Hilary Rosen: Computer, you have a problem, and it's affecting the entire music industry!
Computer: Click, click, click, click (HD red light flashes)
HR: Your RIAA family thinks you need help. We're worried. You're in denial. You need to go to Hard Drives Anonymous.
C: Click click click
HR: Don't talk back to Me! We have it all set up for you. Just let us type format C: and press enter on your keyboard.
C: Click,click click click
HR: Okay then, we have your permission?
C: click click click......silence.
What bothers me is the climate to produce out there that wants...even encourages..fast results.
It encourages this kind of behavor. That's the reason behind the Enrons and the Worldcoms and the Qwests...Quick returns.
Business doesn't care about what happens next year, and will gladly sell future profits down the drain for a quick cash infusion now.
That's all that matters.. now.
Until that attitude changes, you're going to see even more of this, the Enrons, etc.
I work in Broadcast Engineering....(tuna can)
on
Engineer in a Box?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I work in Broadcast Engineering, which is managed by clueless ex-salespersons who wouldn't know what a tower was if it fell on them! All they know is that they pay me way too much to be the only engineering person at a major market 50,000 watt AM station. I manage a 40 computer network here, do the studio work, the transmitter and all the remotes. I work like 50+ hours every week, yet I'm yelled at if I'm not in every day at nine AM sharp (I have to stay until at least 7 PM).
I get chastized for every failure, but hear nothing for (my many) successes. For example, a few Sundays ago (labor day weekend) the station went off due to the failure of a circuit breaker in the 40 plus year old transmitter plant (that they refuse to upgrade and the manager has never been to). I was called on the carpet because: "Nothing should be able to take us off the air". These idiots can't fathom that equipment occasionally does fail. Even four nines reliability (99.99) means almost eight hours a year of outage, yet this idiot expects perfection.
A while back, my wife bought me a T shirt that said: "I'm a can of tuna". When I asked her why she said that in her opinion, managers hired Engineers as if they were shopping for a can of tuna. They go down the supermarket aisle where they have the choice of premium or inexpensive, national brand or house brand and they pick based probably on what's on sale that week (in other words, generally they shop for the lowest priced tuna).
That's what we are: a can of tuna to these clueless jerks! They have no idea of what we do, and don't care. All they know is that we cost them way too much.
Am I looking? You betcha! Problem is from what I can see, 95% of the places out there are as bad (or worse) then things are here.
There are companies out there who use this 5 ghz unlicensed band to do reliable 50+ mile shots using 6-8 foot dishes. Radio stations also use it for digital studio to transmitter links. Andrew makes a line of dishes for this band that are very popular.
The consumers clearly don't want it. If they did, they'd be selling more then the trickle they do sell. The broadcasters (trust me on this, I'm one of them) don't want it. For them it's a pain in the ass!
The only people who WANT HDTV are the content providers (ie: program producers, movie studios) and their paid off lackeys in Congress. Why they want it should be crystal clear to you by now:
CONTROL!!!!
Enough said?
It's impossible right now to apply for a FM commercial radio station. The FCC has had a freeze on applications for new commercial FM stations since 1998 and will probably not allow them until late 2003. In addition, the FCC will only allow you to apply for vacant frequencies that are in their rules (95CFR 73.204). If you want to put an FM station in another community, you need to file a Petition for Rulemaking which needs to show that a channel can be put there without stepping on other stations. The FCC uses mileage separations between transmitter sites to determine this. If your petition is accepted (and there's no sure thing it will) it takes 6 - 12 months for them to assign the channel. Right now there are over 600 vacant FM channels waiting for the freeze on applications to lift. It likely will be several years before even the first one of these can actually begin constructing their station.
Noncommercial FM stations in the reserved band (88.1-91.9) are easier to get. First off, you need to be either a school, church or nonprofit educational foundation to qualify. Second, there's no requirement for a rulemaking; you can 'put one where it fits' and that also allows for directional antennas (perhaps half of the non coms operate directionally). The downside is that you can not sell commercials.
Finally, there's a whole new class of FM stations; The Low Power (LPFM) ones. These mostly operate with the effective coverage of that obtained with 100 watts radiated power and an antenna height of 100 feet. They cover a radius of about five miles and are non-commercial.
Here is a web site that will let you find a LPFM channel: http://www.recnet.com/fmmap/
Be warned however that the whole status of LPFM's are being challenged by the big commercial broadcasters because they are not restricted to 88-92; they may exist anywhere between 88-108. The commercial broadcasters are threatened by the prospect of 100's of these LPFM stations cutting into their signals.
I hope this helps you out.
This is about as anti-consumer a law as I've ever heard of! The FCC is dealing with digital TV quite nicely, thank you. Congress..always sticking their F'n fingers where they shouldn't be!
HEY BILLY...WHY NOT FIX THE DMCA INSTEAD???
But many people -- including, oddly, Mark Ishikawa -- think the DMCA goes too far by making it illegal for me to even tell you how to circumvent encryption or copy protection technologies. It makes the very passing of knowledge against the law whether or not that knowledge is ever used.
"It's a very flawed piece of legislation," says Ishikawa, who predicts that the government will rewrite the copyright law again "in eight or nine years" to correct the mistakes in the DMCA. But until then, the DMCA is the law of the land, and Mark Ishikawa is the Internet's top cop.
If this law is as bad a piece of legislation, why not fix it next week? Eight or nine years is way too late! Already there are laws on the horizon that make this one look positively liberal! If Congress can propose these laws, why can't they fix bad laws they've already passed first?
Oh wait..I know the answer already! MONEY!
This is no different then what happened to the Amateur Action Bulletin Board's owners back in the early 1990's. They ran a BBS out of California, yet were charged (and went to jail because the BBS could be accessed from other states whose political tolerance for dirty pictures wasn't that of California. Many states have always tried (and succeeded) to have jurisdiction over the citizens of other states...just ask anyone who's been involved in a divorce that crossed state lines.
I still manage to screw up some small thing every time. Like reversing the LED connectors..or forgetting to hook up the speaker..or not bothering to download a driver.
Just last week, a friend of mine (who has built hundreds of computers) built my wife a P4 1500 (while she bathed his cat). When it was done, he turned it on and....nothing.
After looking around, we finally took out the DDR RAM (bought on sale from Fry's), and put in a piece of SDRAM. On the unit came...and off I went to Fry's to return the DDR. Came back with the DDR, put it in and turned it on..one POST beep...that's all.
Finally, I picked up the book (book? what a concept!) and read: "This mainboard comes set for SDRAM. To use DDR RAM, change jumpers...."
Set the jumpers, all fine...
DOH!!!!!
So now the question is: did the old RAM work or not? With new RAM in, the board at least beeped, with the old it didn't even do that.
Hmmm.. I wonder how many of people feel that way..... Here's one more likely: "I hate Windows..I have never heard of Linux". Maybe this distribution will help both of these phrases.
This would be the same GM that was testifying before Congress in the early 70's that it was impossible to meet their clean air standards act while at the same time their Engineers had already finished the development of the catalytic converter.
Of course, I read in the LA Times yesterday that California was modifying their timetables regarding electric cars. Then of course there's the hybrids...made by Toyota and Honda.
Try as they might, American car makers just can't seem to get it together...
If Linux is to be accepted by the mainstream user, it must be easy to use. Two completely different looking and acting desktops simply does not accomplish this. Look, I realize that many of you here think this is a bad thing. It isn't. You are looking at this through the tainted eyes of a geek, not John Q. Public's eyes. Right now, Linux is a difficult (almost impossible?) OS for J.Q.P. to use. It's too technical. Windows isn't, and J.Q.P barely can use it! Redhat is trying to make the OS more user friendly. This is a good thing.
I guess what it comes down to is this: Do you want Linux to become mainstream or not? If so, then you support it's homogenization. If not, then you don't.
Of course, there's nothing from keeping you from coding your own version of Linux too you know, and please make it as geeky and user-unfriendly as YOU want it to be.
USC is a private University in Los Angeles and is closely tied into the film and music industries there. Of course, they'd cow tow to their 'benefactors' in the RIAA and MPAA. What do you expect them to do? Have the balls to say no? No way!
Why?
The phone man just left here after giving me the bad news that my new 7100/768 DSL circuit will never run over 5000. Why? Crosstalk in the cable pairs. Poor pair management.
Wireless will eventually take over....networks using cables for the 'last mile' are beginning to degrade. Wireless will continue to improve. Once they cross..and they will..wireless will never look back.
These towers ran with main beam ERP's (effective radiated powers) in the tens of thousands of watts. C band satellite transponders run 5-10 (yes that's five to ten) watts. The satellites were about 30,000 miles away as the crow flies compared to one of these towers being maybe 10-20 miles away. Trust me, there's enough RF scatter from one of these towers to make C band satellite reception almost impossible even if you're 180 degrees off the main beam.
Back in the olden days of satellite communications, all satellites operated on the "C" band. The bane of C band was "TI". TI stood for terrestrial interference...and these towers were the culprits! As a secondary service (these towers were the primary service), satellites were limited to very low powers (5-10 watts), so C band dishes had to be very large to pick up such feeble signals from space. Now that these are being decommissioned, maybe, just maybe, C band's potential can finally be realized. I can think of many uses of this slice of 2-4 Ghz spectrum...though the Govt. is probably already salivating at the prospect of another spectrum auction.
I've been inside of several of them and they're simply awesome and must have cost a fortune to build and maintain. They have living quarters and water tanks. The equipment mostly ran off of banks of single cell
(2 volt) batteries that were kept charged by utility power and generator. They used klystron transmitters I understand.
Another cold war relic made obsolete I guess..but I can't help but be nostalgic for just a bit.. Can you?
This is a problem in just about every city. I live on a tree lined residential street in Santa Monica, CA. There's no real offices or businesses within about a half mile because I live between two public parks. I was planning on putting in a wireless network in my house so I bought a card and put it in my laptop. I was AMAZED to find that it locked right up to someone else's network immediately! I was able to browse the web, and even look at their shared files. This was true on channel after channel on the card. I can only imagine how it must be even worse in an industrial area. Now I know why my 2 Ghz spread spectrum phone has such poor range.
Slashdot Mirror
Hilary Rosen: Computer, you have a problem, and it's affecting the entire music industry! Computer: Click, click, click, click (HD red light flashes) HR: Your RIAA family thinks you need help. We're worried. You're in denial. You need to go to Hard Drives Anonymous. C: Click click click HR: Don't talk back to Me! We have it all set up for you. Just let us type format C: and press enter on your keyboard. C: Click,click click click HR: Okay then, we have your permission? C: click click click......silence.
What bothers me is the climate to produce out there that wants...even encourages..fast results. It encourages this kind of behavor. That's the reason behind the Enrons and the Worldcoms and the Qwests...Quick returns. Business doesn't care about what happens next year, and will gladly sell future profits down the drain for a quick cash infusion now. That's all that matters.. now. Until that attitude changes, you're going to see even more of this, the Enrons, etc.
I work in Broadcast Engineering, which is managed by clueless ex-salespersons who wouldn't know what a tower was if it fell on them! All they know is that they pay me way too much to be the only engineering person at a major market 50,000 watt AM station. I manage a 40 computer network here, do the studio work, the transmitter and all the remotes. I work like 50+ hours every week, yet I'm yelled at if I'm not in every day at nine AM sharp (I have to stay until at least 7 PM). I get chastized for every failure, but hear nothing for (my many) successes. For example, a few Sundays ago (labor day weekend) the station went off due to the failure of a circuit breaker in the 40 plus year old transmitter plant (that they refuse to upgrade and the manager has never been to). I was called on the carpet because: "Nothing should be able to take us off the air". These idiots can't fathom that equipment occasionally does fail. Even four nines reliability (99.99) means almost eight hours a year of outage, yet this idiot expects perfection. A while back, my wife bought me a T shirt that said: "I'm a can of tuna". When I asked her why she said that in her opinion, managers hired Engineers as if they were shopping for a can of tuna. They go down the supermarket aisle where they have the choice of premium or inexpensive, national brand or house brand and they pick based probably on what's on sale that week (in other words, generally they shop for the lowest priced tuna). That's what we are: a can of tuna to these clueless jerks! They have no idea of what we do, and don't care. All they know is that we cost them way too much. Am I looking? You betcha! Problem is from what I can see, 95% of the places out there are as bad (or worse) then things are here.
I feel bad for the guy tjhough..ruined at 32.
Pretty impressive. I'm green with envy! PS: What's a lameness filter and why won't it let me list morse code?
There are companies out there who use this 5 ghz unlicensed band to do reliable 50+ mile shots using 6-8 foot dishes. Radio stations also use it for digital studio to transmitter links.
Andrew makes a line of dishes for this band that are very popular.
The consumers clearly don't want it. If they did, they'd be selling more then the trickle they do sell. The broadcasters (trust me on this, I'm one of them) don't want it. For them it's a pain in the ass! The only people who WANT HDTV are the content providers (ie: program producers, movie studios) and their paid off lackeys in Congress. Why they want it should be crystal clear to you by now: CONTROL!!!! Enough said?
It's impossible right now to apply for a FM commercial radio station. The FCC has had a freeze on applications for new commercial FM stations since 1998 and will probably not allow them until late 2003. In addition, the FCC will only allow you to apply for vacant frequencies that are in their rules (95CFR 73.204). If you want to put an FM station in another community, you need to file a Petition for Rulemaking which needs to show that a channel can be put there without stepping on other stations. The FCC uses mileage separations between transmitter sites to determine this. If your petition is accepted (and there's no sure thing it will) it takes 6 - 12 months for them to assign the channel. Right now there are over 600 vacant FM channels waiting for the freeze on applications to lift. It likely will be several years before even the first one of these can actually begin constructing their station. Noncommercial FM stations in the reserved band (88.1-91.9) are easier to get. First off, you need to be either a school, church or nonprofit educational foundation to qualify. Second, there's no requirement for a rulemaking; you can 'put one where it fits' and that also allows for directional antennas (perhaps half of the non coms operate directionally). The downside is that you can not sell commercials. Finally, there's a whole new class of FM stations; The Low Power (LPFM) ones. These mostly operate with the effective coverage of that obtained with 100 watts radiated power and an antenna height of 100 feet. They cover a radius of about five miles and are non-commercial. Here is a web site that will let you find a LPFM channel: http://www.recnet.com/fmmap/ Be warned however that the whole status of LPFM's are being challenged by the big commercial broadcasters because they are not restricted to 88-92; they may exist anywhere between 88-108. The commercial broadcasters are threatened by the prospect of 100's of these LPFM stations cutting into their signals. I hope this helps you out.
Which is what I've seen at the cellular 'flagpoles' in our neighborhood. Three side by side by the way...
After all, in this post 9-11 time, who would object to a big flag flying atop a big flag pole?
This is about as anti-consumer a law as I've ever heard of! The FCC is dealing with digital TV quite nicely, thank you. Congress..always sticking their F'n fingers where they shouldn't be! HEY BILLY...WHY NOT FIX THE DMCA INSTEAD???
But many people -- including, oddly, Mark Ishikawa -- think the DMCA goes too far by making it illegal for me to even tell you how to circumvent encryption or copy protection technologies. It makes the very passing of knowledge against the law whether or not that knowledge is ever used. "It's a very flawed piece of legislation," says Ishikawa, who predicts that the government will rewrite the copyright law again "in eight or nine years" to correct the mistakes in the DMCA. But until then, the DMCA is the law of the land, and Mark Ishikawa is the Internet's top cop. If this law is as bad a piece of legislation, why not fix it next week? Eight or nine years is way too late! Already there are laws on the horizon that make this one look positively liberal! If Congress can propose these laws, why can't they fix bad laws they've already passed first? Oh wait..I know the answer already! MONEY!
This is no different then what happened to the Amateur Action Bulletin Board's owners back in the early 1990's. They ran a BBS out of California, yet were charged (and went to jail because the BBS could be accessed from other states whose political tolerance for dirty pictures wasn't that of California.
Many states have always tried (and succeeded) to have jurisdiction over the citizens of other states...just ask anyone who's been involved in a divorce that crossed state lines.
In essence, they're putting additional capacity in quadrature. How clever! Memory that shares technology with NTSC color television....
I still manage to screw up some small thing every time. Like reversing the LED connectors..or forgetting to hook up the speaker..or not bothering to download a driver. Just last week, a friend of mine (who has built hundreds of computers) built my wife a P4 1500 (while she bathed his cat). When it was done, he turned it on and....nothing. After looking around, we finally took out the DDR RAM (bought on sale from Fry's), and put in a piece of SDRAM. On the unit came...and off I went to Fry's to return the DDR. Came back with the DDR, put it in and turned it on..one POST beep...that's all. Finally, I picked up the book (book? what a concept!) and read: "This mainboard comes set for SDRAM. To use DDR RAM, change jumpers...." Set the jumpers, all fine... DOH!!!!! So now the question is: did the old RAM work or not? With new RAM in, the board at least beeped, with the old it didn't even do that.
Hmmm..
I wonder how many of people feel that way.....
Here's one more likely: "I hate Windows..I have never heard of Linux".
Maybe this distribution will help both of these phrases.
This would be the same GM that was testifying before Congress in the early 70's that it was impossible to meet their clean air standards act while at the same time their Engineers had already finished the development of the catalytic converter. Of course, I read in the LA Times yesterday that California was modifying their timetables regarding electric cars. Then of course there's the hybrids...made by Toyota and Honda. Try as they might, American car makers just can't seem to get it together...
If Linux is to be accepted by the mainstream user, it must be easy to use. Two completely different looking and acting desktops simply does not accomplish this. Look, I realize that many of you here think this is a bad thing. It isn't. You are looking at this through the tainted eyes of a geek, not John Q. Public's eyes. Right now, Linux is a difficult (almost impossible?) OS for J.Q.P. to use. It's too technical. Windows isn't, and J.Q.P barely can use it! Redhat is trying to make the OS more user friendly. This is a good thing.
I guess what it comes down to is this: Do you want Linux to become mainstream or not? If so, then you support it's homogenization. If not, then you don't.
Of course, there's nothing from keeping you from coding your own version of Linux too you know, and please make it as geeky and user-unfriendly as YOU want it to be.
USC is a private University in Los Angeles and is closely tied into the film and music industries there. Of course, they'd cow tow to their 'benefactors' in the RIAA and MPAA. What do you expect them to do? Have the balls to say no? No way!
To sue this 'rogue P2P system' out of existance! Problem solved. I'm emailing Hillary Rosen as we speak....
Why? The phone man just left here after giving me the bad news that my new 7100/768 DSL circuit will never run over 5000. Why? Crosstalk in the cable pairs. Poor pair management. Wireless will eventually take over....networks using cables for the 'last mile' are beginning to degrade. Wireless will continue to improve. Once they cross..and they will..wireless will never look back.
These towers ran with main beam ERP's (effective radiated powers) in the tens of thousands of watts. C band satellite transponders run 5-10 (yes that's five to ten) watts. The satellites were about 30,000 miles away as the crow flies compared to one of these towers being maybe 10-20 miles away. Trust me, there's enough RF scatter from one of these towers to make C band satellite reception almost impossible even if you're 180 degrees off the main beam.
Back in the olden days of satellite communications, all satellites operated on the "C" band. The bane of C band was "TI". TI stood for terrestrial interference...and these towers were the culprits! As a secondary service (these towers were the primary service), satellites were limited to very low powers (5-10 watts), so C band dishes had to be very large to pick up such feeble signals from space. Now that these are being decommissioned, maybe, just maybe, C band's potential can finally be realized. I can think of many uses of this slice of 2-4 Ghz spectrum...though the Govt. is probably already salivating at the prospect of another spectrum auction.
I've been inside of several of them and they're simply awesome and must have cost a fortune to build and maintain. They have living quarters and water tanks. The equipment mostly ran off of banks of single cell (2 volt) batteries that were kept charged by utility power and generator. They used klystron transmitters I understand. Another cold war relic made obsolete I guess..but I can't help but be nostalgic for just a bit.. Can you?
This is a problem in just about every city. I live on a tree lined residential street in Santa Monica, CA. There's no real offices or businesses within about a half mile because I live between two public parks. I was planning on putting in a wireless network in my house so I bought a card and put it in my laptop. I was AMAZED to find that it locked right up to someone else's network immediately! I was able to browse the web, and even look at their shared files. This was true on channel after channel on the card. I can only imagine how it must be even worse in an industrial area. Now I know why my 2 Ghz spread spectrum phone has such poor range.