There would be people who change their lineups several times per day. If even one percent of the subscriber base did this, they'd have to pay for bigger call centers and more operators. That would drive up costs for all of us.
Simple solution: charge a service fee for each change. Or give people N free changes a year, then make them pay a fee.
We're up to, what, over 900 channels? If we say that the cable bill is $90 a month (and that's overestimating), that's only a single dollar per channel, which would then be further subdivided to pay for each show that airs on that channel.
Yeah, if every channel was paid equally.
Which they aren't.
Hundreds of those channels are PPV and other "interactive" stuff. Of the remainder, ESPN (for example) is about $4 of your cable bill, while Discovery is far less.
However, a Lifetime viewer is probably not as desirable a consumer as a SciFi viewer, for certain classes of product. So it's not clear that pure eyeball statistics represent how marketable the channels would be in an a la carte world.
They discovered this in the UK when Channel 4 was set up. It was supposed to be a niche channel with arts programs and strange comedies, and the legislation was set up so that it would be funded by the mainstream ITV (game shows and sitcoms). After a couple of years, Channel 4 ended up funding ITV.
What killed my use of djb's stuff wasn't any of those things; it was the dependency on his daemontools replacement for/etc/init.d. (Even today, the djbdns FAQ tries to steer people away from using djbdns without daemontools, and only supplies a half-assed script to install manually.)
The Jak and Daxter games on the PS2 used dynamic loading, and the PS2 hardware was clearly inferior to the Wii in every respect.
And check out the reviews of GTA Chinatown Wars for DS, Rockstar clearly put the effort in to think about what the DS could do best, and build the game around that.
Then again, the Prince of Persia team have a history of crappy ports. Their last Wii title was a horrible port with a frame rate that dropped through the floor during the final battle, even though it was derived from the PS2 game.
The main one is that Blackberries don't have end-user friendly plans. Carriers charge a hefty "blackberry fee" that is far and away more expensive than the iPhone plan.
Maybe outside the USA, but T-Mobile's BlackBerry plan for individuals (without the enterprise server connectivity) works out cheaper than AT&T's iPhone plan.
You just wait... in the next episode, Peter will say, "Remember that time I wrote an episode for a Seth McFarlane show," and it will be followed by your post.
Pages files are XML. Though of course, that doesn't help you much unless someone else chooses to support the same XML elements, which currently nobody does.
Neither Apple nor Sony has ever shown much interest in supporting open standards.
Nonsense. MPEG-4 is an open standard. It's just not royalty free.
Other open standards Apple supports, many of which *are* royalty-free, include OpenGL, HTTP, LDAP, X11, PDF, MPEG-1, UPnP, vCal, vCard, DAV, POSIX, NFS, SSH, SIP, XMPP, DHCP, IPv6, SNMP... and of course, they originated open standards like QuickTime and Zeroconf.
We've been waiting for years for a killer video container, and it appears to me that mkv is probably going to be the one. It seems poised to become the mp3 of video. There's finally a container that can be played back in an acceptable number of hardware devices, with acceptable quality, at acceptable filesizes.
My AppleTV, PS3, BlackBerry, DVD player and iPod will all play MPEG-4. None of them will play MKV.
Can you give a few examples of popular hardware devices that'll play MKV?
The book states that the dropped platforms were the least popular of those in earlier editions.
Last I checked, IBM DB2 had the biggest market share of any SQL database. (Link to 2003 Gartner Study, and I don't think the situation has changed much.)
So do DB2 users just not buy books like SQL In A Nutshell? Or have O'Reilly made a serious mistake here?
From my point of view it looks like a mistake, as I'm only interested in PostgreSQL and DB2... but then again, I work for IBM, so maybe I'm a special case?
AT&T justifies it by noting that accessing internal content doesn't use up their backhaul bandwidth. I would think the FCC would be somewhat sympathetic to this argument.
Well, that depends how much difference there is between how much the backhaul bandwidth costs them, and how much they resell it to you for.
In the case of Time Warner's proposed fees, they were planning to charge about 10x the free market rate, which is a bit much when you're a monopoly in many areas.
Nevertheless, Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent hypertext, hyperlinks, or even hypertext over the network.
He just built an implementation of hypertext over TCP/IP that happened to become popular, mostly because it was open source, platform-neutral, and had a GUI interface.
If he hadn't done it, I have no doubt that someone else would have within a few years anyway. The research projects were out there. I'd built a GUI hypertext browser with clickable links a couple of years before, other people had built network hypertext systems, Gopher was out there showing client/server could work, and so on.
In that time they learned that they could own acres of land with three thousand square foot homes for what they had been paying for a walk-up condo, that they could commute in minutes and leave their doors unlocked without worry, and nearly all of them ended up moving to Minnesota.
Yes, but... -45 degrees! I couldn't live in Minnesota, I'd blow my brains out after a few winters.
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Simple solution: charge a service fee for each change. Or give people N free changes a year, then make them pay a fee.
End of problem.
Next excuse?
Yeah, if every channel was paid equally.
Which they aren't.
Hundreds of those channels are PPV and other "interactive" stuff. Of the remainder, ESPN (for example) is about $4 of your cable bill, while Discovery is far less.
However, a Lifetime viewer is probably not as desirable a consumer as a SciFi viewer, for certain classes of product. So it's not clear that pure eyeball statistics represent how marketable the channels would be in an a la carte world.
They discovered this in the UK when Channel 4 was set up. It was supposed to be a niche channel with arts programs and strange comedies, and the legislation was set up so that it would be funded by the mainstream ITV (game shows and sitcoms). After a couple of years, Channel 4 ended up funding ITV.
What killed my use of djb's stuff wasn't any of those things; it was the dependency on his daemontools replacement for /etc/init.d. (Even today, the djbdns FAQ tries to steer people away from using djbdns without daemontools, and only supplies a half-assed script to install manually.)
If you don't need the complicated functionality of BIND, you shouldn't use it.
For instance, DNS caching for a home network can be done using something far smaller and simpler, such as pdnsd.
The Jak and Daxter games on the PS2 used dynamic loading, and the PS2 hardware was clearly inferior to the Wii in every respect.
And check out the reviews of GTA Chinatown Wars for DS, Rockstar clearly put the effort in to think about what the DS could do best, and build the game around that.
Then again, the Prince of Persia team have a history of crappy ports. Their last Wii title was a horrible port with a frame rate that dropped through the floor during the final battle, even though it was derived from the PS2 game.
Maybe outside the USA, but T-Mobile's BlackBerry plan for individuals (without the enterprise server connectivity) works out cheaper than AT&T's iPhone plan.
Naah, 'cause that would be hilarious.
Pages files are XML. Though of course, that doesn't help you much unless someone else chooses to support the same XML elements, which currently nobody does.
But it's not like it's an opaque binary blob.
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/#newsservers
What's going on is that ISPs often have underpowered and badly maintained DNS servers.
That can be traumatic, but not as traumatic as finding him hanged.
Nonsense. MPEG-4 is an open standard. It's just not royalty free.
Other open standards Apple supports, many of which *are* royalty-free, include OpenGL, HTTP, LDAP, X11, PDF, MPEG-1, UPnP, vCal, vCard, DAV, POSIX, NFS, SSH, SIP, XMPP, DHCP, IPv6, SNMP... and of course, they originated open standards like QuickTime and Zeroconf.
My AppleTV, PS3, BlackBerry, DVD player and iPod will all play MPEG-4. None of them will play MKV.
Can you give a few examples of popular hardware devices that'll play MKV?
The iPhone won't run software that I write myself, for starters.
Or any of the software Apple has refused to allow in the app store.
No, the XP service packs don't include .NET.
There are plenty of phones that can be purchased unlocked.
There are plenty of phones on the networks that can run whatever software you want.
Last I checked, IBM DB2 had the biggest market share of any SQL database. (Link to 2003 Gartner Study, and I don't think the situation has changed much.)
So do DB2 users just not buy books like SQL In A Nutshell? Or have O'Reilly made a serious mistake here?
From my point of view it looks like a mistake, as I'm only interested in PostgreSQL and DB2... but then again, I work for IBM, so maybe I'm a special case?
[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]
You know what would be awesome new features?
The ability to run whatever software I want, and the ability to operate on whatever phone network I want.
If you don't want .NET or Silverlight, don't install them.
I don't have .NET installed in my XP image, and so I didn't get this extension.
Well, that depends how much difference there is between how much the backhaul bandwidth costs them, and how much they resell it to you for.
In the case of Time Warner's proposed fees, they were planning to charge about 10x the free market rate, which is a bit much when you're a monopoly in many areas.
Nevertheless, Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent hypertext, hyperlinks, or even hypertext over the network.
He just built an implementation of hypertext over TCP/IP that happened to become popular, mostly because it was open source, platform-neutral, and had a GUI interface.
If he hadn't done it, I have no doubt that someone else would have within a few years anyway. The research projects were out there. I'd built a GUI hypertext browser with clickable links a couple of years before, other people had built network hypertext systems, Gopher was out there showing client/server could work, and so on.
Yes, but... -45 degrees! I couldn't live in Minnesota, I'd blow my brains out after a few winters.
You should never run for President as a Democrat.
Apparently it's OK to be an ex-bankrupt ex-coke-fiend who went AWOL, for example, but only if you're a Republican.
Now that's what I call pwnage.