I've been discussing a project with a friend that would involve distributing standard definition and high definition videos to TV stations around the world. This would not be live streaming; it would be video files to download and integrate into various TV station local productions and broadcast. The TV stations would need to use these videos typically through their non-linear editing systems. Any idea which file format would be most usable by TV stations in these video formats: 480i59.94, 576i50, 720p50, 720p59.94, 1080i50, 1080i59.94?
The problem is passive media. It has to be entirely changed in order to migrate to the next major size. And these changes are not forward compatible because the details of such changes are not known ahead of time. Backward compatibility is often possible (for example a Blu-Ray player can read DVDs because the same size is involved).
Active media generally does not have this issue. Examples of active media are USB memory sticks, Flash memory cards, and hard disk drives (especially the USB/Firewire/eSATA external ones). These devices can, for the most part, come out with greater capacity and be compatible because they can use the same interface. One well known exception is the SD card, which because of poor design requirements, was limited to 2GB capacity. The upward compatible SD/HC replacement interface allows a much larger capacity 2TB capacity. But this is already well above what the Blu-Ray optical media can do (50GB for dual layer).
Optical (passive) media is a better choice where large numbers of media units are needed, and only a small number of active units (players, recorders) are involved, such as the distribution of movies from mass producers to the public. Active media is a better media for self recording. The latter will become more important as people shift from buying pre-recorded media to downloading content (whether legal or otherwise).
My iPod Shuffle is based on built-in flash. My point-and-shoot digital camera (I'm still trying to wean my photography hobby off of film) uses an SD/HC flash card (4GB). I'm considering a camcorder, but I don't want one that records on DVD... I want one that records on SD/HC (even though it is expensive). I can then store my home movies on a hard drive, and post pieces of them on YouTube for friends and enemies.
All optical media is doomed from being the primary way to deal with large media content in all ways. If internet access speeds make it effective to download instead of buy media by the time the Blu-Ray replacement comes out, it won't get adopted.
What is really, really, absurd, is that once I encountered an ISP support tech that was naive enough that I was able to convince her to reboot her computer. Afterwards, I told her the problem was still present (it was... it was a dialup pool that was ringing and not answering). She seemed to actually believe at that point that there were indeed problems that rebooting didn't help for.
It's a figure of speech... "I hate to hold you hostage, but...". That is said in a lot of contexts. If things went down as this story claims, then the ISP tech didn't understand and just blew it all out of proportion.
I had an offer for a domain a few years ago. I immediately considered the notion that if I responded too positively, initially, they could take one or both of two routes: 1. stick with their low initial offer, or 2. initiate a legal action to get the name under the concept that I was just domain squatting. So my response was simply to indicate that I had a substantial investment in the domain, including a few thousand email addresses (a couple hundred of which I or others used, and the rest being spamtraps used to detect where spammers were operating so I could refuse email from those places). They set up a phone conference and tripled the offer. I eventually got it doubled from that, and had this all done through a bank escrow account.
Be very careful with this, especially with a company that has the same name. I might suggest getting them to send you a letter acknowledging your equal right to, and prior possession of, the domain name. But by all means be sure you arrange an escrow account at your bank and be sure your bank understands (in writing) that they are to acknowledge to you that the money is present in a way that cannot be reversed except under the terms of the escrow, which should be limited to you failing to transfer the domain.
As for negotiating a price, keep in mind that no one really gives their best offer up front.
You might be tempted to ask them to commit to forwarding your email to you for one or a few email addresses. Just don't bother with this. Ask for a price that covers your costs and hassles of changing now. Once the transaction is done, they could violate the terms and just shut it off, knowing it would be too hard for you to deal with it via international law (the costs likely to be greater than you get for the domain). Even if you win, they would just say the admin screwed up and they will fix it. This is just not worth it. So think of this deal as including the sale of all your email addresses (and ask for an inflated price for that).
Most Linux distributions include some kind of web server. By default that will be Apache on all the major ones. Some will include LIGHTTPD, too, which you may be able to consider using instead of, or in addition to, Apache. Just do a minimal server install of a favorite major Linux distribution (or BSD) in a virtual machine. Do two virtual machines while you are at it, and you have an extra one to experiment with while not disrupting your web server testing.
If you think Google's www.google.com address just goes to one server that picks out different content by file name, you're in for a surprise. Try the http://www.google.com/chrome address and the http://www.google.com/chrome1 address with a tool that lets you look at the HTTP headers. Look at the "Server" header. Different server code. Google runs a high performance, massively load balanced, widely geographically distributed, HTTP front end that figures out what server to pass things to based on the URI part of the URL. They don't need to do separate hostnames (although they can still do that, too, such as http://maps.google.com/ and http://mail.google.com/).
I just run completely separate instances of Firefox for separate major browsing activities. For example, Slashdot gets its own browser instance. I then open each article of interest in a new window, and use tabs for each reference from that article (story links and comments like this). This way, if while doing some other browsing somewhere else, some bad website bloats Firefox up real big and slows it down, it doesn't affect Slashdot. I can quit the other browser and Slashdot is still active and I don't lose the open windows. If the other browser instance crashes, it doesn't affect the Slashdot instance.
I typically have 4 to 12 browser instances running. Of course, that is a lot of memory usage. But I can clear that memory usage when done by quitting that browser, and not lose everything all at once. So in the end, my overall memory usage is actually lower than if I did all my browsing under a single bloated browser instance.
I actually like the tabs being below the address bar. I think it is a matter of preference. A decent browser would allow people to move the pieces of the browser wherever they want them to be, including tabs on the side (which I'd rather have, on the right side).
Is this going to be a portable browser that can operate under Gnome, KDE, and other environments... unlike Firefox that becomes crippled (for example, it cannot figure out many data formats) when Gnome isn't present/active?
My father received an offer from Verizon to sign up for a plan than included flat-fee long distance. He decided to sign up. They gave him a date when it would be activated (for some reason they couldn't just click a button on the account and change it on the fly). So the date comes and passes. I was there at the time and wanted to do some long distance dialup access overnight (he didn't have broadband), so I called Verizon to check and they confirmed his account was indeed on the plan now. So I did the long dialups over 3 nights. Then he gets the bill and they charged him for the calls over $200. I dealt with them for him. When I asked them what happened, they claimed that even though he was on the plan, the long distance carrier had not switched him over, yet. But the long distance carrier was Verizon. So basically Verizon the local phone company and Verizon the long distance carrier couldn't activate accounts on the same day. It took a month to get them to admit their error, and 2 more months to get the late fees from this error removed.
BTW, the customer rep people themselves were friendly and tried to help. It's just the processes they are stuck with are so poorly designed, and they don't have authority to do anything beyond the options given on their screens.
A friend of mine told me that many of her colleagues at work have lost their jobs as a result of automated payment systems. And she's fearing her job might be next. She's a debt collector.
Try Opera Software. They are headquartered in Norway, with offices in Sweden, Poland, and Czech Republic. So you might have choices and an opportunity to move around.
Pricing is a function of demand, not a function of how much it costs to provide. The underlying costs only serve as a price floor below which they won't offer the service. Texting is very popular, so they can get away with charging the high prices. What they should do is charge nothing for texting from the time the hurricane hits to a week after it leaves. But of course they won't endanger their profit margins.
... to people still stuck with dialup speed access (to the internet or a BBS) or who need to have media mailed to them. Of course the reality today is that those with broadband access no longer need to have everything preloaded. The vendors adopted that model back when it was helpful to consumers. But like most big corporations, they are now stuck on something that no longer makes any sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been discussing a project with a friend that would involve distributing standard definition and high definition videos to TV stations around the world. This would not be live streaming; it would be video files to download and integrate into various TV station local productions and broadcast. The TV stations would need to use these videos typically through their non-linear editing systems. Any idea which file format would be most usable by TV stations in these video formats: 480i59.94, 576i50, 720p50, 720p59.94, 1080i50, 1080i59.94?
The problem is passive media. It has to be entirely changed in order to migrate to the next major size. And these changes are not forward compatible because the details of such changes are not known ahead of time. Backward compatibility is often possible (for example a Blu-Ray player can read DVDs because the same size is involved).
Active media generally does not have this issue. Examples of active media are USB memory sticks, Flash memory cards, and hard disk drives (especially the USB/Firewire/eSATA external ones). These devices can, for the most part, come out with greater capacity and be compatible because they can use the same interface. One well known exception is the SD card, which because of poor design requirements, was limited to 2GB capacity. The upward compatible SD/HC replacement interface allows a much larger capacity 2TB capacity. But this is already well above what the Blu-Ray optical media can do (50GB for dual layer).
Optical (passive) media is a better choice where large numbers of media units are needed, and only a small number of active units (players, recorders) are involved, such as the distribution of movies from mass producers to the public. Active media is a better media for self recording. The latter will become more important as people shift from buying pre-recorded media to downloading content (whether legal or otherwise).
My iPod Shuffle is based on built-in flash. My point-and-shoot digital camera (I'm still trying to wean my photography hobby off of film) uses an SD/HC flash card (4GB). I'm considering a camcorder, but I don't want one that records on DVD ... I want one that records on SD/HC (even though it is expensive). I can then store my home movies on a hard drive, and post pieces of them on YouTube for friends and enemies.
All optical media is doomed from being the primary way to deal with large media content in all ways. If internet access speeds make it effective to download instead of buy media by the time the Blu-Ray replacement comes out, it won't get adopted.
What is really, really, absurd, is that once I encountered an ISP support tech that was naive enough that I was able to convince her to reboot her computer. Afterwards, I told her the problem was still present (it was ... it was a dialup pool that was ringing and not answering). She seemed to actually believe at that point that there were indeed problems that rebooting didn't help for.
Of course he is; he works for an ISP. Someone with a better temperment could get a real job.
I've heard it a lot. But I'm in the USA. Maybe the Canadians never use it enough for most people to know about it.
It's a figure of speech ... "I hate to hold you hostage, but ...". That is said in a lot of contexts. If things went down as this story claims, then the ISP tech didn't understand and just blew it all out of proportion.
I had an offer for a domain a few years ago. I immediately considered the notion that if I responded too positively, initially, they could take one or both of two routes: 1. stick with their low initial offer, or 2. initiate a legal action to get the name under the concept that I was just domain squatting. So my response was simply to indicate that I had a substantial investment in the domain, including a few thousand email addresses (a couple hundred of which I or others used, and the rest being spamtraps used to detect where spammers were operating so I could refuse email from those places). They set up a phone conference and tripled the offer. I eventually got it doubled from that, and had this all done through a bank escrow account.
Be very careful with this, especially with a company that has the same name. I might suggest getting them to send you a letter acknowledging your equal right to, and prior possession of, the domain name. But by all means be sure you arrange an escrow account at your bank and be sure your bank understands (in writing) that they are to acknowledge to you that the money is present in a way that cannot be reversed except under the terms of the escrow, which should be limited to you failing to transfer the domain.
As for negotiating a price, keep in mind that no one really gives their best offer up front.
You might be tempted to ask them to commit to forwarding your email to you for one or a few email addresses. Just don't bother with this. Ask for a price that covers your costs and hassles of changing now. Once the transaction is done, they could violate the terms and just shut it off, knowing it would be too hard for you to deal with it via international law (the costs likely to be greater than you get for the domain). Even if you win, they would just say the admin screwed up and they will fix it. This is just not worth it. So think of this deal as including the sale of all your email addresses (and ask for an inflated price for that).
Most Linux distributions include some kind of web server. By default that will be Apache on all the major ones. Some will include LIGHTTPD, too, which you may be able to consider using instead of, or in addition to, Apache. Just do a minimal server install of a favorite major Linux distribution (or BSD) in a virtual machine. Do two virtual machines while you are at it, and you have an extra one to experiment with while not disrupting your web server testing.
If you think Google's www.google.com address just goes to one server that picks out different content by file name, you're in for a surprise. Try the http://www.google.com/chrome address and the http://www.google.com/chrome1 address with a tool that lets you look at the HTTP headers. Look at the "Server" header. Different server code. Google runs a high performance, massively load balanced, widely geographically distributed, HTTP front end that figures out what server to pass things to based on the URI part of the URL. They don't need to do separate hostnames (although they can still do that, too, such as http://maps.google.com/ and http://mail.google.com/).
I just run completely separate instances of Firefox for separate major browsing activities. For example, Slashdot gets its own browser instance. I then open each article of interest in a new window, and use tabs for each reference from that article (story links and comments like this). This way, if while doing some other browsing somewhere else, some bad website bloats Firefox up real big and slows it down, it doesn't affect Slashdot. I can quit the other browser and Slashdot is still active and I don't lose the open windows. If the other browser instance crashes, it doesn't affect the Slashdot instance.
I typically have 4 to 12 browser instances running. Of course, that is a lot of memory usage. But I can clear that memory usage when done by quitting that browser, and not lose everything all at once. So in the end, my overall memory usage is actually lower than if I did all my browsing under a single bloated browser instance.
I actually like the tabs being below the address bar. I think it is a matter of preference. A decent browser would allow people to move the pieces of the browser wherever they want them to be, including tabs on the side (which I'd rather have, on the right side).
Is this going to be a portable browser that can operate under Gnome, KDE, and other environments ... unlike Firefox that becomes crippled (for example, it cannot figure out many data formats) when Gnome isn't present/active?
My father received an offer from Verizon to sign up for a plan than included flat-fee long distance. He decided to sign up. They gave him a date when it would be activated (for some reason they couldn't just click a button on the account and change it on the fly). So the date comes and passes. I was there at the time and wanted to do some long distance dialup access overnight (he didn't have broadband), so I called Verizon to check and they confirmed his account was indeed on the plan now. So I did the long dialups over 3 nights. Then he gets the bill and they charged him for the calls over $200. I dealt with them for him. When I asked them what happened, they claimed that even though he was on the plan, the long distance carrier had not switched him over, yet. But the long distance carrier was Verizon. So basically Verizon the local phone company and Verizon the long distance carrier couldn't activate accounts on the same day. It took a month to get them to admit their error, and 2 more months to get the late fees from this error removed.
BTW, the customer rep people themselves were friendly and tried to help. It's just the processes they are stuck with are so poorly designed, and they don't have authority to do anything beyond the options given on their screens.
A friend of mine told me that many of her colleagues at work have lost their jobs as a result of automated payment systems. And she's fearing her job might be next. She's a debt collector.
Only a month? Then you didn't see it all. And, IMHO, Bergen is just as good (but fewer IT jobs), though a bit more rainy.
At least in Denmark, there is a waiver for the age line for the IT sector. I have not checked the others, yet.
I'd suggest Mozambique. It's a much more beautiful place, especially Niassa province. And it's cooler weather up in those hills.
And the food is fantastic! I'd move there if it wasn't so hot.
Try Opera Software. They are headquartered in Norway, with offices in Sweden, Poland, and Czech Republic. So you might have choices and an opportunity to move around.
There is Sweden right here in the USA. We call it Minnesota.
Pricing is a function of demand, not a function of how much it costs to provide. The underlying costs only serve as a price floor below which they won't offer the service. Texting is very popular, so they can get away with charging the high prices. What they should do is charge nothing for texting from the time the hurricane hits to a week after it leaves. But of course they won't endanger their profit margins.
... where even the corded phones won't work after a few hours when the power goes out?
... to people still stuck with dialup speed access (to the internet or a BBS) or who need to have media mailed to them. Of course the reality today is that those with broadband access no longer need to have everything preloaded. The vendors adopted that model back when it was helpful to consumers. But like most big corporations, they are now stuck on something that no longer makes any sense.
They make a version of Flash for digital cameras? Is it secure?
... his C-level management may end up promoting him to be the software development manager. It might even include a raise.