Ahhh, I see you've been bitten by the political bug. That's the problem - the science is sound but the "solutions" have more to do with redistributing cash than following science. Real correction would require investment, which is an unpopular and risky path. What we're being fed as "green" is just the path of least resistance based on science sound bites. Example: fuel derived from plants is sustainable (carbon neutral, since they extract C from CO2 which is then recombined in the ICE). Ethanol happens to work in standard cars (ICE) with either no modification (small fractions) or minor modifications (E85). Corn growers have an unending need to prop up prices, as the crop is barely valuable enough on its own to make it profitable. Corn can be used to make Ethanol. Corn is the only crop currently in the US which ahs the installed base to provide enough Ethanol for widespread automotive use. By requiring ethanol in gasoline, it looks "green" and produces a high (cash) yield crop for corn. What's missing is that corn is a lousy base material from which to make ethanol, and most other crops which are better have restrictive tarriffs (put in place by the Corn lobby).
Putting a square peg in a round hole isn't going to work. Making our current designs greener is not the only - or best - answer. There's something like 90% turnover in vehicles over a 10-15 year period. Maybe it's time to address the concerns at the head end, rather than at the tail. Of course, that would cost car companies money in R&D, and they always seem to find cash reserves to lobby against any changes. It would take the collective force of a society to force the changes we need. And, quite honestly, most people don't give a shit. New flatscreen TV or reduce greenhouse gasses? The smart money is in building more TVs.
*shrug* The answers are out there, it's just not a priority for most people, and it's not a financial win for corporations. Path of least resistance...
Of course not, the proper way it to strip out what you have and start from scratch. Otherwise, the entrenched installation will continually pop back to the forefront. Converting from one system to another is a painful, wrenching process - much like getting to cold water. It's best to jump in, do that whole-body shiver, and then get on with your swim. Getting in slowly is a good way to decide you don't want to do it at all.
You'll need a serious migration plan for everything - from common, office apps which have an installed base of thousands (if not more) non-compatible templates, to win-dependent commercial programs, to custom apps written for the old platform which are mission critical but the developer is no longer around. You'll need to organize training for everyone. Twice. And you'll need a kick-ass help desk for everything from copying files to equivalents of obscure Excel formulas.
You have two real possibilities here: A decade of superman-like endurance and patience coupled with a slick-MBA marketing scheme, or utter and complete failure resulting in poor reviews, lousy job satisfaction, and likely counseling (make sure the uni has a good mental health rider with their insurance).
I don't necessarily mean to dissuade you but it's going to take a lot of spit and polish and going piecemeal is a near guarantee of failure. You're going to have to hide the retraining costs, or your plan will fail. This might be too large an organization to try and switch unless you have serious zealots at the top on your side.
You have the constitution wrong. You have been deprived of nothing. Your sets work just fine, and they aren't taking them from you. You own nothing of the transmissions which private companies have been sending you. It's arguable that you have a certain small right to the airspace/RF spectrum (though that's very tenuous and generally regarded as a common property, not an individual one), for which you've been compensated via a free market auction process. That money has reduced your tax burden. It may not seem like it, but those billions of dollars didn't disappear, they were dumped into the common coffers for use in federal programs. Arguing the merit of those is an entirely different argument.
For what it's worth, many (most?) stations are broadcasting digital at a reduced power until the transition occurs. Further, your rabbit ears don't work because most stations are UHF now. Since you're cash-challeneged, I suggest a wire coat hanger.
Besides, if you lost stations, it means you have a converter or a capable TV. You're just pissed that you don't get as good reception. It's not the government's fault that you bought the wrong TVs over the last ten years (the time since digital has been turned on). You can even still use those TVs with non-free services. Or, if you're really tight, go get a modulator and use your single box to have all your TVs get their signal from that.
I lost $200,000 in the market crash this past fall, and it was just as much the Government's fault (poor regulation and lack of oversight) as you losing your TV reception. Get over it.
I think you're just pissed that you'll have to get up off your lazy ass and do something. And that's okay.
Actually, I think I remember that we are coming out of an ice age. Not that it matters too much. The albedo of the surface of the earth is relatively constant over time, and based on the radiation balance you can determine what the temperature of the earth will be on a steady state basis (since the only way for the earth to lose heat is via radiation, and the only way to gain is by solar radiation or internal generation, the latter being several orders of magnitude below the former). Yes, I'm an aerospace/aeronautical engineer, not a climatologist, but I've had more of this type of physics than most.
CO2 has definitively been shown to be rising, and based on the known production (and thereby use, since there is little storage occuring) of fuels we can calculate the increases in concentration. Even most people who are do not believe in the causal relationship agree on this point. They also agree that CO2 is more opaque to infrared radiation than broad spectrum (i.e. solar). That means that the radiation hitting the earth travels through the CO2. The re-radiation back into space occurs at a much lower temperature, within the blocked/reflected region of radiation from CO2 (and other gasses, I might add).
The physics of a planetary greenhouse effect is pretty straight forward, actually.
Now, the argument is how much the increases in average ground temperature over the last infinitessimal period of geological time is due to human releases of CO2. Note - not whether or not it has an effect, but how much that effect is. One one side, scientists claim it is accounting for 50-80% of the effect, on the other less than 10%. There are very, very few who claim that it has no effect, and a similar number who believe it is entirely caused by humans. Those last two generally have significant political ties - and even those ties may or may not be causal in the direction normally attributed.
The following are agreed upon by nearly everyone 1. If we lower emissions of IR opaque gasses, we will lessen the impact of human activities on climate. We will also reduce changes of pH due to our activities. 2. If the climate changes by +4-5C, there will be fairly significant changes to the ecosystem, including predator-prey relationships and global weather patterns 3. If the climate changes by +4-5C, there is no way for humans to actively cool the earth without significantly impacting a large surface area of the planet.
So we may not be causing the problem, but we can reduce our impact. If it turns out that the majority of our global warming is not due to us, then we've only bought ourselves another few years/decades before the changes force major shifts in our ecosystem. If it turns out that the majority of our global warming is due to us, then we may extend our current climate by centuries or more.
Either way, if we curtail CO2, there are no deleterious effects on the environment, all other things being equal. Now, if you claim the economic costs, you're in a fools argument. The world is a closed system, and money spend in one place is not wasted or gained, it's simply moved. If you accept that there are winners and losers to every shift in economy, you'll realize where and why people stand where they do. Ignore them and the choice becomes clearer.
And why should I have had to change two of my outdoor light timer switches two years ago (at about $30 each) because some goofball in DC decided that moving DST by a month would be a cute prank?
Did your neighbor sign up for the two free boxes via the coupon program? You, know, the one which has be advertised on TV for the last year? (For the record, I did, and didn't get them in the mail. They have since expired. FTC still won't re-issue them).
No program is perfect - there are always fringe cases. Had your neighbor put a dime a day into a mason jar for his (or her) precious TV a year ago, there would have been enough to buy a converter today.
Besides, he/she was born before TV; think of it as a return to his/her childhood.
(sorry, I don't mean to be an ass, but $40 really is a small amount of money, even on a budget. If you don't have $40 worth of elasticity in your monthly budget, you're in far deeper trouble than not getting to watch The Price is Right. Now, if you want to argue the endless frustration a non-technically-savvy end user will have hooking up said converter - fire away. I'm all with you on how they fucked up the entire process by ignoring remodulation of HD signals over the venerable coaxial cable, and )
Yes and no. There's no doubt when some things are overproduced, but there's also a lot of stuff out of the mainstream which is underproduced. Most listening isn't critical. I happen to have a background in music (instrumental and vocal) and am pretty sensitive. Still, with a decent set of gear, I can't tell the difference between an uncompressed source and a LAME mp3 compressed track above about 200-224kbps. In fact, I once thought I could tell certain artifacts up in the 256-320kb range, but when I went back and listened to the original CD (still an "imperfect" medium) I hear the same imperfections. Oops.
This is a crutch for many, a genuine tool for some, a novelty for others. Funny, I remember the Cher track mentioned in the article. I though it was just a modern version of the vocoder used in Funky Town. More gimmick than music. *shrug*
As others have noted, Apple plays in it's own (hardware) sandbox. Since it's "competition," that's good to keep the DOJ off of their back. Linux, and Ubuntu specifically, can be installed on nearly any machine that can run Windows. It has a modern, friendly GUI which can be learned from scratch at the same pace as Windows. And, most importantly, it's free. When computers were $5k, tacking on another $300-$1000 for software wasn't as big a deal. Now that computers are $500, adding another $500 in software is big deal (when viewed as a percentage).
In a world where comparison shopping has yielded winners and losers over 3-4% difference in enduser pricing, the ability to strip out 20-50% of the cost of an installed machine makes Linux a formidable opponent. Apple will never compete with Microsoft for a race to the bottom - and that's by design. Hardware vendors with Linux need only determine if the manpower to make the Linux installs work seamlessly outweighs the cost of a Windows license and install budget. If the vendor is big enough, they don't even have to care about pissing off MS, since MS is dependent on that revenue.
Well, for one, I'm self employed, and have been for six years. I went back to school and got a degree which allows me to provide "mainstream" services, instead of the highly-specific aerospace engineering I originally went to school for. I live below my means, so if I ran out of work tomorrow I wouldn't be in that bad a situation. But that's all beside the point...
People prefer TV over radio because it is more entertaining to the average user - the TV was most certainly not invented to advance the ability to convey emergency information. The only potential advantage it has for public safety is the viewing of maps for affected areas. Of course, given the quality of graphics on an NTSC screen of the size and age TV we're concerned about, an audible list of counties is just as accurate. No, there's no advantage of TV over radio in public safety announcements. Quite the opposite, a radio does not even need to be in the same room as the listener, as there is no dependence on visual information. It is also far more common to have a battery- or dynamo-powered radio than a TV, and many disasters require information be broadcast after the public electric grid has been compromised (broadcasters generally have very robust backup generation capabilities).
The roof thing is a red herring. You do know that nearly all of the stations will be broadcasting from the exact same location as they currently are, and that roof antennas designed to pick up the typical UHF/VHF signals will be accurately aligned before and after the transition? I'm not aware of a common roof mounted antenna more than 10 years old which does not pick up UHF.
I maintain that the force behind the delay are the networks. They have a captive audience in these late-adopters (no cable, no sat, no ATSC), and don't want to lose eyeballs in the middle of the TV season. By pushing the rollout back to June the switch will hit during reruns, when ad revenues and eyeballs are lower anyway. To lose viewership in the money making portion of the year scares the shit out of them.
As a very middling hobby singer, its depressing, but only in the same way that a hobby chef will never produce a loaf of Wonder in their home oven.
I am mostly in agreement with you on this. There is a little part of me, though, that thinks the range of music I can enjoy listening to (or, in some cases, tolerate) is appreciably expanded by this sort of manipulation. I love acoustic and a capella works, and to hear great musicians perform live and unmodified is a treat. Those are the musicians of note and worth. Still, there are some pop/punk bands I like to listen to, and I have no doubt that the lead(s) are less than proficient. In those cases, I happen to like the music, and if the singers were hit by a bus tomorrow they could be replaced and I'd be none the wiser. I don't follow them as personalities - I just happen to like the tunes. Having pitch issues would just spoil the fun - like having to slog through a piece of dry carrot cake when all you really wanted to do is dip a spoon into a tub of cream cheese frosting.
It's a bit disappointing how widespread it is, though.
And practically everyone already has a functioning radio on their nightstand. The public safety portion is bullshit. That argument could be used in perpetuity. If the goal is to get more supply available, how is delaying for 4-5 months going to help? Nobody is going to stockpile more converters if they're not selling, and if you slip the date, nobody is going to bother to buy a converter until they need to.
As for all those people who have lost their jobs (and I do feel bad for them), perhaps watching TV isn't the best use of their downtime?
Sounds a lot like the iGo system (which may be the same for all I know). The problem is that you then have to purchase and carry a different tip for each device. Tips run about the same cost as an inexpensive proprietary supply (for low current devices), so it's really a solution for multiple high current devices like laptops.
The key is making the hardware connection a single style. That way you never have to worry about new tips and keeping tabs on them (and what they're for). I rarely have to go find a new power supply since I keep all the old bricks I have in a box. When I have a modern brick die, I splice the connector onto a compatible brick from the box. I haven't had to do so in quite a while, since practically everything I own charges off of USB or takes replaceable batteries.
That's how long the transition has been going on. The "turn off date" was several years ago. This extension is nothing new for those who have any clue about these things. Imagine how many people outside of IT would be surprised that BASIC is no longer a mainstream learning language. (To which 90% of the population would reply "what's a language, I turn my computer on and it does stuff")
Perhaps they should turn off the TV and either work on their resume and start networking, or go learn a new trade. I've yet to be convinced how watching network TV will re-employ several million jobseekers.
As for the emergency services and weather and news, might I suggest a radio? Since most bedside alarm clocks have one, I would be surprised to find that their rate of adoption is less than TVs. Further, for the millions upon millions with a handheld radio, they tend to work far better than your average TV when there is an actual weather emergency as they don't require the local power grid to be functioning.
It's happening everywhere. Nobody is paying money to subscribe to a website. ESPN tried this and failed to get support because there are so many free things out there (you know, like the internet used to be). The problem for them is they also make money off of advertising and need eyeballs. They are trying to figure out ways to play both sides to maximize their profits, and individual users have already told them to go screw themselves.
When I first saw the 360 message, I thought it might have been that Verizon was essentially partnering with ESPN to minimize the bandwidth (a cacheing scheme to minimize the traffic). Guess it's just another money play.
The part you're missing is that 1% their subscribers are probably using 20-40% of their bandwidth. The are looking to maximize the amount of people on their network, and they see that top 1% as using a significantly disproportionate amount.
I'd like to get all worked up about this, but even if I were customer I'd be hard pressed to download 250GB in a month. I could do all the filesharing I wanted to at 250GB; just put a 256k cap on the outbound torrents and you'd still have 2/3 of your cap for inbound content. I'd be happier with 15Mb service and a 250GB cap than a 3MB service (the max in my area) with no cap at all.
Photoshop AutoCAD Revit and ACA Outlook (or fully Exchange compatible client; we are in the small business world here...) MS Excel and Word, or a compatible program which perfectly reads and calculates using the MS installed base of custom spreadsheets and templates (which often would cost $n x 10^5 to replicate in a competing package like OOo for even small shops)
What else do we have that is "mission critical" to small/home office people in various industries? I could name three or four I'd be confident would not work under Wine, such as RAM Advanse or RISA3D. There may be alternate options (though I doubt it) for Linux, but again it would cost about $10-15k to train each engineer in the new software to get them as proficient as in the current apps.
Costs are small, but not zero, for printing, distribution, and marketing. Every box which sits on the shelf or gets shipped back to MS unsold / destroyed (as the big chains will likely require) has a fixed cost which ticks against the MS bottom line. One would expect a netbook version, I suppose, but there will have to be incremental marketing costs to differentiate the (4?) versions for retail use (enterprise doesn't really matter).
I'm sure they'll find a way to make this pay off, I just wonder if a flatter pricing model might not simplify an overly complex rollout.
Okay, I'm a little bitter that HP does not include remote desktop; and don't give me the workaround crap that littered the net for Vista - hacks like that aren't for production machines. Trust me, when the content on a machine is primarily for the wife or daughter, it may as well be considered mission critical.;-)
How much extra does it cost MS to segregate the versions? Why not just ship the ultimate cd and ask, during installation or upgrade, whether the user wants a basic installation, a home media center installation, or a professional installation? There's already a widget in the control panel (or whatever they'll call it in this edition) that allows the installation of microsoft programs.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to simply send a single CD out?
(Yes, you'd miss the fanbois shelling out an extra $100 so they could say they bought "ultimate"; is it really that big a loss with most licenses going out through OEMs for nominal fees?)
Re:I have resisted Facebook and will continue to
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FBML Essentials
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I read it, and it's not that bad. You're not required to put you whole life on there.
Actually, it's pretty nice. If you're anything like the average semi-geek, you knew lots of people in school. You were probably friends with a bunch of them, but in all honesty after 20 years of being apart, you've probably got about 5 minutes of catching up to do. On facebook, you can, and avoid the 45 minutes of awkward prattle that would occur if said acquaintance were to show up in your town and you decided to meet over a beer.
I check my page 2-3 times a week, and it keeps me abreast of friends (and just casual acquaintances) and what they're doing. It also helps in organizing meetings - my old frat brothers get together for golf every year or two, and it's the easiest way to keep coordinated. Use it, don't let it use you. Turn off all the email notifications (Except maybe private messages) and don't install any applications, they are the devil's spawn.
That'll save you a bundle right there. If you write the engineering off as a total loss after you take the first corporation bankrupt and then you stiff the IP owners on royalties when you build them, you'll be on the way to getting it done. It will be flimsy, not include batteries (for 2W you can buy rechargeables), and have a very poor screen, and the $10 won't include packaging, marketing, distribution, or profit. The QA will be poor too, so there will be lots of failures, but at that price point most won't bother to send it back for repairs.
Failed might be strong, but it is an appropriate word for a physical distribution model which requires changes to the copyright laws every 20 years (to extend them beyond even the death of many of the original creators children) to remain profitable.
The amount of waste in the business process of identifying, creating, marketing, and recovering costs for musical talent is excessive, and the model of sales required to support this has caused an entrenchment of the industry in a vain attempt to preserve the status quo. The models for so many information products have clearly shifted to electronic delivery, partially by demand and partially for efficiency, and yet the resistance from record and movie companies has been severe. Movies have a leg up, as there is a distributed mechanism for recovering costs (theaters), such that the aftermarket home use is really just gravy. Music seems to have forgotten about performance revenue and has, instead, made live performances into money-losing marketing stunts, with high budgets and shows which are more about spectacle than music. Not that that isn't a product, but it isn't a sustainable one industry wide.
The music industry found a golden goose in the 50s with the advent of the "star" and the big hit producing millions of dollars for a 3 minute performance in a sort of lottery fashion. Because home reproduction was prohibitively expensive and commercial production so inexpensive, the "spread" was large and the profits on a hit were enormous. With the march of technology, that gap has narrowed - with the big houses being underwater on their production costs (it costs more to produce and ship a CD than it does to download and store the material on a portable device or home computer). Even as recently as the audio-tape era it was expensive enough to get a _good_ copy of a song that it was reasonable for many to purchase a retail version. Their only recourse now is to somehow protect the existing distribution model.
The evolution of data transfer should simply force those corporations to rethink their business model, but instead they look to legislation to preserve their monopoly (which, by definition, it is, and is enforced via copyright). Imagine if a "new album" was only available in person, at a concert, without all the glitz, for the same ticket price, for the first 4 months. Then a fully produced digital version was available to download, direct from the label and in a high definition/lossless format, for a representative fee (say $1 a song, or $5 for the album, $6-10 for a double album). Yes, there would be bootlegs out there, but they'd be poor quality. With the exception of the kids who won't pay anyway, it's faster (read cheaper, if you value your time at all) to download a copy you know is good, tagged, once for your collection.
*shrug* Like I said, it hasn't failed yet, but the push for legislation instead of having the business model evolve is an indication that what they are currently doing is no longer sustainable.
It'd put a pretty big crimp in Netflix's business model. I suppose you could say it would be an attempt to close the "snailmail" hole in the law.
Re:What the world needs ...
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Less Is Moore
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, what we need is a massively fast processor which can scale - quickly - to a "slow" processor like the PIII. Most of the time my systems are idle, and I'd be happy with them running at 400MHz if I could do it for a 90% savings in power. When I hit the gas, though, and want to load my ipod with music from my FLAC collection, doing on the fly transcoding, I want both (or all 4, or 8) cores running at 3+GHz, making my file transfer speeds the bottleneck. I don't care if I burn 150W-200W on the processor at those times, as long as it happens quickly.
I don't use my processor much, but when I use it I want it to be fast. Common apps, like AutoCAD, Adobe Acrobat, and anything processing images, is just painful on my 1.86GHz P4mobile (close to a Core2), but I live with it because I'm too cheap to upgrade. If I could increase the speed by a factor of 5-10, but scale the power back for the 99% of the time I don't need it I could get better battery life and a faster machine. As it is, if I want that kind of speed improvement, I'm looking at a machine which requires a 3lb brick of an AC adapter and an 8lb boat anchor that gets about 2hours of best-case runtime. (Apple's new laptop notwithstanding).
And by best, I mean the most politically logical. I hadn't considered the effect this would have on ad revenue during the season. Of course, that's probably because I don't follow any particular network show, and those I occasionally watch are queued in my DVR.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh, I see you've been bitten by the political bug. That's the problem - the science is sound but the "solutions" have more to do with redistributing cash than following science. Real correction would require investment, which is an unpopular and risky path. What we're being fed as "green" is just the path of least resistance based on science sound bites. Example: fuel derived from plants is sustainable (carbon neutral, since they extract C from CO2 which is then recombined in the ICE). Ethanol happens to work in standard cars (ICE) with either no modification (small fractions) or minor modifications (E85). Corn growers have an unending need to prop up prices, as the crop is barely valuable enough on its own to make it profitable. Corn can be used to make Ethanol. Corn is the only crop currently in the US which ahs the installed base to provide enough Ethanol for widespread automotive use. By requiring ethanol in gasoline, it looks "green" and produces a high (cash) yield crop for corn. What's missing is that corn is a lousy base material from which to make ethanol, and most other crops which are better have restrictive tarriffs (put in place by the Corn lobby).
Putting a square peg in a round hole isn't going to work. Making our current designs greener is not the only - or best - answer. There's something like 90% turnover in vehicles over a 10-15 year period. Maybe it's time to address the concerns at the head end, rather than at the tail. Of course, that would cost car companies money in R&D, and they always seem to find cash reserves to lobby against any changes. It would take the collective force of a society to force the changes we need. And, quite honestly, most people don't give a shit. New flatscreen TV or reduce greenhouse gasses? The smart money is in building more TVs.
*shrug* The answers are out there, it's just not a priority for most people, and it's not a financial win for corporations. Path of least resistance...
Of course not, the proper way it to strip out what you have and start from scratch. Otherwise, the entrenched installation will continually pop back to the forefront. Converting from one system to another is a painful, wrenching process - much like getting to cold water. It's best to jump in, do that whole-body shiver, and then get on with your swim. Getting in slowly is a good way to decide you don't want to do it at all.
You'll need a serious migration plan for everything - from common, office apps which have an installed base of thousands (if not more) non-compatible templates, to win-dependent commercial programs, to custom apps written for the old platform which are mission critical but the developer is no longer around. You'll need to organize training for everyone. Twice. And you'll need a kick-ass help desk for everything from copying files to equivalents of obscure Excel formulas.
You have two real possibilities here: A decade of superman-like endurance and patience coupled with a slick-MBA marketing scheme, or utter and complete failure resulting in poor reviews, lousy job satisfaction, and likely counseling (make sure the uni has a good mental health rider with their insurance).
I don't necessarily mean to dissuade you but it's going to take a lot of spit and polish and going piecemeal is a near guarantee of failure. You're going to have to hide the retraining costs, or your plan will fail. This might be too large an organization to try and switch unless you have serious zealots at the top on your side.
You have the constitution wrong. You have been deprived of nothing. Your sets work just fine, and they aren't taking them from you. You own nothing of the transmissions which private companies have been sending you. It's arguable that you have a certain small right to the airspace/RF spectrum (though that's very tenuous and generally regarded as a common property, not an individual one), for which you've been compensated via a free market auction process. That money has reduced your tax burden. It may not seem like it, but those billions of dollars didn't disappear, they were dumped into the common coffers for use in federal programs. Arguing the merit of those is an entirely different argument.
For what it's worth, many (most?) stations are broadcasting digital at a reduced power until the transition occurs. Further, your rabbit ears don't work because most stations are UHF now. Since you're cash-challeneged, I suggest a wire coat hanger.
Besides, if you lost stations, it means you have a converter or a capable TV. You're just pissed that you don't get as good reception. It's not the government's fault that you bought the wrong TVs over the last ten years (the time since digital has been turned on). You can even still use those TVs with non-free services. Or, if you're really tight, go get a modulator and use your single box to have all your TVs get their signal from that.
I lost $200,000 in the market crash this past fall, and it was just as much the Government's fault (poor regulation and lack of oversight) as you losing your TV reception. Get over it.
I think you're just pissed that you'll have to get up off your lazy ass and do something. And that's okay.
Actually, I think I remember that we are coming out of an ice age. Not that it matters too much. The albedo of the surface of the earth is relatively constant over time, and based on the radiation balance you can determine what the temperature of the earth will be on a steady state basis (since the only way for the earth to lose heat is via radiation, and the only way to gain is by solar radiation or internal generation, the latter being several orders of magnitude below the former). Yes, I'm an aerospace/aeronautical engineer, not a climatologist, but I've had more of this type of physics than most.
CO2 has definitively been shown to be rising, and based on the known production (and thereby use, since there is little storage occuring) of fuels we can calculate the increases in concentration. Even most people who are do not believe in the causal relationship agree on this point. They also agree that CO2 is more opaque to infrared radiation than broad spectrum (i.e. solar). That means that the radiation hitting the earth travels through the CO2. The re-radiation back into space occurs at a much lower temperature, within the blocked/reflected region of radiation from CO2 (and other gasses, I might add).
The physics of a planetary greenhouse effect is pretty straight forward, actually.
Now, the argument is how much the increases in average ground temperature over the last infinitessimal period of geological time is due to human releases of CO2. Note - not whether or not it has an effect, but how much that effect is. One one side, scientists claim it is accounting for 50-80% of the effect, on the other less than 10%. There are very, very few who claim that it has no effect, and a similar number who believe it is entirely caused by humans. Those last two generally have significant political ties - and even those ties may or may not be causal in the direction normally attributed.
The following are agreed upon by nearly everyone
1. If we lower emissions of IR opaque gasses, we will lessen the impact of human activities on climate. We will also reduce changes of pH due to our activities.
2. If the climate changes by +4-5C, there will be fairly significant changes to the ecosystem, including predator-prey relationships and global weather patterns
3. If the climate changes by +4-5C, there is no way for humans to actively cool the earth without significantly impacting a large surface area of the planet.
So we may not be causing the problem, but we can reduce our impact. If it turns out that the majority of our global warming is not due to us, then we've only bought ourselves another few years/decades before the changes force major shifts in our ecosystem. If it turns out that the majority of our global warming is due to us, then we may extend our current climate by centuries or more.
Either way, if we curtail CO2, there are no deleterious effects on the environment, all other things being equal. Now, if you claim the economic costs, you're in a fools argument. The world is a closed system, and money spend in one place is not wasted or gained, it's simply moved. If you accept that there are winners and losers to every shift in economy, you'll realize where and why people stand where they do. Ignore them and the choice becomes clearer.
And why should I have had to change two of my outdoor light timer switches two years ago (at about $30 each) because some goofball in DC decided that moving DST by a month would be a cute prank?
Did your neighbor sign up for the two free boxes via the coupon program? You, know, the one which has be advertised on TV for the last year? (For the record, I did, and didn't get them in the mail. They have since expired. FTC still won't re-issue them).
No program is perfect - there are always fringe cases. Had your neighbor put a dime a day into a mason jar for his (or her) precious TV a year ago, there would have been enough to buy a converter today.
Besides, he/she was born before TV; think of it as a return to his/her childhood.
(sorry, I don't mean to be an ass, but $40 really is a small amount of money, even on a budget. If you don't have $40 worth of elasticity in your monthly budget, you're in far deeper trouble than not getting to watch The Price is Right. Now, if you want to argue the endless frustration a non-technically-savvy end user will have hooking up said converter - fire away. I'm all with you on how they fucked up the entire process by ignoring remodulation of HD signals over the venerable coaxial cable, and )
Yes and no. There's no doubt when some things are overproduced, but there's also a lot of stuff out of the mainstream which is underproduced. Most listening isn't critical. I happen to have a background in music (instrumental and vocal) and am pretty sensitive. Still, with a decent set of gear, I can't tell the difference between an uncompressed source and a LAME mp3 compressed track above about 200-224kbps. In fact, I once thought I could tell certain artifacts up in the 256-320kb range, but when I went back and listened to the original CD (still an "imperfect" medium) I hear the same imperfections. Oops.
This is a crutch for many, a genuine tool for some, a novelty for others. Funny, I remember the Cher track mentioned in the article. I though it was just a modern version of the vocoder used in Funky Town. More gimmick than music. *shrug*
That's almost as much as John Thain (of Merrill Lynch) thought he should get for securing the bailout funds!
As others have noted, Apple plays in it's own (hardware) sandbox. Since it's "competition," that's good to keep the DOJ off of their back. Linux, and Ubuntu specifically, can be installed on nearly any machine that can run Windows. It has a modern, friendly GUI which can be learned from scratch at the same pace as Windows. And, most importantly, it's free. When computers were $5k, tacking on another $300-$1000 for software wasn't as big a deal. Now that computers are $500, adding another $500 in software is big deal (when viewed as a percentage).
In a world where comparison shopping has yielded winners and losers over 3-4% difference in enduser pricing, the ability to strip out 20-50% of the cost of an installed machine makes Linux a formidable opponent. Apple will never compete with Microsoft for a race to the bottom - and that's by design. Hardware vendors with Linux need only determine if the manpower to make the Linux installs work seamlessly outweighs the cost of a Windows license and install budget. If the vendor is big enough, they don't even have to care about pissing off MS, since MS is dependent on that revenue.
Well, for one, I'm self employed, and have been for six years. I went back to school and got a degree which allows me to provide "mainstream" services, instead of the highly-specific aerospace engineering I originally went to school for. I live below my means, so if I ran out of work tomorrow I wouldn't be in that bad a situation. But that's all beside the point...
People prefer TV over radio because it is more entertaining to the average user - the TV was most certainly not invented to advance the ability to convey emergency information. The only potential advantage it has for public safety is the viewing of maps for affected areas. Of course, given the quality of graphics on an NTSC screen of the size and age TV we're concerned about, an audible list of counties is just as accurate. No, there's no advantage of TV over radio in public safety announcements. Quite the opposite, a radio does not even need to be in the same room as the listener, as there is no dependence on visual information. It is also far more common to have a battery- or dynamo-powered radio than a TV, and many disasters require information be broadcast after the public electric grid has been compromised (broadcasters generally have very robust backup generation capabilities).
The roof thing is a red herring. You do know that nearly all of the stations will be broadcasting from the exact same location as they currently are, and that roof antennas designed to pick up the typical UHF/VHF signals will be accurately aligned before and after the transition? I'm not aware of a common roof mounted antenna more than 10 years old which does not pick up UHF.
I maintain that the force behind the delay are the networks. They have a captive audience in these late-adopters (no cable, no sat, no ATSC), and don't want to lose eyeballs in the middle of the TV season. By pushing the rollout back to June the switch will hit during reruns, when ad revenues and eyeballs are lower anyway. To lose viewership in the money making portion of the year scares the shit out of them.
As a very middling hobby singer, its depressing, but only in the same way that a hobby chef will never produce a loaf of Wonder in their home oven.
I am mostly in agreement with you on this. There is a little part of me, though, that thinks the range of music I can enjoy listening to (or, in some cases, tolerate) is appreciably expanded by this sort of manipulation. I love acoustic and a capella works, and to hear great musicians perform live and unmodified is a treat. Those are the musicians of note and worth. Still, there are some pop/punk bands I like to listen to, and I have no doubt that the lead(s) are less than proficient. In those cases, I happen to like the music, and if the singers were hit by a bus tomorrow they could be replaced and I'd be none the wiser. I don't follow them as personalities - I just happen to like the tunes. Having pitch issues would just spoil the fun - like having to slog through a piece of dry carrot cake when all you really wanted to do is dip a spoon into a tub of cream cheese frosting.
It's a bit disappointing how widespread it is, though.
And practically everyone already has a functioning radio on their nightstand. The public safety portion is bullshit. That argument could be used in perpetuity. If the goal is to get more supply available, how is delaying for 4-5 months going to help? Nobody is going to stockpile more converters if they're not selling, and if you slip the date, nobody is going to bother to buy a converter until they need to.
As for all those people who have lost their jobs (and I do feel bad for them), perhaps watching TV isn't the best use of their downtime?
Sounds a lot like the iGo system (which may be the same for all I know). The problem is that you then have to purchase and carry a different tip for each device. Tips run about the same cost as an inexpensive proprietary supply (for low current devices), so it's really a solution for multiple high current devices like laptops.
The key is making the hardware connection a single style. That way you never have to worry about new tips and keeping tabs on them (and what they're for). I rarely have to go find a new power supply since I keep all the old bricks I have in a box. When I have a modern brick die, I splice the connector onto a compatible brick from the box. I haven't had to do so in quite a while, since practically everything I own charges off of USB or takes replaceable batteries.
That's how long the transition has been going on. The "turn off date" was several years ago. This extension is nothing new for those who have any clue about these things. Imagine how many people outside of IT would be surprised that BASIC is no longer a mainstream learning language. (To which 90% of the population would reply "what's a language, I turn my computer on and it does stuff")
Perhaps they should turn off the TV and either work on their resume and start networking, or go learn a new trade. I've yet to be convinced how watching network TV will re-employ several million jobseekers.
As for the emergency services and weather and news, might I suggest a radio? Since most bedside alarm clocks have one, I would be surprised to find that their rate of adoption is less than TVs. Further, for the millions upon millions with a handheld radio, they tend to work far better than your average TV when there is an actual weather emergency as they don't require the local power grid to be functioning.
It's happening everywhere. Nobody is paying money to subscribe to a website. ESPN tried this and failed to get support because there are so many free things out there (you know, like the internet used to be). The problem for them is they also make money off of advertising and need eyeballs. They are trying to figure out ways to play both sides to maximize their profits, and individual users have already told them to go screw themselves.
When I first saw the 360 message, I thought it might have been that Verizon was essentially partnering with ESPN to minimize the bandwidth (a cacheing scheme to minimize the traffic). Guess it's just another money play.
The part you're missing is that 1% their subscribers are probably using 20-40% of their bandwidth. The are looking to maximize the amount of people on their network, and they see that top 1% as using a significantly disproportionate amount.
I'd like to get all worked up about this, but even if I were customer I'd be hard pressed to download 250GB in a month. I could do all the filesharing I wanted to at 250GB; just put a 256k cap on the outbound torrents and you'd still have 2/3 of your cap for inbound content. I'd be happier with 15Mb service and a 250GB cap than a 3MB service (the max in my area) with no cap at all.
All we need to do is get a comparison of:
Photoshop
AutoCAD Revit and ACA
Outlook (or fully Exchange compatible client; we are in the small business world here...)
MS Excel and Word, or a compatible program which perfectly reads and calculates using the MS installed base of custom spreadsheets and templates (which often would cost $n x 10^5 to replicate in a competing package like OOo for even small shops)
What else do we have that is "mission critical" to small/home office people in various industries? I could name three or four I'd be confident would not work under Wine, such as RAM Advanse or RISA3D. There may be alternate options (though I doubt it) for Linux, but again it would cost about $10-15k to train each engineer in the new software to get them as proficient as in the current apps.
Costs are small, but not zero, for printing, distribution, and marketing. Every box which sits on the shelf or gets shipped back to MS unsold / destroyed (as the big chains will likely require) has a fixed cost which ticks against the MS bottom line. One would expect a netbook version, I suppose, but there will have to be incremental marketing costs to differentiate the (4?) versions for retail use (enterprise doesn't really matter).
I'm sure they'll find a way to make this pay off, I just wonder if a flatter pricing model might not simplify an overly complex rollout.
Okay, I'm a little bitter that HP does not include remote desktop; and don't give me the workaround crap that littered the net for Vista - hacks like that aren't for production machines. Trust me, when the content on a machine is primarily for the wife or daughter, it may as well be considered mission critical. ;-)
How much extra does it cost MS to segregate the versions? Why not just ship the ultimate cd and ask, during installation or upgrade, whether the user wants a basic installation, a home media center installation, or a professional installation? There's already a widget in the control panel (or whatever they'll call it in this edition) that allows the installation of microsoft programs.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to simply send a single CD out?
(Yes, you'd miss the fanbois shelling out an extra $100 so they could say they bought "ultimate"; is it really that big a loss with most licenses going out through OEMs for nominal fees?)
I read it, and it's not that bad. You're not required to put you whole life on there.
Actually, it's pretty nice. If you're anything like the average semi-geek, you knew lots of people in school. You were probably friends with a bunch of them, but in all honesty after 20 years of being apart, you've probably got about 5 minutes of catching up to do. On facebook, you can, and avoid the 45 minutes of awkward prattle that would occur if said acquaintance were to show up in your town and you decided to meet over a beer.
I check my page 2-3 times a week, and it keeps me abreast of friends (and just casual acquaintances) and what they're doing. It also helps in organizing meetings - my old frat brothers get together for golf every year or two, and it's the easiest way to keep coordinated. Use it, don't let it use you. Turn off all the email notifications (Except maybe private messages) and don't install any applications, they are the devil's spawn.
That'll save you a bundle right there. If you write the engineering off as a total loss after you take the first corporation bankrupt and then you stiff the IP owners on royalties when you build them, you'll be on the way to getting it done. It will be flimsy, not include batteries (for 2W you can buy rechargeables), and have a very poor screen, and the $10 won't include packaging, marketing, distribution, or profit. The QA will be poor too, so there will be lots of failures, but at that price point most won't bother to send it back for repairs.
Failed might be strong, but it is an appropriate word for a physical distribution model which requires changes to the copyright laws every 20 years (to extend them beyond even the death of many of the original creators children) to remain profitable.
The amount of waste in the business process of identifying, creating, marketing, and recovering costs for musical talent is excessive, and the model of sales required to support this has caused an entrenchment of the industry in a vain attempt to preserve the status quo. The models for so many information products have clearly shifted to electronic delivery, partially by demand and partially for efficiency, and yet the resistance from record and movie companies has been severe. Movies have a leg up, as there is a distributed mechanism for recovering costs (theaters), such that the aftermarket home use is really just gravy. Music seems to have forgotten about performance revenue and has, instead, made live performances into money-losing marketing stunts, with high budgets and shows which are more about spectacle than music. Not that that isn't a product, but it isn't a sustainable one industry wide.
The music industry found a golden goose in the 50s with the advent of the "star" and the big hit producing millions of dollars for a 3 minute performance in a sort of lottery fashion. Because home reproduction was prohibitively expensive and commercial production so inexpensive, the "spread" was large and the profits on a hit were enormous. With the march of technology, that gap has narrowed - with the big houses being underwater on their production costs (it costs more to produce and ship a CD than it does to download and store the material on a portable device or home computer). Even as recently as the audio-tape era it was expensive enough to get a _good_ copy of a song that it was reasonable for many to purchase a retail version. Their only recourse now is to somehow protect the existing distribution model.
The evolution of data transfer should simply force those corporations to rethink their business model, but instead they look to legislation to preserve their monopoly (which, by definition, it is, and is enforced via copyright). Imagine if a "new album" was only available in person, at a concert, without all the glitz, for the same ticket price, for the first 4 months. Then a fully produced digital version was available to download, direct from the label and in a high definition/lossless format, for a representative fee (say $1 a song, or $5 for the album, $6-10 for a double album). Yes, there would be bootlegs out there, but they'd be poor quality. With the exception of the kids who won't pay anyway, it's faster (read cheaper, if you value your time at all) to download a copy you know is good, tagged, once for your collection.
*shrug* Like I said, it hasn't failed yet, but the push for legislation instead of having the business model evolve is an indication that what they are currently doing is no longer sustainable.
It'd put a pretty big crimp in Netflix's business model. I suppose you could say it would be an attempt to close the "snailmail" hole in the law.
Actually, what we need is a massively fast processor which can scale - quickly - to a "slow" processor like the PIII. Most of the time my systems are idle, and I'd be happy with them running at 400MHz if I could do it for a 90% savings in power. When I hit the gas, though, and want to load my ipod with music from my FLAC collection, doing on the fly transcoding, I want both (or all 4, or 8) cores running at 3+GHz, making my file transfer speeds the bottleneck. I don't care if I burn 150W-200W on the processor at those times, as long as it happens quickly.
I don't use my processor much, but when I use it I want it to be fast. Common apps, like AutoCAD, Adobe Acrobat, and anything processing images, is just painful on my 1.86GHz P4mobile (close to a Core2), but I live with it because I'm too cheap to upgrade. If I could increase the speed by a factor of 5-10, but scale the power back for the 99% of the time I don't need it I could get better battery life and a faster machine. As it is, if I want that kind of speed improvement, I'm looking at a machine which requires a 3lb brick of an AC adapter and an 8lb boat anchor that gets about 2hours of best-case runtime. (Apple's new laptop notwithstanding).
And by best, I mean the most politically logical. I hadn't considered the effect this would have on ad revenue during the season. Of course, that's probably because I don't follow any particular network show, and those I occasionally watch are queued in my DVR.