That's something of a PR illusion perpetuated by the ARRL. Hams do sometimes have a role in well-coordinated emergency scenarios -- in those situations it's a ham's job to make sure information gets to where it needs to go, nothing more. That's important enough in and of itself, but a lot of hams tend to have a rather inflated opinion of themselves. Emergency-trained hams who think they're first responders as opposed to support personnel tend to cause more trouble than good.
That's kind of a truism. Thing is, he's advising a ground-up solution. There's no room for tearing down the infrastructure to rebuild from scratch -- you have to work within the existing framework. If he was in Marconi's position and had the ability to redefine the radio world in terms of his theories, I'd call him a genius. But what he's looking for is simply undoable, so I call him a kook.
It's circling the drain, but not dead yet. Most hams and shortwave listeners would love for it to go away, as would anyone who has to use the HF frequencies.
Heh... you're getting the general idea. It doesn't mean anything to call someone an activist judge -- it's just a smear word used by the extreme Right to snow job the non-extreme.
You have an interesting point of view there -- you're assuming people don't listen to reggae or jazz because they actually like it, but because they want to show off. Some people actually like wine, or coffee, or jazz. There's a substantial difference in flavor between a cup of Maxwell House and a cup of Kenya AA from Starbucks, and some people want that. Some other people don't consider it worth it.
The inescapable truth of the matter is that the one thing that still applies from that paper is that extensions make everything messy. It's the same with Basic, only even more radically so -- everyone had their own dialect of Basic, but the Microsoft dialects gradually won out, and VB.NET has very little in common with ANSI Basic apart from a few things like unterminated lines and control structures.
Basic is dead in any meaningful sense, and VB.NET is about as much like it as your great-great-great-grandparents are like you. Pascal hasn't diverged quite as much from its roots, but the early experience with Netscape and IE extensions shows that you don't have to do much to a standard to monkeywrench everything your users want to do.
The Think devotees were as attached to their IDEs as they were to their Macs. I played with Think Pascal once and it was a very well-designed program -- CodeWarrior was cool, but rather minimalist at the beginning and downright crufty after a few years.
The main problem with Pascal is that in its purest form it's too elegant, and efforts to make it usable for Real Work have generated incompatible variants on the language. That's why any serious attempt at a Pascal compiler has to speak not only ISO Pascal (a cripple of a language that Brian Kernighan famously tore apart in an essay called "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language") but at least three or four different extended dialects (just as an example, Turbo Pascal and Apple Pascal).
Pascal should have died out long ago, but it's got a very dedicated and talented hard core of enthusiasts that have been keeping it alive for some time, and then along came Delphi and secured it a place in development circles for all eternity.
I think those pushing for digital radio are overlooking the key advantages that analog radio has -- simple equipment, and a massive installed base. There is no point to IBOC on the AM bands, and it's at best a value-added for the FM bands.
Agreed. It's an interesting idea, but not a particularly workable one outside a limited area. I don't honestly see how it's different from a SoundBridge -- granted the ability to hand off like a cell phone would be rather useful, but overall it's hardly a satellite killer.
I would hardly call Oxford "staid" anymore -- they're quite fond of neologisms, which really if you think about it is as it should be. Someone's going to have to look "bootylicious" up at some point a hundred years down the road, and it may as well be in the biggest big dic of them all -- who else is going to record it?
Me personally, I think Oxford's new word listings remind me of Necco's annual revealing of the new sayings for their Conversation Hearts every V-day season. A little silly, a lot of fun for word geeks.
More to the point, Apple has been using its code names in shipping products for some time now, at least for the operating systems. They've done it for two other versions -- why would they be expected to stop now?
(Besides, they're only doing what both Mac and Windows users have been doing informally for, like, forever.)
Eh, I wouldn't consider the 2600 that specialized. Those who learn to write code for it these days are advised not to make it a beginning project -- it's a computer, but a brutally restricted one. That said, anyone who can write good 2600 code should be regarded the way pilots regard Alaskan bush pilots.
And I do agree -- I'm not an assembler person myself at all, but you really can do a lot in 4K. The question is doing it with a scratch pad the size of a postage stamp.
Sounds great at first thought, but it would be a train wreck in practice. Some religious groups in particular (the conservative ones, natch) are notorious for abusing broadcast privileges under the current system -- "giving the airwaves back to the public" would only make the situation far worse. As it is the FCC is having a lot of trouble with land mobile allocations, and is realigning (read: crunching) bandwidth requirements on a lot of them, and the progress of Broadband over Power Line threatens to destroy much of the HF spectrum.
It would be nice if they'd lighten up on pirate broadcasters a bit, but when they did and created the LPFM service, Congress gutted it.
BBC 6music as well -- better than the best OTA classic rock station you've ever listened to, with a far more intricate mix of music and some really interesting documentary materials. I hear a lot of their overnight programming (evening ET), and while I wouldn't say I'm a religious listener, I've recommended it to a lot of people.
Now if only Roku made it possible to stream RealAudio over a SoundBridge...
Satellite is great, but it's $13 a month. It's a bandaid solution to the real problem, which is that the industry's creativity is being destroyed at the local level. Even in Boston, which is a relatively healthy radio market, most of the best-known talk show hosts are relatively conservative (in one of the country's most notably liberal states), there's a lot of format duplication -- WZLX and WROR being one example, where the first is a straight classic rock station and the second is close enough to being classic rock that the distinction is meaningless. Fortunately there is a fair amount of college radio, public radio, and even one truely awesome indy station (WXRV in Haverhill) to break the monotony.
What about the rise of the Jack format? That's an entirely new idea -- the Cuisinart of music radio. It doesn't appeal to everybody, but if wall-to-wall music and unpredictable variety works for you, it's great.
Slashdot Mirror
That's something of a PR illusion perpetuated by the ARRL. Hams do sometimes have a role in well-coordinated emergency scenarios -- in those situations it's a ham's job to make sure information gets to where it needs to go, nothing more. That's important enough in and of itself, but a lot of hams tend to have a rather inflated opinion of themselves. Emergency-trained hams who think they're first responders as opposed to support personnel tend to cause more trouble than good.
That's kind of a truism. Thing is, he's advising a ground-up solution. There's no room for tearing down the infrastructure to rebuild from scratch -- you have to work within the existing framework. If he was in Marconi's position and had the ability to redefine the radio world in terms of his theories, I'd call him a genius. But what he's looking for is simply undoable, so I call him a kook.
It's circling the drain, but not dead yet. Most hams and shortwave listeners would love for it to go away, as would anyone who has to use the HF frequencies.
For roughly the same reason that /. once did an interview with Alton Brown -- because food can be very geeky.
Heh... you're getting the general idea. It doesn't mean anything to call someone an activist judge -- it's just a smear word used by the extreme Right to snow job the non-extreme.
You have an interesting point of view there -- you're assuming people don't listen to reggae or jazz because they actually like it, but because they want to show off. Some people actually like wine, or coffee, or jazz. There's a substantial difference in flavor between a cup of Maxwell House and a cup of Kenya AA from Starbucks, and some people want that. Some other people don't consider it worth it.
I just don't drink when I can't afford it...
The inescapable truth of the matter is that the one thing that still applies from that paper is that extensions make everything messy. It's the same with Basic, only even more radically so -- everyone had their own dialect of Basic, but the Microsoft dialects gradually won out, and VB.NET has very little in common with ANSI Basic apart from a few things like unterminated lines and control structures.
Basic is dead in any meaningful sense, and VB.NET is about as much like it as your great-great-great-grandparents are like you. Pascal hasn't diverged quite as much from its roots, but the early experience with Netscape and IE extensions shows that you don't have to do much to a standard to monkeywrench everything your users want to do.
The Think devotees were as attached to their IDEs as they were to their Macs. I played with Think Pascal once and it was a very well-designed program -- CodeWarrior was cool, but rather minimalist at the beginning and downright crufty after a few years.
The main problem with Pascal is that in its purest form it's too elegant, and efforts to make it usable for Real Work have generated incompatible variants on the language. That's why any serious attempt at a Pascal compiler has to speak not only ISO Pascal (a cripple of a language that Brian Kernighan famously tore apart in an essay called "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language") but at least three or four different extended dialects (just as an example, Turbo Pascal and Apple Pascal).
Pascal should have died out long ago, but it's got a very dedicated and talented hard core of enthusiasts that have been keeping it alive for some time, and then along came Delphi and secured it a place in development circles for all eternity.
You're very perceptive. But I signed my name to it.
+1, Funny
I think those pushing for digital radio are overlooking the key advantages that analog radio has -- simple equipment, and a massive installed base. There is no point to IBOC on the AM bands, and it's at best a value-added for the FM bands.
I think you're a troll. A very subtle troll, but a troll nonetheless. (I got two words for you: "Deep Cuts.")
That's a big if -- Howard will definitely give them a boost, but I don't think enough people will want to pay to hear him.
But I could be wrong. Howard could be Satellite Radio's killer app, which would be great for Sirius.
Agreed. It's an interesting idea, but not a particularly workable one outside a limited area. I don't honestly see how it's different from a SoundBridge -- granted the ability to hand off like a cell phone would be rather useful, but overall it's hardly a satellite killer.
I would hardly call Oxford "staid" anymore -- they're quite fond of neologisms, which really if you think about it is as it should be. Someone's going to have to look "bootylicious" up at some point a hundred years down the road, and it may as well be in the biggest big dic of them all -- who else is going to record it?
Me personally, I think Oxford's new word listings remind me of Necco's annual revealing of the new sayings for their Conversation Hearts every V-day season. A little silly, a lot of fun for word geeks.
More to the point, Apple has been using its code names in shipping products for some time now, at least for the operating systems. They've done it for two other versions -- why would they be expected to stop now?
(Besides, they're only doing what both Mac and Windows users have been doing informally for, like, forever.)
Eh, I wouldn't consider the 2600 that specialized. Those who learn to write code for it these days are advised not to make it a beginning project -- it's a computer, but a brutally restricted one. That said, anyone who can write good 2600 code should be regarded the way pilots regard Alaskan bush pilots.
And I do agree -- I'm not an assembler person myself at all, but you really can do a lot in 4K. The question is doing it with a scratch pad the size of a postage stamp.
Yeah, cell phones are great in urban and suburban areas, but out in the sticks? Nuh-uh.
Sounds great at first thought, but it would be a train wreck in practice. Some religious groups in particular (the conservative ones, natch) are notorious for abusing broadcast privileges under the current system -- "giving the airwaves back to the public" would only make the situation far worse. As it is the FCC is having a lot of trouble with land mobile allocations, and is realigning (read: crunching) bandwidth requirements on a lot of them, and the progress of Broadband over Power Line threatens to destroy much of the HF spectrum.
It would be nice if they'd lighten up on pirate broadcasters a bit, but when they did and created the LPFM service, Congress gutted it.
BBC 6music as well -- better than the best OTA classic rock station you've ever listened to, with a far more intricate mix of music and some really interesting documentary materials. I hear a lot of their overnight programming (evening ET), and while I wouldn't say I'm a religious listener, I've recommended it to a lot of people.
Now if only Roku made it possible to stream RealAudio over a SoundBridge...
Satellite is great, but it's $13 a month. It's a bandaid solution to the real problem, which is that the industry's creativity is being destroyed at the local level. Even in Boston, which is a relatively healthy radio market, most of the best-known talk show hosts are relatively conservative (in one of the country's most notably liberal states), there's a lot of format duplication -- WZLX and WROR being one example, where the first is a straight classic rock station and the second is close enough to being classic rock that the distinction is meaningless. Fortunately there is a fair amount of college radio, public radio, and even one truely awesome indy station (WXRV in Haverhill) to break the monotony.
Unless you get satellite radio -- XM and Sirius have special packages for businesses that handle the licensing for you.
What about the rise of the Jack format? That's an entirely new idea -- the Cuisinart of music radio. It doesn't appeal to everybody, but if wall-to-wall music and unpredictable variety works for you, it's great.