The standards are set, the FCC & Consumer Electronics Manufacturers have spoken.
They are not going to change anything. The FCC already refused to changed the VSB format to the better CODFM transmission system.
There is no way in hell they are going to change the bandwidth allocations at this point.
Oh, but how history could repeat itself!
If one takes a look at the history of NTSC, you'll note that a quite similar thing happened before with the introduction of color TV. To summarize:
CBS developed an incompatible standard. They pushed the FCC to take it.
RCA at the last minute reveals their standard - compatable with the (at that time) current standard.
FCC takes CBS's standard. Broadcasts are done in both standards, and due to a number of circumstances, it isn't catching on. It's scrapped after 4 months.
After a long unfriendly story, the FCC takes RCA's standard over CBS's. It worked with existing sets, and only one broadcast was needed.
I haven't been by hobbes in a while to check it out (especially now, since it's down), but I have to agree that verbatim copying of a site isn't very cool.
What saddens me more though is the lack of credit.
You see, I was the original owner/creator of hobbes.resnet.tamu.edu. It was a place people went to to search for things on the network. It got reasonable traffic - 20-30k page views a day. The recognition was cool, and it was fun to code up.
The idea of the service the server provide(s/d) wasn't mine however, and I credited the people who originally came up with it. Hell, I even credited a guy for using his idea on a bar graph using tables (asked permission first too - Thanks Doug - you know who ya are.:) ).
In the last couple months before I graduated, I passed it on to Leo so that the service would continue after I left. I felt like he'd do a good job running it. Perhaps I should have spent more time evaluating folks to take it over. Interestingly enough, a couple months after handing it over the mention of myself or the previous originators of the idea disappeared.
In a way I was a little pissed, but dismissed that as just me being selfish. After all, he did some work to improve the service performance, added other features, and so forth. But now, I'm kinda glad my name isn't on there. Not sure how much pride goes along with that.
What an interesting time frame they chose to go after their competition. I realize that they were awarded this screwy patent not too long ago, but hey, this is ridiculous and just plain evil. It kind of reminds me of a time when a local grocery store was in trouble, so they sold canned foods at a loss to attract customers. What happened? The competitor sent employees over to buy all the on-sale items to hasten their death.
Right in time for Christmas shopping - what a great time to cause the most amount of damage with an injunction.
I've always seemed to have done my best work while listening to Delerium. I also listened to them one day after I drank a little too much cough syrup. Now that was an experience. Talk about feeling spaced out.
Throw in a little 10,000 Maniacs (older), some Innocence Mission, and you've got yourself some quality coding music.
I've seen similar situations too. It seems that the students coming in to a class feel that they _deserve_ at least a C or B handed to them on a silver platter. Students should work for every point of that grade - earn it. I know I have. I've made some good grades, and some bad. And I have no one to blame for the bad grades except myself. Sure some of those were from bad professors, but that's not the point. _I_ know that I could have worked harder to get a better grade and I didn't. If a professor was particularly difficult, well, tough &^#$ - life isn't always a cakewalk, and that's just one more thing to learn in college.
Fortunately most of the whiners here get filtered out, i.e. they switch to another major that suits their grade expectations.
"What do you think? Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 running Linux as a web server?" --- I've got exactly that running and it works great. I don't get a huge amount of hits - around 18k/day but half of those are sql queries on a 250k entry table. That's the only hit I notice - and those are pretty brief. Other than that it doesn't phase it whatsoever. And stability hasn't been a problem either (I guess I'm another one of the lucky ones) - a month of uptime with rc5 and no extra cooling is standard.
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They are not going to change anything. The FCC already refused to changed the VSB format to the better CODFM transmission system.
There is no way in hell they are going to change the bandwidth allocations at this point.
Oh, but how history could repeat itself!
If one takes a look at the history of NTSC, you'll note that a quite similar thing happened before with the introduction of color TV. To summarize:
CBS developed an incompatible standard. They pushed the FCC to take it. RCA at the last minute reveals their standard - compatable with the (at that time) current standard.
FCC takes CBS's standard. Broadcasts are done in both standards, and due to a number of circumstances, it isn't catching on. It's scrapped after 4 months.
After a long unfriendly story, the FCC takes RCA's standard over CBS's. It worked with existing sets, and only one broadcast was needed.
I haven't been by hobbes in a while to check it out (especially now, since it's down), but I have to agree that verbatim copying of a site isn't very cool.
:) ).
What saddens me more though is the lack of credit.
You see, I was the original owner/creator of hobbes.resnet.tamu.edu. It was a place people went to to search for things on the network. It got reasonable traffic - 20-30k page views a day. The recognition was cool, and it was fun to code up.
The idea of the service the server provide(s/d) wasn't mine however, and I credited the people who originally came up with it. Hell, I even credited a guy for using his idea on a bar graph using tables (asked permission first too - Thanks Doug - you know who ya are.
In the last couple months before I graduated, I passed it on to Leo so that the service would continue after I left. I felt like he'd do a good job running it. Perhaps I should have spent more time evaluating folks to take it over. Interestingly enough, a couple months after handing it over the mention of myself or the previous originators of the idea disappeared.
In a way I was a little pissed, but dismissed that as just me being selfish. After all, he did some work to improve the service performance, added other features, and so forth. But now, I'm kinda glad my name isn't on there. Not sure how much pride goes along with that.
Thanks Leo. You make me proud.
*sigh*
Philip
What an interesting time frame they chose to go after their competition. I realize that they were awarded this screwy patent not too long ago, but hey, this is ridiculous and just plain evil. It kind of reminds me of a time when a local grocery store was in trouble, so they sold canned foods at a loss to attract customers. What happened? The competitor sent employees over to buy all the on-sale items to hasten their death.
Right in time for Christmas shopping - what a great time to cause the most amount of damage with an injunction.
I've always seemed to have done my best work while listening to Delerium. I also listened to them one day after I drank a little too much cough syrup. Now that was an experience. Talk about feeling spaced out.
Throw in a little 10,000 Maniacs (older), some Innocence Mission, and you've got yourself some quality coding music.
Nice to see Dilbert keeps up with the latest thoughts out there (well this thread isn't exactly a recent occurence).
I've seen similar situations too. It seems that the students coming in to a class feel that they _deserve_ at least a C or B handed to them on a silver platter. Students should work for every point of that grade - earn it. I know I have. I've made some good grades, and some bad. And I have no one to blame for the bad grades except myself. Sure some of those were from bad professors, but that's not the point. _I_ know that I could have worked harder to get a better grade and I didn't. If a professor was particularly difficult, well, tough &^#$ - life isn't always a cakewalk, and that's just one more thing to learn in college.
Fortunately most of the whiners here get filtered out, i.e. they switch to another major that suits their grade expectations.
"What do you think? Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 running Linux as a web server?"
---
I've got exactly that running and it works great. I don't get a huge amount of hits - around 18k/day but half of those are sql queries on a 250k entry table. That's the only hit I notice - and those are pretty brief. Other than that it doesn't phase it whatsoever. And stability hasn't been a problem either (I guess I'm another one of the lucky ones) - a month of uptime with rc5 and no extra cooling is standard.