"Does anyone else see the acquisitions in the past year or so as an opportunity for the DSL industry to rebound?"
No, I see this as the Bells finally having knifed the baby.
These entrenched companies didn't want to open up their developed-under-monopoly wiring plants to outsiders but desperately wanted access to the long-distance market and so were willing to concede entry. However this didn't mean they had to play fair and so they took every opportunity and used every trick in the book to screw, backstab and block their competition. Now that they've managed to eliminate that competition they can buy the carcasses for pennies on the dollar and return to their slow expensive monopolistic ways.
This isn't a rebound, it's a rape and the consumers are the next to get screwed unwillingly.
You don't know me, you don't know a thing about me, don't be an ass and attempt to psychoanalyze me from a few postings.
I've got a life, I've got more life then you can likely imagine. What I don't have is time right now (and considering I spend a few months at a shot working like a dawg then a few years coasting I really don't thing I've got much to worry about on that account.)
Music is *not* life. For some folks it's important, for others not so. I appreciate music in moderation but 6 continuous hours of it while driving is not something I want, not at night, not on a trip I've made hundreds of times and not when I've got to keep an eye out for deer & moose and in winter endure treacherous freezing mountain roads. If you can't wrap you mind around that then fine but stop recommending I adopt your lifestyle.
I like hot sweaty sex with beefy hirsute men who know how to take orders. I appreciate long dinners in a small bistro on Plateau Mont-Royal with a circle of close friends. I revel in spending time with my wonderful lover whether it be sex or cuddling or talking or simply being near each other. I like having a full house of friends and guests all buzzing about. I enjoy hanging out with those same friends, constantly being surprised at the diverse and interesting folks I'm privileged to associate with.
I think it's fantastic I go to dinner parties and sit with the likes of the CEO of a fascinating high-tech business, an internationally known painter, an obscure playwright, the artists former-porn-star boyfriend that I've known for years, a well-known lawyer I've hung with in cities across 3 continents, a good buddy who manages a local leather bar, a mid-level diplomat and the bf of my old bf who's becoming a well known singer in many circles and in town to give a performance, and my own special honey. That we can all enjoy a 3 hour meal full of great conversation, interesting ideas, wonderful wit, all done in two languages and on topics ranging around the world and through time is a great measure of one's life.
I like that I can work like a dawg for 3 or 6 months at a shot then take a year or two or more off and really appreciate life. I love that I get to travel to interesting places, eat in great restaurants and see the wonders of the world. I think it's fun that when Montreal is mentioned in my extended circles my name comes up, that somehow my lover and I are landmarks. I appreciate I sit on a number of boards of organizations I feel are important and am happy to help in my own away. I'm joyous I enjoy good health and have parents who are also hale & hearty whose company I still get to enjoy.
I enjoy going camping and laying nude on a hot sandy beach and visiting art museums. I find it fun to go to seedy leather bars with my best friend and watch him sing wonderfully at karaoke, I enjoy walking through the outrageously rich and conservative town I went to school in and knowing I can blow most of these folks minds and often do (apparently men in full leather gear rarely grab a bite at the Au Bon Pain.) I think it's great I can go dancing and have a stranger compliment me on my style.
I also like listening to radio programs about topical events with interesting folks and would be willing to pay for such if it were of sufficient quality, diversity, and reliability, particularly as when I'm working I spend 12 hours a week on the road often late at night and would like something to keep me sharp.
I don't care to have bozo like you making asinine comments on the quality of my life and have no problem informing you just how tremendously rude you are and I don't give a damn about the music service you obsess about.
Well, I thought I made it clear I'm not interested in bringing along music with me, either in a digital format or on CD/tape. It might be nice as an alternate or for a break but I've already got a fair collection of material and don't need to buy another gadget for this.
I also thought I made it clear that producing material more to my taste (CD's containing downloaded news & interview programs) is simply more effort then I'd like to invest every week. I'm already spending 12 hours on the road on top of just living my life, what free time I have is at a premium and searching / downloading / burning radio programs every week is just too much to ask. However paying for a device and service that offered what I want would be worth it for me if it worked.
Finally while it's nice that you like Canadian radio programming (and yes the CBC is one network though there are many others) please don't insult my other choices. I enjoy many NPR programs: Terry Gross on "All Things Considered" is a fantastic interviewer and "This American Life" often rises to brilliance. Being a US citizen living in Canada I appreciate hearing news and material from both sides of the border. YMMV.
Actually I have listened to books on tape but generally am not fond of them in this format. I'm a voracious reader and am often disappointed by the quality of these presentations. Most good writing is really only appropriate to the page and in bringing it to another medium it often comes off as stilted or awkward. Worse yet the material is often poorly abridged, ineptly acted or read by an author with few skills at presentation (it can be interesting to hear something in the author's own interpretation but only sometimes, more often it is just painful.)
When driving I prefer to hear more topical material of greater diversity. Most public-type radio news & interview programs tend to fill this role admirably. Good stuff in compact doses, not a several hour listening on a single topic or story. However I appreciate your interest and I encourage other's to try these out for themselves.
It's good to know that there's an applicaton that handles this for points along the way but I'm looking for something that could generate listing for the entire route, not just from the dozen or so control cities I'd have to manually plug in.
I assume the FCC has some sort of database of stations, frequencies and transmission areas (I've seen highly detailed maps for individual stations showing thier transmission areas) and there must be a table of stations-to-formats out there. With these two datasets it seems it would be trivial to overlay this on a route and generate a listing of stations of the sort desired and note where they begin & end.
Instead i expect (and well could be wrong not being at all familier with the product) that DeLorme is simply listing stations registered as serving a particular metropolitan area and not actually matching their transmission areas to the exact geographic location.
Not that Boston to Montreal is really "mountainous"
Have you ever actually driven I-89 through New Hampshire & Vermont? It's mountainous all right, that's why I'm always passing the idiots in SUV's spun out in their mad rush to go skiing in the winter (downhill skiing implies mountains to most folks, indeed it's a significent part of both state's economies.)
The White Mountains & the Green Mountains aren't the Rockies or the Tetons but they're considerable ranges nonetheless and more then sufficient to block reception from geosynch satellites. I agree that it's unlikely there will be repeaters placed in the dead-zones along my route but it's due to the lack of listeners, not because there's some magic difference between being in the shadow of Place Ville-Marie and Mt. Whatever just north of exit 2 on I-89 in Vermont.
I commute almost weekly between work in Boston, Mass. USA & home in Montreal, Quebec Canada. It's about a 6-hour drive through mountains and with a very limited choice of stations, both FM and AM. As someone with a strong dislike of both religious programming and country music and with limited endurance for Delilah (an impossible-to-escape syndicated program) I'd be very interested in radio programming that I could receive uninterrupted en route.
My first choice would be for a live NPR feed though PRI and of course CBC would be welcome. All-music would be useful as an alternate though I'm really looking for something to keep me engaged on the long and at this hundredth-time boring night drive. Mp3's or other pre-recorded music aren't what I'm looking for (I already have a large collection of CD's & tapes) and so aren't interesting as an alternative. I could download some news & interview programming I like and burn it to a CD before each trip but this would be far more preparation then I care to do so regularly.
Unfortunately it appears that "satellite radio" will be as problematic for me as conventional radio. Driving through the mountains at ~45 North will likely result in service interruptions (doubtless the same as with conventional radio: always at the most interesting points.) Without much likelihood of repeaters in these rural areas this appears an inherent bug in the service and one which (at least for me) brings it from a strong possibility to something I'm not willing to pay much extra for.
A couple of tangential thoughts:
As Canada's CRTC takes no action to prevent piracy of US FCC-licensed satellite television broadcasts (aside from refusing to allow the services to be directly sold in Canada) I wonder if the same will hold true of radio broadcasts?
Is anyone aware of an online service where I could plug in a route (not a single location) and get a listing of stations by genre along the way? I imagine this would be a popular add-on to the many online route/map services but none seem to have anything like this. What I'd like to see would be something like a listing of public radio station by frequency along my route; others would presumably prefer country stations, pop or rock programming, etc.
Finally, Howstuffworks has a much more complete explanation of the history of this technology and how it really works (the corporate web sites are careful not to identify problems such as the need for repeaters.)
Nowhere does it imply widespread havoc or complete disruption of services. If civilian GPS, telecommunications, etc. continue to operate (and there's absolutely no reason to expect they wont - we been through several flares of this sort in the past few years) then you can expect military ones will too.
Some satellites will experience problems but there are backups and alternates. Error rates will go up on digital transmissions and static may be annoying on analog ones but those aren't showstoppers. Some broadcasts will propagate oddly but that happens occasionally in the best of times.
This is a medium-large flare; it is not a catastrophic situation nor is it a unique event. I expect the world's militaries will be slightly inconvenienced at most.
This will have repercussions on long-distance communications & electrical transmission.
Satellites will likely be affected, indeed some may either have their onboard electronics so disrupted they cease to function temporarily or permanently, in other cases the cameras they use for determining proper altitude may become so filled with transient glitches that they loose lock & station-keeping is compromised.
The Earth's ionosphere will expand and the Van Allen Radiation Belts will become heavily charged resulting in numerous radio transmission oddities ranging from increased static interference to long skips. Low Earth Orbit objects will experience increased drag and possibly require altitude increases. Inhabitants of the ISS should be protected by the magnetosphere though increased radiation counts will be experienced.
Long-distance electrical transmission lines will build up significant charge. The lines in Northern Quebec are especially vulnerable from to their high latitude and lack of grounding due to the ancient granitic nature of the Canadian Shield. However measures put in place since the "Great Northeast Blackout of 1965" should be sufficient to keep any failures local and not produce a domino effect.
To Geeks the result will be poor phone and dataline connections, possibly isolated electrical outages. TV signals will be poor as will most other forms of radio & microwave transmissions. Doubtless a few bits will flip from one state to another in the course of this but this will only be noticeable in very large samples.
The good news is we've just passed the first Solar Maximum of the Information Age without great issue and this bodes well for the future. Though storms like this current one are possible (with diminishing likelihood) for the next year or so it appears fears of widespread disruption due to Solar-Max of were unfounded and along with the GPS rollover, y2k, unix t_time going to 10 digits, various odd dates etc. we've managed to come through all remarkably unscathed.
I can't find the cite but read a debunking of the gold-in-WTC meme the other day. Apparently there did used to be some very large quantity in the complex but it was moved some years ago.
Unless someone can provide a reliable reference I'm gonna call this an urban legend.
Apple has had it's "Open Scripting Architecture" for a number of years. Apple's own AppleScript or Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, Tcl/tk, etc. can all plug in and be used throughout the system. Indeed with the vast majority of MacOS applications being AppleScript-able they're all also automagically Perlable, Pythonable, Javable, JavaScriptable, Tcl/Tkable, etc. As all of the popular MacOS web browsers also support this it's not difficult to script things via web-pages.
As this same functionality is in MacOS X (and I believe in it's peer Open Source "Darwin") the technology is availiable for others to review, compare/contrast, even appropriate. Whatever you think of Apple it's an interesting technology and has already proven it's worth with almost all MacOS applications being made AppleScriptable (and hence everything-else scriptable) for years.
While the paper isn't particularly original in it's parts the breadth is impressive. It's a well written, thoughtful piece outlining a smart, adaptable, robust, future computing environment. What makes it notable is that the folks writing it have the resources to actually get underway and aren't simply blue-sky theorizers.
Unfortunately coming from Microsoft most/.'ers will prefer to scream and whine about it, attempt to twist it to demonstrate their own particular MS issue or make more jokes that are usually weak at best.
Pity, because if this had appeared elsewhere without any MS connection folks would be talking about it in a positive way, taking the discussion someplace interesting. Instead most are just blinded by the name MS and have once again congregated for the ritual stoning.
Anyway,/.-correctness aside there are a couple of points that the paper glosses over (amongst many) that I find particularly interesting:
The first is the concept of stateless storage - files are there as long as you need them then eventually wither away when no longer referenced or required. This seems to me a particularly utopian view as I'm regularly realizing that I'm either missing a note I want from long ago (too aggressive purging) or that I've got so much material on something that it's becoming burdensome. I entirely fail to imagine how this sort of winnowing could be automated. Agents to help me organize, tag, and prioritize yes, but without my interaction it strikes me as likely reliable as a computer consistently recognizing pr0n images from others.
The next is the internal intelligence of a system. This has been an area of much research for many years. The current-state information should be almost all available from within the system and with a few supplied metrics (costs, resources, constraints, priorities) "intelligent" decisions should be possible to make. Surprisingly there seems to be little of this actually available on the market already, at least not much available for general server/desktop management (that I've heard of.)
Finally the lack of references to directory services and the role PKI/encryption would play in this future scenario is interesting. Clearly these will be key elements in the ubiquitous seamless environment the authors are talking about yet their mention is notably absent. Is this a reflection of MS's appreciation of these as areas of strategic importance in which is hasn't yet a firm foundation and doesn't wish to draw attention to or is it something that the authors think will be so established by the time they're envisioning explicit reference isn't necessary? Either way it's an interesting omission.
It'd be really nice to see some legacy free PC hardware!
There is - it's called a Mac. Open firmware, PPC, clean design, these days essentially a consumer-cost workstation-class box. Even runs a modern OS now (oh wait, you already know all about that.)
RMS, i respect your opinion when it comes to software, but please don't voice any other political opinions.
Why not? Why should anyone not express their opinions? RMS certainly has as much right to one as you do.
Indeed as his being someone deeply involved in issues of liberty and freedom I care more to hear his opinions (congruent with my own or not) then I do those of numerous other folks who offer theirs. If you don't agree with them fair enough but asking him to be silent is profoundly offensive.
Perhaps later you'd like to list those who should be allowed to express political opinions? I'm sure there's a job for you in many countries in this world, in the meantime I'll prefer to respect other's rights and encourage those with interesting and knowledgeable material to contribute to the conversation.
As some folks have pointed out most browsers mis-identify themselves as one of the big two in order to avoid being condemned to the "other" catagory.
This is well understood by anyone who trackes browser visits. This is not news, this is not a suprise and it doesn't change the numbers. Often it's possible to identify a browser by exactly what string it does give, othertimes a simple javascript is run or other behaviors are checked.
Any way you cut it; reading logs, actual testing or running surveys the numbers all come out it's IE, NS, then everything else, with the everything else ones pretty much lost in the noise.
Finally for those who continue to bleat out "Just write to the spec!" that'd be great if the browsers actually met the specs but they don't. Furthermore as folks are paid to work in the real world and produce results that are actually usable on their client's desktops they must use the tools available and that means a limited collection of very ideosyncratic browsers.
All of the browsers have their own quirks and strengths and most folks just try to write generic pages most of the time. When something is needed and is browser-specific then work-arounds are made and usually they cover 90%+ of the actual users of a major site.
It's always sorta funny and sorta sad to see how many/.'ers think that everyone else is stoopid and that they have unique insights into every situation. Again - yes browser misreporting is well known and is pretty much compensated for and for sophisticated stuff writing to the specs will get you as much trouble as often as not doing so will. Most web folks would LOVE to write to the specs, if only everything implemented them properly & consistantly!
If Mozilla is going to be able to compete with the major browsers...
What other major browsers? Opera? Lynx? The legions of other 1%'ers?
As far as most webfolks are concerned there's IE for Wintel, IE for Mac (they've different code bases and behave very differently), Netscape et al v.4x, Netscape/Mozilla et al v.6x then generic text-browsers for ADA compatibility. That leaves Netscape/Mozilla as one of the two major names and the rest lost in the "other" catagory*.
*Yes lots of browser-partesians will howl at this but for most web sites the vast majority of browsers hitting them regularly are IE or NS. No comment on quality or anything else, just reading the logs.
For those/.'ers who sneer at reading linked articles the kids just went out and jumped about for a minute. No attempt at synchronization beyond a wall clock and some teacher calling out "OK Luvvies - jump about now!" There wasn't even an attempt to get the kids on a beat (apparently BBC1 couldn't be persuaded to play Queen's "We Will Rock You" at the right time;-)
However as directly useless as this may be to science it's doubtless opened the eye's of Britians youth to what promises to be only the first of the many pointless exercises they will be required to go through in their lives, always a lesson worth learning.
At long last we've got an officially blessed vector format.
I'm sick to death of getting maps and charts as honking big ugly GIFs. They invariably come off looking poorly on screen, printing them out only makes their 72 DPI origin more uglily apparent, and just suck up bandwidth. Finally at 256 colors and without embedded gamma they're always off visually to some large percentage of folks.
PDF's were touted as a replacement but that format has become overloaded with gadgets and dubious features, the plug-in is enormous and invariably buggy plus only works on a few platforms. Also aside from Apple creating their own implementation for MacOS X (Quartz) I don't know of any second source for the technology other then Adobe.
SVG is far lighter weight and far more accessable, now the question is when will decent plugins arrive and how soon 'till support is built-in to the major browsers? Adobe's SVG plug-in just went to v.3beta for a few platforms but I've been unable to find anything open (in either sense) or more cross-patform yet.
Finally my fear is that SVG will become like PNG - a great format that's poorly supported in differently broken ways so it's just not worth the hassle. Does anyone have any insight on how easy/hard SVG support will be to roll into tools & browsers, what producers of such tools timelines are?
Coupla basic points:(easily discovered by anyone willing to invest the same time at a search engine as they did posting something foolish to/.)
MIT is a private institution. Yes it gets money from public grants & programs, almost every accredited institution does. MIT is no more a public or government entity then the trade schools that advertise on late night TV. Furthermore even parts of the US Gov't doing public work can now claim IP on some of their products.
Yes MIT uses Graduate Students and no they don't generally earn much. On the other hand putting them to work probably does keep their tuition down a bit and heck, if you don't like it you can always go someplace else (courts rarely require X years attending MIT as part of a sentence and the campus is very open, one is free to leave it and not return at any time.) However this has nothing to do with the topic and just gets brought up every time a.edu issue is raised.
The USHDTVstandards happened after the FCC ran a competition in which four finalists emerged. Rather then a winner-take-all situation emerging (which would of taken years with the legal wrangling) a pooling of the "best" of a various technologies was brokered. As the patent & other IP issues around HDTV were spread out amongst several institutions and companies a pool was created held by the companies who now dubbed themselves "The Grand Alliance". Then as any other number of projects have done (DVD, Firewire, etc.) an examiner was brought in to determine exactly what IP was required then a formula was put in place to compensate the IP owners and everything got signed off on.
MIT earns some large sum of money every year from it's IP material, money which helps fund them. Sony does the same from it's own portfolio. In this case MIT's IP is used through the Grand Alliance agreement, something which Sony seems to have now decided to ignore. Whether or not you agree with all details of all IP in this case it seems rather strightforward and not to fall into any of the areas which so many folks find offensive.
Yes MIT (a US institution) can sue Sony (a company HQ'd in Japan.) Internationial trade has been going on since we first worked out nations and the laws are rather straightforward in cases like this. Did anyone other then a few sappy posters think that this was a new situation, that one couldn't sue an offshore entity?
It's not the glass, it's the laminates inside the glass and the coatings on it. Subway cars don't use house window glass but instead the safety glass similar to car windowshields (at least in the US; European vehicles have different, lower safety standards (no flame, just a basic fact, many argue that the US's standards are overly high.))
Anyway, the stuff that bonds the layers of glass together along with the IR blocker embedded in many windows is a nasty stuff when it degrades into the ocean, particularly into stuff growing directly on top on it.
As to any danger from future large panes of glass on the sea-bottom, that's not likely a big concern. The sea beds where these artificial reefs are being placed are pretty much 95% silica and the glass will erode due to mechanical and chemical action eventually. In the meantime it's not like kids will be walking on this sand.
As the State was enthused over reusing the old subway cars for this artificial reef (it's their project) and the EPA signed off on it it's not quite the stereotypical "dumping at sea". If you'd bothered to read a bit you'd know that the Redwings had been cleaned of all greases, etc. and that asbestos was specifically considered and deemed safe in an marine environment. So now there's a reef in what was formerly a marine "desert", a landfill *without* a bunch of rotting old subway cars, and an interesting model for ecologically & financially sound disposal.
Instead you shoot-from-the-hip with a stupid comment. The art note isn't worth commenting on beyond it speaks to your own limitations & biases.
Why not have a scrap dealer buy the cars? 'Cause they're full of asbestos and most scrap-dealers aren't enthused about dealing with that. Salvage folks would be further turned off by the poor volume-to-salvagable-metals ratio of an old subway car. Shipping 400 Redwings to a plant, stripping them of asbestos & other nasties then ripping out the various metals: Not worth it.
Instead MTA found a clever way of disposing the vehicles with the asbestos in-place and looking good in the process. At a cost of $1.3 million that's not a bad deal, certianly less then anyone else would want. Heck it's probably less then it would cost to just ship them to an appropriate disposal facilty much less any disposal fees.
My only question is if there's a 1%-for-art bit in this. A sculpture on the ocean floor made up of subway cars - could be pretty neat, especially considering the constraints in seeing it in situ.
Missiles and spacecraft are launched from down here at the bottom of the soup. If they can take advantage of the ambient gasses along the way (up, down, sideways) as an oxidizer then there's that much less material they have to lug along. Yes once in space a Scramjet isn't much use but to and from arbitrary "space" the majority of most trajectories are within enough atmosphere that Scramjets would be useful.
Imagine if your car/bus had to haul along it's own oxidizer in a honking big tank of super-cooled special-purpose gas next to the fuel tank, which is what all liquid-fuel rockets do today. Now imagine someone announced an engine that could possibly dispense with that heavy complex oxidizer tank that's been weighing down your car/bus and instead let the motor just suck in outside air - pretty exciting news eh?
Right now Scramjets are a tricky exotic tech requiring special materials and designs that push the envelopes for those fields. On the other hand the same was true for jet engines when they were developed yet all large and/or long distance aircraft use them pretty much exclusively today. This may be a technological blind alley or it may never be commercially viable but it's interesting stuff nonetheless, indeed exciting for the aerospace-heads.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I see this as the Bells finally having knifed the baby.
These entrenched companies didn't want to open up their developed-under-monopoly wiring plants to outsiders but desperately wanted access to the long-distance market and so were willing to concede entry. However this didn't mean they had to play fair and so they took every opportunity and used every trick in the book to screw, backstab and block their competition. Now that they've managed to eliminate that competition they can buy the carcasses for pennies on the dollar and return to their slow expensive monopolistic ways.
This isn't a rebound, it's a rape and the consumers are the next to get screwed unwillingly.
You don't know me, you don't know a thing about me, don't be an ass and attempt to psychoanalyze me from a few postings.
I've got a life, I've got more life then you can likely imagine. What I don't have is time right now (and considering I spend a few months at a shot working like a dawg then a few years coasting I really don't thing I've got much to worry about on that account.)
Music is *not* life. For some folks it's important, for others not so. I appreciate music in moderation but 6 continuous hours of it while driving is not something I want, not at night, not on a trip I've made hundreds of times and not when I've got to keep an eye out for deer & moose and in winter endure treacherous freezing mountain roads. If you can't wrap you mind around that then fine but stop recommending I adopt your lifestyle.
I like hot sweaty sex with beefy hirsute men who know how to take orders. I appreciate long dinners in a small bistro on Plateau Mont-Royal with a circle of close friends. I revel in spending time with my wonderful lover whether it be sex or cuddling or talking or simply being near each other. I like having a full house of friends and guests all buzzing about. I enjoy hanging out with those same friends, constantly being surprised at the diverse and interesting folks I'm privileged to associate with.
I think it's fantastic I go to dinner parties and sit with the likes of the CEO of a fascinating high-tech business, an internationally known painter, an obscure playwright, the artists former-porn-star boyfriend that I've known for years, a well-known lawyer I've hung with in cities across 3 continents, a good buddy who manages a local leather bar, a mid-level diplomat and the bf of my old bf who's becoming a well known singer in many circles and in town to give a performance, and my own special honey. That we can all enjoy a 3 hour meal full of great conversation, interesting ideas, wonderful wit, all done in two languages and on topics ranging around the world and through time is a great measure of one's life.
I like that I can work like a dawg for 3 or 6 months at a shot then take a year or two or more off and really appreciate life. I love that I get to travel to interesting places, eat in great restaurants and see the wonders of the world. I think it's fun that when Montreal is mentioned in my extended circles my name comes up, that somehow my lover and I are landmarks. I appreciate I sit on a number of boards of organizations I feel are important and am happy to help in my own away. I'm joyous I enjoy good health and have parents who are also hale & hearty whose company I still get to enjoy.
I enjoy going camping and laying nude on a hot sandy beach and visiting art museums. I find it fun to go to seedy leather bars with my best friend and watch him sing wonderfully at karaoke, I enjoy walking through the outrageously rich and conservative town I went to school in and knowing I can blow most of these folks minds and often do (apparently men in full leather gear rarely grab a bite at the Au Bon Pain.) I think it's great I can go dancing and have a stranger compliment me on my style.
I also like listening to radio programs about topical events with interesting folks and would be willing to pay for such if it were of sufficient quality, diversity, and reliability, particularly as when I'm working I spend 12 hours a week on the road often late at night and would like something to keep me sharp.
I don't care to have bozo like you making asinine comments on the quality of my life and have no problem informing you just how tremendously rude you are and I don't give a damn about the music service you obsess about.
Thanks.
I also thought I made it clear that producing material more to my taste (CD's containing downloaded news & interview programs) is simply more effort then I'd like to invest every week. I'm already spending 12 hours on the road on top of just living my life, what free time I have is at a premium and searching / downloading / burning radio programs every week is just too much to ask. However paying for a device and service that offered what I want would be worth it for me if it worked.
Finally while it's nice that you like Canadian radio programming (and yes the CBC is one network though there are many others) please don't insult my other choices. I enjoy many NPR programs: Terry Gross on "All Things Considered" is a fantastic interviewer and "This American Life" often rises to brilliance. Being a US citizen living in Canada I appreciate hearing news and material from both sides of the border. YMMV.
Actually I have listened to books on tape but generally am not fond of them in this format. I'm a voracious reader and am often disappointed by the quality of these presentations. Most good writing is really only appropriate to the page and in bringing it to another medium it often comes off as stilted or awkward. Worse yet the material is often poorly abridged, ineptly acted or read by an author with few skills at presentation (it can be interesting to hear something in the author's own interpretation but only sometimes, more often it is just painful.)
When driving I prefer to hear more topical material of greater diversity. Most public-type radio news & interview programs tend to fill this role admirably. Good stuff in compact doses, not a several hour listening on a single topic or story. However I appreciate your interest and I encourage other's to try these out for themselves.
It's good to know that there's an applicaton that handles this for points along the way but I'm looking for something that could generate listing for the entire route, not just from the dozen or so control cities I'd have to manually plug in.
I assume the FCC has some sort of database of stations, frequencies and transmission areas (I've seen highly detailed maps for individual stations showing thier transmission areas) and there must be a table of stations-to-formats out there. With these two datasets it seems it would be trivial to overlay this on a route and generate a listing of stations of the sort desired and note where they begin & end.
Instead i expect (and well could be wrong not being at all familier with the product) that DeLorme is simply listing stations registered as serving a particular metropolitan area and not actually matching their transmission areas to the exact geographic location.
Have you ever actually driven I-89 through New Hampshire & Vermont? It's mountainous all right, that's why I'm always passing the idiots in SUV's spun out in their mad rush to go skiing in the winter (downhill skiing implies mountains to most folks, indeed it's a significent part of both state's economies.)
The White Mountains & the Green Mountains aren't the Rockies or the Tetons but they're considerable ranges nonetheless and more then sufficient to block reception from geosynch satellites. I agree that it's unlikely there will be repeaters placed in the dead-zones along my route but it's due to the lack of listeners, not because there's some magic difference between being in the shadow of Place Ville-Marie and Mt. Whatever just north of exit 2 on I-89 in Vermont.
My first choice would be for a live NPR feed though PRI and of course CBC would be welcome. All-music would be useful as an alternate though I'm really looking for something to keep me engaged on the long and at this hundredth-time boring night drive. Mp3's or other pre-recorded music aren't what I'm looking for (I already have a large collection of CD's & tapes) and so aren't interesting as an alternative. I could download some news & interview programming I like and burn it to a CD before each trip but this would be far more preparation then I care to do so regularly.
Unfortunately it appears that "satellite radio" will be as problematic for me as conventional radio. Driving through the mountains at ~45 North will likely result in service interruptions (doubtless the same as with conventional radio: always at the most interesting points.) Without much likelihood of repeaters in these rural areas this appears an inherent bug in the service and one which (at least for me) brings it from a strong possibility to something I'm not willing to pay much extra for.
A couple of tangential thoughts:
-
As Canada's CRTC takes no action to prevent piracy of US FCC-licensed satellite television broadcasts (aside from refusing to allow the services to be directly sold in Canada) I wonder if the same will hold true of radio broadcasts?
-
Is anyone aware of an online service where I could plug in a route (not a single location) and get a listing of stations by genre along the way? I imagine this would be a popular add-on to the many online route/map services but none seem to have anything like this. What I'd like to see would be something like a listing of public radio station by frequency along my route; others would presumably prefer country stations, pop or rock programming, etc.
Finally, Howstuffworks has a much more complete explanation of the history of this technology and how it really works (the corporate web sites are careful not to identify problems such as the need for repeaters.)Nowhere does it imply widespread havoc or complete disruption of services. If civilian GPS, telecommunications, etc. continue to operate (and there's absolutely no reason to expect they wont - we been through several flares of this sort in the past few years) then you can expect military ones will too.
Some satellites will experience problems but there are backups and alternates. Error rates will go up on digital transmissions and static may be annoying on analog ones but those aren't showstoppers. Some broadcasts will propagate oddly but that happens occasionally in the best of times.
This is a medium-large flare; it is not a catastrophic situation nor is it a unique event. I expect the world's militaries will be slightly inconvenienced at most.
Satellites will likely be affected, indeed some may either have their onboard electronics so disrupted they cease to function temporarily or permanently, in other cases the cameras they use for determining proper altitude may become so filled with transient glitches that they loose lock & station-keeping is compromised.
The Earth's ionosphere will expand and the Van Allen Radiation Belts will become heavily charged resulting in numerous radio transmission oddities ranging from increased static interference to long skips. Low Earth Orbit objects will experience increased drag and possibly require altitude increases. Inhabitants of the ISS should be protected by the magnetosphere though increased radiation counts will be experienced.
Long-distance electrical transmission lines will build up significant charge. The lines in Northern Quebec are especially vulnerable from to their high latitude and lack of grounding due to the ancient granitic nature of the Canadian Shield. However measures put in place since the "Great Northeast Blackout of 1965" should be sufficient to keep any failures local and not produce a domino effect.
To Geeks the result will be poor phone and dataline connections, possibly isolated electrical outages. TV signals will be poor as will most other forms of radio & microwave transmissions. Doubtless a few bits will flip from one state to another in the course of this but this will only be noticeable in very large samples.
The good news is we've just passed the first Solar Maximum of the Information Age without great issue and this bodes well for the future. Though storms like this current one are possible (with diminishing likelihood) for the next year or so it appears fears of widespread disruption due to Solar-Max of were unfounded and along with the GPS rollover, y2k, unix t_time going to 10 digits, various odd dates etc. we've managed to come through all remarkably unscathed.
Unless someone can provide a reliable reference I'm gonna call this an urban legend.
As this same functionality is in MacOS X (and I believe in it's peer Open Source " Darwin ") the technology is availiable for others to review, compare/contrast, even appropriate. Whatever you think of Apple it's an interesting technology and has already proven it's worth with almost all MacOS applications being made AppleScriptable (and hence everything-else scriptable) for years.
Unfortunately coming from Microsoft most /.'ers will prefer to scream and whine about it, attempt to twist it to demonstrate their own particular MS issue or make more jokes that are usually weak at best.
Pity, because if this had appeared elsewhere without any MS connection folks would be talking about it in a positive way, taking the discussion someplace interesting. Instead most are just blinded by the name MS and have once again congregated for the ritual stoning.
Anyway, /.-correctness aside there are a couple of points that the paper glosses over (amongst many) that I find particularly interesting:
The first is the concept of stateless storage - files are there as long as you need them then eventually wither away when no longer referenced or required. This seems to me a particularly utopian view as I'm regularly realizing that I'm either missing a note I want from long ago (too aggressive purging) or that I've got so much material on something that it's becoming burdensome. I entirely fail to imagine how this sort of winnowing could be automated. Agents to help me organize, tag, and prioritize yes, but without my interaction it strikes me as likely reliable as a computer consistently recognizing pr0n images from others.
The next is the internal intelligence of a system. This has been an area of much research for many years. The current-state information should be almost all available from within the system and with a few supplied metrics (costs, resources, constraints, priorities) "intelligent" decisions should be possible to make. Surprisingly there seems to be little of this actually available on the market already, at least not much available for general server/desktop management (that I've heard of.)
Finally the lack of references to directory services and the role PKI/encryption would play in this future scenario is interesting. Clearly these will be key elements in the ubiquitous seamless environment the authors are talking about yet their mention is notably absent. Is this a reflection of MS's appreciation of these as areas of strategic importance in which is hasn't yet a firm foundation and doesn't wish to draw attention to or is it something that the authors think will be so established by the time they're envisioning explicit reference isn't necessary? Either way it's an interesting omission.
There is - it's called a Mac. Open firmware, PPC, clean design, these days essentially a consumer-cost workstation-class box. Even runs a modern OS now (oh wait, you already know all about that.)
Indeed as his being someone deeply involved in issues of liberty and freedom I care more to hear his opinions (congruent with my own or not) then I do those of numerous other folks who offer theirs. If you don't agree with them fair enough but asking him to be silent is profoundly offensive.
Perhaps later you'd like to list those who should be allowed to express political opinions? I'm sure there's a job for you in many countries in this world, in the meantime I'll prefer to respect other's rights and encourage those with interesting and knowledgeable material to contribute to the conversation.
This is well understood by anyone who trackes browser visits. This is not news, this is not a suprise and it doesn't change the numbers. Often it's possible to identify a browser by exactly what string it does give, othertimes a simple javascript is run or other behaviors are checked.
Any way you cut it; reading logs, actual testing or running surveys the numbers all come out it's IE, NS, then everything else, with the everything else ones pretty much lost in the noise.
Finally for those who continue to bleat out "Just write to the spec!" that'd be great if the browsers actually met the specs but they don't. Furthermore as folks are paid to work in the real world and produce results that are actually usable on their client's desktops they must use the tools available and that means a limited collection of very ideosyncratic browsers.
All of the browsers have their own quirks and strengths and most folks just try to write generic pages most of the time. When something is needed and is browser-specific then work-arounds are made and usually they cover 90%+ of the actual users of a major site.
It's always sorta funny and sorta sad to see how many /.'ers think that everyone else is stoopid and that they have unique insights into every situation. Again - yes browser misreporting is well known and is pretty much compensated for and for sophisticated stuff writing to the specs will get you as much trouble as often as not doing so will. Most web folks would LOVE to write to the specs, if only everything implemented them properly & consistantly!
As far as most webfolks are concerned there's IE for Wintel, IE for Mac (they've different code bases and behave very differently), Netscape et al v.4x, Netscape/Mozilla et al v.6x then generic text-browsers for ADA compatibility. That leaves Netscape/Mozilla as one of the two major names and the rest lost in the "other" catagory*.
*Yes lots of browser-partesians will howl at this but for most web sites the vast majority of browsers hitting them regularly are IE or NS. No comment on quality or anything else, just reading the logs.
For those /.'ers who sneer at reading linked articles the kids just went out and jumped about for a minute. No attempt at synchronization beyond a wall clock and some teacher calling out "OK Luvvies - jump about now!" There wasn't even an attempt to get the kids on a beat (apparently BBC1 couldn't be persuaded to play Queen's "We Will Rock You" at the right time ;-)
However as directly useless as this may be to science it's doubtless opened the eye's of Britians youth to what promises to be only the first of the many pointless exercises they will be required to go through in their lives, always a lesson worth learning.
I'm sick to death of getting maps and charts as honking big ugly GIFs. They invariably come off looking poorly on screen, printing them out only makes their 72 DPI origin more uglily apparent, and just suck up bandwidth. Finally at 256 colors and without embedded gamma they're always off visually to some large percentage of folks.
PDF's were touted as a replacement but that format has become overloaded with gadgets and dubious features, the plug-in is enormous and invariably buggy plus only works on a few platforms. Also aside from Apple creating their own implementation for MacOS X (Quartz) I don't know of any second source for the technology other then Adobe.
SVG is far lighter weight and far more accessable, now the question is when will decent plugins arrive and how soon 'till support is built-in to the major browsers? Adobe's SVG plug-in just went to v.3beta for a few platforms but I've been unable to find anything open (in either sense) or more cross-patform yet.
Finally my fear is that SVG will become like PNG - a great format that's poorly supported in differently broken ways so it's just not worth the hassle. Does anyone have any insight on how easy/hard SVG support will be to roll into tools & browsers, what producers of such tools timelines are?
Anyway, the stuff that bonds the layers of glass together along with the IR blocker embedded in many windows is a nasty stuff when it degrades into the ocean, particularly into stuff growing directly on top on it.
As to any danger from future large panes of glass on the sea-bottom, that's not likely a big concern. The sea beds where these artificial reefs are being placed are pretty much 95% silica and the glass will erode due to mechanical and chemical action eventually. In the meantime it's not like kids will be walking on this sand.
Instead you shoot-from-the-hip with a stupid comment. The art note isn't worth commenting on beyond it speaks to your own limitations & biases.
Instead MTA found a clever way of disposing the vehicles with the asbestos in-place and looking good in the process. At a cost of $1.3 million that's not a bad deal, certianly less then anyone else would want. Heck it's probably less then it would cost to just ship them to an appropriate disposal facilty much less any disposal fees.
My only question is if there's a 1%-for-art bit in this. A sculpture on the ocean floor made up of subway cars - could be pretty neat, especially considering the constraints in seeing it in situ.
Imagine if your car/bus had to haul along it's own oxidizer in a honking big tank of super-cooled special-purpose gas next to the fuel tank, which is what all liquid-fuel rockets do today. Now imagine someone announced an engine that could possibly dispense with that heavy complex oxidizer tank that's been weighing down your car/bus and instead let the motor just suck in outside air - pretty exciting news eh?
Right now Scramjets are a tricky exotic tech requiring special materials and designs that push the envelopes for those fields. On the other hand the same was true for jet engines when they were developed yet all large and/or long distance aircraft use them pretty much exclusively today. This may be a technological blind alley or it may never be commercially viable but it's interesting stuff nonetheless, indeed exciting for the aerospace-heads.
Sorry.