In the forums on that providers web site (duh), somebody points out a link to a Microsoft press release about a very lucrative deal between the provider and Microsoft... dot the i yourself.
Really, would you think Microsoft would let an opportunity like that get away?
This one should get a +6 insightful and be on the top. Under 'work for hire' agreements is how most programmers work, and that makes this point so very true that all other still excellent arguments made in this forum don't matter much anymore.
Microsoft making their codec licensable doesn't make it open. It's an in-house proprietary codec that they may make licensable for certain products under certain restrictions.
MPEG2, which this new codec is supposed to replace for example, is not free either. However, MPEG was developed by an open community of specialists inside of a standards body. All technological choices in the codec are balanced decisions of the companies involved in the standards bodies. The result is a codec that can be implemented by many different chip and system manufacturers on many different platforms resulting in a very healthy and competitive market around the MPEG standard.
WM however, was made by MS inside of MS. The technical decisions of WM are geared towards the business that MS is in. WM will have technical implemenation issues such as we have found in Java (Java runs more efficiently on SUN processors than on Intel/AMD, because of floating point rounding requirements in the Java standard).
So there will be implementers of this hd-dvd that find that they either have to accept a loss of efficiency somewhere, or have to implement WM in a way that would make sense for MS but maybe not for themselves.
That is the fundamental reason why standards are developed in the open, and why something proprietary in a standard is bad for the standard.
Firewire is another example of a standard slowed down because of its proprietary restrictions. When ieee 1394 was defined, plans included to have it fully replace scsi and next generation ide/atapi. That did not happen, we see firewire mostly for the high-end video applications and other high-margin mostly apple-related external devices.
firewire is not in every PC and harddisk, because its license fees price it out of that market. The proprietary nature of firewire is why it failed to replace scsi and ide, and why we now have serial ata.
I will clarify why I bring the Chinese into the equation: Most DVD players will be manufactured there. The manufacturers have a large part in the decision to choose which standard it will comply to. The chinese are working on their own standards, unencumbered by patent licenses, hence no delays because of licensing issues, and a reduction in unit cost.
If we look at history (vhs), all the Chinese will have to do is to convince the porn industry to use their hd-dvd media and hollywood will follow, because those players will be ubiqitious and cheap.
"Have you configured Sendmail to "just authenticate" users via SMTP authentication without having to resort to pain-in-the-ass mechanisms?"
No, but it's not complicated to let postfix do that. <opinion>postfix is better than sendmail anyway<opinion>.
"or allow some PHB to do it via a pointy-clicky interface"
Nobody is saying that Linux is PHB-adminable. In fact, it's well known that to admin a Linux networks, you need more than the point-and-click admin person. However, that one more capable Linux administrator should be capable of managining a larger system/network, because for example where the Linux admin has to write some scripts/configure some complicated textfiles, the Windows admin regularly has to reboot/install security patches or 're-image' broken/ill(virus/worm) desktops.
"Also keep in mind that the people adding users needn't be the administrators themselves -- a department head should be able to add users to their domain without having to run to admins."
The admin writes the script to automate it, but doesn't by far have to be the only one using it! The script could have many interfaces other than a command-line, such as web interface, email interface, or even (ouch) parsing a set of 'word documents' edited by the bosses...
"Just talk to Microsoft. Or go look at their site, it's all layed out there. $0.10USD per copy was the going rate last I checked."
If it is licensable that doesn't make it an open standard. It was developed behind closed doors and it's documented behind closed doors. That is eons less open than H.264 (even though MS has had/is having a pretty substantial and active role in the H.264 development process).
The Chinese have created their own 2nd generation (hd) dvd standardisation effort, for the sole purpose of being able to make dvd players without having to the pay patent fees that they consider rather large already for the MPEG2 codec in current use for dvd's. Their target is lowering cost of the end product. What China does on this front is a big issue: Don't forget the manufacturing power of China, where they can keep the payroll so low that they can use the largest amount of the cash for capital investments in the most modern and advanced manufacturing machinery.
And now the dvdforum seems to move in the opposite way. It's definitely big news, because how the future of dvd standards and dvd players unfolds will have a large impact in the future meaning and use of patents and patent law, for consumers, producers, patent owners, and goverment.
Yes that is the description of your posting. To the rest of us the/. story says really clearly 'proprietary codec in international standard'.
That is a lot of facts with a lot of implications.
If you study the history of standards and technology, you will know that that will most likely be very bad for consumers in the end (or for the standard itself to take off to begin with: what do you think will happen with the chinse hd-dvd standard with this news?)
When people say 'a 40 Mhz scope',they mean a scope with which you can measure signals up to 40Mhz. Sure, nyquist says that you'll need only 80Mhz to sample a 40Mhz bandwith. But for measuring that isn't really what you want:
The reason why people say you need 10 samples is because if you sample at 80Mhz and view the difference between a 40 and 39 Mhz signal, then the 40Mhz signal will look like a perfect 40Mhz square block signal (*1), and the 39 Mhz signal will look like a 40Mhz square block signal, but where one in every fourty blocks takes twice as long. That is not a good representation of the clean 39Mhz signal at all and it is precisely the reason why you need more than 2 samples per period of the maximum frequency you want to measure with a digital oscilloscope.
Plus, if you sample a wideband signal at 80Mhz, then you'll either have a lot of aliasing problems around 30-40Mhz, or you will have to deal with the signal attenuation of the lowpass filters in the analog frontend.
*1: only if the 40Mhz is exactly in phase with the 80Mhz clock of the oscilloscope, which is never the case, hence even the 40Mhz signal will look bad.
If you have a task on Linux that you need to do often, the trick is to script it. Yes, perl, python, php, whatever rings your bell. It doesn't really matter which script language(s) you use, but 'thou shallt script'. When you know the scripting languages well, you'll find yourself writing scripts for 1 minute jobs that you do only twelve times per year and still saving time (plus making fewer mistakes).
If in you system, you need to do so many things that adding a user takes more than 20 seconds, then you need add those extra things that you are doing manually to your script.
"Do you end up mirroring a disk 13000 times only to discover that you forgot to put kcalc on, or that the company intranet in the bookmarks list had changed?"
No, because you make sure that you have a remote maintenance/upgrade/install system in place so that those changes are made automagically while the systems are out there, as long they are on the network.
And that is why you learn one or more good scripting languages if you do any serious Linux work. It pays back for the effort manyfold.
And for the initial install, that is why you make sure you can pxeboot the system.
But at NASA, you have a local replica of the whole system sitting in the lab next door, you're in a team of professionals that if necessary can calculate the most probable results of particular radiation hitting your system under a given angle, or can tell you the power usage and temperature effect of the system components given a particular subroutine, or can dream low-level correct assembly for the platform under study, plus the vendor has a couple of on-line support guys sitting in chairs in the corner of your office waiting for your activation command (which is the word "huh?")...
Reading all these postings, I just see a large oncoming shift. I predict airplanes are going switch towards relying on satellites for communications.
If jetblue can get incoming satellite TV to every coach chair, then why shouldn't bidirectional voice be possible from the cockpit? Shouldn't it be possible to make a satellite communications system that is at least as reliable as VHF?
"impact to the emergency services provided by amateur radio."
Very businesslike, this is a way to look at that:
Basically, the interference should not be so high that a lot of Hams quit. It doesn't really matter how much interference there is, as long as the Hams still actively pursue their hobby, because when there is a need for those emergency services, the power lines and their interference will likely be down. Otherwise, the internet-over-power would still be working....
So, for example, if the interference reduces the range of useful communications, then the amateur radio emergency services will not be impacted as long as the range is still enough for the Hams to get please out of their hobbies. When the power lines go dead, the interference goes with it, and the range is back to normal.
I found it very interesting to find out that in the US, even court bail money is capitalized. It's pretty amazing when you think of it. It both helps the courts and sustains a whole other activity: bounty hunting. When the person out on bail fails to show up in court, it's not just a law enforcement issue to bring the person to justice, because there is a company that is losing money, hence the bounty hunters... A bounty hunter is like a 'repo man' for lost persons... And thanks to the concept of 'citizen arrest', it's all legally possible too. Those are your tough men, the bounty hunters.
I'm sure bail bonds is a very tough business to be in. Besides dealing a lot with crime and voilence, those companies are also basically lending money to people with the very worst creditability... The interest rates will probably not be low.
That's the same as the 'interest rates have gone down' mortgage commercial thing, and the same as gasoline prices. If it is good for them, they just act as if the old status quo is still lingering. Ever noticed that when the crude oil prices go up, the gasoline follows really quickly, but the other way around it just doesn't swing back like that? And if the status quo is bad for them, and the old status is too old to still pretend as valid, then they will try to make it look less bad.
Too many forms of marketing are nothing else but finding a way to lie without being called a liar.
When I am exposed to marketing, I often still do listen if it is for a product that I may be interested in. But I usually end up basically wondering: 'nice wrapper, but how does the cookie taste'?
Which makes it very annoying when marketing for something technical gets so thick that there it gets very hard/impossible to get the hard technical specs. And then when you get the specs, it gets very hard/impossible to find which numbers in the spec are mutually exclusive...
"Is InstanceCount an int, a long or a short? Or is it a pointer to one of the above? Is FirstName a C-style string"
Those are questions that the editor/gui should be able to answer without the need to add typing work for the programmer. I'm sure there are a lot of variables with erroneous hungarian notation, either because of programmer error, or programmer misunderstanding, or a 'forgot to update that' type of thing...Usually no information is better than misinformation.
Slashdot Mirror
In the forums on that providers web site (duh), somebody points out a link to a Microsoft press release about a very lucrative deal between the provider and Microsoft... dot the i yourself.
Really, would you think Microsoft would let an opportunity like that get away?
"I've talked to NO-44 with a handheld before."
Um interesting, but: what did it say back? "beep"?
Or do these satellites collect interesting data, or is it used enough to talk with others that are using it at the same time?
In other words: What is fun about it? I hope it's not just 'hey look, I just made a relay in space say click'.
This one should get a +6 insightful and be on the top. Under 'work for hire' agreements is how most programmers work, and that makes this point so very true that all other still excellent arguments made in this forum don't matter much anymore.
Actually, it can rain upwards on earth too, and sometimes that results in hail. Rising air can blow raindrops upward.
"That 60k for a decent Linux admin is going to pay for your basic licensing costs for windows,"
Not for the amount of boxes that that admin is capable of adminestering.
"doesn't realize that there are windows admins who know what they're doing."
But those amins aren't cheap either. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Spend money on licenses or the admin: choose one.
Yes you are repeating yourself.
Microsoft making their codec licensable doesn't make it open. It's an in-house proprietary codec that they may make licensable for certain products under certain restrictions.
MPEG2, which this new codec is supposed to replace for example, is not free either. However, MPEG was developed by an open community of specialists inside of a standards body. All technological choices in the codec are balanced decisions of the companies involved in the standards bodies. The result is a codec that can be implemented by many different chip and system manufacturers on many different platforms resulting in a very healthy and competitive market around the MPEG standard.
WM however, was made by MS inside of MS. The technical decisions of WM are geared towards the business that MS is in. WM will have technical implemenation issues such as we have found in Java (Java runs more efficiently on SUN processors than on Intel/AMD, because of floating point rounding requirements in the Java standard).
So there will be implementers of this hd-dvd that find that they either have to accept a loss of efficiency somewhere, or have to implement WM in a way that would make sense for MS but maybe not for themselves.
That is the fundamental reason why standards are developed in the open, and why something proprietary in a standard is bad for the standard.
Firewire is another example of a standard slowed down because of its proprietary restrictions. When ieee 1394 was defined, plans included to have it fully replace scsi and next generation ide/atapi. That did not happen, we see firewire mostly for the high-end video applications and other high-margin mostly apple-related external devices.
firewire is not in every PC and harddisk, because its license fees price it out of that market. The proprietary nature of firewire is why it failed to replace scsi and ide, and why we now have serial ata.
I will clarify why I bring the Chinese into the equation: Most DVD players will be manufactured there. The manufacturers have a large part in the decision to choose which standard it will comply to. The chinese are working on their own standards, unencumbered by patent licenses, hence no delays because of licensing issues, and a reduction in unit cost.
If we look at history (vhs), all the Chinese will have to do is to convince the porn industry to use their hd-dvd media and hollywood will follow, because those players will be ubiqitious and cheap.
"Have you configured Sendmail to "just authenticate" users via SMTP authentication without having to resort to pain-in-the-ass mechanisms?"
No, but it's not complicated to let postfix do that. <opinion>postfix is better than sendmail anyway<opinion>.
"or allow some PHB to do it via a pointy-clicky interface"
Nobody is saying that Linux is PHB-adminable. In fact, it's well known that to admin a Linux networks, you need more than the point-and-click admin person. However, that one more capable Linux administrator should be capable of managining a larger system/network, because for example where the Linux admin has to write some scripts/configure some complicated textfiles, the Windows admin regularly has to reboot/install security patches or 're-image' broken/ill(virus/worm) desktops.
"Also keep in mind that the people adding users needn't be the administrators themselves -- a department head should be able to add users to their domain without having to run to admins."
The admin writes the script to automate it, but doesn't by far have to be the only one using it! The script could have many interfaces other than a command-line, such as web interface, email interface, or even (ouch) parsing a set of 'word documents' edited by the bosses...
"Just talk to Microsoft. Or go look at their site, it's all layed out there. $0.10USD per copy was the going rate last I checked."
If it is licensable that doesn't make it an open standard. It was developed behind closed doors and it's documented behind closed doors. That is eons less open than H.264 (even though MS has had/is having a pretty substantial and active role in the H.264 development process).
The Chinese have created their own 2nd generation (hd) dvd standardisation effort, for the sole purpose of being able to make dvd players without having to the pay patent fees that they consider rather large already for the MPEG2 codec in current use for dvd's. Their target is lowering cost of the end product. What China does on this front is a big issue: Don't forget the manufacturing power of China, where they can keep the payroll so low that they can use the largest amount of the cash for capital investments in the most modern and advanced manufacturing machinery.
And now the dvdforum seems to move in the opposite way. It's definitely big news, because how the future of dvd standards and dvd players unfolds will have a large impact in the future meaning and use of patents and patent law, for consumers, producers, patent owners, and goverment.
"No facts, no reasons, no nothing."
/. story says really clearly 'proprietary codec in international standard'.
Yes that is the description of your posting. To the rest of us the
That is a lot of facts with a lot of implications.
If you study the history of standards and technology, you will know that that will most likely be very bad for consumers in the end (or for the standard itself to take off to begin with: what do you think will happen with the chinse hd-dvd standard with this news?)
When people say 'a 40 Mhz scope',they mean a scope with which you can measure signals up to 40Mhz. Sure, nyquist says that you'll need only 80Mhz to sample a 40Mhz bandwith. But for measuring that isn't really what you want:
The reason why people say you need 10 samples is because if you sample at 80Mhz and view the difference between a 40 and 39 Mhz signal, then the 40Mhz signal will look like a perfect 40Mhz square block signal (*1), and the 39 Mhz signal will look like a 40Mhz square block signal, but where one in every fourty blocks takes twice as long. That is not a good representation of the clean 39Mhz signal at all and it is precisely the reason why you need more than 2 samples per period of the maximum frequency you want to measure with a digital oscilloscope.
Plus, if you sample a wideband signal at 80Mhz, then you'll either have a lot of aliasing problems around 30-40Mhz, or you will have to deal with the signal attenuation of the lowpass filters in the analog frontend.
*1: only if the 40Mhz is exactly in phase with the 80Mhz clock of the oscilloscope, which is never the case, hence even the 40Mhz signal will look bad.
If you have a task on Linux that you need to do often, the trick is to script it. Yes, perl, python, php, whatever rings your bell. It doesn't really matter which script language(s) you use, but 'thou shallt script'. When you know the scripting languages well, you'll find yourself writing scripts for 1 minute jobs that you do only twelve times per year and still saving time (plus making fewer mistakes).
If in you system, you need to do so many things that adding a user takes more than 20 seconds, then you need add those extra things that you are doing manually to your script.
"Do you end up mirroring a disk 13000 times only to discover that you forgot to put kcalc on, or that the company intranet in the bookmarks list had changed?"
No, because you make sure that you have a remote maintenance/upgrade/install system in place so that those changes are made automagically while the systems are out there, as long they are on the network.
And that is why you learn one or more good scripting languages if you do any serious Linux work. It pays back for the effort manyfold.
And for the initial install, that is why you make sure you can pxeboot the system.
Hmm. That can be arranged.
I wonder how the duke boys are getting out of this one!
But at NASA, you have a local replica of the whole system sitting in the lab next door, you're in a team of professionals that if necessary can calculate the most probable results of particular radiation hitting your system under a given angle, or can tell you the power usage and temperature effect of the system components given a particular subroutine, or can dream low-level correct assembly for the platform under study, plus the vendor has a couple of on-line support guys sitting in chairs in the corner of your office waiting for your activation command (which is the word "huh?")...
Reading all these postings, I just see a large oncoming shift. I predict airplanes are going switch towards relying on satellites for communications.
If jetblue can get incoming satellite TV to every coach chair, then why shouldn't bidirectional voice be possible from the cockpit? Shouldn't it be possible to make a satellite communications system that is at least as reliable as VHF?
"Such as the fact that power market is regulated and comunications market is not."
Whaddyamean, the communications market is not regulated? What does the FCC do then? And what are those taxes on my phone bills for?
"impact to the emergency services provided by amateur radio."
Very businesslike, this is a way to look at that:
Basically, the interference should not be so high that a lot of Hams quit. It doesn't really matter how much interference there is, as long as the Hams still actively pursue their hobby, because when there is a need for those emergency services, the power lines and their interference will likely be down. Otherwise, the internet-over-power would still be working....
So, for example, if the interference reduces the range of useful communications, then the amateur radio emergency services will not be impacted as long as the range is still enough for the Hams to get please out of their hobbies. When the power lines go dead, the interference goes with it, and the range is back to normal.
I found it very interesting to find out that in the US, even court bail money is capitalized. It's pretty amazing when you think of it. It both helps the courts and sustains a whole other activity: bounty hunting. When the person out on bail fails to show up in court, it's not just a law enforcement issue to bring the person to justice, because there is a company that is losing money, hence the bounty hunters... A bounty hunter is like a 'repo man' for lost persons... And thanks to the concept of 'citizen arrest', it's all legally possible too. Those are your tough men, the bounty hunters.
I'm sure bail bonds is a very tough business to be in. Besides dealing a lot with crime and voilence, those companies are also basically lending money to people with the very worst creditability... The interest rates will probably not be low.
That's the same as the 'interest rates have gone down' mortgage commercial thing, and the same as gasoline prices. If it is good for them, they just act as if the old status quo is still lingering. Ever noticed that when the crude oil prices go up, the gasoline follows really quickly, but the other way around it just doesn't swing back like that? And if the status quo is bad for them, and the old status is too old to still pretend as valid, then they will try to make it look less bad.
Too many forms of marketing are nothing else but finding a way to lie without being called a liar.
When I am exposed to marketing, I often still do listen if it is for a product that I may be interested in. But I usually end up basically wondering: 'nice wrapper, but how does the cookie taste'?
Which makes it very annoying when marketing for something technical gets so thick that there it gets very hard/impossible to get the hard technical specs. And then when you get the specs, it gets very hard/impossible to find which numbers in the spec are mutually exclusive...
I need to chill out. Ok, I'm getting a beer now.
"Is InstanceCount an int, a long or a short? Or is it a pointer to one of the above? Is FirstName a C-style string"
Those are questions that the editor/gui should be able to answer without the need to add typing work for the programmer. I'm sure there are a lot of variables with erroneous hungarian notation, either because of programmer error, or programmer misunderstanding, or a 'forgot to update that' type of thing...Usually no information is better than misinformation.
"So what does a Yahoo search turn up? :)"
Hmm... Google finds a hit, but Yahoo comes back empty handed.
Guess who I think has the bigger database?
"None the less, the FTC was interested when I sent in a complain and I sent the orignal to them."
And did anything come of it? Or was it just a very interesting item, as in just what they needed to fill up that empty part of the filing cabinet?
Sounds more like a C syntax checker with VOIP support to me.
Mind the typo... I typed 'fankeroot', but that should be 'fakeroot'.