No, it really wasn't, and the right way to make the change would have been to allow the market to drive the conversion, rather than issue a fiat. Instead, there are innumerable new problems with license issues, and many LPTV broadcasters at risk of losing their allocations. And in the end, much of the programming, is, as ever, crap.
500 channels, and nothing on.
16:9, and still nothing on.
And by the way, it will be quite a while before anyone outside the top 15 or so markets begins producing in HDTV, so you can look forward to actually enjoying the 16:9 only on network shows and DVDs.
As to DVDs, don't expect great HDTV there until we see the blue-ray technology in our homes, as the data rates (even in MPEG2, MPEG-4, or H.264) will have to be a good deal higher to deliver on the H in HDTV.
Actually, there have been numerous quality improvements, though they have come in the receivers, rather than in the NTSC standard. The standard itself is rather elegant, and apart from the error that resulted in shifting to a non-integer frame rate (and the problems that has created for designers of hardware for decades), it has proved very robust.
WP 6 for Windows managed to override competent printer drivers with their own, and thus render some truly execrable output. Pretty impressive, considering that on Win3.11, the strongest argument for its use was that it was the best available printer driver set around.
Just looked at the prices on their site. At those numbers, I can safely predict no success.
The use of keyboard shortcuts is limited, I suspect, to those of us old enough to have been skilled before the GUI appeared. By the time I had WP 5.1 shoved in my face, I had used WordStar, and then MS Word (DOS), and then had blissfully adopted Sprint, which always and painlessly rendered my intent into well-formatted output. Even now, a dozen years later, when I open an old file (paper, you remember those?), I can tell at a glance anything that was output from Sprint, and it still looks better than anything now, other than the output from a good page-formatting product.
My experience was that reveal codes was essential because their cleanup of embedded codes was incompetent. Example: Select a word, bold the word, unbold the word, then look at the embedded codes. Too often I found that instead of removing the embedded codes, they embedded a second set that negated the first. Eventually the file might be filled with such garbage, with the result that later changes misbehaved. Using reveal codes was the only path I knew for cleaning up WP's screwups.
But in fairness, I was never committed to WP, and never wanted to be, so I only used it under duress. Gurus may have solutions to these problems (but I content that the problems should never have existed.)
I suspect they hope to use the results (assuming they get some licensees) as a sort of plebiscite that they might offer up in court as a popular vote in their favor. Clearly, this is a company in dire straits, and they are flailing away, trying every notion that strikes them, for the generation of what the IRS terms (in application to individuals) passive income. IOW, money for nothing.
I used to purchase my glasses from a "dispensing optician" when I lived in Toronto. The way it worked was that I paid his cost for the lenses and frames, and a fee for his share in things. Lenses were less than CDN$10 a pair (in 1993). So the invention is interesting, but the notion of lessening the cost is unlikely. The cost of lenses is small, but the margin on lenses is high.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 1
I don't here too much about EU types having to travel say 3,000 km in 3 day with a wife 2 kids and luggage on board. I also don't hear about you buying plywood and lumber for building onto your property very often.
In much of Europe, a "long" trip may be 20Km, or so. I have made the trip from Baltimore to San Jose in just over 3 days (it was in a small car, by the way, and it took me a week to get over the various cramps and aches), and have repeatedly made trips on which I averaged 900+ miles per day.
On balance, it is much more pleasant in my minivan than it was in a Mazda, and the mileage is only modestly worse.
Here in the land of fruits and nuts and eco-socialists (California), we are saddled with diamond lanes in a state where carpooling is rarely practical. Net result: car pool lanes are nearly empty when traffic is heaviest, and used only by families, most of the time. Since few of the highways are adequate to the traffic density in the first place, artificially impeding traffic flow actually results in increased air pollution, rather than the decrease that the eco-freaks claim.
Reality is a bitch, and a vocal minority choose to ignore it, while attempting to force their misguided notions on the rest of us.
How about nuclear power, still being prevented from increased uptake? How about the DAT recording technology that was essentially still-born due to RIAA objections? Think a little more -- there are other examples, but those two leapt to mind.
Nanotechnology may yet become the AI of the 21st century. As the nightmare stories about the risks of runaway tech will undoubtedly appeal to the enviro folk out there, I anticipate heavy resistance to widespread adoption of the results.
Note that unlike many open source advocates (who tend to be pretty far left in their views on property rights), the good folks in New Hampshire tend to be pretty conservative. That's also one of the reasons they were recently selected by the Free State Project as an ideal home for their members.
Makes me wonder if Linus has seen the light, and joined the FSP???
Remember that any company seeking to do business in a foreign country is also required to comply with the laws in that country.
A more rational complaint by AI would be that China, if it is still guilty of human rights violations, should be dropped from WTO membership, or that the US should forbid American companies from trading there.
As it stands, this is simply AI taking advantage of the mindless anti-MS mentality prevalent in some quarters and piggy-backing their own ridiculous assertions on that wave.
The dollar cost isn't the worst. What really irritates is the execrable quality of the content in many of these books. I recently took a Java class, and the book was absolute crap. On one page, in a sidebar, no less, in an example of the precision of a double, the values of PI and E were reversed.
If only that error were not typical.
As to electronic publishing, no thanks. E-books suck, and the PC as a classroom interface is wholly inadequate. Give me paper every time.
Let's see... the browser has been ruled to be not a part of the OS, so users are free to use any browser they like, but the implication here is that if a feature is offered, though the feature is clearly not a part of the OS, is must be compliant with the user's selection of browser?
Is it true that the majority of folks here have failed logic?
As it is overwhelmingly clear that to lawyers, any notion of right and wrong is consedered to be mere intellectual abstraction, aren't we long overdue to put them all back under the rocks from under which they crawled?
It's not that complicated really if you take a few minutes to look at it.
Perhaps, but competently prepared tables are normally accompanied by sufficient legends to allow them to communicate clearly and without confusion.
Then, too, the lack of info on the CPU (type, speed, etc.), and system info (memory resources, disk size, type, etc.) makes the whole thing less than useful.
I have found used Tektronix scopes on ebay at very low cost. This beats a PC-based kludge for most things, and doesn't consume your time and energy in developing software and hardware.
I bought a 60MHz portable dual-trace scope in excellent condition for $125.00.
If you really want value, as well as protection from technological obsolescence, have them run conduit for the data lines. That way, you can shoot cat-5 now, and fibre later (or whatever comes along). Moreover, I shudder at the thought of an electrician handling fibre , not to mention the hassle of repairing a failed cable of any sort, once the wallboard is up.
Muting of ads is an old idea. At present, you could detect ads by looking at the energy levels in the sound -- spots *always* use compressed audio (analog compression, meaning the peaks are prevalent, not the dips), but -- and this is critical to understand -- as soon as any significant number of chips was found to be in use, they would simply stop compressing audio, and break the mute.
Europeans pay a tax for television; Americans and Canadians put up with commercials. Take your pick.
But I wish Miguel would spend more time on making Gnome feel as consistent and polished as KDE or Windows. My beef with Windows is not the GUI, which works well enough, and is quite consistent (except the file open dialogs, of which too many variants exist), but the unreliability of it, as well as the excessive variants on the market all at the same time.
Last time I tried Gnome, the response of scroll bars to the mouse was inconsistent, and it seemed prone to decode a lot of double-clicks I did not make. That gets old in a hurry.
KDE is much more polished as a GUI, and I could care less whether it copies Windows. The GUI, after all, is only a tool, not the end result. For any who missed that concept, reread the paragraph.
Thank God I don't have to use Gnome, but can use KDE. That freedom to choose is the best thing about Linux.
Unfortunately, Danny's book is out of print, last time I checked. My own copy will only be pried from my cold, dead fingers. Danny Thorpe is a very thoughtful and insightful software engineer whose communication skills are as great as his coding skills. If you can get a copy of his book, do it!
I find it interesting the proprietary fervor evidenced by so many of the apparently very youthful flamers. Linux is free, after all.
One of the problems with a movement is that sometimes it will succeed. When it does so, and is not owned, then it will evolve in response to the demands of the multitudes.
In this case, the multitudes are users and coders hungry for an alternative. Evolution is a powerful force, and screaming won't slow it.
He gets it just fine. What you don't get is that in the commercial sector (most of the world, outside academia) things run on profits, and on usability. The profit side is a corporate concern, but usability is a concern for everyone.
I've worked with computers and microprocessors for over 25 years, and have had some limited Unix experience, and yet I find Linux a pain to set up. The best Linux distro in that regard (in my experience) is Caldera, but they failed to consider that a user might need the multi-processor kernel, so their install is flawed, too.
I suspect that many of the most rabid Linux proponents may have been breathing for fewer years than I have been writing code. Certainly the tone of their flamse would support that conclusion.
The model for installation, by the way, is BeOS. It's fast, asks few questions, and can even be started from Windows. Linux fanatics take note: if you want to win Windows users away from Windows, make an installer for the OS which can run from Windows.
Unfortunately, BeOS still lacks a few critical things which would otherwise make it my OS of choice. Consequently, I am still looking at Linux.
When puerile flame attacks occur, they have a tendency to draw attention, as you have noted. What you fail to note is that the attention they draw will often turn potential users away from Linux. After all, what corporate suit wants to recommend an OS that has mostly pre-pubescents as its most visible users?
The article was well written, well reasoned, and squarely on target. The problem is that most Linux flamers won't read beyond the first paragraph, and those who do will do so through eyes which have glazed over. Close study of the definition of fanatic is recommended. It's not a compliment.
One more thing. People succeed by creating well and in a novel way something which people want to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Was HDTV really even necessary?
No, it really wasn't, and the right way to make the change would have been to allow the market to drive the conversion, rather than issue a fiat. Instead, there are innumerable new problems with license issues, and many LPTV broadcasters at risk of losing their allocations. And in the end, much of the programming, is, as ever, crap.
500 channels, and nothing on.
16:9, and still nothing on.
And by the way, it will be quite a while before anyone outside the top 15 or so markets begins producing in HDTV, so you can look forward to actually enjoying the 16:9 only on network shows and DVDs.
As to DVDs, don't expect great HDTV there until we see the blue-ray technology in our homes, as the data rates (even in MPEG2, MPEG-4, or H.264) will have to be a good deal higher to deliver on the H in HDTV.
Actually, there have been numerous quality improvements, though they have come in the receivers, rather than in the NTSC standard. The standard itself is rather elegant, and apart from the error that resulted in shifting to a non-integer frame rate (and the problems that has created for designers of hardware for decades), it has proved very robust.
No, make that two...
WP 6 for Windows managed to override competent printer drivers with their own, and thus render some truly execrable output. Pretty impressive, considering that on Win3.11, the strongest argument for its use was that it was the best available printer driver set around.
Just looked at the prices on their site. At those numbers, I can safely predict no success.
The use of keyboard shortcuts is limited, I suspect, to those of us old enough to have been skilled before the GUI appeared. By the time I had WP 5.1 shoved in my face, I had used WordStar, and then MS Word (DOS), and then had blissfully adopted Sprint, which always and painlessly rendered my intent into well-formatted output. Even now, a dozen years later, when I open an old file (paper, you remember those?), I can tell at a glance anything that was output from Sprint, and it still looks better than anything now, other than the output from a good page-formatting product.
My experience was that reveal codes was essential because their cleanup of embedded codes was incompetent. Example: Select a word, bold the word, unbold the word, then look at the embedded codes. Too often I found that instead of removing the embedded codes, they embedded a second set that negated the first. Eventually the file might be filled with such garbage, with the result that later changes misbehaved. Using reveal codes was the only path I knew for cleaning up WP's screwups.
But in fairness, I was never committed to WP, and never wanted to be, so I only used it under duress. Gurus may have solutions to these problems (but I content that the problems should never have existed.)
The product name was supreme folly.
incompetent assignment of functions to function keys (WP5.1)
gross incompatibility between DOS and Windows versions (ragged right Courier on DOS came into Windows WP as justified Symbol
every WP doc I ever explored had more tab stops than Carter's had pills -- and none of the docs was ever consistently formatted wrt those tab stops
So why would anyone want to restore that pain???
I suspect they hope to use the results (assuming they get some licensees) as a sort of plebiscite that they might offer up in court as a popular vote in their favor. Clearly, this is a company in dire straits, and they are flailing away, trying every notion that strikes them, for the generation of what the IRS terms (in application to individuals) passive income. IOW, money for nothing.
I used to purchase my glasses from a "dispensing optician" when I lived in Toronto. The way it worked was that I paid his cost for the lenses and frames, and a fee for his share in things. Lenses were less than CDN$10 a pair (in 1993). So the invention is interesting, but the notion of lessening the cost is unlikely. The cost of lenses is small, but the margin on lenses is high.
I don't here too much about EU types having to travel say 3,000 km in 3 day with a wife 2 kids and luggage on board. I also don't hear about you buying plywood and lumber for building onto your property very often.
In much of Europe, a "long" trip may be 20Km, or so. I have made the trip from Baltimore to San Jose in just over 3 days (it was in a small car, by the way, and it took me a week to get over the various cramps and aches), and have repeatedly made trips on which I averaged 900+ miles per day.
On balance, it is much more pleasant in my minivan than it was in a Mazda, and the mileage is only modestly worse.
Here in the land of fruits and nuts and eco-socialists (California), we are saddled with diamond lanes in a state where carpooling is rarely practical. Net result: car pool lanes are nearly empty when traffic is heaviest, and used only by families, most of the time. Since few of the highways are adequate to the traffic density in the first place, artificially impeding traffic flow actually results in increased air pollution, rather than the decrease that the eco-freaks claim.
Reality is a bitch, and a vocal minority choose to ignore it, while attempting to force their misguided notions on the rest of us.
Yes, but not available to the consumer, who would not have paid the exhorbitant licensing fees.
How about nuclear power, still being prevented from increased uptake? How about the DAT recording technology that was essentially still-born due to RIAA objections? Think a little more -- there are other examples, but those two leapt to mind.
Nanotechnology may yet become the AI of the 21st century. As the nightmare stories about the risks of runaway tech will undoubtedly appeal to the enviro folk out there, I anticipate heavy resistance to widespread adoption of the results.
Note that unlike many open source advocates (who tend to be pretty far left in their views on property rights), the good folks in New Hampshire tend to be pretty conservative. That's also one of the reasons they were recently selected by the Free State Project as an ideal home for their members.
Makes me wonder if Linus has seen the light, and joined the FSP???
Remember that any company seeking to do business in a foreign country is also required to comply with the laws in that country.
A more rational complaint by AI would be that China, if it is still guilty of human rights violations, should be dropped from WTO membership, or that the US should forbid American companies from trading there.
As it stands, this is simply AI taking advantage of the mindless anti-MS mentality prevalent in some quarters and piggy-backing their own ridiculous assertions on that wave.
The dollar cost isn't the worst. What really irritates is the execrable quality of the content in many of these books. I recently took a Java class, and the book was absolute crap. On one page, in a sidebar, no less, in an example of the precision of a double, the values of PI and E were reversed.
If only that error were not typical.
As to electronic publishing, no thanks. E-books suck, and the PC as a classroom interface is wholly inadequate. Give me paper every time.
Let's see... the browser has been ruled to be not a part of the OS, so users are free to use any browser they like, but the implication here is that if a feature is offered, though the feature is clearly not a part of the OS, is must be compliant with the user's selection of browser?
Is it true that the majority of folks here have failed logic?
As it is overwhelmingly clear that to lawyers, any notion of right and wrong is consedered to be mere intellectual abstraction, aren't we long overdue to put them all back under the rocks from under which they crawled?
It's not that complicated really if you take a few minutes to look at it.
Perhaps, but competently prepared tables are normally accompanied by sufficient legends to allow them to communicate clearly and without confusion.
Then, too, the lack of info on the CPU (type, speed, etc.), and system info (memory resources, disk size, type, etc.) makes the whole thing less than useful.
I have found used Tektronix scopes on ebay at very low cost. This beats a PC-based kludge for most things, and doesn't consume your time and energy in developing software and hardware.
I bought a 60MHz portable dual-trace scope in excellent condition for $125.00.
If you really want value, as well as protection from technological obsolescence, have them run conduit for the data lines. That way, you can shoot cat-5 now, and fibre later (or whatever comes along). Moreover, I shudder at the thought of an electrician handling fibre , not to mention the hassle of repairing a failed cable of any sort, once the wallboard is up.
Muting of ads is an old idea. At present, you could detect ads by looking at the energy levels in the sound -- spots *always* use compressed audio (analog compression, meaning the peaks are prevalent, not the dips), but -- and this is critical to understand -- as soon as any significant number of chips was found to be in use, they would simply stop compressing audio, and break the mute.
Europeans pay a tax for television; Americans and Canadians put up with commercials. Take your pick.
But I wish Miguel would spend more time on making Gnome feel as consistent and polished as KDE or Windows. My beef with Windows is not the GUI, which works well enough, and is quite consistent (except the file open dialogs, of which too many variants exist), but the unreliability of it, as well as the excessive variants on the market all at the same time.
Last time I tried Gnome, the response of scroll bars to the mouse was inconsistent, and it seemed prone to decode a lot of double-clicks I did not make. That gets old in a hurry.
KDE is much more polished as a GUI, and I could care less whether it copies Windows. The GUI, after all, is only a tool, not the end result. For any who missed that concept, reread the paragraph.
Thank God I don't have to use Gnome, but can use KDE. That freedom to choose is the best thing about Linux.
Unfortunately, Danny's book is out of print, last time I checked. My own copy will only be pried from my cold, dead fingers. Danny Thorpe is a very thoughtful and insightful software engineer whose communication skills are as great as his coding skills. If you can get a copy of his book, do it!
I find it interesting the proprietary fervor evidenced by so many of the apparently very youthful flamers. Linux is free, after all.
One of the problems with a movement is that sometimes it will succeed. When it does so, and is not owned, then it will evolve in response to the demands of the multitudes.
In this case, the multitudes are users and coders hungry for an alternative. Evolution is a powerful force, and screaming won't slow it.
He gets it just fine. What you don't get is that in the commercial sector (most of the world, outside academia) things run on profits, and on usability. The profit side is a corporate concern, but usability is a concern for everyone.
I've worked with computers and microprocessors for over 25 years, and have had some limited Unix experience, and yet I find Linux a pain to set up. The best Linux distro in that regard (in my experience) is Caldera, but they failed to consider that a user might need the multi-processor kernel, so their install is flawed, too.
I suspect that many of the most rabid Linux proponents may have been breathing for fewer years than I have been writing code. Certainly the tone of their flamse would support that conclusion.
The model for installation, by the way, is BeOS. It's fast, asks few questions, and can even be started from Windows. Linux fanatics take note: if you want to win Windows users away from Windows, make an installer for the OS which can run from Windows.
Unfortunately, BeOS still lacks a few critical things which would otherwise make it my OS of choice. Consequently, I am still looking at Linux.
When puerile flame attacks occur, they have a tendency to draw attention, as you have noted. What you fail to note is that the attention they draw will often turn potential users away from Linux. After all, what corporate suit wants to recommend an OS that has mostly pre-pubescents as its most visible users?
The article was well written, well reasoned, and squarely on target. The problem is that most Linux flamers won't read beyond the first paragraph, and those who do will do so through eyes which have glazed over. Close study of the definition of fanatic is recommended. It's not a compliment.
One more thing. People succeed by creating well and in a novel way something which people want to use.