The problem with DTV rollout has little to do with "6 standards." Once you go digital, adding some more display code is no big thing.
The rollout problem is 1) digital transmitters are totally different from analog ones, and thus represent a double cost to stations 2) 19.3 Mbps MPEG-2 decoders take a lot of CPU, so they are expensive ($200-$400) and 3) High-pixel count TVs are expensive ($1500 and up)
So it has taken a while for stations to be able to afford the transmitters, and it is taking a while for people to afford the TV's and receivers.
The "6 standards" issue is nothing. It actually helps because existing "analog" content can be broadcast as a SD DTV signal.
This might have been a joke, but the truth is that right now, for good DTV reception, you need an antenna. Fortunately, digital channels are in the same exact bands that analog channels are (standard VHF and UHF frequencies), so an existing analog antenna system will do fine.
In Washington, DC, there are a large number of red-light cameras, and now speed cameras. My wife found out that the speed camera OCR works just fine. Twice in a week. $200 per violation. The tickets were mailed several weeks after the violations.
The picture we got in the mail had the car and an enlargement of the rear plate. The counter on the picture was in the tens of thousands. Needless to say, DC is now collecting over $10 million per year in revenue this way.
My impression is that there is a combination of computer OCR pre-processing and human checking. At $200 per violation, a couple of checks by the human eye is totally affordable.
POE Nexrad indicates debris in the air starting between Rusk and Nacogdoches TX, then extending from Cherokee, Nacogdoches, San Augustine and Sabine counties in Texas, into Vernon parish in Louisiana, ending near Leesville, LA.
I use SpamAssassin to dump suspected-spam into another directory. Every day I spend about 10 minutes going D-D-D-D-D-D... in the spam directory, glancing briefly at each subject hearder to make sure I don't miss any false positives. They are rare, but have happened 2 or 3 times over a year.
I find that erasing all of my spam in a "batch process" is much more efficient than not using a filter and doing it randomly through the day.
It is silly as well. There are people who are located where there is neither over-the-air TV or cable, but there is Internet (datacenters, workplace, etc.). By cutting off Internet rebroadcasters, network commercials will not make it to these people. Duh!
NPR gets about 2% of it's funding from tax payers. It's nearly completely listener funded.
The 2% number is definately "fishy." NPR, a distributor of public radio content, receives only 2% of its funding directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which gets money from the Federal Government.
But NPR is but a small part of public radio, and even it gets plenty of taxpayers funds indirectly that are "laundered" through other entities.
For example, NPR gets 30% of its revenue from programming fees from public radio stations. Those stations often receive Federal funding from the CPB (community service grants, for example) and also can receive funds from state governments directly, through educational institutions, from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) through the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP), and often from local governments as well. NPR's satellite distribution service, the PRSS, also receives Federal funding.
So if you "follow the money," you will see that far more than 2% of taxpayer funding ends up going to public radio.
The CPB says that membership accounts for only 25% of public broadcasting revenues. Businesses and foundations contribute 22.6%. Public and private educaitonal sources contribute 10.4%.
So at the end of the day, it is reasonable to say that around 50% of public broadcasting revenues come from taxpayer dollars. Due to the larger number of state supported public television networks, I suspect the number is slightly less for public radio (~40%).
The truth is that real compensation has risen over the last 30 years. See this graph.
Now it is true that productivity in the US has grown faster than real compensation, and the beneficiaries of this excess are the stock holders (over 50% of Americans now).
Personally, I think it would be better if the government would allow us to put our 12% of income towards investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) rather than the Ponzi scheme called Social Security...
How does the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US compare to what it was thirty years ago? It's lower, people make less per hour than they did a generation ago.
It is only lower if you don't take into account the massive expansion of benefits over the last 30 years, the combination of both have risen over that time.
Moreover, the employment cost index has risen massively as well, so theoretically you are also getting lots of great stuff from what your employer is paying of your taxes. If you are not, go to the ballot booth and ask for it back...
Check out CarlaZone which is a blog with cell-phone camera image updates. She used to carry around a tablet computer with CDPD, but the Sanyo 5300 has better battery life and a form-factor you can't beat (especially if you already carry a cellphone).
In Korea they already have full-motion video cameras, check out the story on CellCamZone.
I thought battery time on a cellcam phone would be low as well.
But I was pleasantly suprised by the Sanyo SCP-5300. My wife has been taking as many as 20 pictures per day and uploading them to her webcam site, and the phone has yet to run out of battery...this usually includes flash pictures as well.
I believe the imaging element is CMOS, not CCD, which means it can run at very low power, but really looks bad/banded in low-light.
Another issue is thta moving bits over fiber at gigabits per second is relatively cheap. Routing at gigabits per second is significantly more expensive. Both are getting cheaper thanks to Moore's law.
I regularly see DS3 quotes for $3k/month, I remember when it was more like $30k/month, and before that it was just nuts.
But last-mile is still a problem. I recently priced out a DS3 network to 180 locations in the US. The biggest cost was last-mile connectivity.
Nothing is stopping Slashdot from moving from a unicast medium (The Internet) to a broadcast medium (like cable television). But the economics of broadcast mean you need a certain level of audience to support it.
My theory is that there aren't really enough hardcore geeks to support a standard broadcast operation (see TechTV, which many people argue is pretty dumbed down already).
Now don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a Slashdot TV show, and have even looked into doing it...but it doesn't look like it will happen soon.
As for ISP subsidization, on a bit basis, Slashdot represents a really small amount of my Internet use, as a single streaming video would have many more bits than a year's worth of Slashdot.
Slashdot COULD go on a paid subscription basis only, but that would be (probably?) be against the philosophy of the site. Besides, do you really want your ISP asking the Slashdotters to start posting "Backstreet Boys use Linux" just to raise viewership & revenue? AOL probably does that already.
I admire the Slashdotters for holding together a content site this long. I know it has been tough, but that is the media business. They've done a great job!
A lot has been written about the potential for a technological riff between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.
Yes, a lot has been written, but even some of the poorest people I know still have a pretty good television, VHS or DVD, and AOL/Internet. The latter might be on a 386 (the going price of which is often "just get it out of my basement").
What is expensive is food & rent! Those are more like $10-$20 per day (unlike $10-$20 per month for Internet).
The Libertarians' flawed belief that a Corporation Can Do No Wrong is what got us into this situation in the first place."
I don't see the problem.
I can purchase 100 channels of digital cable television if I wish. I could get another hundred from satellite. I receive about 20 broadcast TV stations, several of which are in high-definition DTV. I can get hundreds of channels of digital satellite radio. I have $40/month DSL with over 600 kbps downlink. I could get 1Mbps cable modem connectivity if I wanted. Some nights, I play first-person-shooters with people all over the country.
I have Internet and a webcam on my cellphone. I canceled my slow CDPD service for 1xRTT. I chose from five different cell carriers. I can ever power up my shortwave and listen to hundreds of stations on there.
I can order all kind of DVDs through Netflix, and never have to go down the street to Blockbuster. There are three new movie theaters in town that specialize in independent and foreing films, all with stadium seating!
Should I get sick of television, I can always make my own and broadcast it on the Net.
Yes, I'm sick of Clear Channel as well, but evidently the majority of listeners like hearing pop...so I'm thinking about going XM. Sorry about change, that's life, but it wasn't like there was a Hindi or techno radio station on FM here anyway! I listen to Shoutcast at home as it is...and did I mention that FM stations will soon have digital sound using iBOC?
I am inundated by far more media than I could ever use. Never in my life have I felt more capable of getting the information I need or want, or being entertained should I need to.
20 years ago I had no cable, DSL, cellphone, digital TV, or Internet access! My media life revolved around a handful of TV networks, a few radio stations, and a few movie studios.
That said, the NewsHour with Jim Leher was recently named the most credible and objective television news show.
PBS gets funding from a wide mix, that includes federal, state & local governments, as well as universities, corporate underwriters, and don't forget "viewers like you."
Internet2 is not a network for home users, it is a research network to examine what you can do with a very, very fast IPV6 network. It is also incredibly underutilized, and only links universities and research institutions.
In this scenario, a sufficiently motivated group could purchase all the media outlets in an area, effectively controlling the flow of information to the populous....satellite/cable and the Internet are moderating forces, but they are not free (federally subsidized)
In the absence of government regulation, what you say is impossible. However, it may also require state and local governments to end regulation (i.e. forced monopolies) of cable and telephone service as well.
But even today, cable isn't free, yet the majority of Americans receive their television programming over cable.
Even if someone bought up all the AM & FM radio stations in an area, you can still listen to Sirius and XM radio, not to mention shortwave!
Plus the Internet will continue to become a very powerful force for balance. Dial-up is cheaper than cable in most markets (as it should be, it is lower bandwidth).
My wife uses Sprint PCS Vision to upload images for her webcam site. The "killer app" part of this is the form factor of a webcam in a cellphone, which you would carry anyway, and actually has a lot of battery time. Check out the images in her gallery to imagine how this might be used, especially by teenagers at parties!
She used to carry around a stylus-based computer in a purse-like fashion using CDPD, which was easier to use (just turn on and it snapped pictures every few minutes), but suffered from low battery time (a few hours) and was just too heavy and bulky.
Of course, using Web browsers on Sprint PCS Vision phones sucks. I haven't checked out a Treo on the network yet, but I know that my Palm V with AT&T CDPD (Omnisky) had much better web browsers that could handle frames and such.
We went Sprint PCS Vision because we needed a cellphone anyway, and paying for unlimited Verizon 1xRTT $100/month was just too much. With Sprint we pay the same we would just for voice service, and possibly $10/month more once the introductory period is over.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with DTV rollout has little to do with "6 standards." Once you go digital, adding some more display code is no big thing.
The rollout problem is 1) digital transmitters are totally different from analog ones, and thus represent a double cost to stations 2) 19.3 Mbps MPEG-2 decoders take a lot of CPU, so they are expensive ($200-$400) and 3) High-pixel count TVs are expensive ($1500 and up)
So it has taken a while for stations to be able to afford the transmitters, and it is taking a while for people to afford the TV's and receivers.
The "6 standards" issue is nothing. It actually helps because existing "analog" content can be broadcast as a SD DTV signal.
This might have been a joke, but the truth is that right now, for good DTV reception, you need an antenna. Fortunately, digital channels are in the same exact bands that analog channels are (standard VHF and UHF frequencies), so an existing analog antenna system will do fine.
HD-Net already has HD bikini contests on satellite...
In Washington, DC, there are a large number of red-light cameras, and now speed cameras. My wife found out that the speed camera OCR works just fine. Twice in a week. $200 per violation. The tickets were mailed several weeks after the violations.
The picture we got in the mail had the car and an enlargement of the rear plate. The counter on the picture was in the tens of thousands. Needless to say, DC is now collecting over $10 million per year in revenue this way.
My impression is that there is a combination of computer OCR pre-processing and human checking. At $200 per violation, a couple of checks by the human eye is totally affordable.
POE Nexrad indicates debris in the air starting between Rusk and
Nacogdoches TX, then extending from Cherokee, Nacogdoches, San Augustine
and Sabine counties in Texas, into Vernon parish in Louisiana, ending near
Leesville, LA.
Also see Shuttle debris on Shreveport Nexrad
You can see the Shuttle debris radar return here: . Go to NBC5 Popup weather, and select the Nexrad loop. Look at the line to the south east of Dallas.
Uh, I didn't see Bill Clinton developing a new Shuttle either...
I use SpamAssassin to dump suspected-spam into another directory. Every day I spend about 10 minutes going D-D-D-D-D-D... in the spam directory, glancing briefly at each subject hearder to make sure I don't miss any false positives. They are rare, but have happened 2 or 3 times over a year.
I find that erasing all of my spam in a "batch process" is much more efficient than not using a filter and doing it randomly through the day.
It is silly as well. There are people who are located where there is neither over-the-air TV or cable, but there is Internet (datacenters, workplace, etc.). By cutting off Internet rebroadcasters, network commercials will not make it to these people. Duh!
NPR gets about 2% of it's funding from tax payers. It's nearly completely listener funded.
The 2% number is definately "fishy." NPR, a distributor of public radio content, receives only 2% of its funding directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which gets money from the Federal Government.
But NPR is but a small part of public radio, and even it gets plenty of taxpayers funds indirectly that are "laundered" through other entities.
For example, NPR gets 30% of its revenue from programming fees from public radio stations. Those stations often receive Federal funding from the CPB (community service grants, for example) and also can receive funds from state governments directly, through educational institutions, from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) through the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP), and often from local governments as well. NPR's satellite distribution service, the PRSS, also receives Federal funding.
So if you "follow the money," you will see that far more than 2% of taxpayer funding ends up going to public radio.
The CPB says that membership accounts for only 25% of public broadcasting revenues. Businesses and foundations contribute 22.6%. Public and private educaitonal sources contribute 10.4%.
So at the end of the day, it is reasonable to say that around 50% of public broadcasting revenues come from taxpayer dollars. Due to the larger number of state supported public television networks, I suspect the number is slightly less for public radio (~40%).
But it isn't 2%...
This war on Iraq is the same thing as well. We have to control everyone in the world, because we're so scared something bad is going to happen.
It already did (9/11). That is why we are engaged in the War for Islamic Democracy.
Right, we need our hands free for cellphone & PDA use! Why not put all the UI in the feet? ;)
Now it is true that productivity in the US has grown faster than real compensation, and the beneficiaries of this excess are the stock holders (over 50% of Americans now).
Personally, I think it would be better if the government would allow us to put our 12% of income towards investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) rather than the Ponzi scheme called Social Security...
How does the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US compare to what it was thirty years ago? It's lower, people make less per hour than they did a generation ago.
It is only lower if you don't take into account the massive expansion of benefits over the last 30 years, the combination of both have risen over that time.
Moreover, the employment cost index has risen massively as well, so theoretically you are also getting lots of great stuff from what your employer is paying of your taxes. If you are not, go to the ballot booth and ask for it back...
Check out CarlaZone which is a blog with cell-phone camera image updates. She used to carry around a tablet computer with CDPD, but the Sanyo 5300 has better battery life and a form-factor you can't beat (especially if you already carry a cellphone).
In Korea they already have full-motion video cameras, check out the story on CellCamZone.
I thought battery time on a cellcam phone would be low as well.
But I was pleasantly suprised by the Sanyo SCP-5300. My wife has been taking as many as 20 pictures per day and uploading them to her webcam site, and the phone has yet to run out of battery...this usually includes flash pictures as well.
I believe the imaging element is CMOS, not CCD, which means it can run at very low power, but really looks bad/banded in low-light.
Another issue is thta moving bits over fiber at gigabits per second is relatively cheap. Routing at gigabits per second is significantly more expensive. Both are getting cheaper thanks to Moore's law.
I regularly see DS3 quotes for $3k/month, I remember when it was more like $30k/month, and before that it was just nuts.
But last-mile is still a problem. I recently priced out a DS3 network to 180 locations in the US. The biggest cost was last-mile connectivity.
Nothing is stopping Slashdot from moving from a unicast medium (The Internet) to a broadcast medium (like cable television). But the economics of broadcast mean you need a certain level of audience to support it.
My theory is that there aren't really enough hardcore geeks to support a standard broadcast operation (see TechTV, which many people argue is pretty dumbed down already).
Now don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a Slashdot TV show, and have even looked into doing it...but it doesn't look like it will happen soon.
As for ISP subsidization, on a bit basis, Slashdot represents a really small amount of my Internet use, as a single streaming video would have many more bits than a year's worth of Slashdot.
Slashdot COULD go on a paid subscription basis only, but that would be (probably?) be against the philosophy of the site. Besides, do you really want your ISP asking the Slashdotters to start posting "Backstreet Boys use Linux" just to raise viewership & revenue? AOL probably does that already.
I admire the Slashdotters for holding together a content site this long. I know it has been tough, but that is the media business. They've done a great job!
A lot has been written about the potential for a technological riff between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.
Yes, a lot has been written, but even some of the poorest people I know still have a pretty good television, VHS or DVD, and AOL/Internet. The latter might be on a 386 (the going price of which is often "just get it out of my basement").
What is expensive is food & rent! Those are more like $10-$20 per day (unlike $10-$20 per month for Internet).
The Libertarians' flawed belief that a Corporation Can Do No Wrong is what got us into this situation in the first place."
I don't see the problem.
I can purchase 100 channels of digital cable television if I wish. I could get another hundred from satellite. I receive about 20 broadcast TV stations, several of which are in high-definition DTV. I can get hundreds of channels of digital satellite radio. I have $40/month DSL with over 600 kbps downlink. I could get 1Mbps cable modem connectivity if I wanted. Some nights, I play first-person-shooters with people all over the country.
I have Internet and a webcam on my cellphone. I canceled my slow CDPD service for 1xRTT. I chose from five different cell carriers. I can ever power up my shortwave and listen to hundreds of stations on there.
I can order all kind of DVDs through Netflix, and never have to go down the street to Blockbuster. There are three new movie theaters in town that specialize in independent and foreing films, all with stadium seating!
Should I get sick of television, I can always make my own and broadcast it on the Net.
Yes, I'm sick of Clear Channel as well, but evidently the majority of listeners like hearing pop...so I'm thinking about going XM. Sorry about change, that's life, but it wasn't like there was a Hindi or techno radio station on FM here anyway! I listen to Shoutcast at home as it is...and did I mention that FM stations will soon have digital sound using iBOC?
I am inundated by far more media than I could ever use. Never in my life have I felt more capable of getting the information I need or want, or being entertained should I need to.
20 years ago I had no cable, DSL, cellphone, digital TV, or Internet access! My media life revolved around a handful of TV networks, a few radio stations, and a few movie studios.
Why all the whining?
That said, the NewsHour with Jim Leher was recently named the most credible and objective television news show.
PBS gets funding from a wide mix, that includes federal, state & local governments, as well as universities, corporate underwriters, and don't forget "viewers like you."
Internet2 is not a network for home users, it is a research network to examine what you can do with a very, very fast IPV6 network. It is also incredibly underutilized, and only links universities and research institutions.
In this scenario, a sufficiently motivated group could purchase all the media outlets in an area, effectively controlling the flow of information to the populous....satellite/cable and the Internet are moderating forces, but they are not free (federally subsidized)
In the absence of government regulation, what you say is impossible. However, it may also require state and local governments to end regulation (i.e. forced monopolies) of cable and telephone service as well.
But even today, cable isn't free, yet the majority of Americans receive their television programming over cable.
Even if someone bought up all the AM & FM radio stations in an area, you can still listen to Sirius and XM radio, not to mention shortwave!
Plus the Internet will continue to become a very powerful force for balance. Dial-up is cheaper than cable in most markets (as it should be, it is lower bandwidth).
And there is always public television/radio...
My wife uses Sprint PCS Vision to upload images for her webcam site. The "killer app" part of this is the form factor of a webcam in a cellphone, which you would carry anyway, and actually has a lot of battery time. Check out the images in her gallery to imagine how this might be used, especially by teenagers at parties!
She used to carry around a stylus-based computer in a purse-like fashion using CDPD, which was easier to use (just turn on and it snapped pictures every few minutes), but suffered from low battery time (a few hours) and was just too heavy and bulky.
Of course, using Web browsers on Sprint PCS Vision phones sucks. I haven't checked out a Treo on the network yet, but I know that my Palm V with AT&T CDPD (Omnisky) had much better web browsers that could handle frames and such.
We went Sprint PCS Vision because we needed a cellphone anyway, and paying for unlimited Verizon 1xRTT $100/month was just too much. With Sprint we pay the same we would just for voice service, and possibly $10/month more once the introductory period is over.