Second Place: John Pardon, 17, of Chapel Hill, N.C., solved a classical open problem in differential geometry Third Place: Dmitry Vaintrob, 18, of Eugene, Ore., proved that loop homology and Hochschild cohomology coincide for an important class of spaces Fourth Place: Catherine Schlingheyde, 17, of Oyster Bay, N.Y., for her research on microRNA repression Fifth Place: Rebecca Kaufman, 17, of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., for her study of the effects of male hormones in a model of schizophrenia Sixth Place: Gregory Brockman, 18, of Thompson, N.D., for his mathematics project that provided a thorough analysis of Ducci sequences Seventh Place: Megan Blewett, 17, of Madison, N.J., for her analysis of a protein that may be implicated in multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis Eighth Place: Daniel Handlin, 18, of Lincroft, N.J., for developing an accurate, low-cost method of determining the position of geo-stationary Earth-orbit (GEO) satellites Ninth Place: Meredith MacGregor, 18, of Boulder, Colo., for her research on the fluid dynamics of the "Brazil Nut Effect" Tenth Place: Emma Call, 18, of Baltimore, Md., for the fabrication of 3-D microcubes
I'm amazed at what these kids were able to accomplish. How much support did they have? What schools do they attend? How much money were they granted to accomplish their research?
In any case, I have two thoughts on this: One, good teachers and money can't make stupid kids smart, but they sure as hell can enable really smart kids to shine. I wonder how this ties in with Bill Gates' recent announcements concerning the state of science and math education in American schools.
Two, I notice a complete lack of representation by the "soft" sciences. Is it because the people writing the grants share the same disdain for disciplines that lack explanatory power as everyone else, or is it because it's easier to set up a biology program than a sociology program? I suspect a little of both--you probably need far more social context than an 18-year-old will have to pursue studies of voter demographics (not to mention the data acq is probably beyond their capabilities).
But some of that context used to be handled by education as well--you had to read the classics, you had to study some philosophy, you had to know history. My aero engineer friend has really never done any of that, so he's an engineer who doesn't know what "empiricism" means. Is this also a failing by our educational system? Isn't such education necessary to be a good researcher?
Do you realize that 1) we don't send them nearly as much as is reported, and 2) the African equivalent of Joe Sixpack doesn't see any of it because he has brutal warlords in his country that fuck it up for everyone else?
Kind of like Lebanon. It's harder to throw out a bunch of armed thugs than you might think.
Don't you think that the philosophical underpinnings of science require faith?
A researcher cannot use empiricism to demonstrate the validity of his observations, and the usefulness of the scientific method itself is rather like one of Kant's necessary, but technically unsupportable, truths. The wisest researcher I know phrased it thus: "Science requires a step of faith, a very small step, whereas religion requires a truly wild-assed leap of faith. With those small steps you can get somewhere. I have no problem with people believing they can fly, but I prefer to walk."
In the end, I don't think we "just do" anything. We always have objectives and motives, and when you set out to try to accomplish one of them, you have a certain faith that you are able to do it; so we speak not of blind faith in the model, but of faith in the process to get us where we want to go (towards a better understanding of the universe) and faith in our own ability to get there. That optimism and hope for the future is one of the greatest features of "SCIENCE," and in my opinion it speaks volumes to the tarnished nature of this age that people don't get that.
And, apparently, poisonous. So really you don't need seeds that will grow more than on generation...I see the beautiful logic now!
Really, I'm not clear on what this has to do with whether or not it's a good thing to give people "Terminator" corn. You could give people seeds that grow golden Cadillacs, but if the cars all break down after a year you're not really addressing a transportation issue with them, are you? And while you're fielding questions, can you tell me what my own charitable donations have to do with whether or not it's ethical for Monsanto to sell Terminator seeds?
In reality, the seed most farmers get in Africa is subsidized by their government, meaning, they plant what they are given, which is what the government bought them. If you don't believe that the government officials involved are getting a payout, then I suspect you don't know much about how government works on this planet.
In any case, I suppose you're entitled to your opinion. I do know that farmers in Africa consistently reject GM crops that have riders attached in favor of crops they can manage all on their own...so maybe both they and I know something you don't.
Ok. If I may gripe for a second: This is where the engineering mindset, which occupies probably around 99% of the/. community (IT guys, coders, physicists, engineers of all types), has trouble coming to grips with biological issues.
Assume for a second that Greenpeace is correct, and that rates of liver damage are statistically significant. That means that, all things being equal, eating this corn is harmful to the rats' livers. Case closed. Aside from figuring out what that reason is in order to fix it, there's no reason to go through all of that--it is a simple application of Occam's Razor.
It looks like you're going through troubleshooting steps..."It can't possibly be this...and it can't possibly be that either!" DO NOT make the mistake of discounting the study because you cannot come up with a root cause right away. First off, in biology it's typically a bad idea to conclude, a priori, that certain variables are not an issue: it's simply a more complex and less well-understood discipline than something as clean-cut as, say, orbital mechanics. Second, you have a much greater potential for interaction effects and emergent properties--stuff you can never predict, but which becomes blatantly obvious once you see it and characterize it...for example, ant colony behavior: if you get some huge number of ants together, the coordination and patterned behavior is fascinating, but it's not obvious from the random behavior of a single ant that such behavior would ever emerge. Once you see it, however, you can easily experiment and track it back to things like pheremones.
The mindset issue comes down to the difference between bottom-up and top-down analysis. Bottom-up analysis will tell you facts, but is poor for integrating those facts. That's what I think you're looking to do. At some point you have to look at the big picture--a view that doesn't tell you much aside from how the facts fit together, and where you should look next. Good analysts do both. Bad analysts either never research facts (this is in fact what you are accusing "religions" of doing) or they fall into the trap of extreme reductionism, wherein you discount observations if your radically simplistic understanding of the universe cannot explain them.
This last is what a friend of mine, who is an aero engineer, does all the time. He knows that physics informs chemistry informs biology informs psychology informs political science--but since he cannot explain election results in terms of the Newtonian motion of atoms, he dismisses any such study as bullshit, as well as the conclusions draw from that bullshit. But you don't have to explain things at the lowest level possible in order to draw meaningful conclusions, such as in this case: Better hold off on eating that Monsanto corn for the time being.
That doesn't seem too alarmist, nor am I trying to vilify genetic engineering. The fact that Monsanto apparently should have made that announcement and instead decided to gloss over it, and thereby profit from others' loss (what you accuse Greenpeace of doing), does tend to make them somewhat vile in my eyes, however.
This guy "Science" does not attempt to prove anything. However, observations can be used to support theories against being disproved.
The issue here is that we cannot yet conceive of a way to test these ideas...so there are no empirically valid observations (as is the case with religion), nor does the history of science in any way guarantee that we'll ever see them. I have faith that we will, and it is that optimistic hope that keeps me interested in science.
Disputing that science requires any kind of faith at all only shows that a person is unfamiliar with what the word means, and with the history and philosophy of science itself.
So far, the only HD content I have pulled off the box are a couple episodes of Firefly--so I suppose that's not encrypted. We get HBO and Skinemax and ESPN in HD here, but I rarely even watch them, much less record them to play back later.
And, actually, I misspoke--I'm paying about $60/month for electricity. Most of my appliances (including the washer and dryer and the fridge) run off gas, I use high-efficiency bulbs, all that jazz. I don't think a huge chunk of that is from my Myth box, tho, as I have two roommates.
Power issues aside, I don't want you to think that I'm blindly supporting Myth over every other solution. My cable provider has given me an HD-DVR which I suspect is a rebranded TiVo and I'll probably dump the Myth solution in favor of it simply because I'm losing interest in playing with the product. Then again, I am considering building and selling Myth-based DVRs--the issue is making them feature-rich enough to justify the price tag, which so far I cannot get below $400, and finding a niche market that won't simply get the same COTS solution everyone else is using.
Yes, that is precisely the issue with using an IR blaster--because cablecard is not supported in Linux, your myth box needs to hijack the STB in order to record your shows. The solution is to simply get more than one STB. My Myth setup has a frontend which is used almost exclusively for playback (and mythgame and so forth) while there is a backend containing the capture cards and controlling an STB (when I was capturing only SD I had two STBs).
This is not a GREAT solution, and in fact it turns off most people I talk to, but it does "work."
You can use an IR blaster to change channels on the box (although supposedly, it is possible, if it's enabled, to use serial or firewire inputs on STBs to change channels) and it's not too difficult to capture video off the firewire port. I don't view any "premium" content--in fact, 99% of the content I record is still HD--but, to answer your question, if there were Linux drivers for cablecards then you would be able to rent one from your cable company and use it to decrypt all their content.
I agree with you that it shouldn't be that difficult and that people should have a better attitude. The MythTV-help mailing list is another good resource.
Ok, some more words. Just because you gave up doesn't mean it doesn't work! And it never occurred to me to determine how much power my setup was using--although, my monthly electric bill for my house is around the cost of TiVo subscription, so I'm not sure you're correct.
Is it more complex a setup than a simple DVR appliance? Yes. Is it still cheaper? Yes. Does it allow you greater freedom to watch your shows wherever you want? Yes.
There's obviously a tradeoff there, but once again, to argue that the TiVo has some capability that you cannot recreate with a Myth box is wholly wrong. It may be that you do not wish to expend the time or that you prefer the simplicity of a TiVo, but please don't confuse your personal preferences with facts.
I'm in Virginia Beach. Cox also scrambles the HD content, so I take it from their HD set-top box.
They are replacing my STB with one that includes DVR functionality, so it's about to become moot--I could still use the myth box in the same fashion, but it would be redundant...though on the other hand, a TiVo or cable box won't let you space-shift your shows. So maybe there is still some value.
Oh, and as an added bonus, the site details what hardware you need to get in order to make sure you won't have hardware issues: so assuming you have an old computer lying around (otherwise, why would you complain about incompatibilities?), you only need to purchase about $200 in video hardware.
So, let's say you have now expended $300 in real and opportunity cost to build this HD Myth Box. A similar TiVo product would run you ~$1030 in the first year (oh! you didn't know that the HD TiVo starts at around $800? $200 indeed).
So, the realities are $300 vs. $1000. If you want to piss away 5 hours' salary on something, that's on you, but it's an illegitimate claim to make that it is too difficult to justify the time investment to set up a Myth box.
Yah, a CableCard would be better (especially since at least Cox Cable and probably some other providers are bundling the HD STB with DVR functionality). But to say that a homebrew DVR is not functional because there is no CableCard support in Linux is just plain wrong.
No. The incestuous "service" economy requires people to buy services they don't need: expensive dinners, massage therapy, interior decorating.
You're thinking of retail. And it's also based on people buying things they don't need: books, music, art, furniture, HD televisions with hookups for your xbox 360.
It's likely that without a vigorous trade in fluff items, there would not be a whole lot of money for simple and truly essential things, like clean water and groceries.
Where this is bullshit is that the money could be used in DIFFERENT WAYS to stimulate the economy, such as subsidizing small local businesses.
What is it about train system efficiency that inculcates a preference for or against fascism in the general populace? For all the people that equate Bush and Hitler, one would think that Amtrak would be in better shape.
This absolutely made my day, thank you.
So far as I understand, things that today we take for granted, like efficiency in coordinating massive transportation networks, used to be very difficult. People nonetheless had very high expectations of such systems and one of the attractive points on the mechanistic dictatorships is that everything works like it's supposed to, smoothly and on time (see: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We).
In America, at least, today, the powers that be seem to have simply reduced everyone's expectations. People accept that Ford cars, the public educational system, and supermarket coffee are all shit--like the liquor in Brave New World--everyone knows Victory Gin tastes awful but they guzzle it as if it's good because that's all they've got. So it is that when we see our elected representatives mentioning, as an aside, that they have just disposed of another fundamental freedom, we only give a tired sigh. We don't even react strongly to scandal anymore.
Anyway, getting back to your point, I think that the industry that arose in the 19th century naturally led to philosophies, political and otherwise, that centered on a mechanistic view of humanity. From this came fascism. Maybe it was a zeitgeist thing...I dunno. But I would be careful about putting the cart before the horse--is it the American automobile that encourages radical individualism, or did Americans' penchant for "doing their own thing" lead to the success of cars and highways?
Whatever company steps up to the plate to provide this is going to make money hand over fist. Make no mistake about that. They're also going to be positioned to snap up bids from other cities. Why whine about having to compete with other vendors after the install, when the incumbent is almost always favored (incompetence notwithstanding)...
The only reason why companies haven't jumped on this is that they're waiting to see what bigger fish (ie, telcos) are planning.
Assuming the previous poster's numbers are correct (and I've no reason to believe they're not), there's over 8,082,812,770,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations...
To a layman, that's about 8 brazilian combinations.
You mean you have SAV pushing virus definitions to all of your seats, right? And you're using their anti-spam, firewall (network and client), and correlation solutions as well?
If not, then your statement above is in error. If so, then you need to realize that as a big customer you can and should demand a level of support from that company. If you have a problem with the software, you have a million-dollar stick you can beat them with. If you fail to do so, blame nobody but yourself for your dissatisfaction.
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In any case, I have two thoughts on this:
One, good teachers and money can't make stupid kids smart, but they sure as hell can enable really smart kids to shine. I wonder how this ties in with Bill Gates' recent announcements concerning the state of science and math education in American schools.
Two, I notice a complete lack of representation by the "soft" sciences. Is it because the people writing the grants share the same disdain for disciplines that lack explanatory power as everyone else, or is it because it's easier to set up a biology program than a sociology program? I suspect a little of both--you probably need far more social context than an 18-year-old will have to pursue studies of voter demographics (not to mention the data acq is probably beyond their capabilities).
But some of that context used to be handled by education as well--you had to read the classics, you had to study some philosophy, you had to know history. My aero engineer friend has really never done any of that, so he's an engineer who doesn't know what "empiricism" means. Is this also a failing by our educational system? Isn't such education necessary to be a good researcher?
I admitted as much.
Do you realize that 1) we don't send them nearly as much as is reported, and 2) the African equivalent of Joe Sixpack doesn't see any of it because he has brutal warlords in his country that fuck it up for everyone else?
Kind of like Lebanon. It's harder to throw out a bunch of armed thugs than you might think.
Don't you think that the philosophical underpinnings of science require faith?
A researcher cannot use empiricism to demonstrate the validity of his observations, and the usefulness of the scientific method itself is rather like one of Kant's necessary, but technically unsupportable, truths. The wisest researcher I know phrased it thus: "Science requires a step of faith, a very small step, whereas religion requires a truly wild-assed leap of faith. With those small steps you can get somewhere. I have no problem with people believing they can fly, but I prefer to walk."
In the end, I don't think we "just do" anything. We always have objectives and motives, and when you set out to try to accomplish one of them, you have a certain faith that you are able to do it; so we speak not of blind faith in the model, but of faith in the process to get us where we want to go (towards a better understanding of the universe) and faith in our own ability to get there. That optimism and hope for the future is one of the greatest features of "SCIENCE," and in my opinion it speaks volumes to the tarnished nature of this age that people don't get that.
Ah. Yes, of course :)
And, apparently, poisonous. So really you don't need seeds that will grow more than on generation...I see the beautiful logic now!
Really, I'm not clear on what this has to do with whether or not it's a good thing to give people "Terminator" corn. You could give people seeds that grow golden Cadillacs, but if the cars all break down after a year you're not really addressing a transportation issue with them, are you? And while you're fielding questions, can you tell me what my own charitable donations have to do with whether or not it's ethical for Monsanto to sell Terminator seeds?
In reality, the seed most farmers get in Africa is subsidized by their government, meaning, they plant what they are given, which is what the government bought them. If you don't believe that the government officials involved are getting a payout, then I suspect you don't know much about how government works on this planet.
In any case, I suppose you're entitled to your opinion. I do know that farmers in Africa consistently reject GM crops that have riders attached in favor of crops they can manage all on their own...so maybe both they and I know something you don't.
I would go one step further and note that, when the West sells seed to starving African nations, it's "Terminator" seed.
:)
We don't give those nations a hand up, we put them on life support.
Just another example of how free enterprise and secular science benefit the poor by the innate goodness of their natures...
Ok, maybe that was a poor troll. But only for being obvious, not for being false
Ok. If I may gripe for a second: This is where the engineering mindset, which occupies probably around 99% of the /. community (IT guys, coders, physicists, engineers of all types), has trouble coming to grips with biological issues.
Assume for a second that Greenpeace is correct, and that rates of liver damage are statistically significant. That means that, all things being equal, eating this corn is harmful to the rats' livers. Case closed. Aside from figuring out what that reason is in order to fix it, there's no reason to go through all of that--it is a simple application of Occam's Razor.
It looks like you're going through troubleshooting steps..."It can't possibly be this...and it can't possibly be that either!" DO NOT make the mistake of discounting the study because you cannot come up with a root cause right away. First off, in biology it's typically a bad idea to conclude, a priori, that certain variables are not an issue: it's simply a more complex and less well-understood discipline than something as clean-cut as, say, orbital mechanics. Second, you have a much greater potential for interaction effects and emergent properties--stuff you can never predict, but which becomes blatantly obvious once you see it and characterize it...for example, ant colony behavior: if you get some huge number of ants together, the coordination and patterned behavior is fascinating, but it's not obvious from the random behavior of a single ant that such behavior would ever emerge. Once you see it, however, you can easily experiment and track it back to things like pheremones.
The mindset issue comes down to the difference between bottom-up and top-down analysis. Bottom-up analysis will tell you facts, but is poor for integrating those facts. That's what I think you're looking to do. At some point you have to look at the big picture--a view that doesn't tell you much aside from how the facts fit together, and where you should look next. Good analysts do both. Bad analysts either never research facts (this is in fact what you are accusing "religions" of doing) or they fall into the trap of extreme reductionism, wherein you discount observations if your radically simplistic understanding of the universe cannot explain them.
This last is what a friend of mine, who is an aero engineer, does all the time. He knows that physics informs chemistry informs biology informs psychology informs political science--but since he cannot explain election results in terms of the Newtonian motion of atoms, he dismisses any such study as bullshit, as well as the conclusions draw from that bullshit. But you don't have to explain things at the lowest level possible in order to draw meaningful conclusions, such as in this case: Better hold off on eating that Monsanto corn for the time being.
That doesn't seem too alarmist, nor am I trying to vilify genetic engineering. The fact that Monsanto apparently should have made that announcement and instead decided to gloss over it, and thereby profit from others' loss (what you accuse Greenpeace of doing), does tend to make them somewhat vile in my eyes, however.
Please, use the correct language.
This guy "Science" does not attempt to prove anything. However, observations can be used to support theories against being disproved.
The issue here is that we cannot yet conceive of a way to test these ideas...so there are no empirically valid observations (as is the case with religion), nor does the history of science in any way guarantee that we'll ever see them. I have faith that we will, and it is that optimistic hope that keeps me interested in science.
Disputing that science requires any kind of faith at all only shows that a person is unfamiliar with what the word means, and with the history and philosophy of science itself.
So far, the only HD content I have pulled off the box are a couple episodes of Firefly--so I suppose that's not encrypted. We get HBO and Skinemax and ESPN in HD here, but I rarely even watch them, much less record them to play back later.
And, actually, I misspoke--I'm paying about $60/month for electricity. Most of my appliances (including the washer and dryer and the fridge) run off gas, I use high-efficiency bulbs, all that jazz. I don't think a huge chunk of that is from my Myth box, tho, as I have two roommates.
Power issues aside, I don't want you to think that I'm blindly supporting Myth over every other solution. My cable provider has given me an HD-DVR which I suspect is a rebranded TiVo and I'll probably dump the Myth solution in favor of it simply because I'm losing interest in playing with the product. Then again, I am considering building and selling Myth-based DVRs--the issue is making them feature-rich enough to justify the price tag, which so far I cannot get below $400, and finding a niche market that won't simply get the same COTS solution everyone else is using.
Yes, that is precisely the issue with using an IR blaster--because cablecard is not supported in Linux, your myth box needs to hijack the STB in order to record your shows. The solution is to simply get more than one STB. My Myth setup has a frontend which is used almost exclusively for playback (and mythgame and so forth) while there is a backend containing the capture cards and controlling an STB (when I was capturing only SD I had two STBs).
This is not a GREAT solution, and in fact it turns off most people I talk to, but it does "work."
You can use an IR blaster to change channels on the box (although supposedly, it is possible, if it's enabled, to use serial or firewire inputs on STBs to change channels) and it's not too difficult to capture video off the firewire port. I don't view any "premium" content--in fact, 99% of the content I record is still HD--but, to answer your question, if there were Linux drivers for cablecards then you would be able to rent one from your cable company and use it to decrypt all their content.
I agree with you that it shouldn't be that difficult and that people should have a better attitude. The MythTV-help mailing list is another good resource.
One word: Firewire.
Ok, some more words. Just because you gave up doesn't mean it doesn't work!
And it never occurred to me to determine how much power my setup was using--although, my monthly electric bill for my house is around the cost of TiVo subscription, so I'm not sure you're correct.
No, you'd only need more than one STB.
Is it more complex a setup than a simple DVR appliance? Yes.
Is it still cheaper? Yes.
Does it allow you greater freedom to watch your shows wherever you want? Yes.
There's obviously a tradeoff there, but once again, to argue that the TiVo has some capability that you cannot recreate with a Myth box is wholly wrong. It may be that you do not wish to expend the time or that you prefer the simplicity of a TiVo, but please don't confuse your personal preferences with facts.
I'm in Virginia Beach. Cox also scrambles the HD content, so I take it from their HD set-top box.
They are replacing my STB with one that includes DVR functionality, so it's about to become moot--I could still use the myth box in the same fashion, but it would be redundant...though on the other hand, a TiVo or cable box won't let you space-shift your shows. So maybe there is still some value.
Can anyone watching appreciate the difference?
No?
Clown.
Or, you could follow Jarod's Wilson's Step-by-step guide to building a MythTV System on Fedora Core 6 w/ATrpms which takes about an hour, including installing FC6. Since the majority of that time does not require interaction on the part of the user, surely you should pro-rate the hourly cost.
Oh, and as an added bonus, the site details what hardware you need to get in order to make sure you won't have hardware issues: so assuming you have an old computer lying around (otherwise, why would you complain about incompatibilities?), you only need to purchase about $200 in video hardware.
So, let's say you have now expended $300 in real and opportunity cost to build this HD Myth Box. A similar TiVo product would run you ~$1030 in the first year (oh! you didn't know that the HD TiVo starts at around $800? $200 indeed).
So, the realities are $300 vs. $1000. If you want to piss away 5 hours' salary on something, that's on you, but it's an illegitimate claim to make that it is too difficult to justify the time investment to set up a Myth box.
Yah, a CableCard would be better (especially since at least Cox Cable and probably some other providers are bundling the HD STB with DVR functionality). But to say that a homebrew DVR is not functional because there is no CableCard support in Linux is just plain wrong.
No. The incestuous "service" economy requires people to buy services they don't need: expensive dinners, massage therapy, interior decorating.
You're thinking of retail. And it's also based on people buying things they don't need: books, music, art, furniture, HD televisions with hookups for your xbox 360.
It's likely that without a vigorous trade in fluff items, there would not be a whole lot of money for simple and truly essential things, like clean water and groceries.
Where this is bullshit is that the money could be used in DIFFERENT WAYS to stimulate the economy, such as subsidizing small local businesses.
My Myth setup simply uses an IR blaster to interact with the set-top box. It does precisely everything the latest HD TiVo does.
Just a suggestion, maybe you should know what you're talking about before you dismiss Myth as "irrelevant."
What is it about train system efficiency that inculcates a preference for or against fascism in the general populace? For all the people that equate Bush and Hitler, one would think that Amtrak would be in better shape.
This absolutely made my day, thank you.
So far as I understand, things that today we take for granted, like efficiency in coordinating massive transportation networks, used to be very difficult. People nonetheless had very high expectations of such systems and one of the attractive points on the mechanistic dictatorships is that everything works like it's supposed to, smoothly and on time (see: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We).
In America, at least, today, the powers that be seem to have simply reduced everyone's expectations. People accept that Ford cars, the public educational system, and supermarket coffee are all shit--like the liquor in Brave New World--everyone knows Victory Gin tastes awful but they guzzle it as if it's good because that's all they've got. So it is that when we see our elected representatives mentioning, as an aside, that they have just disposed of another fundamental freedom, we only give a tired sigh. We don't even react strongly to scandal anymore.
Anyway, getting back to your point, I think that the industry that arose in the 19th century naturally led to philosophies, political and otherwise, that centered on a mechanistic view of humanity. From this came fascism. Maybe it was a zeitgeist thing...I dunno. But I would be careful about putting the cart before the horse--is it the American automobile that encourages radical individualism, or did Americans' penchant for "doing their own thing" lead to the success of cars and highways?
there was no contract lockin as incentive.
Whatever company steps up to the plate to provide this is going to make money hand over fist. Make no mistake about that. They're also going to be positioned to snap up bids from other cities. Why whine about having to compete with other vendors after the install, when the incumbent is almost always favored (incompetence notwithstanding)...
The only reason why companies haven't jumped on this is that they're waiting to see what bigger fish (ie, telcos) are planning.
This sounds pretty interesting--the DSP most of all. How much storage are you thinking of putting in this thing?
Assuming the previous poster's numbers are correct (and I've no reason to believe they're not), there's over 8,082,812,770,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations...
To a layman, that's about 8 brazilian combinations.
"One big managed client?"
You mean you have SAV pushing virus definitions to all of your seats, right?
And you're using their anti-spam, firewall (network and client), and correlation solutions as well?
If not, then your statement above is in error.
If so, then you need to realize that as a big customer you can and should demand a level of support from that company. If you have a problem with the software, you have a million-dollar stick you can beat them with. If you fail to do so, blame nobody but yourself for your dissatisfaction.
So issuing a patch doesn't constitute "taking ownership?"
If not, then what does? What else are you looking for from a vendor?