And the people who are in that market couldn't give a crap about whether or not the drivers are open source or not.
If they do happen to run into a bug, then they'll call up nVidia and it'll get fixed. Because nVidia knows that this market is a prime revenue source.
Frankly, you keep talking about how "easy" it is to reverse engineer the drivers. Funny. Nobody has yet. If it was that easy, I'd expect that someone would've done it and open sourced the results.
If you don't like it, then quit whining and buy a different card. Matrox has open source drivers. Yeah, they suck. But they're open source, and that appears to be the driving factor in the whining.
One day the open-source-uber-alles zealots will get a clue and realize that the business world does have things like trade secrets and intellectual property that can't just be released. The driver code is part of nVidia's core business, and asking them to open it wide open is equivalent to asking them to just hand money to their competitors.
There has been some debate over whether stations can exploit additional space within their bandwidth, used for neither digital nor analog signals, for commercial purposes. I'm not sure how that came out.
Resolved two or so years ago with the FCC stating, quite explicitly, that the new bandwidth would be used primarily for DTV broadcasting. As I recall, failure to do so would lead to a revokation of license for both channels.
HDTV also portends a new round of DRM that may ultimately peel off some fair use rights
No it doesn't. Go read some of my other posts. There's one freaking bit (as in 1/0) for "DRM" in the HDTV broadcast and it's pretty much useless.
As for the "forced" move - feel free to suggest a better way. It's inherently impossible to broadcast a mixed analog/digital signal. It simply can't be done like the transition to color was (which, while clever, is a hack and an ugly one, and part of why NTSC has such a bad rap in the broadcast industry). And I haven't seen anyone told that they have to buy a DTV right now. In fact, it's increasingly looking like the final transition won't happen for another decade - which means a 15 year+ transition period. That's hardly rapid. By that time digital sets will have little or no price difference to analog sets.
I'm not jumping for joy over the requirement to integrate digital tuners either... I know it's one way to force the move to DTV, but I think it was the wrong one. As a partial alternative, the FCC should have enforced the cable "must-carry" laws with respect to digital signals. Instead they decided it didn't apply, and so 3 years later the cable companies are only beginning to do area-limited HD cable systems. Certainly there would've been downsides to such a ruling (particularly to Dishstar and DirecTV), but at least then it would've put the content out to more people faster, and thus given more people a reason to buy a DTV.
Frankly, I don't have an HDTV yet myself. Because I didn't want to pay the tremendous prices for the very early adopters either. But I do have money earmarked for a nice, big set (front projection just isn't in the cards for my house), I'm waiting on prices to come down some more before buying. Like I said, there's no gun pointed at my head.
Will there eventually be some people forced to buy a new TV? Yup. But with a transition period of over 15 years, I find it really hard to sympathize.
FYI - most of the nForce2 MBs out there do not have integrated video. There are two chipsets - one with and one without integrated video. The IGP part has integrated video, the SPP does not.
Very likely it was running an nVidia card using a previous version of these same drivers -- it's pretty likely that AMD would have access to pre-release code/binaries after all.
You would think that in an age of encryption and such, those bands could all be opened up
Uh... encryption just makes sure nobody can understand you, it does no good at all if you're broadcasting from the field on a 5W handheld unit but can't be heard because Joe Schmoe is broadcasting on the same frequency using a wireless toy that outputs 500W.
Yes, the military is moving toward digital spread-spectrum, encrypted technology (mostly because it's a helluva lot harder to jam or intercept), but they'd still like clear channels thank-you-very-much.
The military has given back quite a bit of spectrum recently though, since they just don't need as much. A good bit of that is not horribly useful to the public though since it has miserable propogation properties.
Huh? HDTV uses exactly the same amount of bandwidth as regular TV. I suspect you mean that, currently, all broadcast stations are allocated twice the bandwidth - one allocation for analog, and one for DTV.
If I recall, the bandwidth was handed out for free, an interesting sacrifice given all the money made from auctioning cellphone channels
You recall... oddly. Yes, they were given to the broadcasters "for free". With the caveat that they had to hand back the analog spectrum in the future, which would then be auctioned off. And which are much, much more valuable than the DTV frequencies because they propogate better.
Will HDTV flop, driving some stations to seek more useful applications for their free spectrum
If DTV "flops" (which it won't -- it's going to happen sooner or later), then the broadcasters cannot use their frequencies for anything else. The FCC mandated this as well - another one of those little riders that came with the "free" bandwidth.
And no, I doubt you demanded HDTV. And I doubt many demanded TV in the early 50s. Or color in the 60s. And corporations universally shunned email until the 90s. Thankfully we don't just do things that people "want".
Uh... sure... just as much as a DAT had DRM. The DTV signal has a single content control flag in it, which basically states whether or not it's recordable. To my knowledge, no content has been broadcast to date with this flag set (except by accident).
Additionally, the first D-VHS recorder that was available utterly ignored the flag. The two newer versions now available do respect the flag though. But I don't know of any PC-based DTV tuners that respect it - it would be rather difficult, since they'd have to essentially turn off the data feed entirely. That or process everything onboard and output it only to component/svideo - which they can't do.
Yes, studios, broadcasters, and the cable cos tried to get more draconian DRM into DTV. They failed. Utterly. The manufacturers told them to fuck off and now it's too late to change the standard, especially with mandated integrated tuners coming in 2004.
The concern about buying a new set is certainly valid, but it's falling on deaf ears.
the date's been pushed back from (i think) 2004 to 2007, and probably will be pushed back again.
The original date was 2006. It's been pushed back to "when 80% of the public is capable of receiving DTV" (note that this is dependant not on the public having DTV tuners, but upon broadcasters putting out signals). My best guess is 2010-2012 at this point.
That said, the spectrum is viewed as a cash cow now. And while I think Congress and the government in general is seriously overvaluing the airwaves, I'd be surprised if the FCC went with this plan. The FCC has been pretty deep in corporate pockets for the past 20 years, and the current board is even further from "public interest" than most. The only way I might see them going for it is if they happen to have stock in companies that would benefit from unlicensed wireless.
Yeah, I'm a bit of a pessimist regarding the current board. Just too many shitty decisions (must carry not applying to HDTV on cable and telcos required to cut their own throats with DSL while not requiring the same of cable being the two biggest I can think of offhand).
And while unlicensing spectrum sounds all fine and dandy, there still have to be a modicum of rules around it. I'd still want to see specified bands for particular purposes, otherwise you could have applications stepping all over one another (no... we haven't seen that at all in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. Uh uh. No problems with cordless phones and wireless networks).
As you say, there may be little value in locking up spectrum now, but I don't want Joe down the street using that unlicensed spectrum to broadcast his own public access TV channel while I'm trying to use it to surf the net.
Well, actually, they would lose money if it was unlicensed.
A good bit of the budget surplus was predicted based off the auctioning of the current analog TV spectrum in 2006 (which was the original sunset date for analog broadcasts since HD was supposed to be prevelent by then -- not that 2006 was ever a reasonable goal). If a portion of that spectrum is released to unlicensed usage then it's unlikely that it will be auctioned off in the future, which is a future shortfall in revenue.
Whether or not you agree with the auctioning, or the amounts that were predicted is secondary. The plan was to sell it, and so not selling it will be a loss of money on paper.
As you (and others) have said, however, it could lead to an improved economy, and that's worth considerably more in the long run than a one-time auction.
Actually not that much on the serious end -- no broken bones, etc. -- but she's been in rehab for 4 months now from pulling pretty much every muscle in her body.
It was a 2 lane road, 35 mph zone, during commute hours -- so everyone does 45. Some ditz in a borrowed car crossed the double yellow lines and ran head on into my sister's car. So they were doing somewhere in the 70-90 mph combined range (if you thought 90 mph per car... well, no, you're not going to survive that).
This was about 6 months after she had bought a brand new Honda Accord - because her 11 year old one slipped out of gear while parked and rolled into a tree, totalling it. If she'd been in her old car, she'd be dead.
Needless to say, she's buying another Accord (and since she probably makes mid-6 figures it's not because she couldn't buy whatever the hell she wanted).
Well... depends. There's probably a good bit of MS code lurking around in utilities, and certainly most of HPFS is from MS, but the last bit of MS code was excised from the kernel and UI in the Warp (3.0) days.
As I recall, there was a party thrown down in Boca Raton when the last bit of MS code was removed. Warp was also much more stable than previous versions of the OS.
I'm sure there are bits and pieces of the OS that could be of use to the open source community, but I think that by and large you're correct about code age.
The bits that would be of the most use are probably of mixed copyright and thus unreleaseable.
Not if you position the shoulder strap appropriately.
One of my best friends just had a baby (as in, he's 1 week old in about 3 hours) and she wore a seatbelt the entire pregnancy. Good thing too, since she was in a T-bone accident at about 6 months. Yes, she called her doctor after the accident and they had her come in immediately for an evaluation.
Doctor's recommend wearing one, because the injury that could occur to the fetus by improperly/not wearing one is much greater than the injury potential when wearing one properly.
I could not buy the vehicle without buying the radio
Bet you could. You just didn't want to wait for one to be built and shipped from the factory. Or you could've purchased a model with an improved radio.
Likewise, my townhome came with really terrible, contractor grade windows
Did you buy the townhome from the builder? If so then you could've opted to pay for a window upgrade. If you bought it from a previous owner, well, duh.
Oh, you didn't want windows at all? Sorry, that's not up to code and would be illegal.
Finally all the Macs in my organization run one flavor of Mac OS or another. I could not buy these things without Mac OS. Maybe I can convince Steve Jobs to give me $100 for each copy of Mac OS I don't use?
You just said you're using them. Make up your mind.
Face it, bundling is prevalent every where you look
Yes, but when you get charged for the bundled item even when you don't receive it then it's illegal. Particularly when a judge says "that's not a legal contract".
Frankly, a better comparison is being charged for lettuce, tomato, and pickles on a hamburger when you ask for them not to be put on. It's a customary practice in the US. The only difference I can think of is that the tomato, et. al. don't compromise 10-20% of the overall cost.
As of Jan, 2001 17 states had primary seat belt laws (meaning that if a cop saw you not wearing one then you could be pulled over and ticketed for that alone). I haven't been able to find any more current numbers or how many states have secondary laws (can't be pulled over for it, but can be ticketed if pulled over for something else). I'm sure someone out there with better Google skills can find info.
As for the women who put the shoulder belt behind them -- well, I hope they never wind up in an accident. Three point harnasses (shoulder and waist belts) are not made to be worn without the shoulder strap. They will probably wind up being seriously injured in the groin area, along with upper chest injuries from slamming into the steering wheel (with or without airbag -- my sister has been spending the last 4 months recovering from a 90 mph head on collision because some ditz crossed into her lane of traffic; if it hadn't been for her wearing a selt belt properly and airbags she would be dead).
Regal Cinemas has been showing ads before the films for some time now... and I would stop going to them except that: 1) It's the only theater some of our friends will go to, 2) All the other chains are doing it too.
They recently changed how they were showing the ads though - instead of starting the ads at the listed showing time, they start them about 10 minutes before the movie... of course, you get the "privledge" of watching more ads, but it's better than the slideshow crap. Mostly.
Not that the movie started any closer to the actual listed time... they replaced the 5 minutes of ads with 5 more minutes of trailers (different ads). Sigh.
It's gotten ridiculous... you can tack on an extra half hour to any movie now just because of all the previews and junk.
So if Sony the label wants people to stop pirating songs... Why do they make MP3 players to play those illegal songs?
Because, maybe, just maybe, Sony has different divisions and they don't talk to one another?
Sony Electronics is virtually a separate company from Sony Entertainment. Each of which have sub-companies which don't talk to one another much. The money funnels upstream, but very little corporate direction funnels back down
It's a huge company... as are many nowadays. You don't think that the GE engineers making lightbulbs sit around and have lunch with the ones making high performance jet engines, do you?
So while pausing Live TV seems like a cool "must have" feature, if all you watch is programs you specifically record, you still have that funtionality
Well yeah... and then when you actually go to watch live TV for something like, oh say, the weather, you're utterly screwed because it's a disconnect between how you're used to watching and how you can watch now. And no, internet weather is not the same as the Weather channel. I'll surf the net if I need forcasts, but if I need to know current weather and the most up to date likelihood of icing, I'm going to turn on the TV.
Then you can vastly improve the life of the hard drive in your PVR
How? Frankly, what kills your HD is spinning it up and down all the time. Talk to any mechanical or electrical engineer - stop/start cycles are what kill things.
CPU cycles wasted on buffering Live TV
Uh... dedicated MPEG-2 encoder/decoder. The CPU is used only for other stuff.
If you want to pause Live TV, just hit the record button, then it's a recorded program and you can pause it.
Yes, but you can't recapture the last 15-30 minutes of TV.
Heck, I've been watching a show, had the recording end early, and then been able to use the live TV buffer to catch what I missed. Yes, it's a special case, but it helped nonetheless.
So if you can't really use a TiVO without a subscription
You can if it's an old enough TiVo. You just need to: A) find one that originally came with 1.3, B) find a 1.3 image you can put onto the drive.
It makes you wonder if these comments were actually posted BY Tivo
No, they were posted by people with a clue.
I would love to purchase or build a PVR. But I have absolutely no interest in adding to my monthly bills
Then you have several choices.
1) Build your own/buy a HTPC solution. Understand that, currently, it's simply not as good - the UI is poor, the scheeduling isn't as good, and it's not as easy to integrate or be used by others. On the upside, it'll be a lot easier to rip digital video for archive purposes than a TiVo (but not a Replay).
2) Buy an old TiVo from eBay, get an image, deal with the annoy screens.
3) Buy a new TiVo, purchase a lifetime subscription. For $250 it's done. You're looking at a sum-total cost of $450 at this moment for a basic TiVo ($200 for the box, $250 for the sub) and that's it.
4) Buy a new DirecTiVo (if you have DirecTV), and if you have the TotalChoice Premier package then the $5/mo fee is waived.
5) Buy a ReplayTV -- the cost of the subscription is included.
In any of the above situations your monthly bills have not changed.
All these comments saying it isnt as good as TiVO are totally off-topic and are just clogging up the discussion
No they're not. If you believe that build-your-own is as good a solution as a TiVo, you're wrong. It's not. The example given in this article isn't even a good implementation -- you can build one that does a helluva lot better job, but it's still not as good.
If you want to talk about paranoia regarding TiVo/Replay "watching you" then that's another thing (not that I buy into the level of paranoia that concerns people). If you want to talk about worrying about the company folding, that's a valid issue as well. But whining about increased monthly fees is just bullshit - it means you haven't done your homework and are talking out of your ass.
I'd pay the artist for their time, I just wont pay for the art itself. Big difference between a service and intellectual property.
I do not believe in intellectual property PERIOD.
Ok, so take your favorite band. Say it has four members. They spend a full year producing an album, and would like to publish it and get paid for their efforts.
That will be $150,000 please.
Why? Because you are paying for their time and expenses. $30,000 for each member's time for a full year, plus $20,000 in recording and production expenses. Ok, you can actually cut those expenses down to as little as $2,000 now, but it depends on exactly what level of post-production they needed. And note that $30,000 isn't all that wonderful of a paycheck for a full year's work -- you can make more than that in most skilled professions. I believe it's a bit low even for concert orchestras, but I'm not positive.
And yes, they do need that full $120-150k upfront. Because you've said that you're willing to pay only for their time, and that IP is hogwash. Because of this they have to charge the full price to the first buyer -- since there are no IP laws protecting their product, the buyer could take the CD and give a copy to the entire world, which eliminates their capability to sell any more copies. So they won't get paid again.
Oh, sure, they can put on concerts, but that's more time and work - and they should be paid for that as well. Separately.
Or maybe you want to protest patents covering drugs... ok. So how much will that little pill cost? After all, it only took about $.02 to manufacture. Of course, you might want to include the costs of the research and testing for the past decade. So if you'd like to cure that bacterial infection up with this brand new antibiotic, please pony up, oh say, $10M. Because that pays for a staff of 10 $100k researchers for 10 years. You may not need all 10 for all those years, but we're not adding in the costs of lab testing, animal testing, human testing, and so forth, so it evens out. Actually, it probably comes out in your favor.
After all, once you have those pills in hand you can take them to just about any chemistry lab and have them analyzed. A manufacturing plant can then replicate the drugs within a day for a few dollars. Where, exactly, were you expecting companies to reclaim expenses? If they don't do it upfront, they won't. Ever. And the end result will be that nobody but charities and hobbyists will bother -- which should cut out about 95% of the research being done on modern medicines today.
Saying that you don't believe in IP, period, just says that you don't even understand it or why it exists. There are some godawful problems with the current US patent and copyright system, but that doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If you don't have a sense of ethics, or a concept of right and wrong, then I truely pity you.
Personally, I try to follow the golden rule, and that's my baseline for ethical behavior. And, yes, I expect others to live up to the same standards. If you can't be decent to others, then frankly, you're not human.
Yes, and all of that work is considered "work for hire" and, as such, owned by my company.
I've done work on my own prior to this current job, and I'll undoubtably do some afterwards as well. That's all mine.
But yes, you're right in general about the up-the-creek-without-a-paddle bit -- but I've taken IP law courses, and I do understand at least the rudimentary concepts behind it (although copyright law has changed quite a bit since when I took the course ~7 years ago).
Yeah. And they're being reported on doing it. And getting sued for civil liberties violations.
lets talk about IP and the fact that none of us here have IP
Speak for yourself. I'm a coder. I have IP. And, frankly, if you had a clue about the IP laws you'd know you had IP too. But instead of educating yourself about IP and what's right and wrong with the current IP system, you'd rather just whine and moan about the RIAA and MPAA being evil and horrible, and compare them to draconian authoritative regimes clouding the issue... all so that you can not pay the artist for their time when you download a song or movie off a P2P network.
I happen to agree that the RIAA and MPAA have wildly overstepped their bounds, but I've yet to see anyone figure out a decent scheme that still ensures the artist will be paid. I don't give a flying fuck about the middlemen and their dieing business model, but I damn well do want to see the inventor properly paid for their time and effort.
Its pathetic, leave China alone for a moment and whoever is moderator of Slashdot, please post an article comparing China and the USA's censorship and see that we are just as bad
Wow... that's such an incredible stretch it's not even funny.
Are you worried about someone coming to your home tonight, arresting you and your family, and throwing you into prison for the rest of your (possibly drastically shortened) life because of the post you made on/. today? No? Well you would be in China if you talked about the government in this way.
There may very well be issues in the US. We can strive to fix them. That doesn't mean we can't point at someone else and say "no, that's wrong".
I can't believe there were enough moderators that thought this was "interesting" or "insightful" to get you modded up past all the proper "flamebait" mods. This is pure tripe.
I've often wondered why a two piece conventional freon refrigerator never caught on
Probably because you've just added a massive number of points of failure, additional construction requirements, additional codes, etc. to the system which will double or triple the cost, and haven't really given much in return. Just how much do you think it's going to save you in cooling bills? And don't forget that come winter, you'll have to spend more on heating since you no longer have the refrigerator dumping waste heat into your living space.
And installation changes from something doable by anyone who knows the right end of a wrench to something doable only by a die-hard DIYer or a pro.
I question the flexibility as well -- with modern HVAC units you don't replace the compressor separately from the coils. They may be in two physically separate locations, but they're a matched pair. Yeah, it's doable if one fails, but you better hope that replacement parts for that exact model are available or else you're going to have a mismatch that will lower efficiency. Since what you're talking about is essentially another compressor/coil setup, you're going to run into the same issues here.
Slashdot Mirror
And the people who are in that market couldn't give a crap about whether or not the drivers are open source or not.
If they do happen to run into a bug, then they'll call up nVidia and it'll get fixed. Because nVidia knows that this market is a prime revenue source.
Frankly, you keep talking about how "easy" it is to reverse engineer the drivers. Funny. Nobody has yet. If it was that easy, I'd expect that someone would've done it and open sourced the results.
Wow, 20% more in price?
And 20% more than 0 is how much, exactly?
If you don't like it, then quit whining and buy a different card. Matrox has open source drivers. Yeah, they suck. But they're open source, and that appears to be the driving factor in the whining.
One day the open-source-uber-alles zealots will get a clue and realize that the business world does have things like trade secrets and intellectual property that can't just be released. The driver code is part of nVidia's core business, and asking them to open it wide open is equivalent to asking them to just hand money to their competitors.
There has been some debate over whether stations can exploit additional space within their bandwidth, used for neither digital nor analog signals, for commercial purposes. I'm not sure how that came out.
Resolved two or so years ago with the FCC stating, quite explicitly, that the new bandwidth would be used primarily for DTV broadcasting. As I recall, failure to do so would lead to a revokation of license for both channels.
HDTV also portends a new round of DRM that may ultimately peel off some fair use rights
No it doesn't. Go read some of my other posts. There's one freaking bit (as in 1/0) for "DRM" in the HDTV broadcast and it's pretty much useless.
As for the "forced" move - feel free to suggest a better way. It's inherently impossible to broadcast a mixed analog/digital signal. It simply can't be done like the transition to color was (which, while clever, is a hack and an ugly one, and part of why NTSC has such a bad rap in the broadcast industry). And I haven't seen anyone told that they have to buy a DTV right now. In fact, it's increasingly looking like the final transition won't happen for another decade - which means a 15 year+ transition period. That's hardly rapid. By that time digital sets will have little or no price difference to analog sets.
I'm not jumping for joy over the requirement to integrate digital tuners either... I know it's one way to force the move to DTV, but I think it was the wrong one. As a partial alternative, the FCC should have enforced the cable "must-carry" laws with respect to digital signals. Instead they decided it didn't apply, and so 3 years later the cable companies are only beginning to do area-limited HD cable systems. Certainly there would've been downsides to such a ruling (particularly to Dishstar and DirecTV), but at least then it would've put the content out to more people faster, and thus given more people a reason to buy a DTV.
Frankly, I don't have an HDTV yet myself. Because I didn't want to pay the tremendous prices for the very early adopters either. But I do have money earmarked for a nice, big set (front projection just isn't in the cards for my house), I'm waiting on prices to come down some more before buying. Like I said, there's no gun pointed at my head.
Will there eventually be some people forced to buy a new TV? Yup. But with a transition period of over 15 years, I find it really hard to sympathize.
FYI - most of the nForce2 MBs out there do not have integrated video. There are two chipsets - one with and one without integrated video. The IGP part has integrated video, the SPP does not.
Very likely it was running an nVidia card using a previous version of these same drivers -- it's pretty likely that AMD would have access to pre-release code/binaries after all.
You would think that in an age of encryption and such, those bands could all be opened up
Uh... encryption just makes sure nobody can understand you, it does no good at all if you're broadcasting from the field on a 5W handheld unit but can't be heard because Joe Schmoe is broadcasting on the same frequency using a wireless toy that outputs 500W.
Yes, the military is moving toward digital spread-spectrum, encrypted technology (mostly because it's a helluva lot harder to jam or intercept), but they'd still like clear channels thank-you-very-much.
The military has given back quite a bit of spectrum recently though, since they just don't need as much. A good bit of that is not horribly useful to the public though since it has miserable propogation properties.
Do I have even some of my facts right
Some. You got a ton wrong though.
all the more so with double-wide HDTV
Huh? HDTV uses exactly the same amount of bandwidth as regular TV. I suspect you mean that, currently, all broadcast stations are allocated twice the bandwidth - one allocation for analog, and one for DTV.
If I recall, the bandwidth was handed out for free, an interesting sacrifice given all the money made from auctioning cellphone channels
You recall... oddly. Yes, they were given to the broadcasters "for free". With the caveat that they had to hand back the analog spectrum in the future, which would then be auctioned off. And which are much, much more valuable than the DTV frequencies because they propogate better.
Will HDTV flop, driving some stations to seek more useful applications for their free spectrum
If DTV "flops" (which it won't -- it's going to happen sooner or later), then the broadcasters cannot use their frequencies for anything else. The FCC mandated this as well - another one of those little riders that came with the "free" bandwidth.
And no, I doubt you demanded HDTV. And I doubt many demanded TV in the early 50s. Or color in the 60s. And corporations universally shunned email until the 90s. Thankfully we don't just do things that people "want".
digital-rights management
Uh... sure... just as much as a DAT had DRM. The DTV signal has a single content control flag in it, which basically states whether or not it's recordable. To my knowledge, no content has been broadcast to date with this flag set (except by accident).
Additionally, the first D-VHS recorder that was available utterly ignored the flag. The two newer versions now available do respect the flag though. But I don't know of any PC-based DTV tuners that respect it - it would be rather difficult, since they'd have to essentially turn off the data feed entirely. That or process everything onboard and output it only to component/svideo - which they can't do.
Yes, studios, broadcasters, and the cable cos tried to get more draconian DRM into DTV. They failed. Utterly. The manufacturers told them to fuck off and now it's too late to change the standard, especially with mandated integrated tuners coming in 2004.
The concern about buying a new set is certainly valid, but it's falling on deaf ears.
the date's been pushed back from (i think) 2004 to 2007, and probably will be pushed back again.
The original date was 2006. It's been pushed back to "when 80% of the public is capable of receiving DTV" (note that this is dependant not on the public having DTV tuners, but upon broadcasters putting out signals). My best guess is 2010-2012 at this point.
Excellent comment.
That said, the spectrum is viewed as a cash cow now. And while I think Congress and the government in general is seriously overvaluing the airwaves, I'd be surprised if the FCC went with this plan. The FCC has been pretty deep in corporate pockets for the past 20 years, and the current board is even further from "public interest" than most. The only way I might see them going for it is if they happen to have stock in companies that would benefit from unlicensed wireless.
Yeah, I'm a bit of a pessimist regarding the current board. Just too many shitty decisions (must carry not applying to HDTV on cable and telcos required to cut their own throats with DSL while not requiring the same of cable being the two biggest I can think of offhand).
And while unlicensing spectrum sounds all fine and dandy, there still have to be a modicum of rules around it. I'd still want to see specified bands for particular purposes, otherwise you could have applications stepping all over one another (no... we haven't seen that at all in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. Uh uh. No problems with cordless phones and wireless networks).
As you say, there may be little value in locking up spectrum now, but I don't want Joe down the street using that unlicensed spectrum to broadcast his own public access TV channel while I'm trying to use it to surf the net.
Well, actually, they would lose money if it was unlicensed.
A good bit of the budget surplus was predicted based off the auctioning of the current analog TV spectrum in 2006 (which was the original sunset date for analog broadcasts since HD was supposed to be prevelent by then -- not that 2006 was ever a reasonable goal). If a portion of that spectrum is released to unlicensed usage then it's unlikely that it will be auctioned off in the future, which is a future shortfall in revenue.
Whether or not you agree with the auctioning, or the amounts that were predicted is secondary. The plan was to sell it, and so not selling it will be a loss of money on paper.
As you (and others) have said, however, it could lead to an improved economy, and that's worth considerably more in the long run than a one-time auction.
Actually not that much on the serious end -- no broken bones, etc. -- but she's been in rehab for 4 months now from pulling pretty much every muscle in her body.
It was a 2 lane road, 35 mph zone, during commute hours -- so everyone does 45. Some ditz in a borrowed car crossed the double yellow lines and ran head on into my sister's car. So they were doing somewhere in the 70-90 mph combined range (if you thought 90 mph per car... well, no, you're not going to survive that).
This was about 6 months after she had bought a brand new Honda Accord - because her 11 year old one slipped out of gear while parked and rolled into a tree, totalling it. If she'd been in her old car, she'd be dead.
Needless to say, she's buying another Accord (and since she probably makes mid-6 figures it's not because she couldn't buy whatever the hell she wanted).
Well... depends. There's probably a good bit of MS code lurking around in utilities, and certainly most of HPFS is from MS, but the last bit of MS code was excised from the kernel and UI in the Warp (3.0) days.
As I recall, there was a party thrown down in Boca Raton when the last bit of MS code was removed. Warp was also much more stable than previous versions of the OS.
I'm sure there are bits and pieces of the OS that could be of use to the open source community, but I think that by and large you're correct about code age.
The bits that would be of the most use are probably of mixed copyright and thus unreleaseable.
Not if you position the shoulder strap appropriately.
One of my best friends just had a baby (as in, he's 1 week old in about 3 hours) and she wore a seatbelt the entire pregnancy. Good thing too, since she was in a T-bone accident at about 6 months. Yes, she called her doctor after the accident and they had her come in immediately for an evaluation.
Doctor's recommend wearing one, because the injury that could occur to the fetus by improperly/not wearing one is much greater than the injury potential when wearing one properly.
I could not buy the vehicle without buying the radio
Bet you could. You just didn't want to wait for one to be built and shipped from the factory. Or you could've purchased a model with an improved radio.
Likewise, my townhome came with really terrible, contractor grade windows
Did you buy the townhome from the builder? If so then you could've opted to pay for a window upgrade. If you bought it from a previous owner, well, duh.
Oh, you didn't want windows at all? Sorry, that's not up to code and would be illegal.
Finally all the Macs in my organization run one flavor of Mac OS or another. I could not buy these things without Mac OS. Maybe I can convince Steve Jobs to give me $100 for each copy of Mac OS I don't use?
You just said you're using them. Make up your mind.
Face it, bundling is prevalent every where you look
Yes, but when you get charged for the bundled item even when you don't receive it then it's illegal. Particularly when a judge says "that's not a legal contract".
Frankly, a better comparison is being charged for lettuce, tomato, and pickles on a hamburger when you ask for them not to be put on. It's a customary practice in the US. The only difference I can think of is that the tomato, et. al. don't compromise 10-20% of the overall cost.
As of Jan, 2001 17 states had primary seat belt laws (meaning that if a cop saw you not wearing one then you could be pulled over and ticketed for that alone). I haven't been able to find any more current numbers or how many states have secondary laws (can't be pulled over for it, but can be ticketed if pulled over for something else). I'm sure someone out there with better Google skills can find info.
As for the women who put the shoulder belt behind them -- well, I hope they never wind up in an accident. Three point harnasses (shoulder and waist belts) are not made to be worn without the shoulder strap. They will probably wind up being seriously injured in the groin area, along with upper chest injuries from slamming into the steering wheel (with or without airbag -- my sister has been spending the last 4 months recovering from a 90 mph head on collision because some ditz crossed into her lane of traffic; if it hadn't been for her wearing a selt belt properly and airbags she would be dead).
You apparantly haven't encountered an Excursion XL yet.
Regal Cinemas has been showing ads before the films for some time now... and I would stop going to them except that: 1) It's the only theater some of our friends will go to, 2) All the other chains are doing it too.
They recently changed how they were showing the ads though - instead of starting the ads at the listed showing time, they start them about 10 minutes before the movie... of course, you get the "privledge" of watching more ads, but it's better than the slideshow crap. Mostly.
Not that the movie started any closer to the actual listed time... they replaced the 5 minutes of ads with 5 more minutes of trailers (different ads). Sigh.
It's gotten ridiculous... you can tack on an extra half hour to any movie now just because of all the previews and junk.
So if Sony the label wants people to stop pirating songs... Why do they make MP3 players to play those illegal songs?
Because, maybe, just maybe, Sony has different divisions and they don't talk to one another?
Sony Electronics is virtually a separate company from Sony Entertainment. Each of which have sub-companies which don't talk to one another much. The money funnels upstream, but very little corporate direction funnels back down
It's a huge company... as are many nowadays. You don't think that the GE engineers making lightbulbs sit around and have lunch with the ones making high performance jet engines, do you?
So while pausing Live TV seems like a cool "must have" feature, if all you watch is programs you specifically record, you still have that funtionality
Well yeah... and then when you actually go to watch live TV for something like, oh say, the weather, you're utterly screwed because it's a disconnect between how you're used to watching and how you can watch now. And no, internet weather is not the same as the Weather channel. I'll surf the net if I need forcasts, but if I need to know current weather and the most up to date likelihood of icing, I'm going to turn on the TV.
Then you can vastly improve the life of the hard drive in your PVR
How? Frankly, what kills your HD is spinning it up and down all the time. Talk to any mechanical or electrical engineer - stop/start cycles are what kill things.
CPU cycles wasted on buffering Live TV
Uh... dedicated MPEG-2 encoder/decoder. The CPU is used only for other stuff.
If you want to pause Live TV, just hit the record button, then it's a recorded program and you can pause it.
Yes, but you can't recapture the last 15-30 minutes of TV.
Heck, I've been watching a show, had the recording end early, and then been able to use the live TV buffer to catch what I missed. Yes, it's a special case, but it helped nonetheless.
So if you can't really use a TiVO without a subscription
You can if it's an old enough TiVo. You just need to: A) find one that originally came with 1.3, B) find a 1.3 image you can put onto the drive.
It makes you wonder if these comments were actually posted BY Tivo
No, they were posted by people with a clue.
I would love to purchase or build a PVR. But I have absolutely no interest in adding to my monthly bills
Then you have several choices.
1) Build your own/buy a HTPC solution. Understand that, currently, it's simply not as good - the UI is poor, the scheeduling isn't as good, and it's not as easy to integrate or be used by others. On the upside, it'll be a lot easier to rip digital video for archive purposes than a TiVo (but not a Replay).
2) Buy an old TiVo from eBay, get an image, deal with the annoy screens.
3) Buy a new TiVo, purchase a lifetime subscription. For $250 it's done. You're looking at a sum-total cost of $450 at this moment for a basic TiVo ($200 for the box, $250 for the sub) and that's it.
4) Buy a new DirecTiVo (if you have DirecTV), and if you have the TotalChoice Premier package then the $5/mo fee is waived.
5) Buy a ReplayTV -- the cost of the subscription is included.
In any of the above situations your monthly bills have not changed.
All these comments saying it isnt as good as TiVO are totally off-topic and are just clogging up the discussion
No they're not. If you believe that build-your-own is as good a solution as a TiVo, you're wrong. It's not. The example given in this article isn't even a good implementation -- you can build one that does a helluva lot better job, but it's still not as good.
If you want to talk about paranoia regarding TiVo/Replay "watching you" then that's another thing (not that I buy into the level of paranoia that concerns people). If you want to talk about worrying about the company folding, that's a valid issue as well. But whining about increased monthly fees is just bullshit - it means you haven't done your homework and are talking out of your ass.
I'd pay the artist for their time, I just wont pay for the art itself. Big difference between a service and intellectual property.
I do not believe in intellectual property PERIOD.
Ok, so take your favorite band. Say it has four members. They spend a full year producing an album, and would like to publish it and get paid for their efforts.
That will be $150,000 please.
Why? Because you are paying for their time and expenses. $30,000 for each member's time for a full year, plus $20,000 in recording and production expenses. Ok, you can actually cut those expenses down to as little as $2,000 now, but it depends on exactly what level of post-production they needed. And note that $30,000 isn't all that wonderful of a paycheck for a full year's work -- you can make more than that in most skilled professions. I believe it's a bit low even for concert orchestras, but I'm not positive.
And yes, they do need that full $120-150k upfront. Because you've said that you're willing to pay only for their time, and that IP is hogwash. Because of this they have to charge the full price to the first buyer -- since there are no IP laws protecting their product, the buyer could take the CD and give a copy to the entire world, which eliminates their capability to sell any more copies. So they won't get paid again.
Oh, sure, they can put on concerts, but that's more time and work - and they should be paid for that as well. Separately.
Or maybe you want to protest patents covering drugs... ok. So how much will that little pill cost? After all, it only took about $.02 to manufacture. Of course, you might want to include the costs of the research and testing for the past decade. So if you'd like to cure that bacterial infection up with this brand new antibiotic, please pony up, oh say, $10M. Because that pays for a staff of 10 $100k researchers for 10 years. You may not need all 10 for all those years, but we're not adding in the costs of lab testing, animal testing, human testing, and so forth, so it evens out. Actually, it probably comes out in your favor.
After all, once you have those pills in hand you can take them to just about any chemistry lab and have them analyzed. A manufacturing plant can then replicate the drugs within a day for a few dollars. Where, exactly, were you expecting companies to reclaim expenses? If they don't do it upfront, they won't. Ever. And the end result will be that nobody but charities and hobbyists will bother -- which should cut out about 95% of the research being done on modern medicines today.
Saying that you don't believe in IP, period, just says that you don't even understand it or why it exists. There are some godawful problems with the current US patent and copyright system, but that doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater.
It has nothing to do with pride.
If you don't have a sense of ethics, or a concept of right and wrong, then I truely pity you.
Personally, I try to follow the golden rule, and that's my baseline for ethical behavior. And, yes, I expect others to live up to the same standards. If you can't be decent to others, then frankly, you're not human.
Hmmm are you being paid for being a coder?
Yes, and all of that work is considered "work for hire" and, as such, owned by my company.
I've done work on my own prior to this current job, and I'll undoubtably do some afterwards as well. That's all mine.
But yes, you're right in general about the up-the-creek-without-a-paddle bit -- but I've taken IP law courses, and I do understand at least the rudimentary concepts behind it (although copyright law has changed quite a bit since when I took the course ~7 years ago).
in the USA we have the RIAA tracking people down
/. today? No? Well you would be in China if you talked about the government in this way.
Yeah. And they're being reported on doing it. And getting sued for civil liberties violations.
lets talk about IP and the fact that none of us here have IP
Speak for yourself. I'm a coder. I have IP. And, frankly, if you had a clue about the IP laws you'd know you had IP too. But instead of educating yourself about IP and what's right and wrong with the current IP system, you'd rather just whine and moan about the RIAA and MPAA being evil and horrible, and compare them to draconian authoritative regimes clouding the issue... all so that you can not pay the artist for their time when you download a song or movie off a P2P network.
I happen to agree that the RIAA and MPAA have wildly overstepped their bounds, but I've yet to see anyone figure out a decent scheme that still ensures the artist will be paid. I don't give a flying fuck about the middlemen and their dieing business model, but I damn well do want to see the inventor properly paid for their time and effort.
Its pathetic, leave China alone for a moment and whoever is moderator of Slashdot, please post an article comparing China and the USA's censorship and see that we are just as bad
Wow... that's such an incredible stretch it's not even funny.
Are you worried about someone coming to your home tonight, arresting you and your family, and throwing you into prison for the rest of your (possibly drastically shortened) life because of the post you made on
There may very well be issues in the US. We can strive to fix them. That doesn't mean we can't point at someone else and say "no, that's wrong".
I can't believe there were enough moderators that thought this was "interesting" or "insightful" to get you modded up past all the proper "flamebait" mods. This is pure tripe.
I've often wondered why a two piece conventional freon refrigerator never caught on
Probably because you've just added a massive number of points of failure, additional construction requirements, additional codes, etc. to the system which will double or triple the cost, and haven't really given much in return. Just how much do you think it's going to save you in cooling bills? And don't forget that come winter, you'll have to spend more on heating since you no longer have the refrigerator dumping waste heat into your living space.
And installation changes from something doable by anyone who knows the right end of a wrench to something doable only by a die-hard DIYer or a pro.
I question the flexibility as well -- with modern HVAC units you don't replace the compressor separately from the coils. They may be in two physically separate locations, but they're a matched pair. Yeah, it's doable if one fails, but you better hope that replacement parts for that exact model are available or else you're going to have a mismatch that will lower efficiency. Since what you're talking about is essentially another compressor/coil setup, you're going to run into the same issues here.