If the players don't support direct downloads, then Sony has not "given in to consumer pressure." They're just fiddling with their recording format -- something Sony engineers love to do.
What would you do with that billion dollars? Buy a TV network? It's maybe enough, but all the networks belong to media conglomerates that want a distribution channel they can control, so none are for sale.
Time was when anybody could syndicate a nation TV show, and didn't even need a billion bucks to do it. Aside from the cost of the show itself, the only expense was satellite time (a few hundred bucks an hour) and the cost of persuading independent TV stations to carry your stuff. Which is why there were so many weird little syndicated TV shows back in the 80s.
No more. Those media conglomerates that couldn't buy existing networks started their own, which is were Fox, WB, and UPN come from. So there are very few independent TV stations left -- almost everybody's committed to showing a network feed.
Cable TV used to have a lot of independent channels. But the same conglomerates have forced cable companies to buy packages that soak up all their channel space.
If you have original programming to distribute, your only real choice is a DVD burner.
OK, it sounds like I'm wrong about how Russia pays for its space flights. But you're wrong if you think Russia is rolling in dough. A few oil exports aren't enough to make up for a stagnant economy and rampant corruption. Sometimes the government can't even cover its basic operating costs.
I've had lousy luck with Bittorrent. I spend days download a torrent, then end up with a corrupted file. I could probably figure out what I'm doing wrong, but I don't watch enough TV to really care.
Working on two shuttles at once is not unusual for NASA. But it is unusual for NASA to prepare two shuttles to launch a month apart, as a rescue mission would require. To stay on schedule, NASA had to pull workers away from servicing the third remaining shuttle, Endeavour. "It's really tough to have those vehicles lined up that close together," says Steven Lindsey, the astronaut who would command Atlantis if a rescue were needed.
Here's what's really sad. I seem to recall that the original plan was to work towards have a shuttle launch every month, indefinitely. That was the whole point of the shuttle program -- to be able to go into space on a schedule. A reminder how thoroughly the program has failed.
It is true that the Russians are doing more than their share in terms of getting hardware, supplies, and people into orbit. But remember who's paying for those rockets. As long as they get enough money to cover their costs, the Russians are not going to bail on us. They can't afford to!
Even if you saw the pilot first (and a lot of us did, there was a bootleg floating around), it wasn't at all clear why there was there was so much retro technology on the show. It was clear if you read some of the interviews Whedon gave out before the show started, or browsed around the official web site. But even then it helped to have read a lot of "hard" SF, where technological regression is often a theme.
So most people who watched Firefly thought the sixguns were some kind of weird artistic statement. Even most SF fans I've talked to thought so -- except for those who thought the whole show was just dumb.
The sad fact is that Joss Whedon is not very good at getting his ideas across. His best work to date is Buffy -- and to this day, most people just don't get what that show is about.
Network execs always think a TV show doesn't have enough action. I've heard producers complain that they try to turn every pitch for a new show into a cop show, no matter how unlikely the transformation is. Some producers just give in. (That's why there are so many cop shows.) Others know how to game the system to get decent concepts on the air. Unfortunately, Joss Whedon, for all his creativity and intelligence, is not one of them.
It was a lot of stuff. Like the heroes having six-shooters instead of ray guns. The premise was that ray guns existed, but most people couldn't afford them. One big mistake Whedon made was not to explain stuff like that clearly.
I'm not looking forward to the movie. I was a big Joss Whedon fan for a while, but eventually his shortcomings became a little too painful to watch.
Actually, that started before TNG with the movies. And TOS mostly had human-looking aliens "because the Enterprise specializes in relations with humanoid species". These aliens only lacked latex noses and funny makeup because it wasn't in the budget.
That's what they tried to do in Deep Space 9. Might have worked, except too many of the stories were lame, and it kept colliding with the glossy premises of the "The Federation".
Joss Whedon did the right thing with Firefly when he threw out all the basic Trekkie ideas and started from scratch. Unfortunately, he didn't do a good job of making his ideas accessible to the audience. Those of us who were already fans of that kind of SF understood what he was trying to do. But everybody else thought he was just making it up as he went along. Unfortunately, "everybody else" included most of the executives at Fox, so the show was dead before it even got on the air.
Weird aliens that always look like humans, good guys that ALWAYS win at the last possible moment with some crazy technical miracle, magical SciFi gadgets that are backed with ridiculous jargon, doctors with miraculous cures for every insane ailment.... bleh, spare me.
Well now, that criticism is fair, but it describes the whole Trek Franchise, not just Enterprise. And in fact some of us have long since decided that the whole Star Trek idea is worn out, and deserves to be retired.
Hardcore Trekkies will say, "No! Just get rid of Rick Berman and everything will be fine!" Well, RB is a talentless bean-counter. But even if you replaced him with the smartest guy in the world, you'd still be stuck with a vapid 60s premise that almost everybody is sick of. Let's see something fresh and new.
Fat chance. Star Trek has made Parmount too much money to go away any time soon. And almost every TV SF show made recently has imitated Trek's worst cliches. The one attempt to do something really original failed before it even got on the air.
I am sort of intrigued by the new Battlestar Galactica. The fact that it's totally disloyal to the original (a corny Star Wars ripoff) is actually a good thing. Alas, I can't afford cable, and probably wouldn't have it if I could. Have to wait for the DVD.
That theme is pretty awful isn't it? "I've got faith -- of the heart..."
I too am sick of time travel stories. But I wasn't turned off by Twelve Monkeys (actually one of my favorite movies), or by First Contact (not a great movie, but it had its moments). Or Butterfly Effect (never saw it). It was Voyager, which used time travel over and over and over again to tell stupid little stories with Deus ex machina endings.
Even before Enterprise went on the air, I knew it would be awful. Why? Because it was going to involve a "temporal cold war". A promise that the writers would use cheap gimmicks, not their imaginations.
Your comparison is lame, because TOS had a lot of good scripts during the first two seasons. They didn't start to falter until the third and final season, when most of the best writers and producers had left.
I do get pissed when I see a good TV show cancelled before it has a chance to find an audience. But a proper chance is two or three months, not 3 years.
Even most Trekkies found the early Enterprise scripts rancid. Stand back from your Trekkieness for a minute and consider that from the network's POV. They spend millions of bucks on a TV show, and it can't even inspire enthusiasm among hard core fans who are supposed to be a lock. Any other show that screwed up that badly wouldn't have lasted a full season, never mind getting renewed twice. Didn't get a chance? Spare me.
Do you really think anybody can sell domains for $8 a year and still afford to pay a competant support staff?
If there's more to your web site than a few static pages, you spend hundreds of dollars a year on hosting and bandwidth. It boggles the mind that people will do that, then try to save a few bucks on the domain registration.
Personally, I often wish that.com registrations had stayed at $50. Yeah yeah, Network Solutions was making a lot of money for very little work. Wasn't the worst thing in the world. Not as bad as having all the best domain names snapped up by opportunists who either sit on them or use them to host porn.
We're just fighting for a way to make this happen elegantly without major pain on our already understaffed doc team.
You can certainly make it happen -- but I'd forget about "elegantly".
Your big problem is convincing your management that you're not just indulging in simple foot dragging. So you need evidence that's harder to argue with than anything you have. Like metrics.
Consider some kind of pilot project. Pick a manual, make a plan for converting it into a set of those "Yahoo-like" web pages they're in love with. The real-world cost of doing that will put the whole plan in perspective.
The big question is, what kind of budget do you submit for the pilot project. If it's too realistic, management might think you're dragging your feet by inflating costs. You can loball in order to cater to management expectations, but that guarantees that the pilot project will fail. Of course, that failure is itself very instructive...
Blowing up an asteroid with an a-bomb may make sense in Hollywood, but doesn't work in real life. The B612 Foundation has a more practical solution -- but not sexy enough to attract funding.
You talk about PDF, HTML, CMS, and a lot of other technology for delivering your manuals online. But these are your goals. Before you can consider goals, you have to understand your starting point. In other words -- WHAT FORMATs ARE YOU CURRENTLY USING TO MAINTAIN YOUR MANUALS????? Before you do anything else, go back to your tech writers and ask them that.
In any case, you're certainly going to have to scale back your expectations. It's easy enough to set up an a fancy CMS that will deliver nicely structured web-based manuals. But you've got to get your manuals into the CMS!!!!.
It's a safe bet that your current documentation base is a collection of word processor and graphics files -- Microsoft Word, FrameMaker, Visio, various Adobe formats. Getting these unstructured formats into the sort of simple, clean online CMS your talking about is a big effort. And that conversion has to be done by carbon-based units -- there's simply no technology to do it automatically. (There's various forms of software snakeoil that claims otherwise -- but it's pure bullshit. AI isn't that advanced!) Unless your management is a lot more open to spending money than they appear to be, it's not going to happen.
Which is not to say that you can't convert your documents into web pages. That's actually pretty easy, since all the abovementioned programs have some kind of HTML export. Just one problem: the HTML you create will be at least as messy as the original documents. You can put it online, add a search engine, and have a document base your customers will find very useful. But it'll never be the fancy, clean CMS-driven web site your management is hoping for.
(If most of your documents are in unstructured FrameMaker format, I strongly recommend using the full version of WebWorks Publisher instead of the limited version that ships with FrameMaker. And there's a version for Word that works rather better than Word's own HTML export feature. WWP has nice table-driven transformation macros that eliminate a lot of work and messiness. Not all of it, alas.)
And if none of your tech writers are tech-literate enough for you, you might consider hiring one who is. (I'm available!) Though you should also consider whether there aren't some two-way communications issues with your tech writing team. There usually is.
It's nice to see technology marching forward. But most of us were unaware that was such a thing as a 600 Gigahertz barrier. How does this advance affect those of us who consider 6 Gighertz systems to be the state of the art? If at all.
So what if the codec is sub-optimal? If you're an Icecast broadcaster who streams at 24bps, switching to Skype will actually improve your sound quality.
Did you miss the part where Skype doesn't support this, except to encourage its users to experiment? It was inevitable that those experiments would include attempts at broadcasting. It may well be that Skype isn't the right way to do that -- but some people won't be convinced until they try it themselves.
Zonk apparently posted the story without checking any of the three links. The first is just a very brief summary of another story. The second contains a stupid typo in the URL. The third is to a page that requires a Moodle registration to access -- not bad in itself, but there has to be an appropriate warning next to the link.
We're getting way too much of this crap. Are Slashdot editors too busy playing The Sims to do their jobs, or what?
I should also respond to your claim that the Cape represents "space infrastructure". It's a launch facility, which is a small part of a real space infrastructure. You might as well build a single train station and claim you've made a good start on building a railroad network.
Slashdot Mirror
If the players don't support direct downloads, then Sony has not "given in to consumer pressure." They're just fiddling with their recording format -- something Sony engineers love to do.
Time was when anybody could syndicate a nation TV show, and didn't even need a billion bucks to do it. Aside from the cost of the show itself, the only expense was satellite time (a few hundred bucks an hour) and the cost of persuading independent TV stations to carry your stuff. Which is why there were so many weird little syndicated TV shows back in the 80s.
No more. Those media conglomerates that couldn't buy existing networks started their own, which is were Fox, WB, and UPN come from. So there are very few independent TV stations left -- almost everybody's committed to showing a network feed.
Cable TV used to have a lot of independent channels. But the same conglomerates have forced cable companies to buy packages that soak up all their channel space.
If you have original programming to distribute, your only real choice is a DVD burner.
OK, it sounds like I'm wrong about how Russia pays for its space flights. But you're wrong if you think Russia is rolling in dough. A few oil exports aren't enough to make up for a stagnant economy and rampant corruption. Sometimes the government can't even cover its basic operating costs.
I've had lousy luck with Bittorrent. I spend days download a torrent, then end up with a corrupted file. I could probably figure out what I'm doing wrong, but I don't watch enough TV to really care.
It is true that the Russians are doing more than their share in terms of getting hardware, supplies, and people into orbit. But remember who's paying for those rockets. As long as they get enough money to cover their costs, the Russians are not going to bail on us. They can't afford to!
So most people who watched Firefly thought the sixguns were some kind of weird artistic statement. Even most SF fans I've talked to thought so -- except for those who thought the whole show was just dumb.
The sad fact is that Joss Whedon is not very good at getting his ideas across. His best work to date is Buffy -- and to this day, most people just don't get what that show is about.
Network execs always think a TV show doesn't have enough action. I've heard producers complain that they try to turn every pitch for a new show into a cop show, no matter how unlikely the transformation is. Some producers just give in. (That's why there are so many cop shows.) Others know how to game the system to get decent concepts on the air. Unfortunately, Joss Whedon, for all his creativity and intelligence, is not one of them.
Failing to keep track of food stocks is a bureaucratic problem, not a technical one.
I'm not looking forward to the movie. I was a big Joss Whedon fan for a while, but eventually his shortcomings became a little too painful to watch.
Actually, that started before TNG with the movies. And TOS mostly had human-looking aliens "because the Enterprise specializes in relations with humanoid species". These aliens only lacked latex noses and funny makeup because it wasn't in the budget.
Joss Whedon did the right thing with Firefly when he threw out all the basic Trekkie ideas and started from scratch. Unfortunately, he didn't do a good job of making his ideas accessible to the audience. Those of us who were already fans of that kind of SF understood what he was trying to do. But everybody else thought he was just making it up as he went along. Unfortunately, "everybody else" included most of the executives at Fox, so the show was dead before it even got on the air.
Hardcore Trekkies will say, "No! Just get rid of Rick Berman and everything will be fine!" Well, RB is a talentless bean-counter. But even if you replaced him with the smartest guy in the world, you'd still be stuck with a vapid 60s premise that almost everybody is sick of. Let's see something fresh and new.
Fat chance. Star Trek has made Parmount too much money to go away any time soon. And almost every TV SF show made recently has imitated Trek's worst cliches. The one attempt to do something really original failed before it even got on the air.
I am sort of intrigued by the new Battlestar Galactica. The fact that it's totally disloyal to the original (a corny Star Wars ripoff) is actually a good thing. Alas, I can't afford cable, and probably wouldn't have it if I could. Have to wait for the DVD.
I too am sick of time travel stories. But I wasn't turned off by Twelve Monkeys (actually one of my favorite movies), or by First Contact (not a great movie, but it had its moments). Or Butterfly Effect (never saw it). It was Voyager, which used time travel over and over and over again to tell stupid little stories with Deus ex machina endings.
Even before Enterprise went on the air, I knew it would be awful. Why? Because it was going to involve a "temporal cold war". A promise that the writers would use cheap gimmicks, not their imaginations.
I do get pissed when I see a good TV show cancelled before it has a chance to find an audience. But a proper chance is two or three months, not 3 years.
Even most Trekkies found the early Enterprise scripts rancid. Stand back from your Trekkieness for a minute and consider that from the network's POV. They spend millions of bucks on a TV show, and it can't even inspire enthusiasm among hard core fans who are supposed to be a lock. Any other show that screwed up that badly wouldn't have lasted a full season, never mind getting renewed twice. Didn't get a chance? Spare me.
If there's more to your web site than a few static pages, you spend hundreds of dollars a year on hosting and bandwidth. It boggles the mind that people will do that, then try to save a few bucks on the domain registration.
Personally, I often wish that .com registrations had stayed at $50. Yeah yeah, Network Solutions was making a lot of money for very little work. Wasn't the worst thing in the world. Not as bad as having all the best domain names snapped up by opportunists who either sit on them or use them to host porn.
And Netscape sold precisely 25 copies of that product before giving up and including the editor in the free version.
Your big problem is convincing your management that you're not just indulging in simple foot dragging. So you need evidence that's harder to argue with than anything you have. Like metrics.
Consider some kind of pilot project. Pick a manual, make a plan for converting it into a set of those "Yahoo-like" web pages they're in love with. The real-world cost of doing that will put the whole plan in perspective.
The big question is, what kind of budget do you submit for the pilot project. If it's too realistic, management might think you're dragging your feet by inflating costs. You can loball in order to cater to management expectations, but that guarantees that the pilot project will fail. Of course, that failure is itself very instructive...
Sigh. I've come to believe that Science Fiction is the worst enemy of space exploration.
Greg Egan has a simple solution to the neutron bombardment problem -- convert everybody into software. I think he underestimates the technical issues...
In any case, you're certainly going to have to scale back your expectations. It's easy enough to set up an a fancy CMS that will deliver nicely structured web-based manuals. But you've got to get your manuals into the CMS!!!!.
It's a safe bet that your current documentation base is a collection of word processor and graphics files -- Microsoft Word, FrameMaker, Visio, various Adobe formats. Getting these unstructured formats into the sort of simple, clean online CMS your talking about is a big effort. And that conversion has to be done by carbon-based units -- there's simply no technology to do it automatically. (There's various forms of software snakeoil that claims otherwise -- but it's pure bullshit. AI isn't that advanced!) Unless your management is a lot more open to spending money than they appear to be, it's not going to happen.
Which is not to say that you can't convert your documents into web pages. That's actually pretty easy, since all the abovementioned programs have some kind of HTML export. Just one problem: the HTML you create will be at least as messy as the original documents. You can put it online, add a search engine, and have a document base your customers will find very useful. But it'll never be the fancy, clean CMS-driven web site your management is hoping for.
(If most of your documents are in unstructured FrameMaker format, I strongly recommend using the full version of WebWorks Publisher instead of the limited version that ships with FrameMaker. And there's a version for Word that works rather better than Word's own HTML export feature. WWP has nice table-driven transformation macros that eliminate a lot of work and messiness. Not all of it, alas.)
And if none of your tech writers are tech-literate enough for you, you might consider hiring one who is. (I'm available!) Though you should also consider whether there aren't some two-way communications issues with your tech writing team. There usually is.
It's nice to see technology marching forward. But most of us were unaware that was such a thing as a 600 Gigahertz barrier. How does this advance affect those of us who consider 6 Gighertz systems to be the state of the art? If at all.
Did you miss the part where Skype doesn't support this, except to encourage its users to experiment? It was inevitable that those experiments would include attempts at broadcasting. It may well be that Skype isn't the right way to do that -- but some people won't be convinced until they try it themselves.
We're getting way too much of this crap. Are Slashdot editors too busy playing The Sims to do their jobs, or what?
I should also respond to your claim that the Cape represents "space infrastructure". It's a launch facility, which is a small part of a real space infrastructure. You might as well build a single train station and claim you've made a good start on building a railroad network.