The iPad will not interfere with the deployment of the airbag. The airbag will deploy and the iPad will be accelerated at the driver's face, at about 50 ft/sec. Ideally, this will occur before the driver has reproduced.
Videx is popular in hospitals for high-abuse keys (like Code Blue keys for elevator overrides) and for remote gate keys in places such as airports or nuclear plant where loss of a key would have tremendous implications unless you can make sure the key will expire in a short period of time or can be quickly override.
The cost is high, IIRC around $400/cylinder, and the keys aren't cheap. However, I find the idea clever and it's nice to have a system you can just do drop-in installations for.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to fit your requirements.
Agreed. And how did this poor excuse for news get past the/. editor? If there were indeed a set of recient articles, could a better one have been chosen for a link? This one was poorly thought out and argued from the perspective of "I think its wrong, so its wrong..."
The investment on the local loops was largely made under the Bell days, and is depreciated
The capital on the DSLAMs was invested long enough ago that it should be depreciated (and some of it wasn't invested by SBC in any real form)
The fiber interconnects have been available at rock-bottom prices due to overbuilding
I appreciate that I've been getting all this broadband for free all this time. Oh, wait, I pay a monthly fee for that. Hmm, perhaps I can pay that fee to someone else who won't be so restrictive? Where is that number for Speakeasy...
The gentleman seems to have an odd understanding of how this all works. Google pays him to get to me, and I pay him to get to Google. The second that changes, I'll pay someone else who doesn't feel that it's a privledge to get my business.
...with Hotmail and Groove (you can buy Groove services from them, rather than run your own servers). However, this does sound a little too much like its justified by "well, Google is doing it!", which isn't exactly true. Running hosted services is a difficult proposition, unless you can either quickly crank out SLAs or its all zero-admin. Its not something they've really done before, but I suppose it worth a try, since it will give them lots of experience in improving their admin interfaces for Windows Server 2k* as well as learning first hand the risks caused by the security holes in their products.
But did any of this exploration really require a manned mission? If the same (dollar|weight|time) budget had been spent creating unmanned probes (that didn't have to provide food/oxygen to a crew, be safely brought home, etc), do you think more exploration could've been done in the same timeframe?
No, because the technology required to construct something that was a versitile as a person for that mission "component" didn't exist at the time. Look at those old moon films with their TV pictures, and keep in mind that was pretty much the best sort of picture that the Soviets and US could send back over that distance in the 1960s. Now, if you're a geologist teleoperating a collection device, are you going to be able to pick interesting rocks (or rock collection areas) with an image that sparse and noisy? Simply, no.
Please also keep in mind the number of space probes that simply haven't worked. The count was higher in the 1960s. Had Apollo 11 been an unmanned probe, it would most probably have crashed on landing. People have some value in the loop; the question is how to best optimize that value.
There is an investment question here: if your end-goal is to have people living in space long term, then things like ISS make sense because you're learning how people adapt to living in space. Sounds circular, but it makes sense in the same way that figuring out how to cure scurvy made sense in the 1700s: after all, no one had to care about scurvy unless they were taking long sea voyages that weren't "necessary" for the people back home.
Alas, our 50K years of evolution on this planet have made us so that we aren't well adapted to living in a low-gravity field, in very small communities in confined spaces, in constant threat of death, or under even small amounts of continual radiation. Those problems, in addition to the fact that no one has ever managed a successful colonization program when you have to carry all your air with you, are more serious than all of the theoretical discussions about spacerobots vs. spacemen or all the diamonds and gold laying around on the face of the moon waiting for us to pick them up.
The problem with those who don't know history...
on
Indirect Documents At Last
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...is that they're doomed to not remember that Ted is rehashing Xanadu here. What is being described here is his original conception for Xanadu, with one of his big goals of being able to freely draw from the work of others while allowing them to be compensated. Ted has tried to implement Xanadu multiple times before, burning through alot of money to no clear result. And as noted above by another wise soul, pretty pictures and nice ideas are not what makes the Net -- the Net is still "show me" space, favoring working code over design utopias.
Some of the ideas that Ted has expressed in Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines have been implemented in other places, examples being Notes, NoteCards, and HTML. The fact that his vision hasn't been achieved in full certainly doesn't require that no one else truly understands, nor that we're just one technical push from getting there -- it may just not be fully workable. It seems more likely that the rather grotty little copyright scheme that we live with is something that enough people want as is. It may also be that people don't really want to replace paper with pads, no matter how cool they looked on Star Trek. Not saying that either of these is true, just that consumer acceptance is the metric, whether the consumers are Red-State Republicans or Modern Day Hippies.
One would think that the main benefit of open source software (and the original reason for its creation) is the ability for it to be extended. That way, you start from the base of a product and modify it in clever and useful ways. Those sort of modifications could be said to be innovative, depending upon their utility.
From that as a starting point, there are not that many OSS projects that started from that point to achieve greatness. Having OSS roots does not appear to facilitate innovation either. How many programs can you think of that started as an OSS clone of another program and someone took the source and ran with it to do something really amazing? Note that I'm not saying the number is zero, just probably less than 5% of all OSS projects are new and innovative ways of addressing the same problem. And contrast that with a clearly huge leap like Excel versus 123 (which was far more than just a GUI on a spreadsheet). If you examine the evolution of u$ Office over the same period, and look at what has changed, u$ Office is innovative.
The OSS imprint may facilitiate acceptance, because it allows users some more control of the structure of their operating environment (or at least the appearance of same) and the direct ability to control parts of their operating environment that would otherwise be inaccessable. OSS has also permitted the creation of programs whose utility is largely driven by the necessity of easy extensibility (Apache and the associated sub-projects). But if all you're trying to do is make an OSS u$ Office clone, then you've got a problem from the start -- how can you innovate and stay simular to the thing you're trying to clone? Being 'free' (as in requiring hours and hours of effort to understand how to make it functional...:-) isn't innovative, isn't revolutionary, and may not even be that useful for most cases.
On another topic, there was a comment made above that u$ is an OS company. I don't think that is true -- u$ is more more an apps company that uses their control of the OS to stifle competition. Note that when they've made their nods towards exposing source, that hasn't been the source of the Office suite. Windows is a cash-cow, but it is also the place where u$ is most easily threatened. The various OSS efforts towards apps haven't made even an echo of an impression among many of us who are easily technically capable of making the transistion.
As an illustration, I work in the professional services group at a large security company, where one key qualification for employment is being an OS polyglot. Many of our staff run Linux as the base OS on their laptops, but no more than two have I ever noticed running OpenOffice. Everyone instead runs VMware and Office. Its not an interchange issue (one of the OpenOffice users made sure that all of our baseline doc templates were clean on both systems), so I think it has to be something more substancial.
If the company doesn't want to pay for broadband, then when something breaks, you come into the office to fix it. If they don't want to page for pagers/cell phones/etc. then they get service when you happen to get the message, can come in, etc. If these decisions on the part of the CIO mean that IT productivity goes down and response time goes up, then document that and produce the docs. But don't expect to get a Blackberry as a reward; a plain ol analog pager will do what they want to do.
That being said, you might try reading Paul Straussman on technology expenditures. For most people, increased speed of contact doesn't really have an increased productivity element, either for themselves or others. There are a certain number of jobs where it does, usually either sales, professional services or management type jobs. OTOH, spending money to buy faster laptops for your sales force is also a lose. You have to look at what you think you're buying for the money.
Declared value on items is based upon invoice pricing, not 'current' real value. If you want to get a lower price, you have to pay for a professional 'valuation'.
So, since the agreed price was the amount 'paid' by the seller, that would be the declared value, not the aggregated cost of the parts used to make the product.
Of late, it seems to be something that I ask about in the interview when HR appears. I am willing to accept a criminal background check, as it seems appropriate if I'm working in a job where I have the opportunity to abscond with tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Two jobs I had required the criminal check because of either Federal law or a seperate legal obligation of the company who owned us. For example, if you work for a Federally insursed bank, your employer has to fingerprint you and send the card off to the Federal Reserve. Certain states require employees in specific positions in state institutions to have the same done. If you go work for the Federal, State, County or City government, you almost certainly will have a criminal background check performed.
I don't object to that, largely because, again if I have shown that I abuse trust to the extent that I end up convicted, it seems reasonable for my employer to not want to give me the keys to the equipment storeroom.
I've had two potential employers who wanted to do tests that I was unwilling to do. One was a drug-test, and the other a credit check. Why did I think this was unreasonable?
Well, they had my resume, and they made it clear that they would check it and my references for accuracy. If they're going to go to that much trouble to verify my background, what does the credit or the drug test tell them? It doesn't tell them anything useful. If I have a bad credit rating, but I've held all these positions, accomplished all of these tasks and my former employers think I'm great, does that mean they should hire only people with bad credit ratings? If my drug-test comes back clean, how do they know I will keep up good performance? Perhaps it was only my meth habit that let me get all those machines installed in a timely manner.
The point is that the additional information tells them nothing. And worse, it might open up liability for the company. In most states, even at will ones, disciplinary actions and such that are based on things that cannot be directly connected to requirements of the job itself are considered torts.
Last but not least, if the criminal background and credit check were not disclosed in their offer letter, I think you might have some leverage. In California, at least, I have yet to see an offer letter that doesn't list all the things the offer is contingent upon.
FYI: I'm not a lawyer, and am not offering legal advice. Consult a labor attorney or the local office of your relevent state agency for more information.
Re:Text of Proposal document
on
Peephole Displays
·
· Score: 5, Informative
He missed a big reference: this idea was already proposed by Jef Raskin. It's called ZoomWorld, some references can be found in his "The Humane Interface" book. The example he shows is the same idea used to provide information about patients in an ICU at Catholic Healthcare West.
There is also a company doing something with this idea in webspace, Cincro. Their product is called Zanvas.
I have XM in the 'big truck', which makes lots of journeys into the world outside (good) FM coverage (northern, central and eastern Nevada), so having the satellite out there is quite desirable. Not to mention that I love (love love) having BBC World Service 24/7. I've had the unit for about a year.
As to the "icky, evil commercials", ignoring those channels which are just audio feeds of the video (Fox News, CNN Headline, et al), most of the commericals are to be found on the five or six channels which are live feeds of broadcast radio stations. Interestingly, the ads on these feeds are not those being heard on the actual station; due to the new weirdnesses in audio licensing these ads are specifically for the satellite market. CNET Radio is the best example of this. As a consumer, I find the ads occasionally annoying, but no more so than listening to any other AM or FM radio station. In the SF Bay Area or in Boston, you can use the CNET signal to figure out the delay between satellite and live. Last time I measured it, the delay was about 45 seconds.
In the early days, XM ran so many promos for their other channels that I actually wrote an e-mail to complain. This was quite promptly answered with a "yes, yes, we suck but we're trying to position the channels and it will end soon." It did decrease, but you still get the positioning ads a little often than I would like.
The big advantage (I thought) that Sirius had over XM was the "NPR" channel. However, once they actually started the feed, it was this weird NPR "National" feed. So, you can listen to "Morning Edition" -- during the afternoon drive time! This choice was made to ensure that the local affiliates didn't lose ears to the satellite service. And the filler stuff is really fourth- or fifth-rate. KCRW has a new call-in/talk show that is making up much of the odds-and-ends and boy, is it awful.
Ok, so now to the general programming. It is rather generic (and the bluegrass channel doesn't have much bluegrass older than 1985 -- however, I do love the "steam powered radio" idea). However, you do get more variety than the usual local "country", "jazz" or "rock" station. They have about four different flavors of country music, which is nice, since, for myself, I can't stand much country that came after 1979. However, my point is that you can pick the era you like of most genres. And you have those less appreciated channels, like Hindi film music (when do we get the Telagu and Tamil channels!?!) and Tejano.
All in all, I'm really happy with XM. It has minimal coverage problems, even in town and the programmers choices of stations is pretty good. It could use more varities of classical music (only the 'generic' mix of romantic and baroque vs. vocal) and it would be nice if PRI jumped in with some of their programming (Le Show can be found on the comedy channel, but I'd like more). For $100/year and a single preset on the dial, it's a pretty good bargin
IF...
...you go to areas where you need fill-in coverage. In town, I rarely find myself turning on the XM unit. I usually play music off the MDs, CDs or iPod when driving around, or listening to my NPR affiliate of choice (KALW). However, as soon as I'm past Vallejo, the XM unit is used at least 50% of the time.
So, if that is what you're looking for, or you want BBC 24/7, pony up the $150 + $100 and pick up a box.
(I am thinking of getting another one for the motorcycle. Has to be removable, so it will probably be the Sony.)
One thing that careful observers of the 70mm print of tPM might have noticed: it had sections that were out of focus. This would have been caught in the rushes, but Lucas was insisting on using HD to review the daily material. Thus, the problem wasn't detected until post-production, where it was noticed but it was too late to fix it.
Lucas's conclusion appears to have been that if everthing in the chain is HD, this problem would not have occurred. Not a guy I talk with, so I wouldn't know his real thinking.
However, his push for HD, while interesting, is wrapped up in the particular economics of Star Wars: he's produced a license to print money, and the money he gets has little or nothing to do with the movie itself, it's technical quality, or lack thereof. The last three movies were largely licensing constructs: whether the movie made or lost money at the box office, it made tons-and-tons of money in product licenses. As a result, the idea would be to continue to create movies that contained lots and lots of licensible elements, and then cut costs everywhere else you can. So, you spend money on effects using cool spaceships, light sabers, and digitally synthezized characters (much better, though not actually cheaper than those pesky actors!), and cut it on the costs of printing and distribution.
Lucas has preached how the inspiration for the Star Wars series was the Republic serials of the 20s and 30s. However, as the NYT has noted, those serials didn't cost $140 million (per episode) to make. Nor, I would note, did those serials have the licensing tie-ins.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPad will not interfere with the deployment of the airbag. The airbag will deploy and the iPad will be accelerated at the driver's face, at about 50 ft/sec. Ideally, this will occur before the driver has reproduced.
Videx is popular in hospitals for high-abuse keys (like Code Blue keys for elevator overrides) and for remote gate keys in places such as airports or nuclear plant where loss of a key would have tremendous implications unless you can make sure the key will expire in a short period of time or can be quickly override.
The cost is high, IIRC around $400/cylinder, and the keys aren't cheap. However, I find the idea clever and it's nice to have a system you can just do drop-in installations for.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to fit your requirements.
Agreed. And how did this poor excuse for news get past the /. editor? If there were indeed a set of recient articles, could a better one have been chosen for a link? This one was poorly thought out and argued from the perspective of "I think its wrong, so its wrong..."
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
I appreciate that I've been getting all this broadband for free all this time. Oh, wait, I pay a monthly fee for that. Hmm, perhaps I can pay that fee to someone else who won't be so restrictive? Where is that number for Speakeasy...
The gentleman seems to have an odd understanding of how this all works. Google pays him to get to me, and I pay him to get to Google. The second that changes, I'll pay someone else who doesn't feel that it's a privledge to get my business.
...with Hotmail and Groove (you can buy Groove services from them, rather than run your own servers). However, this does sound a little too much like its justified by "well, Google is doing it!", which isn't exactly true. Running hosted services is a difficult proposition, unless you can either quickly crank out SLAs or its all zero-admin. Its not something they've really done before, but I suppose it worth a try, since it will give them lots of experience in improving their admin interfaces for Windows Server 2k* as well as learning first hand the risks caused by the security holes in their products.
But did any of this exploration really require a manned mission? If the same (dollar|weight|time) budget had been spent creating unmanned probes (that didn't have to provide food/oxygen to a crew, be safely brought home, etc), do you think more exploration could've been done in the same timeframe?
No, because the technology required to construct something that was a versitile as a person for that mission "component" didn't exist at the time. Look at those old moon films with their TV pictures, and keep in mind that was pretty much the best sort of picture that the Soviets and US could send back over that distance in the 1960s. Now, if you're a geologist teleoperating a collection device, are you going to be able to pick interesting rocks (or rock collection areas) with an image that sparse and noisy? Simply, no.
Please also keep in mind the number of space probes that simply haven't worked. The count was higher in the 1960s. Had Apollo 11 been an unmanned probe, it would most probably have crashed on landing. People have some value in the loop; the question is how to best optimize that value.
There is an investment question here: if your end-goal is to have people living in space long term, then things like ISS make sense because you're learning how people adapt to living in space. Sounds circular, but it makes sense in the same way that figuring out how to cure scurvy made sense in the 1700s: after all, no one had to care about scurvy unless they were taking long sea voyages that weren't "necessary" for the people back home.
Alas, our 50K years of evolution on this planet have made us so that we aren't well adapted to living in a low-gravity field, in very small communities in confined spaces, in constant threat of death, or under even small amounts of continual radiation. Those problems, in addition to the fact that no one has ever managed a successful colonization program when you have to carry all your air with you, are more serious than all of the theoretical discussions about spacerobots vs. spacemen or all the diamonds and gold laying around on the face of the moon waiting for us to pick them up.
...is that they're doomed to not remember that Ted is rehashing Xanadu here. What is being described here is his original conception for Xanadu, with one of his big goals of being able to freely draw from the work of others while allowing them to be compensated. Ted has tried to implement Xanadu multiple times before, burning through alot of money to no clear result. And as noted above by another wise soul, pretty pictures and nice ideas are not what makes the Net -- the Net is still "show me" space, favoring working code over design utopias.
Some of the ideas that Ted has expressed in Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines have been implemented in other places, examples being Notes, NoteCards, and HTML. The fact that his vision hasn't been achieved in full certainly doesn't require that no one else truly understands, nor that we're just one technical push from getting there -- it may just not be fully workable. It seems more likely that the rather grotty little copyright scheme that we live with is something that enough people want as is. It may also be that people don't really want to replace paper with pads, no matter how cool they looked on Star Trek. Not saying that either of these is true, just that consumer acceptance is the metric, whether the consumers are Red-State Republicans or Modern Day Hippies.
One would think that the main benefit of open source software (and the original reason for its creation) is the ability for it to be extended. That way, you start from the base of a product and modify it in clever and useful ways. Those sort of modifications could be said to be innovative, depending upon their utility.
:-) isn't innovative, isn't revolutionary, and may not even be that useful for most cases.
From that as a starting point, there are not that many OSS projects that started from that point to achieve greatness. Having OSS roots does not appear to facilitate innovation either. How many programs can you think of that started as an OSS clone of another program and someone took the source and ran with it to do something really amazing? Note that I'm not saying the number is zero, just probably less than 5% of all OSS projects are new and innovative ways of addressing the same problem. And contrast that with a clearly huge leap like Excel versus 123 (which was far more than just a GUI on a spreadsheet). If you examine the evolution of u$ Office over the same period, and look at what has changed, u$ Office is innovative.
The OSS imprint may facilitiate acceptance, because it allows users some more control of the structure of their operating environment (or at least the appearance of same) and the direct ability to control parts of their operating environment that would otherwise be inaccessable. OSS has also permitted the creation of programs whose utility is largely driven by the necessity of easy extensibility (Apache and the associated sub-projects). But if all you're trying to do is make an OSS u$ Office clone, then you've got a problem from the start -- how can you innovate and stay simular to the thing you're trying to clone? Being 'free' (as in requiring hours and hours of effort to understand how to make it functional...
On another topic, there was a comment made above that u$ is an OS company. I don't think that is true -- u$ is more more an apps company that uses their control of the OS to stifle competition. Note that when they've made their nods towards exposing source, that hasn't been the source of the Office suite. Windows is a cash-cow, but it is also the place where u$ is most easily threatened. The various OSS efforts towards apps haven't made even an echo of an impression among many of us who are easily technically capable of making the transistion.
As an illustration, I work in the professional services group at a large security company, where one key qualification for employment is being an OS polyglot. Many of our staff run Linux as the base OS on their laptops, but no more than two have I ever noticed running OpenOffice. Everyone instead runs VMware and Office. Its not an interchange issue (one of the OpenOffice users made sure that all of our baseline doc templates were clean on both systems), so I think it has to be something more substancial.
If the company doesn't want to pay for broadband, then when something breaks, you come into the office to fix it. If they don't want to page for pagers/cell phones/etc. then they get service when you happen to get the message, can come in, etc. If these decisions on the part of the CIO mean that IT productivity goes down and response time goes up, then document that and produce the docs. But don't expect to get a Blackberry as a reward; a plain ol analog pager will do what they want to do.
That being said, you might try reading Paul Straussman on technology expenditures. For most people, increased speed of contact doesn't really have an increased productivity element, either for themselves or others. There are a certain number of jobs where it does, usually either sales, professional services or management type jobs. OTOH, spending money to buy faster laptops for your sales force is also a lose. You have to look at what you think you're buying for the money.
Declared value on items is based upon invoice pricing, not 'current' real value. If you want to get a lower price, you have to pay for a professional 'valuation'.
So, since the agreed price was the amount 'paid' by the seller, that would be the declared value, not the aggregated cost of the parts used to make the product.
Of late, it seems to be something that I ask about in the interview when HR appears. I am willing to accept a criminal background check, as it seems appropriate if I'm working in a job where I have the opportunity to abscond with tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Two jobs I had required the criminal check because of either Federal law or a seperate legal obligation of the company who owned us. For example, if you work for a Federally insursed bank, your employer has to fingerprint you and send the card off to the Federal Reserve. Certain states require employees in specific positions in state institutions to have the same done. If you go work for the Federal, State, County or City government, you almost certainly will have a criminal background check performed.
I don't object to that, largely because, again if I have shown that I abuse trust to the extent that I end up convicted, it seems reasonable for my employer to not want to give me the keys to the equipment storeroom.
I've had two potential employers who wanted to do tests that I was unwilling to do. One was a drug-test, and the other a credit check. Why did I think this was unreasonable?
Well, they had my resume, and they made it clear that they would check it and my references for accuracy. If they're going to go to that much trouble to verify my background, what does the credit or the drug test tell them? It doesn't tell them anything useful. If I have a bad credit rating, but I've held all these positions, accomplished all of these tasks and my former employers think I'm great, does that mean they should hire only people with bad credit ratings? If my drug-test comes back clean, how do they know I will keep up good performance? Perhaps it was only my meth habit that let me get all those machines installed in a timely manner.
The point is that the additional information tells them nothing. And worse, it might open up liability for the company. In most states, even at will ones, disciplinary actions and such that are based on things that cannot be directly connected to requirements of the job itself are considered torts.
Last but not least, if the criminal background and credit check were not disclosed in their offer letter, I think you might have some leverage. In California, at least, I have yet to see an offer letter that doesn't list all the things the offer is contingent upon.
FYI: I'm not a lawyer, and am not offering legal advice. Consult a labor attorney or the local office of your relevent state agency for more information.
He missed a big reference: this idea was already proposed by Jef Raskin. It's called ZoomWorld, some references can be found in his "The Humane Interface" book. The example he shows is the same idea used to provide information about patients in an ICU at Catholic Healthcare West. There is also a company doing something with this idea in webspace, Cincro. Their product is called Zanvas.
I have XM in the 'big truck', which makes lots of journeys into the world outside (good) FM coverage (northern, central and eastern Nevada), so having the satellite out there is quite desirable. Not to mention that I love (love love) having BBC World Service 24/7. I've had the unit for about a year.
As to the "icky, evil commercials", ignoring those channels which are just audio feeds of the video (Fox News, CNN Headline, et al), most of the commericals are to be found on the five or six channels which are live feeds of broadcast radio stations. Interestingly, the ads on these feeds are not those being heard on the actual station; due to the new weirdnesses in audio licensing these ads are specifically for the satellite market. CNET Radio is the best example of this. As a consumer, I find the ads occasionally annoying, but no more so than listening to any other AM or FM radio station. In the SF Bay Area or in Boston, you can use the CNET signal to figure out the delay between satellite and live. Last time I measured it, the delay was about 45 seconds.
In the early days, XM ran so many promos for their other channels that I actually wrote an e-mail to complain. This was quite promptly answered with a "yes, yes, we suck but we're trying to position the channels and it will end soon." It did decrease, but you still get the positioning ads a little often than I would like.
The big advantage (I thought) that Sirius had over XM was the "NPR" channel. However, once they actually started the feed, it was this weird NPR "National" feed. So, you can listen to "Morning Edition" -- during the afternoon drive time! This choice was made to ensure that the local affiliates didn't lose ears to the satellite service. And the filler stuff is really fourth- or fifth-rate. KCRW has a new call-in/talk show that is making up much of the odds-and-ends and boy, is it awful.
Ok, so now to the general programming. It is rather generic (and the bluegrass channel doesn't have much bluegrass older than 1985 -- however, I do love the "steam powered radio" idea). However, you do get more variety than the usual local "country", "jazz" or "rock" station. They have about four different flavors of country music, which is nice, since, for myself, I can't stand much country that came after 1979. However, my point is that you can pick the era you like of most genres. And you have those less appreciated channels, like Hindi film music (when do we get the Telagu and Tamil channels!?!) and Tejano.
All in all, I'm really happy with XM. It has minimal coverage problems, even in town and the programmers choices of stations is pretty good. It could use more varities of classical music (only the 'generic' mix of romantic and baroque vs. vocal) and it would be nice if PRI jumped in with some of their programming (Le Show can be found on the comedy channel, but I'd like more). For $100/year and a single preset on the dial, it's a pretty good bargin
IF...
...you go to areas where you need fill-in coverage. In town, I rarely find myself turning on the XM unit. I usually play music off the MDs, CDs or iPod when driving around, or listening to my NPR affiliate of choice (KALW). However, as soon as I'm past Vallejo, the XM unit is used at least 50% of the time.
So, if that is what you're looking for, or you want BBC 24/7, pony up the $150 + $100 and pick up a box.
(I am thinking of getting another one for the motorcycle. Has to be removable, so it will probably be the Sony.)
One thing that careful observers of the 70mm print of tPM might have noticed: it had sections that were out of focus. This would have been caught in the rushes, but Lucas was insisting on using HD to review the daily material. Thus, the problem wasn't detected until post-production, where it was noticed but it was too late to fix it.
Lucas's conclusion appears to have been that if everthing in the chain is HD, this problem would not have occurred. Not a guy I talk with, so I wouldn't know his real thinking.
However, his push for HD, while interesting, is wrapped up in the particular economics of Star Wars: he's produced a license to print money, and the money he gets has little or nothing to do with the movie itself, it's technical quality, or lack thereof. The last three movies were largely licensing constructs: whether the movie made or lost money at the box office, it made tons-and-tons of money in product licenses. As a result, the idea would be to continue to create movies that contained lots and lots of licensible elements, and then cut costs everywhere else you can. So, you spend money on effects using cool spaceships, light sabers, and digitally synthezized characters (much better, though not actually cheaper than those pesky actors!), and cut it on the costs of printing and distribution.
Lucas has preached how the inspiration for the Star Wars series was the Republic serials of the 20s and 30s. However, as the NYT has noted, those serials didn't cost $140 million (per episode) to make. Nor, I would note, did those serials have the licensing tie-ins.
It's flawless until you use a program like Adobe Illustrator. Then it doesn't work. PCL is not a perfect PostScript emulator.