You can store video for television station playback on Linux computers using pretty much off the shelf components. But by the time you get the output syncronous with the rest of the TV station, you might as well have purchased a Pinnacle system which will _already be in time_.
It's all fine and well to record and playback video using cheap consumer gear. The problem comes when you want to switch the video between sources or do effects. If it's not syncronous with the rest of the facility, you're screwed.
Certainly, there are SDI video cards with reference input for PCs. And many of them, like the DVS boards, are supported by OS X and Linux (many weather graphics systems you see on TV use Linux and DVS boards). But these cards are $1500 each and you're on your own when it comes to finding software that will work with them.
As far as playing video out of a cron file; if it were only that simple. Sure, you can tell it to start playing, but at what point? Are you willing to have 15 seconds of bars and tone? You'll need some sort of metadata to tell it the in-point. And how about insertions for promos and commercials? How big is the donut and where?
There's a reason that the off-the-shelf solutions are outrageously expensive. They do a lot because this isn't a trivial application.
And we wonder why the MPAA, HBO and their peers are hell-bent on digital rights management. It's because of this turkey who thinks he has a right to "back-up" what he never owned in the first place. Ditto for the clown in Warren, Michigan who has been all over the press in SE Michigan. For those that don't know, Warren is where you live if you CAN'T get into Detroit.
Let's be honest; many American consumers generally follow the rules and have zero problems with many of the goods and services they purchase. But there's a number of them, that think the world is their feeding trough and they're not getting their dollar's worth if they don't absolutely take all they can. Whether or not it's legal, considerate or healthy is of little concern.
...the networks still have distribution agreements with local affiliates.
The networks would LOVE to be able to distribute their content on their own; MSNBC is an example of doing just that, and eventually the day will come when the local stations have to pay for the network feed (some CBS stations already pay for network).
Television is changing, but I don't think it's been changing for the better. The internet doesn't add much to the change, just quickens the pace. The programming is still crap.
The iBiquity standard is in use. Good luck getting everyone on-board to update transmitting software and hopefully make it compatible with receivers already in the marketplace.
Of course, if Congress mandates copy protection and you can't do it without making everyone pitch their radios, you've just killed in-band digital radio. Well, at least for the 5 people that actually went out and bought new digital in-band radios.
I'm sure someone, somewhere within the enterprise is using features of Exchange that they won't get anywhere else. Not to sound like a Microsoft fan-boy sock puppet, but there's some features that Exchange has that people in a business environment just love.
However, since you asked. I'd run Exim or Qmail and Cyrus IMAP.
The common mode for many Silicon Valley companies of the time like Netscape and SGI was simply pure arrogance. Ever try dealing with these people?
Netscape was unbelieveable. While they might have been the first to come up with an ISP agreement, wanting a percentage of the ISP's revenue for a package they GAVE AWAY online was asking way too much. Their other products, like their Collabra server, were WinNT ports of open source products like INN. And they worked like magic; it took a lot of hocus pokus to keep it running more than twelve hours. And forget actually interfacing it to Usenet, it simply couldn't handle the load.
If you called and complained, you were basically told "it is what it is, but the new version fixes it so send us more money". And that was just one software product.
Marc Andressen was not the golden boy he likes to make himself out to be. He was in the right place at the right time, and fortunately for him, made out pretty well. But he's a one trick pony.
Netscape didn't die because of Microsoft, Netscape died because of their own arrogance and they believed their own marketing. Good riddance. At least what was left was turned into something decent.
No, people can receive morse code while sending and I do it all the time. It's how I find my signal on the amateur satellites. Better still, I'm able to send while dealing with the quarter-second delay for my signal to make the round-trip. Try talking into a phone while listening to yourself with that sort of delay -- you'll get all meally-mouthed.
It's full duplex (or full break-in/QSK). Works beautifully.
Hello? Our government is not a democracy, it is a constitutionally limited republic. Maybe if our elected leaders remembered that's how our founding fathers wanted it, we wouldn't have these ridiculous intrusions upon our freedoms.
Oh well, keep your powder dry....democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner...
I have an account there, as they occasionally have good deals on accessories and if you don't mind waiting, can find decent deals on cameras and things.
However, this is just another case of another business trying to extort another in the courts. The taxpayer foots the bill for these games, I'm sick of it.
I just zipped off an email from my account on their web site and told them to close the account and stop sending me their catalogs, I wasn't interested in using a business that would resort to sleezy tactics such as this.
It won't make a bit of difference, management has been seduced by the illusion of dollar signs painted by their legal counsel.
Adios, Tiger Direct - you won't see another penny from me.
I ran Arkeia with a large web hosting firm for about 2 years mixed with Linux and Windows machines. We tested the backups extensively before deployment and spent $18,000 with Knox for licenses.
All seemed well until we needed to restore data. The logging indicated a perfect backup, but time and time again our restores were either failing or incomplete. On Windows, it simply wouldn't restore anything.
The solution, according to Arkeia was to purchase an upgrade ($12,000) which would solve all our problems. And since we refused to spend another 15% for a support agreement, that was our only alternative. I don't think so.
Needless to say, we went with someone else. Veritas had a great enterprise solution that worked with Linux and Windows (the server app runs only on Windows) and supports a huge array of tape drives. And it was one-third the price.
I can't definetly recall, but the Veritas agent also has some security peculiarities that raised some eyebrows. If you run any enterprise backup, I guess the answer is to make sure you're firewalled.
In this day and age of cheap disk drives, I wonder if anyone is using USB or Firewire drives and just using those for back-ups. A Lacie 250 gig Firewire drive is <$200.
The government is one of ChoicePoint's largest customers, so you can be certain that there will be zero rules and regulations imposed on ChoicePoint or similar companies. Nor will you see any changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which affords no penalty to companies that report wrong information on individuals other than once proven incorrect, it is removed.
If this incident doesn't create intense public outrage and a rash of calls to legislators demanding change, then I doubt there will ever be changes that protect individual identity and information.
Furthermore, I would propose that every individual that finds ChoicePoint's egregious lack of security reprehensible, to draft a letter demanding a full explanation and any details relating to whether or not their information has been stolen. I don't expect this company to come clean, but just imagine the hassle of having to reply to hundreds of thousands of letters.
Maybe having to deal with thousands of peeved off consumers will clean up their act.
Microsoft innovates again; takes the now industry standard look of search engine results established by Google and "embraces and extends" them.
The end result is that we have another search engine that looks just like Google.
For a company that just paid out a 32 billion dollar dividend and records record profits, you'd think they'd actually try something new instead of trying to hone-in on someone else's game. But then again, that's why shareholders love 'em -- they are a money machine.
The weather service has had RSS and XML data feeds available online for over a year.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/
Although they term this as "experimental", there's nothing experimental about it as many information services use this feed to RESELL to their customers.
Many of the weather alert paging services you find on the Internet also use these feeds.
FURTHERMORE, the data has always been freely available to those willing to buy a satellite receiver (Zephyrus) and point it to the right geosyncronous bird. The software to make sense of the binary data (particularily NEXRAD and composite radar data) is not free.
It's time to simply revamp the entire naming system. With IT being what it is, there's no reason large corporations shouldn't control their own TLD the same way they control their current.com addresses.
If Sony wants everything to be.sony, like playstation.sony or tv.sony or music.sony, then Sony runs the root for.sony and has at it. Of course, the problem with doing that is that there's no automated way (right now) to deal with an enormous splurge in TLDs. But it's not an insurmountable task and could be easily phased into operation as the years progress.
If ICANN wants TLDs to be specific, I see this as being the ultimate and FINAL solution.
The sending of the spam was bad enough, the bigger problem is that this putz was engaging in fraud, plain and simple.
His attorney can argue free speech and the unconstitutional aspects of the CAN-SPAM act all he wants, the fact remains that he misled people using spam and sold them products and services of no value whatsoever.
Crime does indeed pay, and this shows it pays handsomely. Now the courts need to AGAIN provide some negative reinforement of that fact and lock this clown away with Andrew Fastow and the rest of the classic white collar criminals.
Problem is, it's very hard to fight it. The record companies use middle men, independent record promoters, to do the dirty-work (as indicated in the article).
When I was far younger, I used to work in the radio broadcasting industry and the stories of what the indie-promoters do is shameful.
The program director, a few of his lackies, some of the higher-profile talent and an independent promoter all went out to dinner in Windsor. Not only did the promoter spring for dinner, but then he hands everyone in the group three crisp $100 bills and tells them to have fun in the Windsor Casino.
Or perhaps the station is out of money for promotions and can't buy bumper stickers or on-air give-aways. The indie will line up all sorts of cool goods to give away like video games, cell phones and lots and lots of record product and concert tickets. Funny thing is, the listeners get the record product and the concert tickets, but the video games and cell phones are traded to vendors to print bumper stickers. Or, they simply go into the pocket of the general manager and program director.
Another disturbing thing that happens now is ClearChannel has a concert promotion business too. So when their show comes into town, the playlist is modified so heavily on all their radio stations that you can't get away from the featured act. Imagine a weekend of nearly nothing but Journey!
Radio is pretty much a license to print money. It is not a surprise that it's rampant with abuse and corruption.
1. Yes, those who are less than technically savvy are going to be very wary of it. So they'll spend $15 per month for a Voicepulse account and keep the landline. For a couple months, until they realize that $15 buys the essentially the same thing they're paying some ILEC $50 when they could be paying a VoIP provider a lot less.
Money talks.
2. How so? VoIP requires an analog telephone adapter that plugs into your existing corded and cordless phones. They all work great. And here's something that'll make your hair stand on end and a lot of people on Slashdot just can't seem to grasp about VoIP; you'll need a VoIP provider for a very long time because a large percentage of the world will still be on the circuit switched POTS network.
So while the concept of point-to-point VoIP calls over the Internet is sexy, it's likely your calls to grandma will still need a POTS line somewhere. So when the rest of the world catches up to you, enjoy your ATA and your plain old telephones.
3. You obviously do not have a family with teenagers. My monthly home telephone minutes are in excess of 800 minutes. $15 on Voicepulse gets me half of my state as a local phone call and 200 minutes of long distance. I don't think any cell provider could touch that.
No. Television is programmed for the lowest common denominator because what they want is sheer numbers of eyeballs, not the quality of the brain residing behind the eyeballs.
Of course, television is slowly learning to rue the day that all they have left is the LCD because anyone with an iota of smarts is out playing on the Internet anyway.
Because 99% of the rest of the world still uses circuit switched data. You're paying the service provider a fee to convert your IP into circuit switched data so it can traverse over the POTS network. Unless you only talk to the other 1%, you need an interface into the past.
That's it, end of story. Consider it a tax for being on the bleeding edge of technology until the rest of the world catches-up to you.
When the rest of the world does catch up, they'll hawk the rental of phone switch services as a convenient way to prevent SPIM.
Slashdot Mirror
You can store video for television station playback on Linux computers using pretty much off the shelf components. But by the time you get the output syncronous with the rest of the TV station, you might as well have purchased a Pinnacle system which will _already be in time_.
It's all fine and well to record and playback video using cheap consumer gear. The problem comes when you want to switch the video between sources or do effects. If it's not syncronous with the rest of the facility, you're screwed.
Certainly, there are SDI video cards with reference input for PCs. And many of them, like the DVS boards, are supported by OS X and Linux (many weather graphics systems you see on TV use Linux and DVS boards). But these cards are $1500 each and you're on your own when it comes to finding software that will work with them.
As far as playing video out of a cron file; if it were only that simple. Sure, you can tell it to start playing, but at what point? Are you willing to have 15 seconds of bars and tone? You'll need some sort of metadata to tell it the in-point. And how about insertions for promos and commercials? How big is the donut and where?
There's a reason that the off-the-shelf solutions are outrageously expensive. They do a lot because this isn't a trivial application.
Why is it that the Mac/PC debate is more likely to cause a knife fight than Harley and BMW owners meeting at a bar? C'mon people, it's a computer.
Each OS has merits; which one you use is based upon merits as individual as the user. If the ads offend you, please go get some thicker skin.
And we wonder why the MPAA, HBO and their peers are hell-bent on digital rights management. It's because of this turkey who thinks he has a right to "back-up" what he never owned in the first place. Ditto for the clown in Warren, Michigan who has been all over the press in SE Michigan. For those that don't know, Warren is where you live if you CAN'T get into Detroit.
Let's be honest; many American consumers generally follow the rules and have zero problems with many of the goods and services they purchase. But there's a number of them, that think the world is their feeding trough and they're not getting their dollar's worth if they don't absolutely take all they can. Whether or not it's legal, considerate or healthy is of little concern.
...the networks still have distribution agreements with local affiliates.
The networks would LOVE to be able to distribute their content on their own; MSNBC is an example of doing just that, and eventually the day will come when the local stations have to pay for the network feed (some CBS stations already pay for network).
Television is changing, but I don't think it's been changing for the better. The internet doesn't add much to the change, just quickens the pace. The programming is still crap.
One of those Clickie white latex erasers will remove the scratches.
The iBiquity standard is in use. Good luck getting everyone on-board to update transmitting software and hopefully make it compatible with receivers already in the marketplace.
Of course, if Congress mandates copy protection and you can't do it without making everyone pitch their radios, you've just killed in-band digital radio. Well, at least for the 5 people that actually went out and bought new digital in-band radios.
...they need to think about this very carefully.
I'm sure someone, somewhere within the enterprise is using features of Exchange that they won't get anywhere else. Not to sound like a Microsoft fan-boy sock puppet, but there's some features that Exchange has that people in a business environment just love.
However, since you asked. I'd run Exim or Qmail and Cyrus IMAP.
The common mode for many Silicon Valley companies of the time like Netscape and SGI was simply pure arrogance. Ever try dealing with these people?
Netscape was unbelieveable. While they might have been the first to come up with an ISP agreement, wanting a percentage of the ISP's revenue for a package they GAVE AWAY online was asking way too much. Their other products, like their Collabra server, were WinNT ports of open source products like INN. And they worked like magic; it took a lot of hocus pokus to keep it running more than twelve hours. And forget actually interfacing it to Usenet, it simply couldn't handle the load.
If you called and complained, you were basically told "it is what it is, but the new version fixes it so send us more money". And that was just one software product.
Marc Andressen was not the golden boy he likes to make himself out to be. He was in the right place at the right time, and fortunately for him, made out pretty well. But he's a one trick pony.
Netscape didn't die because of Microsoft, Netscape died because of their own arrogance and they believed their own marketing. Good riddance. At least what was left was turned into something decent.
No, people can receive morse code while sending and I do it all the time. It's how I find my signal on the amateur satellites. Better still, I'm able to send while dealing with the quarter-second delay for my signal to make the round-trip. Try talking into a phone while listening to yourself with that sort of delay -- you'll get all meally-mouthed.
It's full duplex (or full break-in/QSK). Works beautifully.
That was Exxon.
Hello? Our government is not a democracy, it is a constitutionally limited republic. Maybe if our elected leaders remembered that's how our founding fathers wanted it, we wouldn't have these ridiculous intrusions upon our freedoms.
...democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner...
Oh well, keep your powder dry.
I have an account there, as they occasionally have good deals on accessories and if you don't mind waiting, can find decent deals on cameras and things.
However, this is just another case of another business trying to extort another in the courts. The taxpayer foots the bill for these games, I'm sick of it.
I just zipped off an email from my account on their web site and told them to close the account and stop sending me their catalogs, I wasn't interested in using a business that would resort to sleezy tactics such as this.
It won't make a bit of difference, management has been seduced by the illusion of dollar signs painted by their legal counsel.
Adios, Tiger Direct - you won't see another penny from me.
Tapeware doesn't use routeable protocols, so you can't do backups on systems outside your subnet.
I ran Arkeia with a large web hosting firm for about 2 years mixed with Linux and Windows machines. We tested the backups extensively before deployment and spent $18,000 with Knox for licenses.
All seemed well until we needed to restore data. The logging indicated a perfect backup, but time and time again our restores were either failing or incomplete. On Windows, it simply wouldn't restore anything.
The solution, according to Arkeia was to purchase an upgrade ($12,000) which would solve all our problems. And since we refused to spend another 15% for a support agreement, that was our only alternative. I don't think so.
Needless to say, we went with someone else. Veritas had a great enterprise solution that worked with Linux and Windows (the server app runs only on Windows) and supports a huge array of tape drives. And it was one-third the price.
I can't definetly recall, but the Veritas agent also has some security peculiarities that raised some eyebrows. If you run any enterprise backup, I guess the answer is to make sure you're firewalled.
In this day and age of cheap disk drives, I wonder if anyone is using USB or Firewire drives and just using those for back-ups. A Lacie 250 gig Firewire drive is <$200.
The government is one of ChoicePoint's largest customers, so you can be certain that there will be zero rules and regulations imposed on ChoicePoint or similar companies. Nor will you see any changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which affords no penalty to companies that report wrong information on individuals other than once proven incorrect, it is removed.
If this incident doesn't create intense public outrage and a rash of calls to legislators demanding change, then I doubt there will ever be changes that protect individual identity and information.
Furthermore, I would propose that every individual that finds ChoicePoint's egregious lack of security reprehensible, to draft a letter demanding a full explanation and any details relating to whether or not their information has been stolen. I don't expect this company to come clean, but just imagine the hassle of having to reply to hundreds of thousands of letters.
Maybe having to deal with thousands of peeved off consumers will clean up their act.
Microsoft innovates again; takes the now industry standard look of search engine results established by Google and "embraces and extends" them.
The end result is that we have another search engine that looks just like Google.
For a company that just paid out a 32 billion dollar dividend and records record profits, you'd think they'd actually try something new instead of trying to hone-in on someone else's game. But then again, that's why shareholders love 'em -- they are a money machine.
It's free in the same sense that data on the Internet is "free" as long as you have a PC and an Internet connection.
I think you can wrap your mind around that simple concept.
The weather service has had RSS and XML data feeds available online for over a year.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/
Although they term this as "experimental", there's nothing experimental about it as many information services use this feed to RESELL to their customers.
Many of the weather alert paging services you find on the Internet also use these feeds.
FURTHERMORE, the data has always been freely available to those willing to buy a satellite receiver (Zephyrus) and point it to the right geosyncronous bird. The software to make sense of the binary data (particularily NEXRAD and composite radar data) is not free.
It's time to simply revamp the entire naming system. With IT being what it is, there's no reason large corporations shouldn't control their own TLD the same way they control their current .com addresses.
.sony, like playstation.sony or tv.sony or music.sony, then Sony runs the root for .sony and has at it. Of course, the problem with doing that is that there's no automated way (right now) to deal with an enormous splurge in TLDs. But it's not an insurmountable task and could be easily phased into operation as the years progress.
If Sony wants everything to be
If ICANN wants TLDs to be specific, I see this as being the ultimate and FINAL solution.
The sending of the spam was bad enough, the bigger problem is that this putz was engaging in fraud, plain and simple.
His attorney can argue free speech and the unconstitutional aspects of the CAN-SPAM act all he wants, the fact remains that he misled people using spam and sold them products and services of no value whatsoever.
Crime does indeed pay, and this shows it pays handsomely. Now the courts need to AGAIN provide some negative reinforement of that fact and lock this clown away with Andrew Fastow and the rest of the classic white collar criminals.
Problem is, it's very hard to fight it. The record companies use middle men, independent record promoters, to do the dirty-work (as indicated in the article).
When I was far younger, I used to work in the radio broadcasting industry and the stories of what the indie-promoters do is shameful.
The program director, a few of his lackies, some of the higher-profile talent and an independent promoter all went out to dinner in Windsor. Not only did the promoter spring for dinner, but then he hands everyone in the group three crisp $100 bills and tells them to have fun in the Windsor Casino.
Or perhaps the station is out of money for promotions and can't buy bumper stickers or on-air give-aways. The indie will line up all sorts of cool goods to give away like video games, cell phones and lots and lots of record product and concert tickets. Funny thing is, the listeners get the record product and the concert tickets, but the video games and cell phones are traded to vendors to print bumper stickers. Or, they simply go into the pocket of the general manager and program director.
Another disturbing thing that happens now is ClearChannel has a concert promotion business too. So when their show comes into town, the playlist is modified so heavily on all their radio stations that you can't get away from the featured act. Imagine a weekend of nearly nothing but Journey!
Radio is pretty much a license to print money. It is not a surprise that it's rampant with abuse and corruption.
Unfortunately, it's outrageously expensive here.
1. Yes, those who are less than technically savvy are going to be very wary of it. So they'll spend $15 per month for a Voicepulse account and keep the landline. For a couple months, until they realize that $15 buys the essentially the same thing they're paying some ILEC $50 when they could be paying a VoIP provider a lot less.
Money talks.
2. How so? VoIP requires an analog telephone adapter that plugs into your existing corded and cordless phones. They all work great. And here's something that'll make your hair stand on end and a lot of people on Slashdot just can't seem to grasp about VoIP; you'll need a VoIP provider for a very long time because a large percentage of the world will still be on the circuit switched POTS network.
So while the concept of point-to-point VoIP calls over the Internet is sexy, it's likely your calls to grandma will still need a POTS line somewhere. So when the rest of the world catches up to you, enjoy your ATA and your plain old telephones.
3. You obviously do not have a family with teenagers. My monthly home telephone minutes are in excess of 800 minutes. $15 on Voicepulse gets me half of my state as a local phone call and 200 minutes of long distance. I don't think any cell provider could touch that.
No. Television is programmed for the lowest common denominator because what they want is sheer numbers of eyeballs, not the quality of the brain residing behind the eyeballs.
Of course, television is slowly learning to rue the day that all they have left is the LCD because anyone with an iota of smarts is out playing on the Internet anyway.
Because 99% of the rest of the world still uses circuit switched data. You're paying the service provider a fee to convert your IP into circuit switched data so it can traverse over the POTS network. Unless you only talk to the other 1%, you need an interface into the past.
That's it, end of story. Consider it a tax for being on the bleeding edge of technology until the rest of the world catches-up to you.
When the rest of the world does catch up, they'll hawk the rental of phone switch services as a convenient way to prevent SPIM.