I'll admit, there's a spot on the highway west of me (in my case I am almost always driving east) where the XM always drops out due to a cliff above the highway to the south.
But it only drops out for 10-20 seconds, and immediately reestablishes as soon as I get away from the cliff without user intervention.
Actually, the primary reason for bankruptcy cited by Sirius XM is not satellite network maintenance costs, but talent costs such as Stern's $500m contract.
Actually it's both - Sirius XM cited rising talent costs as the prime reason for their bankruptcy.
I'm not sure how bankruptcy law and contract law interoperate, but they could save a LOT of money by ditching Stern. I have nothing against Stern, but if you look at how much his contract was for, you wonder, "how the hell is that investment going to pay for itself?". Yeah Stern will bring in some subscribers, but $500m in profit worth? Not likely.
Looks like fortunately for Sirius XM, their 5-year contract with Stern is up soon.
Also, even if cell phone data plans were free, the fact is that cellular coverage in the US just isn't good enough for reliable audio streaming at decent qualities.
I've done the "stream to a phone" thing in my car once or twice, and it just wasn't worth the hassle. There are places on the highway where the stream drops every time I pass them, requiring manual intervention to restart with most players. Also, operating in an EDGE area requires a low-quality low-bitrate stream.
I have a mobile device capable of streaming, but when in the car, it is the XM receiver I always listen to.
I do remember that an old version of tvtorrents.com gave something like 1.5x credit for seeding a completed file - That version worked well.
It went down for a year or two and when it came back, it had a strict 1:1 ratio enforcement and it was next to impossible to establish credits. Also I frequently would not receive credit for seeding.
I've had no problems finding relatively old content on public trackers, long after most people stop seeding them on private trackers because they're no longer able to get any credit for them.
The problem with ratio requirement sites is if you download content "later" (e.g. not in the first day of release), it is sometimes impossible to keep a good ratio no matter how much you try to seed since no one is downloading.
As an example, at one ratio site they had 8 torrents that I was able to get from other sources and one that I wanted. Even after 2-3 days of seeding those 8 torrents, I didn't have enough credits to fully download a single torrent without going negative. Yes, I left it seeding constantly, but most of the time it was all seeders and no leechers.
To be honest, I've never had speed problems for most content from non-ratio-enforcing sites. I've found ratio-enforcing sites to be a major hassle. YES my ratio is well above 1:1 for public content as I don't believe in leeching, but it's actually really difficult to maintain one's ratio on a ratio-enforcing site because you frequently run into a "lots of seeders and no leechers" scenario.
It's probably one of the few reasons any Linux user wants to install Silverlight/Moonlight (given the fact that it still has a large number of closed-source components).
Also, based on some user reports I've seen (I admit I need to try it myself, will do so tonight with Netflix since it sounds like the "old" WMP-based system is gone or going away soon, too bad once you choose the Silverlight option you can't go back if it doesn't work well), Silverlight suffers from many of the performance problems that Adobe Flash Player does. (Namely, playing back streaming content on an Intel Atom netbook stutters severely while playing back the same content with a standalone player such as SMplayer or VLC leaves plenty of CPU to spare.)
The next military truck might not even be from the company that makes the HMMWV. BTW, most of the JLTV entrants (if not all? It might be a program requirement...) are hybrids. The military wants increased fuel efficiency for logistical purposes.
Attitudes like theirs are going to destroy this country's lead in technology.
So many of the old research powerhouses have now fallen (Bell Labs is a mere shadow of its former self, don't expect anything as revolutionary as some of its former inventions to ever come out of there again - where would the world be without the transistor?), and it's a matter of time with modern attitudes towards research that the rest will fall.
FYI, before the release of the "official" Linux client (which was basically the Windows version compiled against Cedega's version of winelib), this is what CCP did - they actively worked with the Cedega and WINE folks to make EVE run well under WINE.
I want to support the site and would happily watch the ads. Ads are NOT why I rip Hulu video for later viewing.
Unfortunately, Adobe's Flash player is AWFUL and requires 2-3 times the CPU power of any other method to play back the same videos. My HDTV is fed by a somewhat older HTPC system that can happily play back most content I want to watch. This system can play back Hulu and CBS ripped FLV videos with 20-30% CPU usage at worst. The same videos played "legitimately" stutter with Hulu's player and are effectively a slideshow for CBS online videos.
Same content, different player. If they embedded the ads inside the main video stream I would not mind at all. They'd get the money for ads they want, I'd get video that played back on my living room PC. Right now with the sorry state of Adobe's flash video player, it's a choice of one or the other but not both.
I did not start as a WoW player. I was a DAoC player and was looking forward to WAR. I preordered WAR, and in my case my system supported it. When I tried to get my two WoW-playing friends to switch, they readily did give it a try (former DAoCers who for 2 years or so swore they'd never touch WoW...) - it wouldn't run playably on their rather above-average systems.
I wound up as a compromise playing WoW while they got their system upgraded. (I think my offer was "I'll give WoW a try for a month if you give WAR a chance".) Well, after a month I cancelled WAR. Especially since my girlfriend hinted at a desire to actually try WoW (she had no interest in DAoC or WAR.)
It also failed to run at a playable framerate on systems more than capable of WoW. Two friends of mine tried it and it wasn't playable for them, and there's simply no way my girlfriend's computer could play WAR. (Admittedly even WoW is stretching it, but at least it runs and is playable at low detail.)
Yup, the original complainer's first bug listed sounded just like the WoW evade bug, which is still pretty common. I guess less so on raid bosses (squeaky wheel gets the oil...) but plenty still occur in normal PvE, especially in Northrend.
That said, I eventually dropped WAR for WoW - the realm balance was the killer in the end.
I was just thinking this - a lot of the article focused on how the music industry doesn't like Apple's dominance in the market. Then the article implies that they feel that removal of DRM *strengthens* this dominance.
As you say, idiots... DRM is the major impediment to other music vendors succeeding, and probably the #1 contributor to the failure of many competitors to iTunes. Like it or not, Apple dominates the portable audio player industry, so if what you sell doesn't play on an iPod, you're toast. There is NOTHING preventing people from selling music that plays on the iPod, UNLESS you want DRM - then you're stuck with Apple.
No DRM, no Apple control. Music vendors can potentially compete with Apple if they don't have DRM, and similarly audio player vendors can compete with Apple if the music isn't DRMed. (Although very few non-Apple players support AAC, even unencrypted AAC, there's no barrier to that changing.)
Cable companies (being a paid and access controlled service) are not subject to the same rules as OTA broadcasters. They follow those rules in general for PR reasons, but they aren't subject to the same fines OTA broadcasters are.
They usually have prearranged times when someone is at the station operating. Most of the time it's for scheduled contacts, but sometimes it's just an unscheduled free-for-all. Usually this translates to "massive DX pileup".
Yeah, the hardest part of communicating with the ISS is:
Arranging a prescheduled contact so you don't have competition.
Busting through the pileup during non-prescheduled operation.
If you have a prearranged contact without interference, there is no technical challenge. If you're competing with the pileup, that's a whole other story...
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I'll admit, there's a spot on the highway west of me (in my case I am almost always driving east) where the XM always drops out due to a cliff above the highway to the south.
But it only drops out for 10-20 seconds, and immediately reestablishes as soon as I get away from the cliff without user intervention.
Actually, the primary reason for bankruptcy cited by Sirius XM is not satellite network maintenance costs, but talent costs such as Stern's $500m contract.
Actually it's both - Sirius XM cited rising talent costs as the prime reason for their bankruptcy.
I'm not sure how bankruptcy law and contract law interoperate, but they could save a LOT of money by ditching Stern. I have nothing against Stern, but if you look at how much his contract was for, you wonder, "how the hell is that investment going to pay for itself?". Yeah Stern will bring in some subscribers, but $500m in profit worth? Not likely.
Looks like fortunately for Sirius XM, their 5-year contract with Stern is up soon.
Also, even if cell phone data plans were free, the fact is that cellular coverage in the US just isn't good enough for reliable audio streaming at decent qualities.
I've done the "stream to a phone" thing in my car once or twice, and it just wasn't worth the hassle. There are places on the highway where the stream drops every time I pass them, requiring manual intervention to restart with most players. Also, operating in an EDGE area requires a low-quality low-bitrate stream.
I have a mobile device capable of streaming, but when in the car, it is the XM receiver I always listen to.
That actually sounds like a nice setup.
I do remember that an old version of tvtorrents.com gave something like 1.5x credit for seeding a completed file - That version worked well.
It went down for a year or two and when it came back, it had a strict 1:1 ratio enforcement and it was next to impossible to establish credits. Also I frequently would not receive credit for seeding.
I've had no problems finding relatively old content on public trackers, long after most people stop seeding them on private trackers because they're no longer able to get any credit for them.
The problem with ratio requirement sites is if you download content "later" (e.g. not in the first day of release), it is sometimes impossible to keep a good ratio no matter how much you try to seed since no one is downloading.
As an example, at one ratio site they had 8 torrents that I was able to get from other sources and one that I wanted. Even after 2-3 days of seeding those 8 torrents, I didn't have enough credits to fully download a single torrent without going negative. Yes, I left it seeding constantly, but most of the time it was all seeders and no leechers.
To be honest, I've never had speed problems for most content from non-ratio-enforcing sites. I've found ratio-enforcing sites to be a major hassle. YES my ratio is well above 1:1 for public content as I don't believe in leeching, but it's actually really difficult to maintain one's ratio on a ratio-enforcing site because you frequently run into a "lots of seeders and no leechers" scenario.
Then what's the point?
It's probably one of the few reasons any Linux user wants to install Silverlight/Moonlight (given the fact that it still has a large number of closed-source components).
Also, based on some user reports I've seen (I admit I need to try it myself, will do so tonight with Netflix since it sounds like the "old" WMP-based system is gone or going away soon, too bad once you choose the Silverlight option you can't go back if it doesn't work well), Silverlight suffers from many of the performance problems that Adobe Flash Player does. (Namely, playing back streaming content on an Intel Atom netbook stutters severely while playing back the same content with a standalone player such as SMplayer or VLC leaves plenty of CPU to spare.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Light_Tactical_Vehicle
The next military truck might not even be from the company that makes the HMMWV. BTW, most of the JLTV entrants (if not all? It might be a program requirement...) are hybrids. The military wants increased fuel efficiency for logistical purposes.
Attitudes like theirs are going to destroy this country's lead in technology.
So many of the old research powerhouses have now fallen (Bell Labs is a mere shadow of its former self, don't expect anything as revolutionary as some of its former inventions to ever come out of there again - where would the world be without the transistor?), and it's a matter of time with modern attitudes towards research that the rest will fall.
I think this falls into the same category as the 707 barrel roll...
Some airlines do offer "coach plus" which is exactly that, but it's often more than 1.5 times the price. :(
That's how I read it too. The network was shitting itself so badly that even the management functions were severely degraded.
FYI, before the release of the "official" Linux client (which was basically the Windows version compiled against Cedega's version of winelib), this is what CCP did - they actively worked with the Cedega and WINE folks to make EVE run well under WINE.
For me it's a mixed thing.
I want to support the site and would happily watch the ads. Ads are NOT why I rip Hulu video for later viewing.
Unfortunately, Adobe's Flash player is AWFUL and requires 2-3 times the CPU power of any other method to play back the same videos. My HDTV is fed by a somewhat older HTPC system that can happily play back most content I want to watch. This system can play back Hulu and CBS ripped FLV videos with 20-30% CPU usage at worst. The same videos played "legitimately" stutter with Hulu's player and are effectively a slideshow for CBS online videos.
Same content, different player. If they embedded the ads inside the main video stream I would not mind at all. They'd get the money for ads they want, I'd get video that played back on my living room PC. Right now with the sorry state of Adobe's flash video player, it's a choice of one or the other but not both.
That's kind of oversimplifying things.
A lot of things require a vote of all who have director-level access...
But for some things, yeah it's basically sudo.
Or more precisely, being in /etc/sudoers
Oh, as more history:
I did not start as a WoW player. I was a DAoC player and was looking forward to WAR. I preordered WAR, and in my case my system supported it. When I tried to get my two WoW-playing friends to switch, they readily did give it a try (former DAoCers who for 2 years or so swore they'd never touch WoW...) - it wouldn't run playably on their rather above-average systems.
I wound up as a compromise playing WoW while they got their system upgraded. (I think my offer was "I'll give WoW a try for a month if you give WAR a chance".) Well, after a month I cancelled WAR. Especially since my girlfriend hinted at a desire to actually try WoW (she had no interest in DAoC or WAR.)
This wasn't WAR's only accessibility barrier.
It also failed to run at a playable framerate on systems more than capable of WoW. Two friends of mine tried it and it wasn't playable for them, and there's simply no way my girlfriend's computer could play WAR. (Admittedly even WoW is stretching it, but at least it runs and is playable at low detail.)
Yup, the original complainer's first bug listed sounded just like the WoW evade bug, which is still pretty common. I guess less so on raid bosses (squeaky wheel gets the oil...) but plenty still occur in normal PvE, especially in Northrend.
That said, I eventually dropped WAR for WoW - the realm balance was the killer in the end.
Hmm, things have changed a lot in the past year or two. Last time I looked at the market almost no one did AAC.
I was just thinking this - a lot of the article focused on how the music industry doesn't like Apple's dominance in the market. Then the article implies that they feel that removal of DRM *strengthens* this dominance.
As you say, idiots... DRM is the major impediment to other music vendors succeeding, and probably the #1 contributor to the failure of many competitors to iTunes. Like it or not, Apple dominates the portable audio player industry, so if what you sell doesn't play on an iPod, you're toast. There is NOTHING preventing people from selling music that plays on the iPod, UNLESS you want DRM - then you're stuck with Apple.
No DRM, no Apple control. Music vendors can potentially compete with Apple if they don't have DRM, and similarly audio player vendors can compete with Apple if the music isn't DRMed. (Although very few non-Apple players support AAC, even unencrypted AAC, there's no barrier to that changing.)
He'd have to be in the double digits or less...
Cable companies (being a paid and access controlled service) are not subject to the same rules as OTA broadcasters. They follow those rules in general for PR reasons, but they aren't subject to the same fines OTA broadcasters are.
They usually have prearranged times when someone is at the station operating. Most of the time it's for scheduled contacts, but sometimes it's just an unscheduled free-for-all. Usually this translates to "massive DX pileup".
Yeah, the hardest part of communicating with the ISS is:
Arranging a prescheduled contact so you don't have competition.
Busting through the pileup during non-prescheduled operation.
If you have a prearranged contact without interference, there is no technical challenge. If you're competing with the pileup, that's a whole other story...