The higher-numbered elements are really difficult to make. So far, the ones that have been made are unstable and have really short half lives. However, I've heard that there are theoretical models of even higher-number elements that should be stable (or at least a lot more stable than the ones that preceed them.
This is all from something I read on the Internet some time ago, so it must be true.
If the study was comparing the piracy among students in the 96-97 school year and those same people today, you would have a point. However, it is comparing the students in the 96-97 school year and the students now, which in most cases are different people.
The point is that something has changed on campuses. Obviously, the people are different. But also, either the values or the software that they're using is different, too. Or the study is flawed, which wouldn't surprise me.
At current prices around here, cable modems are within a few dollars of what you would pay if you had a separate phone line for Internet access and also paid about $20/month for your ISP. Depending on what extra options you're accidentally paying for on the phone line and what ISP you're using, cable modems can still be cheaper--significantly so if you don't rent the modem.
And based on the number of people complaining about the lack of cable Internet access, it seems that the demand is rather inelastic, so raising prices does, indeed, bring in more revenue.
For people who don't use the Internet enough to need a separate phone line, it is and always will be a tougher sell.
Many communities were given promises of broadband Internet when the franchise contracts came up for renewal. (You know those franchise fees listed on your cable bill? They go to your state or town.) The cable networks fully intend to provide these services, but doing so requires an investment in upgrading older equipment.
Now the problem is debt. Sure, if you look at it from the perspective of a single community, comparing the debt required to upgrade with the profit brought in by the new services makes it an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, when you look at the total amount of debt that the cable company must assume to upgrade all the communities screaming for Internet access, it makes a huge impact on the company's financial statements. Investors are fine with debt up to a point, but too much makes them nervous, which hurts the stock value. After all, no matter how good the projections are, debt is risk.
So here in MA, AT&T has scaled back its expansion plans and raised rates. While the higher rates are bad for existing customers, they mean that the debt gets paid off sooner, leaving AT&T with more cash to invest in upgrades.
In the mean time, upgrades are continuing, and communities that make the most noise are the most likely to get moved to the top of the schedule.
With MediaOne/AT&T, I have an almost static IP number. Every few months, it changes, so I go and update my DNS so that the domain works right. It means a day of downtime for the domain, but for the sort of stuff I'm doing, that's just fine.
DARE has to be an acronym created by a committee. They probably came up with the slogan, and then had to come up with something for DARE to stand for. Of course, the obvious answer is "Drugs Are Really Excellent," not "Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education."
I wonder how quickly they would sue if I started selling bumper stickers with the alternate slogan?
I believe that this was done in the IBM AS/400 using a special version of the PowerPC chip. There was a talk on this at the Ottawa Linux Symposium last summer. According to the IBM people, it mostly worked great, but there were a few issues with spin locks--the CPU saw that one thread was busy (in a spin lock), so it never switched to the other one (that was holding the lock). The Intel implementation may be slightly different, but this is something to look at.
When your hardware isn't exactly what the software was written for, you tend to have weird bugs like that. I would not be surprised if Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and other OSes need minor patches to work well with this new hyperthreading from Intel.
I've heard it suggested that what makes us different is the use of language. I think the theory goes that our species existed for a long time with little sign of intelligence. Then language was developed, and everything changed almost overnight. Key factors include not just the brain capacity for language, but the vocal capacity for language. Or so goes the theory.
I've heard of them teaching other primates to use sign language, and the results are fascinating.
So perhaps we aren't that much smarter than other primates, and hence, people studying brain mechanisms won't find the differences they're looking for.
The problem with that is what happens if Acme motors registers the domain several months before Acme chemicals? Then you have a situation where Acme motors has invested in the acme.us domain to identify it with them. It may be mentioned on Television advertisements and brochures. It may be in people's bookmarks.
Now if Acme motors had been told that they couldn't register acme.us, but only acme.autos.us, then Acme Chemicals would never have noticed them when registering acme.chem.us.
But you're not going to get the hierarchy perfect, so you'll still have conflicts. Ultimately, I think it should go to the first person to register the domain unless it can be proven that the domain was registered to take advantage of someone else's trademark.
It seems like a reasonable requirement that you must have an address in a state to register something.state.us. It seems unreasonable to require that you not be allowed to keep the domain even if your address changes to another state when you renew the domain.
The real problem with trademarks is that before the net, there was no problem with two companies using the same name as long as it was in a different context. Now that both of those companies will want the same domain name, it gets ugly. When you also have individuals and small organizations getting names in the same namespace, it gets really ugly. Having a more hierarchical namespace helps, but doesn't eliminate the problem.
What's needed isn't a chance for trademark holders to get a head start, but a better system for resolving conflicts when disputes arise.
I would like to see them become widely used, but I would also like to see some degree of hierarchical naming enforced.
I think all.gov and.mil addresses should be changed to.gov.us and.mil.us addresses.
There should probably be a small set of foo.us domains pre-defined for which people could register bar.foo.us domains.
mybiz.com.us (US business)
myname.indv.us (individual)
mybiz.com.ma.us (Massachussetts local business)
Or should we require any.co.us domain to have one more generic level in the domain, such as cnn.news.co.us? That would cut down on the problems of namespace collisions.
Wow. Those are expensive players. Here in the US, you can get DVD players for under $100. Amazon has an Apex AD-1500 for $84.99. BestBuy.com lists a Mintek DVD palyer for $99.99.
I just saw an article on Yahoo that stated that the patent royalties amount to $28 per player. That's over a third of the price for some units, and that's the retail price, not the wholesale price. It's no wonder that companies aren't paying up.
It's just like with other intellectual property--when you price it too high, people will avoid paying.
So how much does it cost to make an episode of Futurama, anyway? That is probably one of the key questions in determining if Cartoon Network or possibly Comedy Central picks it up.
Also, there may be legal issues. Some shows are made by outside companies and can switch networks when contracts expire or are terminated (e.g., Buffy). Others are made by the networks themselves, and don't have a prayer of ever moving to a channel not owned by that network. Is there any confirmation that Futurama is produced under a contract that will allow them to go to another network?
With Time Cop, though, it was a syndicated show, so it was just your station, not the whole eastern half of the US. (And that show wasn't so great, IMHO.)
The Simpsons is heading into, what, season 12? It's not that original anymore, but still funny.
I'm enjoying 24, but I've heard that Fox was very disappointed with the ratings, so while they'll do 24 episodes, I wouldn't count on that being back next year.
I don't watch sitcoms, so I won't argue there. I do watch the latest Trek, though it's by no means my favorite show; same with X-files.
What I do find to be well-written and worth watching include: Farscape (probably the most original and best written Sci Fi in a long time), CSI (remember when CBS used to be a network?), Futurama (like the Simpsons, only fresher), BBC World News (on BBC America), The Avengers (from the 60's; it's on the Mystery Channel), and Dark Angel. Everyone tells me I should be watching Buffy; I should start picking it up the next time they start it over on syndication.
If you ever find yourself sitting down to watch TV and channel surfing, then that's when, if you had a PVR, you would be watching something you were interested in watching, instead.
Using something like my ReplayTV has totally revolutionized how I watch TV. I've heard owners of other PVRs say the same thing.
Before I had a PVR, I would make an effort to watch my favorite shows live. If I wasn't going to be home, I would tape them, but that only applied to a very few shows--most I wouldn't bother with the hassle.
Now that I have a PVR, I tell it exactly what I want to watch, and I never worry about when it is showing. I never make an effort to watch something live. In fact, I make a point of not watching live television, as I can watch something previously recorded without commercials at the same time as my show is recording.
And don't compare fast forwarding with a VCR to skipping over the commercials with ReplayTV. The new ReplayTV 4000 series skips over commercials automatically and instantly. With my older model, I use the 30-second skip button to instantly jump past each commercial. While I didn't think it would be a big deal before I bought it, I can't imagine living without my Quick Skip and Instant Replay buttons. (I've even upgraded my remote with a JP1 cable so that I have a 2-minute skip button and a 1-minute instant replay button, as well.)
While you can make an analogy to VCRs when discussing PVRs, they are in practice a totally new technology. The networks understand this, and they have good reason to be scared.
One critical job for a manager is political support. Many projects have the potential to step on the toes of other groups. The project's manager needs to act as an advocate for the project. If a manager tries to smooth over conflicts and act as a peacemaker, the project will suffer.
One of the great things about DSL is that you have your own connection to the ISP, as opposed to cable modems, which share bandwidth within each neighborhood. With this scheme, it looks like they are using each subscriber as a relay, so your bandwitch is shared with anyone upstream from you. This can be good for business, but not so great for consumers.
Yup, that's exactly what I'm doing for my home firewall. I happened to have an old 120MHz laptop sitting around, so instead of buying a LinkSys router for my cable modem, I'm using it with two network cards.
Now if I had a four-port PCMCIA ethernet card, I wouldn't even need a hub.
So with yet another video media coming out, it occurs to me to ask what the ideal media would be? Is it DVD, or is there a need for something better? Does DVD really offer HDTV resolution?
Personally, I see several shortcomings in the current DVD format:
* NTSC/PAL-based encoding. Rubbish. The disc should be encoded with however many frames per second the original media used. The players can then convert to NTSC/PAL, or they can put out a native signal for multisync TVs. Then each frame on the disc is one original frame from the film.
* Size limitations. If we're creating a new format, we can use newer technology to get a lot more data on the discs.
* Region coding/content coding. Well, this won't go away, but it certainly belongs on a wish list.
DVHS promises 4 hours/tape of HDTV or 50 hours/tape of regular TV.
For some people, the 50 hours/tape feature may be exciting. That's about 70 hours of TV if you cut out the commericals.
Personally, I think this will go the way of DAT. Digital audio tape was a cool idea, and is still used in niche markets, but with recordable CDs isn't terribly interesting to consumers. With consumer-grade recordable DVD just around the corner, there's no real market here for a new tape format.
Slashdot Mirror
The higher-numbered elements are really difficult to make. So far, the ones that have been made are unstable and have really short half lives. However, I've heard that there are theoretical models of even higher-number elements that should be stable (or at least a lot more stable than the ones that preceed them.
This is all from something I read on the Internet some time ago, so it must be true.
If the study was comparing the piracy among students in the 96-97 school year and those same people today, you would have a point. However, it is comparing the students in the 96-97 school year and the students now, which in most cases are different people.
The point is that something has changed on campuses. Obviously, the people are different. But also, either the values or the software that they're using is different, too. Or the study is flawed, which wouldn't surprise me.
At current prices around here, cable modems are within a few dollars of what you would pay if you had a separate phone line for Internet access and also paid about $20/month for your ISP. Depending on what extra options you're accidentally paying for on the phone line and what ISP you're using, cable modems can still be cheaper--significantly so if you don't rent the modem.
And based on the number of people complaining about the lack of cable Internet access, it seems that the demand is rather inelastic, so raising prices does, indeed, bring in more revenue.
For people who don't use the Internet enough to need a separate phone line, it is and always will be a tougher sell.
Many communities were given promises of broadband Internet when the franchise contracts came up for renewal. (You know those franchise fees listed on your cable bill? They go to your state or town.) The cable networks fully intend to provide these services, but doing so requires an investment in upgrading older equipment.
Now the problem is debt. Sure, if you look at it from the perspective of a single community, comparing the debt required to upgrade with the profit brought in by the new services makes it an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, when you look at the total amount of debt that the cable company must assume to upgrade all the communities screaming for Internet access, it makes a huge impact on the company's financial statements. Investors are fine with debt up to a point, but too much makes them nervous, which hurts the stock value. After all, no matter how good the projections are, debt is risk.
So here in MA, AT&T has scaled back its expansion plans and raised rates. While the higher rates are bad for existing customers, they mean that the debt gets paid off sooner, leaving AT&T with more cash to invest in upgrades.
In the mean time, upgrades are continuing, and communities that make the most noise are the most likely to get moved to the top of the schedule.
With MediaOne/AT&T, I have an almost static IP number. Every few months, it changes, so I go and update my DNS so that the domain works right. It means a day of downtime for the domain, but for the sort of stuff I'm doing, that's just fine.
DARE has to be an acronym created by a committee. They probably came up with the slogan, and then had to come up with something for DARE to stand for. Of course, the obvious answer is "Drugs Are Really Excellent," not "Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education."
I wonder how quickly they would sue if I started selling bumper stickers with the alternate slogan?
And set the 404 error to be a redirect to a transparent gif.
This works great for me.
Of course, I still see the slashdot ads, because they're served from the same server as the other images, but most sites use separate ad servers.
I believe that this was done in the IBM AS/400 using a special version of the PowerPC chip. There was a talk on this at the Ottawa Linux Symposium last summer. According to the IBM people, it mostly worked great, but there were a few issues with spin locks--the CPU saw that one thread was busy (in a spin lock), so it never switched to the other one (that was holding the lock). The Intel implementation may be slightly different, but this is something to look at.
When your hardware isn't exactly what the software was written for, you tend to have weird bugs like that. I would not be surprised if Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and other OSes need minor patches to work well with this new hyperthreading from Intel.
I've heard it suggested that what makes us different is the use of language. I think the theory goes that our species existed for a long time with little sign of intelligence. Then language was developed, and everything changed almost overnight. Key factors include not just the brain capacity for language, but the vocal capacity for language. Or so goes the theory.
I've heard of them teaching other primates to use sign language, and the results are fascinating.
So perhaps we aren't that much smarter than other primates, and hence, people studying brain mechanisms won't find the differences they're looking for.
The problem with that is what happens if Acme motors registers the domain several months before Acme chemicals? Then you have a situation where Acme motors has invested in the acme.us domain to identify it with them. It may be mentioned on Television advertisements and brochures. It may be in people's bookmarks.
Now if Acme motors had been told that they couldn't register acme.us, but only acme.autos.us, then Acme Chemicals would never have noticed them when registering acme.chem.us.
But you're not going to get the hierarchy perfect, so you'll still have conflicts. Ultimately, I think it should go to the first person to register the domain unless it can be proven that the domain was registered to take advantage of someone else's trademark.
It seems like a reasonable requirement that you must have an address in a state to register something.state.us. It seems unreasonable to require that you not be allowed to keep the domain even if your address changes to another state when you renew the domain.
The real problem with trademarks is that before the net, there was no problem with two companies using the same name as long as it was in a different context. Now that both of those companies will want the same domain name, it gets ugly. When you also have individuals and small organizations getting names in the same namespace, it gets really ugly. Having a more hierarchical namespace helps, but doesn't eliminate the problem.
What's needed isn't a chance for trademark holders to get a head start, but a better system for resolving conflicts when disputes arise.
What sort of policies do we want for .us domains?
.gov and .mil addresses should be changed to .gov.us and .mil.us addresses.
.co.us domain to have one more generic level in the domain, such as cnn.news.co.us? That would cut down on the problems of namespace collisions.
I would like to see them become widely used, but I would also like to see some degree of hierarchical naming enforced.
I think all
There should probably be a small set of foo.us domains pre-defined for which people could register bar.foo.us domains.
mybiz.com.us (US business)
myname.indv.us (individual)
mybiz.com.ma.us (Massachussetts local business)
Or should we require any
Wow. Those are expensive players. Here in the US, you can get DVD players for under $100. Amazon has an Apex AD-1500 for $84.99. BestBuy.com lists a Mintek DVD palyer for $99.99.
I just saw an article on Yahoo that stated that the patent royalties amount to $28 per player. That's over a third of the price for some units, and that's the retail price, not the wholesale price. It's no wonder that companies aren't paying up.
It's just like with other intellectual property--when you price it too high, people will avoid paying.
So how much does it cost to make an episode of Futurama, anyway? That is probably one of the key questions in determining if Cartoon Network or possibly Comedy Central picks it up.
Also, there may be legal issues. Some shows are made by outside companies and can switch networks when contracts expire or are terminated (e.g., Buffy). Others are made by the networks themselves, and don't have a prayer of ever moving to a channel not owned by that network. Is there any confirmation that Futurama is produced under a contract that will allow them to go to another network?
Just questions. Too bad I can't post the answers.
Yup.
With Time Cop, though, it was a syndicated show, so it was just your station, not the whole eastern half of the US. (And that show wasn't so great, IMHO.)
Dark Angel is still worth watching.
The Simpsons is heading into, what, season 12? It's not that original anymore, but still funny.
I'm enjoying 24, but I've heard that Fox was very disappointed with the ratings, so while they'll do 24 episodes, I wouldn't count on that being back next year.
I don't watch sitcoms, so I won't argue there. I do watch the latest Trek, though it's by no means my favorite show; same with X-files.
What I do find to be well-written and worth watching include: Farscape (probably the most original and best written Sci Fi in a long time), CSI (remember when CBS used to be a network?), Futurama (like the Simpsons, only fresher), BBC World News (on BBC America), The Avengers (from the 60's; it's on the Mystery Channel), and Dark Angel. Everyone tells me I should be watching Buffy; I should start picking it up the next time they start it over on syndication.
If you ever find yourself sitting down to watch TV and channel surfing, then that's when, if you had a PVR, you would be watching something you were interested in watching, instead.
I take it you don't have a PVR.
Using something like my ReplayTV has totally revolutionized how I watch TV. I've heard owners of other PVRs say the same thing.
Before I had a PVR, I would make an effort to watch my favorite shows live. If I wasn't going to be home, I would tape them, but that only applied to a very few shows--most I wouldn't bother with the hassle.
Now that I have a PVR, I tell it exactly what I want to watch, and I never worry about when it is showing. I never make an effort to watch something live. In fact, I make a point of not watching live television, as I can watch something previously recorded without commercials at the same time as my show is recording.
And don't compare fast forwarding with a VCR to skipping over the commercials with ReplayTV. The new ReplayTV 4000 series skips over commercials automatically and instantly. With my older model, I use the 30-second skip button to instantly jump past each commercial. While I didn't think it would be a big deal before I bought it, I can't imagine living without my Quick Skip and Instant Replay buttons. (I've even upgraded my remote with a JP1 cable so that I have a 2-minute skip button and a 1-minute instant replay button, as well.)
While you can make an analogy to VCRs when discussing PVRs, they are in practice a totally new technology. The networks understand this, and they have good reason to be scared.
One critical job for a manager is political support. Many projects have the potential to step on the toes of other groups. The project's manager needs to act as an advocate for the project. If a manager tries to smooth over conflicts and act as a peacemaker, the project will suffer.
One of the great things about DSL is that you have your own connection to the ISP, as opposed to cable modems, which share bandwidth within each neighborhood. With this scheme, it looks like they are using each subscriber as a relay, so your bandwitch is shared with anyone upstream from you. This can be good for business, but not so great for consumers.
Yup, that's exactly what I'm doing for my home firewall. I happened to have an old 120MHz laptop sitting around, so instead of buying a LinkSys router for my cable modem, I'm using it with two network cards.
Now if I had a four-port PCMCIA ethernet card, I wouldn't even need a hub.
So with yet another video media coming out, it occurs to me to ask what the ideal media would be? Is it DVD, or is there a need for something better? Does DVD really offer HDTV resolution?
Personally, I see several shortcomings in the current DVD format:
* NTSC/PAL-based encoding. Rubbish. The disc should be encoded with however many frames per second the original media used. The players can then convert to NTSC/PAL, or they can put out a native signal for multisync TVs. Then each frame on the disc is one original frame from the film.
* Size limitations. If we're creating a new format, we can use newer technology to get a lot more data on the discs.
* Region coding/content coding. Well, this won't go away, but it certainly belongs on a wish list.
DVHS promises 4 hours/tape of HDTV or 50 hours/tape of regular TV.
For some people, the 50 hours/tape feature may be exciting. That's about 70 hours of TV if you cut out the commericals.
Personally, I think this will go the way of DAT. Digital audio tape was a cool idea, and is still used in niche markets, but with recordable CDs isn't terribly interesting to consumers. With consumer-grade recordable DVD just around the corner, there's no real market here for a new tape format.