First off, I own a Sony VPH-1278Q. Paid $1350 for it from eBay seller BPAI in Maryland, went and picked it up in person.
LCD and DLP projectors are compact, lightweight, and portable. Bright images from a small unit. Bulb costs are high, and the color intensity changes with the bulb life. Fixed resolution for the panels, there are widescreen units availible. Screen cannot do true black, there is always illumination even when the screen is "black"
CRT projectors are bulky, a pain in the ass to setup (you have to converge all 3 guns together). The 1278Q can do 1280x1024 I believe, but I run it from a HTPC @ 1024x768. Mine generates some noise, I could take efforts to silence it but it doesn't bother me.
CRT life can hit 8000 hours, the blue is the first to go. Static images burn in on CRT projectors, DLP/LCD don't suffer from this issue. CRT can do true black, all power to guns is cut and the screen is dark. CRT's are also known to have a hotness in the color when there is just a tiny bit, that is if there is just a little bit of red then it will be over-emphasised a bit because it takes a certain amount of power to fire the CRT (I haven't noticed this, this is from what I've read).
The CRT projector prices are falling, BUT ****BEWARE**** because many of the units on the surplus market are from corporate use, where they have been abused. Windows NT login splash burned into the display, etc. Be careful about this!!! There are hour counters on CRT projectors, mine had about 2200 hours on it when I bought it. I noticed some 4:3 browning but it didn't have any effect as it was outside of my projection area.
There is a bit more info on my web page above.
People balk at the size of my projector and start to talk about something they saw at SAMS club for xyz. There is much more to it than just point and shoot.
I use a program called dscaler (sourceforge) to upscale my laserdisk player for CRT projection, so far it hasn't been that noticable, and I'm using an 800mhz Athlon.
I find it hard to believe that it would be that difficult to incorporate a faster/better engineered processor or DSP to handle the video scaling functions, especially in plasma displays that start at $3000 and higher.
Does the DVDo units (the outboard device that pretty much killed the line-doubler market) suffer this delay? That unit was at the forefront of cheap line doubling, if it can upconvert without causing too much of a delay in audio there is _NO EXCUSE_ why the embedded chipsets in modern sets aren't able to cope.
I was thinking about that, can you imagine... instead of BBSes running the Courier HST dual standards pimping the latest Sierra titles, drive in warez sites.... people drive into "the zone" or point a directional at a tall building and gain access to the host, trading files @ 802.11g speeds. It could be the future!
Someone should make a mp3 cache system for the schools. This magic box loaded with ATA disks and could jump in when college kids go to download the latest Justin Timberlake track.
This could greatly reduce the amount of bandwidth being used.
It could also be used to cache warez and porn.
First, I wouldn't say it is in a rural area. There is a large population in our region. We suffer from sprawl pretty badly, but the figures say we have more technology jobs in Southeastern Virginia than in the state's capital region, Richmond. Norfolk is next to Virginia Beach (400k), Portsmouth, Suffolk, Hampton, Newport News, Chesapeake and others. At least 1.5mil, if not more.
FROM WHAT I UNDERSTAND, the maglev system worked when it was in Flordia on the test track, because the rails were on the ground. There are videos on the American Maglev site of it moving before the ODU system was put together. Once the ODU setup was constructed, they hit a snag. The rail flexes from the weight, and the system tries to adjust for it by adjusting power to magnets, which causes the rail to react, which starts an oscillation loop or something. Ooops.
The system here is opposite from the German Transrapid system (which is totally bad ass, btw). The guideway in the German system is more intelligent / has electromagnets / something, where as the one at ODU most of the guts are in the actual cars. This means the guideway is much cheaper to deploy. If you have ever seen it, the guideway is pretty frigging narrow, it would be easier to handle right of ways for such a thing.
It is a shame the contractors haven't been paid, and it is a shame it hasn't gotten further. From what I understand they are finally getting their hands on the money. It would be interesting to see a cost break down.
If you think about it, 14 million in what could be a better transportation solution for cities is chump change. Companies spend $3 million on blanket Windows software licenses. The theory is if/when it works it could spawn a new industry and our region could gain new businesses that support it.
People complain about the money going to the monorail, yet they don't complain about their tax money going to schools where many of the students are from out of country and leave when they are done with their education. Granted there are private interests working here, but I fail to understand the hatred for the creation of something new and something better.
Lastly, they are started to talk about this stupid light rail stuff here, that is little trollys that run on conventional rails. Lame, gradings obstruct traffic, they are slow. Elevated maglev is the answer! HOORAY!
Pretty simple solution, FreeBSD. Or OpenBSD if your paranoid and don't mind sacrificing IO performance for audits. Or NetBSD if your running on some sorta reject box that probably shouldn't be running BSD and should be running the native OS for that hardware platform.
But no, everyone is gaga over Linux. Meanwhile, BSD systems and users sit in the background humming along, under the scope of the media radar.
Price might be the issue. SGI prices their gear pretty much parallel to the Sun equivilent. Whatever a Sun V880 costs with 8 CPUs is probably what you will pay for an Origin whatever with 8 CPUs (whatever the current comparable product is).
I can only guess SGI screwed up marketing. SGI should still be in competition to Sun, but instead they have kind of faded. There are still certain industries that rely on their hardware, but that appears to be shrinking. Having worked with Power Series to Origin 3800s and Sparcstation 1's to Sun V880s, I think SGI equipment is superior to Sun. Solaris has come further (bigger user base) than IRIX. The lack of Oracle and other big business apps on SGI hardware hurts them. There was some sort of fight between Oracle and SGI I believe.
Oracle was going to release a scalable database appliance based on the SGI Origin 300, from what I heard. The unit would be expandable by bricks. 4 CPUS now, add a router and 16 more later. During this time Oracle lived on IRIX, and from what I heard Oracle was faster on IRIX/SGI than Solaris/Sun... politics kicked in, Oracle yanked support for IRIX, and the damage is done. Without the business apps, you loose quite a bit of market share.
SGI still owns it in the video world. I'm not talking Final Cut Pro, but huge Discreet apps that require insane pipes for uncompressed HD video. Big SGIs can move insane amounts of data.
Figures. You can get Maya demos for Windows, but try getting one to run on your old SGI box. Alias acts like SGI hardware doesn't exist, even though SGI owned them.
I was hoping to get a demo copy to put my MXI graphics to work on my SGI Octane. Nope!
Poor SGI, I hope they can make a comeback. Somehow.
They are running out of things to sell off. Cray? Gone. Their buildngs? Gone (I believe they lease them now).
Gotta look good for the shareholders. The American way.
Okay, CATV was established as Community Antenna Television. An antenna on top of the mountain fed the people in the valley, or some such.
People bought cable mainly to rid themselves of the hassles of an antenna, you know, the Archer Space Command thing on every chimney, rusting away with TWINAX to the back of yo' Zenith.
Cable eliminate that, and gave you a few extra channels. But the prices kept going up, and up, and up. Premium channels like HBO offer movies, and appear to have no commercials. Actually, the 30 minute documentaries about movies and indeed commercials, but that is besides the point.
Along has come HDTV. HDTV is digital, and should deliver a picture that is exactly as good as the cable delivered station. So assuming more content providers show up in town providing channels, then the need for cable should be reduced.
In my market (Virginia Beach, VA) you can receive MTV2 on UHF broadcast, but can't get it on cable until your spending $60+ dollars for Cox TV + Cox Cable. MTV2 broadcast seems to be filled with DirecTV ads. I don't get it, DirecTV delivers the same digital cable quality programming for analog cable pricing.
I know people that routinely spend $80 a month for Cable, Digtial cable and premium channels. If you think about it, that is quite a bit of money considering the majority of the channels are getting paid for your viewership. Your subscription demands them higher dollars for advertising. Not to mention half the channels go infomercial at 10pm it seems.
The house lights come on, WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP the klaxon howls. "UNAUTHORIZED BAG OF SKITTLES DETECTED IN ISLE 7! GUARDS, SECURE!" is heard over a PA speaker with a narrow range of fidelity. Troopers hustle down the isles and rip some kid out of his seat, skittles briefly rain down on nearby customers. Kid is hustled away, movie starts back up and house lights go down.
Next time the camcorderist should sit in the upper right or upper left part, that way he can't be seen.
Somehow, I just don't see these crappy video CD and DivX distributions of zero day movies a threat to their profits. Sure, bored kids with no money might sit at home wasting hours downloading them but anyone with income to afford the DVD copy will most likely buy it.
Wasn't it Europe where the movie industry wanted to stop text messaging because people were messaging each other and giving advice as to which movies sucked, which supposidly undermined the advertising campaign that overhypes crap?
Just like software piracy, some 14 year old running 3dStudio Max on mom's PC is not a loss in profits.
Okay, I've been thinking about this alot. I see the same drivel on fuckedcompany.com, about how IT workers end up training their lower cost foreign replacement in order to collect a little bit of extra living cash for their upcoming vacation.
If a few US workers were to beat the shit out of the visitors, and make sure that the news spread far and wide, it could make the foreigners uneasy about coming to the US. What is more, *IF* the major media picked up on the story it would gain a bit more attention to the cause.
You could even go so far as carrying a hat-cam and a digital8/DV video walkman to record a story about your management, then cut it out to a DVD/MPEG1 Video CD and distribute it freely, it would probably spread -- especially on the p2p networks. Make it funny, though -- we don't want to sit thru a boring movie.
Some groups are saying the issue isn't as bad as it seems. I tend to think that there is more of an issue than simply a few of our mega corporations outsourcing work. Many small companies sold out to the mega corporations (Lucent bought Ascend, Octel, Livingston, others), Cisco buys people for tech, Intel bought Dialogic, etc.... these small companies were probably good places to work. Companies get bought, eliminated, market consolidates due to lack of competition, are new companies being formed?
I don't see many people really doing anything about it. Go to Bank of America, take all of the deposit envelopes, go home, laser print your statement about outsourcing, take them back the next night, swap them out for the current batch, repeat daily until your arrested for tresspassing. Once again, work the media into it.
This isn't really much different than the blue collar jobs. Some people cry these are brain jobs, but judging some of the IT workers I've seen I'd much rather have a blue collar worker because they are probably smarter.
There are a bunch of issues facing the US. I just wish some friendly aliens would visit, that would really fuck things up. (Not like Mars Attacks or Killer Clowns, more like Close Encounters or something).
One of the big pushes for CATV (Community Antenna Television) was signal reception. With the development and deployment of HDTV the signal issue isn't quite a factor. There is better quality programming over the air versus our local cable television network.
If someone sought permission to put some of the "cable" channels over the air (maintaining the ability to run their own ad insertion), who would need Cable for anything outside of broadband?
In our area (Norfolk, VA), you can get MTV2 on UHF bunny ears, but can't get it on cable without paying $75 for digital. It seems to run a bunch of DirecTV ads, and runs at 19kw or so.
Obviously we can count cable modems out. Cable television isn't generally availible to those people in the fringes that receive service subsidized by the USF.
The biggest issue is those customers that are "on fiber." DSL works by transporting the data signals alongside the analog phone calls. In rural areas, they use multiplexors to provide service. This means there is no way to colocate the DSL equipment at the central office and extend service, since the layout is more distributed and connected by fiber.
If the multiplexors were upgraded, or new cards developed there shouldn't be much of a problem pushing the speed of the fiber up and then using that excess bandwidth to provide DSL service. In the remote multiplexor you could house new circuit cards that provide DSL + Analog capability.
There are plenty of companies out there working in this market, and this type of solution probably already exists. If nothing else, they could buy DSLAMS from eBay and rack them out remotely.
It might even be possible to exted ISDN (64k channels) off of the multiplexors.
Phone companies don't seem to want to do things until shoved. Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) kept the prices of ISDN at $250 a month well into the day of cable modem deployment.
My parents retired to an area that lacks broadband. It isn't that it would be hard to do, it is just the telcos don't seem to care. And there would easily be enough subscribers to support racking out a DSLAM in a cabinet next to the fiber mux that is servicing the community. If I lived closer, I would probably try to do it.
During the time of emergency, the power is out. So the BPL transmissions will have quit, and everyone is free to use their Ham Radios.
What we need is to get it over with. Single mode fiber to every home. This would solve all of the worlds problems, with the exception of the MPAA and RIAA.
Rough road, I've been there
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One of the products our small startup as tried to market in Southeastern Virginia is basically free to the customer wireless internet access. Everyone knows how much a DSL circuit costs, and we see it as an added benefit for customers. The business can use the internet circuit for other uses as well, weather it is POS or security.
It is actually kind of odd, but I went to the local airport board and said "If you will pay the $100/month DSL fee, we will provide all of the hardware, installation, and support to provide free wireless internet at Norfolk International Airport"
I got turned down. They said I should bid on putting in for-pay kiosks. They couldn't get involved without a competitive bid process. $1200 a year we are talking, they spend that much on one run of advertisements (15 or so) on the local radio station.
We have a setup that blocks outbound pop3 requests, as well as a few other important things to prevent abuse (spammers, some attacks). With the number of cameras and the number of other open wireless access points why would someone go to an airport to commit a crime.
It is a rough sell. We tried malls, but they don't want people to do anything but quickly buy things and leave. Hotels want the signal in every room, and many are serviced by lodgenet.
So at this point we have only managed a limited number of deployments. The airport though, I figured it would benefit everyone so I would put down the money for the hardware. Good publicity and a useful service.
Doh. Our setup has a splash page with ads and security information that the user must view, then they are free to web browse. We still might end up in one of the local malls, time will tell.
We are going to try to get one of the other businesses at the airport to sponsor it, but no telling if it will work. TMobile has one of those hotspot things, but it is only at one particular gate (how useful).
True story, I live in Virginia Beach, Va. Going into my neighborhood the other day was a car with the NASA Meatball logo and the customized vanity plate "HYPER-X" or "HYPERX"
I used to work @ NASA Langley for a contractor (Atmostpheric sciences) and I remember seeing the same car over there on center.
I don't think the person with the red sports car lives in our hood, maybe just visiting.
I thought I would share this with you. That is all.
To be honest, the setup was ghetto from the start. Who in their right mind would deploy full towers in racks? It is such a waste of space reserved normally for companies like Rackspace.com who used to use the metal gurillaracks and cheap ATX towers.
I asked it months ago why they didn't just get the boards + supplies and have cheap metal 3u (or maybe 2u) boxes made with proper front to back cooling (could be stamped out for $200 or less by a metal shop in qty). Similar to what hotmail uses.
If it is true that the upgrade is free, I guess it makes sense. But we all know the new Cray system (www.cray.com) will be #1 on top500, bringing the US to #1 again.
I don't think it is a matter of trying to run a closed community, but more of a matter of the way the social network system works. It will be an interesting experiment, because you will truely know that everyone on the site is linked via someone else. Everyone will get their chance. It will expand exponentially.
Check out the Tidewater Unix Users Group (www.twuug.org) for linux/bsd/commercial users! Free open group that meets once a month.
Also, there is a Hampton Roads geek mailing list on www.hrconnect.com.
With any luck, Virginia Beach will also look into Linux as a viable alternative, especially after getting hit with an audit from Microsoft (as reported earlier on slashdot).
Actually, if you look at the previous news postings you will see that it was operating in Florida, and managed to stop before it hit water.
There might be no friction, but you still have to change the polarity going to the electromagnets or step the magnets to move it.
I don't think stopping is the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I own a Sony VPH-1278Q. Paid $1350 for it from eBay seller BPAI in Maryland, went and picked it up in person.
LCD and DLP projectors are compact, lightweight, and portable. Bright images from a small unit. Bulb costs are high, and the color intensity changes with the bulb life. Fixed resolution for the panels, there are widescreen units availible. Screen cannot do true black, there is always illumination even when the screen is "black"
CRT projectors are bulky, a pain in the ass to setup (you have to converge all 3 guns together). The 1278Q can do 1280x1024 I believe, but I run it from a HTPC @ 1024x768. Mine generates some noise, I could take efforts to silence it but it doesn't bother me.
CRT life can hit 8000 hours, the blue is the first to go. Static images burn in on CRT projectors, DLP/LCD don't suffer from this issue. CRT can do true black, all power to guns is cut and the screen is dark. CRT's are also known to have a hotness in the color when there is just a tiny bit, that is if there is just a little bit of red then it will be over-emphasised a bit because it takes a certain amount of power to fire the CRT (I haven't noticed this, this is from what I've read).
The CRT projector prices are falling, BUT ****BEWARE**** because many of the units on the surplus market are from corporate use, where they have been abused. Windows NT login splash burned into the display, etc. Be careful about this!!! There are hour counters on CRT projectors, mine had about 2200 hours on it when I bought it. I noticed some 4:3 browning but it didn't have any effect as it was outside of my projection area.
There is a bit more info on my web page above.
People balk at the size of my projector and start to talk about something they saw at SAMS club for xyz. There is much more to it than just point and shoot.
If AMD can sell 2ghz chips for $100....
I use a program called dscaler (sourceforge) to upscale my laserdisk player for CRT projection, so far it hasn't been that noticable, and I'm using an 800mhz Athlon.
I find it hard to believe that it would be that difficult to incorporate a faster/better engineered processor or DSP to handle the video scaling functions, especially in plasma displays that start at $3000 and higher.
Does the DVDo units (the outboard device that pretty much killed the line-doubler market) suffer this delay? That unit was at the forefront of cheap line doubling, if it can upconvert without causing too much of a delay in audio there is _NO EXCUSE_ why the embedded chipsets in modern sets aren't able to cope.
I was thinking about that, can you imagine... instead of BBSes running the Courier HST dual standards pimping the latest Sierra titles, drive in warez sites.... people drive into "the zone" or point a directional at a tall building and gain access to the host, trading files @ 802.11g speeds. It could be the future!
Someone should make a mp3 cache system for the schools. This magic box loaded with ATA disks and could jump in when college kids go to download the latest Justin Timberlake track. This could greatly reduce the amount of bandwidth being used. It could also be used to cache warez and porn.
First, I wouldn't say it is in a rural area. There is a large population in our region. We suffer from sprawl pretty badly, but the figures say we have more technology jobs in Southeastern Virginia than in the state's capital region, Richmond. Norfolk is next to Virginia Beach (400k), Portsmouth, Suffolk, Hampton, Newport News, Chesapeake and others. At least 1.5mil, if not more.
FROM WHAT I UNDERSTAND, the maglev system worked when it was in Flordia on the test track, because the rails were on the ground. There are videos on the American Maglev site of it moving before the ODU system was put together. Once the ODU setup was constructed, they hit a snag. The rail flexes from the weight, and the system tries to adjust for it by adjusting power to magnets, which causes the rail to react, which starts an oscillation loop or something. Ooops.
The system here is opposite from the German Transrapid system (which is totally bad ass, btw). The guideway in the German system is more intelligent / has electromagnets / something, where as the one at ODU most of the guts are in the actual cars. This means the guideway is much cheaper to deploy. If you have ever seen it, the guideway is pretty frigging narrow, it would be easier to handle right of ways for such a thing.
It is a shame the contractors haven't been paid, and it is a shame it hasn't gotten further. From what I understand they are finally getting their hands on the money. It would be interesting to see a cost break down.
If you think about it, 14 million in what could be a better transportation solution for cities is chump change. Companies spend $3 million on blanket Windows software licenses. The theory is if/when it works it could spawn a new industry and our region could gain new businesses that support it.
People complain about the money going to the monorail, yet they don't complain about their tax money going to schools where many of the students are from out of country and leave when they are done with their education. Granted there are private interests working here, but I fail to understand the hatred for the creation of something new and something better.
Lastly, they are started to talk about this stupid light rail stuff here, that is little trollys that run on conventional rails. Lame, gradings obstruct traffic, they are slow. Elevated maglev is the answer! HOORAY!
Pretty simple solution, FreeBSD. Or OpenBSD if your paranoid and don't mind sacrificing IO performance for audits. Or NetBSD if your running on some sorta reject box that probably shouldn't be running BSD and should be running the native OS for that hardware platform.
But no, everyone is gaga over Linux. Meanwhile, BSD systems and users sit in the background humming along, under the scope of the media radar.
Workstation companies don't generally play the mhz game. There are more MIPS chips on the horizon, I believe. Dual core and hitting 1ghz I believe.
Development costs? Is there much difference in the PLE for Windows versus the full edition? Minus a few limitations?
Price might be the issue. SGI prices their gear pretty much parallel to the Sun equivilent. Whatever a Sun V880 costs with 8 CPUs is probably what you will pay for an Origin whatever with 8 CPUs (whatever the current comparable product is).
I can only guess SGI screwed up marketing. SGI should still be in competition to Sun, but instead they have kind of faded. There are still certain industries that rely on their hardware, but that appears to be shrinking. Having worked with Power Series to Origin 3800s and Sparcstation 1's to Sun V880s, I think SGI equipment is superior to Sun. Solaris has come further (bigger user base) than IRIX. The lack of Oracle and other big business apps on SGI hardware hurts them. There was some sort of fight between Oracle and SGI I believe.
Oracle was going to release a scalable database appliance based on the SGI Origin 300, from what I heard. The unit would be expandable by bricks. 4 CPUS now, add a router and 16 more later. During this time Oracle lived on IRIX, and from what I heard Oracle was faster on IRIX/SGI than Solaris/Sun... politics kicked in, Oracle yanked support for IRIX, and the damage is done. Without the business apps, you loose quite a bit of market share.
SGI still owns it in the video world. I'm not talking Final Cut Pro, but huge Discreet apps that require insane pipes for uncompressed HD video. Big SGIs can move insane amounts of data.
Figures. You can get Maya demos for Windows, but try getting one to run on your old SGI box. Alias acts like SGI hardware doesn't exist, even though SGI owned them.
I was hoping to get a demo copy to put my MXI graphics to work on my SGI Octane. Nope!
Poor SGI, I hope they can make a comeback. Somehow.
They are running out of things to sell off. Cray? Gone. Their buildngs? Gone (I believe they lease them now).
Gotta look good for the shareholders. The American way.
Corrections: "about movies and indeed commercials" should be "about movies ARE indeed commercials"
And "Cox TV + Cox Cable" should read "Cox Cable + Cox Digital Cable"
Your should be you are... oops.
Okay, CATV was established as Community Antenna Television. An antenna on top of the mountain fed the people in the valley, or some such.
People bought cable mainly to rid themselves of the hassles of an antenna, you know, the Archer Space Command thing on every chimney, rusting away with TWINAX to the back of yo' Zenith.
Cable eliminate that, and gave you a few extra channels. But the prices kept going up, and up, and up. Premium channels like HBO offer movies, and appear to have no commercials. Actually, the 30 minute documentaries about movies and indeed commercials, but that is besides the point.
Along has come HDTV. HDTV is digital, and should deliver a picture that is exactly as good as the cable delivered station. So assuming more content providers show up in town providing channels, then the need for cable should be reduced.
In my market (Virginia Beach, VA) you can receive MTV2 on UHF broadcast, but can't get it on cable until your spending $60+ dollars for Cox TV + Cox Cable. MTV2 broadcast seems to be filled with DirecTV ads. I don't get it, DirecTV delivers the same digital cable quality programming for analog cable pricing.
I know people that routinely spend $80 a month for Cable, Digtial cable and premium channels. If you think about it, that is quite a bit of money considering the majority of the channels are getting paid for your viewership. Your subscription demands them higher dollars for advertising. Not to mention half the channels go infomercial at 10pm it seems.
The house lights come on, WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP the klaxon howls. "UNAUTHORIZED BAG OF SKITTLES DETECTED IN ISLE 7! GUARDS, SECURE!" is heard over a PA speaker with a narrow range of fidelity. Troopers hustle down the isles and rip some kid out of his seat, skittles briefly rain down on nearby customers. Kid is hustled away, movie starts back up and house lights go down.
Next time the camcorderist should sit in the upper right or upper left part, that way he can't be seen.
Somehow, I just don't see these crappy video CD and DivX distributions of zero day movies a threat to their profits. Sure, bored kids with no money might sit at home wasting hours downloading them but anyone with income to afford the DVD copy will most likely buy it.
Wasn't it Europe where the movie industry wanted to stop text messaging because people were messaging each other and giving advice as to which movies sucked, which supposidly undermined the advertising campaign that overhypes crap?
Just like software piracy, some 14 year old running 3dStudio Max on mom's PC is not a loss in profits.
It starts out innocently... then another rack, then another...
Old pic:
old picture
Okay, I've been thinking about this alot. I see the same drivel on fuckedcompany.com, about how IT workers end up training their lower cost foreign replacement in order to collect a little bit of extra living cash for their upcoming vacation.
If a few US workers were to beat the shit out of the visitors, and make sure that the news spread far and wide, it could make the foreigners uneasy about coming to the US. What is more, *IF* the major media picked up on the story it would gain a bit more attention to the cause.
You could even go so far as carrying a hat-cam and a digital8/DV video walkman to record a story about your management, then cut it out to a DVD/MPEG1 Video CD and distribute it freely, it would probably spread -- especially on the p2p networks. Make it funny, though -- we don't want to sit thru a boring movie.
Some groups are saying the issue isn't as bad as it seems. I tend to think that there is more of an issue than simply a few of our mega corporations outsourcing work. Many small companies sold out to the mega corporations (Lucent bought Ascend, Octel, Livingston, others), Cisco buys people for tech, Intel bought Dialogic, etc.... these small companies were probably good places to work. Companies get bought, eliminated, market consolidates due to lack of competition, are new companies being formed?
I don't see many people really doing anything about it. Go to Bank of America, take all of the deposit envelopes, go home, laser print your statement about outsourcing, take them back the next night, swap them out for the current batch, repeat daily until your arrested for tresspassing. Once again, work the media into it.
This isn't really much different than the blue collar jobs. Some people cry these are brain jobs, but judging some of the IT workers I've seen I'd much rather have a blue collar worker because they are probably smarter.
There are a bunch of issues facing the US. I just wish some friendly aliens would visit, that would really fuck things up. (Not like Mars Attacks or Killer Clowns, more like Close Encounters or something).
One of the big pushes for CATV (Community Antenna Television) was signal reception. With the development and deployment of HDTV the signal issue isn't quite a factor. There is better quality programming over the air versus our local cable television network. If someone sought permission to put some of the "cable" channels over the air (maintaining the ability to run their own ad insertion), who would need Cable for anything outside of broadband? In our area (Norfolk, VA), you can get MTV2 on UHF bunny ears, but can't get it on cable without paying $75 for digital. It seems to run a bunch of DirecTV ads, and runs at 19kw or so.
Obviously we can count cable modems out. Cable television isn't generally availible to those people in the fringes that receive service subsidized by the USF.
The biggest issue is those customers that are "on fiber." DSL works by transporting the data signals alongside the analog phone calls. In rural areas, they use multiplexors to provide service. This means there is no way to colocate the DSL equipment at the central office and extend service, since the layout is more distributed and connected by fiber.
If the multiplexors were upgraded, or new cards developed there shouldn't be much of a problem pushing the speed of the fiber up and then using that excess bandwidth to provide DSL service. In the remote multiplexor you could house new circuit cards that provide DSL + Analog capability.
There are plenty of companies out there working in this market, and this type of solution probably already exists. If nothing else, they could buy DSLAMS from eBay and rack them out remotely.
It might even be possible to exted ISDN (64k channels) off of the multiplexors.
Phone companies don't seem to want to do things until shoved. Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) kept the prices of ISDN at $250 a month well into the day of cable modem deployment.
My parents retired to an area that lacks broadband. It isn't that it would be hard to do, it is just the telcos don't seem to care. And there would easily be enough subscribers to support racking out a DSLAM in a cabinet next to the fiber mux that is servicing the community. If I lived closer, I would probably try to do it.
During the time of emergency, the power is out. So the BPL transmissions will have quit, and everyone is free to use their Ham Radios.
What we need is to get it over with. Single mode fiber to every home. This would solve all of the worlds problems, with the exception of the MPAA and RIAA.
One of the products our small startup as tried to market in Southeastern Virginia is basically free to the customer wireless internet access. Everyone knows how much a DSL circuit costs, and we see it as an added benefit for customers. The business can use the internet circuit for other uses as well, weather it is POS or security.
It is actually kind of odd, but I went to the local airport board and said "If you will pay the $100/month DSL fee, we will provide all of the hardware, installation, and support to provide free wireless internet at Norfolk International Airport"
I got turned down. They said I should bid on putting in for-pay kiosks. They couldn't get involved without a competitive bid process. $1200 a year we are talking, they spend that much on one run of advertisements (15 or so) on the local radio station.
We have a setup that blocks outbound pop3 requests, as well as a few other important things to prevent abuse (spammers, some attacks). With the number of cameras and the number of other open wireless access points why would someone go to an airport to commit a crime.
It is a rough sell. We tried malls, but they don't want people to do anything but quickly buy things and leave. Hotels want the signal in every room, and many are serviced by lodgenet.
So at this point we have only managed a limited number of deployments. The airport though, I figured it would benefit everyone so I would put down the money for the hardware. Good publicity and a useful service.
Doh. Our setup has a splash page with ads and security information that the user must view, then they are free to web browse. We still might end up in one of the local malls, time will tell. We are going to try to get one of the other businesses at the airport to sponsor it, but no telling if it will work. TMobile has one of those hotspot things, but it is only at one particular gate (how useful).
True story, I live in Virginia Beach, Va. Going into my neighborhood the other day was a car with the NASA Meatball logo and the customized vanity plate "HYPER-X" or "HYPERX" I used to work @ NASA Langley for a contractor (Atmostpheric sciences) and I remember seeing the same car over there on center. I don't think the person with the red sports car lives in our hood, maybe just visiting. I thought I would share this with you. That is all.
To be honest, the setup was ghetto from the start. Who in their right mind would deploy full towers in racks? It is such a waste of space reserved normally for companies like Rackspace.com who used to use the metal gurillaracks and cheap ATX towers.
I asked it months ago why they didn't just get the boards + supplies and have cheap metal 3u (or maybe 2u) boxes made with proper front to back cooling (could be stamped out for $200 or less by a metal shop in qty). Similar to what hotmail uses.
If it is true that the upgrade is free, I guess it makes sense. But we all know the new Cray system (www.cray.com) will be #1 on top500, bringing the US to #1 again.
I don't think it is a matter of trying to run a closed community, but more of a matter of the way the social network system works. It will be an interesting experiment, because you will truely know that everyone on the site is linked via someone else. Everyone will get their chance. It will expand exponentially.
Are you in Hampton Roads (Southeastern Virginia)?
Check out the Tidewater Unix Users Group (www.twuug.org) for linux/bsd/commercial users! Free open group that meets once a month.
Also, there is a Hampton Roads geek mailing list on www.hrconnect.com.
With any luck, Virginia Beach will also look into Linux as a viable alternative, especially after getting hit with an audit from Microsoft (as reported earlier on slashdot).
Actually, if you look at the previous news postings you will see that it was operating in Florida, and managed to stop before it hit water. There might be no friction, but you still have to change the polarity going to the electromagnets or step the magnets to move it. I don't think stopping is the issue.