I don't think that's terribly likely -- there's more room on the UHF band.
That said, the VHF band is split anyway -- I wouldn't be too surprised to hear FM radio expand over part of Channel 6, for example, maybe an amateur allocation somewhere in the middle (Greenland has an amateur band right in the middle of our Channel 4, for example).
It's all laid out rather weirdly, to be honest. But I would agree, VHF would be more community-conducive.
I said elsewhere in this thread, and will repeat now:
Couldn't hurt to petition the FCC to give away some of that spectrum to local communities, especially UHF. It won't happen, mind you, but it would be a good idea.
I will say that I've seen some truly frightening results from the analog-to-digital conversions on some screens. I was in a bar watching Monday Night Football a while back on a digital screen. Not only was the (analog) signal stretched out because of the different aspect ratio on the monitor, the "upconversion" led to a picture on a par with a frighteningly poor DVD conversion -- oversaturated whites, limited color response, and bizarre crosshatch artifacts on the field lines.
(Of course, it was probably their fault for not understanding the technology -- WCVB, the local ABC affiliate, has an OTA digital feed as well, so I would argue they could have done a little better. Besides, isn't MNF fed in digital anyway?)
That kind of depends on the market for HDV-format video, I should think. And it presumes that there will be no community access television as well.
Fact is, if you don't mind the vagaries of working with MPEG-2 instead of DV, JVC has the content-creation tools available right now (for a premium -- the prosumer GR-HD1 is MSRP $3500), and the price will almost certainly come down as HDTV becomes more common. Consider that a digital video camcorder a couple of years ago was over $1000 on average, and now you can find a reasonable one-CCD camera for $500. If you don't mind the odd appearance of digital video, you're getting something like 80% broadcast quality for a ridiculously cheap price. Tape your show on HDV, edit in Final Cut Pro 5 (just guessing there), dub it to DVD or DVHS, bring it down to the local public access studio, bada bing, you're on the air. (That's two, three, maybe four years from now, mind you, but it's not all that different from what's done in public access facilities across the country today.)
The tools exist now, even if they're rather kludgy.
What I'd like to see is a petition for the FCC to allocate at least a few of the old broadcast channels (probably UHF) to communities for their own OTA programs. It'd be an interesting footnote to the inevitable spectrum grab between companies and amateur radio operators, and it would save a lot of trouble with trying to recycle millions of old TVs.
There are special plugs available that allow you to hot-swap SCSI, but I don't know how well they work. I don't know if they still make them, but go to a publishing house or service bureau where they use a lot of Macs and I'd bet the techs have a couple of them kicking around in the closet, forgotten since the last beige G3 server was decommissioned like four years ago. (Though it would only be on a server -- they were/are too expensive for mass desktop use, I'm sure.)
But apart from that... anyone who has ever used SCSI would agree that SCSI is weird enough as it is (the regular nightmare of Mac users for years). Hotswapping it is just flat out insane, even if you know you can get away with it.
As pointed out elsewhere, iTunes is scriptable. It's possible to write a front end to it that does exactly what you need because of the Open Scripting Architecture -- in fact, I've heard of people creating iTunes "skins" doing exactly that. Dropping the app file directly on the AppleScript Script Editor will tell you exactly what can be controlled, and for years Mac apps in general have been designed for exactly that capability.
I've seen AppleScript do some very weird things, believe me... if you get past the candygrammar it's like Perl on steroids.
Seriously, though. I think Bluetooth is an incredibly cool technology (spread-spectrum is teh r0x0rz), but it seems to be a bit lacking in practical utility. I want to get into it, but my cell is an el cheapo Nokia, and the Bluetooth adapters for the Palm m5xx series are far too expensive to be a worthwhile upgrade. I'm iffy about its security issues, and I flat out don't believe it's anything more than a solution in search of a problem.
I say that having just got my ham radio ticket mind you -- you want broken solutions, try packet radio... great idea, but still stuck 20 years ago (among other reasons, by FCC regulation).
Re:One big missing flavor...
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Skittlebrau
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It's not for you, it's not for you...
But you're going to burn in hell for dissing it.
I once had a Guinness shandy. It was a pain in the ass for the bartender to pour, and didn't taste terribly good once I had it. I felt sorry for putting the guy through it.
Okay, I'm calling shenanigans on this one. If you're an "IT Architect" (presumably that means you have substantial decision-making capability in your organization -- if I'm reading this correctly you're actually working as a contractor) you should know better than to be bringing outside hardware onto a company network.
I'm a Mac man myself, I sympathize... but even though you're using a Mac (more secure), you're compromising network security. If you were my employee I'd write you up at the very least.
It would seem to me that this interview pretty much confirms what everyone's suspected all along -- SCO is doing this because they're losing market position badly. I think Darl all but came out and said it several times. This is a plain ol' sour grapes lawsuit...
Well, as I said, it can cook you -- the microwave oven was invented because of a guy who found a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted while he was standing near a radar tube.
The fact is that the EMF thing has been studied in horrific detail, and nothing statistically significant has been found; in fact, the guy who started the whole microwaves-cause-cancer thing based his conclusions on the idea that the government was doing most of the research and therefore the data couldn't be trusted. He had his conclusion already mapped out before he did his reporting, which is sloppy journalism at best; it doesn't even get into bad science territory, never mind accurate scientific data (check out Voodoo Science by Robert Park for more on it).
As for the 3G thing... well, we'll have to keep an eye on that. For all anyone here knows, it might be one anomalous study out of a dozen, and future research will discount it for one reason or another. The body does run on electricity, true, and it's possible for EMF to disrupt that; otherwise we wouldn't have EEGs and defibrillators. But the specific issue here is about cancer risks, and all I see here is a bunch of greedy lawyers and undereducated parents.
The fact is that if people knew something about physics, this would be dismissed in a heartbeat. Granted RF in large doses can harm you -- standing in front of a directional antenna pumping out, say, a few thousand watts will do a fairly good job of cooking your eyes like a boiled egg. But there are different kinds of radiation. Virtually all radio signals have longer wavelengths than visible light, and while some can create the same heating effect as a microwave oven, it's not ionizing radiation, which is what tears molecules apart and causes cancerous gene mutation.
Ionizing radiation -- which starts somewhere in the purple range and includes ultraviolet and x-rays -- can cause cancer, because it directly causes chemical change in the body. RF can't do that, and powerlines (a mere 60Hz) can't do that either, no matter what some class-action lawyer tries to tell you.
Well, one thing's obvious from that links list -- they're projecting the image of a conservative, libertarian-leaning group. (Wouldn't a true libertarian support the ACLU as opposed to some no-name "alternative"?)
I'm surprised they didn't have a link to junkscience.com... Steven Milloy is to real debunkers as Loretta LaRoche is to standup comedians (except Loretta LaRoche is actually funny, and occasionally worth watching).
Show of hands... how many of you got hit on by a recruiter? One that I dealt with caught me as I was headed out the door to my first interview -- the conversation started with lemonade, drifted to Thai food, and got around to suggesting we go out for a beer.
Three somewhat awkward months and no more than three placements later, I hand-delivered a note to her saying, essentially, "If you still want to go get that beer, we can go, but your company is fired."
You know... those of you thinking of doing a pizza DDOS... this guy is pretty much the stereotypical chickenboner, so how about some chicken'n'ribs delivery instead, if there's some in the area?
Seriously, though. This guy is so the obvious spammer stereotype... I'm surprised the reporter (who, btw, comes off as being a rather vacuous fellow in his own right) didn't make note of empty buckets of KFC in the garbage.
You can't *fit* them upside down, but they're a royal pain in the kiester to plug in anyway, because most of the PS/2 plugs I've seen are round. They may as well not be keyed because a lot of the time you need to see to plug them in anyway.
Now Apple used to use similar mini-DIN plugs for their serial and ADB connectors, but they always, always, always had a flat side that you could use to figure out how to plug in the cable. What's so hard about doing that on a PC?
Oddly enough, I used GEOS quite a bit, and did a fair amount of graphics stuff. But school papers were done in regular C64 mode (on a C128) in SpeedScript because GeoWrite wasn't worth the trouble.
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I don't think that's terribly likely -- there's more room on the UHF band.
That said, the VHF band is split anyway -- I wouldn't be too surprised to hear FM radio expand over part of Channel 6, for example, maybe an amateur allocation somewhere in the middle (Greenland has an amateur band right in the middle of our Channel 4, for example).
It's all laid out rather weirdly, to be honest. But I would agree, VHF would be more community-conducive.
I said elsewhere in this thread, and will repeat now:
Couldn't hurt to petition the FCC to give away some of that spectrum to local communities, especially UHF. It won't happen, mind you, but it would be a good idea.
I will say that I've seen some truly frightening results from the analog-to-digital conversions on some screens. I was in a bar watching Monday Night Football a while back on a digital screen. Not only was the (analog) signal stretched out because of the different aspect ratio on the monitor, the "upconversion" led to a picture on a par with a frighteningly poor DVD conversion -- oversaturated whites, limited color response, and bizarre crosshatch artifacts on the field lines.
(Of course, it was probably their fault for not understanding the technology -- WCVB, the local ABC affiliate, has an OTA digital feed as well, so I would argue they could have done a little better. Besides, isn't MNF fed in digital anyway?)
That kind of depends on the market for HDV-format video, I should think. And it presumes that there will be no community access television as well.
Fact is, if you don't mind the vagaries of working with MPEG-2 instead of DV, JVC has the content-creation tools available right now (for a premium -- the prosumer GR-HD1 is MSRP $3500), and the price will almost certainly come down as HDTV becomes more common. Consider that a digital video camcorder a couple of years ago was over $1000 on average, and now you can find a reasonable one-CCD camera for $500. If you don't mind the odd appearance of digital video, you're getting something like 80% broadcast quality for a ridiculously cheap price. Tape your show on HDV, edit in Final Cut Pro 5 (just guessing there), dub it to DVD or DVHS, bring it down to the local public access studio, bada bing, you're on the air. (That's two, three, maybe four years from now, mind you, but it's not all that different from what's done in public access facilities across the country today.)
The tools exist now, even if they're rather kludgy.
What I'd like to see is a petition for the FCC to allocate at least a few of the old broadcast channels (probably UHF) to communities for their own OTA programs. It'd be an interesting footnote to the inevitable spectrum grab between companies and amateur radio operators, and it would save a lot of trouble with trying to recycle millions of old TVs.
I'd mod this one Funny, actually...
"My country: Fix it or leave it."
I like it. 'Bout time someone came up with a counter to ignorant-conservative rhetoric like that.
There are special plugs available that allow you to hot-swap SCSI, but I don't know how well they work. I don't know if they still make them, but go to a publishing house or service bureau where they use a lot of Macs and I'd bet the techs have a couple of them kicking around in the closet, forgotten since the last beige G3 server was decommissioned like four years ago. (Though it would only be on a server -- they were/are too expensive for mass desktop use, I'm sure.)
But apart from that... anyone who has ever used SCSI would agree that SCSI is weird enough as it is (the regular nightmare of Mac users for years). Hotswapping it is just flat out insane, even if you know you can get away with it.
As pointed out elsewhere, iTunes is scriptable. It's possible to write a front end to it that does exactly what you need because of the Open Scripting Architecture -- in fact, I've heard of people creating iTunes "skins" doing exactly that. Dropping the app file directly on the AppleScript Script Editor will tell you exactly what can be controlled, and for years Mac apps in general have been designed for exactly that capability.
I've seen AppleScript do some very weird things, believe me... if you get past the candygrammar it's like Perl on steroids.
iTunes is also fully scriptable, from shell or AppleScript. It really shouldn't be a problem at all to do something like that dynamically.
Harold Melvin and the Blueteeth?
Seriously, though. I think Bluetooth is an incredibly cool technology (spread-spectrum is teh r0x0rz), but it seems to be a bit lacking in practical utility. I want to get into it, but my cell is an el cheapo Nokia, and the Bluetooth adapters for the Palm m5xx series are far too expensive to be a worthwhile upgrade. I'm iffy about its security issues, and I flat out don't believe it's anything more than a solution in search of a problem.
I say that having just got my ham radio ticket mind you -- you want broken solutions, try packet radio... great idea, but still stuck 20 years ago (among other reasons, by FCC regulation).
It's not for you, it's not for you...
But you're going to burn in hell for dissing it.
I once had a Guinness shandy. It was a pain in the ass for the bartender to pour, and didn't taste terribly good once I had it. I felt sorry for putting the guy through it.
Okay, I'm calling shenanigans on this one. If you're an "IT Architect" (presumably that means you have substantial decision-making capability in your organization -- if I'm reading this correctly you're actually working as a contractor) you should know better than to be bringing outside hardware onto a company network.
I'm a Mac man myself, I sympathize... but even though you're using a Mac (more secure), you're compromising network security. If you were my employee I'd write you up at the very least.
It would seem to me that this interview pretty much confirms what everyone's suspected all along -- SCO is doing this because they're losing market position badly. I think Darl all but came out and said it several times. This is a plain ol' sour grapes lawsuit...
Well, as I said, it can cook you -- the microwave oven was invented because of a guy who found a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted while he was standing near a radar tube.
The fact is that the EMF thing has been studied in horrific detail, and nothing statistically significant has been found; in fact, the guy who started the whole microwaves-cause-cancer thing based his conclusions on the idea that the government was doing most of the research and therefore the data couldn't be trusted. He had his conclusion already mapped out before he did his reporting, which is sloppy journalism at best; it doesn't even get into bad science territory, never mind accurate scientific data (check out Voodoo Science by Robert Park for more on it).
As for the 3G thing... well, we'll have to keep an eye on that. For all anyone here knows, it might be one anomalous study out of a dozen, and future research will discount it for one reason or another. The body does run on electricity, true, and it's possible for EMF to disrupt that; otherwise we wouldn't have EEGs and defibrillators. But the specific issue here is about cancer risks, and all I see here is a bunch of greedy lawyers and undereducated parents.
The fact is that if people knew something about physics, this would be dismissed in a heartbeat. Granted RF in large doses can harm you -- standing in front of a directional antenna pumping out, say, a few thousand watts will do a fairly good job of cooking your eyes like a boiled egg. But there are different kinds of radiation. Virtually all radio signals have longer wavelengths than visible light, and while some can create the same heating effect as a microwave oven, it's not ionizing radiation, which is what tears molecules apart and causes cancerous gene mutation.
Ionizing radiation -- which starts somewhere in the purple range and includes ultraviolet and x-rays -- can cause cancer, because it directly causes chemical change in the body. RF can't do that, and powerlines (a mere 60Hz) can't do that either, no matter what some class-action lawyer tries to tell you.
Well, one thing's obvious from that links list -- they're projecting the image of a conservative, libertarian-leaning group. (Wouldn't a true libertarian support the ACLU as opposed to some no-name "alternative"?)
I'm surprised they didn't have a link to junkscience.com... Steven Milloy is to real debunkers as Loretta LaRoche is to standup comedians (except Loretta LaRoche is actually funny, and occasionally worth watching).
Well, yeah, inasmuch as SGI, despite its financial troubles, is one of the two or three biggest companies in the supercomputing field.
I wouldn't worry too much myself.
Show of hands... how many of you got hit on by a recruiter? One that I dealt with caught me as I was headed out the door to my first interview -- the conversation started with lemonade, drifted to Thai food, and got around to suggesting we go out for a beer.
Three somewhat awkward months and no more than three placements later, I hand-delivered a note to her saying, essentially, "If you still want to go get that beer, we can go, but your company is fired."
Never heard from her...
I've not had random mouse hangs exactly, but I do have a problem where the USB controller fails to wake the mouse up when the computer's been asleep.
As for the Linksys thing... how screwed up does a system have to be to break a router? And who's fault is it anyway?
You know... those of you thinking of doing a pizza DDOS... this guy is pretty much the stereotypical chickenboner, so how about some chicken'n'ribs delivery instead, if there's some in the area?
Seriously, though. This guy is so the obvious spammer stereotype... I'm surprised the reporter (who, btw, comes off as being a rather vacuous fellow in his own right) didn't make note of empty buckets of KFC in the garbage.
You can't *fit* them upside down, but they're a royal pain in the kiester to plug in anyway, because most of the PS/2 plugs I've seen are round. They may as well not be keyed because a lot of the time you need to see to plug them in anyway.
Now Apple used to use similar mini-DIN plugs for their serial and ADB connectors, but they always, always, always had a flat side that you could use to figure out how to plug in the cable. What's so hard about doing that on a PC?
There may be just a wee bit more to the story.
The proof is in the pudding.
No, really. Bacardi 151.
How about... my box, my right to do as I wish with it?
Pretty simple, really...
Try actually *playing* God Only Knows. The chord arrangements on that song alone are some of the most fingertwisting since Robert Johnson.
Oddly enough, I used GEOS quite a bit, and did a fair amount of graphics stuff. But school papers were done in regular C64 mode (on a C128) in SpeedScript because GeoWrite wasn't worth the trouble.