When I was looking for a digital-to-analog converter for my TV, I returned all the ones that displayed blank screens when the signal became weak. The one I eventually chose (x5) was the Channel Master unit. When the signal is weak it continues displaying a noisy image, rather than go blank, or it reverts to "audio only" mode, rather than go silent. It lets me continue watching programs rather than be completely cutoff.
>>>>> If this type of thing is implemented at the file level every application is going to have to do its own thing. >> >>Great. So add it to the system level.
Somebody has ADD and didn't bother to finish reading the *whole* paragraph. Quote: "It would be better to do most of them at the filesystem..."
>>>"...analog pictures and film can degrade and still be usable; why can't the same be true of digital files?"
The ear-eye-brain connection has ~500 million years of development, and has learned the ability to filter-out noise. If for example I'm listening to a radio, the hiss is mentally filtered-out, or if I'm watching a VHS tape that has wrinkles, my brain can focus on the undamaged areas. In contrast when a computer encounters noise or errors, it panics and says, "I give up," and the digital radio or digital television goes blank.
What we need is a smarter computer that says, "I don't know what this is supposed to be, but here's my best guess," and displays noise. Let the brain then takeover and mentally remove the noise from the audio or image.
>>>Which they will quickly refuse to pay, putting the printer back in your hands
Hello? McFly? (knock) (knock) knock). The post office can't return items if you don't include your return address! I'm sorry but that just seems so obvious to me. So the corporate HQ will be stuck with the printer and the "postage due" bill.
Yep. I sell all my junk of ebay for a penny ($0.01) plus shipping cost of $20 ($12 actual postage plus $8 to cover incidentals like buying a shipping box, your gasoline, packing foam, etc). SOMEBODY will buy it.
As for the actual printer, I've learned to buy LASER printers. They have a high initial cost but low-priced ink (~$50 for 5000 pages). The laser printer ends-up being cheaper after you pass 800 pages.
I don't see why this is a problem. It makes sense that the "free calling" would only apply to a small distance, and anything above that you must pay. So for example if I call 100 miles to my aunt, that would cost money. It covers the cost of the longer lines and additional switching stations.
>>>A few examples - those 'green' light bulbs and wind power.
The green lightbulbs are filled with dangerous mercury, take a long time to reach full brightness (2-3 minutes), and are unsuitable for many applications like an ovens or enclosed fixtures (heat kills the electronics). And wind power is often considered ugly by the neighbors who have to look at the windmills. .
>>>If the whole man-made climate change thing falls apart tomorrow, dollars invested in good green technology won't be lost at all. They'll be just as profitable
No they won't. The green technologies might survive but they won't be "as" profitable in a non-warming world as they would be in a world where governments *grant a monopoly* to CFLs and windmills. It is to GE's advantage to keep pushing for global change and cash-in on the resulting monopoly they'll give themselves as incandescents/oil technologies are banned by law
Okay. Now suppose I'm watching channel 17 from ~60 miles away.
And my neighbor decides he wants to turn-on his whitespace TV Band Device directly over top channel 17.
How is this database supposed to stop that from happening? I'm afraid the DB will tell the neighbor's TVBD that it's okay to broadcast over channel seventeen because it's not located inside my market. Goodbye channel 17; hello digital hash.
>>>How do you mind out what an exe in your process list does there?
Most users don't care about the EXE, or even bother to look at the process list. In contrast Linux's useability problems trace to every day, commonplace events like "Why doesn't Internet Explorer show youtube videos?" Windows or Mac will provide a nice helpfile to read. Linux won't provide anything.
>>>A fun example would be taking a disk image, checksumming it while compressing it lightly and sending it through an encrypted tunnel to a server, as with light enough encryption, this will actually be faster than sending it unencrypted -- especially if the destination drive is slower/busier than the source drive... >>>
I'd argue that sending the uncompressed file is faster, because you don't need to waste half an hour writing an elaborate program. It always amused me when I was working with CompSci majors who would tell me (an EE), "There's a faster way to do that," and then spend a half-hour writing and debugging some script, followed by, "See? That only took 30 seconds to crunch those numbers."
And I'd just smile and say "Yeah neat" but I'd secretly be thinking, 'You mean it took 30 seconds plus 30 minutes of coding. Using a mouse would have only taken 5 minutes.' .
>>>the fact that I need the commandline to do that now isn't a bug, it's a missing feature
AND it's non-user friendly. I grew-up using command lines, but was thrilled when I bought my first mouse. It made it possible to do the same stuff, but without memorizing the commands or digging through a manual. Replacing the CLI with a mouse improves usability.
>>>VoIP. Clipped high and low tones, often choppy like a bad cell call. Most businesses will not want their customers having that experience talking to them.
My company uses VOIP (the phone plugs direct to the Ethernet), and it sounds just as good as plain-old telephone service. I've not noticed any of the problems you describe
Sorry but I just don't see how VOIP can be compatible with V.90 or V.92 56k data modems. You're essentially taking the PCM code from the modem, converting it to analog, then converting it to VOIP data, then back to analog at the destination, and back to PCM again.
Those unnecessary conversions would really kill your speed. All the extra introduced noise would probably force to you to fall back to 33k.
>>>you purchase a long distance service separately from a local phone service.
It didn't used to be that way. It used to be like Europe where you would buy a phone, and it came with Bell Telephone service, both local and long-distance.
But then during President Carter's term that Bell Monopoly was broken-up, so now you have two companies - one for the local hookup and one for long distance. IMHO it's better because it gives you freedom of choice.
>>>Except that in many places, you really are already on a VOIP network, you just have POTS on the last mile.
False. If that were true then dialup modems would be unusable. Dialup modems rely on having a "clean" analog wire to the central office, and VOIP would interfere with that.
If you meant to say the analog sound is digitized after it reaches the CO, then that would be correct, but it's definitely not VOIP
>>>a true pots switch port cannot carry DSL. its the port that does the low-pass filtering
Yes I know but I was making the point that just because something LOOKS the same, doesn't mean it is. i.e. The Mac floppy versus PC floppy example. They may look alike but they have different formats. Likewise POTS and DSL are both twisted pair, but very different formats. POTS is 0-4000 hertz while DSL has no upper limit.
Up til a year ago, my phone line could not carry DSL. It was band-limited to 4000 or below. Then I got an upgrade.
>>>They sell those 3G USB dongles and pre-paid access at pretty competitive prices now
My dialup costs $7 per month. Are they competitive with that? I see Verizon charges $50 for every 500 megabytes. That 500 MB is equivalent to only 22 hours of dialup downloading.
>>>"Microsoft and Vista Suck" is not really any sort of intelligent statement
How about? "I plugged my USB drive into my brothers 1/2 gig Vista machine, and it took 5 minutes to display a directory." Does that qualify as intelligent and useful criticism?
>>>Microsoft has done a lot of good and are continuing to.
I would argue that most of the "good" was invented by other companies like Atari, Apple, Commodore, and Amiga. MS merely played "catch up" implementing ideas that has already existed for many years prior. For example - color displays and music-quality sound. Atari computers had 128 colors in 1979. MS-based computers did not get the same functionality until eight years later. Both Atari and Commodore produced music-quality sound in 1982. MS-based computers went "beep" or "boop"
Or preemptive multitasking. Amiga had that in 1985. MS didn't do it until Windows 95 (and only in limited fashion).
- Mosaic was the first PC/Mac browser. - Netscape extended the web with audio and video capabilities in 1994. - MS didn't arrive to the party until 1996.
Same with ocean shipping. I wanted to send a video to a guy i Sweden, and the ocean route was half the price but took 3 months. I chose air shipment instead.
Stealing electricity from the phone company will get you jailed or fined. Those phone-powered lamps are nice to have during power outages, but should not be used when the regular power lines are up-and-running.
By the way, the reason phones had power was because they reached into many areas that had no electricity. So the electricity had to be supplied in the wire.
>>>Go to the bin folder. type ls. Gives you a list of commands
And how the hell is some user sitting alone in his room soupposed to know this? Perhaps if there was a "readmefirst" file on the desktop to give new users this info, but there isn't.
If the user has to type a "hidden" command in order to access help files, then the system is already broke. This is the advantage mature OSes like Windows and MacOS have - you can access the help files with a mouse click.
>>>I imagine a lot of what they are going to do is sponsor/mandate DSL implementations, including some sort of repeater technology to break the "local loop distance" barrier and give every American household that has a POTS phone line today access to DSL tomorrow. >>>
Agree 100%. Or as one colleague told me: Run fiber to the DSLAM, and then use the existing phone lines to provide DSL to that neighborhood. That's a very cheap upgrade
That's just like analog television. It too provided reliable service all across the country. I was able to get ~25 different stations in my location. "Of course we're going to replace it."
And we did. The new digital television only gives me 4 sometimes 5 channels. I can get more, but I have to risk my life crawling onto the roof to install a giant-sized antenna that cost $200+
In many mountainous areas of the country, DTV might as well not exist, because it can't "bend" around the hills like analog could. You either get a perfect picture, or nothing at all, and the rural folk get nothing. At least with analog it degraded gracefully, so you might be watching Tom Brokaw in black-and-white but at least you could still see/hear him. With digital you get nada.
>>>I suspect there are some parts of the country which just are not serviceable without some type of large footprint (cheap) wireless solution.
I disagree. They could just use the existing phone lines to carry DSL to rural homes. At 1000 kbit/s DSL can extend 5 miles away from the central office. More distant homes could use a combination Fiber-to-Neighborhood DSLAM to provide the connection to various clusters of homes.
And as for the USF, I'd support the idea so long as it had a 10-year-sunset. None of that bullshit where we are paying a Spanish-American War Tax a century after the war ended. Taxes need to disappear after they are no longer needed.
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P.S.
When I was looking for a digital-to-analog converter for my TV, I returned all the ones that displayed blank screens when the signal became weak. The one I eventually chose (x5) was the Channel Master unit. When the signal is weak it continues displaying a noisy image, rather than go blank, or it reverts to "audio only" mode, rather than go silent. It lets me continue watching programs rather than be completely cutoff.
>>>>> If this type of thing is implemented at the file level every application is going to have to do its own thing.
>>
>>Great. So add it to the system level.
Somebody has ADD and didn't bother to finish reading the *whole* paragraph. Quote: "It would be better to do most of them at the filesystem..."
>>>"...analog pictures and film can degrade and still be usable; why can't the same be true of digital files?"
The ear-eye-brain connection has ~500 million years of development, and has learned the ability to filter-out noise. If for example I'm listening to a radio, the hiss is mentally filtered-out, or if I'm watching a VHS tape that has wrinkles, my brain can focus on the undamaged areas. In contrast when a computer encounters noise or errors, it panics and says, "I give up," and the digital radio or digital television goes blank.
What we need is a smarter computer that says, "I don't know what this is supposed to be, but here's my best guess," and displays noise. Let the brain then takeover and mentally remove the noise from the audio or image.
>>>Which they will quickly refuse to pay, putting the printer back in your hands
Hello? McFly? (knock) (knock) knock). The post office can't return items if you don't include your return address! I'm sorry but that just seems so obvious to me. So the corporate HQ will be stuck with the printer and the "postage due" bill.
Kaboom is the name of one of the best videogames ever made!
http://www.atariguide.com/0/026.htm
Yep. I sell all my junk of ebay for a penny ($0.01) plus shipping cost of $20 ($12 actual postage plus $8 to cover incidentals like buying a shipping box, your gasoline, packing foam, etc). SOMEBODY will buy it.
As for the actual printer, I've learned to buy LASER printers. They have a high initial cost but low-priced ink (~$50 for 5000 pages). The laser printer ends-up being cheaper after you pass 800 pages.
I don't see why this is a problem. It makes sense that the "free calling" would only apply to a small distance, and anything above that you must pay. So for example if I call 100 miles to my aunt, that would cost money. It covers the cost of the longer lines and additional switching stations.
>>>A few examples - those 'green' light bulbs and wind power.
The green lightbulbs are filled with dangerous mercury, take a long time to reach full brightness (2-3 minutes), and are unsuitable for many applications like an ovens or enclosed fixtures (heat kills the electronics). And wind power is often considered ugly by the neighbors who have to look at the windmills.
.
>>>If the whole man-made climate change thing falls apart tomorrow, dollars invested in good green technology won't be lost at all. They'll be just as profitable
No they won't. The green technologies might survive but they won't be "as" profitable in a non-warming world as they would be in a world where governments *grant a monopoly* to CFLs and windmills. It is to GE's advantage to keep pushing for global change and cash-in on the resulting monopoly they'll give themselves as incandescents/oil technologies are banned by law
Okay. Now suppose I'm watching channel 17 from ~60 miles away.
And my neighbor decides he wants to turn-on his whitespace TV Band Device directly over top channel 17.
How is this database supposed to stop that from happening? I'm afraid the DB will tell the neighbor's TVBD that it's okay to broadcast over channel seventeen because it's not located inside my market. Goodbye channel 17; hello digital hash.
>>>How do you mind out what an exe in your process list does there?
Most users don't care about the EXE, or even bother to look at the process list. In contrast Linux's useability problems trace to every day, commonplace events like "Why doesn't Internet Explorer show youtube videos?" Windows or Mac will provide a nice helpfile to read. Linux won't provide anything.
>>>A fun example would be taking a disk image, checksumming it while compressing it lightly and sending it through an encrypted tunnel to a server, as with light enough encryption, this will actually be faster than sending it unencrypted -- especially if the destination drive is slower/busier than the source drive...
>>>
I'd argue that sending the uncompressed file is faster, because you don't need to waste half an hour writing an elaborate program. It always amused me when I was working with CompSci majors who would tell me (an EE), "There's a faster way to do that," and then spend a half-hour writing and debugging some script, followed by, "See? That only took 30 seconds to crunch those numbers."
And I'd just smile and say "Yeah neat" but I'd secretly be thinking, 'You mean it took 30 seconds plus 30 minutes of coding. Using a mouse would have only taken 5 minutes.'
.
>>>the fact that I need the commandline to do that now isn't a bug, it's a missing feature
AND it's non-user friendly. I grew-up using command lines, but was thrilled when I bought my first mouse. It made it possible to do the same stuff, but without memorizing the commands or digging through a manual. Replacing the CLI with a mouse improves usability.
>>>VoIP. Clipped high and low tones, often choppy like a bad cell call. Most businesses will not want their customers having that experience talking to them.
My company uses VOIP (the phone plugs direct to the Ethernet), and it sounds just as good as plain-old telephone service. I've not noticed any of the problems you describe
Sorry but I just don't see how VOIP can be compatible with V.90 or V.92 56k data modems. You're essentially taking the PCM code from the modem, converting it to analog, then converting it to VOIP data, then back to analog at the destination, and back to PCM again.
Those unnecessary conversions would really kill your speed. All the extra introduced noise would probably force to you to fall back to 33k.
>>>you purchase a long distance service separately from a local phone service.
It didn't used to be that way. It used to be like Europe where you would buy a phone, and it came with Bell Telephone service, both local and long-distance.
But then during President Carter's term that Bell Monopoly was broken-up, so now you have two companies - one for the local hookup and one for long distance. IMHO it's better because it gives you freedom of choice.
>>>Except that in many places, you really are already on a VOIP network, you just have POTS on the last mile.
False. If that were true then dialup modems would be unusable. Dialup modems rely on having a "clean" analog wire to the central office, and VOIP would interfere with that.
If you meant to say the analog sound is digitized after it reaches the CO, then that would be correct, but it's definitely not VOIP
>>>a true pots switch port cannot carry DSL. its the port that does the low-pass filtering
Yes I know but I was making the point that just because something LOOKS the same, doesn't mean it is. i.e. The Mac floppy versus PC floppy example. They may look alike but they have different formats. Likewise POTS and DSL are both twisted pair, but very different formats. POTS is 0-4000 hertz while DSL has no upper limit.
Up til a year ago, my phone line could not carry DSL. It was band-limited to 4000 or below. Then I got an upgrade.
>>>They sell those 3G USB dongles and pre-paid access at pretty competitive prices now
My dialup costs $7 per month. Are they competitive with that? I see Verizon charges $50 for every 500 megabytes. That 500 MB is equivalent to only 22 hours of dialup downloading.
>>>"Microsoft and Vista Suck" is not really any sort of intelligent statement
How about? "I plugged my USB drive into my brothers 1/2 gig Vista machine, and it took 5 minutes to display a directory." Does that qualify as intelligent and useful criticism?
>>>Microsoft has done a lot of good and are continuing to.
I would argue that most of the "good" was invented by other companies like Atari, Apple, Commodore, and Amiga. MS merely played "catch up" implementing ideas that has already existed for many years prior. For example - color displays and music-quality sound. Atari computers had 128 colors in 1979. MS-based computers did not get the same functionality until eight years later. Both Atari and Commodore produced music-quality sound in 1982. MS-based computers went "beep" or "boop"
Or preemptive multitasking. Amiga had that in 1985. MS didn't do it until Windows 95 (and only in limited fashion).
- Mosaic was the first PC/Mac browser.
- Netscape extended the web with audio and video capabilities in 1994.
- MS didn't arrive to the party until 1996.
More efficient but also a lot slower.
Same with ocean shipping. I wanted to send a video to a guy i Sweden, and the ocean route was half the price but took 3 months. I chose air shipment instead.
Stealing electricity from the phone company will get you jailed or fined. Those phone-powered lamps are nice to have during power outages, but should not be used when the regular power lines are up-and-running.
By the way, the reason phones had power was because they reached into many areas that had no electricity. So the electricity had to be supplied in the wire.
>>>Go to the bin folder. type ls. Gives you a list of commands
And how the hell is some user sitting alone in his room soupposed to know this? Perhaps if there was a "readmefirst" file on the desktop to give new users this info, but there isn't.
>>>man
>>>apropos
If the user has to type a "hidden" command in order to access help files, then the system is already broke. This is the advantage mature OSes like Windows and MacOS have - you can access the help files with a mouse click.
>>>I imagine a lot of what they are going to do is sponsor/mandate DSL implementations, including some sort of repeater technology to break the "local loop distance" barrier and give every American household that has a POTS phone line today access to DSL tomorrow.
>>>
Agree 100%. Or as one colleague told me: Run fiber to the DSLAM, and then use the existing phone lines to provide DSL to that neighborhood. That's a very cheap upgrade
That's just like analog television. It too provided reliable service all across the country. I was able to get ~25 different stations in my location. "Of course we're going to replace it."
And we did. The new digital television only gives me 4 sometimes 5 channels. I can get more, but I have to risk my life crawling onto the roof to install a giant-sized antenna that cost $200+
In many mountainous areas of the country, DTV might as well not exist, because it can't "bend" around the hills like analog could. You either get a perfect picture, or nothing at all, and the rural folk get nothing. At least with analog it degraded gracefully, so you might be watching Tom Brokaw in black-and-white but at least you could still see/hear him. With digital you get nada.
No I'm not bitter.
;-)
>>>I suspect there are some parts of the country which just are not serviceable without some type of large footprint (cheap) wireless solution.
I disagree. They could just use the existing phone lines to carry DSL to rural homes. At 1000 kbit/s DSL can extend 5 miles away from the central office. More distant homes could use a combination Fiber-to-Neighborhood DSLAM to provide the connection to various clusters of homes.
And as for the USF, I'd support the idea so long as it had a 10-year-sunset. None of that bullshit where we are paying a Spanish-American War Tax a century after the war ended. Taxes need to disappear after they are no longer needed.