And why isn't anyone really pushing Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), like they have in the UK ?
for basically the same reason we have five different incompatible underengineered digital mobile phone systems, rather than one that really works: because the Reagan administration transformed the government agency responsible for spectrum management in the USA into a committee of lawyers obsessed with spectrum license revenue maximization, to the exclusion of any kind of prescriptive role in, or enforcement of, engineering standards.
When it comes to engineering, the FCC just gives industry what it wants. That's how we keep winding up with turkeys like IBOC and ATSC.
None of the places you mention as "remote" are more than a couple hundred miles from Seattle. A conventional satellite paging system with a North American footprint should do you fine; fifteen years ago when I had a boss who wanted to be able to get me out of bed wherever I was, he made me carry a SkyPager.
Firefox 1.0 is working great for me on OS X and Windows, but it's so flaky on Linux (never seems to finish loading) that I've pulled it off and returned to Moz 1.73.
hmm. Comcast shut me down for listening on common ports (admittedly this was shortly before @Home packed it in).
Frankly, I haven't checked the TOS lately, but they also used to prohibit business use on residential accounts; they've never screwed with my VPN connections though.
Energy balance for ethanol is either something under or just over unity, depending on who you ask. This means that for every joule you get from ethanol, you consume just about that much fossil fuel in growing the corn. This is why ethanol is a stupid idea, unless Klaatu and Gort are dumping huge mounds of free extraterrestrial waste corn somewhere. Ethanol power generation is pure pork for farmers; we'd be better off just using the gasoline directly and not growing the corn.
On the other hand, soybean biodiesel returns 220% to 230% of the input energy from fossil fuel. Soybean cultivation is the solar power technology that is most suitable for powering vehicles.
it covers what WSH does with.ws files, which is pretty pedestrian, but could be extended in lots of useful ways. I don't know if it's been carried forward into.NET yet, but I bet it could be useful for X#/Xen.
I could easily imagine the concept being extended into something similar to Occam, where you describe a multithreaded application, potentially running across multiple processors, in a single source file.
uncompressed HD video would be an impressive demo, even though it wouldn't eat the full two and a half gigs.
To the true video geek, though, a multiplexed MPEG stream would be even more impressive. Compressed streams are much more susceptible to damage from lost or misordered packets.
There are tricks to making video work, though, beyond just sheer bandwidth. Video depends on packets arriving in the proper order in (near-) real time. You can have real time with UDP, or you can have proper order with TCP, but you cannot get both on an IP network without specially groomed routers at each hop. Preferably, you wouldn't use IP at all; for video transfer, an ATM circuit can outperform six times its bandwidth in raw IP.
All depends on what you're trying to demonstrate. I for one would be impressed if you could push lossless hidef over public IP.
I'd go with satellite TV. The Comcast campaign is ridiculous FUD. I have seen rain outages of competently installed satellite receivers in really heavy rainfall, but just as often (i.e., very rarely) I have seen entire cable systems taken out by malfunction or misadjustment of hardware at the headend.
You usually have a pretty good idea of when a thunderstorm is going to end; good luck trying to explain an engineering problem to the customer service rep who answers the cable company's phone.
(I'm a Comcast customer, but that's because I live six miles from the CO, well out of DSL range, under a lot of big trees.)
Microsoft gives away the Windows Media server. You as a content distributor can serve up as many Windows Media streams as you want, no charge. Microsoft develops state-of-the-art codecs and integrates them into a platform that is literally a no-brainer to install and use. Windows Media is a loss leader for Microsoft that makes it a lot easier for them to sell servers.
Despite widespread popular belief, MPEG technology is not free; there are many components of various MPEG standards that are patented. Typically, in exchange for a license to implement an MPEG standard, a manufacturer pays royalties to the patentholders, which it typically recovers in the price paid by the consumer. In the last few years Thomson and Fraunhofer-Institut, the main holders of patents relative to.mp3, have begun to try to collect royalties from the authors of all the various implementations of.mp3 technology.
For more details check out http://mp3licensing.com/ (for audio) or http://mpegla.com/ (for video and systems like your cable modem - yes, your cable modem tunnels IP over MPEG-2). In general, MPEG royalties are not what little guys like you and I would think of as "cheap".
Moreover, MPEG, being an international standards body, moves with all the blazing speed of diplomacy. The.mp3 standard is 14 years old now, which accounts for the 50% bitrate penalty you pay vis-a-vis Windows Media for comparable performance.
(To be thorough here, Microsoft also charges royalties to third-party developers who implement Windows Media. You can read all about them at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/crea te/licensing.aspx . In general, they're considerably lower than MPEG's.)
Real's situation is more difficult than in that licensing the streaming technology is its primary source of income - which in general is not true of Microsoft, the MPEG patentholders, or the various businesses associated with Quicktime streaming. Consequently, RNWK tries to hit up everyone it can find for as much money as possible. This is not only distasteful to the consumer, but also to the streamcaster whose largest single operating expenditure is license fees to RNWK.
There's nothing really wrong with RNWK's technology, except maybe that they don't have the cash flow to spend on codec development that Microsoft or Apple does. They've done well just to stay in business this long, given the market they're in and the competition they've taken on.
A. The 2006 goal of starting to shut off NTSC transmitters has been around since 1998 at least. So if you want to blame the FCC for being autocratic here (which I personally think is a defensible position), you can't blame this one on Michael Powell, you have to go back to Reed Hundt.
B. If the FCC is talking about July 2007 now rather than January '06, this represents an admission on their part that their original goal was unrealistic.
C. Conditional access (televisionese for encryption) is intimately built into MPEG-2 and has been around on your DBS receivers for years. Billy Tauzin didn't invent it. Billy Tauzin can't go just blithely imposing technology wherever he wants to; sophisticated engineering like MPEG-2 takes years if not decades from drawing board to consumer.
D. The FCC realizes that it can't just shut off NTSC. Not only are there all those NTSC sets sitting out there in living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms, but there are NTSC transmitters and production equipment sitting in every TV station from coast to coast that will have to be scrapped at the transition to DTV and replaced with brand-new expensive digital stuff.
In the top 30 market I live in, exactly one of the six network affiliates has taken a digital signal to air at this point. The five who have not are resisting presumably because it's hard enough to make a living in NTSC television already. And that's in a major metropolitan market; forget those guys who are running UHF transmitters in, say, Nebraska. If the FCC mandates a hard switchover to DTV at any point it will effectively mean the end of terrestrial TV in rural areas.
E. In general, you don't have to worry about Hollywood's evil technical geniuses; if Hollywood had evil technical geniuses, you'd already be watching Jackass five nights a week.
Worry about the boneheads in Washington, and the malinformed paranoids who vote them in.
so I go clicking on this link hoping someone possibly has some insight into technical means of tax collection over the net, and instead I run into a long thread of nattering by kneejerk libertarians who not only don't understand that taxation is necessary and inevitable, but also don't seem to appreciate that sales tax in the US is a STATE function. Some states have it, some don't, and each of those who do has its own laws about which transactions are liable to sales tax and which aren't.
for example, here in Tennessee, I as a consultant am required by law to charge sales tax on time I spend writing code (actually, according to my local tax cops, time I spend 'changing the configuration of the client's system'), but not on time I spend doing other things for the client like requirements analysis, spec writing, code reviews, and staff meetings.
states (like tennessee and washington) with sales taxes higher than those of surrounding states have been trying to solve the problem of the interstate shopper for a long time. the problem is particularly bad in washington, which has high sales taxes, no income tax, and a long border with oregon, which has exactly the opposite. first they tried passing a 5% tax on vehicles purchased out-of-state, but then people (and car rental companies!) just started registering their vehicles to addresses in oregon. eventually the state had to get mean and start openly encouraging people to rat on their cheating neighbors (this is a recurring trend in washington state government - they have a special phone number that they post on the interstates for you to use to fink on BMW-driving yuppies who cheat in the HOV lanes).
some degree of cooperation between neighboring states takes place in enforcing state tax laws, particularly with respect to income taxes; I'm sure that one of the reasons tennessee doesn't have a tax on ordinary income is that we share borders with seven or eight other states, which would mean a bookkeeping nightmare for the tax people in Nashville.
what would be nice to have happen is for individual states to simply find enforcible ways of requiring net retailers to report their sales income. it would be too bad if the demagogues in washington were able to carry through on their vague threats of a federal sales tax.
sure, this would fail to address the problem of revenue diversion to low-tax states, but there's nothing new about that. and if you're willing to send your money offshore to avoid sales tax altogether, then you probably deserve the problems that go along with trying to buy things from caribbean islands run by the mob.
maybe this will force states into adopting income taxes rather than sales taxes. that wouldn't be an entirely bad thing either; sales taxes are regressive as hell.
As a consultant about to turn 40 who could bill 80 hours a week if it were consistent with my sanity, I'm always a little mystified by these stories. I don't know any unemployed programmers my age in any of the markets I've worked in lately (which cover most of the Midwest).
I have strong feelings about the competence of people in positions of hiring responsibility who allow age to play any role in their hiring decisions, but if you don't already share them, I'm not going to be able to convince you here. You'll learn, eventually.
It IS true that people who are unemployable as programmers have had a much better opportunity to demonstrate their incompetence by the time they're 40 than they have in their mid-20s, I suppose.
I suspect that this phenomenon may be somewhat geographically localized, possibly more common on the west coast. In any case there's a lesson here for geekpeople of all ages: as I often tell people, my 1981 degree in electrical engineering was mostly obsolete within five years, and I've been making a living from self-taught skills for the subsequent fifteen. Folks whose learning styles aren't autodidactic probably should remember to go back to school periodically.
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> I don't think the Python or Tcl maintainers will be interested.
Oh, the Python people are interested all right, they've just settled on the JVM already.
And why isn't anyone really pushing Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), like they have in the UK ?
for basically the same reason we have five different incompatible underengineered digital mobile phone systems, rather than one that really works: because the Reagan administration transformed the government agency responsible for spectrum management in the USA into a committee of lawyers obsessed with spectrum license revenue maximization, to the exclusion of any kind of prescriptive role in, or enforcement of, engineering standards.
When it comes to engineering, the FCC just gives industry what it wants. That's how we keep winding up with turkeys like IBOC and ATSC.
None of the places you mention as "remote" are more than a couple hundred miles from Seattle. A conventional satellite paging system with a North American footprint should do you fine; fifteen years ago when I had a boss who wanted to be able to get me out of bed wherever I was, he made me carry a SkyPager.
Sheesh. Kids these days...
Firefox 1.0 is working great for me on OS X and Windows, but it's so flaky on Linux (never seems to finish loading) that I've pulled it off and returned to Moz 1.73.
hmm. Comcast shut me down for listening on common ports (admittedly this was shortly before @Home packed it in).
Frankly, I haven't checked the TOS lately, but they also used to prohibit business use on residential accounts; they've never screwed with my VPN connections though.
Energy balance for ethanol is either something under or just over unity, depending on who you ask. This means that for every joule you get from ethanol, you consume just about that much fossil fuel in growing the corn. This is why ethanol is a stupid idea, unless Klaatu and Gort are dumping huge mounds of free extraterrestrial waste corn somewhere. Ethanol power generation is pure pork for farmers; we'd be better off just using the gasoline directly and not growing the corn.
On the other hand, soybean biodiesel returns 220% to 230% of the input energy from fossil fuel. Soybean cultivation is the solar power technology that is most suitable for powering vehicles.
it covers what WSH does with .ws files, which is pretty pedestrian, but could be extended in lots of useful ways. I don't know if it's been carried forward into .NET yet, but I bet it could be useful for X#/Xen.
I could easily imagine the concept being extended into something similar to Occam, where you describe a multithreaded application, potentially running across multiple processors, in a single source file.
uncompressed HD video would be an impressive demo, even though it wouldn't eat the full two and a half gigs.
To the true video geek, though, a multiplexed MPEG stream would be even more impressive. Compressed streams are much more susceptible to damage from lost or misordered packets.
There are tricks to making video work, though, beyond just sheer bandwidth. Video depends on packets arriving in the proper order in (near-) real time. You can have real time with UDP, or you can have proper order with TCP, but you cannot get both on an IP network without specially groomed routers at each hop. Preferably, you wouldn't use IP at all; for video transfer, an ATM circuit can outperform six times its bandwidth in raw IP.
All depends on what you're trying to demonstrate. I for one would be impressed if you could push lossless hidef over public IP.
unless you want to spend the rest of your life wage-slaving as a router jockey.
I'd go with satellite TV. The Comcast campaign is ridiculous FUD. I have seen rain outages of competently installed satellite receivers in really heavy rainfall, but just as often (i.e., very rarely) I have seen entire cable systems taken out by malfunction or misadjustment of hardware at the headend.
You usually have a pretty good idea of when a thunderstorm is going to end; good luck trying to explain an engineering problem to the customer service rep who answers the cable company's phone.
(I'm a Comcast customer, but that's because I live six miles from the CO, well out of DSL range, under a lot of big trees.)
Microsoft gives away the Windows Media server. You as a content distributor can serve up as many Windows Media streams as you want, no charge. Microsoft develops state-of-the-art codecs and integrates them into a platform that is literally a no-brainer to install and use. Windows Media is a loss leader for Microsoft that makes it a lot easier for them to sell servers.
.mp3, have begun to try to collect royalties from the authors of all the various implementations of .mp3 technology.
.mp3 standard is 14 years old now, which accounts for the 50% bitrate penalty you pay vis-a-vis Windows Media for comparable performance.
a te/licensing.aspx . In general, they're considerably lower than MPEG's.)
Despite widespread popular belief, MPEG technology is not free; there are many components of various MPEG standards that are patented. Typically, in exchange for a license to implement an MPEG standard, a manufacturer pays royalties to the patentholders, which it typically recovers in the price paid by the consumer. In the last few years Thomson and Fraunhofer-Institut, the main holders of patents relative to
For more details check out http://mp3licensing.com/ (for audio) or http://mpegla.com/ (for video and systems like your cable modem - yes, your cable modem tunnels IP over MPEG-2). In general, MPEG royalties are not what little guys like you and I would think of as "cheap".
Moreover, MPEG, being an international standards body, moves with all the blazing speed of diplomacy. The
(To be thorough here, Microsoft also charges royalties to third-party developers who implement Windows Media. You can read all about them at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/cre
Real's situation is more difficult than in that licensing the streaming technology is its primary source of income - which in general is not true of Microsoft, the MPEG patentholders, or the various businesses associated with Quicktime streaming. Consequently, RNWK tries to hit up everyone it can find for as much money as possible. This is not only distasteful to the consumer, but also to the streamcaster whose largest single operating expenditure is license fees to RNWK.
There's nothing really wrong with RNWK's technology, except maybe that they don't have the cash flow to spend on codec development that Microsoft or Apple does. They've done well just to stay in business this long, given the market they're in and the competition they've taken on.
Time-release 100-mg B complex, with plenty of water. Also good for hangovers if you take the B last thing before hitting the sack.
I have gone off caffeine cold turkey a couple of times this way.
A. The 2006 goal of starting to shut off NTSC transmitters has been around since 1998 at least. So if you want to blame the FCC for being autocratic here (which I personally think is a defensible position), you can't blame this one on Michael Powell, you have to go back to Reed Hundt.
B. If the FCC is talking about July 2007 now rather than January '06, this represents an admission on their part that their original goal was unrealistic.
C. Conditional access (televisionese for encryption) is intimately built into MPEG-2 and has been around on your DBS receivers for years. Billy Tauzin didn't invent it. Billy Tauzin can't go just blithely imposing technology wherever he wants to; sophisticated engineering like MPEG-2 takes years if not decades from drawing board to consumer.
D. The FCC realizes that it can't just shut off NTSC. Not only are there all those NTSC sets sitting out there in living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms, but there are NTSC transmitters and production equipment sitting in every TV station from coast to coast that will have to be scrapped at the transition to DTV and replaced with brand-new expensive digital stuff.
In the top 30 market I live in, exactly one of the six network affiliates has taken a digital signal to air at this point. The five who have not are resisting presumably because it's hard enough to make a living in NTSC television already. And that's in a major metropolitan market; forget those guys who are running UHF transmitters in, say, Nebraska. If the FCC mandates a hard switchover to DTV at any point it will effectively mean the end of terrestrial TV in rural areas.
E. In general, you don't have to worry about Hollywood's evil technical geniuses; if Hollywood had evil technical geniuses, you'd already be watching Jackass five nights a week.
Worry about the boneheads in Washington, and the malinformed paranoids who vote them in.
so I go clicking on this link hoping someone possibly has some insight into technical means of tax collection over the net, and instead I run into a long thread of nattering by kneejerk libertarians who not only don't understand that taxation is necessary and inevitable, but also don't seem to appreciate that sales tax in the US is a STATE function. Some states have it, some don't, and each of those who do has its own laws about which transactions are liable to sales tax and which aren't.
for example, here in Tennessee, I as a consultant am required by law to charge sales tax on time I spend writing code (actually, according to my local tax cops, time I spend 'changing the configuration of the client's system'), but not on time I spend doing other things for the client like requirements analysis, spec writing, code reviews, and staff meetings.
states (like tennessee and washington) with sales taxes higher than those of surrounding states have been trying to solve the problem of the interstate shopper for a long time. the problem is particularly bad in washington, which has high sales taxes, no income tax, and a long border with oregon, which has exactly the opposite. first they tried passing a 5% tax on vehicles purchased out-of-state, but then people (and car rental companies!) just started registering their vehicles to addresses in oregon. eventually the state had to get mean and start openly encouraging people to rat on their cheating neighbors (this is a recurring trend in washington state government - they have a special phone number that they post on the interstates for you to use to fink on BMW-driving yuppies who cheat in the HOV lanes).
some degree of cooperation between neighboring states takes place in enforcing state tax laws, particularly with respect to income taxes; I'm sure that one of the reasons tennessee doesn't have a tax on ordinary income is that we share borders with seven or eight other states, which would mean a bookkeeping nightmare for the tax people in Nashville.
what would be nice to have happen is for individual states to simply find enforcible ways of requiring net retailers to report their sales income. it would be too bad if the demagogues in washington were able to carry through on their vague threats of a federal sales tax.
sure, this would fail to address the problem of revenue diversion to low-tax states, but there's nothing new about that. and if you're willing to send your money offshore to avoid sales tax altogether, then you probably deserve the problems that go along with trying to buy things from caribbean islands run by the mob.
maybe this will force states into adopting income taxes rather than sales taxes. that wouldn't be an entirely bad thing either; sales taxes are regressive as hell.
As a consultant about to turn 40 who could bill 80 hours a week if it were consistent with my sanity, I'm always a little mystified by these stories. I don't know any unemployed programmers my age in any of the markets I've worked in lately (which cover most of the Midwest).
I have strong feelings about the competence of people in positions of hiring responsibility who allow age to play any role in their hiring decisions, but if you don't already share them, I'm not going to be able to convince you here. You'll learn, eventually.
It IS true that people who are unemployable as programmers have had a much better opportunity to demonstrate their incompetence by the time they're 40 than they have in their mid-20s, I suppose.
I suspect that this phenomenon may be somewhat geographically localized, possibly more common on the west coast. In any case there's a lesson here for geekpeople of all ages: as I often tell people, my 1981 degree in electrical engineering was mostly obsolete within five years, and I've been making a living from self-taught skills for the subsequent fifteen. Folks whose learning styles aren't autodidactic probably should remember to go back to school periodically.