As a small voice of support for your position, this is more or less how Prohibition got repealed. The cumulative affect of a very significant portion of the population simply ignoring the law until it could no longer stand. I'm not saying it can or will work for copyright, there were additional factors in Prohibition relating to the public health risks posed both by the smugglers and dangerously unregulated booze production that just don't exist in this case, but it is an analogous if not identical situation.
Having said that, I definitely feel that most of the parties involved in this dispute are being unreasonable. Content creators (or rather the huge companies that "represent" them) are clearly overreaching what they can reasonably claim both in terms of length of copyright and what rights are granted. The Government is clearly giving more weight to the rights of content companies than to rights of consumers, which is both unfair and a violation of its mandate. Many if not most of the "information wants to be free" crowd seem perfectly content to drive the people who create content completely out of business. This is doubly foolish since it both hurts the content creators, in the end, the consumers themselves. Rather like "fishing out" an area, many of these voracious consumers of content may find that should they ever succeed in in their quest they will have no content to consume.
It seems to me that while the concept of copyright is sound, its terms and duration are currently excessive. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to "unmake" regulation. I am not really sure what the answer is.
The purpose of higher education is not to teach you how to merge tables in MySQL 4, it's to teach how relational databases work and what it means to merge tables. You might use MySQL 4 as a teaching tool, to demonstrate the concept involved, but no one expects that you'll be necessarily using the same tool or the same version in the real world. Algorithms are algorithms, database structures (mostly) are universal across relational databases. The implementation can be changed from language to language, database product to database product, or version to version sure, but the concept remain the same.
A person with a degree in computer science is certainly not going to be an expert in every programming language, database product, or operating system you might use. What they are (or should be, assuming a good program) is highly trained in the theoretical basis behind algorithm design and analysis, database design, and operating system and network fundamentals. Picking up the specifics of your environment will be quicker for them than for some kid you pulled off the street. They'll also know more than whatever stove pipe you put them in. So that (for instance) when you hire a kid to be a programmer, he'll know a bit about operating systems to, so he can intelligently articulate his needs to the systems administrator.
University is not tech school. You're not supposed to come out knowing how to use the latest version of MySQL or the latest buzzword compliant programming language. You're supposed to have the basis to learn whatever you need for your career.
Exactly. Why wouldn't you want to help and train anyone you can when the opportunity presents itself. Whether it's a sysadmin training and mentoring the Helldesk guys, or the Helldesk guys in turn taking any chance to train and mentor users, it's sure to decrease your workload in the long run, and help out the person you're mentoring. A win-win by any measure.
Dunno about these days, but I did it via the time honored method of teaching myself and convincing the company I worked for to start a small Linux support group (basically, "send them to me if they're using Linux" but just official enough to put on my resume). Then I convinced that one guy in the really small office that happened to have an old Solaris server in addition to all their Windows stuff that I could run his computers well enough. After that I could legitimately put "Unix Administrator" on my resume and things got easier.
Depends where you work. In some places (it sounds like this is a medium sized business, so it probably fits the bill), desktop support is ALSO supposed to work on operational IT. In other words, your job is to take user support calls, but while you're at it, look at these spam filter rules and see if you can't tighten things up a bit, and check the web server configs to see if we can support this new Intranet page., and write a script to check the status of the mailserver ever 10 minutes. It's really, really hard to concentrate on an operational problem when you are constantly being interrupted by user issues. Yes, it's your job but this other thing is ALSO your job, and if you could just get an hour without interruption maybe you could finally get it done.
I've been in the opposite situation myself several times, my title was "Systems Administrator", but the company was small enough that I also had to deal with user issues. This is even worse, since my "primary" job is to support the operational and planning needs of the organization, and user issues are supposed to be "secondary". In practices, since users are real flesh and blood people who can whine and/or complain to the director, their issues can never really be "secondary" and operational needs suffer.
like it or not, you got lucky. Lots of companies won't let you by the HR screen without a BS/BA. Ironically I have a degree in History, not CS, but between my experience, my minor in CS and my having gotten through a large chunk of a masters of CS I'm usually OK. Even now 10 years into career though I've been told that my lack of a BSc probably hinders me slightly in shops with big HR hurdles.
Depends on the the situation. It the OP's case, that might actually be possible since it's an internal Help Desk and theoretically the manager has influence with other managers to alleviate the most abusive callers. I used to help manage a computer company's call center though (Back in the day before all of this was outsourced). In that case you solve the problems you can (and certainly some of these people had good reason to be angry), and with the abusive ones you just sob silently and take it. It's not like you can talk to a customer's manager and ask him to have his employees behave like civilized people. In two cases that I recall someone was so well documented and so repeatedly abusive that we were essentially told that they had voided their warranty and could be ignored (In both cases they'd managed to get themselves elevated to the VP of customer service and abused HIM). Otherwise, you just had to deal with it and hope that once the problem was solved, the person would go away.
Not to mention, as I keep pointing out, this guy is contract IT for a very small company with no internal IT department. Who's going to manage all these machines with Linux and a Windows VM? Who's going install stuff in Wine? Explain how two shut down one computer that is actually two computers? Show the users how to work in this kind of unusual and complex environment? So many of these solutions are great for an enterprise sized company, a firm with a highly skilled user base, or a company that really even has one guy with a full time responsibility for the network and systems, but just don't seem reasonable for the environment put forth in the question.
1) You totally missed the joke. 2) You, like a lot of people, don't seem to actually want answer (or haven't read) the original question. This guy is contract IT for a very small company that has no full time IT person. There's no way you can disable physical data access. There's no "stupid process" for getting software installed, any process at all is overhead for someone who could be doing something else. Most likely users install their own software if they need something that isn't in the base install. Do you think they're going to pay him to come in and install every small time thing someone just realized they needed for the latest project? There is no IT department, there is no software vetting process, there is no way to do "user education" beyond making them read a for and promise to be good. They want him to install something close to a turn key solution that he will hopefully have to come in to service as seldom as possible.
There's no guarantee that there are even shared drives (a Linux "server" is mentioned but no details about what it does). Your solution might work for a 100 person company with a 5 man IT staff (even then it depends on what they do and what their needs are), but not for this problem.
1) No data is "The users" in a corporate environment, or at least very little of it should be. Most of the stuff on my work hard drive is something for work. In an ideal world the important stuff should be stored on a network drive and/or backed up automatically, but in a shop without even a full time IT guy that seems like a risky proposition at best. It's fairly likely that anything lost by the foolish user in question is something that the company might need or want.
2) The rest of us will be unlikely to be laughing when the data lost was critical to the Bowman contract and need to be regenerated IMMEDIATELY.
3) No all viruses or malware spread via the vectors you mention. It is possible to be infect without doing anything wrong. I will grant that it is far more comment o get infected by doing something stupid, but that's not the only way it can happen. Also, people aren't perfect. While you can usually convince them to not click on naked pictures of Angelina Jolie, an infected file that looks like an Excel spreadsheet and looks like it comes from someone the user trusts is a different matter.
4) User education is problematical at best in a company with no IT department at all. You gonna pay the contract IT guy's rates to come in and run a class every time you hire someone new?
5) it will be the contract IT guys fault the first time an infection spreads. It will happen, and it will be his fault. They asked him for a solution and he gave them vapors. That's how they'll see it no matter how you see it.
Possibly a valid response from your point of view, but note that the original questioner doesn't have Windows servers so no AD/Exchange. It doesn't negate your point, but it does say that your point is not applicable to the original question.
As sibling states, a forced upgrade in the next year or two is likely anyway. The real question is compatibility. Depending on what they do, Macs could be completely compatible with their current system. Normally one of the biggest compatibility nightmares with migrating a shop to a different OS (OS X or Linux) from Windows is replicating all of the stuff that AD does for you. These guys already don't use AD, so Macs (or Linux workstations for that matter) could work for them depending on the application software they use. Hell, by using a Unix based workstation OS, they could GAIN a lot. Suddenly OpenLDAP and NFS become easy solutions to solve many problems that AD normally solves in pure Windows Domains. Since their server is Linux already, (again depending on application support) Mac OS or Linux could make their whole system much more compatible.
Now if AutoCAD is a requirement for business, then the whole idea falls apart. Certainly switching operating systems and/or systems is not always a great solution, but especially given Microsoft's big push to get people off of XP, it's worth consideration at least. It may not works for the questioner, but it may, and now is a pretty good time to consider it.
Yeah, cause there are NO intelligent religious people. Newton, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Einstein, and thousands or millions of others are all statistical anomalies. (Please note that many of these people were not "conventionally" religious, but all can be quoted at one point or another as expressing awe, gratitude, or reverence of some sort of universal generative force)
But that's going to happen anyway. I'm not necessarily saying I agree one way or the other with this screening, but in point in fact it is only helping to make a decision that would otherwise be random. If I go to a fertility clinic with my wife they will fertilize, say, a dozen of her eggs with my sperm and try to implant 2 or 3 of them. Normally the selection of which 2 or 3 is a random one (once the most basic genetic disease screens are done), and 1, 2, or all three of the embryos might implant. If that happens and my wife carries a child or three to term, they discard the rest of the embryos. Whether I picked them because they were going to be blond haired, green eyed girls, or whether they picked three at random and implanted them. The "extra" embryos only get used if the first implantation doesn't take, the baby(ies) is not carried to term, or we later decide we want more kids. Only VERY rarely are all the fertilized embryos used. The "unchosen" embryos eliminated by this screening probably have the same chance of being later implanted as any other "unchosen" embryos whose potential siblings were chosen by random chance.
If you're going to object to this screening on the moral basis you state, then by any reasonable standard you should object to the whole idea of having children this way.
Nor would Hellen Keller who was blinded and deafened by (probably) Scarlet Fever in early childhood (around 18 months old). No one is certain what the disease was, but it certainly afflicted her well after birth.
1) They did (finally, I'll grant you, but they did) start shipping a two button mouse. 2) They never failed to implement a UI feature. The UI has supported multi-button mouses for years. They simply chose not to ship the hardware to match that function. It may seem like a nit-pick, but it's an important point. Realizing that some people like having the UI feature, they implemented it. Deciding that most of their users didn't care, they chose to make it an option. It's not like a two button mouse is either expensive or difficult to find if you want one, nor has it been for many, many years.
Personally I've never missed the maximize button, since I hate maximized windows in OSes that do support them, but I can see where you'd find that irritating if you want it. Honestly, I always thought the third button was to maximize... Since I never use maximize I've never played with it.
I often find it funny that Apple (rightly infamous for their generally poor mouse design choices in the last decade or so) has finally made the trackpad a usable interface. Using the very concepts (context menus and mouse scrolling) they resisted for so long in their physical mouses. I hate the trackpads on all of my PCs, precisely because I keep trying to use all the multitouch stuff I take for granted on my Mac.
Mine uses YPrPb RCA, but it's also fairly old as upscaling DVD players go. I didn't even realize it could do upscaling till I moved and noticed the YPrPb ports.
Personally I think it has a lot to do with portability. Imax films are analog and extremely high resolution, but they come shipped on pallets. You could probably fit a digital movie with a similar resolution on a 1 TB hard drive. Analog can be "good enough", but digital can be "good enough" on a small, relatively rugged silver disk. VCRs were "good enough" for a lot of years, but the DVD was a HUGE improvement. They were more durable, smaller, didn't suffer from degradation over time and viewing, stored some cute "extra" content, and had a better picture.
If I capture analog content into a digital format it gains most of those advantages. Especially if it was high quality analog content to begin with (as in the case of recapturing analog content that was just taken from a high quality digital source.)
I'm a good bit more technical that "Average Joe" and I couldn't care less about the quality difference. if you stick them next to each other and I squint I can tell the difference between upscaled DVD and BR on a decent sized HD TV, but since I don't usually have them sitting next to each other DVD looks fine. I was actually considering a BR player for a while, but when I moved recently I noticed that my DVD player had a YPrPb out. When I hooked that up and saw what an upscaled DVD looked like, I gave up my BR plans immediately (Made me wish I'd pulled the DVD player out to look at the back 8 months earlier when I bought the TV).
I'm not sure, but I think some people might be confusing three channel component RCA with RGB, I don't think I've ever seen a TV with RGB. Most HD TV's I've seen have two or three channels of 3 channel component RCA (video, left sound, right sound), two or three channels of YPrPb RCA (The five RCA connector cables that most people think of as "HD"), an HDMI channel, a VGA channel, and a "TV" input for receiving regular OTA TV signals. RGB (as I'm sure you know, but for the benefit of those that don't) is usually 5 coax cables, one each for red, green, blue, and right and left sound. The only place I've seen it used a lot is in video remoting and/or switching systems used in computer labs of various sorts.
Get a good DVD player with HD out. I'm sure there IS a difference in quality between a BR and a regular DVD player with HD out, but unless you put them side by side I doubt you can tell. I'm QUITE happy with the ways normal DVDs look on my 42 inch LCD. I simply can't justify the $300 to upgrade to BR (not to mention that the movies are more expensive).
I got several replies like this to a similar comment I made farther up. I think I fell into the "I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" trap, since I've worked mostly on big parallel computing boxes. All the scientific apps I've seen use C derived languages or Fortran, but I have not seen all scientific apps. Having said that, since many if not most hard scientists eventually want to utilize the power of large parallel computing systems, it still makes sense to me to teach the harder low level languages first. If only because to tends to be easier to learn scripting languages from a low level language base than vice-versa.
As a sort of general reply to all the replies above....
Most of my experience with research computing involves being the admin on big iron boxes in the computer room for a couple of universities. I suppose I should have qualified my statements by saying so. All of the programs run on the big boxes were compiled and written in either Fortran or C derived languages. I suppose that since I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Having said that, and in reply to some of the "the point is to teach programming, not teach the language they are going to use" comments: given that many of these students are likely to need a low level language eventually (since I think we can accept that MOST hard science students eventually have to do something using big iron parallel system), doesn't it make more sense to learn a low level language first? Most people I know that start with a scripting language and move to lower level languages have a hard time with a lot things. On the other hand, people that start with low level languages and move to scripting languages can get a pretty strong hold on the new language in just a week or two.
Also, I apologize for letting my spell checker replace interpreted with interrupted. Duh.
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As a small voice of support for your position, this is more or less how Prohibition got repealed. The cumulative affect of a very significant portion of the population simply ignoring the law until it could no longer stand. I'm not saying it can or will work for copyright, there were additional factors in Prohibition relating to the public health risks posed both by the smugglers and dangerously unregulated booze production that just don't exist in this case, but it is an analogous if not identical situation.
Having said that, I definitely feel that most of the parties involved in this dispute are being unreasonable. Content creators (or rather the huge companies that "represent" them) are clearly overreaching what they can reasonably claim both in terms of length of copyright and what rights are granted. The Government is clearly giving more weight to the rights of content companies than to rights of consumers, which is both unfair and a violation of its mandate. Many if not most of the "information wants to be free" crowd seem perfectly content to drive the people who create content completely out of business. This is doubly foolish since it both hurts the content creators, in the end, the consumers themselves. Rather like "fishing out" an area, many of these voracious consumers of content may find that should they ever succeed in in their quest they will have no content to consume.
It seems to me that while the concept of copyright is sound, its terms and duration are currently excessive. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to "unmake" regulation. I am not really sure what the answer is.
The purpose of higher education is not to teach you how to merge tables in MySQL 4, it's to teach how relational databases work and what it means to merge tables. You might use MySQL 4 as a teaching tool, to demonstrate the concept involved, but no one expects that you'll be necessarily using the same tool or the same version in the real world. Algorithms are algorithms, database structures (mostly) are universal across relational databases. The implementation can be changed from language to language, database product to database product, or version to version sure, but the concept remain the same.
A person with a degree in computer science is certainly not going to be an expert in every programming language, database product, or operating system you might use. What they are (or should be, assuming a good program) is highly trained in the theoretical basis behind algorithm design and analysis, database design, and operating system and network fundamentals. Picking up the specifics of your environment will be quicker for them than for some kid you pulled off the street. They'll also know more than whatever stove pipe you put them in. So that (for instance) when you hire a kid to be a programmer, he'll know a bit about operating systems to, so he can intelligently articulate his needs to the systems administrator.
University is not tech school. You're not supposed to come out knowing how to use the latest version of MySQL or the latest buzzword compliant programming language. You're supposed to have the basis to learn whatever you need for your career.
Exactly. Why wouldn't you want to help and train anyone you can when the opportunity presents itself. Whether it's a sysadmin training and mentoring the Helldesk guys, or the Helldesk guys in turn taking any chance to train and mentor users, it's sure to decrease your workload in the long run, and help out the person you're mentoring. A win-win by any measure.
Dunno about these days, but I did it via the time honored method of teaching myself and convincing the company I worked for to start a small Linux support group (basically, "send them to me if they're using Linux" but just official enough to put on my resume). Then I convinced that one guy in the really small office that happened to have an old Solaris server in addition to all their Windows stuff that I could run his computers well enough. After that I could legitimately put "Unix Administrator" on my resume and things got easier.
Depends where you work. In some places (it sounds like this is a medium sized business, so it probably fits the bill), desktop support is ALSO supposed to work on operational IT. In other words, your job is to take user support calls, but while you're at it, look at these spam filter rules and see if you can't tighten things up a bit, and check the web server configs to see if we can support this new Intranet page., and write a script to check the status of the mailserver ever 10 minutes. It's really, really hard to concentrate on an operational problem when you are constantly being interrupted by user issues. Yes, it's your job but this other thing is ALSO your job, and if you could just get an hour without interruption maybe you could finally get it done.
I've been in the opposite situation myself several times, my title was "Systems Administrator", but the company was small enough that I also had to deal with user issues. This is even worse, since my "primary" job is to support the operational and planning needs of the organization, and user issues are supposed to be "secondary". In practices, since users are real flesh and blood people who can whine and/or complain to the director, their issues can never really be "secondary" and operational needs suffer.
like it or not, you got lucky. Lots of companies won't let you by the HR screen without a BS/BA. Ironically I have a degree in History, not CS, but between my experience, my minor in CS and my having gotten through a large chunk of a masters of CS I'm usually OK. Even now 10 years into career though I've been told that my lack of a BSc probably hinders me slightly in shops with big HR hurdles.
Depends on the the situation. It the OP's case, that might actually be possible since it's an internal Help Desk and theoretically the manager has influence with other managers to alleviate the most abusive callers. I used to help manage a computer company's call center though (Back in the day before all of this was outsourced). In that case you solve the problems you can (and certainly some of these people had good reason to be angry), and with the abusive ones you just sob silently and take it. It's not like you can talk to a customer's manager and ask him to have his employees behave like civilized people. In two cases that I recall someone was so well documented and so repeatedly abusive that we were essentially told that they had voided their warranty and could be ignored (In both cases they'd managed to get themselves elevated to the VP of customer service and abused HIM). Otherwise, you just had to deal with it and hope that once the problem was solved, the person would go away.
Not to mention, as I keep pointing out, this guy is contract IT for a very small company with no internal IT department. Who's going to manage all these machines with Linux and a Windows VM? Who's going install stuff in Wine? Explain how two shut down one computer that is actually two computers? Show the users how to work in this kind of unusual and complex environment? So many of these solutions are great for an enterprise sized company, a firm with a highly skilled user base, or a company that really even has one guy with a full time responsibility for the network and systems, but just don't seem reasonable for the environment put forth in the question.
1) You totally missed the joke.
2) You, like a lot of people, don't seem to actually want answer (or haven't read) the original question. This guy is contract IT for a very small company that has no full time IT person. There's no way you can disable physical data access. There's no "stupid process" for getting software installed, any process at all is overhead for someone who could be doing something else. Most likely users install their own software if they need something that isn't in the base install. Do you think they're going to pay him to come in and install every small time thing someone just realized they needed for the latest project? There is no IT department, there is no software vetting process, there is no way to do "user education" beyond making them read a for and promise to be good. They want him to install something close to a turn key solution that he will hopefully have to come in to service as seldom as possible.
There's no guarantee that there are even shared drives (a Linux "server" is mentioned but no details about what it does). Your solution might work for a 100 person company with a 5 man IT staff (even then it depends on what they do and what their needs are), but not for this problem.
1) No data is "The users" in a corporate environment, or at least very little of it should be. Most of the stuff on my work hard drive is something for work. In an ideal world the important stuff should be stored on a network drive and/or backed up automatically, but in a shop without even a full time IT guy that seems like a risky proposition at best. It's fairly likely that anything lost by the foolish user in question is something that the company might need or want.
2) The rest of us will be unlikely to be laughing when the data lost was critical to the Bowman contract and need to be regenerated IMMEDIATELY.
3) No all viruses or malware spread via the vectors you mention. It is possible to be infect without doing anything wrong. I will grant that it is far more comment o get infected by doing something stupid, but that's not the only way it can happen. Also, people aren't perfect. While you can usually convince them to not click on naked pictures of Angelina Jolie, an infected file that looks like an Excel spreadsheet and looks like it comes from someone the user trusts is a different matter.
4) User education is problematical at best in a company with no IT department at all. You gonna pay the contract IT guy's rates to come in and run a class every time you hire someone new?
5) it will be the contract IT guys fault the first time an infection spreads. It will happen, and it will be his fault. They asked him for a solution and he gave them vapors. That's how they'll see it no matter how you see it.
Possibly a valid response from your point of view, but note that the original questioner doesn't have Windows servers so no AD/Exchange. It doesn't negate your point, but it does say that your point is not applicable to the original question.
As sibling states, a forced upgrade in the next year or two is likely anyway. The real question is compatibility. Depending on what they do, Macs could be completely compatible with their current system. Normally one of the biggest compatibility nightmares with migrating a shop to a different OS (OS X or Linux) from Windows is replicating all of the stuff that AD does for you. These guys already don't use AD, so Macs (or Linux workstations for that matter) could work for them depending on the application software they use. Hell, by using a Unix based workstation OS, they could GAIN a lot. Suddenly OpenLDAP and NFS become easy solutions to solve many problems that AD normally solves in pure Windows Domains. Since their server is Linux already, (again depending on application support) Mac OS or Linux could make their whole system much more compatible.
Now if AutoCAD is a requirement for business, then the whole idea falls apart. Certainly switching operating systems and/or systems is not always a great solution, but especially given Microsoft's big push to get people off of XP, it's worth consideration at least. It may not works for the questioner, but it may, and now is a pretty good time to consider it.
Yeah, cause there are NO intelligent religious people. Newton, Galileo, Martin Luther King, Einstein, and thousands or millions of others are all statistical anomalies. (Please note that many of these people were not "conventionally" religious, but all can be quoted at one point or another as expressing awe, gratitude, or reverence of some sort of universal generative force)
But that's going to happen anyway. I'm not necessarily saying I agree one way or the other with this screening, but in point in fact it is only helping to make a decision that would otherwise be random. If I go to a fertility clinic with my wife they will fertilize, say, a dozen of her eggs with my sperm and try to implant 2 or 3 of them. Normally the selection of which 2 or 3 is a random one (once the most basic genetic disease screens are done), and 1, 2, or all three of the embryos might implant. If that happens and my wife carries a child or three to term, they discard the rest of the embryos. Whether I picked them because they were going to be blond haired, green eyed girls, or whether they picked three at random and implanted them. The "extra" embryos only get used if the first implantation doesn't take, the baby(ies) is not carried to term, or we later decide we want more kids. Only VERY rarely are all the fertilized embryos used. The "unchosen" embryos eliminated by this screening probably have the same chance of being later implanted as any other "unchosen" embryos whose potential siblings were chosen by random chance.
If you're going to object to this screening on the moral basis you state, then by any reasonable standard you should object to the whole idea of having children this way.
Nor would Hellen Keller who was blinded and deafened by (probably) Scarlet Fever in early childhood (around 18 months old). No one is certain what the disease was, but it certainly afflicted her well after birth.
1) They did (finally, I'll grant you, but they did) start shipping a two button mouse.
2) They never failed to implement a UI feature. The UI has supported multi-button mouses for years. They simply chose not to ship the hardware to match that function. It may seem like a nit-pick, but it's an important point. Realizing that some people like having the UI feature, they implemented it. Deciding that most of their users didn't care, they chose to make it an option. It's not like a two button mouse is either expensive or difficult to find if you want one, nor has it been for many, many years.
Personally I've never missed the maximize button, since I hate maximized windows in OSes that do support them, but I can see where you'd find that irritating if you want it. Honestly, I always thought the third button was to maximize... Since I never use maximize I've never played with it.
I often find it funny that Apple (rightly infamous for their generally poor mouse design choices in the last decade or so) has finally made the trackpad a usable interface. Using the very concepts (context menus and mouse scrolling) they resisted for so long in their physical mouses. I hate the trackpads on all of my PCs, precisely because I keep trying to use all the multitouch stuff I take for granted on my Mac.
I don't use no-script and I'm getting the same artifacts. I just keep assuming that they'll be fixed. Beginning to think this is a bad assumption.
Mine uses YPrPb RCA, but it's also fairly old as upscaling DVD players go. I didn't even realize it could do upscaling till I moved and noticed the YPrPb ports.
Personally I think it has a lot to do with portability. Imax films are analog and extremely high resolution, but they come shipped on pallets. You could probably fit a digital movie with a similar resolution on a 1 TB hard drive. Analog can be "good enough", but digital can be "good enough" on a small, relatively rugged silver disk. VCRs were "good enough" for a lot of years, but the DVD was a HUGE improvement. They were more durable, smaller, didn't suffer from degradation over time and viewing, stored some cute "extra" content, and had a better picture.
If I capture analog content into a digital format it gains most of those advantages. Especially if it was high quality analog content to begin with (as in the case of recapturing analog content that was just taken from a high quality digital source.)
I'm a good bit more technical that "Average Joe" and I couldn't care less about the quality difference. if you stick them next to each other and I squint I can tell the difference between upscaled DVD and BR on a decent sized HD TV, but since I don't usually have them sitting next to each other DVD looks fine. I was actually considering a BR player for a while, but when I moved recently I noticed that my DVD player had a YPrPb out. When I hooked that up and saw what an upscaled DVD looked like, I gave up my BR plans immediately (Made me wish I'd pulled the DVD player out to look at the back 8 months earlier when I bought the TV).
I'm not sure, but I think some people might be confusing three channel component RCA with RGB, I don't think I've ever seen a TV with RGB. Most HD TV's I've seen have two or three channels of 3 channel component RCA (video, left sound, right sound), two or three channels of YPrPb RCA (The five RCA connector cables that most people think of as "HD"), an HDMI channel, a VGA channel, and a "TV" input for receiving regular OTA TV signals. RGB (as I'm sure you know, but for the benefit of those that don't) is usually 5 coax cables, one each for red, green, blue, and right and left sound. The only place I've seen it used a lot is in video remoting and/or switching systems used in computer labs of various sorts.
Get a good DVD player with HD out. I'm sure there IS a difference in quality between a BR and a regular DVD player with HD out, but unless you put them side by side I doubt you can tell. I'm QUITE happy with the ways normal DVDs look on my 42 inch LCD. I simply can't justify the $300 to upgrade to BR (not to mention that the movies are more expensive).
I got several replies like this to a similar comment I made farther up. I think I fell into the "I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" trap, since I've worked mostly on big parallel computing boxes. All the scientific apps I've seen use C derived languages or Fortran, but I have not seen all scientific apps. Having said that, since many if not most hard scientists eventually want to utilize the power of large parallel computing systems, it still makes sense to me to teach the harder low level languages first. If only because to tends to be easier to learn scripting languages from a low level language base than vice-versa.
As a sort of general reply to all the replies above....
Most of my experience with research computing involves being the admin on big iron boxes in the computer room for a couple of universities. I suppose I should have qualified my statements by saying so. All of the programs run on the big boxes were compiled and written in either Fortran or C derived languages. I suppose that since I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Having said that, and in reply to some of the "the point is to teach programming, not teach the language they are going to use" comments: given that many of these students are likely to need a low level language eventually (since I think we can accept that MOST hard science students eventually have to do something using big iron parallel system), doesn't it make more sense to learn a low level language first? Most people I know that start with a scripting language and move to lower level languages have a hard time with a lot things. On the other hand, people that start with low level languages and move to scripting languages can get a pretty strong hold on the new language in just a week or two.
Also, I apologize for letting my spell checker replace interpreted with interrupted. Duh.