The problem with using the Vesa or other OSS drivers is that they don't support proprietary features of some NVidia cards, like accelerated MPEG-2 decoding. If you're trying to use an older set of hardware for your STB (like an older Celeron, or something else that can be easily passively cooled), and have a TV tuner card that records to MPEG-2 (like the WinTV PVR 150/350 series) this is a major issue. Offloading the decompression to the GPU saves a lot of CPU cycles.
If there are OSS drivers that support these features, then I'll agree with you that there's no reason to screw around with the NVidia binary ones, but every piece of documentation I've read says that you are better off using the Nvidia drivers with an Nvidia card, in order to get good video performance.
I think when he was talking about a "USB remote" earlier in his comment, he meant an RF-based wireless remote. The Harmony 890 is one like this. It has a base station which is a RF receiver and IR transmitter, so you can use the remote anywhere in a 100' radius and the base station will relay the remote's commands to the appropriate device via IR.
So it's basically: [Remote] -> RF -> [Base Station] -> IR -> [Device]
I've never used the Harmony series, but they also have USB interfaces, for programming. Maybe there are even some where you can plug the receiver directly into a compatible device using USB, and skip the IR step (not sure if they work like that though).
How, other than being based on Fedora, is this any different from KnoppMyth? It runs as a LiveCD and will then (if you want it to) install itself onto your hard drive, doing all the requisite steps.
I'm not panning MythDora, but it just doesn't seem totally unique, unless I'm missing some critical thing about it.
You should read the OTARD rules carefully; you may be entitled to put one on the roof, assuming that you do it to code, if no place on your property is suitable. The FCC rules are pretty clear that HUAs and other regulatory bodies (historic commissions, etc.) can restrict the places you can put up antennas, but their restrictions have to be as minimalist as possible, and can't have the effect of completely prohibiting you from putting up an allowed antenna.
You may have to get a little adversarial with the condo association to get them to back down -- based on my experience, condo and HUA boards are filled with little people who like the smell of power over others -- but sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. You have FCC rules -- which carry the weight of Federal Law -- on your side. How often can you say that?
There is also a link on the linked site where you can submit a complaint to the FCC if someone is prohibiting you from exercising your rights under the OTARD rules. You might have to bitch and moan a little to the FCC to get them to do anything (the FCC definitely follows the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" philosophy, trust me I've dealt with them in other capacities) but you might be able to let them do the intimidation for you.
There aren't too many times when a 'little guy' can have the law on his side versus entities like condo boards, HUA's, and landlords; you might as well relish the opportunity to stick this one to them.
It's interesting that this topic came up on Slashdot. Earlier today I was reading a question on Ask Metafilter about this very site, regarding downloading some of their files as PDFs.
It seems as though they present the PDFs using some sort of weird PHP interface that discourages downloading and saving them.
It's also worth pointing out that the scores are not really 'free' in the free-software sense, they're released under a fairly restrictive license that they are claiming applies to the scanned images of the scores, independent of the scores themselves (which should be in the public domain). I tend to agree with the MeFi-er that this claim is spurious, at least in the U.S., since simply scanning a document isn't enough of a creative act to put it under a new copyright. It seems more like a collection of recipes or other non-copyrightable or public domain material.
At any rate, it would be interesting to see if Slashdotters can have any more success figuring out a way to download the PDF files than the folks on MeFi did.
Yes, they basically cut or otherwise remove the copper wires going into your house, so once you switch, you can never go back to DSL. They seem to think this is acceptable because they offer the same prices on POTS service delivered over fiber as POTS delivered over copper, but you're SOL if you want copper-based internet.
Frankly this alone would be enough to keep me from switching. I would love fiber internet and maybe even fiber TV, but I want those copper wires still going into my house Just In Case.
I feel like their policy ought to be illegal in some way, but I haven't seen the lawyers bite on it yet, so maybe they can do it. I think they claim to own the wires right up until they enter your house, so they can take them down if they want.
Although you didn't say whether your inability to have a dish was a result of geography/location or a landlord, if it's the latter, you might be able to show them that they cannot legally prohibit you from installing a small-dish system. A lot of landlords don't know this, and think that they can just tell tenants that they can't put one up. Unless you're living in a historic area, or there are particular safety reasons for not installing one, you have the right to put one up. The landlord can say that you can't drill into or damage the building, so you might need to get creative, but they can't prohibit one altogether.
This applies to dishes smaller than 1m in diameter and conventional TV antennas smaller than 1m in diagonal measurement. (Sadly it doesn't apply to amateur radio antennas, but the FCC has always treated amateurs like its red-headed stepchildren so I can't say I'm surprised.) More info and the actual rules are here. Alternately you can Google "OTARD".
Interestingly, it also applies to home-owners associations (HUAs) -- which can be even more of a pain-in-the-ass than landlords -- and local municipal and state regulations. It pretty much trumps everything.
I don't think that an ATSC tuner will decode in-the-clear QAM channels, if it's not a hybrid ATSC/QAM device. A lot of HD tuner cards for PCs will do both, but some won't. I have definitely seen ATSC tuners that would not do QAM, because they were only designed for decoding 8/16-VSB and not 256-QAM. Asking for an ATSC tuner when you want something you can plug into your cable line to decode unencrypted QAM broadcasts may be setting yourself up for disappointment.
If the terms that Radio Shack staff will understand are going to be the most specific ones we can use, we are seriously in trouble. I'll bet half the people at my local store couldn't tell you the difference between a resistor and a capacitor if you put a gun to their head.
Because of the fact that the harder you compress the channels, the more you can push down the wire, the cable companies have every incentive to push the compression to the limit, and then push a bit more.
At least as I understand it, most Video-over-IP systems (which may or may not include FiOS, I don't really know that much about how it works) ought to be a little more resistant to that, because they don't transmit all the channels simultaneously as cable does.
There is an incentive to over-compress on cable TV systems because that's the only way to add more channels. If you want to go from 150 channels to 300 channels, and you're already using all the bandwidth, you need to compress each one at 2:1 in order to squeeze more in.
IP based systems don't work this way, because they only transmit down the wire the channel that you're watching. That's not to say that your entire connection is used to transmit that one channel (because that would prohibit having more than one tuner per household, or doing things like TiVO-style watch+record or PiP, which would put them at a disadvantage compared to cable), but it's not transmitting all the channels, all the time. When you want to change channels a command is sent upstream and you get a different feed hooked up at the head-end. So each channel can take a much larger percentage of the total bandwidth than on a cable system, at least theoretically. I think in practice, both IPTV companies and cable companies will compromise on some sort of de facto standard quality, which they think is just enough to not cause a person on a SDTV to get too pissed off. That's the way they work -- they'll deliver the bare minimum necessary to prevent people from switching, and not an ounce more.
Reading the FiOS article on Wikipedia, it seems as though Verizon's system in addition to the upstream and downstream data channels, also has a separate and distinct channel (1550nm) for RF video overlaid on an optical carrier. So conceivably they could be using data circuits for switching, and then send the video down the RF channel. This seems somewhat unlikely, but who knows.
In theory anyway, a circuit-switched system like that offered by optical fiber could give more quality with an equal or greater number of channels than conventional cable. It also makes the addition of On Demand services or additional channels relatively simple, since an additional channel doesn't require an allocation of 'to the curb' bandwidth when it's not being watched by anyone. In practice though, I expect Fiber-based and coax-based TV services to sink to the same levels of mediocrity.
Yeah I was pretty stunned by that, too. I guess I shouldn't have been, because it's probably going to work -- people don't expect commercials to flat-out lie to them, because of truth-in-advertising laws, so they'll probably believe that Net Neutrality is bad, because they saw it on TV.
Unless Google and some other deep-pocketed companies get together and start running some serious counter-advertising (and just running stuff on the Internet is not going to work; people who use the internet "recreationally" are almost all already sold on the idea of Net Neutrality, it's preaching to the choir), I think Congress is going to roll over and we're going to have a tiered Internet before people even know what happened to them.
I know a guy who works as an attorney for the telecom companies, actively working against Net Neutrality every day, and not even he would say something as cut-and-dried as "Net Neutrality means you'll pay more." Everything he says is the usual beating-around-the-bush lines that you'd expect, and that's the line I expected they'd maintain in the commercials. But they really decided to kick directly for the balls.
I suggest a counter-advertising campaign of "Telephone Companies Are Funding Al Qaeda" or perhaps "Comcast's Executives Worship Satan."
You'd think they actually hurt someone, by all the Vitriol against environmentalists.
Well, some of them actually do. The "greenies" who are constantly saying things that aren't quite true, or who exaggerate facts in order to push an agenda, are responsible for the less-than-serious face that the public puts on the environmental movement in general.
They damage the cause they claim to be supporting, in the same way that the ELF/PETA folks damage the credibility of the mainstream animal rights movement, by making everyone easier to marginalize by association. Having people who are trying to do the right thing the wrong way, undermines folks who are trying to do the right thing in the right way, and the net effect can actually be regressive (as it obviously is with the ELF -- I mean they're a terrorist organization for the love of God).
I am a person who is concerned with environmental issues, but I'd never call myself an 'environmentalist' because it's practically a dirty word, at least in my social circle. It has a perception as being an arational point of view (even though I think it's the most logical stance to take) and emotionally-dictated political views are nothing I want to associate myself with.
The real solution to the entire problem is to eliminate the use of Money.
Well, we could always go back to direct barter, but have you ever tried to stuff live pigs into your wallet? Sitting on them gives you a real crick in your back, let me tell you.
We actually spend more time per day in an agricultural/industrial society fulfilling our basic needs than we would in a hunter-gatherer society.
Huh? How about a source on this, because I am not buying it. People in hunter/gatherer societies basically spend all their waking hours providing for their basic needs. They're either hunting, or gathering, or building shelters or making weapons or moving in search of better game. Very little occurs in those societies that isn't directly related to food production or shelter.
Even in a society that's doing subsistence agriculture, individuals have a lot more free time. If they didn't, they'd never be able to differentiate into specialized occupations, develop industry, write books, etc. In modern industrialized societies, if you spend a few minutes a day actually providing for your own continued existence in any direct fashion I'd be surprised. E.g., I pay rent in order to have a house, in order to pay that rent I work at my job, but less than 20% of my income goes to rent, and probably less than that to food. If we say I spend 40% of my time essentially paying for my own survival (and really, it's far less than that -- if I bought food based on calories or raw nutritional benefit per dollar, I could survive on a few bucks a day), that's 60% of my day going to other ends. And that's only working about 40-50 hours per week! There's no way you'd be able to approach that as a hunter-gatherer. There's no such thing as a 9-5 occupation in the pre-agricultural world; you'd starve to death if you tried.
What you're saying directly contradicts almost every theory of the development of civilization (from labor surpluses which occur as a direct result of sedentary/agricultural living) that I've ever heard, including other works by some of the authors you mentioned (Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, for one) not to mention sheer common sense.
How about putting some serious brainpower to changing cultural values?
Solving the engineering problems associated with power consumption are far easier than the social issues at work here.
I'd argue that we'll probably have unlimited free energy from nuclear fusion or microwave satellites or millions of gerbils running on wheels before we'd make any significant progress on getting people to live in smaller homes by choice. It just ain't going to happen. Bigger houses have equaled more wealth and status for thousands of years. I bet before there were even people, the proto-human with the biggest cave was probably envied by his peers.
You'd be better off trying to do some germline genetic engineering and produce people with gills that can live underwater, or tolerate extremes of temperature and live without artificial cooling in non-temperate regions, than try and modify social values so radically.
I don't know any attempts at top-down social engineering like what you're proposing, that have ever succeeded in the long term. The only way you'll engineer the type of society you apparently want, is if the people living in it aren't humans in anything like the current sense. You might as well discuss a robot metropolis.
Admittedly though, I think part of this is market-driven. Partially because people have just accepted that "Windows way" is just how computers in general are supposed to work, a lot of home users are frustrated with computers and would probably readily accept 'applianceized' computing.
A significant percentage of users only want a 'content delivery box' for their computer. That's what they use it for; that and as a game machine. Most people don't really use their computer for anything that wouldn't be provided as part of a Microsoft Communication Machine that would only run signed code and play DRMed media.
Not saying it's a good thing, but people bitch about their cable boxes far less often than they bitch about their computers, in my experience.
Re:Another reason to switch to Linux?
on
Firefox 3 In Alpha
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but would those people really even be likely to upgrade to FF3, if it was available for their platform? I think not. People running systems that old are probably OK with the software they have and basically resistant to change. If it works, more power to them I guess. When they want to run newer software, they're probably going to be doing a hardware upgrade at the same time; until then, they're probably going to be running old versions of everything.
At least in the First World and particularly in corporate environments, the up-front cost of software really isn't that significant a factor in its adoption. How much does an OEM version of MS Office cost -- I doubt more than $200 per seat. Assuming an upgrade every 3 years, that's around 18 cents per day per person. For an employee whose time is valued at $20 an hour that's about 32 seconds worth of time. At $60 an hour it's around 10. If a free piece of software is even slightly slower than the proprietary alternative, or requires any sort of learning curve at all, it's difficult to make it work economically.
For a home user (who typically undervalue their own time), who's not using an office suite day in and day out, there's a big advantage. At this point, I'd say OpenOffice is there. I wouldn't pay for Office on a purely home computer, as the number of times per week/month that you use it goes down, the cost per usage goes up and alternatives consequently look more attractive.
If free software wants to push beyond the home and other low-time-value environments, it needs to be more than a "free clone of x," where x is a proprietary software package. If you look at the OSS packages that are clones, they're mostly only moderately successful and have only limited penetration into the target markets. I'm not disparaging the efforts of those developers, but you can't lead and follow at the same time. The places where OSS has been most successful is where it's not emulating another product.
I work in a corporate environment and I know a bunch of people who have OO installed on their machines, but it's not there because it's free, it's there because they're using it as a PDF exporter. (And yeah, I know, they could just use a OSS PDF printer driver...I didn't say it was a good reason to have it.) But the point is that the reason they're using it is because of a single feature that it offers that MS Office doesn't. If there were more features like that, rather than just price and interoperability, I think more people would be interested.
I don't get it. If you're just going to be querying the OS for information about its configuration (antivirus, patch state, version level, etc.) why don't you just implement it at a higher level? I don't see any reason to bury this sort of stuff down in the network stack. It could just as easily run as an application-level service rather than being built in down on the transport level. (And in fact I know of systems which do this sort of thing running as userspace tools.)
The goal here seems to just be a way to allow corporate networks like WANs to restrict access based on the version of Windows that's running and the security software being implemented on the client. Setting aside how a rootkit would just fake the responses (and I don't believe for a second that there won't be rootkits for Vista once it gets mainstream), why does this have to be in the network stack? It could be easily implemented as part of the higher-level networking services like WINS or Active Directory, as a requirement before the user is allowed access to particular network resources.
This whole concept seems rather flawed, unless there's some large part of it that I'm missing, and it just seems like it's going to require other OSes to rewrite their perfectly good TCP/IP stacks in order to inter-operate with Windows networks. Maybe that's the whole point?
Actually, I was watching a program last night on the History Channel -- not exactly peer reviewed scientific literature, I realize, but IMO on par with TFA -- which was talking about the viability of wind power in the United States as a renewable energy source.
They pointed out that although wind does take up space, it's not as if the space it "takes up" can't be used for other things. They had some interesting shots of farmland out in the midwest where there were wind generators standing in the middle of the fields. The actual footprint of the generator on the ground is pretty small. Though I suppose its shadow might reduce crop yields in the surrounding acres slightly, one assumes the electricity generated must be enough to make up for this cost to the farmer. Probably the biggest drawback of having them all over your field is that it becomes harder to spray your crops using aircraft, but that doesn't seem like a total deal-breaker.
There's a whole lot of farmland out in the middle part of the country which also has pretty steady winds, and is already being used for what basically amounts to an "industrial" purpose (large scale high-yield farming). If you can show the owners of that land that they can increase their financial yield per acre by adding wind turbines to their fields -- basically giving them another cash crop besides food -- you probably wouldn't have as much of the NIMBYism that plagues wind projects in more residential or coastal areas. (Although I think eventually, those people are just going to have to suck it up and learn to enjoy looking at turbines; 100 years ago, people probably bitched about having a lighthouse mucking up their view, but now they're considered a beautiful addition to the landscape. Surely generators could be the same way in time.)
Although I think in the short term, nuclear (fission, obviously) plants are probably our best bet towards cutting carbon emissions and reducing our dependency on foreign energy sources, wind turbines seem close to being practical. Most of the objections to them seem to be aesthetic, and when it comes down to having your lights go out, or having some sort of power plant in your backyard, wind turbines seem a whole lot nicer than a coal-burner or nuclear facility (or being flooded out for a hydro project).
He did say a "high quality" scanner. While that's pretty vague, I just thought that I'd point out that if you wanted to go upmarket of the good quality flatbeds already mentioned, the next step before you get into drum scanning territory (real PMT-based drum scanners) and start seeing price tags that rival Italian automobiles, would be something like the Imacon Flextight, maybe a 343 or a 646. I have seem some 4x5 Provia scans done on one of them, and they're pretty amazing.
It all depends on what this guy's budget is, which he didn't really say. If the budget is in the hundreds, a flatbed is definitely the way to go. If it's in the thousands, an Imacon will allow for some real archival-grade scans (although preserving the digital files may be harder than preserving the negatives) and ridiculous enlargability.
For the price that most service bureaus are going to charge to scan 'a few hundred' 4x5 negatives, he can afford a pretty nice flatbed scanner and transparency adapter that will almost certainly give this guy the results he needs. Unless these are really nice, professionally taken 4x5s, a drum scanner is just going to be spending most of its resolution investigating the finer points of the film grain. Not really very useful. That much resolution just isn't needed for older photos taken by amateur photographers, and which were meant to be printed out 1:1 onto fiber-based photo paper. If these were original Ansel Adams negatives, I'll take all that back...but if they're grandad's snapshots, 11000 lpi is just a waste of bits.
Actually, for the price that a service bureau would charge, this guy could probably go out and buy a used Imacon Flextight and then sell it at the conclusion of the project. The difference in quality between a good Imacon scan and a drum scan would probably not be worth the cost in this instance.
I think someone needs to schedule a meeting of Cliff and the clue-by-four; I think that he's under the impression that the "Digital" category refers to anything consisting of lots of numbers, and not the company.
In that vein, I think we should all have a moment of silence for the late DEC and its products. I'm still waiting to get my hands on an Alpha... one of these days, I'm going to find one at a hamfest or something, and then my life will be complete. (Okay, well not quite; I still want to own a working Data General Nova, somehow I think that's going to be a tougher find.)
When you use a Blackberry as a GSM modem, the data never (or at least, shouldn't ever) travels over RIM's network. It's not like you're chunking a file into little pieces and attaching it to emails. It's just using the Blackberry's connection to the cellular network to transfer data.
If the cellular company didn't want you doing that, they could certainly ratelimit you, but generally most people using smartphones have an unlimited-data plan, which would let them use a PC Card-style GSM modem or other type of phone to push as many packets as they wanted. The cellular infrastructure is designed to give data service a lower priority than voice calls, and it's all designed with QoS in mind -- this isn't like your neighborhood cable modem setup. I know that T-Mobile doesn't mind if you use full-speed Internet access on your EDGE device; that's included in the $30/mo extra you pay for data access. (I assume if you were really abusive in some way, they might cut you off, but that's not the issue here.)
I think that this guy should send a polite letter to RIM asking what the deal is. I don't get if it's an all-over Blackberry issue, or a PC/Mac one, where PC users can do this modem thing at full speed, and Mac users get a reduced rate. If that's the case, then it's fairly odd. But more likely, I tend to wonder if they didn't just drop the rate on the BT connection because they never figured that anybody would be doing anything with it other than using BT headsets and syncing data with their desktop computer from time to time. Maybe the lower connection prevents packet loss in other circumstances. At any rate, it seems odd for them to crap so obviously over a feature, particularly one that some of their competitors' products offer.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with using the Vesa or other OSS drivers is that they don't support proprietary features of some NVidia cards, like accelerated MPEG-2 decoding. If you're trying to use an older set of hardware for your STB (like an older Celeron, or something else that can be easily passively cooled), and have a TV tuner card that records to MPEG-2 (like the WinTV PVR 150/350 series) this is a major issue. Offloading the decompression to the GPU saves a lot of CPU cycles.
If there are OSS drivers that support these features, then I'll agree with you that there's no reason to screw around with the NVidia binary ones, but every piece of documentation I've read says that you are better off using the Nvidia drivers with an Nvidia card, in order to get good video performance.
I think when he was talking about a "USB remote" earlier in his comment, he meant an RF-based wireless remote. The Harmony 890 is one like this. It has a base station which is a RF receiver and IR transmitter, so you can use the remote anywhere in a 100' radius and the base station will relay the remote's commands to the appropriate device via IR.
So it's basically: [Remote] -> RF -> [Base Station] -> IR -> [Device]
I've never used the Harmony series, but they also have USB interfaces, for programming. Maybe there are even some where you can plug the receiver directly into a compatible device using USB, and skip the IR step (not sure if they work like that though).
lemme just grab some tin foil out of the kitchen....... Seriously though, I wonder what they will use for the new coins....
Plastic?
I mean, it's not like we're running short on oil.
How, other than being based on Fedora, is this any different from KnoppMyth? It runs as a LiveCD and will then (if you want it to) install itself onto your hard drive, doing all the requisite steps.
I'm not panning MythDora, but it just doesn't seem totally unique, unless I'm missing some critical thing about it.
Grizly,
:)
Would you mind emailing me directly? If you think you might be interested in unburdening yourself of one, I do need a project for the winter...
You should read the OTARD rules carefully; you may be entitled to put one on the roof, assuming that you do it to code, if no place on your property is suitable. The FCC rules are pretty clear that HUAs and other regulatory bodies (historic commissions, etc.) can restrict the places you can put up antennas, but their restrictions have to be as minimalist as possible, and can't have the effect of completely prohibiting you from putting up an allowed antenna.
You may have to get a little adversarial with the condo association to get them to back down -- based on my experience, condo and HUA boards are filled with little people who like the smell of power over others -- but sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. You have FCC rules -- which carry the weight of Federal Law -- on your side. How often can you say that?
There is also a link on the linked site where you can submit a complaint to the FCC if someone is prohibiting you from exercising your rights under the OTARD rules. You might have to bitch and moan a little to the FCC to get them to do anything (the FCC definitely follows the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" philosophy, trust me I've dealt with them in other capacities) but you might be able to let them do the intimidation for you.
There aren't too many times when a 'little guy' can have the law on his side versus entities like condo boards, HUA's, and landlords; you might as well relish the opportunity to stick this one to them.
It's interesting that this topic came up on Slashdot. Earlier today I was reading a question on Ask Metafilter about this very site, regarding downloading some of their files as PDFs.
It seems as though they present the PDFs using some sort of weird PHP interface that discourages downloading and saving them.
It's also worth pointing out that the scores are not really 'free' in the free-software sense, they're released under a fairly restrictive license that they are claiming applies to the scanned images of the scores, independent of the scores themselves (which should be in the public domain). I tend to agree with the MeFi-er that this claim is spurious, at least in the U.S., since simply scanning a document isn't enough of a creative act to put it under a new copyright. It seems more like a collection of recipes or other non-copyrightable or public domain material.
At any rate, it would be interesting to see if Slashdotters can have any more success figuring out a way to download the PDF files than the folks on MeFi did.
Yes, they basically cut or otherwise remove the copper wires going into your house, so once you switch, you can never go back to DSL. They seem to think this is acceptable because they offer the same prices on POTS service delivered over fiber as POTS delivered over copper, but you're SOL if you want copper-based internet.
Frankly this alone would be enough to keep me from switching. I would love fiber internet and maybe even fiber TV, but I want those copper wires still going into my house Just In Case.
I feel like their policy ought to be illegal in some way, but I haven't seen the lawyers bite on it yet, so maybe they can do it. I think they claim to own the wires right up until they enter your house, so they can take them down if they want.
Although you didn't say whether your inability to have a dish was a result of geography/location or a landlord, if it's the latter, you might be able to show them that they cannot legally prohibit you from installing a small-dish system. A lot of landlords don't know this, and think that they can just tell tenants that they can't put one up. Unless you're living in a historic area, or there are particular safety reasons for not installing one, you have the right to put one up. The landlord can say that you can't drill into or damage the building, so you might need to get creative, but they can't prohibit one altogether.
This applies to dishes smaller than 1m in diameter and conventional TV antennas smaller than 1m in diagonal measurement. (Sadly it doesn't apply to amateur radio antennas, but the FCC has always treated amateurs like its red-headed stepchildren so I can't say I'm surprised.) More info and the actual rules are here. Alternately you can Google "OTARD".
Interestingly, it also applies to home-owners associations (HUAs) -- which can be even more of a pain-in-the-ass than landlords -- and local municipal and state regulations. It pretty much trumps everything.
I don't think that an ATSC tuner will decode in-the-clear QAM channels, if it's not a hybrid ATSC/QAM device. A lot of HD tuner cards for PCs will do both, but some won't. I have definitely seen ATSC tuners that would not do QAM, because they were only designed for decoding 8/16-VSB and not 256-QAM. Asking for an ATSC tuner when you want something you can plug into your cable line to decode unencrypted QAM broadcasts may be setting yourself up for disappointment.
If the terms that Radio Shack staff will understand are going to be the most specific ones we can use, we are seriously in trouble. I'll bet half the people at my local store couldn't tell you the difference between a resistor and a capacitor if you put a gun to their head.
Because of the fact that the harder you compress the channels, the more you can push down the wire, the cable companies have every incentive to push the compression to the limit, and then push a bit more.
At least as I understand it, most Video-over-IP systems (which may or may not include FiOS, I don't really know that much about how it works) ought to be a little more resistant to that, because they don't transmit all the channels simultaneously as cable does.
There is an incentive to over-compress on cable TV systems because that's the only way to add more channels. If you want to go from 150 channels to 300 channels, and you're already using all the bandwidth, you need to compress each one at 2:1 in order to squeeze more in.
IP based systems don't work this way, because they only transmit down the wire the channel that you're watching. That's not to say that your entire connection is used to transmit that one channel (because that would prohibit having more than one tuner per household, or doing things like TiVO-style watch+record or PiP, which would put them at a disadvantage compared to cable), but it's not transmitting all the channels, all the time. When you want to change channels a command is sent upstream and you get a different feed hooked up at the head-end. So each channel can take a much larger percentage of the total bandwidth than on a cable system, at least theoretically. I think in practice, both IPTV companies and cable companies will compromise on some sort of de facto standard quality, which they think is just enough to not cause a person on a SDTV to get too pissed off. That's the way they work -- they'll deliver the bare minimum necessary to prevent people from switching, and not an ounce more.
Reading the FiOS article on Wikipedia, it seems as though Verizon's system in addition to the upstream and downstream data channels, also has a separate and distinct channel (1550nm) for RF video overlaid on an optical carrier. So conceivably they could be using data circuits for switching, and then send the video down the RF channel. This seems somewhat unlikely, but who knows.
In theory anyway, a circuit-switched system like that offered by optical fiber could give more quality with an equal or greater number of channels than conventional cable. It also makes the addition of On Demand services or additional channels relatively simple, since an additional channel doesn't require an allocation of 'to the curb' bandwidth when it's not being watched by anyone. In practice though, I expect Fiber-based and coax-based TV services to sink to the same levels of mediocrity.
Yeah I was pretty stunned by that, too. I guess I shouldn't have been, because it's probably going to work -- people don't expect commercials to flat-out lie to them, because of truth-in-advertising laws, so they'll probably believe that Net Neutrality is bad, because they saw it on TV.
Unless Google and some other deep-pocketed companies get together and start running some serious counter-advertising (and just running stuff on the Internet is not going to work; people who use the internet "recreationally" are almost all already sold on the idea of Net Neutrality, it's preaching to the choir), I think Congress is going to roll over and we're going to have a tiered Internet before people even know what happened to them.
I know a guy who works as an attorney for the telecom companies, actively working against Net Neutrality every day, and not even he would say something as cut-and-dried as "Net Neutrality means you'll pay more." Everything he says is the usual beating-around-the-bush lines that you'd expect, and that's the line I expected they'd maintain in the commercials. But they really decided to kick directly for the balls.
I suggest a counter-advertising campaign of "Telephone Companies Are Funding Al Qaeda" or perhaps "Comcast's Executives Worship Satan."
You'd think they actually hurt someone, by all the Vitriol against environmentalists.
Well, some of them actually do. The "greenies" who are constantly saying things that aren't quite true, or who exaggerate facts in order to push an agenda, are responsible for the less-than-serious face that the public puts on the environmental movement in general.
They damage the cause they claim to be supporting, in the same way that the ELF/PETA folks damage the credibility of the mainstream animal rights movement, by making everyone easier to marginalize by association. Having people who are trying to do the right thing the wrong way, undermines folks who are trying to do the right thing in the right way, and the net effect can actually be regressive (as it obviously is with the ELF -- I mean they're a terrorist organization for the love of God).
I am a person who is concerned with environmental issues, but I'd never call myself an 'environmentalist' because it's practically a dirty word, at least in my social circle. It has a perception as being an arational point of view (even though I think it's the most logical stance to take) and emotionally-dictated political views are nothing I want to associate myself with.
The real solution to the entire problem is to eliminate the use of Money.
Well, we could always go back to direct barter, but have you ever tried to stuff live pigs into your wallet? Sitting on them gives you a real crick in your back, let me tell you.
We actually spend more time per day in an agricultural/industrial society fulfilling our basic needs than we would in a hunter-gatherer society.
Huh? How about a source on this, because I am not buying it. People in hunter/gatherer societies basically spend all their waking hours providing for their basic needs. They're either hunting, or gathering, or building shelters or making weapons or moving in search of better game. Very little occurs in those societies that isn't directly related to food production or shelter.
Even in a society that's doing subsistence agriculture, individuals have a lot more free time. If they didn't, they'd never be able to differentiate into specialized occupations, develop industry, write books, etc. In modern industrialized societies, if you spend a few minutes a day actually providing for your own continued existence in any direct fashion I'd be surprised. E.g., I pay rent in order to have a house, in order to pay that rent I work at my job, but less than 20% of my income goes to rent, and probably less than that to food. If we say I spend 40% of my time essentially paying for my own survival (and really, it's far less than that -- if I bought food based on calories or raw nutritional benefit per dollar, I could survive on a few bucks a day), that's 60% of my day going to other ends. And that's only working about 40-50 hours per week! There's no way you'd be able to approach that as a hunter-gatherer. There's no such thing as a 9-5 occupation in the pre-agricultural world; you'd starve to death if you tried.
What you're saying directly contradicts almost every theory of the development of civilization (from labor surpluses which occur as a direct result of sedentary/agricultural living) that I've ever heard, including other works by some of the authors you mentioned (Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, for one) not to mention sheer common sense.
How about putting some serious brainpower to changing cultural values?
Solving the engineering problems associated with power consumption are far easier than the social issues at work here.
I'd argue that we'll probably have unlimited free energy from nuclear fusion or microwave satellites or millions of gerbils running on wheels before we'd make any significant progress on getting people to live in smaller homes by choice. It just ain't going to happen. Bigger houses have equaled more wealth and status for thousands of years. I bet before there were even people, the proto-human with the biggest cave was probably envied by his peers.
You'd be better off trying to do some germline genetic engineering and produce people with gills that can live underwater, or tolerate extremes of temperature and live without artificial cooling in non-temperate regions, than try and modify social values so radically.
I don't know any attempts at top-down social engineering like what you're proposing, that have ever succeeded in the long term. The only way you'll engineer the type of society you apparently want, is if the people living in it aren't humans in anything like the current sense. You might as well discuss a robot metropolis.
Admittedly though, I think part of this is market-driven. Partially because people have just accepted that "Windows way" is just how computers in general are supposed to work, a lot of home users are frustrated with computers and would probably readily accept 'applianceized' computing.
A significant percentage of users only want a 'content delivery box' for their computer. That's what they use it for; that and as a game machine. Most people don't really use their computer for anything that wouldn't be provided as part of a Microsoft Communication Machine that would only run signed code and play DRMed media.
Not saying it's a good thing, but people bitch about their cable boxes far less often than they bitch about their computers, in my experience.
Yeah, but would those people really even be likely to upgrade to FF3, if it was available for their platform? I think not. People running systems that old are probably OK with the software they have and basically resistant to change. If it works, more power to them I guess. When they want to run newer software, they're probably going to be doing a hardware upgrade at the same time; until then, they're probably going to be running old versions of everything.
Not to most people.
At least in the First World and particularly in corporate environments, the up-front cost of software really isn't that significant a factor in its adoption. How much does an OEM version of MS Office cost -- I doubt more than $200 per seat. Assuming an upgrade every 3 years, that's around 18 cents per day per person. For an employee whose time is valued at $20 an hour that's about 32 seconds worth of time. At $60 an hour it's around 10. If a free piece of software is even slightly slower than the proprietary alternative, or requires any sort of learning curve at all, it's difficult to make it work economically.
For a home user (who typically undervalue their own time), who's not using an office suite day in and day out, there's a big advantage. At this point, I'd say OpenOffice is there. I wouldn't pay for Office on a purely home computer, as the number of times per week/month that you use it goes down, the cost per usage goes up and alternatives consequently look more attractive.
If free software wants to push beyond the home and other low-time-value environments, it needs to be more than a "free clone of x," where x is a proprietary software package. If you look at the OSS packages that are clones, they're mostly only moderately successful and have only limited penetration into the target markets. I'm not disparaging the efforts of those developers, but you can't lead and follow at the same time. The places where OSS has been most successful is where it's not emulating another product.
I work in a corporate environment and I know a bunch of people who have OO installed on their machines, but it's not there because it's free, it's there because they're using it as a PDF exporter. (And yeah, I know, they could just use a OSS PDF printer driver...I didn't say it was a good reason to have it.) But the point is that the reason they're using it is because of a single feature that it offers that MS Office doesn't. If there were more features like that, rather than just price and interoperability, I think more people would be interested.
I don't get it. If you're just going to be querying the OS for information about its configuration (antivirus, patch state, version level, etc.) why don't you just implement it at a higher level? I don't see any reason to bury this sort of stuff down in the network stack. It could just as easily run as an application-level service rather than being built in down on the transport level. (And in fact I know of systems which do this sort of thing running as userspace tools.)
The goal here seems to just be a way to allow corporate networks like WANs to restrict access based on the version of Windows that's running and the security software being implemented on the client. Setting aside how a rootkit would just fake the responses (and I don't believe for a second that there won't be rootkits for Vista once it gets mainstream), why does this have to be in the network stack? It could be easily implemented as part of the higher-level networking services like WINS or Active Directory, as a requirement before the user is allowed access to particular network resources.
This whole concept seems rather flawed, unless there's some large part of it that I'm missing, and it just seems like it's going to require other OSes to rewrite their perfectly good TCP/IP stacks in order to inter-operate with Windows networks. Maybe that's the whole point?
Actually, I was watching a program last night on the History Channel -- not exactly peer reviewed scientific literature, I realize, but IMO on par with TFA -- which was talking about the viability of wind power in the United States as a renewable energy source.
They pointed out that although wind does take up space, it's not as if the space it "takes up" can't be used for other things. They had some interesting shots of farmland out in the midwest where there were wind generators standing in the middle of the fields. The actual footprint of the generator on the ground is pretty small. Though I suppose its shadow might reduce crop yields in the surrounding acres slightly, one assumes the electricity generated must be enough to make up for this cost to the farmer. Probably the biggest drawback of having them all over your field is that it becomes harder to spray your crops using aircraft, but that doesn't seem like a total deal-breaker.
There's a whole lot of farmland out in the middle part of the country which also has pretty steady winds, and is already being used for what basically amounts to an "industrial" purpose (large scale high-yield farming). If you can show the owners of that land that they can increase their financial yield per acre by adding wind turbines to their fields -- basically giving them another cash crop besides food -- you probably wouldn't have as much of the NIMBYism that plagues wind projects in more residential or coastal areas. (Although I think eventually, those people are just going to have to suck it up and learn to enjoy looking at turbines; 100 years ago, people probably bitched about having a lighthouse mucking up their view, but now they're considered a beautiful addition to the landscape. Surely generators could be the same way in time.)
Although I think in the short term, nuclear (fission, obviously) plants are probably our best bet towards cutting carbon emissions and reducing our dependency on foreign energy sources, wind turbines seem close to being practical. Most of the objections to them seem to be aesthetic, and when it comes down to having your lights go out, or having some sort of power plant in your backyard, wind turbines seem a whole lot nicer than a coal-burner or nuclear facility (or being flooded out for a hydro project).
He did say a "high quality" scanner. While that's pretty vague, I just thought that I'd point out that if you wanted to go upmarket of the good quality flatbeds already mentioned, the next step before you get into drum scanning territory (real PMT-based drum scanners) and start seeing price tags that rival Italian automobiles, would be something like the Imacon Flextight, maybe a 343 or a 646. I have seem some 4x5 Provia scans done on one of them, and they're pretty amazing.
It all depends on what this guy's budget is, which he didn't really say. If the budget is in the hundreds, a flatbed is definitely the way to go. If it's in the thousands, an Imacon will allow for some real archival-grade scans (although preserving the digital files may be harder than preserving the negatives) and ridiculous enlargability.
For the price that most service bureaus are going to charge to scan 'a few hundred' 4x5 negatives, he can afford a pretty nice flatbed scanner and transparency adapter that will almost certainly give this guy the results he needs. Unless these are really nice, professionally taken 4x5s, a drum scanner is just going to be spending most of its resolution investigating the finer points of the film grain. Not really very useful. That much resolution just isn't needed for older photos taken by amateur photographers, and which were meant to be printed out 1:1 onto fiber-based photo paper. If these were original Ansel Adams negatives, I'll take all that back...but if they're grandad's snapshots, 11000 lpi is just a waste of bits.
Actually, for the price that a service bureau would charge, this guy could probably go out and buy a used Imacon Flextight and then sell it at the conclusion of the project. The difference in quality between a good Imacon scan and a drum scan would probably not be worth the cost in this instance.
I think someone needs to schedule a meeting of Cliff and the clue-by-four; I think that he's under the impression that the "Digital" category refers to anything consisting of lots of numbers, and not the company.
In that vein, I think we should all have a moment of silence for the late DEC and its products. I'm still waiting to get my hands on an Alpha... one of these days, I'm going to find one at a hamfest or something, and then my life will be complete. (Okay, well not quite; I still want to own a working Data General Nova, somehow I think that's going to be a tougher find.)
When you use a Blackberry as a GSM modem, the data never (or at least, shouldn't ever) travels over RIM's network. It's not like you're chunking a file into little pieces and attaching it to emails. It's just using the Blackberry's connection to the cellular network to transfer data.
If the cellular company didn't want you doing that, they could certainly ratelimit you, but generally most people using smartphones have an unlimited-data plan, which would let them use a PC Card-style GSM modem or other type of phone to push as many packets as they wanted. The cellular infrastructure is designed to give data service a lower priority than voice calls, and it's all designed with QoS in mind -- this isn't like your neighborhood cable modem setup. I know that T-Mobile doesn't mind if you use full-speed Internet access on your EDGE device; that's included in the $30/mo extra you pay for data access. (I assume if you were really abusive in some way, they might cut you off, but that's not the issue here.)
I think that this guy should send a polite letter to RIM asking what the deal is. I don't get if it's an all-over Blackberry issue, or a PC/Mac one, where PC users can do this modem thing at full speed, and Mac users get a reduced rate. If that's the case, then it's fairly odd. But more likely, I tend to wonder if they didn't just drop the rate on the BT connection because they never figured that anybody would be doing anything with it other than using BT headsets and syncing data with their desktop computer from time to time. Maybe the lower connection prevents packet loss in other circumstances. At any rate, it seems odd for them to crap so obviously over a feature, particularly one that some of their competitors' products offer.