Same here in Austin TX. Time Warner want $54.88 for entry level digital cable, plus $7.99 for the box, plus $6.35 for program guide, plus $9.95 for the DVR, for a grand total of $79.17.
That's before you even get any HD channels, half the channels are still analog, and you can only record/watch one channel at a time.
So I went with DirecTV with TiVo. $47.99 to get everything in digital quality, and I can watch 1 show while recording 2 more.
I paid to have extra coax and phone lines run in to a 4-way wall socket, and paid up front for the TiVo box, because frankly you'd have to be smoking crack to pick the lousy cable around here, unless you're satisfied with analog basic cable.
I tried to like it at the time. My company bought a copy of Warp to test, with a view to moving all our development machines over. We couldn't get it to run on any of them.
On mine, the video drivers didn't work. On a second one, the hard disk drivers didn't work reliably. On a third, it wouldn't even boot.
So that was the end of Warp.
It was probably fine on all-IBM hardware, but that wasn't a realistic proposition.
Right, that's why I don't have an HDTV. The only channels I'd care to watch in HD that are actually available in HD are Discovery and PBS, and it's not worth an extra $10.99 a month on top of the $45 I already pay to get those two channels. For movies, I watch DVDs, because I won't watch cut, censored, cropped movies or movies with ads in.
So basically, I only care about having a TV that can handle DVD resolution.
When HD-DVD or Blu-Ray becomes available, I *might* want an HDTV--but it looks as if those formats will be crippled with DRM, so I won't bother with them, hence no need for an HDTV.
On UK TV, you have all the stuff that's worth watching packed into three or four channels. (BBC2, Channel 4, BBC1... er... that's about it.)
On US TV, you have almost exactly the same amount of TV that's worth watching, but it's spread across about a dozen channels, and you can only get those by subscribing to about a hundred channels.
The answer is ReplayTV or TiVo. You tell it what you want to watch, and it goes away and searches the hundreds of channels and finds the 3 channels' worth of stuff that's worth watching. It also lets you skip the obnoxious ads.
I tried watching US TV without a PVR, and it's just impossible. You have to dedicate an hour or two to reading the centimeters-thick TV guide each week, you have to track where FOX have moved your show to this week, you have to sit through the ads without going into a homicidal rage, and so on. The reward-to-effort ratio is way too low.
This is why Americans who get TiVo liken it to a religious experience, and say "You'll have my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers". It turns US TV into something approaching UK TV.
Anyway, as far as the original topic goes... I don't see it as that big of a deal if they just go ahead with the switchover. Nobody who gets cable or satellite will even notice. How many people get their TV via bunny ears anyway?
Rural America doesn't get its TV via bunny ears. My in-laws live in rural America. They all have satellite dishes, because there's no way you'll pick up TV via a set-top antenna out on the prairies. No, the people who will be hit by this are predominantly poor people who live in cities and suburbs, and culture snobs who think they're too good for TV but occasionally sneak a fix (see examples in this discussion). 90% of the problem could probably be fixed by capping the price of basic cable.
Anyone have any actual statistics on how many people receive TV via bunny ears?
Once the president starts just looking for bold type instead of scanning the entire document, he is likley to miss things that some lower level official didn't deem important.
The current president doesn't read or even scan documents; he has other people read them for him and then "brief" him verbally.
http://developer.apple.com/ has technical documentation that puts most Linux efforts to shame, and of course if you find an issue in Darwin you can always look at the source and contribute a patch.
Furthermore, there are a lot of technologies that are way easier to learn to juggle on Mac OS X--such as video, audio, vectorization, and OpenGL (the last because you don't have to dick around with endless X and driver problems; I still haven't got accelerated GL working on any of my Linux machines.)
Cocoa is a really nice framework for getting a proper UI up and running quickly, and the fact that you can just call out to raw C without any messing about.
Not to detract from Linux in any way, but I think you do Apple's platform an injustice by implying that you need to pay lots of money to learn to develop on it, or that there are no good sources of knowledge.
Frankly, I wish I had a Linux development environment as good as X-code. (Please don't suggest Eclipse unless you can point me at some good documentation for SWT and JFace that doesn't come in expensive doorstop format.)
What Microsoft is talking about is having 'search' folders that display a set a documents based on criteria, like the search folders introduced in Office Outlook back in 2002. (Again a Microsoft innovation)
Microsoft innovation my ass. Dynamic folders were demonstrated in Apple's Copland OS in 1996, in BeOS around the same time, and in Lotus Notes 3.0 in 1993, maybe even earlier.
Then again, perhaps you mean 'innovation' in the Microsoft sense, i.e. 'copy'.
Well, technically under the law gay people have all the rights of straight people. A gay man has the right to marry a woman and two straight men may not marry.
And back in the 50s, a black man had the right to marry a black woman, and a white man had the right to marry a white woman. And every person had the right to sit on the bus with other people of the same color of skin. So, no equal rights issues there either, right?
Except somehow the courts didn't seem to see it that way...
If Linus adopted Arch or Monotone, he would basically be admitting that he could have adopted open source tools in the first place and avoided the whole BitKeeper stupidity. So for ego reasons, he has to build a new tool.
Huh? I set up my printers using KDE's printer tools, and then I needed to fiddle with some settings so I logged into CUPS and there they were. I hadn't realized KDE offered anything other than CUPS.
I tried my last four addresses, and it didn't have any of them. Does it not have residential addresses?
In fact, the address search seems to be quite broken. A search for "Brays Close, Hyde Heath" fails, yet if you search for just "Hyde Heath" and zoom in, you can see Brays Close on the map.
Also, it generally fails if you supply a house number, but works if you supply just the street.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, but when I go to http://www.imaging-resource.com/ and pull up comparison shots (e.g. the "house" shot), to me the Canon looks better. Look at the sharpness of the right-hand window, and the lack thereof on the Nikon image.
Hey, guess what? I have a Nikon film scanner too. I've also been screwed over by their lack of support for SCSI scanners under OS X. Fortunately Hamrick's VueScan gets around the problem, and does a better job than Nikon's software anyway. Check it out.
I also had a hellish experience with an APS loader for the scanner. My experience with Nikon's "support" has already ensured I'd never buy another Nikon product. However, I thought that was somewhat irrelevant to the discussion at hand...
So yeah, I'm a Canon guy now. Two Canon pocket digital cameras, a Canon camcorder, and a Canon flatbed scanner. Nikon can sit on a tripod and swivel.
Frankly, I'm not that impressed with Nikon's sub-$1000 digital cameras either. When I look at the images on dpreview and other sites, to my eyes the color fringeing is noticably worse than Canon. I think at this point Nikon are mostly surviving on vendor lock-in and their exaggerated reputation.
I do hope you reported his piracy to the BSA. If he had to pay full price for all those copies of Office, he would probably be more amenable to using OpenOffice instead.
I hate to bear bad news, but there's nothing new here. Back in the 90s I observed similar situations--that no matter what the TTL, and even if you were careful to increment your version IDs, there were plenty of DNS servers that wouldn't notice DNS changes for weeks.
Hence whenever someone tells me that they're going to move their web hosting, I always advise them to allow for a couple of weeks of overlap, so that they don't lose a ton of traffic. Often they ignore my advice, because of course they have set their TTL low so their changes will take effect immediately, or so they think.
And then they wonder why they're getting hundreds of e-mails from people telling them that the site is down. And I forward them a copy of the e-mail I sent them beforehand warning them of the problem.
My gut feeling is that screaming about other people's DNS servers refusing to observe your TTLs is going to get you about as far as screaming about other people's SMTP servers refusing to deliver your spam. It's their server, they can do what they like. For instance, any TTL under 24 hours will be ignored by my caching DNS server. (RFCs say TTLs should be at least a day, more like 1-2 weeks.)
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Yeah, and if you know of any companies who actually offer a decent analog signal, be sure to let us know.
Comcast isn't one, I can tell you that for starters...
Same here in Austin TX. Time Warner want $54.88 for entry level digital cable, plus $7.99 for the box, plus $6.35 for program guide, plus $9.95 for the DVR, for a grand total of $79.17.
That's before you even get any HD channels, half the channels are still analog, and you can only record/watch one channel at a time.
So I went with DirecTV with TiVo. $47.99 to get everything in digital quality, and I can watch 1 show while recording 2 more.
I paid to have extra coax and phone lines run in to a 4-way wall socket, and paid up front for the TiVo box, because frankly you'd have to be smoking crack to pick the lousy cable around here, unless you're satisfied with analog basic cable.
My big problem with iPhoto is the way it insists on moving all the JPEGs around and naming them according to its own whims.
Sounds like the new iPhoto will be even worse in that regard. Which means I won't touch it.
Shame, I was kinda hoping that iPhoto's file-mangling would be fixed some day, it seemed like a nice application other than that.
The death of OS/2 is certainly no mystery to me.
I tried to like it at the time. My company bought a copy of Warp to test, with a view to moving all our development machines over. We couldn't get it to run on any of them.
On mine, the video drivers didn't work. On a second one, the hard disk drivers didn't work reliably. On a third, it wouldn't even boot.
So that was the end of Warp.
It was probably fine on all-IBM hardware, but that wasn't a realistic proposition.
That's why we have CSS, Einstein.
HTML + CSS = formatted page.
Personally I didn't see anything special about "American Graffiti". It was just commercial pap.
Right, that's why I don't have an HDTV. The only channels I'd care to watch in HD that are actually available in HD are Discovery and PBS, and it's not worth an extra $10.99 a month on top of the $45 I already pay to get those two channels. For movies, I watch DVDs, because I won't watch cut, censored, cropped movies or movies with ads in.
So basically, I only care about having a TV that can handle DVD resolution.
When HD-DVD or Blu-Ray becomes available, I *might* want an HDTV--but it looks as if those formats will be crippled with DRM, so I won't bother with them, hence no need for an HDTV.
Here's the difference between UK and US TV:
On UK TV, you have all the stuff that's worth watching packed into three or four channels. (BBC2, Channel 4, BBC1... er... that's about it.)
On US TV, you have almost exactly the same amount of TV that's worth watching, but it's spread across about a dozen channels, and you can only get those by subscribing to about a hundred channels.
The answer is ReplayTV or TiVo. You tell it what you want to watch, and it goes away and searches the hundreds of channels and finds the 3 channels' worth of stuff that's worth watching. It also lets you skip the obnoxious ads.
I tried watching US TV without a PVR, and it's just impossible. You have to dedicate an hour or two to reading the centimeters-thick TV guide each week, you have to track where FOX have moved your show to this week, you have to sit through the ads without going into a homicidal rage, and so on. The reward-to-effort ratio is way too low.
This is why Americans who get TiVo liken it to a religious experience, and say "You'll have my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers". It turns US TV into something approaching UK TV.
Anyway, as far as the original topic goes... I don't see it as that big of a deal if they just go ahead with the switchover. Nobody who gets cable or satellite will even notice. How many people get their TV via bunny ears anyway?
Rural America doesn't get its TV via bunny ears. My in-laws live in rural America. They all have satellite dishes, because there's no way you'll pick up TV via a set-top antenna out on the prairies. No, the people who will be hit by this are predominantly poor people who live in cities and suburbs, and culture snobs who think they're too good for TV but occasionally sneak a fix (see examples in this discussion). 90% of the problem could probably be fixed by capping the price of basic cable.
Anyone have any actual statistics on how many people receive TV via bunny ears?
Well, if your total budget's under $600, fair enough.
The current president doesn't read or even scan documents; he has other people read them for him and then "brief" him verbally.
Someone else might see my spam? Or I might look at the account and find there's spam there already? Oh, the humanity!
Also, Swing has usable documentation available for free, whereas SWT apparently does not.
(I've never managed to find it.)
http://developer.apple.com/ has technical documentation that puts most Linux efforts to shame, and of course if you find an issue in Darwin you can always look at the source and contribute a patch.
Furthermore, there are a lot of technologies that are way easier to learn to juggle on Mac OS X--such as video, audio, vectorization, and OpenGL (the last because you don't have to dick around with endless X and driver problems; I still haven't got accelerated GL working on any of my Linux machines.)
Cocoa is a really nice framework for getting a proper UI up and running quickly, and the fact that you can just call out to raw C without any messing about.
Not to detract from Linux in any way, but I think you do Apple's platform an injustice by implying that you need to pay lots of money to learn to develop on it, or that there are no good sources of knowledge.
Frankly, I wish I had a Linux development environment as good as X-code. (Please don't suggest Eclipse unless you can point me at some good documentation for SWT and JFace that doesn't come in expensive doorstop format.)
Microsoft innovation my ass. Dynamic folders were demonstrated in Apple's Copland OS in 1996, in BeOS around the same time, and in Lotus Notes 3.0 in 1993, maybe even earlier.
Then again, perhaps you mean 'innovation' in the Microsoft sense, i.e. 'copy'.
Both black and white men had the same choices available to them--the choice to marry someone with the same color skin as them.
Keep squirming.
And back in the 50s, a black man had the right to marry a black woman, and a white man had the right to marry a white woman. And every person had the right to sit on the bus with other people of the same color of skin. So, no equal rights issues there either, right?
Except somehow the courts didn't seem to see it that way...
If Linus adopted Arch or Monotone, he would basically be admitting that he could have adopted open source tools in the first place and avoided the whole BitKeeper stupidity. So for ego reasons, he has to build a new tool.
Huh? I set up my printers using KDE's printer tools, and then I needed to fiddle with some settings so I logged into CUPS and there they were. I hadn't realized KDE offered anything other than CUPS.
I tried my last four addresses, and it didn't have any of them. Does it not have residential addresses?
In fact, the address search seems to be quite broken. A search for "Brays Close, Hyde Heath" fails, yet if you search for just "Hyde Heath" and zoom in, you can see Brays Close on the map.
Also, it generally fails if you supply a house number, but works if you supply just the street.
Oh well, it's still in beta...
I don't store my photos in PSD format, no.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, but when I go to http://www.imaging-resource.com/ and pull up comparison shots (e.g. the "house" shot), to me the Canon looks better. Look at the sharpness of the right-hand window, and the lack thereof on the Nikon image.
Linus is never going to admit that Andy Tanenbaum was right about microkernels...
Hey, guess what? I have a Nikon film scanner too. I've also been screwed over by their lack of support for SCSI scanners under OS X. Fortunately Hamrick's VueScan gets around the problem, and does a better job than Nikon's software anyway. Check it out.
I also had a hellish experience with an APS loader for the scanner. My experience with Nikon's "support" has already ensured I'd never buy another Nikon product. However, I thought that was somewhat irrelevant to the discussion at hand...
So yeah, I'm a Canon guy now. Two Canon pocket digital cameras, a Canon camcorder, and a Canon flatbed scanner. Nikon can sit on a tripod and swivel.
Frankly, I'm not that impressed with Nikon's sub-$1000 digital cameras either. When I look at the images on dpreview and other sites, to my eyes the color fringeing is noticably worse than Canon. I think at this point Nikon are mostly surviving on vendor lock-in and their exaggerated reputation.
I do hope you reported his piracy to the BSA. If he had to pay full price for all those copies of Office, he would probably be more amenable to using OpenOffice instead.
I hate to bear bad news, but there's nothing new here. Back in the 90s I observed similar situations--that no matter what the TTL, and even if you were careful to increment your version IDs, there were plenty of DNS servers that wouldn't notice DNS changes for weeks.
Hence whenever someone tells me that they're going to move their web hosting, I always advise them to allow for a couple of weeks of overlap, so that they don't lose a ton of traffic. Often they ignore my advice, because of course they have set their TTL low so their changes will take effect immediately, or so they think.
And then they wonder why they're getting hundreds of e-mails from people telling them that the site is down. And I forward them a copy of the e-mail I sent them beforehand warning them of the problem.
My gut feeling is that screaming about other people's DNS servers refusing to observe your TTLs is going to get you about as far as screaming about other people's SMTP servers refusing to deliver your spam. It's their server, they can do what they like. For instance, any TTL under 24 hours will be ignored by my caching DNS server. (RFCs say TTLs should be at least a day, more like 1-2 weeks.)