You didn't read the article, the version with commercials is free, the other is not. But NBC will delay rolling out the pay service.
NBC's current Flash player has tons of free episodes from last year. I think they'll take those down when the new season starts in a few weeks. It is a little buggy: it loses the close captioning every so often, etc. But the main thing is that you can't watch it on a slow DSL (384Kb) connection, there is no way to degrade or cache. It just stops every five seconds. Pausing does not help. I think that's why you can't rip the cache.flv, unlike with most other Flash players.
Fox's player on MySpace is better. Uck.
Quote of a quote from TFA:
"It's not just a shift from a supermarket to a mom-and-pop story, it's a shift to one store that only sells bread, another store that only sells dairy products. The consumers have decided they want to get their content from iTunes."
The NBC streaming quality is also too *good*. It does not degrade well on a slow DSL line (384 Kbps). It's unwatchable because it will not buffer, even if you pause it. I found out why when I tried to save the.flv file from the cache. It's not cached. And the Flash embed they use has no UI for changing the bandwidth setting. The functionality is pre-Real Player!
I long ago gave up trying to watch Comedy Central online, even on fast DSL.
It's usually the mastering, not the mixing, that compresses out the dynamic range. The musician may be there with the producer and sound engineer and whoever for the mixing, but the mastering is done later by the record company. So I have read.
My power company - actually a rural co-op that still gets FDR New Deal funding - has been trying to roll out BPL for years. Something is slowing them down, and I don't think it's the initial ham radio opposition. They have one or two substations hooked up and claim all is going well but the timetables keep moving out. The provider is something called IBEC. The price point is like $30/month, a lot cheaper than satellite, and probably easier contracts and no latency issue.
Parent is exactly right. This is old news, but Firefox still ships with the insecure default setting. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signon.prefillForms To change it to "false", type "about:config" in the address bar, hit enter, and put "prefill" or whatever in the filter to search to it: signon.prefillForms
Are these fan-driven things any better once they get going at a good speed? Compared to a traditional bike, you lose the drag of the drive train, if there is any. But the big advantage would be if you could get the wheels off the ground. But I don't see how disconnecting the chain from the wheels allows enough design freedom to improve the aerodynamics much.
I will be a good way for the Dept. of Defense to spend a tremendous amount of money. And use a lot of power!
The DoD is not in the defense business, it is in the contracting business. That is all they talk about in the E-ring cafeterias.
Just look at how they are running the war in Iraq. It's all about spending as much money as possible with private contractors. They don't even have cooks anymore. And they use a tremendous amount of fuel. And it takes a lot of fuel to bring the fuel in from the refineries in Kuwait. Over half the logistics is just moving fuel for the now very heavy "up-armored" vehicles.
In Afghanistan they don't even clean their own offices but hire locals who steal their USB keys with every frickin' secret plan they have, and then sell them in the bazaar in front of the office, priced by color! DoD keeps personnel levels as low as possible so the contractors can use up all the money.
they're supposed to provide X hours of publix service content
Once upon a time. Now it's more like this:
Wikipedia article:
A substantial portion of other regulations were repealed, such as guidelines for minimal amounts of non-entertainment programming in 1985. They are still supposed to operate in the public interest though.
Interesting. But couldn't a bad question pilot well? Sorta like neural nets, the system has an intelligence to it that you haven't specifically designed. OK. So the question pilots well for some unknown reason. But a knowledgeable person reads it and hates it because it relies on confusion or quick guessing or whatever. But it works because the right* people tend to answer it right anyway, even though it annoys them and they know it is a bad question. Just sayin...
* For those that don't know anything about this methodology "right" people are those who do well on known good parts of the test, leaving out the easiest and hardest questions, IIRC.
I've always suspected that statistical design test leads to poorly written questions, or can in the hands of people who use it in practice. But thanks for bringing up a much more important topic than the silly article, which anybody knows who has read the instructions to the SAT (test for 16 year-olds in much of the USA)! Stupid article.
Anyway, say we take the stat method you describe and put it in the hands of people who aren't too smart... or are just greedy. Instead of employing a bunch good question writers in Princeton, they collect crap questions from a bunch of freelancers working in their spare time wherever, and then just run the sample tests and run the stats and use that to pick the questions. I know I have taken some tests written that way. You end up with confusing questions that do statistically differentiate the takers who score generally well on the middle of the test from those that don't, but that are unfair, in that the answers don't match the question too well, etc. But still the stats work.
Now you work on this full-time, and I'm just voicing my suspicions based on a few data points. I haven't done the math. But I'm very suspicious of replacing intelligence with dumb stats, given the profit motive. Cheaper to hire the less qualified, or it seems that way to management. It might not even be true! You pay for expensive stats, after all.
I read this: http://www.internet2.edu/projects/ So it looks like several types of features are involved: network stuff (faster, better topology, etc.), "middleware" (authentication), and apps, specifically integrated voice, video, IM. How much will end up vaporware, or let's say feature-speak...?
Hybrid Optical Networking Initiative (HOPI) Motivated by extreme applications that strain today's networks, the HOPI project investigates revolutionary network architectures that will serve as models for the next-generation of Internet2 networks.
End-to-End Performance Initiative (E2EPI) By developing tools to embed performance and diagnostic technology within the network infrastructure, E2EPI is making it easier to create a more reliable, predictable and seamless network experience for all users, and encourage the adoption of next-generation network applications.
Observatory To enable a better understanding of the inner-workings and use of a large-scale infrastructure by network engineers, researchers and users, the Observatory provides a unique and comprehensive real-time operational data associated with Internet2's nationwide high-performance network.
Middleware Initiative The Middleware Initiative brings together leading IT architects from Internet2 member organizations to address critical issues in authentication and authorization in order to create practical and secure inter-institutional services.
Security The Internet2 Security initiative supports members as they explore and implement network security in ways that ensure continued high-performance, innovation and support for advanced network applications.
SIP.edu With an estimated 10 million Internet2-connected users, SIP.edu supports testing and encourages the adoption of advanced communications applications that integrate voice, video, and instant messaging through presence services and open standards.
Internet2 Technology Evaluation Centers (ITEC) ITECs are national centers that provide leadership and support for the Internet2 community in specific areas of technology and networking, such as optical technologies, network performance, Voice over IP (VoIP), and video conferencing.
H. Clinton with the powers of the Patriot Act, unitary executive, whatever, is the biggest nightmare of the right in Congress. This has been pointed out already in pundit-land. Not sure what will come of it. Probably some legislation before January 2009!
Ridiculous article yestersay in the Wash. Post about a large outer-suburban MacMansion-style development that is stuck in a 75-year contract for internet/phone/cable. Some years ago it seemed like a good deal since the company ran fiver optic to each house. Now it's a ripoff monopoly. Hard to feel sorry for the MacMansionites, who are busy violating their own association rules by sprouting satellite dishes, and should have known what a contract meant. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/05/20/AR2007052001724.html
If you don't know about these U.S. developments, almost all the "affluent" growth goes into outer suburbs, while the inner ones, not really built to last, start to peel and crack. Many or most new developments are private entities, with "association" rules and regulations layered on or replacing normal local law.
So if you're looking for virgin territory for high-speed internet service, that's where it is. Or was.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6676205.stm
"The BBC programme Panorama is to highlight concerns about a lack of safety research into wi-fi networks.
"But the Health Protection Agency says emissions are within safety guidelines."
etc.
Preventing that has been part of Mozilla's IDN implementation, and I assume other browsers have addressed (ha) it as well. If a TLD, like.ie, Ireland, has a policy against phishing, and a table of lookalike letters, then Firefox will present the IDN address in the address bar in its own, non-English, language. Otherwise, Firefox displays the address in its IDN-encoded form, which is all ASCII. AFAIK, from reading bug reports on Mozilla, this is already in force.
Sirius Sat. Radio wanted to be able to pre-empt their C-SPAN channel for sports events. C-SPAN said no, so Sirius canceled the channel. XM Sat. Radio still has C-SPAN, which also broadcasts on AM and FM in Washington.
SwissAir 111 went down because the in-flight entertainment & gambling system had been rushed into service, and due to its design overheated and burned down the plane in-flight. This was its design: a separate computer for each seat. The computers (presumably single cards) were located in the ceiling near the front of the passenger compartment. So were the avionics wires. The entertainment/gambling devices overheated, caught fire and the plane crashed near Nova Scotia. Greed. SwissAir is no more.
Slashdot Mirror
NBC's current Flash player has tons of free episodes from last year. I think they'll take those down when the new season starts in a few weeks. It is a little buggy: it loses the close captioning every so often, etc. But the main thing is that you can't watch it on a slow DSL (384Kb) connection, there is no way to degrade or cache. It just stops every five seconds. Pausing does not help. I think that's why you can't rip the cache
Fox's player on MySpace is better. Uck.
Quote of a quote from TFA: "It's not just a shift from a supermarket to a mom-and-pop story, it's a shift to one store that only sells bread, another store that only sells dairy products. The consumers have decided they want to get their content from iTunes."
Just about the only Emmy they got right, 30 Rock.
The NBC streaming quality is also too *good*. It does not degrade well on a slow DSL line (384 Kbps). It's unwatchable because it will not buffer, even if you pause it. I found out why when I tried to save the .flv file from the cache. It's not cached. And the Flash embed they use has no UI for changing the bandwidth setting. The functionality is pre-Real Player!
I long ago gave up trying to watch Comedy Central online, even on fast DSL.
Fox streaming works fine for me, politics aside.
Repubs! Finally want to repeal it in year 7 so Hillary won't have it. Hillary with the Patriot act! Quake in fear!
It's usually the mastering, not the mixing, that compresses out the dynamic range. The musician may be there with the producer and sound engineer and whoever for the mixing, but the mastering is done later by the record company. So I have read.
Compiled fmpeg binaries for Win32 were here, last time I checked: http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_builds/
My power company - actually a rural co-op that still gets FDR New Deal funding - has been trying to roll out BPL for years. Something is slowing them down, and I don't think it's the initial ham radio opposition. They have one or two substations hooked up and claim all is going well but the timetables keep moving out. The provider is something called IBEC. The price point is like $30/month, a lot cheaper than satellite, and probably easier contracts and no latency issue.
Parent is exactly right. This is old news, but Firefox still ships with the insecure default setting.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signon.prefillForms
To change it to "false", type "about:config" in the address bar, hit enter, and put "prefill" or whatever in the filter to search to it:
signon.prefillForms
Are these fan-driven things any better once they get going at a good speed? Compared to a traditional bike, you lose the drag of the drive train, if there is any. But the big advantage would be if you could get the wheels off the ground. But I don't see how disconnecting the chain from the wheels allows enough design freedom to improve the aerodynamics much.
Go slow, use legs.
I will be a good way for the Dept. of Defense to spend a tremendous amount of money. And use a lot of power!
The DoD is not in the defense business, it is in the contracting business. That is all they talk about in the E-ring cafeterias.
Just look at how they are running the war in Iraq. It's all about spending as much money as possible with private contractors. They don't even have cooks anymore. And they use a tremendous amount of fuel. And it takes a lot of fuel to bring the fuel in from the refineries in Kuwait. Over half the logistics is just moving fuel for the now very heavy "up-armored" vehicles.
In Afghanistan they don't even clean their own offices but hire locals who steal their USB keys with every frickin' secret plan they have, and then sell them in the bazaar in front of the office, priced by color! DoD keeps personnel levels as low as possible so the contractors can use up all the money.
End of rant.
Once upon a time. Now it's more like this:
Wikipedia article: A substantial portion of other regulations were repealed, such as guidelines for minimal amounts of non-entertainment programming in 1985. They are still supposed to operate in the public interest though.Interesting. But couldn't a bad question pilot well? Sorta like neural nets, the system has an intelligence to it that you haven't specifically designed. OK. So the question pilots well for some unknown reason. But a knowledgeable person reads it and hates it because it relies on confusion or quick guessing or whatever. But it works because the right* people tend to answer it right anyway, even though it annoys them and they know it is a bad question. Just sayin...
* For those that don't know anything about this methodology "right" people are those who do well on known good parts of the test, leaving out the easiest and hardest questions, IIRC.
I've always suspected that statistical design test leads to poorly written questions, or can in the hands of people who use it in practice. But thanks for bringing up a much more important topic than the silly article, which anybody knows who has read the instructions to the SAT (test for 16 year-olds in much of the USA)! Stupid article.
Anyway, say we take the stat method you describe and put it in the hands of people who aren't too smart... or are just greedy. Instead of employing a bunch good question writers in Princeton, they collect crap questions from a bunch of freelancers working in their spare time wherever, and then just run the sample tests and run the stats and use that to pick the questions. I know I have taken some tests written that way. You end up with confusing questions that do statistically differentiate the takers who score generally well on the middle of the test from those that don't, but that are unfair, in that the answers don't match the question too well, etc. But still the stats work.
Now you work on this full-time, and I'm just voicing my suspicions based on a few data points. I haven't done the math. But I'm very suspicious of replacing intelligence with dumb stats, given the profit motive. Cheaper to hire the less qualified, or it seems that way to management. It might not even be true! You pay for expensive stats, after all.
Security being the big one. Are they using IP protocols? Same old SMTP?
So it looks like several types of features are involved: network stuff (faster, better topology, etc.), "middleware" (authentication), and apps, specifically integrated voice, video, IM. How much will end up vaporware, or let's say feature-speak...? Hybrid Optical Networking Initiative (HOPI)
Motivated by extreme applications that strain today's networks, the HOPI project investigates revolutionary network architectures that will serve as models for the next-generation of Internet2 networks.
End-to-End Performance Initiative (E2EPI)
By developing tools to embed performance and diagnostic technology within the network infrastructure, E2EPI is making it easier to create a more reliable, predictable and seamless network experience for all users, and encourage the adoption of next-generation network applications.
Observatory
To enable a better understanding of the inner-workings and use of a large-scale infrastructure by network engineers, researchers and users, the Observatory provides a unique and comprehensive real-time operational data associated with Internet2's nationwide high-performance network.
Middleware Initiative
The Middleware Initiative brings together leading IT architects from Internet2 member organizations to address critical issues in authentication and authorization in order to create practical and secure inter-institutional services.
Security
The Internet2 Security initiative supports members as they explore and implement network security in ways that ensure continued high-performance, innovation and support for advanced network applications.
SIP.edu
With an estimated 10 million Internet2-connected users, SIP.edu supports testing and encourages the adoption of advanced communications applications that integrate voice, video, and instant messaging through presence services and open standards.
Internet2 Technology Evaluation Centers (ITEC)
ITECs are national centers that provide leadership and support for the Internet2 community in specific areas of technology and networking, such as optical technologies, network performance, Voice over IP (VoIP), and video conferencing.
H. Clinton with the powers of the Patriot Act, unitary executive, whatever, is the biggest nightmare of the right in Congress. This has been pointed out already in pundit-land. Not sure what will come of it. Probably some legislation before January 2009!
Ridiculous article yestersay in the Wash. Post about a large outer-suburban MacMansion-style development that is stuck in a 75-year contract for internet/phone/cable. Some years ago it seemed like a good deal since the company ran fiver optic to each house. Now it's a ripoff monopoly. Hard to feel sorry for the MacMansionites, who are busy violating their own association rules by sprouting satellite dishes, and should have known what a contract meant.c le/2007/05/20/AR2007052001724.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
If you don't know about these U.S. developments, almost all the "affluent" growth goes into outer suburbs, while the inner ones, not really built to last, start to peel and crack. Many or most new developments are private entities, with "association" rules and regulations layered on or replacing normal local law.
So if you're looking for virgin territory for high-speed internet service, that's where it is. Or was.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6676205.stm "The BBC programme Panorama is to highlight concerns about a lack of safety research into wi-fi networks. "But the Health Protection Agency says emissions are within safety guidelines." etc.
D'oh!
Here are the references on IDN puny-code spoofing prevention settings in Mozilla. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.IDN.blacklist_ch ars
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.IDN.whitelist.*
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.enableIDN
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.IDN_show_punycod e
For example. .jp Japan is whitelisted but .ie Ireland is not.
There was a debate between people that wanted to disable or hobble IDN/puny-code, for security, and people who wanted to internationalize Mozilla completely. The resulting blacklist/whitelist and configurability was a compromise.
Preventing that has been part of Mozilla's IDN implementation, and I assume other browsers have addressed (ha) it as well. If a TLD, like .ie, Ireland, has a policy against phishing, and a table of lookalike letters, then Firefox will present the IDN address in the address bar in its own, non-English, language. Otherwise, Firefox displays the address in its IDN-encoded form, which is all ASCII. AFAIK, from reading bug reports on Mozilla, this is already in force.
Sirius Sat. Radio wanted to be able to pre-empt their C-SPAN channel for sports events. C-SPAN said no, so Sirius canceled the channel. XM Sat. Radio still has C-SPAN, which also broadcasts on AM and FM in Washington.
Come to think of it, I think each computer may have had its own power supply, but I'm not sure.
SwissAir 111 went down because the in-flight entertainment & gambling system had been rushed into service, and due to its design overheated and burned down the plane in-flight. This was its design: a separate computer for each seat. The computers (presumably single cards) were located in the ceiling near the front of the passenger compartment. So were the avionics wires. The entertainment/gambling devices overheated, caught fire and the plane crashed near Nova Scotia. Greed. SwissAir is no more.