What, everyone is supposed to use cash on the off chance that they might kill their spouse so that it will be harder for the police to figure out if you really did it or not?
Do you really think they wait until they're convinced someone committed a capital crime before people look through their CC records?
They'll look through them just because it's TUESDAY.
Cash is MUCH harder to trace, accepted everywhere, cheaper, and FASTER (no need to show ID and sign papers to buy a pack of gum).
Gee, ext3 must've matured a lot in the past few years. I stopped using extX filesystems long ago because they lost files after power cuts waay too easily.
Don't compare ext3 with ext2.
Non-journaling, ext2 was terribly unreliable... And even with that, it's not that the filesystem was unstable, just that it couldn't maintain integrity when mounted async. Sadly, for performance, it was mounted async by default, and few people either understood, or had enough good sense to change it.
( I could bork an old RedHat install simply by pulling the plug/rebooting several times ). Moved to reiser then xfs and barely lost anything if I had to force a reboot.
When I was first starting with Linux (Redhad 5.x), I lost large Ext2 filesystems on multiple occasions. With ext3, however, I haven't lost one yet.
The only problem I ever had was that fsck.ext3 didn't fix one filesystem error I was seeing (after a crash), but manually running fsck.ext2 on it solved the problem...
Yes, development of ATSC was started years before DVB. Deployment has been slower in the US, mainly because of the 6X higher resolution increase happening at the same time.
We've had digital terrestrial television in the UK since the late 90s,
The first sentence of the wikipedia article you quote says ATSC was formed in 1982, LONG before the DVB Project (1993), and long before the "late 90s" (1998). The FCC officially adopted ATSC in 1996, long before anyone had deployed digital broadcast TV.
Hmm, what does Wikipedia say. Oh look: "ATSC coexists with the earlier and more widely-used DVB-T standard"
Wikipedia is wrong all the time. You just make yourself look like an idiot for quoting it as a source.
Get your facts right instead of going on an Anti-Europe rant.
What I said, are the facts. You're the one using bad sources and a complete lack of facts to try and skew reality to make the US look bad for no reason.
PF "losses" are not losses, it is power that is in effect returned back to the source. One can simply treat it as power that isn't delivered at all.
Electricity isn't water, you can't return it to the source.
With a lower power factor, you're either forcing the power company to install huge banks of capacitors, or making the generators work that much harder for fewer watts actually delivered/used. That's practically the definition of "inefficent".
I understood the old channels would be sold and/or not allowed for existing television signals. Is that not the case?
In February 2009 all the analog channels have to shutdown. The FCC will then give a portion of the spectrum to emergency services. It's always been the obvious assumption that most of the rest will be auctioned off by the FCC as they do with all other free spectrum, but those plans aren't concrete, at least that I'm aware of, so they could potentially delay for quite a while, or change at any time.
Not true. You aren't taking into account Power Factor at all... Not that I'm surprised, as most people don't understand it.
With switching power supplies, it's common to see PF in the range of 0.4, as opposed to fully-resistive electric space-heaters (and incandesent lightbulbs) with a perfect 1.0 PF.
Residential customers are lucky, in that they don't get charged for PF losses by the power company, while companies certainly do. However, it's still highly ineffecient, even if you aren't paying for it directly.
And besides that, electric heating is almost always more expensive than conventional heating, like natural gas, or electric heatpumps.
NTSC may not be high-def, but the whole analog-tv ecosystem and infrastructure has been built up painstakingly through 70-odd years of experience.
These aren't roads we're talking about. For the cost of a new transmitter, some cameras, and editing hardware, you've easily built a new digital infrastructure. What's more, they've been at it for a decade now.
The FCC is mandating that it all be thrown away in favor of a few years worth of half-baked digital technology, which in many cases isn't even going to work as well as conventional analog broadcasts.
Completely wrong. DTV isn't "half-baked", and only in select few cases will it work worse than analog. In most cases it will be far, far better than you could dream of. Perfect digital signals, even at the very edge of the coverage area.
(If you haven't experienced the mass of multipath that is ATSC in a built-up area, it sucks.)
You can likely fix that problem with a more directional antenna, and newer recievers, that have been improving significantly in those areas.
And naturally, it won't be the same technology as the rest of the world, so the golden opportunity we had to implement a unified world standard was wasted.
Don't complain about the US, complain about Europe... ATSC was started first, and Europe just decided to chose something entirely different. It's the same old story of European politics, that goes back to the very start of the electrical grid, and before.
When they have the opportunity to chose something incompatible with the (earlier) US standard, they always do. Not that there aren't reasons for it, in this case, but complaining that the US is being incompatible with the rest of the world is entirely backwards.
The whole digital-TV transition seems, to me, to be nothing but a handout to the cable companies and consumer-electronics producers.
It may well take away from cable/satellite companies, as broadcast transmissions will suddenly become crystal clear, and much higher quality than the same channels on cable/satellite.
Everyone is either going to have to buy a digital ATSC tuner/converter, or subscribe to cable/satellite service, just to watch what they get for free right now.
The government will be refunding the cost of the digital tuner, so what are you complaining about?
That you haven't been modded down to -1 Troll by now is astounding.
The ignorance you're displaying is... overwhelming.
Why is the FCC going to give everyone a converter,
Umm, "why" they are going to pay for it should be quite obvious. They are doing it so that (almost) all current TVs that get broadcast signals will continue to work after the digital switch-over.
multiply 15 by 10 and you get maybe 150 million TV sets out there.
~99% of those TVs will continue to recieve their same TV channels without any additional investment by their owners. So why in the world do you believe everyone is going to throw out their TV, just for the heck of it?
Anyone have more info on this? Even the FCC PDF doesn't say a damn thing.
What range of frequencies? The exceptions are all in the UHF band (14-69), are any of the VHF channels (2-13) included or not? If so, you're talking about frequencies just above the shortwave spectrum, which opens the possibility of very long-range transmissions (not ionosphere skip, but still very impressive ranges).
What kind of power are we talking about? Can the current TV broadcast towers continue at current power levels, now broadcasting IP services instead of a video signal?
Even if only UHF, the lower frequencies will not be strictly line-of-sight, unlike 802.11b/g, and could allow for longer hauls, and connections where natural or man-made obsticles have previously precluded Wireless internet access.
Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself. If they decide to limit these devices to 10mW, (despite their stated intention of broadband internet access) or require expensive licenses and regulations, it may not have any effect on the public at all.
The only reason i recycle my HP ink cartridges is because they include than handy prepaid envelope to send it back - less effort to just put it in the outgoing mail bin, then take it down to the trash.
This is why bottles and cans have a deposit/redemption value.
People care a lot more about recycling when they get a few bucks for doing it... Even if you're the ultra-lazy type, the guy walking past your dumpster probably isn't, and has an easy way to make $5...
For example, you'll notice that you almost never see old car batteries lying around.
The are already starving, lack electricity in 95% of the country, are almost completely uneducated, and make most starving African nations look rich in comparison.
The idea isn't to sanction the populace, the idea is to make the administration unable to get what they need to maintain their armies, develop weapons, etc.
If North Korea can't import oil from China, Russia, etc., any longer, the strength of the administration will begin to decline.
There have been many examples of this in the past, and it practically always helps to weaken the leadership of the country.
before rendering the TVs we have now piles of leaded junk for the landfill if someone doesn't buy a digital converter box for each set.
Why does everyone forget that the FCC is going to be paying for the digital converter box you will need to "buy"? And that some 95+% of TVs are currently hooked-up to Cable/Satellite anyhow?
set. Our environment can't take much more lead poisoning, and TVs will do that to us when thrown out by the hundreds of millions.
Even if my set couldn't pick up TV channels at all, I still wouldn't throw it away... Still perfectly good at games, VHS/DVD display, PC/DVR output device, etc.
And "hundreds of millions" is so ridiculously far off the mark it's not even funny. But I guess the 500 trillion mods who modded your post up just don't care about any kind of accuracy or rationality...
Thus CD-quality is, if not perfect, then good enough that further improvements are ignorable for most people.
The thing about standards is that they can't just be good enough for "most people" they have to be good enough for EVERYONE to get traction. CDs will be around for a while to come, but I can see it being replaced with something better.
CD-quality losslessly-compressed music is around 300MB/hour.
Higher sample-rate, more channels (surround sound) etc. Maybe even include a direct copy of the studio multichannel recording, so people can either listen to the pre-mixed version, or mix their own...
10GB/hour is in the ballpark of what you'd need for the sort of quality a modern cinema can deliver. (and there's no particular reason we couldn't go higher.)
Not just higher, but MUCH higher. Film has great resolution, but 24fps is ridiculously low. Upgrading to 120fps seems an obvious step even now.
Besides that, like DVDs, it's not unreasonable to assume that with every movie you get, you also have to keep many GBs worth of special content and features you don't really want... When there's enough space, expect the dozens of commentary tracks to include video instead of just audio. And in-depth coverage of every aspect of every minute of every film...
And all that's not to mention what will happen to video data-rates when holographic displays become practical, and movies go 3D. (holodecks are much further off)
The name itself is larger than the software it represents. fscking with this reveals new depths of disregard for the adoption of Desktop Linux more generally.
Riiiight... The best way to help adoption of Desktop Linux is to completely throw-out everything Linux stands for...
Who wants to be able to patch bugs? Who wants to be able to legally distribute software? Surely the name of a web browser is much more important than freedom...
He is complaining about people who suggest backing-up with "tar cvz/" but really, the only thing missing is the: "p". I use it extensively and it just works (not for databases, but that should go without saying).
In order to ensure I'm never in a tough spot, I made a custom bootable image using my distro's kernel and utilities. Then I made a bzip2 -9 compressed tar backup of my notebook hard drive, which is just small enough to fit on a single CD... (With DVD-Rs these days, the situation is even better).
After burning it all to CD, I restored from it, and it's still working perfectly to this day. Now I can be sure that no matter what unforseen events happen, I'll never be stranded with a non-working notebook due to software problems, and a CD is notably lighter than carrying a second, backup notebook.
Fiber gets multiplicative bandwidth improvements by transmitting light at different frequencies all over the same physical fiber optic cable.
Source?
Just a couple years ago, when I was studying fiber-optics in detail, multimode was SLOWER (combined) than single-mode, due to the optical inteference between different wavelengths.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think they wait until they're convinced someone committed a capital crime before people look through their CC records?
They'll look through them just because it's TUESDAY.
Cash is MUCH harder to trace, accepted everywhere, cheaper, and FASTER (no need to show ID and sign papers to buy a pack of gum).
Don't compare ext3 with ext2.
Non-journaling, ext2 was terribly unreliable... And even with that, it's not that the filesystem was unstable, just that it couldn't maintain integrity when mounted async. Sadly, for performance, it was mounted async by default, and few people either understood, or had enough good sense to change it.
When I was first starting with Linux (Redhad 5.x), I lost large Ext2 filesystems on multiple occasions. With ext3, however, I haven't lost one yet.
The only problem I ever had was that fsck.ext3 didn't fix one filesystem error I was seeing (after a crash), but manually running fsck.ext2 on it solved the problem...
Still, it's really not worth arguing. It doesn't change the point of my post at all.
Yes, development of ATSC was started years before DVB. Deployment has been slower in the US, mainly because of the 6X higher resolution increase happening at the same time.
The first sentence of the wikipedia article you quote says ATSC was formed in 1982, LONG before the DVB Project (1993), and long before the "late 90s" (1998). The FCC officially adopted ATSC in 1996, long before anyone had deployed digital broadcast TV.
Wikipedia is wrong all the time. You just make yourself look like an idiot for quoting it as a source.
What I said, are the facts. You're the one using bad sources and a complete lack of facts to try and skew reality to make the US look bad for no reason.
By auctioning off part of the spectrum they will reclaim in the deal, they will make that money back many times over.
That would make for quite a nasty puddle wherever it impacts...
How about something like this: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04
Electricity isn't water, you can't return it to the source.
With a lower power factor, you're either forcing the power company to install huge banks of capacitors, or making the generators work that much harder for fewer watts actually delivered/used. That's practically the definition of "inefficent".
Both run on DC, so they don't even count. The switching power supply, which converts the AC to DC, is the only thing that counts.
This sentence makes no sense at all. You clearly have no understanding of PF.
You can't at the moment. There's well over a year to go before the program goes into effect.
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/digitaltv.ht
In February 2009 all the analog channels have to shutdown. The FCC will then give a portion of the spectrum to emergency services. It's always been the obvious assumption that most of the rest will be auctioned off by the FCC as they do with all other free spectrum, but those plans aren't concrete, at least that I'm aware of, so they could potentially delay for quite a while, or change at any time.
Not true. You aren't taking into account Power Factor at all... Not that I'm surprised, as most people don't understand it.
With switching power supplies, it's common to see PF in the range of 0.4, as opposed to fully-resistive electric space-heaters (and incandesent lightbulbs) with a perfect 1.0 PF.
Residential customers are lucky, in that they don't get charged for PF losses by the power company, while companies certainly do. However, it's still highly ineffecient, even if you aren't paying for it directly.
And besides that, electric heating is almost always more expensive than conventional heating, like natural gas, or electric heatpumps.
These aren't roads we're talking about. For the cost of a new transmitter, some cameras, and editing hardware, you've easily built a new digital infrastructure. What's more, they've been at it for a decade now.
Completely wrong. DTV isn't "half-baked", and only in select few cases will it work worse than analog. In most cases it will be far, far better than you could dream of. Perfect digital signals, even at the very edge of the coverage area.
You can likely fix that problem with a more directional antenna, and newer recievers, that have been improving significantly in those areas.
Don't complain about the US, complain about Europe... ATSC was started first, and Europe just decided to chose something entirely different. It's the same old story of European politics, that goes back to the very start of the electrical grid, and before.
When they have the opportunity to chose something incompatible with the (earlier) US standard, they always do. Not that there aren't reasons for it, in this case, but complaining that the US is being incompatible with the rest of the world is entirely backwards.
It may well take away from cable/satellite companies, as broadcast transmissions will suddenly become crystal clear, and much higher quality than the same channels on cable/satellite.
The government will be refunding the cost of the digital tuner, so what are you complaining about?
That you haven't been modded down to -1 Troll by now is astounding.
Umm, "why" they are going to pay for it should be quite obvious. They are doing it so that (almost) all current TVs that get broadcast signals will continue to work after the digital switch-over.
~99% of those TVs will continue to recieve their same TV channels without any additional investment by their owners. So why in the world do you believe everyone is going to throw out their TV, just for the heck of it?
No. Politics doesn't wait for scientific proof.
Whether actually an atomic bomb or not, China is still quite pissed about it.
Whether North Korea's claim is true or not, it has finally pushed all parties close to an agreement on sanctions.
And, if nothing else, it's always very interesting to consider alternative possibilities for significant historical events.
Anyone have more info on this? Even the FCC PDF doesn't say a damn thing.
What range of frequencies? The exceptions are all in the UHF band (14-69), are any of the VHF channels (2-13) included or not? If so, you're talking about frequencies just above the shortwave spectrum, which opens the possibility of very long-range transmissions (not ionosphere skip, but still very impressive ranges).
What kind of power are we talking about? Can the current TV broadcast towers continue at current power levels, now broadcasting IP services instead of a video signal?
Even if only UHF, the lower frequencies will not be strictly line-of-sight, unlike 802.11b/g, and could allow for longer hauls, and connections where natural or man-made obsticles have previously precluded Wireless internet access.
Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself. If they decide to limit these devices to 10mW, (despite their stated intention of broadband internet access) or require expensive licenses and regulations, it may not have any effect on the public at all.
This is why bottles and cans have a deposit/redemption value.
People care a lot more about recycling when they get a few bucks for doing it... Even if you're the ultra-lazy type, the guy walking past your dumpster probably isn't, and has an easy way to make $5...
For example, you'll notice that you almost never see old car batteries lying around.
The exact same thing goes for conventional explosives, however. Missles don't have to be tipped with nukes.
The idea isn't to sanction the populace, the idea is to make the administration unable to get what they need to maintain their armies, develop weapons, etc.
If North Korea can't import oil from China, Russia, etc., any longer, the strength of the administration will begin to decline.
There have been many examples of this in the past, and it practically always helps to weaken the leadership of the country.
Why does everyone forget that the FCC is going to be paying for the digital converter box you will need to "buy"? And that some 95+% of TVs are currently hooked-up to Cable/Satellite anyhow?
Even if my set couldn't pick up TV channels at all, I still wouldn't throw it away... Still perfectly good at games, VHS/DVD display, PC/DVR output device, etc.
And "hundreds of millions" is so ridiculously far off the mark it's not even funny. But I guess the 500 trillion mods who modded your post up just don't care about any kind of accuracy or rationality...
Helpful in certain situations, but not necessary.
The thing about standards is that they can't just be good enough for "most people" they have to be good enough for EVERYONE to get traction. CDs will be around for a while to come, but I can see it being replaced with something better.
Higher sample-rate, more channels (surround sound) etc. Maybe even include a direct copy of the studio multichannel recording, so people can either listen to the pre-mixed version, or mix their own...
Not just higher, but MUCH higher. Film has great resolution, but 24fps is ridiculously low. Upgrading to 120fps seems an obvious step even now.
Besides that, like DVDs, it's not unreasonable to assume that with every movie you get, you also have to keep many GBs worth of special content and features you don't really want... When there's enough space, expect the dozens of commentary tracks to include video instead of just audio. And in-depth coverage of every aspect of every minute of every film...
And all that's not to mention what will happen to video data-rates when holographic displays become practical, and movies go 3D. (holodecks are much further off)
Riiiight... The best way to help adoption of Desktop Linux is to completely throw-out everything Linux stands for...
Who wants to be able to patch bugs? Who wants to be able to legally distribute software? Surely the name of a web browser is much more important than freedom...
He is complaining about people who suggest backing-up with "tar cvz /" but really, the only thing missing is the: "p". I use it extensively and it just works (not for databases, but that should go without saying).
In order to ensure I'm never in a tough spot, I made a custom bootable image using my distro's kernel and utilities. Then I made a bzip2 -9 compressed tar backup of my notebook hard drive, which is just small enough to fit on a single CD... (With DVD-Rs these days, the situation is even better).
After burning it all to CD, I restored from it, and it's still working perfectly to this day. Now I can be sure that no matter what unforseen events happen, I'll never be stranded with a non-working notebook due to software problems, and a CD is notably lighter than carrying a second, backup notebook.
What OS I use on my cell phone doesn't change the fact that Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop PCs.
These laptops are PDAs by any measure, and are only competing with WinCE (not Windows) where Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly.
Source?
Just a couple years ago, when I was studying fiber-optics in detail, multimode was SLOWER (combined) than single-mode, due to the optical inteference between different wavelengths.