I manage a television broadcast facility. The majority of systems are automated and there is a lot of software/database interaction. Pointing the finger in problem situations is what I get to do.
My tips:
1) Pre-arrange response times and service levels with each vendor. Know exactly how long before they can have an expert on the phone with you. Don't confuse this with general tech support response time. The first person that picks up the phone usually can't solve your issue. Know the names and skills of the people in support in advance. Make the vendor supply you with names. titles, phone numbers and written escalation plan for their support group.
2) Do research before calling. Do some basic trouble shooting before picking up the phone. Have software/hardware version levels ready to go. While your vendor *should* have this info, they never do.
3) If you have two systems and you can't decide which is at fault, ask the vendor how to eliminate the other guy as the problem. For example if you can't decide if vendor A or B is a fault, ask vendor A how to prove it's not vendor B. This turns the problem around. Usually they get focused on proving it's not their own gear.
4) Put the involved vendors on the phone together to help them hash it out. I have gone so far as to get engineers from two companies to stand in front of the problem system and we all looked at the RS-422 analyzer together to agee who was at fault.
5) Escalate a problem up higher. If you aren't getting the support you want, escalate to higher levels of both technical support *and* salees/marketing. Never forget how much power(wrath) the sales guys can bring on the support guys. In most companies the management chains of sales & support join up rather high. So if you complain loudly to sales, usually a person fairly high up hears and issues a "fix it NOW, I don't want to hear about this anymore" order.
While all of this seems outrageous behavior by the MPAA, we must all remember that this is not the first time 'the law' has been used as a device to throttle new technology.
When records were introduced, musicians decried the invention as the end of live music. They fought to prevent music form being sold on the 'dictating machine' that had just been invented. Records won.
The movie & television studios went after VCRs when they first arrived. "How dare people record television?" they asked. VCRs won.
The RIAA went after Diamond when the Rio was released. Guess what? The MP3 players won.
So who will win the Napster/DeCSS wars? The new technologies will. The genie is out of the bottle and it can't go back in.
Big business will always rather use 'the law' to fight changes to business modles rather than reinvent themselves. They will eventually have to accept the idea of people copying movies just as making cassette mix tapes is accepted.
We, the consumers, will win out in the end. We have the dollars/pounds/rubles they desperately want. Eventually they will give us what we want. record companies WILL sell MP3s of live performances and movie studios will sell enhanced DVDlike movie on the net.
Look at what happened to a bad technology, the Divx DVD system. Consumers saw it for what it was, an attempt to wring every last dollar of out of the consumer with no benefit. Divx is out of business.
The most important thing we can do as individuals is write our government reps and tell them our views. The MPAA & RIAA have lobbiest in their offices all the time. Make sure they see more than one side of the arguement.
I see a company intentionally not showing that that they have a video card as good as the competition (PCs). I see a company that locks their users into hardware options with little control of choice. I see a company with an outdated operating system. I see a company with good design and hardware skills but poor software skills.
All kidding aside. What is the strategy? What am I missing here?
How vain is Steve Jobs that he would do such a thing?
Honestly, are Apple's closed source, closed hardware, legal brief tossing ways any better than Microsoft's? I think not. The silliness with the leaked photos would happen in no other company.
Steve is messing with the bottomline $s of the company when important new items like state of the art video cards are not shown due to 'punishment'.
Apple has great hardware engineers and many great ideas, but they treat their customers like sheep and their partners like children. If they really want to sell hardware, get their engineers to work on some x86 solutions and let have an CuMine Cube and an iPC. I'd buy those products in a heartbeat. But buying a Mac today with no memory management or multitasking is farsical.
Stunts like this help prevent Apple from creating new customers. The Faithful Apple Cabal of users grows smaller everyday.
In meatspace making an individual keep a physical distance away and have no contact with a person/business is called a restraining order. These orders are issued every day in courts across the land.
Sounds like ebay is trying to get an effective restraining order in cybersapce that can be enforced.
Hmmm, sounds reasonable. Anyone think there's a downside to virtual restraining orders? I can't think of one.
Even the govt. can't crack PGP mail on a realtime basis. Encrypted email provides for secure communications. The only surprising thing is that people continue to send unencrypted emails. It's unfathomable why businesses don't use encrypted email exclusively. http://www.pgp.com/
Seems to me there is a Linux trade show every 3 months or so. This may be a bit too often. In many business there is one big trade show per year like Comdex or NAB or E3.
From one inside a trans-national-megacorp, it's hard to justify several trade show trips for the same stuff. I went the last Linux* show in San Jose last August and have considered traveling to one again mainly because of cost.
Since the backbone attendees to these shows are corporate types looking at the technology, you need to make it sensible to attend.
Perhaps two shows a year, one west coast and one east coast would be good, but too many shows = low turnout.
I can only imagine all the extra giveaways left over from the show. Time to call my buddy at VALinux and beg.
The blockiness you see in MPEG is due to the block size of the estimated area. The block size is proportional to the data rate you are recording at. If you record MPEG data at 1Mb/s you get lots of blockiness. If you record MPEG data at 25Mb/s you see NO blockiness at all.
The way to reduce artifacts is to increase the bandwidth used to record/tranmsit the video. Increased frame rate and resolution won't remove artifacts.
BTW, MPEG as seen on DirecTV averages to around 3-4 Mb/s. DVDs are like 6 Mb/s. Professional video recorded at 25, 50, and even 100 Mb/s has no perceptible artifacting.
ATVEF encodes the network identifier. It's up to the EPG (electronic program guide) to scan the tuner card to establish the channel order. Once that's done, javascript on the web page can request the tv: tag (something like that, the coder guys know the details, I'm the broadcaster guy).
Intel used to have a product called Intercast that did this and listen for triggers to pre-cache and pull up web data on command.
ATVEF embeds HTML and URL information in the television signal. Your computer/WebTV/smartTV then sucks down the desired conent from the net and displays it onscreen with the television program.
All broadcast manufacturers are heading toward doing top end production on 1080 24P systems. It makes film people happy because 24P matches film. It makes TV people since you can downconvert to any resolution/scan format. It make computer people happy because the nasty interlace demons are gone.
You will see television broadcast move to 720 60P in the next decade. Why? Because the coming large plasma displays and projection sets are all natively progressive. Watching interlaced content on a progrssive screen is like listening to 8track tapes on a high end stereo system.
As a television engineer that was at the founding meetings of ATVEF and the ATSC commitee meetings I can tell you this is a very thorny subject.
Basically it boils down to two camps. One camp wants to invent new languages/scripting to be used for television. The other camp wants to incorporate and amplify IETF standards and utilize them.
I'm for the HTML based plan like ATVEF, since it has all the advantages of an established standard. Plenty of creation tools, few intellectual property issues, and plenty of people that know how to code it.
Those proposing new display engines (usually based on Java) point to the limitations of HTML and XML as unsuitable for use on television. The IP questions about using Java with a 'clean room' version are mind blowing. Noone wants to touch this issue except the electronics manufacturers since all they do is buy a chip and don't deal with any other licensing issues.
The real issue is what will the content providers choose to support. No content provider wants to code several versions of an enhancement to play on differing systems. They want one unified standard to code to all the time. I think most of the content providers have lined up with the ATVEF plans since they allow simple reuse of web apges and tools to make enhanced television.
Contrary to the above posts, the debate isn't about scan rate and format any more, it's about data enhancement.
In the US there is debate that the approved VSB transmission method is far worse than the CODFM method used in Europe. I can tell you as a fact that CODFM is a better method than VSB, but the consumer electronic manufacturers will never allow a switch at this point.
Today we take it for granted that when you buy something on the net, you are using encryption for security. It wasn't always this way, but the need arose and transaction encryption is now common place.
Within a few years, most email will be PGP encyrpted. Companies will definitely use it and most individuals will as well.
The real question is will governments have the ability to routinely crack 1024 & 2048 bit PGP messages. If they can decrypt any message in real time, then this becomes a real issue. Otherwise, communication will still be secure.
Someone please explain why BeOS is a good thing
on
Be to Drop BeOS? No.
·
· Score: 1
I don't know enough about BeOS to know why it is good or bad. The demos I've seen show multimedia capabities, but I don't know much more.
I used to think BeOS was viewed as the eventual replacement for the MacOS, but I haven't heard that talk lately.
Would a knowledgeable individual please explain this all to me.
While the datacasting model is neato and all, the plan is a bit flawed for the home user. With the current transmission technology, a user MUST place a DIRECTIONAL antenna on their roof to pick up these signals. That means that as you change stations, you must turn your antenna with a rotor to pick up the new station.
For those of us that can't wait three seconds for a page to load, it ain't just going to cut it. Furthermore, if you can't place an antenna on your roof, you are SOL. Indoor antennas for HDTV do not work. The proposed alternative plan of CODFM modulation does solve these problems, but the FCC just killed the proposal to use it in America.
I work for a large trans-national entertainment company, and believe me we are trying to figure out how to make money off this, but without cable carriage, it just won't work.
I've seen HDTV and it does rock, especially the sound, but watching the local news in HD isn't too impressive. If you have to have it, buy the DirecTV box and see the movies as intended.
HDTV is a huge political tarball that no one wants to touch for fear of getting dragged down. -----
While I'm not a big fan fiction booster, I see the draw of it.
How many Star Trek fans long for 20 minute sequences of starship combat? The shows tend to stay away from this, but the fans crave more and more of it.
The basic concept of fan fiction does find some respect in publishing circles. For example, look at the Man/Kzinti War series. The orginal concept of Man/Kzinti wars was written by Larry Niven. The eight volume series of books written by other authors based on Niven's concepts are popular with Niven fans.
Personally I love some Heinlein fan fiction. John Barnes is the second coming of Heinlein, but he lacks Heinlein's military perspective.
-----
Does 5.2 have any Outlook/Exchange compatibility?
on
StarOffice 5.2 Preview
·
· Score: 1
I could switch over my office desktop to StarOffice if they can handle dealing with Outlook.
Like it or not, corporations love the Outlook/Exchange system. A competitor to Microsoft Office needs to include an Outlook replacement. -----
Slashdot Mirror
I've checked about 7 mirrors and the Mandrake directory is empty and the RH, SUSE, and Caldera distro directories are loaded with the goods.
Post here is you know where I can find the Mandrake RPM of KDE Beta 3.
I manage a television broadcast facility. The majority of systems are automated and there is a lot of software/database interaction. Pointing the finger in problem situations is what I get to do.
My tips:
1) Pre-arrange response times and service levels with each vendor. Know exactly how long before they can have an expert on the phone with you. Don't confuse this with general tech support response time. The first person that picks up the phone usually can't solve your issue. Know the names and skills of the people in support in advance. Make the vendor supply you with names. titles, phone numbers and written escalation plan for their support group.
2) Do research before calling. Do some basic trouble shooting before picking up the phone. Have software/hardware version levels ready to go. While your vendor *should* have this info, they never do.
3) If you have two systems and you can't decide which is at fault, ask the vendor how to eliminate the other guy as the problem. For example if you can't decide if vendor A or B is a fault, ask vendor A how to prove it's not vendor B. This turns the problem around. Usually they get focused on proving it's not their own gear.
4) Put the involved vendors on the phone together to help them hash it out. I have gone so far as to get engineers from two companies to stand in front of the problem system and we all looked at the RS-422 analyzer together to agee who was at fault.
5) Escalate a problem up higher. If you aren't getting the support you want, escalate to higher levels of both technical support *and* salees/marketing. Never forget how much power(wrath) the sales guys can bring on the support guys. In most companies the management chains of sales & support join up rather high. So if you complain loudly to sales, usually a person fairly high up hears and issues a "fix it NOW, I don't want to hear about this anymore" order.
Good luck.
Simple clear graphs, easy to understand pages.
This would have been a good talk to attend.
I have that exact quote from Machiavelli framed nad hanging in my office.
I'm glad another found it...
While all of this seems outrageous behavior by the MPAA, we must all remember that this is not the first time 'the law' has been used as a device to throttle new technology.
When records were introduced, musicians decried the invention as the end of live music. They fought to prevent music form being sold on the 'dictating machine' that had just been invented. Records won.
The movie & television studios went after VCRs when they first arrived. "How dare people record television?" they asked. VCRs won.
The RIAA went after Diamond when the Rio was released. Guess what? The MP3 players won.
So who will win the Napster/DeCSS wars? The new technologies will. The genie is out of the bottle and it can't go back in.
Big business will always rather use 'the law' to fight changes to business modles rather than reinvent themselves. They will eventually have to accept the idea of people copying movies just as making cassette mix tapes is accepted.
We, the consumers, will win out in the end. We have the dollars/pounds/rubles they desperately want. Eventually they will give us what we want. record companies WILL sell MP3s of live performances and movie studios will sell enhanced DVDlike movie on the net.
Look at what happened to a bad technology, the Divx DVD system. Consumers saw it for what it was, an attempt to wring every last dollar of out of the consumer with no benefit. Divx is out of business.
The most important thing we can do as individuals is write our government reps and tell them our views. The MPAA & RIAA have lobbiest in their offices all the time. Make sure they see more than one side of the arguement.
I see a company intentionally not showing that that they have a video card as good as the competition (PCs). I see a company that locks their users into hardware options with little control of choice. I see a company with an outdated operating system. I see a company with good design and hardware skills but poor software skills.
All kidding aside. What is the strategy? What am I missing here?
How vain is Steve Jobs that he would do such a thing?
Honestly, are Apple's closed source, closed hardware, legal brief tossing ways any better than Microsoft's? I think not. The silliness with the leaked photos would happen in no other company.
Steve is messing with the bottomline $s of the company when important new items like state of the art video cards are not shown due to 'punishment'.
Apple has great hardware engineers and many great ideas, but they treat their customers like sheep and their partners like children. If they really want to sell hardware, get their engineers to work on some x86 solutions and let have an CuMine Cube and an iPC. I'd buy those products in a heartbeat. But buying a Mac today with no memory management or multitasking is farsical.
Stunts like this help prevent Apple from creating new customers. The Faithful Apple Cabal of users grows smaller everyday.
It's obvious. He always wants to be the detective on the holodeck.
In meatspace making an individual keep a physical distance away and have no contact with a person/business is called a restraining order. These orders are issued every day in courts across the land.
Sounds like ebay is trying to get an effective restraining order in cybersapce that can be enforced.
Hmmm, sounds reasonable. Anyone think there's a downside to virtual restraining orders? I can't think of one.
Even the govt. can't crack PGP mail on a realtime basis. Encrypted email provides for secure communications. The only surprising thing is that people continue to send unencrypted emails. It's unfathomable why businesses don't use encrypted email exclusively. http://www.pgp.com/
Seems to me there is a Linux trade show every 3 months or so. This may be a bit too often. In many business there is one big trade show per year like Comdex or NAB or E3.
From one inside a trans-national-megacorp, it's hard to justify several trade show trips for the same stuff. I went the last Linux* show in San Jose last August and have considered traveling to one again mainly because of cost.
Since the backbone attendees to these shows are corporate types looking at the technology, you need to make it sensible to attend.
Perhaps two shows a year, one west coast and one east coast would be good, but too many shows = low turnout.
I can only imagine all the extra giveaways left over from the show. Time to call my buddy at VALinux and beg.
NTSC and non-HDTV televisions are inherently interlace scanned.
Perhaps your decoder card is meant to feed TVs (interlaced) or computer monitors (progressive).
The blockiness you see in MPEG is due to the block size of the estimated area. The block size is proportional to the data rate you are recording at. If you record MPEG data at 1Mb/s you get lots of blockiness. If you record MPEG data at 25Mb/s you see NO blockiness at all.
The way to reduce artifacts is to increase the bandwidth used to record/tranmsit the video. Increased frame rate and resolution won't remove artifacts.
BTW, MPEG as seen on DirecTV averages to around 3-4 Mb/s. DVDs are like 6 Mb/s. Professional video recorded at 25, 50, and even 100 Mb/s has no perceptible artifacting.
ATVEF encodes the network identifier. It's up to the EPG (electronic program guide) to scan the tuner card to establish the channel order. Once that's done, javascript on the web page can request the tv: tag (something like that, the coder guys know the details, I'm the broadcaster guy).
Intel used to have a product called Intercast that did this and listen for triggers to pre-cache and pull up web data on command.
ATVEF embeds HTML and URL information in the television signal. Your computer/WebTV/smartTV then sucks down the desired conent from the net and displays it onscreen with the television program.
At the recent National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas, noone was able to receive VSB signals insde the building.
COFDM not only was receivable inside, but there were MOBILE, HANDHELD receivers that picked up clean transmissions.
All broadcast manufacturers are heading toward doing top end production on 1080 24P systems. It makes film people happy because 24P matches film. It makes TV people since you can downconvert to any resolution/scan format. It make computer people happy because the nasty interlace demons are gone.
You will see television broadcast move to 720 60P in the next decade. Why? Because the coming large plasma displays and projection sets are all natively progressive. Watching interlaced content on a progrssive screen is like listening to 8track tapes on a high end stereo system.
As a television engineer that was at the founding meetings of ATVEF and the ATSC commitee meetings I can tell you this is a very thorny subject.
Basically it boils down to two camps. One camp wants to invent new languages/scripting to be used for television. The other camp wants to incorporate and amplify IETF standards and utilize them.
I'm for the HTML based plan like ATVEF, since it has all the advantages of an established standard. Plenty of creation tools, few intellectual property issues, and plenty of people that know how to code it.
Those proposing new display engines (usually based on Java) point to the limitations of HTML and XML as unsuitable for use on television. The IP questions about using Java with a 'clean room' version are mind blowing. Noone wants to touch this issue except the electronics manufacturers since all they do is buy a chip and don't deal with any other licensing issues.
The real issue is what will the content providers choose to support. No content provider wants to code several versions of an enhancement to play on differing systems. They want one unified standard to code to all the time. I think most of the content providers have lined up with the ATVEF plans since they allow simple reuse of web apges and tools to make enhanced television.
Contrary to the above posts, the debate isn't about scan rate and format any more, it's about data enhancement.
In the US there is debate that the approved VSB transmission method is far worse than the CODFM method used in Europe. I can tell you as a fact that CODFM is a better method than VSB, but the consumer electronic manufacturers will never allow a switch at this point.
Why Alphas and not Intel, AMD, whatever?
Today we take it for granted that when you buy something on the net, you are using encryption for security. It wasn't always this way, but the need arose and transaction encryption is now common place.
Within a few years, most email will be PGP encyrpted. Companies will definitely use it and most individuals will as well.
The real question is will governments have the ability to routinely crack 1024 & 2048 bit PGP messages. If they can decrypt any message in real time, then this becomes a real issue. Otherwise, communication will still be secure.
I don't know enough about BeOS to know why it is good or bad. The demos I've seen show multimedia capabities, but I don't know much more.
I used to think BeOS was viewed as the eventual replacement for the MacOS, but I haven't heard that talk lately.
Would a knowledgeable individual please explain this all to me.
While the datacasting model is neato and all, the plan is a bit flawed for the home user. With the current transmission technology, a user MUST place a DIRECTIONAL antenna on their roof to pick up these signals. That means that as you change stations, you must turn your antenna with a rotor to pick up the new station.
For those of us that can't wait three seconds for a page to load, it ain't just going to cut it. Furthermore, if you can't place an antenna on your roof, you are SOL. Indoor antennas for HDTV do not work. The proposed alternative plan of CODFM modulation does solve these problems, but the FCC just killed the proposal to use it in America.
I work for a large trans-national entertainment company, and believe me we are trying to figure out how to make money off this, but without cable carriage, it just won't work.
I've seen HDTV and it does rock, especially the sound, but watching the local news in HD isn't too impressive. If you have to have it, buy the DirecTV box and see the movies as intended.
HDTV is a huge political tarball that no one wants to touch for fear of getting dragged down.
-----
The above poster is correct, choose the best resolution in your monitor, that is 720 progressive, not 1080 interlaced.
The current production gear is now making 1080 progressive pictures, but I know of no consumer sets able to display this.
-----
While I'm not a big fan fiction booster, I see the draw of it.
How many Star Trek fans long for 20 minute sequences of starship combat? The shows tend to stay away from this, but the fans crave more and more of it.
The basic concept of fan fiction does find some respect in publishing circles. For example, look at the Man/Kzinti War series. The orginal concept of Man/Kzinti wars was written by Larry Niven. The eight volume series of books written by other authors based on Niven's concepts are popular with Niven fans.
Personally I love some Heinlein fan fiction. John Barnes is the second coming of Heinlein, but he lacks Heinlein's military perspective.
-----
I could switch over my office desktop to StarOffice if they can handle dealing with Outlook.
Like it or not, corporations love the Outlook/Exchange system. A competitor to Microsoft Office needs to include an Outlook replacement.
-----