1) NYC Metro area. Nothing is sparsely populated other than the airport ground or a park. Even the 'burbs are pretty densely populated 50 miles out from Manhattan. (That should fall within the Western end of Suffolk County.) Populationwise, some of our townships have more population than a small city.
2) OTA is for the poor people. The overwhelming majority of residents in the NYC metro area are on cable service. That's why there are no "repeater" towers for TV. The cable company looks at them as unwanted competition, the NIMBY's don't want to be irradiated, and at 50 miles, the repeater would be considered "too close" to the other transmitters. Also, its the private sector that owns the transmission towers. Those towers burn a lot of dinosaurs every day. How would they make money with OTA when most of the households are cabled? (i.e. - The financial incentive is not there.)
I never understood why some content providers, like the Sci-Fi channel, VH1, USA, or TNT, didn't try to use local broadcasters in the major metro areas to string together a spotty national network. They run commercials anyway. Hell, really lame independent broadcasters appear to make a living, and their programming is pathetic syndicated programs, reruns, and old movies.
If you can get channel 25 UHF where you live, you can get excellent DTV performance. Your malperformance probably has more to do with quality of DTV converter box, whether you get ghosting and whether your antenna reduces ghosts (multipathing), if there are blocking buildings or trees, and your configuration setup (reception is directional).
I live on a ground floor apartment, with many multistoried buildings nearby, and I get great DTV reception on the (currently) crappiest antenna setup. Reception will improve after the cutover, and no one is going to get PBS (channel 13) until after the cutover.
VHF-Lo is going away. Those are the frequencies that were auctioned away by the FCC last year. Its POSSIBLE they may keep VHF-Lo for analog TVs in really remote regions, because supposedly the signal carries farther on those frequencies. But I'm not sure how that would work out, since no one would be making analog TVs anymore.
1) Subchannels are not the same thing as actual channels.
2) Those are probably "virtual channels" as the box reports them. The actual UHF frequencies are different.
3) I haven't sat down to understand the issue, but the FCC allows certain stations in very close proximity to broadcast in adjacent frequencies. I presume there's different hardware involved that allows that to happen.
4) The FCC keeps stations from different markets from overlapping into active frequencies in adjacent regions. If they were really that "tight", you were probably not meant to receive some of them.
1) Don't discount the possibility your DTV converter box is a piece of junk. avsforum.com has a wealth of DTV information.
2) You need to hit tvfool.com or antennaweb.com and figure out your distances to the transmitting towers and the orientation to your home. They also give approximate dB strengths. If you can get better than -47dB on a signal, you'll probably get DTV. (That's my observed signal threshold where I live in the Bronx. That's not based on direct instrument readings.) Then see what kind of signal strength you can get with your antenna and pre-amplifier setup.
3) Generally, if you're within 100 miles and have a clear LOS to the tower, you should receive DTV by the time the cutover occurs in June. Before then, stations will skimp on the transmission power. What I'm trying to say is that DTV will suck now because there's no cutover mandate. You won't know for sure what you can get until after June.
I had the same experience in NYC. A week beforehand, I had great NBC reception. Then for some retarded reason, reception totally died. The day of the Superbowl, reception was still weak. I figured I'd have to hit a sports bar to see the SB. But then, right about an hour before gametime, the great NBC reception I used to have was restored. Its maintained that great reception since.
I understand that antenna work is going to cause stations to drop in and out. What I don't understand is why they cut transmitting power all week and WAITED until one hour before restoring power. Working like mad on a Sunday and then flipping a switch an hour before the most lucrative TV show seems to me to be poor operations planning.
1) The gov't has ZERO obligation to send them a coupon (unless new legislation is passed).
2) The program was always first come, first served. There were no provisions made after the fund was expended. They snoozed, they losed.
3) I was still able to order and get a coupon card in early DECEMBER. (My first request got stolen. I ordered the second card after it expired.)
4) The TV was flashing public service announcement commercials starting in the SUMMER. (Earlier for PBS stations). Those 2.5 million on the waiting list ARE procrastinating LOSERS.
Its been unofficially done on avsforum.com. The answer is:
Zenith DTT-901 (cobranded as Insignia NS-DXA1)
Sold at major box stores like bestbuy, target, etc. Its what I have. Tip: get the latest version product (currently october 2008 on the bar code.)
or
ChannelMaster 7000
Unfortunately, they don't seem to carry them at the box stores.
=====
Being a fellow NYCer (Bronx), I can tell you if you live in the boroughs, they're irradiating us with UHF. I live in a ground floor apartment, and I'm getting UHF reception with a loose rg-6 cable! Your pal's problem is not (really) with weak signals, but with multipathing. The Zenith is good with that, but he's best off getting an antenna designed to ameliorate "multipathing". ex. - Philips Silver Sensor. It looks like a triangular raygun made of silver tongue depressors. A homemade Grey-Hoverman antenna could do the job too. If he lives directly behind a blocking apartment tower, he's probably screwed. The reason why we get crappy reception with DTV now? Its because none of the stations can broadcast at FULL POWER until AFTER the cutover!
Hit tvfool.com, get a projected reception listing of all the digital stations near your zip code. They base their information from the FCC transaction announcements. Its screamingly obvious there will be many shifts in digital frequencies (channels) at and after the cutover. I also believe, based on printed power levels, there will be a marked increase in transmitting power after the cutover, in order for broadcasters to meet mandated reception range targets. avsforum.com is a great website, and has forums geared to your locality, because every market (100 miles) is different.
DTV looks gorgeous on my TV. But it drives me up the wall that my PBS station doesn't come in, because it got shafted over to the tail end of the spectrum, and power in the tens of kilowatts, rather than hundreds of kilowatts. I will finally get PBS back when the damned cutover FINALLY takes effect!
Also, because there is (now) no cutover mandate, digital stations keep screwing around with power and transmission locations. A few weeks ago, I got great ABC reception, now its "disappeared". DTV is WELL worth the cutover hassle.
The problem is that you have to be geekier to understand how to get optimal digital reception. People in the 'burbs will have to screw around more with outdoor antennas on roofs in order to get acceptable reception. Renters in the 'burbs are pretty much screwed.
Guys, stop showing your ignorance. HP and Dell have very little to do with the laptop designs. They're mostly designed and manufactured by chinese companies and stamped HP/Dell/Whatever. The design bureaus at the large computer companies deal more with QA and marketing issues than actual from scratch design.
I dunno. Hearing about alcoholic teachers keeping their jobs or unusually incompetent teachers keeping their jobs make my blood boil. The only think the union can whine about is how underpaid teachers are, and I beleive its easy to put the blame on the union when you point out how they are directly responsible for skyrocketing operational costs.
So what you're saying is that you only plan to buy three more games in your lifetime, and you don't want the other two titles to be Starcraft related? Why did you even bother to buy BroodWar when you already paid for Starcraft???
It shouldn't matter if Blizzard decides to release three games focusing on an individual race. What should matter is whether each game, with its sets of tweaks, would be worth paying $50-75 each. Perhaps, perhaps not.
That is an UTTERLY flawed view as to why tenure is important. Its there purely to protect the ability to introduce new, unpopular theories into the academic arena. As long as the proponent has demonstrated they are competent in the research techniques required to properly and "impartially" present a new theory, society can be satified the theory met a level of intellectual rigor and standards. It doesn't exist to fight racism or unpopular non-academic political agenda.
Tenure absolutely should NOT exist on the primary school education level. High school teachers do not present new research, and are not there to crusade unpopular ideas to students. They are totally subject to the dictates of the school board. There's no reason for primary school teachers to have tenure, and it obviously instills mediocrity (if not incompetence) and raises the cost to PROPERLY administer a school. Instead of good teachers getting competitive raises, its spent keeping lousy teachers employed even when there is no economic reason to do so.
Unions did not come about because of GREED on the part of the members. They came about due to the "greed" of the employers, whether they are capitalists or taxpayers. Nobody gets rich working for the union (at least, not since the '60's). It does not mean unions are devoid of other negative traits which make them an anathema.
The answer is to get the general public bleeding furious at the union, make the teachers strike, and bring in the strike breakers.
Sure it will be chaos and financially ruinous to all parties, but the tail can't wag the dog. And if fighting a strike won't be successful, then voucher the school system. The union can't use a strike as a threat. One way or another, decertify the union if it won't consider the customer's interest as well as their members.
No, there aren't any "alternate forms" of DVD encoding.
So UDF encoding doesn't write backups to its "bad sector" table, or alternate DVD block headers in case the master one gets blown away? With the current, standard ISO9660 spec, is there a way to retrieve raw data on each sector on a disc? One then could still arrange the data format within each written sector. Then if the master block on the DVD disc gets blown, one could do raw reads of each sector on the disk, patch it together as one dump file, and then select certain written sectors as checksum data, create a checksum volume file out of it, and then rebuild the dump file, which would result in the recovered data. Are there reference spec details that limit the ability to do that?
And finally, an "ISO image file" contains only the most basic information from DVDs. There is lots and lots of other stuff on the disc that isn't represented there at all. The idea that you can represent a CD or DVD completely as an ISO image file is utterly false. Sure, you can get the basics, but that is all.
Apologies, I misspoke. I meant that I would have to rip into the hardware reference specs for DVD writing. They're referred to as RFC's on the Computer Science end. I'm not sure how those ISO committee reference documents are referred to (ISO docs?)
The current state of open source backup technology is abysmal. Currently, I'd say reliable would by rsyncing to a large, removeable hard drive, and then couriering it to a remote location or "secure" physical storage service.
For "long term" backup, get a DLT tape drive, and selectively backup to tape. The tape, if properly stored, will be more likely to recover data than a hard drive. Also note, this is a few hundred dollar investment, with large capacity DLT tapes going for a hundred a pop as well.
=====
As anyone who's experienced this can attest, DVD-R/+R media really sucks for long term data storage. (We're talking 5+ year ranges.) But the latest error correction technologies (parchive2) has got me rethinking the problem.
parchive2, for those not familiar with it, uses reed-solomon ECC algorithm to produce checksum files against a datafile (or set of datafiles). Its conceptually similar to raid5 data storage. So even with an inevitable failure of a sector of DVD-dye, you can still recover the data intact after running a reconstruction. A beautiful demonstration of a datafile's recoverability, with even 15% loss of data, would be to download a DVD (or even bluray disk) off USENET NEWS, delete a few data chunks, and then run par2 to rebuild the lost chunks. (And unrar to restore the original DVD disk.)
The general idea is that you process the directory you want backed up using the RAR program (which "archives" it into a dump file, and then chops up the dump file into even pieces), create enough par2 data to allow a recovery with 20% data loss, and then split the data files and the par2 ECC files over 6+ DVD disks. (That would allow a recovery, even if you lost a disc, and lose a few sectors on another.)
One "trivial" problem would be to write up a convenient utility to automate this whole process. The difficult problem, as I see it, is to increase data survivability when the DVD header block is lost, and the whole DVD disk becomes unreadable. I suspect there are alternate forms of DVD data encoding which allows one to either retrieve an alternate header block, or do sector recovery of disc data.
A payoff here would be awesome; one wouldn't need to split a backup over many DVD disks, and still ensure data recovery, say, 10 years from now. So I will have to rip into hardware DVD ISOs to get an answer, but if someone has a better esoteric knowledge of DVD technology, any help would be much appreciated.
No one who cares about education wants to pass legislation to BAN teaching specific THEORIES. That's why they could even get as high as 50% not against teaching ID in school.
But Intelligent Design has NOTHING to do with teaching SCIENCE. Its all about obfuscating currently accepted evolution theory, developed from the peer reviewed scientific methodology for over 1.5 centuries, to make it conform to Christian theologic idiocy.
The Biblethumpers are terrified about the government indoctrinating children in a thinking methodology which enables individuals to QUESTION the rationales upon which religious faith is based upon. They look at science as a competing religion that needs to be made subordinate to their religious ideology, without even realizing that implying that wishful thinking could have relevance to what is supposed to be an empirical process pretty much perverts science.
Yes, one is able to find a PhD here and there, which may be able to present credible points which can challenge currently accepted scientific theory, but they are retards to think supporting ID will lead to an enhanced educational experience for the kids. ID is all about crippling the instruction of scientific methodology to kids.
The sad thing is the average idiot voter cannot even understand what is at stake by mandating the obfuscation of science instruction.
Rationalizations. Global warming wouldn't cause more rain in the Great Plains. It would probably increase desertification, which looks like what is happening in that region and Georgia now.
The point is, "Are things so climacticly bad in the US (1980-90), that any change would be an improvement?" I'd argue no.
The FISA Amendments bill was a disaster EVEN IF telecom immunity is removed as a provision.
It allows for spying on domestic citizens (unlike the previous FISA law). It allows a future administration to wait 30 days before applying for a warrant, take 30 days for a court to reject the spying, and spend another 30 days appealing the decision. Basically, a future administration can spy on 10 Senators and their families, take up to 90 days to collect dirt, and then use the information against those politicians afterwards. And the FISA court cannot breathe a word about it.
And how is anyone to know if a group of FBI agents merely want to cash in on sensitive information, "illegally"? How is the target of the spying, the phone company, or the courts supposed to know the FISA law is being violated???
Obama could have voted against cloture and voted against the bill. Instead, he chose to betray the Constitution. And let me ask you, who are these shithead Americans that are so wildly for FISA spying??? Nobody I know in NYC. And as much contempt as I have for "Red" state voters, it appears a whole boatload of them are against the FISA amendment law. Hell, even Bob Barr is against provisions in the FISA amendment law.
So who are these shithead American traitors that WANT the FISA law? Got some news, its not the American citizen. Its the rich that want it, to arm-twist troublesome politicians that are gumming up the works. The majority of politicians are falling in line. This is what a filibuster is supposed to protect the country from; a slight majority of politicians from passing BAD law.
You should go over your itemized phone bill sometime. It turns out the cell phone company is compelled to collect USD $6-7 from each customer in the form of federal, state, and local taxes. That ends up being 20% of my phone bill. The gov't is taxing our right to "free" speech (beyond vocal distance). Who's going to protect the consumers from the gov't?
You definitely waste money going with 1080p, rather than 720p/1080i set. But I'm not sure about what the savings/availability/quality of the of lower performance setup with really large screen sizes (40"/102cm+). 1080p still makes sense if you plan to view a lot of bluray discs.
HERE's a question. Given the pricing/standards of the market, are you just better off paying less than $80 for a HDTV card, and just watch TV off your computer/laptop screen? You don't get ubersimplicity, but as long as you're not married/dating, does it really make a difference?
I'll start by saying I am a fan of assembler programming as well, and believe it needs to be in the CS curriculum. But not because its a useful language, but because it "teaches" you how the hardware "thinks". If you don't develop for embedded processor environment, you'll probably never see assembler again in your lifetime. But you will still need to understand how the hardware in your platform works.
Its the computer scientists that like to dream and pretend that one day soon, you will be able to contruct useful programs without ever having to understand the machine (high abstraction), but the drawback of abstraction is that it will alway result in less efficient runtimes, or inability to implement what you want to "express"
Assembler will never be the language of choice for a multiprocessor environment. Even if you could master writing programs that could be spread over N processors and communicate threads to each other without deadlocking, it still would not be adopted. Assembler does not force you into particular coding patterns, and tend to be very individual to the programmer, at his level of experience at the time. They are just too costly to maintain with one programmer, let alone of team of them, or a programmer drifting in and out of a company during the product's lifetime. The reason for assembler is to use a human to maximally optimize performance of a program. The driving force of faster hardware and distributed processors is to aggregate enough computing power NOT to need a human to optimize performance of an application.
What MIGHT happen is a trend to design future processors such that the microinstructions available reflect the basic constructs of the language (e.g. java). So writing "futurejava" ends up writing the assembler runtime of that CPU. That's a feature which helps make virtual machines the popular trend in compiler/language design; it gets you closer to it.
The real challenge of the new multicore processor programming is to exploit its specific design. When you have cores with L1 caches and L2 caches and out-of-order-execution pipelines, etc. etc., you can write up high level languages, and they will run on that CPU, but they may not best exploit the features of the CPU, and frankly run like a dog. (as opposed to writing in a manner making the most used routines as small as possible to fit in the cache, or best optimize the use of predictive pipeline caching.) The idea with VM based languages is preserve the idea of an abstract language, but let the internals routines of the language best implement those issues while hiding it from the programmer.
I suspect near term, that's how the "next" popular language will go. It will abstract concepts of concurrency and threads and IPC into a set of instructions, and it will be kludged into the VM/language. Perhaps its as simple as a fork() instruction (and the VM/multiprocessor platform takes care of all the internals). It will have utterly unacceptable performance for some rarefied multiprocessor platforms, but it will be good enough for the average programmer, and thus become the standard. It'll be the COBOL of matrix processing platforms. I have my doubts about Haskell/Erlang/OCAML only because if it really satisfied industry requirements, they would already be the de facto language. But perhaps it hasn't caught on just because the platforms capable of running it haven't been widely available until recently.
Excuse my ignorance, but not just do I agree with what you said, but I think its useful to point out that the articles are really talking about a future hardware and software model 99.9% of the readers here will have no say as to what gets decided. Furthermore, the issues there doesn't really have relevance to the consumer dual cores we use today.
Unless you are a part of that elite 1% who will either be writing video processing applications, massive simulations, or advanced videogame programming, you're best off avoiding the whole issues of parallel processing via threaded programming. Everyone wants to be able to max out their 2-4 cores, but the reality is that you're going to quadruple your development time in bugs, and potentially make your computer less stable running your damn app.
There is already a paradigm for utilizing these multi-core CPUs. Threaded, distributed OS, AND using a Virtual Machine based language like java, to do your application development (I'll be checking out C#. It should be interesting to see if Perl6 can exploit the multi-core, multiprocessing platforms.) VM languages are designed to primitively take advantage of multiprocessing, in a herky-jerky way, while minimizing the active involvement by the programmer to implement those details.
You want to develop faster programs in shorter amounts of time? Focus more on basic algorithms and design, rather than threaded code. Threaded code is probably the assembler language programming of the 21st century.
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1) NYC Metro area. Nothing is sparsely populated other than the airport ground or a park. Even the 'burbs are pretty densely populated 50 miles out from Manhattan. (That should fall within the Western end of Suffolk County.) Populationwise, some of our townships have more population than a small city.
2) OTA is for the poor people. The overwhelming majority of residents in the NYC metro area are on cable service. That's why there are no "repeater" towers for TV. The cable company looks at them as unwanted competition, the NIMBY's don't want to be irradiated, and at 50 miles, the repeater would be considered "too close" to the other transmitters. Also, its the private sector that owns the transmission towers. Those towers burn a lot of dinosaurs every day. How would they make money with OTA when most of the households are cabled? (i.e. - The financial incentive is not there.)
I never understood why some content providers, like the Sci-Fi channel, VH1, USA, or TNT, didn't try to use local broadcasters in the major metro areas to string together a spotty national network. They run commercials anyway. Hell, really lame independent broadcasters appear to make a living, and their programming is pathetic syndicated programs, reruns, and old movies.
If you can get channel 25 UHF where you live, you can get excellent DTV performance. Your malperformance probably has more to do with quality of DTV converter box, whether you get ghosting and whether your antenna reduces ghosts (multipathing), if there are blocking buildings or trees, and your configuration setup (reception is directional).
I live on a ground floor apartment, with many multistoried buildings nearby, and I get great DTV reception on the (currently) crappiest antenna setup. Reception will improve after the cutover, and no one is going to get PBS (channel 13) until after the cutover.
25mi is not that far away. It may be TOO far away to use an indoor bowtie or loop.
1) You may get reception after the cutover. Most stations will be boosting their transmission power.
2) There may be other factors involved. (You're on the ground floor and there is a large building blocking reception, or a clump of trees.)
3) You'll definitely get reception with a good outdoor antenna mounted on the roof.
VHF-Lo is going away. Those are the frequencies that were auctioned away by the FCC last year. Its POSSIBLE they may keep VHF-Lo for analog TVs in really remote regions, because supposedly the signal carries farther on those frequencies. But I'm not sure how that would work out, since no one would be making analog TVs anymore.
1) Subchannels are not the same thing as actual channels.
2) Those are probably "virtual channels" as the box reports them. The actual UHF frequencies are different.
3) I haven't sat down to understand the issue, but the FCC allows certain stations in very close proximity to broadcast in adjacent frequencies. I presume there's different hardware involved that allows that to happen.
4) The FCC keeps stations from different markets from overlapping into active frequencies in adjacent regions. If they were really that "tight", you were probably not meant to receive some of them.
1) Don't discount the possibility your DTV converter box is a piece of junk. avsforum.com has a wealth of DTV information.
2) You need to hit tvfool.com or antennaweb.com and figure out your distances to the transmitting towers and the orientation to your home. They also give approximate dB strengths. If you can get better than -47dB on a signal, you'll probably get DTV. (That's my observed signal threshold where I live in the Bronx. That's not based on direct instrument readings.) Then see what kind of signal strength you can get with your antenna and pre-amplifier setup.
3) Generally, if you're within 100 miles and have a clear LOS to the tower, you should receive DTV by the time the cutover occurs in June. Before then, stations will skimp on the transmission power. What I'm trying to say is that DTV will suck now because there's no cutover mandate. You won't know for sure what you can get until after June.
I had the same experience in NYC. A week beforehand, I had great NBC reception. Then for some retarded reason, reception totally died. The day of the Superbowl, reception was still weak. I figured I'd have to hit a sports bar to see the SB. But then, right about an hour before gametime, the great NBC reception I used to have was restored. Its maintained that great reception since.
I understand that antenna work is going to cause stations to drop in and out. What I don't understand is why they cut transmitting power all week and WAITED until one hour before restoring power. Working like mad on a Sunday and then flipping a switch an hour before the most lucrative TV show seems to me to be poor operations planning.
1) The gov't has ZERO obligation to send them a coupon (unless new legislation is passed).
2) The program was always first come, first served. There were no provisions made after the fund was expended. They snoozed, they losed.
3) I was still able to order and get a coupon card in early DECEMBER. (My first request got stolen. I ordered the second card after it expired.)
4) The TV was flashing public service announcement commercials starting in the SUMMER. (Earlier for PBS stations). Those 2.5 million on the waiting list ARE procrastinating LOSERS.
Its been unofficially done on avsforum.com. The answer is:
Zenith DTT-901 (cobranded as Insignia NS-DXA1)
Sold at major box stores like bestbuy, target, etc. Its what I have. Tip: get the latest version product (currently october 2008 on the bar code.)
or
ChannelMaster 7000
Unfortunately, they don't seem to carry them at the box stores.
=====
Being a fellow NYCer (Bronx), I can tell you if you live in the boroughs, they're irradiating us with UHF. I live in a ground floor apartment, and I'm getting UHF reception with a loose rg-6 cable! Your pal's problem is not (really) with weak signals, but with multipathing. The Zenith is good with that, but he's best off getting an antenna designed to ameliorate "multipathing".
ex. - Philips Silver Sensor. It looks like a triangular raygun made of silver tongue depressors. A homemade Grey-Hoverman antenna could do the job too. If he lives directly behind a blocking apartment tower, he's probably screwed. The reason why we get crappy reception with DTV now? Its because none of the stations can broadcast at FULL POWER until AFTER the cutover!
Hit tvfool.com, get a projected reception listing of all the digital stations near your zip code. They base their information from the FCC transaction announcements. Its screamingly obvious there will be many shifts in digital frequencies (channels) at and after the cutover. I also believe, based on printed power levels, there will be a marked increase in transmitting power after the cutover, in order for broadcasters to meet mandated reception range targets. avsforum.com is a great website, and has forums geared to your locality, because every market (100 miles) is different.
DTV looks gorgeous on my TV. But it drives me up the wall that my PBS station doesn't come in, because it got shafted over to the tail end of the spectrum, and power in the tens of kilowatts, rather than hundreds of kilowatts. I will finally get PBS back when the damned cutover FINALLY takes effect!
Also, because there is (now) no cutover mandate, digital stations keep screwing around with power and transmission locations. A few weeks ago, I got great ABC reception, now its "disappeared". DTV is WELL worth the cutover hassle.
The problem is that you have to be geekier to understand how to get optimal digital reception. People in the 'burbs will have to screw around more with outdoor antennas on roofs in order to get acceptable reception. Renters in the 'burbs are pretty much screwed.
Guys, stop showing your ignorance. HP and Dell have very little to do with the laptop designs. They're mostly designed and manufactured by chinese companies and stamped HP/Dell/Whatever. The design bureaus at the large computer companies deal more with QA and marketing issues than actual from scratch design.
I dunno. Hearing about alcoholic teachers keeping their jobs or unusually incompetent teachers keeping their jobs make my blood boil. The only think the union can whine about is how underpaid teachers are, and I beleive its easy to put the blame on the union when you point out how they are directly responsible for skyrocketing operational costs.
So what you're saying is that you only plan to buy three more games in your lifetime, and you don't want the other two titles to be Starcraft related? Why did you even bother to buy BroodWar when you already paid for Starcraft???
It shouldn't matter if Blizzard decides to release three games focusing on an individual race. What should matter is whether each game, with its sets of tweaks, would be worth paying $50-75 each. Perhaps, perhaps not.
That is an UTTERLY flawed view as to why tenure is important. Its there purely to protect the ability to introduce new, unpopular theories into the academic arena. As long as the proponent has demonstrated they are competent in the research techniques required to properly and "impartially" present a new theory, society can be satified the theory met a level of intellectual rigor and standards. It doesn't exist to fight racism or unpopular non-academic political agenda.
Tenure absolutely should NOT exist on the primary school education level. High school teachers do not present new research, and are not there to crusade unpopular ideas to students. They are totally subject to the dictates of the school board. There's no reason for primary school teachers to have tenure, and it obviously instills mediocrity (if not incompetence) and raises the cost to PROPERLY administer a school. Instead of good teachers getting competitive raises, its spent keeping lousy teachers employed even when there is no economic reason to do so.
Unions did not come about because of GREED on the part of the members. They came about due to the "greed" of the employers, whether they are capitalists or taxpayers. Nobody gets rich working for the union (at least, not since the '60's). It does not mean unions are devoid of other negative traits which make them an anathema.
The answer is to get the general public bleeding furious at the union, make the teachers strike, and bring in the strike breakers.
Sure it will be chaos and financially ruinous to all parties, but the tail can't wag the dog. And if fighting a strike won't be successful, then voucher the school system. The union can't use a strike as a threat. One way or another, decertify the union if it won't consider the customer's interest as well as their members.
So UDF encoding doesn't write backups to its "bad sector" table, or alternate DVD block headers in case the master one gets blown away?
With the current, standard ISO9660 spec, is there a way to retrieve raw data on each sector on a disc? One then could still arrange the data format within each written sector. Then if the master block on the DVD disc gets blown, one could do raw reads of each sector on the disk, patch it together as one dump file, and then select certain written sectors as checksum data, create a checksum volume file out of it, and then rebuild the dump file, which would result in the recovered data.
Are there reference spec details that limit the ability to do that?
Apologies, I misspoke. I meant that I would have to rip into the hardware reference specs for DVD writing. They're referred to as RFC's on the Computer Science end. I'm not sure how those ISO committee reference documents are referred to (ISO docs?)
The current state of open source backup technology is abysmal. Currently, I'd say reliable would by rsyncing to a large, removeable hard drive, and then couriering it to a remote location or "secure" physical storage service.
For "long term" backup, get a DLT tape drive, and selectively backup to tape. The tape, if properly stored, will be more likely to recover data than a hard drive. Also note, this is a few hundred dollar investment, with large capacity DLT tapes going for a hundred a pop as well.
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As anyone who's experienced this can attest, DVD-R/+R media really sucks for long term data storage. (We're talking 5+ year ranges.) But the latest error correction technologies (parchive2) has got me rethinking the problem.
parchive2, for those not familiar with it, uses reed-solomon ECC algorithm to produce checksum files against a datafile (or set of datafiles). Its conceptually similar to raid5 data storage. So even with an inevitable failure of a sector of DVD-dye, you can still recover the data intact after running a reconstruction. A beautiful demonstration of a datafile's recoverability, with even 15% loss of data, would be to download a DVD (or even bluray disk) off USENET NEWS, delete a few data chunks, and then run par2 to rebuild the lost chunks. (And unrar to restore the original DVD disk.)
The general idea is that you process the directory you want backed up using the RAR program (which "archives" it into a dump file, and then chops up the dump file into even pieces), create enough par2 data to allow a recovery with 20% data loss, and then split the data files and the par2 ECC files over 6+ DVD disks. (That would allow a recovery, even if you lost a disc, and lose a few sectors on another.)
One "trivial" problem would be to write up a convenient utility to automate this whole process. The difficult problem, as I see it, is to increase data survivability when the DVD header block is lost, and the whole DVD disk becomes unreadable. I suspect there are alternate forms of DVD data encoding which allows one to either retrieve an alternate header block, or do sector recovery of disc data.
A payoff here would be awesome; one wouldn't need to split a backup over many DVD disks, and still ensure data recovery, say, 10 years from now. So I will have to rip into hardware DVD ISOs to get an answer, but if someone has a better esoteric knowledge of DVD technology, any help would be much appreciated.
The survey is a push poll.
No one who cares about education wants to pass legislation to BAN teaching specific THEORIES. That's why they could even get as high as 50% not against teaching ID in school.
But Intelligent Design has NOTHING to do with teaching SCIENCE. Its all about obfuscating currently accepted evolution theory, developed from the peer reviewed scientific methodology for over 1.5 centuries, to make it conform to Christian theologic idiocy.
The Biblethumpers are terrified about the government indoctrinating children in a thinking methodology which enables individuals to QUESTION the rationales upon which religious faith is based upon. They look at science as a competing religion that needs to be made subordinate to their religious ideology, without even realizing that implying that wishful thinking could have relevance to what is supposed to be an empirical process pretty much perverts science.
Yes, one is able to find a PhD here and there, which may be able to present credible points which can challenge currently accepted scientific theory, but they are retards to think supporting ID will lead to an enhanced educational experience for the kids. ID is all about crippling the instruction of scientific methodology to kids.
The sad thing is the average idiot voter cannot even understand what is at stake by mandating the obfuscation of science instruction.
Rationalizations. Global warming wouldn't cause more rain in the Great Plains. It would probably increase desertification, which looks like what is happening in that region and Georgia now.
The point is, "Are things so climacticly bad in the US (1980-90), that any change would be an improvement?" I'd argue no.
You don't get it.
The FISA Amendments bill was a disaster EVEN IF telecom immunity is removed as a provision.
It allows for spying on domestic citizens (unlike the previous FISA law). It allows a future administration to wait 30 days before applying for a warrant, take 30 days for a court to reject the spying, and spend another 30 days appealing the decision. Basically, a future administration can spy on 10 Senators and their families, take up to 90 days to collect dirt, and then use the information against those politicians afterwards. And the FISA court cannot breathe a word about it.
And how is anyone to know if a group of FBI agents merely want to cash in on sensitive information, "illegally"? How is the target of the spying, the phone company, or the courts supposed to know the FISA law is being violated???
Obama could have voted against cloture and voted against the bill. Instead, he chose to betray the Constitution. And let me ask you, who are these shithead Americans that are so wildly for FISA spying??? Nobody I know in NYC. And as much contempt as I have for "Red" state voters, it appears a whole boatload of them are against the FISA amendment law. Hell, even Bob Barr is against provisions in the FISA amendment law.
So who are these shithead American traitors that WANT the FISA law? Got some news, its not the American citizen. Its the rich that want it, to arm-twist troublesome politicians that are gumming up the works. The majority of politicians are falling in line. This is what a filibuster is supposed to protect the country from; a slight majority of politicians from passing BAD law.
You should go over your itemized phone bill sometime. It turns out the cell phone company is compelled to collect USD $6-7 from each customer in the form of federal, state, and local taxes. That ends up being 20% of my phone bill. The gov't is taxing our right to "free" speech (beyond vocal distance). Who's going to protect the consumers from the gov't?
You definitely waste money going with 1080p, rather than 720p/1080i set. But I'm not sure about what the savings/availability/quality of the of lower performance setup with really large screen sizes (40"/102cm+). 1080p still makes sense if you plan to view a lot of bluray discs.
HERE's a question. Given the pricing/standards of the market, are you just better off paying less than $80 for a HDTV card, and just watch TV off your computer/laptop screen? You don't get ubersimplicity, but as long as you're not married/dating, does it really make a difference?
I'll start by saying I am a fan of assembler programming as well, and believe it needs to be in the CS curriculum. But not because its a useful language, but because it "teaches" you how the hardware "thinks". If you don't develop for embedded processor environment, you'll probably never see assembler again in your lifetime. But you will still need to understand how the hardware in your platform works.
Its the computer scientists that like to dream and pretend that one day soon, you will be able to contruct useful programs without ever having to understand the machine (high abstraction), but the drawback of abstraction is that it will alway result in less efficient runtimes, or inability to implement what you want to "express"
Assembler will never be the language of choice for a multiprocessor environment. Even if you could master writing programs that could be spread over N processors and communicate threads to each other without deadlocking, it still would not be adopted. Assembler does not force you into particular coding patterns, and tend to be very individual to the programmer, at his level of experience at the time. They are just too costly to maintain with one programmer, let alone of team of them, or a programmer drifting in and out of a company during the product's lifetime. The reason for assembler is to use a human to maximally optimize performance of a program. The driving force of faster hardware and distributed processors is to aggregate enough computing power NOT to need a human to optimize performance of an application.
What MIGHT happen is a trend to design future processors such that the microinstructions available reflect the basic constructs of the language (e.g. java). So writing "futurejava" ends up writing the assembler runtime of that CPU. That's a feature which helps make virtual machines the popular trend in compiler/language design; it gets you closer to it.
The real challenge of the new multicore processor programming is to exploit its specific design. When you have cores with L1 caches and L2 caches and out-of-order-execution pipelines, etc. etc., you can write up high level languages, and they will run on that CPU, but they may not best exploit the features of the CPU, and frankly run like a dog. (as opposed to writing in a manner making the most used routines as small as possible to fit in the cache, or best optimize the use of predictive pipeline caching.) The idea with VM based languages is preserve the idea of an abstract language, but let the internals routines of the language best implement those issues while hiding it from the programmer.
I suspect near term, that's how the "next" popular language will go. It will abstract concepts of concurrency and threads and IPC into a set of instructions, and it will be kludged into the VM/language. Perhaps its as simple as a fork() instruction (and the VM/multiprocessor platform takes care of all the internals). It will have utterly unacceptable performance for some rarefied multiprocessor platforms, but it will be good enough for the average programmer, and thus become the standard. It'll be the COBOL of matrix processing platforms. I have my doubts about Haskell/Erlang/OCAML only because if it really satisfied industry requirements, they would already be the de facto language. But perhaps it hasn't caught on just because the platforms capable of running it haven't been widely available until recently.
Excuse my ignorance, but not just do I agree with what you said, but I think its useful to point out that the articles are really talking about a future hardware and software model 99.9% of the readers here will have no say as to what gets decided. Furthermore, the issues there doesn't really have relevance to the consumer dual cores we use today.
Unless you are a part of that elite 1% who will either be writing video processing applications, massive simulations, or advanced videogame programming, you're best off avoiding the whole issues of parallel processing via threaded programming. Everyone wants to be able to max out their 2-4 cores, but the reality is that you're going to quadruple your development time in bugs, and potentially make your computer less stable running your damn app.
There is already a paradigm for utilizing these multi-core CPUs. Threaded, distributed OS, AND using a Virtual Machine based language like java, to do your application development (I'll be checking out C#. It should be interesting to see if Perl6 can exploit the multi-core, multiprocessing platforms.) VM languages are designed to primitively take advantage of multiprocessing, in a herky-jerky way, while minimizing the active involvement by the programmer to implement those details.
You want to develop faster programs in shorter amounts of time? Focus more on basic algorithms and design, rather than threaded code. Threaded code is probably the assembler language programming of the 21st century.