I suppose some things are a bit different, but the cable company that I work for was one of the first in Canada (correct me if I'm wrong, Mountain Cablevision) to go 100% digital.
True, channels we pickup off-air may see "fuzziness" or come through poorly, but it's not like that's degradation within the cable system, that's straight from the off-air feed. Temperature inversion and Sun Outages (as far as satellite feeds) can cause a lot of the problems straight from the digital headend.
I think the consumers are highly mis-informed, and a lot of them just want "clear pictures and sound" and forget about all the technical reasons for why it is so difficult to get it to their homes during certain parts of the year.
Sure, if the cable plant sucks, and you're 2-10 amplifiers deep, your reception is going to be horrible, but that in itself is the only problem the cable companies should have to worry about.
A) He probably doesn't realize that,
(i) all 300 channels are NOT HD,
(ii) the 5-25 HDTV channels do NOT always broadcast in HD
(iii) his HD terminal should have settings to change from that crappy 4:3 Letterbox, READ THE MANUAL
B) He thinks that digital terminals (including HD terminals) will work magic, if a signal is brought into the cable headend in analog, processed and spit out in digital, it CAN look crappy, it just means that the source is just as bad as the destination.
C) HD is ready for primetime (pardon the pun here), but it's the only time they actual broadcast in HD (aside PBS and a couple other select HD channels). They're trying to hook you on watching primetime shows, so that when they switch the entire lineup, you have something to be eager about. Of course, they also broadcast monday night football and other bigger sporting events because they know they will have the coverage, and have more than enough in the budget to afford the hundred of thousands of dollars to record the game from 10 different angles, with those $100K+ camera's that allow them to broadcast with HD.
try out http://www.bootdisk.com/
This web site has a range of bootdisks from win95 to win2000 and so on.
If you ever need a bootdisk, I'm sure it'll be there.
Sounds like what happened with a truck I just recently started financing...
The thing had some paint imperfections, so under warranty, I wanted either A) a new truck, or B) the repairs to be done professionally.
I didn't get either, and the worst of it all is I was essentially told to "deal with it".
I guess it's time to go knock some heads around.
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I forgot to mention...
I suppose some things are a bit different, but the cable company that I work for was one of the first in Canada (correct me if I'm wrong, Mountain Cablevision) to go 100% digital.
True, channels we pickup off-air may see "fuzziness" or come through poorly, but it's not like that's degradation within the cable system, that's straight from the off-air feed. Temperature inversion and Sun Outages (as far as satellite feeds) can cause a lot of the problems straight from the digital headend.
I think the consumers are highly mis-informed, and a lot of them just want "clear pictures and sound" and forget about all the technical reasons for why it is so difficult to get it to their homes during certain parts of the year.
Sure, if the cable plant sucks, and you're 2-10 amplifiers deep, your reception is going to be horrible, but that in itself is the only problem the cable companies should have to worry about.
The problem with this persons article is that:
A) He probably doesn't realize that,
(i) all 300 channels are NOT HD,
(ii) the 5-25 HDTV channels do NOT always broadcast in HD
(iii) his HD terminal should have settings to change from that crappy 4:3 Letterbox, READ THE MANUAL
B) He thinks that digital terminals (including HD terminals) will work magic, if a signal is brought into the cable headend in analog, processed and spit out in digital, it CAN look crappy, it just means that the source is just as bad as the destination.
C) HD is ready for primetime (pardon the pun here), but it's the only time they actual broadcast in HD (aside PBS and a couple other select HD channels). They're trying to hook you on watching primetime shows, so that when they switch the entire lineup, you have something to be eager about. Of course, they also broadcast monday night football and other bigger sporting events because they know they will have the coverage, and have more than enough in the budget to afford the hundred of thousands of dollars to record the game from 10 different angles, with those $100K+ camera's that allow them to broadcast with HD.
try out http://www.bootdisk.com/ This web site has a range of bootdisks from win95 to win2000 and so on. If you ever need a bootdisk, I'm sure it'll be there.
Sounds like what happened with a truck I just recently started financing... The thing had some paint imperfections, so under warranty, I wanted either A) a new truck, or B) the repairs to be done professionally. I didn't get either, and the worst of it all is I was essentially told to "deal with it". I guess it's time to go knock some heads around.