It would appear that the card is able to detect when a DVI to HDMI cable is being used (the TV indicates that it is connected via HDMI), and sends audio out over the DVI port. (Some Radeon HD cards require the dongle, others, like this one apparently, do not). Since HDMI does not have any dedicated audio pins, the audio has to be encoded as part of the signal (and research I have done seems to indicate this).
So, a bastardization of the DVI spec, yes, but the HDMI spec, no. All the card is doing is treating the DVI port as an HDMI port (HDMI contains a subset of the DVI pins, so it's kosher).
And yes, I double-checked my PC, there is nothing connected to the audio ports.:) There's also no internal connection needed, as the video card has it's own sound processor.
Audio works perfectly fine over a DVI->HDMI cable on my ASUS Radeon HD3450 card under Windows. I don't have any other sound source connected, and there's no hardware passthrough.
The video card apparently includes it's own sound chip, a Realtek model. It could be a perversion of the specs, but it works, and hasn't blown up my TV, so I'm happy.
The information that I have received is that Europe is looking to move to MPEG-4, for the extra compression. There are at least a few (if not many) Chinese set-top boxes that are capable of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 playback.
In the United States where the operators "invested" in a lot of proprietary equipment, MPEG-2 may stay the standard for a number of years (at least with the big operators).
I don't moderate, so I can't mod you up, but you're right on the mark here.
The problem is not bandwidth, it is that the cable operators are locked into their antiquated equipment due to politics within the industry (for example, the CableLabs cabal/consortium), or due to the cost of the equipment (although I only do software at a company that makes this equipment, I have heard estimates of hundreds of dollars per channel in costs).
In a typical cable company office (I've been in a couple), you'll see rows upon rows of boxes that they use to receive the actual television signals from satellite (one per channel they receive). Most of these boxes are provided by the networks in question.
Many of these boxes can only output the signal as analog (on a user-specified frequency, for arbitrary placement in the channel map), some of them are capable of outputting MPEG-2 data using ASI as the physical link. In order to cram multiple channels in one frequency, the MPEG-2 streams have to be changed (PID numbers must be changed to be non-duplicates, PAT and PMT packets need to be updated), then these MPEG-2 streams need to be muxed together and encoded into QAM.
Seeing as this is an expensive process (that cable companies might not have planned for, especially in the case of smaller operators), I believe that many of them are waiting for the migration to MPEG-4, to get the most bang for the buck.
Disclaimer: My personal opinion, not that of the company I work for.
Actually, the big part of it is that Motorola and SA know that with a fully open encryption system, cable operators wouldn't have to continue to purchase their equipment, operators could choose to integrate competitors' equipment in the mix more easily. Working for an upstart competitor, one problem that we see is that cable operators just spent a ton of money on Mot/SA equipment, and don't want to lose that "investment".
If they would actually have an open standard, made by somebody other than CableLabs (having dealt with CableLabs in the past, it left a bad taste in my mouth), we would see a whole new world of features.
From what I can see in the article, it's not meant to replace getopt/getopt_long.
I am currently writing an application (for my employer) where this may be useful. Although it also uses command line parameters (via getopt_long), it also receives commands in ASCII over a network connection - that is what I believe this article targets.
Because the commands I receive can have almost any series of parameters in any sequence however, I prefer to do what another poster here already stated - you look for keywords in a lookup table, and then call a function to handle whatever keywords come up afterwards. The suggestion of the article is that rather than iterating on a lookup table, you can use a hashing function to more quickly determine which keyword you are looking at.
The extra complexity of this method however (having to use extra tools) makes me lean towards simple iteration - easier to code, and when you add a new token, it's a minimal change.
Try to enter the United States through Pearson International Airport. Everybody whom I've spoken to that has done it (as well as myself) have experienced nothing but rudeness and/or incompetence from the Customs officials. Out of six times (once per year), I have only had one Customs officer who wasn't rude, or at least downright grumpy. Additionally, if they think that they can hold something over your head, they will (and they've threatened refusal to let me back in to the U.S. before).
One Customs officer, after approving me, as I was about to walk away said, "You should watch C-Span - I hear that they're about to revoke a bunch of H1s in your (software) field".
The most pleasant experience I had was entering San Francisco from a foreign country - no issues at all, the process was fast and smooth, and the officer was very pleasant.
I await the nightmare that shall be Pearson International in a few weeks when I'm sure I'll get a Customs officer who has no idea how to handle an "Adjustment of Status".
I work at a Silicon Valley startup that has been in existence for four years now.
It's funny in that the engineering team that I work with (who cannot afford a house) agree with your sentiment, but of course, the management team (who do have houses) refuse to even consider relocating the company (or a part of it). My informal poll has showed that everybody in the engineering team would gladly pick up and move if given the chance. This company has no need to be in the Valley, the customers that we are going after are either outside of the United States, or have offices nationwide, which are generally not in the Valley. The company founder could easily save money by relocating us.
I would gladly take a small pay cut to live and work in a nicer area with a lower cost of living, and be able to lead a better life. After this job, I'm out of the Valley, and not looking to return. There's too much BS in the Valley, and California as a whole.
There's no gene, there's just a willingness (or unwillingness) to learn how to work with technology.
At many of the places I have worked, a lot of the employees (especially older ones who grew up before personal computers) show no willingness to learn how the system works, they simply memorize the keystrokes or menu combinations for what they need to get done. If there is any deviation, then they will disturb somebody else for the answer. This in itself is not bad, but they just don't learn - after trying to teach somebody how to format a floppy disk three times, you just give up and do it for them.
People tend to like routine - it's comfortable and requires little thought. There's no chance of getting it wrong if you do it the same way every time (provided said way is correct in the first place). Change is threatening.
Quite frankly, I wish that the warning labels would be taken off of everything for a year or so - the problem would certainly straighten itself out in a hurry.
I'm similar in planning my trips, in that I will generally try to keep a paper map of the area with me - but I rely on the GPS for navigation, and fall back to the paper maps if something doesn't seem right.
Generally, I will program the route in my GPS and look it over before I do the drive - that gives me an idea of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, that doesn't give me a full idea of what's going on, as if you don't know the area, you don't know what lane you have to be in at a given time. California is notorious for having the right-most lane turning into an exit lane with little notice - and if traffic is busy, good luck merging out of that lane. It's to the point where I will rarely drive in that lane, unless I really know the area.
The GPS units that I've used (Garmin iQue3600 and Mobile 20) have an annoying flaw - sometimes they're too slow to keep up with what your position is. Thus when it tells you to exit, you've already shot past it, especially if traffic is really flowing on the freeway. Unfortunately, this means that you have to keep an eye on the screen to see what the next turn is, which means taking your attention away from the road.
Despite that (and some of the strange directions it sometimes gives), I'll take a GPS unit over paper maps any day of the week. I'll also take it over reading the printout of the Google Maps directions while I'm driving, which is in itself, problematic.
As I've been told by many pedant border crossing officials (in Toronto), an H-1B is not a visa.
My immigration attorney actually addressed this situation with me, because he knows that I like to travel, and I mentioned that I'd like to head to San Diego sometime soon. His advice is to carry your I-94 form (which should be stapled in your passport), and you should be fine.
On Interstate 8, where it's close to the border, they apparently do checks every now and then, especially if they see a broken-down car.
SPEWS blocks the entire netblock that our company resides in. That netblock is managed by NextWeb, the only ISP we can get with our building location, and although we have not spammed anybody, we are collateral damage.
Yesterday, I was contacting a company about a technical support issue, and their e-mail server sent me back a nice 550 of, "5.7.0 Your server is a suspected spammer, we are quarantining the e-mail" (or something like that, not those exact words).
SPEWS is the only DNSBL that our IP address is listed in. Unfortunately, the SPEWS page is down right now, so I can't see their BS "evidence".
In many cases, they don't need to use a second cable modem, there are several PacketCable modems that are designed to be dropped in place of the existing cable modem (cable modems with two or more phone jacks and battery backup). If the cable operator doesn't use one, then they are just probably trying to recycle old equipment, or trying to avoid buying PacketCable CMTS' for as long as possible (because cable operators are known to be super cheap).
Myself, having done DOCSIS development in the past, I'm not a big fan of CableLabs - but it's not for this reason. I just didn't like chasing the never-ending specification, and the "big boys" club.
If you don't like the status quo, then you need to lobby your local government and convince them to allow second and third carriers to send data over the lines - after all, the lines run on their land, which is more than likely not owned by the cable company. Alternatively, convince your local government that it's in their best interest to allow for another cable provider to run their own lines. Unfortunately, local government likes having one monopoly for each service, it's less headaches for them.
PacketCable, which is what is used for these Cable/VoIP lines doesn't (intentionally) work like that.
DOCSIS has excellent QoS support. It supports what are called "Service Flows" when the modem is provisioned in DOCSIS 1.1 mode. Essentially, a service flow creates a secondary pipe to the CMTS that is completely independant of the other ones. Thus, there would be a second service flow, provisioned for 64 or 128Kbps, used only for VoIP, which has a higher priority than the data flow.
When using cable modem service, traffic from Vonage unfortunately falls into the "data" pipe, and therefore gets jumbled with the rest.
I don't feel that Comcast is being anti-competitive at all, they're using a feature of the DOCSIS specification that cable operators devised and use. Perhaps you need to take your case to CableLabs (and get laughed out by them).
I was talking about the "Triple Play" solution, which consists of voice, data and video. I am not aware of a set-top box (which uses a QAM tuner for the video and a DOCSIS return channel) that supports PacketCable, therefore two boxes are required for the Triple Play. These two boxes don't necessarily work well in combination.
The company that I work for is developing (and demoing) video solutions for the European market. One company that we are trying to sell to, their "Triple Play" solution consists of three different devices chained in combination to get this working. The retail box for this monstrosity was the size of a suitcase - and it apparently doesn't work all that well.
I am well aware that there are special cable modems that contain the data and voice, and that they work well together. I had the "privilege" of working for a company that had access to Broadcom PacketCable reference design modems, and we had two of our devices based on them at SCTE one year. After proper provisioning, they worked quite well.
PacketCable calls use special flows that have guaranteed latency-and-jitter limits specially designed for voice. Only the cable company can create and use those flows.
Precisely the point that everybody forgets. (I've done software development on DOCSIS cable modems and a CMTS - although I didn't do any PacketCable work, I've had to read some of the specs and have also configured test systems for use with it.)
The cable company has a huge advantage over DSL when it comes to VoIP, because Vonage et al. share the same logical traffic flow - they just change the priority of the packets within that single stream. With the PacketCable capable modem, you have multiple streams, and the head-end equipment is made aware of this, thus being able to prioritize the streams themselves. It's a kind of super QoS.
Because of this, I feel that cable is the technically superior platform, except that the cable operators just don't want to put any thought, planning or money into the infrastructure. The charges that CableLabs levies for testing don't help either, although they have come down a fair amount since the time I was doing DOCSIS work.
All that said, I'm still waiting for the day when they finally get it right - a single modem/set-top box that can handle a PacketCable stream, an HDTV QAM stream, and a data stream, with PacketCable as top priority, HDTV as second and then the data. From what I've been hearing, companies that are trying to do "triple-play" are finding that they have to install multiple boxes (as many as one for each purpose sometimes), and they don't necessarily work well together.
The cable operators, for the longest time, have been stagnant, as they never had any competition. They have the local monopoly, and the phone companies could never offer traditional cable television. When DOCSIS cable modems came out, it was a new form of competition - something that was standards based.
Now, the main threat to cable operators is alternative forms of television - satellite and IPTV. The satellite operators don't have to pay the cable operators to broadcast their signals, and the phone companies are also monopolies that are rapidly expanding - FIOS, VDSL - techologies that can deliver more video bandwidth than cable, and still have room left over for lots of data.
In an attempt to try to beat the phone companies to the triple play (television, data, phone), the cable companies sank a lot of money into proprietary digital television systems (Motorola and Scientific Atlanta). The telephone companies have been researching alternate systems, and I figure that they'll be able to beat the cable companies based on cost alone.
Right now, the cable companies are trying to convert to digital cable as quickly as they can - for every analog channel that they move off to digital, they can put in between 5-10 analog channels. This space can then be redeployed for cable modems/EMTAs (for data and phone usage). But, there's a downside to this - every new digital subscriber costs the cable company hundreds of dollars in the form of an expensive PVR (a proprietary PVR that cannot be swapped out because of the proprietary encryption). So, they're screwed either way.
Any decent desktop distribution should work great for what you're doing.
Agreed. Having, "been there, done that", I've used both Fedora Core and Mandrake for this in the past. (Mandrake because this was my main PC and I wanted easier access to multimedia and a slicker desktop).
Most of the time will be spent actually building the cross-compilation toolkit and developing code for the target, so you might as well do it in an environment that you're familiar and comfortable with.
Sorry, for legal and personal reasons, Al does not accept song ideas from fans (he's got plenty warped ideas on his own!) You might try following in Al's footsteps by recording your songs and sending them to Dr. Demento - maybe you'll hear yourself on the radio!"
I've never met him, but I'm told that he's a really cool guy (a family member of mine who was working security at one of his shows talked to him for a bit). And of course, being the diehard fan that I am, I have quite a few of his albums.
I work in a promising startup now - the options are great if they come through, but if not, I don't lose a whole lot. I made sure that my salary and benefits were adequate when I took the job.
The best thing about working in a startup is that it's a small company, and we're all friends (having worked together at a previous company). That is worth more than all of the money in the world, because it makes working more fun than most other jobs.
I disagree with the parts about well-focused projects and little bureaucracy - it only takes one or two to spoil things. But because the rest of us are so close, we've come up with ways to deal with that.:) Also, long hours are only an issue if you let them be, and the lack of security is roughly the same at almost any type of job.
Don't use iTunes then - I don't. I never really could stand the user interface for it under Windows (I'm told it's better on a Mac by a friend who has a Mac).
I use Anapod Explorer by Red Chair Software. It allows me to keep my music collection in FLAC, and will transcode it to WAV or MP3 on the fly when I upload it to the iPod. Works great with my iPod Video.
We've got a process in place for that under capitalism- Supply and Demand pricing. What your employer SHOULD have done was increase the salary they were willing to pay. But instead they went the indentured seritude route. No, what potential employees should have done was reduce their expectations. A kid straight out of college will not get $100,000 for a Junior Support/Software Engineering position (that's what some people asked for, for that position). Their loss turned out to be my gain, because even though my base salary was only $45,000, by the time you factored in bonuses, I was making over $60,000 per year (cash bonuses plus 401K matching, etc.). Additionally, when it came time for my raise the next year, I got it promptly, and it was a big one at that. Most importantly, I learned a lot of new things that helped me out in my career.
(Incidentally, I was contacted for the position, because that employer saw some of my work posted online. They thought that my skills would be a perfect fit for the job, and after interviewing me, they felt that I fit in with everybody else, most of whom were close to my age and background. Total fluke, but I'll take it.)
I agree that there should be automated systems in place to be able to apply for a Green Card, and finally the government is moving towards that (PERM allows for online filing now). But, this is still government, and it will take them years for the kinks to be worked out. The first batch of applicants were automatically rejected due to a bug in the online filing system. Although there isn't much action on my file right now, I feel much better that it's sitting in a box in a warehouse in Dallas than being screwed up by a computer right now.
I started out on a TN visa nearly seven years ago - but once the employer decides that they'd actually like to keep you, they're supposed to file for an H1, since you can't go from TN to Green Card (at least not easily, and it's not recommended by many immigration attorneys). So, they sponsored my H1, and when they went under, I was able to transfer to another company (increasing my paycheck in the process). Although in theory there isn't a limit on the number of TNs that you can get (I've heard of people staying here for 15 years on TN visas), the USCIS will tend to not grant them after a certain amount of time (because they want you to go through the H1 process). An employer who wants to keep the employee would be crazy to keep them on a TN knowing that they could be refused entry (say, coming back from a business trip) - and an employee would be crazy to accept that possibility.
Also, on a TN, you don't have to be a contractor - I was actually hired by my company as a regular full-time employee. In fact, I don't think you can actually be a 1099 on a TN (or H1 for that matter) - the requirement for a TN is that you have a valid employment offer that matches one of the TN categories. If you had to be a contractor, that would imply that you could just cross the border and then freelance yourself, which is what they're trying to prevent. And yes, you can be deported on a TN, probably even more easily than as an H1.
I'm not here to get rich, and I'm not here to uncut American labor - I get paid what the salary studies for my area show that I should get paid (and unfortunately no more, since the company I work for has imposed a salary cap for all employess - Americans included), which the government approves. I'm law-abiding, I pay my taxes, and I've shown intent to stay here for a while by getting my H1 and applying for my Green Card. If I actually get my Green Card (not likely), who knows, maybe if things change by then I'd be willing to get my citizenship by then (at that point, we're looking at 12 years from now). But for now, no way.
[troll mode="on"] If there was an American who was capable of doing my current job, and who actually wanted to apply for it, I'm certain that they would have gotten the position, because it would have saved my company at least $10,
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Not a proprietary cable, just a DVI to HDMI cable that I picked up off the shelf of a local retailer.
:) There's also no internal connection needed, as the video card has it's own sound processor.
This is the card in question: http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=2&l2=8&l3=634&l4=0&model=2051&modelmenu=1
It would appear that the card is able to detect when a DVI to HDMI cable is being used (the TV indicates that it is connected via HDMI), and sends audio out over the DVI port. (Some Radeon HD cards require the dongle, others, like this one apparently, do not). Since HDMI does not have any dedicated audio pins, the audio has to be encoded as part of the signal (and research I have done seems to indicate this).
So, a bastardization of the DVI spec, yes, but the HDMI spec, no. All the card is doing is treating the DVI port as an HDMI port (HDMI contains a subset of the DVI pins, so it's kosher).
And yes, I double-checked my PC, there is nothing connected to the audio ports.
-- Joe
Audio works perfectly fine over a DVI->HDMI cable on my ASUS Radeon HD3450 card under Windows. I don't have any other sound source connected, and there's no hardware passthrough.
The video card apparently includes it's own sound chip, a Realtek model. It could be a perversion of the specs, but it works, and hasn't blown up my TV, so I'm happy.
-- Joe
The information that I have received is that Europe is looking to move to MPEG-4, for the extra compression. There are at least a few (if not many) Chinese set-top boxes that are capable of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 playback.
In the United States where the operators "invested" in a lot of proprietary equipment, MPEG-2 may stay the standard for a number of years (at least with the big operators).
-- Joe
In case you weren't joking...
MPEG-2 Packet IDentifer, not operating system Process ID.
-- Joe
I don't moderate, so I can't mod you up, but you're right on the mark here.
The problem is not bandwidth, it is that the cable operators are locked into their antiquated equipment due to politics within the industry (for example, the CableLabs cabal/consortium), or due to the cost of the equipment (although I only do software at a company that makes this equipment, I have heard estimates of hundreds of dollars per channel in costs).
-- Joe
In a typical cable company office (I've been in a couple), you'll see rows upon rows of boxes that they use to receive the actual television signals from satellite (one per channel they receive). Most of these boxes are provided by the networks in question.
Many of these boxes can only output the signal as analog (on a user-specified frequency, for arbitrary placement in the channel map), some of them are capable of outputting MPEG-2 data using ASI as the physical link. In order to cram multiple channels in one frequency, the MPEG-2 streams have to be changed (PID numbers must be changed to be non-duplicates, PAT and PMT packets need to be updated), then these MPEG-2 streams need to be muxed together and encoded into QAM.
Seeing as this is an expensive process (that cable companies might not have planned for, especially in the case of smaller operators), I believe that many of them are waiting for the migration to MPEG-4, to get the most bang for the buck.
-- Joe
It works seamlessly with my car stereo.
If when I purchased this stereo (or even now), there was a better MP3 player that worked, I'd have gone for it.
I run Windows, but hate iTunes.
-- Joe
Disclaimer: My personal opinion, not that of the company I work for.
Actually, the big part of it is that Motorola and SA know that with a fully open encryption system, cable operators wouldn't have to continue to purchase their equipment, operators could choose to integrate competitors' equipment in the mix more easily. Working for an upstart competitor, one problem that we see is that cable operators just spent a ton of money on Mot/SA equipment, and don't want to lose that "investment".
If they would actually have an open standard, made by somebody other than CableLabs (having dealt with CableLabs in the past, it left a bad taste in my mouth), we would see a whole new world of features.
-- Joe
From what I can see in the article, it's not meant to replace getopt/getopt_long.
I am currently writing an application (for my employer) where this may be useful. Although it also uses command line parameters (via getopt_long), it also receives commands in ASCII over a network connection - that is what I believe this article targets.
Because the commands I receive can have almost any series of parameters in any sequence however, I prefer to do what another poster here already stated - you look for keywords in a lookup table, and then call a function to handle whatever keywords come up afterwards. The suggestion of the article is that rather than iterating on a lookup table, you can use a hashing function to more quickly determine which keyword you are looking at.
The extra complexity of this method however (having to use extra tools) makes me lean towards simple iteration - easier to code, and when you add a new token, it's a minimal change.
-- Joe
Try to enter the United States through Pearson International Airport. Everybody whom I've spoken to that has done it (as well as myself) have experienced nothing but rudeness and/or incompetence from the Customs officials. Out of six times (once per year), I have only had one Customs officer who wasn't rude, or at least downright grumpy. Additionally, if they think that they can hold something over your head, they will (and they've threatened refusal to let me back in to the U.S. before).
One Customs officer, after approving me, as I was about to walk away said, "You should watch C-Span - I hear that they're about to revoke a bunch of H1s in your (software) field".
The most pleasant experience I had was entering San Francisco from a foreign country - no issues at all, the process was fast and smooth, and the officer was very pleasant.
I await the nightmare that shall be Pearson International in a few weeks when I'm sure I'll get a Customs officer who has no idea how to handle an "Adjustment of Status".
-- Joe
I work at a Silicon Valley startup that has been in existence for four years now.
It's funny in that the engineering team that I work with (who cannot afford a house) agree with your sentiment, but of course, the management team (who do have houses) refuse to even consider relocating the company (or a part of it). My informal poll has showed that everybody in the engineering team would gladly pick up and move if given the chance. This company has no need to be in the Valley, the customers that we are going after are either outside of the United States, or have offices nationwide, which are generally not in the Valley. The company founder could easily save money by relocating us.
I would gladly take a small pay cut to live and work in a nicer area with a lower cost of living, and be able to lead a better life. After this job, I'm out of the Valley, and not looking to return. There's too much BS in the Valley, and California as a whole.
-- Joe
There's no gene, there's just a willingness (or unwillingness) to learn how to work with technology.
At many of the places I have worked, a lot of the employees (especially older ones who grew up before personal computers) show no willingness to learn how the system works, they simply memorize the keystrokes or menu combinations for what they need to get done. If there is any deviation, then they will disturb somebody else for the answer. This in itself is not bad, but they just don't learn - after trying to teach somebody how to format a floppy disk three times, you just give up and do it for them.
People tend to like routine - it's comfortable and requires little thought. There's no chance of getting it wrong if you do it the same way every time (provided said way is correct in the first place). Change is threatening.
Quite frankly, I wish that the warning labels would be taken off of everything for a year or so - the problem would certainly straighten itself out in a hurry.
-- Joe
I'm similar in planning my trips, in that I will generally try to keep a paper map of the area with me - but I rely on the GPS for navigation, and fall back to the paper maps if something doesn't seem right.
Generally, I will program the route in my GPS and look it over before I do the drive - that gives me an idea of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, that doesn't give me a full idea of what's going on, as if you don't know the area, you don't know what lane you have to be in at a given time. California is notorious for having the right-most lane turning into an exit lane with little notice - and if traffic is busy, good luck merging out of that lane. It's to the point where I will rarely drive in that lane, unless I really know the area.
The GPS units that I've used (Garmin iQue3600 and Mobile 20) have an annoying flaw - sometimes they're too slow to keep up with what your position is. Thus when it tells you to exit, you've already shot past it, especially if traffic is really flowing on the freeway. Unfortunately, this means that you have to keep an eye on the screen to see what the next turn is, which means taking your attention away from the road.
Despite that (and some of the strange directions it sometimes gives), I'll take a GPS unit over paper maps any day of the week. I'll also take it over reading the printout of the Google Maps directions while I'm driving, which is in itself, problematic.
-- Joe
As I've been told by many pedant border crossing officials (in Toronto), an H-1B is not a visa.
My immigration attorney actually addressed this situation with me, because he knows that I like to travel, and I mentioned that I'd like to head to San Diego sometime soon. His advice is to carry your I-94 form (which should be stapled in your passport), and you should be fine.
On Interstate 8, where it's close to the border, they apparently do checks every now and then, especially if they see a broken-down car.
-- Joe
Just yesterday, where I work, in fact.
SPEWS blocks the entire netblock that our company resides in. That netblock is managed by NextWeb, the only ISP we can get with our building location, and although we have not spammed anybody, we are collateral damage.
Yesterday, I was contacting a company about a technical support issue, and their e-mail server sent me back a nice 550 of, "5.7.0 Your server is a suspected spammer, we are quarantining the e-mail" (or something like that, not those exact words).
SPEWS is the only DNSBL that our IP address is listed in. Unfortunately, the SPEWS page is down right now, so I can't see their BS "evidence".
-- Joe
In many cases, they don't need to use a second cable modem, there are several PacketCable modems that are designed to be dropped in place of the existing cable modem (cable modems with two or more phone jacks and battery backup). If the cable operator doesn't use one, then they are just probably trying to recycle old equipment, or trying to avoid buying PacketCable CMTS' for as long as possible (because cable operators are known to be super cheap).
Myself, having done DOCSIS development in the past, I'm not a big fan of CableLabs - but it's not for this reason. I just didn't like chasing the never-ending specification, and the "big boys" club.
If you don't like the status quo, then you need to lobby your local government and convince them to allow second and third carriers to send data over the lines - after all, the lines run on their land, which is more than likely not owned by the cable company. Alternatively, convince your local government that it's in their best interest to allow for another cable provider to run their own lines. Unfortunately, local government likes having one monopoly for each service, it's less headaches for them.
-- Joe
PacketCable, which is what is used for these Cable/VoIP lines doesn't (intentionally) work like that.
DOCSIS has excellent QoS support. It supports what are called "Service Flows" when the modem is provisioned in DOCSIS 1.1 mode. Essentially, a service flow creates a secondary pipe to the CMTS that is completely independant of the other ones. Thus, there would be a second service flow, provisioned for 64 or 128Kbps, used only for VoIP, which has a higher priority than the data flow.
When using cable modem service, traffic from Vonage unfortunately falls into the "data" pipe, and therefore gets jumbled with the rest.
I don't feel that Comcast is being anti-competitive at all, they're using a feature of the DOCSIS specification that cable operators devised and use. Perhaps you need to take your case to CableLabs (and get laughed out by them).
-- Joe
I was talking about the "Triple Play" solution, which consists of voice, data and video. I am not aware of a set-top box (which uses a QAM tuner for the video and a DOCSIS return channel) that supports PacketCable, therefore two boxes are required for the Triple Play. These two boxes don't necessarily work well in combination.
The company that I work for is developing (and demoing) video solutions for the European market. One company that we are trying to sell to, their "Triple Play" solution consists of three different devices chained in combination to get this working. The retail box for this monstrosity was the size of a suitcase - and it apparently doesn't work all that well.
I am well aware that there are special cable modems that contain the data and voice, and that they work well together. I had the "privilege" of working for a company that had access to Broadcom PacketCable reference design modems, and we had two of our devices based on them at SCTE one year. After proper provisioning, they worked quite well.
-- Joe
PacketCable calls use special flows that have guaranteed latency-and-jitter limits specially designed for voice. Only the cable company can create and use those flows.
Precisely the point that everybody forgets. (I've done software development on DOCSIS cable modems and a CMTS - although I didn't do any PacketCable work, I've had to read some of the specs and have also configured test systems for use with it.)
The cable company has a huge advantage over DSL when it comes to VoIP, because Vonage et al. share the same logical traffic flow - they just change the priority of the packets within that single stream. With the PacketCable capable modem, you have multiple streams, and the head-end equipment is made aware of this, thus being able to prioritize the streams themselves. It's a kind of super QoS.
Because of this, I feel that cable is the technically superior platform, except that the cable operators just don't want to put any thought, planning or money into the infrastructure. The charges that CableLabs levies for testing don't help either, although they have come down a fair amount since the time I was doing DOCSIS work.
All that said, I'm still waiting for the day when they finally get it right - a single modem/set-top box that can handle a PacketCable stream, an HDTV QAM stream, and a data stream, with PacketCable as top priority, HDTV as second and then the data. From what I've been hearing, companies that are trying to do "triple-play" are finding that they have to install multiple boxes (as many as one for each purpose sometimes), and they don't necessarily work well together.
-- Joe
The cable operators, for the longest time, have been stagnant, as they never had any competition. They have the local monopoly, and the phone companies could never offer traditional cable television. When DOCSIS cable modems came out, it was a new form of competition - something that was standards based.
Now, the main threat to cable operators is alternative forms of television - satellite and IPTV. The satellite operators don't have to pay the cable operators to broadcast their signals, and the phone companies are also monopolies that are rapidly expanding - FIOS, VDSL - techologies that can deliver more video bandwidth than cable, and still have room left over for lots of data.
In an attempt to try to beat the phone companies to the triple play (television, data, phone), the cable companies sank a lot of money into proprietary digital television systems (Motorola and Scientific Atlanta). The telephone companies have been researching alternate systems, and I figure that they'll be able to beat the cable companies based on cost alone.
Right now, the cable companies are trying to convert to digital cable as quickly as they can - for every analog channel that they move off to digital, they can put in between 5-10 analog channels. This space can then be redeployed for cable modems/EMTAs (for data and phone usage). But, there's a downside to this - every new digital subscriber costs the cable company hundreds of dollars in the form of an expensive PVR (a proprietary PVR that cannot be swapped out because of the proprietary encryption). So, they're screwed either way.
-- Joe
Any decent desktop distribution should work great for what you're doing.
Agreed. Having, "been there, done that", I've used both Fedora Core and Mandrake for this in the past. (Mandrake because this was my main PC and I wanted easier access to multimedia and a slicker desktop).
Most of the time will be spent actually building the cross-compilation toolkit and developing code for the target, so you might as well do it in an environment that you're familiar and comfortable with.
-- Joe
Nope.
In fact, by even posting it on Slashdot, they've pretty much ensured that Weird Al would never make the song.
From the FAQ section of his site (http://www.weirdal.com/faq.htm):
"Can I send my song ideas to Al?
Sorry, for legal and personal reasons, Al does not accept song ideas from fans (he's got plenty warped ideas on his own!) You might try following in Al's footsteps by recording your songs and sending them to Dr. Demento - maybe you'll hear yourself on the radio!"
I've never met him, but I'm told that he's a really cool guy (a family member of mine who was working security at one of his shows talked to him for a bit). And of course, being the diehard fan that I am, I have quite a few of his albums.
-- Joe
Hear, hear!
:) Also, long hours are only an issue if you let them be, and the lack of security is roughly the same at almost any type of job.
I work in a promising startup now - the options are great if they come through, but if not, I don't lose a whole lot. I made sure that my salary and benefits were adequate when I took the job.
The best thing about working in a startup is that it's a small company, and we're all friends (having worked together at a previous company). That is worth more than all of the money in the world, because it makes working more fun than most other jobs.
I disagree with the parts about well-focused projects and little bureaucracy - it only takes one or two to spoil things. But because the rest of us are so close, we've come up with ways to deal with that.
-- Joe
Don't use iTunes then - I don't. I never really could stand the user interface for it under Windows (I'm told it's better on a Mac by a friend who has a Mac).
I use Anapod Explorer by Red Chair Software. It allows me to keep my music collection in FLAC, and will transcode it to WAV or MP3 on the fly when I upload it to the iPod. Works great with my iPod Video.
-- Joe
We've got a process in place for that under capitalism- Supply and Demand pricing. What your employer SHOULD have done was increase the salary they were willing to pay. But instead they went the indentured seritude route.
No, what potential employees should have done was reduce their expectations. A kid straight out of college will not get $100,000 for a Junior Support/Software Engineering position (that's what some people asked for, for that position). Their loss turned out to be my gain, because even though my base salary was only $45,000, by the time you factored in bonuses, I was making over $60,000 per year (cash bonuses plus 401K matching, etc.). Additionally, when it came time for my raise the next year, I got it promptly, and it was a big one at that. Most importantly, I learned a lot of new things that helped me out in my career.
(Incidentally, I was contacted for the position, because that employer saw some of my work posted online. They thought that my skills would be a perfect fit for the job, and after interviewing me, they felt that I fit in with everybody else, most of whom were close to my age and background. Total fluke, but I'll take it.)
I agree that there should be automated systems in place to be able to apply for a Green Card, and finally the government is moving towards that (PERM allows for online filing now). But, this is still government, and it will take them years for the kinks to be worked out. The first batch of applicants were automatically rejected due to a bug in the online filing system. Although there isn't much action on my file right now, I feel much better that it's sitting in a box in a warehouse in Dallas than being screwed up by a computer right now.
I started out on a TN visa nearly seven years ago - but once the employer decides that they'd actually like to keep you, they're supposed to file for an H1, since you can't go from TN to Green Card (at least not easily, and it's not recommended by many immigration attorneys). So, they sponsored my H1, and when they went under, I was able to transfer to another company (increasing my paycheck in the process). Although in theory there isn't a limit on the number of TNs that you can get (I've heard of people staying here for 15 years on TN visas), the USCIS will tend to not grant them after a certain amount of time (because they want you to go through the H1 process). An employer who wants to keep the employee would be crazy to keep them on a TN knowing that they could be refused entry (say, coming back from a business trip) - and an employee would be crazy to accept that possibility.
Also, on a TN, you don't have to be a contractor - I was actually hired by my company as a regular full-time employee. In fact, I don't think you can actually be a 1099 on a TN (or H1 for that matter) - the requirement for a TN is that you have a valid employment offer that matches one of the TN categories. If you had to be a contractor, that would imply that you could just cross the border and then freelance yourself, which is what they're trying to prevent. And yes, you can be deported on a TN, probably even more easily than as an H1.
I'm not here to get rich, and I'm not here to uncut American labor - I get paid what the salary studies for my area show that I should get paid (and unfortunately no more, since the company I work for has imposed a salary cap for all employess - Americans included), which the government approves. I'm law-abiding, I pay my taxes, and I've shown intent to stay here for a while by getting my H1 and applying for my Green Card. If I actually get my Green Card (not likely), who knows, maybe if things change by then I'd be willing to get my citizenship by then (at that point, we're looking at 12 years from now). But for now, no way.
[troll mode="on"]
If there was an American who was capable of doing my current job, and who actually wanted to apply for it, I'm certain that they would have gotten the position, because it would have saved my company at least $10,