What I find discouraging with these smaller outfits (maybe I've been unlucky in my choice of companies whose APIs I've used) is the attitude that once the API is announced, there is a disconcerting tendency not to bother to communicate changes to developers who've made use of the API. I generally discover that some change has been made purely by accident a week or more after the event, when I discover that something no longer works properly.
And, of course, there's always the issue that the actual API as implemented often is just-different-enough from the published description to cause one to experience an annoying period of trial-and-error as one figures out what actually works.
What's particularly interesting to me about this is that many people predicted the death of CW (i.e., the use of Morse code) when the requirement to learn it was taken away from the license exams in most countries... and yet in the long-distance amateur radio contests we are finding that the use of Morse Code is quite clearly and consistently rising.
There are technical reasons why CW is superior to voice transmissions for long-distance communications, but I think a lot of us thought that the relative difficulty of learning the code would naturally lead to people not ever putting in the effort and thereby being in a position to discover its technical superiority for at least some kinds of communications. It seems that we were wrong, for which I am heartily grateful since I find CW simply a more pleasurable mode and was wondering if I would have anyone left to talk to in my dotage.
Surely it would be a serious inefficiency for NHTSA to maintain on staff a large number of specialists to handle this kind of problem? Isn't that exactly what (properly qualified) consultants are for?
I was part of the team that wrote the IPv6 portion of the DOCSIS 3.0 specs. Although DOCSIS 3.0 added a huge number of features, the two that the cable companies were most desperate for were channel bonding (so they could compete with fiber) and IPv6 support.
IPv6 has been internal testing with major cable operators for several years now. Comcast was always likely to be the first to deploy it (for reasons that I can't go into) but I expect the other major operators to follow suit within a year or two.
Counties and cities have their own sales taxes, so a state lookup or even a zip code lookup wouldn't cut it. You'd need to know what municipality the buyer is in, then get state, county, and municipality tax rates.
It's even worse than that. You really need the entire 9-digit zip code. I live in a place where the vast majority of people in my 5-digit zip code are in city A, which has a high sales tax. My address is served out of a post office also in city A, so the "city" line in my address is and the 5-digit zip code both make it look like I should pay those municipal taxes. But I don't live in the city. Try explaining that to some robot form, or even to a human being on a phone. I gave up long ago; the number of mail-order places that understand how to handle this situation properly is vanishingly small (even though it's quite a common situation around here). What's particularly ironic is that this is exactly the sort of thing at which a computerized system should excel.
I'm sure if the BBC had contacted google.. they would have gotten lots of information on the subject. Or at least a quote they could include.. something along the lines of "google engineer x would like to remind Newscorp that they can _completely_ "block" us (and many others) from "stealing" their content by putting a simple text file on their site.
The BBC did have an interview with someone from google on this issue on the World Service a couple of days ago. The google spokesman did make the point (without going into the details of robots.txt) that Mr. Murdoch is completely at liberty to stop Google from indexing his sites. Actually, I got the distinct impression that the google person thought that this was all somewhat of an unbelievable joke, since the solution was so simple, and rested entirely in Mr. Murdoch's hands.
Can anyone explain the difference between 'Priority Best Effort' (PBE) queueing and 'Best Effort' (BE) queueing?
If a node isn't saturated, are the BE packets delayed and if it is saturated will they just not arrive?
I'll try to explain a bit. But the real answer about the way traffic is handled in DOCSIS is so complicated that you probably don't really want to know the details.
Basically, first, the difference between traffic that is best effort and traffic that has a quality-of-service "guarantee" (which you didn't ask about, but I think needs to be summarized first) is that traffic with QoS is tagged and treated separately (read, preferentially [usually]), so that it has limited latency and jitter, and any given packet is very unlikely to get dropped.
Generic "best-effort" traffic has no such guarantees, and if the CMTS or the upstream or downstream you are using gets too congested, each BE packet has a non-zero probability of getting dropped in order to ease the congestion.
Priority-based best-effort traffic basically means that there are a series of queues of different priority (eight in DOCSIS), and the way in which traffic gets dropped when congestion occurs depends on which of the eight priority queues your traffic is in. (It's also a complicated function of various queues inside the CMTS, which differ from manufacturer to manufacturer.)
Typically, a cable ISP will change your priority queue in real time as a function of your traffic pattern over the last few minutes or even seconds (the way this is done depends on the individual ISP and also the manufacturer of the CMTS). In this way, when things get congested, the chance of your traffic getting dropped depends on your recent behaviour.
If you want to know more, you should look at the DOCSIS specs. But I really doubt that you want to do that:-) Unless you have trouble sleeping.
I run the 64-bit Kubuntu variant. My conclusions over the past few days:
1. Roughly 90% of the bugs and inconveniences in Kubuntu jaunty are unchanged.
2. Something like 10% of the Kubuntu jaunty problems have been fixed, to be replaced essentially one-for-one by new problems.
I have not seen any of the specific problems mentioned in the summary. It did take several reboots following the upgrade before the system became stable (don't ask me to explain that, because I can't).
How this is possible? I don't understand the whole rental world. How does the studio have any control over it? Sure, they own the copyright on the material on the disk but I own the disk. I can sell it, why can't I rent it out to someone?
What legal principle prevents me from loaning out, selling, or renting any (physical) CD/DVD/Book that I have purchased? Do these companies seriously have to buy special versions that they rent out? They have copyright which let's them dictate copying or performance, giving out the physical item I bought doesn't seem to fall in that category.
I don't understand the rental world either, but the case that confounds me is somewhat the flip side of the same question. It's puzzled me frequently that on Netflix DVDs there is sometimes that idiotic blurb at the front that says words to the effect of "this disc is not to be rented out"... and yet that's exactly how I'm watching it. One time I stopped and read the blurb quite carefully, in case I was missing something, but I could see no way that my rental of the DVD from Netflix was allowed by the limitations I was reading. My only conclusion was that the limitations have as much standing in the real world as those crazy "do not steal movies" adverts that they put on the front of some DVDs (perhaps the first sale doctrine somehow nullifies the written limitations?). But I would love to see some closely-reasoned legal argument on the subject, instead of having to guess how Netflix can ignore the limitations.
your payday is not lost if you pre-emptively sue them NOW.
Or contact their lawyers and go "Hey, I've got prior art, if you don't want your patent invalidated you'd better pay X$$$$"
Why would they pay? Either there is prior art or there is not. Paying off one person -- even the person who "invented" the prior art -- doesn't in the slightest change that. Their patent would still be invalid.
VoIP requires only ~120kbps. The thing about VoIP is not that it requires high speed, but that it requires low latency.
Um, did you read that before you hit post?? You
I read it but I didn't notice that I should have put "speed" in quotes and stated that I was using it in the same sense as AT&T (i.e., to mean "throughput"). I was sloppy not to do that. Sorry.
And as far as I know speed always refers to "latency" except for internet.
I too find it confusing (and/or annoying) the way terms like "speed" and "bandwidth" are typically used as synonyms for "throughput" when they are applied to the Internet (or, I suppose, nowadays networking in general). But unfortunately those terms seem to have entered the vernacular.
AT&T said regulators should keep in mind that not all applications like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) or streaming video, that require faster speeds,
So AT&T says that VoIP requires "faster speeds". Even using G.711 (i.e., uncompressed toll-quality), and including the overhead of the other layers, VoIP requires only ~120kbps. The thing about VoIP is not that it requires high speed, but that it requires low latency.
Once upon a time the string "AT&T" stood for some kind of technical excellence. So, for that matter, did the string "FCC". Now I just want to go hide in a cave while they play their various spin games.
Can someone please explain why progressive lenses are so despised?
I tried them for about two weeks, then returned them and got bifocals.
They were hideous. I truly felt like ripping them off my face and doing without glasses entirely. And yet I know people who can wear them quite happily (like you).
I have a theory about this -- it's to do with how much one moves one's eyeballs compared to moving one's head. People seem to vary tremendously in whether they move their head or their eyeball to view something not on the focal axis. I think that people who habitually move their head have relatively little difficulty adapting to progressive lenses, but those (like me) who don't move their head much suddenly have to re-train their entire way of viewing things so as to move their head instead of their eyes.
Anyway, I do find it interesting that people seem to fall quite definitely into one of two camps: either they adapt quite quickly to progressives, or they hate the things with a passion.
To me, bifocals are an inconvenience when going downstairs and when looking at prices when shopping, but otherwise I don't notice I'm wearing them.
Random Fact: The proper adjective form to refer to the 2nd solar planet is not Venusian but Venereal.
Nope. It's "cytherean". Of course, you could believe Tony Randall over someone who has worked on PVO (Pioneer Venus Orbiter) data. I admit that it's probably more fun that way.
Even less fathomable is why publishers are letting the ebook market degenerate into competing formats, proprietary readers and possible market dominance by Amazon. One would think it is in their interest to come up with and dictate a single book format, one which all readers can implement, one which all stores can sell books with. It sounds obvious but a single format would level the playing field and catapult ebooks into the mainstream.
While one hears a lot about the Kindle (most US people who are even aware of the existence of e-book readers generally believe that the Kindle is the only one on the market), but once one digs through the hype to try to see what's actually happening in the industry, the situation is very different.
All the entities with interests in the classical publishing industry (meaning, mostly, authors, agents, and "classical" publishers) are thoroughly unsure how best to prepare for the tidal wave that is now in its early stages. There are lots of ways it could go, and most of the players are trying to cover as many possible outcomes as possible; no one that I know of is betting the farm on any particular outcome. So you'll see entities supporting the Kindle (if they're willing to agree to Amazon's (draconian, IMHO) contract) but they are generally aware of the dangers of turning Amazon into a monopoly; so you'll also see support for other readers (personally, I'm a fan of the Sony so far, but if they implement some kind of "publishers must pay to list a book on our store" policy, they will struggle to be more than a bit player eventually).
There are plenty of other possibilities too. Maybe we'll see more publishers creating their own online stores. Maybe more authors will do the same thing (depending on what contracts the authors are willing to sign anent digital rights). Maybe e-books will simply not take off (unlikely, I suspect, at least for some kinds of books). The whole "how does the author get paid if the marginal cost to generate a copy is zero" issue is the elephant in the room. Again, there are several possible answers, but which one(s) will prevail is anyone's guess at the moment.
In short, it's all in huge flux, and everyone right now is just trying to survive until things begin to be a bit clearer.
Just my opinion, of course. But I am a writer and publisher. On the other hand, I inhabit slashdot, so you know how much that means my opinion is worth.
As a purveyor of security software (to a different industry), I've seen countless times that almost always the conversation really does go along an only slightly-less direct route:
A. We need to secure X B. How much does it cost? A. (insert any dollars) B. Do we have to spend that? A. We do if we want to be reasonably secure. B (thinks... We're smart people; we can install a few firewalls; that'll keep the Bad Guys out) B. (Having insight) But this is like insurance, right? If we keep people out of the network, we don't get anything for those dollars. A. Well, sort of, I suppose so. B. Right, we'll save those dollars.
---
You have to assume that Bad Guys CAN get into your network if they really want to. Because the truth is, whatever your in-house people have told you, they can. Of you doubt me, talk to people whose job is to break into networks. All the ones I've known will tell you that 100% of targeted commercial networks fall to a concerted attack.
When they do fall, security's job is to make sure, at a minimum:
1) the Bad Guys can't learn anything useful
2) the Bad Guys can't interfere with the service you're selling
3) there's a high probability that you'll detect the event and be able to track the Bad Guys
B's insight isn't a bad one at all... security *is* a kind of insurance. Which means that most of the time, if you have a well-designed system you really are "wasting" the dollars. But one day you or your successor will regret those "saved" dollars.
B's job really is to make a proper cost/benefit analysis. My experience is that that almost never happens. They either just "save" the dollars without thinking or, more often, either a) look to what their competition is doing or b) assume that the risk is so small ("we haven't been hacked so far") that it's not worth spending any money.
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
For physical products, it makes sense to provide some kind of middleman to take care of the hassles involved with delivering the product; but for electronic products, it's not at all obvious to me why such a middleman is necessary.
As an author, I'm still struggling with the question of whether to make electronic versions of my books available; but if were to do so, (and especially having carefully read the contract that Amazon makes you sign to make your work available for the Kindle) I wouldn't be inclined to insert another profit-making entity between me and my readers.
The DTI specification has a distance limitation of 200 meters between the CMTS and edge QAM modulator. There are ideas of utilizing global positioning system (GPS) to sync multiple time servers to allow the edge QAM modulator to be in a hub site and the CMTS in the headend./quote>
Um, as an author of the spec that covers the edge QAM in the above quote, I'm scratching my head wondering what on Earth that quote has to do with anything on-topic. The DTI spec (which is to do with timing across devices, which has to be very tight) basically says "for now, keep these things close together so we can keep the timing in sync". Eventually, if it becomes important (which it isn't at the moment; if it were, we'd have done it already), there'll be another spec that will describe how to keep the timing sufficiently synchronised when the devices aren't all in the same building.
I'm at a loss to understand how that quote somehow leads to the title "DOCSIS 3 is a bitch for the US of A". DOCSIS 3.0 was, after all, designed in the US and the spec work was driven essentially entirely by US cable companies.
Slashdot Mirror
What I find discouraging with these smaller outfits (maybe I've been unlucky in my choice of companies whose APIs I've used) is the attitude that once the API is announced, there is a disconcerting tendency not to bother to communicate changes to developers who've made use of the API. I generally discover that some change has been made purely by accident a week or more after the event, when I discover that something no longer works properly.
And, of course, there's always the issue that the actual API as implemented often is just-different-enough from the published description to cause one to experience an annoying period of trial-and-error as one figures out what actually works.
Radio transmitters do not go "offline". They go "off the air".
What's particularly interesting to me about this is that many people predicted the death of CW (i.e., the use of Morse code) when the requirement to learn it was taken away from the license exams in most countries... and yet in the long-distance amateur radio contests we are finding that the use of Morse Code is quite clearly and consistently rising.
There are technical reasons why CW is superior to voice transmissions for long-distance communications, but I think a lot of us thought that the relative difficulty of learning the code would naturally lead to people not ever putting in the effort and thereby being in a position to discover its technical superiority for at least some kinds of communications. It seems that we were wrong, for which I am heartily grateful since I find CW simply a more pleasurable mode and was wondering if I would have anyone left to talk to in my dotage.
As Einstein famously said: "Time is what a clock reads". I always thought that was rather a clever evasion: true but not particularly helpful.
For many years that quotation was on a poster that greeted one in the lobby of what was then the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, CO.
Surely it would be a serious inefficiency for NHTSA to maintain on staff a large number of specialists to handle this kind of problem? Isn't that exactly what (properly qualified) consultants are for?
I was part of the team that wrote the IPv6 portion of the DOCSIS 3.0 specs. Although DOCSIS 3.0 added a huge number of features, the two that the cable companies were most desperate for were channel bonding (so they could compete with fiber) and IPv6 support.
IPv6 has been internal testing with major cable operators for several years now. Comcast was always likely to be the first to deploy it (for reasons that I can't go into) but I expect the other major operators to follow suit within a year or two.
Ever wondered how much the internet physically weighs?
No.
And, oddly, even after someone else has asked the question, I still don't.
Counties and cities have their own sales taxes, so a state lookup or even a zip code lookup wouldn't cut it. You'd need to know what municipality the buyer is in, then get state, county, and municipality tax rates.
It's even worse than that. You really need the entire 9-digit zip code. I live in a place where the vast majority of people in my 5-digit zip code are in city A, which has a high sales tax. My address is served out of a post office also in city A, so the "city" line in my address is and the 5-digit zip code both make it look like I should pay those municipal taxes. But I don't live in the city. Try explaining that to some robot form, or even to a human being on a phone. I gave up long ago; the number of mail-order places that understand how to handle this situation properly is vanishingly small (even though it's quite a common situation around here). What's particularly ironic is that this is exactly the sort of thing at which a computerized system should excel.
I'm sure if the BBC had contacted google.. they would have gotten lots of information on the subject. Or at least a quote they could include.. something along the lines of "google engineer x would like to remind Newscorp that they can _completely_ "block" us (and many others) from "stealing" their content by putting a simple text file on their site.
The BBC did have an interview with someone from google on this issue on the World Service a couple of days ago. The google spokesman did make the point (without going into the details of robots.txt) that Mr. Murdoch is completely at liberty to stop Google from indexing his sites. Actually, I got the distinct impression that the google person thought that this was all somewhat of an unbelievable joke, since the solution was so simple, and rested entirely in Mr. Murdoch's hands.
Can anyone explain the difference between 'Priority Best Effort' (PBE) queueing and 'Best Effort' (BE) queueing?
If a node isn't saturated, are the BE packets delayed and if it is saturated will they just not arrive?
I'll try to explain a bit. But the real answer about the way traffic is handled in DOCSIS is so complicated that you probably don't really want to know the details.
Basically, first, the difference between traffic that is best effort and traffic that has a quality-of-service "guarantee" (which you didn't ask about, but I think needs to be summarized first) is that traffic with QoS is tagged and treated separately (read, preferentially [usually]), so that it has limited latency and jitter, and any given packet is very unlikely to get dropped.
Generic "best-effort" traffic has no such guarantees, and if the CMTS or the upstream or downstream you are using gets too congested, each BE packet has a non-zero probability of getting dropped in order to ease the congestion.
Priority-based best-effort traffic basically means that there are a series of queues of different priority (eight in DOCSIS), and the way in which traffic gets dropped when congestion occurs depends on which of the eight priority queues your traffic is in. (It's also a complicated function of various queues inside the CMTS, which differ from manufacturer to manufacturer.)
Typically, a cable ISP will change your priority queue in real time as a function of your traffic pattern over the last few minutes or even seconds (the way this is done depends on the individual ISP and also the manufacturer of the CMTS). In this way, when things get congested, the chance of your traffic getting dropped depends on your recent behaviour.
If you want to know more, you should look at the DOCSIS specs. But I really doubt that you want to do that :-) Unless you have trouble sleeping.
I run the 64-bit Kubuntu variant. My conclusions over the past few days:
1. Roughly 90% of the bugs and inconveniences in Kubuntu jaunty are unchanged.
2. Something like 10% of the Kubuntu jaunty problems have been fixed, to be replaced essentially one-for-one by new problems.
I have not seen any of the specific problems mentioned in the summary. It did take several reboots following the upgrade before the system became stable (don't ask me to explain that, because I can't).
How this is possible? I don't understand the whole rental world. How does the studio have any control over it? Sure, they own the copyright on the material on the disk but I own the disk. I can sell it, why can't I rent it out to someone?
What legal principle prevents me from loaning out, selling, or renting any (physical) CD/DVD/Book that I have purchased? Do these companies seriously have to buy special versions that they rent out? They have copyright which let's them dictate copying or performance, giving out the physical item I bought doesn't seem to fall in that category.
I don't understand the rental world either, but the case that confounds me is somewhat the flip side of the same question. It's puzzled me frequently that on Netflix DVDs there is sometimes that idiotic blurb at the front that says words to the effect of "this disc is not to be rented out"... and yet that's exactly how I'm watching it. One time I stopped and read the blurb quite carefully, in case I was missing something, but I could see no way that my rental of the DVD from Netflix was allowed by the limitations I was reading. My only conclusion was that the limitations have as much standing in the real world as those crazy "do not steal movies" adverts that they put on the front of some DVDs (perhaps the first sale doctrine somehow nullifies the written limitations?). But I would love to see some closely-reasoned legal argument on the subject, instead of having to guess how Netflix can ignore the limitations.
your payday is not lost if you pre-emptively sue them NOW.
Or contact their lawyers and go "Hey, I've got prior art, if you don't want your patent invalidated you'd better pay X$$$$"
Why would they pay? Either there is prior art or there is not. Paying off one person -- even the person who "invented" the prior art -- doesn't in the slightest change that. Their patent would still be invalid.
VoIP requires only ~120kbps. The thing about VoIP is not that it requires high speed, but that it requires low latency.
Um, did you read that before you hit post?? You
I read it but I didn't notice that I should have put "speed" in quotes and stated that I was using it in the same sense as AT&T (i.e., to mean "throughput"). I was sloppy not to do that. Sorry.
And as far as I know speed always refers to "latency" except for internet.
I too find it confusing (and/or annoying) the way terms like "speed" and "bandwidth" are typically used as synonyms for "throughput" when they are applied to the Internet (or, I suppose, nowadays networking in general). But unfortunately those terms seem to have entered the vernacular.
AT&T said regulators should keep in mind that not all applications like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) or streaming video, that require faster speeds,
So AT&T says that VoIP requires "faster speeds". Even using G.711 (i.e., uncompressed toll-quality), and including the overhead of the other layers, VoIP requires only ~120kbps. The thing about VoIP is not that it requires high speed, but that it requires low latency.
Once upon a time the string "AT&T" stood for some kind of technical excellence. So, for that matter, did the string "FCC". Now I just want to go hide in a cave while they play their various spin games.
Tortoise is also cross-platform, for when that's important.
I beg to differ.
From http://tortoisesvn.net/node/58:
TortoiseSVN is only available on Windows.
That page lists clients similar to tortoise for other OSes, but the real, genuine tortoiseSVN is Windows-only.
According to Ciclops it's 480 km inward of the outer edge of the B ring, which puts it at a radial distance of 117,100 km
Thanks very much; that's a much better source of information than TFA.
I haven't been able to find a reference that states the precise radial location of this object. Does anyone here have that information?
The Voyager 2 photopolarimeter data from 1981 suggested the presence of a small object in Saturn's B ring at a radial distance of around 109,000 km.
It would be interesting to know whether this is confirmation of that object, 28 years later.
(I have a vested interest: I was the principal author on the Voyager paper: Icarus 54, 267 (1983).)
Can someone please explain why progressive lenses are so despised?
I tried them for about two weeks, then returned them and got bifocals.
They were hideous. I truly felt like ripping them off my face and doing without glasses entirely. And yet I know people who can wear them quite happily (like you).
I have a theory about this -- it's to do with how much one moves one's eyeballs compared to moving one's head. People seem to vary tremendously in whether they move their head or their eyeball to view something not on the focal axis. I think that people who habitually move their head have relatively little difficulty adapting to progressive lenses, but those (like me) who don't move their head much suddenly have to re-train their entire way of viewing things so as to move their head instead of their eyes.
Anyway, I do find it interesting that people seem to fall quite definitely into one of two camps: either they adapt quite quickly to progressives, or they hate the things with a passion.
To me, bifocals are an inconvenience when going downstairs and when looking at prices when shopping, but otherwise I don't notice I'm wearing them.
Random Fact: The proper adjective form to refer to the 2nd solar planet is not Venusian but Venereal.
Nope. It's "cytherean". Of course, you could believe Tony Randall over someone who has worked on PVO (Pioneer Venus Orbiter) data. I admit that it's probably more fun that way.
Even less fathomable is why publishers are letting the ebook market degenerate into competing formats, proprietary readers and possible market dominance by Amazon. One would think it is in their interest to come up with and dictate a single book format, one which all readers can implement, one which all stores can sell books with. It sounds obvious but a single format would level the playing field and catapult ebooks into the mainstream.
While one hears a lot about the Kindle (most US people who are even aware of the existence of e-book readers generally believe that the Kindle is the only one on the market), but once one digs through the hype to try to see what's actually happening in the industry, the situation is very different.
All the entities with interests in the classical publishing industry (meaning, mostly, authors, agents, and "classical" publishers) are thoroughly unsure how best to prepare for the tidal wave that is now in its early stages. There are lots of ways it could go, and most of the players are trying to cover as many possible outcomes as possible; no one that I know of is betting the farm on any particular outcome. So you'll see entities supporting the Kindle (if they're willing to agree to Amazon's (draconian, IMHO) contract) but they are generally aware of the dangers of turning Amazon into a monopoly; so you'll also see support for other readers (personally, I'm a fan of the Sony so far, but if they implement some kind of "publishers must pay to list a book on our store" policy, they will struggle to be more than a bit player eventually).
There are plenty of other possibilities too. Maybe we'll see more publishers creating their own online stores. Maybe more authors will do the same thing (depending on what contracts the authors are willing to sign anent digital rights). Maybe e-books will simply not take off (unlikely, I suspect, at least for some kinds of books). The whole "how does the author get paid if the marginal cost to generate a copy is zero" issue is the elephant in the room. Again, there are several possible answers, but which one(s) will prevail is anyone's guess at the moment.
In short, it's all in huge flux, and everyone right now is just trying to survive until things begin to be a bit clearer.
Just my opinion, of course. But I am a writer and publisher. On the other hand, I inhabit slashdot, so you know how much that means my opinion is worth.
Sorry I wandered a bit off topic.
As a purveyor of security software (to a different industry), I've seen countless times that almost always the conversation really does go along an only slightly-less direct route:
A. We need to secure X
B. How much does it cost?
A. (insert any dollars)
B. Do we have to spend that?
A. We do if we want to be reasonably secure.
B (thinks... We're smart people; we can install a few firewalls; that'll keep the Bad Guys out)
B. (Having insight) But this is like insurance, right? If we keep people out of the network, we don't get anything for those dollars.
A. Well, sort of, I suppose so.
B. Right, we'll save those dollars.
---
You have to assume that Bad Guys CAN get into your network if they really want to. Because the truth is, whatever your in-house people have told you, they can. Of you doubt me, talk to people whose job is to break into networks. All the ones I've known will tell you that 100% of targeted commercial networks fall to a concerted attack.
When they do fall, security's job is to make sure, at a minimum:
1) the Bad Guys can't learn anything useful
2) the Bad Guys can't interfere with the service you're selling
3) there's a high probability that you'll detect the event and be able to track the Bad Guys
B's insight isn't a bad one at all... security *is* a kind of insurance. Which means that most of the time, if you have a well-designed system you really are "wasting" the dollars. But one day you or your successor will regret those "saved" dollars.
B's job really is to make a proper cost/benefit analysis. My experience is that that almost never happens. They either just "save" the dollars without thinking or, more often, either a) look to what their competition is doing or b) assume that the risk is so small ("we haven't been hacked so far") that it's not worth spending any money.
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
It seems to me cheaper and more efficient for the publisher of a book (or the author himself) to provide downloads directly.
For physical products, it makes sense to provide some kind of middleman to take care of the hassles involved with delivering the product; but for electronic products, it's not at all obvious to me why such a middleman is necessary.
As an author, I'm still struggling with the question of whether to make electronic versions of my books available; but if were to do so, (and especially having carefully read the contract that Amazon makes you sign to make your work available for the Kindle) I wouldn't be inclined to insert another profit-making entity between me and my readers.
Lest anyone think DOCSIS 3 is just new hardware at both ends, let me assure you - it isn't.
From: http://www.cable360.net/ct/strategy/emergingtech/34304.html
The DTI specification has a distance limitation of 200 meters between the CMTS and edge QAM modulator. There are ideas of utilizing global positioning system (GPS) to sync multiple time servers to allow the edge QAM modulator to be in a hub site and the CMTS in the headend. /quote>
Um, as an author of the spec that covers the edge QAM in the above quote, I'm scratching my head wondering what on Earth that quote has to do with anything on-topic. The DTI spec (which is to do with timing across devices, which has to be very tight) basically says "for now, keep these things close together so we can keep the timing in sync". Eventually, if it becomes important (which it isn't at the moment; if it were, we'd have done it already), there'll be another spec that will describe how to keep the timing sufficiently synchronised when the devices aren't all in the same building.
I'm at a loss to understand how that quote somehow leads to the title "DOCSIS 3 is a bitch for the US of A". DOCSIS 3.0 was, after all, designed in the US and the spec work was driven essentially entirely by US cable companies.