have digital cable through them (including about 10 HD channels and on demand), plus 6M/1M internet service. Everything works great, and when I call to make adjustments to my service they are always very helpful.
Every company is great, until you have a problem... Then you see how utterly incompotent they are.
I had a charter service person comming out to my house every week, for 2 months. Every time, cutting off the connectors on my coax, and crimping new ones. Then they turn on the cable modem, watch it light up, visit yahoo, and then leave as quickly as possible moments before it stops working.
It makes no different how many times, and how many different ways you tell them that the last dozen guys did the same thing, they go through the steps, and take off.
About 1/10th of the time I called for service, the rep would refund a couple dollars for the months and months I was unable to use the service. The rest of the time, I was supposed to pay for the unusable service.
I can only hope the cost of sending people out was much more than the money they sucked from me...
That's not to mention their TV service. The idiots that work there can't even aim a dish... Several times a day, one channel or another will freeze-up for several seconds. With longer outages a weekly occurance. That's not to mention that all the local TV channels are unbelievably static-filled (almost unwatchable) some 30% of the time.
Satellite TV isn't doing well because it's any better technology, or any cheaper. It's doing well because of incompotent morons like Charter are the only real alternative (until HDTV rolls out everywhere).
"For the first time in nearly fifty years another mammal, specifically an aquatic mammal, has gone extinct.
I don't believe that for a second, and the article certainly doesn't support that.
It says "the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction."
That means it's been 50 years since an animal that is "large" AND "aquatic" AND "mammal" has gone extinct. I have no doubt that numerous other mammals have gone extinct in the past 50 years.
I'm not defending "betamax" in your analogy, I'm just pointing out tha VHS isn't really a killer app, and also pointing out it's limitations over betamax... hoping the same mistakes aren't made in the next ones (DVDs?).
First of all, that's completely wrong (see below).
Second, that's no excuse anyhow. The DVB standard may encompass more, but just because it's part of the same standard, doesn't make it any more universal or interoperable.
For example, DVB covers Terrestrial, Satellite, and Cable, but you have to buy AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CARD FOR EACH ONE. You didn't gain anything by calling them all "DVB". They're still entirely seperate.
The same digital signal is sent, using different modulation, over satelite, cable or terrestrial.
ATSC also has (long had) standards for broadcast, cable, and satellite transmission.
When the modulation would be a major concern, it would be possible to do DVB over the 8VSB modulation used by ATSC.
Yes, but it would hardly even resemble ATSC anymore, so there's no benefit in calling it DVB. At that point, it would be cheaper just to buy the ATSC equipment, rather than wrapping most of ATSC in DVB.
But independent testing in countries wanting to adopt a digital TV standard often showed that OFDM (DVB-T) was superior to 8VSB (ATSC) in practice.
Sources? You've provided no reasons, no specifics, and absolutely no sources.
Considering that you've shown yourself to be absolutely and completely misinformed (read: wrong) so far, I'm not likely to take this on faith.
skywave bounces off the ionosphere cause pockets of listenability for many thousands of miles
I have no idea why you're bringing skywave/ionosphere into this. Only the very lowest of US TV channels have any hope of "skip", and the FM frequencies have NO chance what-so-ever.
in the 1920s, primitive tube radios were made with great sensitivity, and if you had a good set, there was no problem listening on one coast of the US to the other coast nightly.
There was no FM radio nor TV in the 1920s. AM (MW) radio operates on VASTLY different frequency ranges, which don't have anywhere near the same propogation.
I get the feeling you just read a book on early radio, and are utterly confused about it...
Where are you from? In the US the NTSC color signal was specifically developed to maintain compatibility with B&W sets so that no one needed to buy a new TV if they didn't want to.
I'd guess he's from the UK, where they switched to PAL rather than try and shoe-horn color into their odd-ball 408 line TV standard.
(if you're already illegal due to your broadcasting, then what difference does copyright infringement make?)
I'd say it's a difference between a cease-and-desist warning letter from the FCC, and a $10 million dollar copyright infringement lawsuit from the MPAA.
DVB-T is the standard adopted by Europe and Asia (and perhaps other places as well?) for Digital OTA broadcasting, while ATSC is used in the U.S.A., Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan
You've got it exactly backwards. ATSC was in development a couple years before DVB even started developing, and standardized and ratified in the US a couple years before DVB.
So instead, I'll ask you... why didn't the rest of the world standardize on ATSC? It can be used for standard-def TV just as easily as HD. I can buy lots of ATSC equipment from usb sticks that are linux/MacOS/Windows laptop compatable to PCI cards. its feaking everywhere. why DVB technical reasons ?
Now, no one (in power) seems to really care if the public has access to TV or not. With the rise in expensive digital and HD receivers, and the mass obsoletion of literal tons of cheap, mercury-laden TV tubes, TV will become a luxury.
That's the most paranoid rant I've seen in a while...
There's no reason you need an HDTV to watch digital broadcasts. A converter box will work just fine on your 20 year-old box.
There's no reason for anyone to go without. In Europe, second-hand boxes are dirt cheap, and in the US, the government is going to be paying for the converter boxes for every household that wants one.
If they wanted to get rid of TV, they sure did a crappy job going out of their way to make sure the poorest could afford it.
By the time analog TV is outlawed, will broadcast TV even be relevant anymore?
Yes. More than ever. They will be able to supply 4Xs more broadcasts, and leverage all the benefits of digital, like broadcasting digital data to any computers that may be attached.
In fact, the digital modulation stands to make digital broadcasts go significantly further before, and retain perfect picture quality, even in the outskirts. If anything, the switch to digital will rejuvenate broadcast TV, likely at the expense of cable and satellite.
By 2008 (if that date sticks, which it might not), household datapipes could increase to the point where people will start dumping TV receivers like they're currently dumping POTS lines.
It's just shy of 2007, and I've got a 768k connection. Somehow, I don't think I'll be up to 20Mbit a year from now.
Even if I was, I wouldn't want to max out that connection all day on TV, and be unable to USE it for anything else. Never mind the fact that more than one person in the house would like to watch different shows at the same time (good luck with that on your internet connection).
Consequently, no-one on the Internet can get to a PC in the private address range - not only that but there are probably thousands of PCs using anyone of those private IP addresses at any moment in time.
People keep repeating it, but it's just not true. It is TRIVIALLY easy to send packets to private addresses behind an open NAT.
First off, the way in which packets sent to a NAT box disappear is like waving a big red flag that says "NAT". Then all it takes is a little bit of forging of header address, and a couple packets, and you can discover the exact addresses of all the machines on the private net, and send whatever you want to them.
The two ways I like to explain it (for brevity) is source routed packets, and gateways.
Sequentially ping the broadcast addresses of the private networks (like 10.255.255.255) setting a source-route of the public IP address of the NAT box. The routers between the two of you will forward the packets to the NAT box. Then, being the good little router it is, it will see the packet is supposed to go to the private network, and forward it there. The ICMP replies will be sent back to you, and you now have a list of (most of) the running systems behind the NAT. Now you can send whatever payload you want, to any one of those privately-addressed machines.
Another very simple way (which gets around blocked source-routed packets) is to get an address on the same public subnet as your target. Most providers have their public addresses grouped in a/24 subnet, or larger, which gives you at least 253 chances. That should be trivially easy to accomplish, and is left as an exercise for the reader. Once you've done that, all you have to do is set your default gateway as the NAT box's public IP, and you can just directly address all those machines by their private address, directly. No skill needed at all. The NAT box is only too happy to forward your packets, and return the replies.
Needless to say, there are many, many other ways to trick the NAT into forwarding packets to the privately addressed machines, but they are a bit too involved for a short post on/. Suffice it to say, NAT is common enough that I suspect a very large number of crackers have automatic routines to penetrate them, and your NAT isn't going to even slow them down.
For about two decades now, it has been trivially easy to setup a machine to do stateful packet filtering, which actually WILL stop penetration attempts. There's no reason NOT to do it. And for any kind of security, that's precisely what you need.
The warm fuzzy feeling you get with a NAT box, because you're ignorant of how easy they are to bypass, won't stop your computers from being turned into zombies.
Remind me why you chaps had the revolution again? There was something in there about Freedom, but its all been lost in the noise.
Everyone wants to dump on the US at every chance they get, but you could at least try to base it on REAL shortcomings.
This is one guy, out of 100, in the senate, proposing something that the senate, the house, and the president would have to approve of.
Then it would have to stand-up to court challenges, which this is practically guaranteed not to.
And after that, it could also be voted out by any subsequent congress.
The moral of the story is, you're bitching about nothing at all. Lots of noise has been made, by people like yourself, about the US' recent actions, but we've handled far worse over the past 230 years, and with a little time, everything eventually gets worked out for the better.
Even most Creationists conform to at least some kind of evolution (micro).
Microevolution is really just an all-encompasing term to cover "changes" to a population in general. It is "evolution" in name only, and is not the evolution that is debated.
If there were just 2 of the animals (dogs for instance) why are they so different now?
All breeds of dogs exist due to selective breeding of wolves. No genetic mutations necessary for that.
For example, if Adam & Eve were the only parents why are people so different?
Selective breeding should work just as well with humans...
What about humans on the Ark, were they forced to inbreed for a second time to populate?
That depends... how distant of a relative does one have to be, for it to no longer qualify as inbreeding?
So when you have small changes over a small period of time, is believing that over a large period of time you could have large changes really that unreasonable?
You are talking about a difference in-kind.
For example:
Since you can fly a plane high into the air, isn't it reasonable to assume you can fly to the moon?
Since the speed of car doubles every 10 years, isn't is reasonable to assume that we'll be driving faster than the speed of light in 1,000 years?
Microevolution and Macroevolution, as they are called, are largely unrelated to one-another, at least in this senario.
Every time the boot configuration changes, write a new "hibernation file" to the flash memory, and then boot from that.
That would require as much Flash as you have RAM, and for what? Suspend (S3) mode uses about as much power as entirely "off", resumes in a second, and doesn't require extra hardware.
Indeed, the most-accessed binaries can be copied onto the flash memory, as space permits.
Possible, but also potentially unnecessary if Standby becomes more common. With most apps cached in RAM, you wouldn't care how fast the disk is.
No, it's just that in the Southern Hemisphere, it will be pointing approximately north, instead of south.
Take the watch off your wrist and hold it horizontally. Point the hour hand at the sun. Halfway between that and 12 is South
That is the most overly complicated trick I've ever heard.
It depends on having a clock accurately set to local time. Both traversing time-zones, and daylight savings, can significantly skew the results.
Some much more useful tricks: - The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. - When the sun is at it's peak (around 12:00 noon), your shadow will point north if in the northern hemisphere, or south in the southern hemisphere. If you're near the equator, too bad. - The two stars which make-up the "cup" end of the BIG dipper, point torwards the last star in the handle of the LITTLE dipper. That star is Polaris, the North Star, and it is a very accurate indication of north. - The vast majority of rivers in the world flow southward, and following one, downstream is almost always a good idea.
How this didn't generate more attention when it happened is beyond my comprehension.
Probably because it's earth-shattering news only to tin-foil hat wearers like yourself who blow crap out of proportion.
In the first case, they HAD a warrant, and simply failed to knock. Since the necessity to knock is a local state law, and NOT enumerated in the 4th ammendment, your claim is pure bullshit.
In the second case, they are talking about parolees, who agreed to the terms of parole, which include temporarily (for the length of parole) volunteering to forego several of their constitutional rights (not a problem, since they WERE already convicted in a court of law) including the 4th.
I have always found people who claim that they just could not kill, to be oddities. I'm torn between simply believing that they're deluding themselves about their own nature, or accepting that there are people who are just wired so fundamentally differently than everyone I know.
Killing someone is not easy. I have no problem believing that a quite large minority of people couldn't bring themselves to take someone else's life when it comes right down to it.
Not at all. If you mean the WWW, that could easily run under gopher:// rather than http.
Personally, I don't think WWW is all that hot. gopher could just as easily have included rich text, graphics, and things like secure shopping, and it would have done so in a structured way, that might actually be parsable by machines, and displayed in any of millions of ways the user wants, unlike the unstructured mish-mash of HTML crud.
Slashdot Mirror
Every company is great, until you have a problem... Then you see how utterly incompotent they are.
I had a charter service person comming out to my house every week, for 2 months. Every time, cutting off the connectors on my coax, and crimping new ones. Then they turn on the cable modem, watch it light up, visit yahoo, and then leave as quickly as possible moments before it stops working.
It makes no different how many times, and how many different ways you tell them that the last dozen guys did the same thing, they go through the steps, and take off.
About 1/10th of the time I called for service, the rep would refund a couple dollars for the months and months I was unable to use the service. The rest of the time, I was supposed to pay for the unusable service.
I can only hope the cost of sending people out was much more than the money they sucked from me...
That's not to mention their TV service. The idiots that work there can't even aim a dish... Several times a day, one channel or another will freeze-up for several seconds. With longer outages a weekly occurance. That's not to mention that all the local TV channels are unbelievably static-filled (almost unwatchable) some 30% of the time.
Satellite TV isn't doing well because it's any better technology, or any cheaper. It's doing well because of incompotent morons like Charter are the only real alternative (until HDTV rolls out everywhere).
I don't believe that for a second, and the article certainly doesn't support that.
It says "the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction."
That means it's been 50 years since an animal that is "large" AND "aquatic" AND "mammal" has gone extinct. I have no doubt that numerous other mammals have gone extinct in the past 50 years.
For example:
Pyrenean Ibex (~2000)
Cyprus Spiny Mouse (~1980--unverified)
Javan tiger (1972)
No doubt I could find many more if I cared enough to put some time and effort into it.
I'm not defending "betamax" in your analogy, I'm just pointing out tha VHS isn't really a killer app, and also pointing out it's limitations over betamax... hoping the same mistakes aren't made in the next ones (DVDs?).
First of all, that's completely wrong (see below).
Second, that's no excuse anyhow. The DVB standard may encompass more, but just because it's part of the same standard, doesn't make it any more universal or interoperable.
For example, DVB covers Terrestrial, Satellite, and Cable, but you have to buy AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CARD FOR EACH ONE. You didn't gain anything by calling them all "DVB". They're still entirely seperate.
ATSC also has (long had) standards for broadcast, cable, and satellite transmission.
Yes, but it would hardly even resemble ATSC anymore, so there's no benefit in calling it DVB. At that point, it would be cheaper just to buy the ATSC equipment, rather than wrapping most of ATSC in DVB.
Sources? You've provided no reasons, no specifics, and absolutely no sources.
Considering that you've shown yourself to be absolutely and completely misinformed (read: wrong) so far, I'm not likely to take this on faith.
An incredibly expensive, complex, and ineffecient battery.
You can do that with actual batteries, far less expensively, and much more effeciently.
I have no idea why you're bringing skywave/ionosphere into this. Only the very lowest of US TV channels have any hope of "skip", and the FM frequencies have NO chance what-so-ever.
There was no FM radio nor TV in the 1920s. AM (MW) radio operates on VASTLY different frequency ranges, which don't have anywhere near the same propogation.
I get the feeling you just read a book on early radio, and are utterly confused about it...
*405 line*
I'd guess he's from the UK, where they switched to PAL rather than try and shoe-horn color into their odd-ball 408 line TV standard.
I'd say it's a difference between a cease-and-desist warning letter from the FCC, and a $10 million dollar copyright infringement lawsuit from the MPAA.
You've got it exactly backwards. ATSC was in development a couple years before DVB even started developing, and standardized and ratified in the US a couple years before DVB.
So instead, I'll ask you... why didn't the rest of the world standardize on ATSC? It can be used for standard-def TV just as easily as HD.
I can buy lots of ATSC equipment from usb sticks that are linux/MacOS/Windows laptop compatable to PCI cards. its feaking everywhere. why DVB technical reasons ?
Just because you don't know what's going on, doesn't mean the adults shouldn't talk when you're around...
Because digital TV doesn't use WiFi for transmission?
Because you didn't bother to read the linked article on 8vsb?
That's the most paranoid rant I've seen in a while...
There's no reason you need an HDTV to watch digital broadcasts. A converter box will work just fine on your 20 year-old box.
There's no reason for anyone to go without. In Europe, second-hand boxes are dirt cheap, and in the US, the government is going to be paying for the converter boxes for every household that wants one.
If they wanted to get rid of TV, they sure did a crappy job going out of their way to make sure the poorest could afford it.
Yes. More than ever. They will be able to supply 4Xs more broadcasts, and leverage all the benefits of digital, like broadcasting digital data to any computers that may be attached.
In fact, the digital modulation stands to make digital broadcasts go significantly further before, and retain perfect picture quality, even in the outskirts. If anything, the switch to digital will rejuvenate broadcast TV, likely at the expense of cable and satellite.
It's just shy of 2007, and I've got a 768k connection. Somehow, I don't think I'll be up to 20Mbit a year from now.
Even if I was, I wouldn't want to max out that connection all day on TV, and be unable to USE it for anything else. Never mind the fact that more than one person in the house would like to watch different shows at the same time (good luck with that on your internet connection).
People keep repeating it, but it's just not true. It is TRIVIALLY easy to send packets to private addresses behind an open NAT.
First off, the way in which packets sent to a NAT box disappear is like waving a big red flag that says "NAT". Then all it takes is a little bit of forging of header address, and a couple packets, and you can discover the exact addresses of all the machines on the private net, and send whatever you want to them.
The two ways I like to explain it (for brevity) is source routed packets, and gateways.
Sequentially ping the broadcast addresses of the private networks (like 10.255.255.255) setting a source-route of the public IP address of the NAT box. The routers between the two of you will forward the packets to the NAT box. Then, being the good little router it is, it will see the packet is supposed to go to the private network, and forward it there. The ICMP replies will be sent back to you, and you now have a list of (most of) the running systems behind the NAT. Now you can send whatever payload you want, to any one of those privately-addressed machines.
Another very simple way (which gets around blocked source-routed packets) is to get an address on the same public subnet as your target. Most providers have their public addresses grouped in a
Needless to say, there are many, many other ways to trick the NAT into forwarding packets to the privately addressed machines, but they are a bit too involved for a short post on
For about two decades now, it has been trivially easy to setup a machine to do stateful packet filtering, which actually WILL stop penetration attempts. There's no reason NOT to do it. And for any kind of security, that's precisely what you need.
The warm fuzzy feeling you get with a NAT box, because you're ignorant of how easy they are to bypass, won't stop your computers from being turned into zombies.
No. VMware is ENTIRELY closed source.
KQEMU is a tiny bit of closed-source code, which works together with a fully open source program.
You've already been pointed to the open source VM86, which I've personally used quite successfully in the past in lieu of kqemu.
No, Qemu, used along with with the "Qemu Accelerator" is just as much a virtual machine as VMWare.
Everyone wants to dump on the US at every chance they get, but you could at least try to base it on REAL shortcomings.
This is one guy, out of 100, in the senate, proposing something that the senate, the house, and the president would have to approve of.
Then it would have to stand-up to court challenges, which this is practically guaranteed not to.
And after that, it could also be voted out by any subsequent congress.
The moral of the story is, you're bitching about nothing at all. Lots of noise has been made, by people like yourself, about the US' recent actions, but we've handled far worse over the past 230 years, and with a little time, everything eventually gets worked out for the better.
Microevolution is really just an all-encompasing term to cover "changes" to a population in general. It is "evolution" in name only, and is not the evolution that is debated.
All breeds of dogs exist due to selective breeding of wolves. No genetic mutations necessary for that.
Selective breeding should work just as well with humans...
That depends... how distant of a relative does one have to be, for it to no longer qualify as inbreeding?
You are talking about a difference in-kind.
For example:
Since you can fly a plane high into the air, isn't it reasonable to assume you can fly to the moon?
Since the speed of car doubles every 10 years, isn't is reasonable to assume that we'll be driving faster than the speed of light in 1,000 years?
Microevolution and Macroevolution, as they are called, are largely unrelated to one-another, at least in this senario.
That would require as much Flash as you have RAM, and for what? Suspend (S3) mode uses about as much power as entirely "off", resumes in a second, and doesn't require extra hardware.
Possible, but also potentially unnecessary if Standby becomes more common. With most apps cached in RAM, you wouldn't care how fast the disk is.
No, it's just that in the Southern Hemisphere, it will be pointing approximately north, instead of south.
That is the most overly complicated trick I've ever heard.
It depends on having a clock accurately set to local time. Both traversing time-zones, and daylight savings, can significantly skew the results.
Some much more useful tricks:
- The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
- When the sun is at it's peak (around 12:00 noon), your shadow will point north if in the northern hemisphere, or south in the southern hemisphere. If you're near the equator, too bad.
- The two stars which make-up the "cup" end of the BIG dipper, point torwards the last star in the handle of the LITTLE dipper. That star is Polaris, the North Star, and it is a very accurate indication of north.
- The vast majority of rivers in the world flow southward, and following one, downstream is almost always a good idea.
Any other good ones?
Probably because it's earth-shattering news only to tin-foil hat wearers like yourself who blow crap out of proportion.
In the first case, they HAD a warrant, and simply failed to knock. Since the necessity to knock is a local state law, and NOT enumerated in the 4th ammendment, your claim is pure bullshit.
In the second case, they are talking about parolees, who agreed to the terms of parole, which include temporarily (for the length of parole) volunteering to forego several of their constitutional rights (not a problem, since they WERE already convicted in a court of law) including the 4th.
The lesson is: you are a sensationalist nutjob.
Killing someone is not easy. I have no problem believing that a quite large minority of people couldn't bring themselves to take someone else's life when it comes right down to it.
Revenge != Punishment
A world where people are very careful not to poke someone else's eye out.
You should tell that to someone who has had their entire family murdered...
Not at all. If you mean the WWW, that could easily run under gopher:// rather than http.
Personally, I don't think WWW is all that hot. gopher could just as easily have included rich text, graphics, and things like secure shopping, and it would have done so in a structured way, that might actually be parsable by machines, and displayed in any of millions of ways the user wants, unlike the unstructured mish-mash of HTML crud.
The dragons took it with them...