Honestly, how is Tmo's data service -- both in big cities (like Miami, Orlando, Dallas, etc) and the hinterlands in between (say, in a car/train on an interstate/rural tracks while traveling between two cities through hardcore rural territory with lots of traffic... say, Miami->Orlando)?
I want an Android phone in the worst way, but I'm way too fond of Sprint's data network for my own good. I openly tether (I don't travel often enough to pay for a dedicated wireless modem, but often enough for the $15 extra I pay for "Phone as Modem" so I can tether my phone to my laptop to be easily worth every cent), and use both Google Maps and Opera Mobile daily. Unfortunately, Sprint STILL has no native Android phone, the best port (for the Touch/Vogue) doesn't do Bluetooth or GPS (no bluetooth is a killer... my cell phone is my real phone, and MUST be able to pair with my cordless phone at home and the stereo in my car), and it looks like the only Android phone likely to see the light of day in SprintLand this summer is an iSlab-like brick devoid of real buttons.
Put another way, I like the G1, but have serious qualms about the network it's tied to as a practical matter (the G1 doesn't do 850MHz & is incompatible with AT&T's 3G data network, right? And even if it WERE, based on the bitching from iPhone users I assume THEIR 3G data is even worse than T-Mo's...). And of course, Verizon, even if it HAD an Android phone, manages to fatally-flaw and cripple every phone it sells into uselessness... and if they didn't, their Nazi TOS officially prohibit just about everything besides web browsing.
Argh. Sorry about the frustrated rant. I hate my current phone, but it seems like the best alternatives to it available at the moment merely suck less and in different ways than my current phone (HTC Touch). At this point I'm looking for an excuse to throw in the towel and buy a G1, but two years is a LONG time to be tied to a carrier if T-Mo ends up sucking miserably compared to Sprint. Oh, also... is it really necessary to buy a full-priced dev phone, or can the subsidized ones still be rooted with trivial ease?
Well, for the sake of historical honesty and integrity, I remember that there *was* one computer that got the grudging respect of Amiga owners: the color NeXT cube. Especially WordPerfect for NeXT. I had a friend at UM (you'd never guess it from my name *grin*) who owned one (he also had a complete harem of Amigas, including a Toaster-equipped 2500 w/'040 card and a base A500 he used as his videogame console). He had a major love-hate relationship with it... WP for NeXT was the best word processor available at the time, bar none... but god, that computer was slow. Sinfully slow. (Yes, I know NeXT ultimately evolved into the core of OSX).
It's just a shame Jay Miner wasn't able to talk Amiga's original backers & Commodore into letting him go just a *tiny* bit farther with the original chipset and give it 320x240x256, non-interlaced 640x480x16, and 512k onboard (with another 512k of chip ram in the A1000's expander) from the start. At the very least, that tiny extra bit would have given the Amiga another year or two of life, and spared me the two years of tribulation I endured with OS/2 before Win95's arrival at World Wide Live in May '94.
> Apple was hands down the king from 1984 until Windows 95 came out.
(coughing violently, gasping for breath) (wipes soda from keyboard and panel)
No. It wasn't. The Amiga was.
Even the lowliest Amiga 500 with 512k and a floppy spanked Apple's (not even GRAYSCALE) faux Etch-a-Sketch(tm) excuse for a real computer -- and its punishingly slow & brutally expensive (yet mentally-stunted) color NuBus sibling -- like unloved children with meth-addicted parents in an Appalachian trailer park.
Well, OK... It DID have ONE compelling app worthy of running on a cracked copy of A-Max... MacPlaymate. At least, until Bedroom Olympics and sliced-HAM Pr0n arrived:-D
As of early 2008, that was true. Things changed last year. IPv6's original supporters were furious, but the pragmatists won. The original stance was that NAT6 and manual configuration isn't just unnecessary, it's actively harmful. I suspect its proponents still believe that, but as of now they've decided to just throw in the towel and let people have NAT6 and human-manageable IPv6 addresses if that's what makes us happy. In ARIN-land, at least, requesting enough prefixes to hand out a/48 to any customer that wants one (if not everyone, period) is automatically approved and doesn't need to be justified.
To wit: for the next decade or so, at least, if you really want to make IPv6 look like IPv4 with slightly longer addresses, you can. The official stance is that you shouldn't, but nobody's going to forcibly stop you if you try. The original stance was that they were going to stamp out any and all IPv4 heresy, even if it killed them in the process (by motivating ISPs and others to say "No" and just keep extending IPv4 via NAT).
> I thought IPv6 split the network and local address segments right down the middle (i.e. each is 64-bit).
From what I remember, that was more or less the plan circa 2002-2004. The main problem with the original address allocation scheme was that it left big gaps in places that made it nice to route, but a bitch to memorize and rendered the proposed shortcut notation all but useless. Originally, they planned to use the upper 3 bits as a grand macro-level version indicator, then leave the next byte zero for now, then hop and skip over the next few bytes using the lower bit or two of each byte until they got to the "meat" of the address somewhere around bytes 5-8. That would have resulted in lovely addresses like 100:103:401:3f7a:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx which, if you actually used your MAC address to set the lower 48 bits, would have been all but impossible to meaningfully encode with the "::" zero-packing shortcut. At best, you might have ended up with 2 pairs of sequential zero bytes to compress, and had to pick one or the other.
> if you think spam is bad now wait till the spammers go ipv6, those DNSBL lists will be impossibly large (unusable) > when the spammers have trillions of addresses to choose from the stream will become an ocean
In theory, yes. In all likelihood, no. It looks like ISPs are going to be expected to assign 48-bit prefixes to "users" (site, customer, household, office, etc). So even if a spammer picks random 80-bit IP addresses in his subnet to spam from, it'll be obvious where the ultimate source is located. Also, for the near future at least, most IPv6 addresses will have "2001" as their first 16 bit prefix, which basically leaves 32 bits of unique addressing space to share among internet users of the world. Put another way, "zero day" IPv6 is basically going to be the same real address space we have now (32 bits), but tweaked a bit to make the routing and allocation easier. Even when the 2001 prefix gets outgrown (I'm guessing 2-5 years), there won't be any compelling need to massively expand the first 16 bits beyond a few more values (say, one per regional authority... 2100 for ARIN, 2200 for RIPE, 2300 for APNIC, 2400 for AFRINIC, etc).
As long as ISPs are somehow restrained from assigning fewer than 80 bits of address space to customers, the total number of values that need to go into a blacklist table will be roughly the same as now (while the "2001 era" lasts), maybe 4-8 times as large as it is now once addressing expands out into a second-gen prefix per regional coordinator, and at worst 65,536 times as large as it is now if the upper 16 bits were fully and arbitrarily utilized.
Hunt my posting history and read the post I did before this one... it explains why IPv6's ridiculously huge address space isn't likely to be quite as gruesome to deal with as it was originally intended to be.
> However, since each home network has 48 bits of address space (snip)
The last time I checked (about 6 weeks ago), ISPs are supposed to assign a 48-bit address to each "customer" (read: site, household, office, etc), who'll have 80 bits, not 48, under his direct control -- from a block whose upper 32 bits are assigned to the ISP by the local coordinator (ARIN, RIPE, etc). In English, here's a theoretical IP address represented by placeholder letters (each letter represents 1 hexadecimal digit = 4 bits):
aaaa:aaaa:bbbb:cccc:dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd
where
aaaa:aaaa is a prefix assigned by ARIN/RIPE/etc to the ISP. For now, most of the addresses we see will have "2001" as the first 4 digits.
bbbb is a 16-bit value, representing 65,536 potential customers. This is the part the ISP gets to assign to customers.
cccc is another 16-bit value. This is the part you, the customer, are officially supposed to be able to use however you please
dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd is a 64-bit value. In theory, this value is supposed to be determined by your ethernet card's MAC address. Originally, it was "mandated". Due to privacy concerns (your ethernet card would be trackable out-of-band wherever in the world you used it from and would have effectively been the "tracking cookie from hell"), it was first softened to allow some randomization, and eventually made a "recommendation". More on this in a moment...
So... what does this mean for you, Joe DslCableModelCustomer? In theory, you will someday be getting a letter from them to the effect of, "Your new IPv6 prefix is 2001:3f87:991d:/48". What does this mean? In the real world, it means you'll plug the shiny new Linksys router you bought circa mid-2012 into it, and configure its address to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 You'll then verify that the rest of your network (192.168.x.x IPv4 addresses and all) is happily doing NAT, and forget about it.
To the rest of the world, your desktop PC (192.168.0.128) will either appear to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 (if the router is acting as an IPv4 proxy), or if you're extra-clever, will transparently be rewritten to something like 2001:3f87:991d:0::192.168.0.101 or 2001:3f87:991d:0::c0a8:0065. Ditto, for the other half-dozen computers and devices in your home that are connected to the internet.
A few weeks later, you get into an IPv6 fetish, and decide to abolish the IPv4 legacy and make everything pure IPv6. At this point, your public IP addresses look even prettier:
your firewall's new IPv6 address is set to 2001:3f87:991d::100 your desktop PC's new IPv6 address is now 2001:3f87:991d::101 your TiVO's new IPv6 address is 2001:3f87:991d::102 and so on.
Put another way, nobody is going to put a gun to your head and force you to use the lower 64-80 bits if you really don't want to. If you're a typical home user who just wants to plug things in and have them work, they'll autoconfig using the munged MAC address and publicly assume some horrific, ugly value its owner will probably never type directly anyway. If you want your network to be handcrafted, with addresses you can remember, you're perfectly free to collapse the 80 bits you control down to as few as 1 bit if that's what makes you happy. Maybe even ZERO bits (I'm not 100% sure whether 2001:3f87:991d:0:0:0:0:0:0 is a legitimate address, or whether the::0 address still refers to the (sub)net as a whole).
As for privacy, I fully expect that most ISPs will eventually have a semi-anonymizing web proxy available for their customers to use. They'll keep logs for a few days to fight spammers, botnets, and criminals, but keep things sufficiently shuffled around to keep marketers from ever getting TOO comfy and intimate with your IP address. It'll make ISPs happy, because they can make it cache traffic and squeeze more use out of their upstream bandwidth.
Note that the allocation scheme I just mentioned IS radically different from what IETF envisioned circa 2000. Sometime in the past 2 or 3 years, they put down the crack
Cashflow permitting, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea at this point to begin stockpiling cat food. No, seriously. Everyone with a feline child/companion knows they don't take kindly to changes in their diet. If a real, honest to god pandemic emerges, there will probably be supply-chain problems, and stores running out of things. Do you REALLY want to go on a hundred-mile quest to visit two dozen Petco and PetSmart stores until you find the one that still has ${your cat's food} in stock, and multiply your own potential exposure by ${number of stores you have to visit}?
Think about it. Your cat's food probably has an expiration date sometime next year. It's a safe thing to stockpile, because you're going to use it one way or another. If no pandemic emerges, well, at least that's one less thing you'll have to worry about shopping for until a few months from now. Don't forget the kitty litter, catnip, and flea medication. Figure out all the stuff you'd have to buy over the next 6 months anyway, and buy it now so it's one less thing to worry about. Just don't forget to keep it replenished as you use stuff until next year. Remember, the 1918 flu emerged early in the year, but didn't actually peak until October (and in October, it REALLY peaked).
Ditto, for hurricane supplies (if you live in Florida). You're going to have to buy the crate of batteries and nonperishable food in a month or two anyway. Go to Sam's club now, and get it over with. God forbid a hurricane hits in the middle of a Florida pandemic, sending millions of people who ought to be staying home foraging through Publix and Wal Mart for last-minute hurricane supplies... or worse, throws hundreds of strangers (at least a few of whom are probaby sick) together in a gymnasium for a day or two.
Buy a bread machine. The ingredients for making bread are cheap and have a long shelf life, and it'll come in handy if you find yourself really not wanting to leave the house for a while... but desperately wanting something to eat besides breakfast cereal, frozen pizza, and junk food. Just don't get into the habit of inhaling half loaf of freshly baked bread for breakfast unless you want to emerge from the pandemic alive, but 50 pounds heavier. Before you ask, bread uses NON-self-rising flour. While you're at the store, buy a jar of wheat gluten to add to the flour if the bread ends up being too dense (gluten makes the dough "stretchier" and more capable of rising).
I personally blame Microsoft. No, really. Remember the happy days of yore when you could effortlessly run commercial applications from removable media, and run them from any machine you made bodily contact with at the moment? Just to name one particular one, WordPerfect4.x. Amiga, PC, I had purchased copies of both. What happened? Microsoft began pushing the wacky idea of "installing" programs in ways that sprayed and splattered them across the hard drive, so you COULDN'T easily run them on arbitrary computers from removable media.
For a while (between the 1.4mb disc and the arrival of Zip discs) it made a certain amount of sense as a least-evil compromise... but like a bad venereal disease, it never really went away. Even IrfanView seems to have finally succumbed to "Installation-itis", after years of happily running from removable media with no compulsive need to make its mark on the host operating system's hard drive.
Note to Microsoft: forget "Office Live". Sell us a copy on a flash drive (hell, for $399, you can afford the added cost of flash media) that can optionally cache itself to the local PC's hard drive, but can run from any PC we plug it into. And license the technology to Adobe so they can do the same with their apps.
I'm still hoping that the popularity of Knoppix-like distros will finally start to influence Redmond. I've heard rumors that Win7 might have a "live" variant that's not quite as completely useless as XP/Vista's "Recovery" disc, in no small part because people at MICROSOFT ITSELF have started using bootable Linux CDs as toolkits for fixing hopelessly-fsck'ed installations of Windows (the arrival of ntfs-3g went a long way towards making this a reasonable solution, and spared lots of us from the grief of painfully trying to keep Windows itself on a fat32 partition PRECISELY so we could fix it by booting Linux when/if it ended up getting fried beyond anything Safe mode could deal with).
> It was the iPhone (not the blackberry) that made wireless data marketable to the tech-savvy consumer
Um, no. It might have made data marketable to the NON-tech-savvy unwashed masses, but tech-savvy consumers were running WinMo on Sprint & Verizon YEARS before the first IPhone was sold. I'd personally put the American dawn of wireless data around the time the HTC Apache/PPC6700/XV6700 arrived. It was utterly dysfunctional as a device for making voice telephone calls, but made up for it by being a decent pocket laptop with perpetual internet access, and the thirdparty apps that eventually appeared fixed the worst and most intolerable of its deficiencies as a device for making phone calls.
American 3GSM sucks goatse.cx balls, but CDMA EV-DO from Sprint & Verizon was delivering cheap high-speed wireless data back when the rest of the world (besides maybe urban areas in Scandinavia) still thought EDGE was "fast".
> The problem is dealing with someone who says, "I can get it done in under 9 weeks," and then > sometimes it takes 2 weeks, sometimes it take 9 weeks, sometimes it takes 23 weeks, and sometimes > it never gets done.
In most cases like that, here's what really happens...
Mgt: "How long do you think this will take?"
Programmer: "Er, I guess 3 months or so, assuming nothing major goes wrong along the way."
Mgt: "That's too long! We need it in 8 weeks. Can it be done?"
Programmer: "I doubt it. Maybe if god parts the skies and makes a miracle happen."
Mgt: "It's really, really important. In fact, it really needs to be done in 6 weeks."
Programmer: "You're insane. There's no way in hell it's going to happen."
Mgt: "OK, I'll allocate 8 weeks."
Programmer: (sigh) "Whatever."
8 weeks later...
Mgt: "Is the program done?"
Programmer: "No. We'll probably be done in another month, maybe two at worst."
I think you see where this is going. The programmer had a decent idea of how long it would take, and could have probably given a more realistic estimate within a few days had he been encouraged to identify the riskiest parts of the project (specifically, third-party libraries and things constrained by real-world hardware/network performance) and try to tackle them *first*. However, if management twists his arm backwards, or keeps pressuring him for a "better" (ie, shorter) estimate, he'll eventually get disgusted and throw them the number management wants... rationalizing that it's not *quite* a lie since miracles occasionally happen, and absolving himself of any moral responsibility for actually agreeing to a deadline he views as ridiculous since he was coerced into it.
That, IMHO, is the root of more miscommunication between management and developers. Far too many managers don't quite understand that programmers *hate* interpersonal conflict, and will casually agree to just about *anything* if they think it will get the person to quit bothering them. The constructive way to deal with it is to begin by asking the programmer for a range (best case vs likely worst case), then ask him to identify the riskiest factors influencing the range, then nudge him to tackle those factors first so a better estimate can be refined quickly. Just don't make him feel like you're twisting his arm or browbeating him, because estimates are like information from interrogation -- torture will get you the answer you want quickly, but the answer itself will likely prove to be worthless.
> How many people have heard a particular track or album "live?"
Maybe I've just been to the wrong concerts over the years, but the ones I've been to (Chicago, Van Halen, NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and Warped Tour '06, among others) were deafeningly loud, in venues with just about the worst acoustics you could possibly have. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the concerts, but I've never considered "live" to be the pinnacle of quality. As I see it, "music" is both a performance art AND a fine art. The artists themselves engage in music as a performance art when they give a concert. The producer engages in music as a fine art when he takes the recordings made in the studio, then spends hours tweaking and refining them before exporting the final 32-bit 96khz PCM stereo copy for mastering to disc. Both aspects of music are special in their own ways. Both are disappointing in the wrong context. A lip-sync'ed performance is about as enjoyable as listening to a CD in a car with cheap speakers and kilowatt "Elektro-Bass"(TM) amp from a flea market. A live recording is almost certain to be a disappointment compared to the best studio productions.
At the end of the day, when it comes to recordings, a drum that begins its life as an acoustically-modeled bitstream triggered by a drumstick hitting a sensor pad (or a timeline marker in Cakewalk) is going to sound better than ANY real drum with a microphone nearby. Ditto, for other physically-modeled digital instrument sounds. It's just the nature of recorded music. When it comes to digital audio recordings of an artist like Madonna, "Perfect" isn't good enough. It has to be utterly flawless, then take it to the next level higher, because every millisecond of it is ultimately going to be scrutinized millions of times, and criticized over the tiniest detail.
IMHO, the best compromise would be to enable people who actively care about maintaining their copyright to do so forever, but ensure that anything that gets forgotten about quickly, unambiguously, and permanently falls out of copyright.
Example:
1. All works are automatically protected by copyright for one year from the moment of their creation. The creator doesn't have to DO anything to enjoy this first year of protection. By the same token, if you stumble across something that you want to use commercially, but have no idea who owns it (or whether it's copyrighted at all), you could get it timestamped and notarized, then sit on it for a year and proceed to step 2.
2. At any point before the first year ends, the work can be formally copyrighted for 5 years. Registration requires the online submission of the proper form, nominal fee, and searchable digital copy of the work. For things like books/stories/poetry/etc, this means the extracted text, so that someone who comes across your work in the future and makes a good-faith effort to determine its ownership can go to the copyright office's website, begin entering a sample of text from it, and quickly narrow it down to a few possibilities. For images, this means a high-res copy in jpeg form. For movies, this means a copy that's at least as good as the best copy that gets distributed commercially. Furthermore, like music, there's a split between the work and its physical expression. If you write a story, then I license the rights to publish it, you'd copyright the story, and I'd copyright its exact typeset presentation. If you allow the copyright to lapse, I can still renew the copyright on my expression of it... meaning anyone can typeset/format their own copy of it, but someone who tries to literally tweak and redistribute MY copy can be sued.
3. At least 4, but fewer than 5, years after a work is copyrighted, its registration can be renewed for another 20 years for approximately $100. The copyright holder has a one year grace period during year 6 to renew if he/she fails to do so before year 5 ends. HOWEVER, during that year, the work is subject to compulsory licensing as long as the licensee can prove that he or she made a good-faith effort to determine its copyright status, and discovered that it had, in fact, fallen out of copyright.
4. Beyond year 25, copyright must be renewed during each 10th anniversary year (no sooner, no later), at rates that double for each 10-year renewal based upon the current year's fee for the first 20-year extension. So, if the first 20-year renewal costs $100, and the fee goes unchanged, it costs $200 for years 26-35, $400 for years 36-45, $800 for years 46-55, $1600 for years 56-65, $3200 for years 66-75, $6400 for years 76-85, $12800 for years 96-105, and so on. By year 155, it would cost Disney $409600... assuming of course that it still cost $100 to register that first 20-year extension.
By year 200, not even DISNEY would find it likely to be be worthwhile to keep extending Steamboat Willie's copyright. Most low-value content would fall out of copyright within 5 years. As a practical matter, I'd expect just about everything to fall out of copyright after 45-75 years. In theory, big media syndicates could buy up old copyrights for a pittance and renew them for a few more decades, but at some point even those syndicates are going to face the reality that the don't have the cash flow to renew millions of copyrights forever... if the transaction costs of hiring/paying armies of people to oversee the actual work didn't deter them, the perpetually-doubling renewal fees eventually WOULD.
Another key element I alluded to earlier is a requirement that works be submitted in digitally-indexable form. The idea is to make it cheap and easy for anyone to make a good-faith effort to determine copyright status and attempt to license it, but simultaneously leave a clear legal path for the use of "orphaned" works. Say, by payment into escrow of nominal compulsory licensing fees upon demonstration that a work'
When confronted by an iPhone-brandishing evangelist, smile while pulling out your Android-running HTC Touch and tell them, "At least MY phone didn't have to be jailbroken to run whatever software I want"...
IMHO, the fact that patent licenses aren't automatically recursive is absolutely perverse. Under current law, if you buy something made with a patented part, modify it, and sell it, you can be sued for infringement even though the part in question was fully licensed at the time of purchase. That's perverse. The mere fact that most people are shocked (if they even believe you) when you tell them shows that our elected officials have become seriously disconnected from society's consensus about IP law.
If I want to create mashups of movies by George Lucas and Disney, and do so by purchasing a retail copy of every DVD from which footage is ripped, then render them unusable and package them along with my mashup copy, it should be absolutely 100% legal. Ditto, if I make a cool dance remix of a Metallica song. If every copy of my remix CD is backed up by a purchased & destroyed copy of Metallica's CD, Metallica will have lost nothing. They made their money from the sale of the media that was purchased, then rendered unplayable. If someone purchases my mashup instead of the original, the copyright owner would be no worse off, because I would have purchased a copy of THEIR original on behalf of whomever purchased a copy of MY mashup.
Licensing should be recursive, for both patent and copyright law. IP law needs to be reformed so that any licensed item is automatically and recursively licensed in perpetuity, as long as there is no net increase in licensed content. If I use content from five CDs to make one of my own, proof of purchasing a complete set of those five CDs prior to their official destruction should be an automatic defense against allegations of infringement.
The problem, of course, with SACD (besides the divergence in music preferences between their apparent audience and everyone else), is the fact that they fail miserably at reason #2 for buying physical media: the acquisition of a flawless master from which to make all your format-shifted copies. If the only place where I can meaningfully listen to a purchased SACD is my living room, during daylight hours when it won't disturb the neighbors, its value to me is approximately $2.
Insofar as blind quality tests go, yeah... I'm assuming the comparison is being done on an audio system that didn't come in a single box, with speakers whose diameter is at least equal to the diameter of the disc being played.
Really, it hurts to see the relentless downward slide into poor audio quality. I also put part of the blame on the fact that consumers under 25 years old never really experienced digital audio as a profound, "oh my god" improvement over what they had before, because to them, CDs have always been the norm. They've grown up with earbuds, tinny laptop speakers, and audio gear whose biggest selling point is either its size, color, or price.
I still remember the look my youngest cousin (17) gave me when I forced him to listen to a CD wearing the huge, ugly earmuff-like headphones I bought when I was in college (remember? the ones that weighed about 5 pounds due to the rigid metal shells and HUGE samarium cobalt magnets?) to show him what music through headphones was SUPPOSED to sound like. He was blown away. He'd literally never experienced headphones that could give you the kind of listening experience you'd otherwise have to make your neighbors hate you for having. That Christmas, I bought him a $250 pair for his own. It was a small investment in a better future... he's now a music engineering major at my alma mater, determined to help fight the music industry's race to the bottom.:-)
> Uh...hello? What exactly is the point, then? Last I heard, portable CD players have been made completely and utterly obsolete > due to the advent of portable MP3 players, which are now cheaper, smaller, and can hold a whole CD binder worth of music in a > device smaller than a cellphone.
Not... quite...
The main reason why more and more people think mp3 audio sounds as good as CD audio is because the audio fidelity of CDs has gone down the toilet over the past decade. It's as if the recording engineers of the world have completely forgotten EVERYTHING they learned during the previous 25 years. Modern CDs have CLIPPING, for god's sake. That's inexcusable. Combine sloppy mastering with media of diminishing quality and players whose quality basically ceased to exist 5 years ago, and you have the reason why most current CDs sound like crap. Modern CD players never skip, because they have big ram buffers so they can recover from skips before the listener realizes it happened at all, but pretty much every other spec meaningful to CD players has gone downhill since the mid-90s.
Find a DDD Telarc disc from the early 90s that was intended to show off the capabilities of CD players back then -- wide dynamic range, basically 0% cross-channel interference, the works. Now rip it, and try to make the best-quality mp3/ogg encoding possible. Now do a blind comparison of the two. I guarantee you'll be able to tell the difference. You might have a hard time telling which is which if you hear it in isolation, but side by side you'll have no problem figuring out which one is compressed.
Put another way, the quality of compressed audio hasn't increased... the quality of CD audio has fallen compared to the quality it had during its golden era. 15 years ago, record companies spent lots of money trying to master perfect CDs, because they knew every disc they released was going to be scrutinized for the tiniest audio imperfection. Now, they don't even bother trying... and wonder why their customers don't bother *buying*.
If every new Britney Spears & Madonna disc had the production standards and "reach out and touch the music" clarity that the best Telarc discs had 20 years ago, people would STILL be buying them at stores, even if they intended to rip them to mp3 for convenience. Why? The added value of a flawless, premium-quality master from which to rip at will. We'd probably even start seeing "mp3" players that can play raw PCM, and people taking advantage of SDHC media's capacity to "rip them raw". Even a 2 gigabyte microSD card can hold ~3 CDs worth of uncompressed data.
> is to get companies to start using a different FS on memory cards
It's not going to happen, and here's why:
* The royalties are capped. Beyond a certain point, it costs SanDisk, Minolta, and the others nothing in additional royalties for cards produced during a given year.
* As a practical matter, Microsoft can only force you to pay royalties if you sell the card preformatted. Leave it up to the end user to format the drive himself, and Microsoft can't make you pay them a cent. Technically, the end user would be responsible for paying the royalties himself if he formats the card with FAT32, but as a practical matter Microsoft isn't going to come knocking on his door.
Thus, it's self-limiting for large users, and there's a de-facto escape hatch for small users. The limit is high enough to make Microsoft lots of money, but low enough to not be worth the development and support costs of any alternate filesystem for the large users.
In any case, I'll be shocked if Microsoft ever launches into an all-out assault on Linux. Frankly, Microsoft BENEFITS from having a small & noisy group of people loudly insisting there are alternatives to Windows. It lets them point and say, "See, we aren't REALLY a monopoly!
That's interesting. I had the exact opposite experience (circa mid-1997). On the average, I managed to pull off ~20-45 minutes between Netscape 4 crashes. IE4, in contrast, usually managed to avoid crashing for 2 or 3 hours. On the other hand, at least once or twice a week, Netscape crashed badly enough to take Windows down with it (god only knows what it actually did to make THAT happen). That, personally, was the last straw that got me to delete Netscape 4 and never look at it again. IE4 was buggy, but at least it never crashed the entire computer.
The truth of the matter is, in 1997, IE4 was a shiny, brand new browser, and Netscape 4 was the creaky, rotting carcass of Spyglass... with ugly hacks stapled onto kludges held in place with metaphorical duct tape. ~6 years later, IE6 was the hulking undead monstrosity, and Firefox 2 was the shiny new browser mostly devoid of legacy baggage. Unfortunately, Firefox is now getting kind of creaky, its UI is *still* single-threaded and hangs if Acrobat Reader gets launched & takes too long to produce something renderable, and IE8 isn't giving me the same happy vibe IE4 did ~11 years ago (to tell the truth, I never really warmed up to IE7 after installing Vista, and kept using Firefox. There's just something about the way they reorganized IE's UI that annoys & irritates me, though I can't quite put my finger on what it is).
Netscape 4 was beyond bad. It was dreadful. It was *so awful*, if Microsoft ported IE4 to Linux and sold copies for $89.95 (the same as a copy of Windows), they would have ended up making almost as much money from a copy of Linux as they made from a copy of Windows, because nearly everyone running Linux would have ended up holding their noses in disgust and buying a copy anyway, just to be rid of Netscape once and for all. Go check out archived usenet postings to Linux newsgroups circa 1997-98. The #1 question splattered *everywhere* was whether Microsoft had a version of IE that ran under Linux. I still remember the jubilation over Konqueror... a browser everyone thought was pretty lame, but used anyway because it was *still* a billion times better than Netscape.
> No, *that* is *specifically* opinion. Last I checked, there was no "adjudicated fact" that demonstrated > that Microsoft's *current* actions, today, are resulting in an "ongoing downside for the industry and > consumers". Only that their previous actions have done so.
Point of order... from what I remember, there were plenty of examples that Microsoft's conduct was financially devastating to its competitors (particularly Novell), but I seem to remember that the vast majority of examples given of alleged harm suffered by real consumers were largely fabricated and contrived. For every struggling poor person with no need of networking allegedly harmed by having to pay an alleged $2.17 more for a copy of Windows because networking was foisted upon him, there were several hundred or thousand consumers who owned 2 or more computers and had them all networked precisely because networking WAS free.
Step back for a moment and envision a world where just about everything related to Windows was a-la-carte. Hmmm, CD/DVD writing comes to mind as a particularly good example of an area where Microsoft -- paranoid of adding fuel to their accusers' fires -- bent over backwards to avoid encroaching into areas with commercial applications. The result was the optical media mess (specifically, UDF discs that were only partly compatible with those formatted/written by other drivers) that's just now starting to finally get sorted out. Now, suppose Microsoft had eliminated the really BIG barrier to entry (the actual disc writing) back in 1999 with Windows 2000 Pro and Windows ME, and exposed the whole API so anyone with a copy of Visual Basic could hack together a disc-writing app. Would it have devastated Ahead (Nero's maker)? Almost certainly. It would have beaten up Adaptec pretty badly, too. But actual consumers would be able to go online and download any of several thousand freeware apps hacked together to take advantage of the OS-level support for disc reading/writing the way they do NOW.
IMHO, the best thing Microsoft can do for real consumers is to sweep away the big, hard barriers to different kinds of apps (they have bargaining power with licensors that peons like you and I will never have, and even companies as big as Adobe and Corel occasionally find themselves getting snubbed by the Sonys, Samsungs, and Matsushitas of the world), make them free (to use) parts of Windows, and expose them all via public APIs so the rest of us can put them to good use.
Ditto, for browsers. Is there anyone who'll even TRY to argue that Netscape 4 didn't completely suck in every meaningful way possible compared to IE4? Opera was commercial, yet its standards support was no better than IE's -- and when you factor things like client-side XSLT, was pretty lame compared to IE. Opera's developers treated standards as limits rather than minimum goals, and probably did more to make normal users think standards were something that made web pages look ugly than anything Microsoft has ever done (by the way, I own and use Opera Mobile daily, and regard it as a "Must Have" app alongside S2U2 and Winterface for anyone with a touchscreen WM6 phone).
Of course, if someone manages to find a way to use Microsoft's official status as a convicted monopolist to make them sell a DRM-free edition of Windows 7, I just might start beating the war drums against them, too...;-)
Yeah, you'd use a "Y" cable to feed the left & right stereo signals to both the TV and VCR. You could do the same thing with the composite video if you wanted to use it to feed both the TV and VCR. If you had a last-generation VCR with 19uM-heads capable of pseudo-S-video, you could also split the s-video & use it to feed both the TV and VCR... but for that case, I'd recommend a Radio Shack 1x4 distribution amp, like this one: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103065
Radio Shack is a pale shadow of what it used to be, but for things like AV cables & accessories, they're usually the best place to go if you need it *today* and don't want to burn the afternoon hitting a half-dozen stores. Price and quality-wise, they're kind of the sweet spot between Wal Mart (cheap, but garbage) and Best Buy (their good stuff is hideously overpriced). Radio Shack's cables aren't sexy, but they work as well as Monster at roughly half the price.
Don't forget the biggest mistake of all: the merger.
Had the merger not occurred, Sirius would be mostly breaking even today. Still operating at a slight loss, but its existence as a going concern would not be in jeopardy. XM, on the other hand, would have gone bankrupt a few months ago, and now be in the hands of new owners. The big debt that's coming due in a few days is *XM* debt. Sirius' original debt wasn't due to cause problems for a few more years.
Mel has destroyed Sirius as a company. He took on XM and its debt load, and achieved nothing besides alienating the customers of both networks for no good reason. The amount of money he saved by consolidating channels was literally pocket change compared to the cost of owning two sets of satellites. I'll give Sirius a pass on Howard for the moment, because he probably WAS worth it to pre-merger Sirius. Remember, before Howard, XM was clearly in #1, and Sirius was the struggling "also-ran". By the end of Year H+1, Sirius was in the lead, and almost making a profit (mostly through creative accounting, but that's still better than XM could do). He wanted XM's bandwidth to launch seatback Barney videos for kids, but ended up gutting the audio quality of both services to add more channels with lower audio fidelity.
The REAL cost savings would have been for Sirius to sell off both of XM's geostationary satellites & broadcast the two data streams formerly handled by them using Sirius' Molniya satellites(*). Rural indoor users would have either needed a proper outdoor antenna with view of the entire sky, or had to move the antenna puck from windowsill to windowsill like Sirius users do, but it would have improved XM's mobile coverage in mountainous areas (where cars were in the shadow of mountains relative to geostationary satellites) and literally saved them hundreds of millions of dollars.
---
(*) Sirius has a constellation of 4 satellites in modified Molniya orbits. Basically, one satellite is a spare, and the other 3 are arranged so that at any given moment, one satellite is (more or less) "straight up" (relative to Iowa), one satellite is near the horizon, and one is on the other side of the earth. XM's constellation consisted of two satellites in conventional geostationary orbits over the equator.
Sirius and XM divided their bands into 3 slices, each of which carried the full bitstream. Two slices were broadcast by satellite, and the third slice was broadcast via terrestrial repeaters. I'd be seriously shocked if Sirius' satellites were physically incapable of broadcasting a slice of XM's band, and vice-versa. For one thing, satellite transmitters tend to be designed with fairly open-ended capabilities ANYWAY (they're so expensive to launch, with so much lead time, that the satellite's owner would be financially suicidal to not launch them with a "Plan B" in case the original user falls through. For another, I'm sure XM and Sirius both entertained the prospect that the other's satellites could be knocked out by space debris, solar flare, or some other malfunction... and faced with the prospect of shutting down or paying the other extortionate fees to carry their signal, would grudgingly pay the fees.
How to use an old VCR to record TV shows with a digital converter box ("box" hereafter):
1. Buy a digital converter box with s-video and composite video outputs.
2. Connect the box's s-video output to the TV's s-video input.
3. Connect the box's composite output to the VCR's composite input.
Now, let's assume you want to record channel 5 every Tuesday from 8pm to 9pm:
4a) Program the box to change to channel 5 every Tuesday at 8pm, send the remote code to turn on the VCR, and send the remote code for the VCR to begin recording. At 9pm, it sends the remote code to stop recording. You connect what's basically an infrared LED connected to a headphone jack to a port on the back of the box labeled something like "IR LINK", and tape the business end of the LED to the front of the VCR in front of its infrared sensor. As far as the VCR is concerned, the converter box is a remote control.
4b) If your box is brain dead and doesn't have programming capabilities, all is not lost... you just need a better universal remote. For ~$50-100, you can get one with LCD panel that can ITSELF be programmed to do your recording. You tell the remote when the program comes on, ends, and its channel, then leave the remote somewhere it can be seen by the VCR and converter box. At the appropriate time, the remote sends the code to turn on the VCR, turn on the converter box, change the VCR's input to composite, change the box's channel to 5, and begin recording. At 9pm, it sends the code to the VCR to stop recording.
Frankly, if it came down to buying a better remote, I'd advise you to just buy a used TiVo on eBay. Once you update the firmware, it'll know how to control the converter box on its own, and the total cost won't be much more than you would have spent on the remote alone.
Added bonus from Digital TV for people with old TVs: broadcast TV won't be high-definition, but it WILL be "dvd quality". It'll still be interlaced, and still have a nominal resolution of 704x480, but the color fidelity will be ENORMOUSLY better than the mangled mush broadcast NTSC was able to provide.
Tip for anyone in Hurricane-prone areas: buy a Hauppauge Win-TV HVR-950Q. They're ~$67 on eBay and can tune over the air HDTV, unencrypted QAM HDTV from cable, broadcast NTSC (not that it'll matter much longer, but it's there), and do video capture from composite or s-video. When the power goes out, plug it into your laptop's USB port, and watch TV with your laptop (it works just fine with the 1.6GHz Atom on my MSI Wind netbook). Buy a couple of battery jumpstarters from Radio Shack or Wal Mart to keep your laptop running a few hours longer (and run the 12v fan later so you can actually get a little bit of sleep without air conditioning), and take advantage of their cigarette lighter jacks to power a car adapter (or cheap inverter into which your laptop's normal supply would be plugged). I bought one a few weeks ago, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I can get all but one local channel from SW Broward inside the house using only the provided antenna. I specifically recommend the Hauppauge 950q, because it ALSO can work directly with Windows Media Center (no need to screw with some buggy, proprietary app that won't be supported 6 months from now) and has a normal 75-ohm coax connector on it (no fragile dongle to break or get lost). I've never tried it, but I assume that anything that can be made to work with Windows Media Center can also be made to work (sooner or later) with Linux.
> So if the pricing of the eBooks reflects the reduction in production costs, > it might be far cheaper
Keep dreaming. Read any forum about eBooks, and the #1 thing everyone complains about endlessly is the fact that they're usually the same cost as the printed book... maybe, MAYBE a buck less... if you're lucky. By the time the eBook price goes down, the paperback edition is already in the 70% off pile at Borders.
I guarantee... when college textbook publishers jump on the eBook bandwagon, they'll drop the price a tiny bit at first, then eliminate printed editions, then quickly jack the eBook edition's price up to what it would have been ANYWAY had it been printed, instead.
Right now, the ONLY thing keeping publishers halfway honest is the fact that used books can be purchased nationwide from Amazon.com and other sources. Take away second-sale rights, and they can jack the price up to extortionate levels within a few years.
Remember, college textbooks are a fairly inelastic, noncompetitive market. By the time you find out what textbooks a professor wants you to buy, it's too late to go shopping for a new professor. Assuming, of course, that you'd even consider changing your schedule or a good professor on the basis of textbook prices. Most students aren't, and the textbook publishers KNOW it.
The other problem is that current ebook readers basically suck for anything besides reading stories page by page. Just TRY jumping around in a programming book with an e-ink reader. The 700+ms it takes to go from page - to -- page --- to ----page will drive you insane.
What we REALLY need is for someone like O'Reilly & Manning to throw their weight against Amazon to open up Kindle's UI architecture. In other words, treat the document as a black box that can have UI gadgets and notes overlaid on top, but otherwise enable anyone with a free SDK to rewrite the UI code so the buttons, touchscreen, etc do what THEY think they should do. Within a year or two, the better UI ideas will bubble up and become more popular, and the bad UI ideas (or compromised UI ideas that aren't really ideal for anything, in a "one size fits nobody" kind of way) fall by the wayside.
All I can say is, god help us all if Microsoft ends up behind a dominant eReader platform. We'll end up having to navigate through 3 levels of menus just to jump to the next chapter or set a bookmark, 2/3 of each page will be filled with EULA-mandated legal notices, and the search won't allow explicit boolean operators or clauses... it'll try to guess what you mean, be egregiously wrong at least half the time, and force you to constantly try outsmarting it to get the results you want (anyone who's ever used MSDN's search engine knows what I'm talking about...)
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, how is Tmo's data service -- both in big cities (like Miami, Orlando, Dallas, etc) and the hinterlands in between (say, in a car/train on an interstate/rural tracks while traveling between two cities through hardcore rural territory with lots of traffic... say, Miami->Orlando)?
I want an Android phone in the worst way, but I'm way too fond of Sprint's data network for my own good. I openly tether (I don't travel often enough to pay for a dedicated wireless modem, but often enough for the $15 extra I pay for "Phone as Modem" so I can tether my phone to my laptop to be easily worth every cent), and use both Google Maps and Opera Mobile daily. Unfortunately, Sprint STILL has no native Android phone, the best port (for the Touch/Vogue) doesn't do Bluetooth or GPS (no bluetooth is a killer... my cell phone is my real phone, and MUST be able to pair with my cordless phone at home and the stereo in my car), and it looks like the only Android phone likely to see the light of day in SprintLand this summer is an iSlab-like brick devoid of real buttons.
Put another way, I like the G1, but have serious qualms about the network it's tied to as a practical matter (the G1 doesn't do 850MHz & is incompatible with AT&T's 3G data network, right? And even if it WERE, based on the bitching from iPhone users I assume THEIR 3G data is even worse than T-Mo's...). And of course, Verizon, even if it HAD an Android phone, manages to fatally-flaw and cripple every phone it sells into uselessness... and if they didn't, their Nazi TOS officially prohibit just about everything besides web browsing.
Argh. Sorry about the frustrated rant. I hate my current phone, but it seems like the best alternatives to it available at the moment merely suck less and in different ways than my current phone (HTC Touch). At this point I'm looking for an excuse to throw in the towel and buy a G1, but two years is a LONG time to be tied to a carrier if T-Mo ends up sucking miserably compared to Sprint. Oh, also... is it really necessary to buy a full-priced dev phone, or can the subsidized ones still be rooted with trivial ease?
Well, for the sake of historical honesty and integrity, I remember that there *was* one computer that got the grudging respect of Amiga owners: the color NeXT cube. Especially WordPerfect for NeXT. I had a friend at UM (you'd never guess it from my name *grin*) who owned one (he also had a complete harem of Amigas, including a Toaster-equipped 2500 w/'040 card and a base A500 he used as his videogame console). He had a major love-hate relationship with it... WP for NeXT was the best word processor available at the time, bar none... but god, that computer was slow. Sinfully slow. (Yes, I know NeXT ultimately evolved into the core of OSX).
It's just a shame Jay Miner wasn't able to talk Amiga's original backers & Commodore into letting him go just a *tiny* bit farther with the original chipset and give it 320x240x256, non-interlaced 640x480x16, and 512k onboard (with another 512k of chip ram in the A1000's expander) from the start. At the very least, that tiny extra bit would have given the Amiga another year or two of life, and spared me the two years of tribulation I endured with OS/2 before Win95's arrival at World Wide Live in May '94.
> Apple was hands down the king from 1984 until Windows 95 came out.
(coughing violently, gasping for breath)
(wipes soda from keyboard and panel)
No. It wasn't. The Amiga was.
Even the lowliest Amiga 500 with 512k and a floppy spanked Apple's (not even GRAYSCALE) faux Etch-a-Sketch(tm) excuse for a real computer -- and its punishingly slow & brutally expensive (yet mentally-stunted) color NuBus sibling -- like unloved children with meth-addicted parents in an Appalachian trailer park.
Well, OK... It DID have ONE compelling app worthy of running on a cracked copy of A-Max... MacPlaymate. At least, until Bedroom Olympics and sliced-HAM Pr0n arrived :-D
As of early 2008, that was true. Things changed last year. IPv6's original supporters were furious, but the pragmatists won. The original stance was that NAT6 and manual configuration isn't just unnecessary, it's actively harmful. I suspect its proponents still believe that, but as of now they've decided to just throw in the towel and let people have NAT6 and human-manageable IPv6 addresses if that's what makes us happy. In ARIN-land, at least, requesting enough prefixes to hand out a /48 to any customer that wants one (if not everyone, period) is automatically approved and doesn't need to be justified.
To wit: for the next decade or so, at least, if you really want to make IPv6 look like IPv4 with slightly longer addresses, you can. The official stance is that you shouldn't, but nobody's going to forcibly stop you if you try. The original stance was that they were going to stamp out any and all IPv4 heresy, even if it killed them in the process (by motivating ISPs and others to say "No" and just keep extending IPv4 via NAT).
> I thought IPv6 split the network and local address segments right down the middle (i.e. each is 64-bit).
From what I remember, that was more or less the plan circa 2002-2004. The main problem with the original address allocation scheme was that it left big gaps in places that made it nice to route, but a bitch to memorize and rendered the proposed shortcut notation all but useless. Originally, they planned to use the upper 3 bits as a grand macro-level version indicator, then leave the next byte zero for now, then hop and skip over the next few bytes using the lower bit or two of each byte until they got to the "meat" of the address somewhere around bytes 5-8. That would have resulted in lovely addresses like 100:103:401:3f7a:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx which, if you actually used your MAC address to set the lower 48 bits, would have been all but impossible to meaningfully encode with the "::" zero-packing shortcut. At best, you might have ended up with 2 pairs of sequential zero bytes to compress, and had to pick one or the other.
> if you think spam is bad now wait till the spammers go ipv6, those DNSBL lists will be impossibly large (unusable)
> when the spammers have trillions of addresses to choose from the stream will become an ocean
In theory, yes. In all likelihood, no. It looks like ISPs are going to be expected to assign 48-bit prefixes to "users" (site, customer, household, office, etc). So even if a spammer picks random 80-bit IP addresses in his subnet to spam from, it'll be obvious where the ultimate source is located. Also, for the near future at least, most IPv6 addresses will have "2001" as their first 16 bit prefix, which basically leaves 32 bits of unique addressing space to share among internet users of the world. Put another way, "zero day" IPv6 is basically going to be the same real address space we have now (32 bits), but tweaked a bit to make the routing and allocation easier. Even when the 2001 prefix gets outgrown (I'm guessing 2-5 years), there won't be any compelling need to massively expand the first 16 bits beyond a few more values (say, one per regional authority... 2100 for ARIN, 2200 for RIPE, 2300 for APNIC, 2400 for AFRINIC, etc).
As long as ISPs are somehow restrained from assigning fewer than 80 bits of address space to customers, the total number of values that need to go into a blacklist table will be roughly the same as now (while the "2001 era" lasts), maybe 4-8 times as large as it is now once addressing expands out into a second-gen prefix per regional coordinator, and at worst 65,536 times as large as it is now if the upper 16 bits were fully and arbitrarily utilized.
Hunt my posting history and read the post I did before this one... it explains why IPv6's ridiculously huge address space isn't likely to be quite as gruesome to deal with as it was originally intended to be.
> However, since each home network has 48 bits of address space (snip)
The last time I checked (about 6 weeks ago), ISPs are supposed to assign a 48-bit address to each "customer" (read: site, household, office, etc), who'll have 80 bits, not 48, under his direct control -- from a block whose upper 32 bits are assigned to the ISP by the local coordinator (ARIN, RIPE, etc). In English, here's a theoretical IP address represented by placeholder letters (each letter represents 1 hexadecimal digit = 4 bits):
aaaa:aaaa:bbbb:cccc:dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd
where
aaaa:aaaa is a prefix assigned by ARIN/RIPE/etc to the ISP. For now, most of the addresses we see will have "2001" as the first 4 digits.
bbbb is a 16-bit value, representing 65,536 potential customers. This is the part the ISP gets to assign to customers.
cccc is another 16-bit value. This is the part you, the customer, are officially supposed to be able to use however you please
dddd:dddd:dddd:dddd is a 64-bit value. In theory, this value is supposed to be determined by your ethernet card's MAC address. Originally, it was "mandated". Due to privacy concerns (your ethernet card would be trackable out-of-band wherever in the world you used it from and would have effectively been the "tracking cookie from hell"), it was first softened to allow some randomization, and eventually made a "recommendation". More on this in a moment...
So... what does this mean for you, Joe DslCableModelCustomer? In theory, you will someday be getting a letter from them to the effect of, "Your new IPv6 prefix is 2001:3f87:991d:/48". What does this mean? In the real world, it means you'll plug the shiny new Linksys router you bought circa mid-2012 into it, and configure its address to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 You'll then verify that the rest of your network (192.168.x.x IPv4 addresses and all) is happily doing NAT, and forget about it.
To the rest of the world, your desktop PC (192.168.0.128) will either appear to be 2001:3f87:991d::1 (if the router is acting as an IPv4 proxy), or if you're extra-clever, will transparently be rewritten to something like 2001:3f87:991d:0::192.168.0.101 or 2001:3f87:991d:0::c0a8:0065. Ditto, for the other half-dozen computers and devices in your home that are connected to the internet.
A few weeks later, you get into an IPv6 fetish, and decide to abolish the IPv4 legacy and make everything pure IPv6. At this point, your public IP addresses look even prettier:
your firewall's new IPv6 address is set to 2001:3f87:991d::100
your desktop PC's new IPv6 address is now 2001:3f87:991d::101
your TiVO's new IPv6 address is 2001:3f87:991d::102
and so on.
Put another way, nobody is going to put a gun to your head and force you to use the lower 64-80 bits if you really don't want to. If you're a typical home user who just wants to plug things in and have them work, they'll autoconfig using the munged MAC address and publicly assume some horrific, ugly value its owner will probably never type directly anyway. If you want your network to be handcrafted, with addresses you can remember, you're perfectly free to collapse the 80 bits you control down to as few as 1 bit if that's what makes you happy. Maybe even ZERO bits (I'm not 100% sure whether 2001:3f87:991d:0:0:0:0:0:0 is a legitimate address, or whether the ::0 address still refers to the (sub)net as a whole).
As for privacy, I fully expect that most ISPs will eventually have a semi-anonymizing web proxy available for their customers to use. They'll keep logs for a few days to fight spammers, botnets, and criminals, but keep things sufficiently shuffled around to keep marketers from ever getting TOO comfy and intimate with your IP address. It'll make ISPs happy, because they can make it cache traffic and squeeze more use out of their upstream bandwidth.
Note that the allocation scheme I just mentioned IS radically different from what IETF envisioned circa 2000. Sometime in the past 2 or 3 years, they put down the crack
Cashflow permitting, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea at this point to begin stockpiling cat food. No, seriously. Everyone with a feline child/companion knows they don't take kindly to changes in their diet. If a real, honest to god pandemic emerges, there will probably be supply-chain problems, and stores running out of things. Do you REALLY want to go on a hundred-mile quest to visit two dozen Petco and PetSmart stores until you find the one that still has ${your cat's food} in stock, and multiply your own potential exposure by ${number of stores you have to visit}?
Think about it. Your cat's food probably has an expiration date sometime next year. It's a safe thing to stockpile, because you're going to use it one way or another. If no pandemic emerges, well, at least that's one less thing you'll have to worry about shopping for until a few months from now. Don't forget the kitty litter, catnip, and flea medication. Figure out all the stuff you'd have to buy over the next 6 months anyway, and buy it now so it's one less thing to worry about. Just don't forget to keep it replenished as you use stuff until next year. Remember, the 1918 flu emerged early in the year, but didn't actually peak until October (and in October, it REALLY peaked).
Ditto, for hurricane supplies (if you live in Florida). You're going to have to buy the crate of batteries and nonperishable food in a month or two anyway. Go to Sam's club now, and get it over with. God forbid a hurricane hits in the middle of a Florida pandemic, sending millions of people who ought to be staying home foraging through Publix and Wal Mart for last-minute hurricane supplies... or worse, throws hundreds of strangers (at least a few of whom are probaby sick) together in a gymnasium for a day or two.
Buy a bread machine. The ingredients for making bread are cheap and have a long shelf life, and it'll come in handy if you find yourself really not wanting to leave the house for a while... but desperately wanting something to eat besides breakfast cereal, frozen pizza, and junk food. Just don't get into the habit of inhaling half loaf of freshly baked bread for breakfast unless you want to emerge from the pandemic alive, but 50 pounds heavier. Before you ask, bread uses NON-self-rising flour. While you're at the store, buy a jar of wheat gluten to add to the flour if the bread ends up being too dense (gluten makes the dough "stretchier" and more capable of rising).
I personally blame Microsoft. No, really. Remember the happy days of yore when you could effortlessly run commercial applications from removable media, and run them from any machine you made bodily contact with at the moment? Just to name one particular one, WordPerfect4.x. Amiga, PC, I had purchased copies of both. What happened? Microsoft began pushing the wacky idea of "installing" programs in ways that sprayed and splattered them across the hard drive, so you COULDN'T easily run them on arbitrary computers from removable media.
For a while (between the 1.4mb disc and the arrival of Zip discs) it made a certain amount of sense as a least-evil compromise... but like a bad venereal disease, it never really went away. Even IrfanView seems to have finally succumbed to "Installation-itis", after years of happily running from removable media with no compulsive need to make its mark on the host operating system's hard drive.
Note to Microsoft: forget "Office Live". Sell us a copy on a flash drive (hell, for $399, you can afford the added cost of flash media) that can optionally cache itself to the local PC's hard drive, but can run from any PC we plug it into. And license the technology to Adobe so they can do the same with their apps.
I'm still hoping that the popularity of Knoppix-like distros will finally start to influence Redmond. I've heard rumors that Win7 might have a "live" variant that's not quite as completely useless as XP/Vista's "Recovery" disc, in no small part because people at MICROSOFT ITSELF have started using bootable Linux CDs as toolkits for fixing hopelessly-fsck'ed installations of Windows (the arrival of ntfs-3g went a long way towards making this a reasonable solution, and spared lots of us from the grief of painfully trying to keep Windows itself on a fat32 partition PRECISELY so we could fix it by booting Linux when/if it ended up getting fried beyond anything Safe mode could deal with).
> It was the iPhone (not the blackberry) that made wireless data marketable to the tech-savvy consumer
Um, no. It might have made data marketable to the NON-tech-savvy unwashed masses, but tech-savvy consumers were running WinMo on Sprint & Verizon YEARS before the first IPhone was sold. I'd personally put the American dawn of wireless data around the time the HTC Apache/PPC6700/XV6700 arrived. It was utterly dysfunctional as a device for making voice telephone calls, but made up for it by being a decent pocket laptop with perpetual internet access, and the thirdparty apps that eventually appeared fixed the worst and most intolerable of its deficiencies as a device for making phone calls.
American 3GSM sucks goatse.cx balls, but CDMA EV-DO from Sprint & Verizon was delivering cheap high-speed wireless data back when the rest of the world (besides maybe urban areas in Scandinavia) still thought EDGE was "fast".
> The problem is dealing with someone who says, "I can get it done in under 9 weeks," and then
> sometimes it takes 2 weeks, sometimes it take 9 weeks, sometimes it takes 23 weeks, and sometimes
> it never gets done.
In most cases like that, here's what really happens...
Mgt: "How long do you think this will take?"
Programmer: "Er, I guess 3 months or so, assuming nothing major goes wrong along the way."
Mgt: "That's too long! We need it in 8 weeks. Can it be done?"
Programmer: "I doubt it. Maybe if god parts the skies and makes a miracle happen."
Mgt: "It's really, really important. In fact, it really needs to be done in 6 weeks."
Programmer: "You're insane. There's no way in hell it's going to happen."
Mgt: "OK, I'll allocate 8 weeks."
Programmer: (sigh) "Whatever."
8 weeks later ...
Mgt: "Is the program done?"
Programmer: "No. We'll probably be done in another month, maybe two at worst."
I think you see where this is going. The programmer had a decent idea of how long it would take, and could have probably given a more realistic estimate within a few days had he been encouraged to identify the riskiest parts of the project (specifically, third-party libraries and things constrained by real-world hardware/network performance) and try to tackle them *first*. However, if management twists his arm backwards, or keeps pressuring him for a "better" (ie, shorter) estimate, he'll eventually get disgusted and throw them the number management wants... rationalizing that it's not *quite* a lie since miracles occasionally happen, and absolving himself of any moral responsibility for actually agreeing to a deadline he views as ridiculous since he was coerced into it.
That, IMHO, is the root of more miscommunication between management and developers. Far too many managers don't quite understand that programmers *hate* interpersonal conflict, and will casually agree to just about *anything* if they think it will get the person to quit bothering them. The constructive way to deal with it is to begin by asking the programmer for a range (best case vs likely worst case), then ask him to identify the riskiest factors influencing the range, then nudge him to tackle those factors first so a better estimate can be refined quickly. Just don't make him feel like you're twisting his arm or browbeating him, because estimates are like information from interrogation -- torture will get you the answer you want quickly, but the answer itself will likely prove to be worthless.
> How many people have heard a particular track or album "live?"
Maybe I've just been to the wrong concerts over the years, but the ones I've been to (Chicago, Van Halen, NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and Warped Tour '06, among others) were deafeningly loud, in venues with just about the worst acoustics you could possibly have. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the concerts, but I've never considered "live" to be the pinnacle of quality. As I see it, "music" is both a performance art AND a fine art. The artists themselves engage in music as a performance art when they give a concert. The producer engages in music as a fine art when he takes the recordings made in the studio, then spends hours tweaking and refining them before exporting the final 32-bit 96khz PCM stereo copy for mastering to disc. Both aspects of music are special in their own ways. Both are disappointing in the wrong context. A lip-sync'ed performance is about as enjoyable as listening to a CD in a car with cheap speakers and kilowatt "Elektro-Bass"(TM) amp from a flea market. A live recording is almost certain to be a disappointment compared to the best studio productions.
At the end of the day, when it comes to recordings, a drum that begins its life as an acoustically-modeled bitstream triggered by a drumstick hitting a sensor pad (or a timeline marker in Cakewalk) is going to sound better than ANY real drum with a microphone nearby. Ditto, for other physically-modeled digital instrument sounds. It's just the nature of recorded music. When it comes to digital audio recordings of an artist like Madonna, "Perfect" isn't good enough. It has to be utterly flawless, then take it to the next level higher, because every millisecond of it is ultimately going to be scrutinized millions of times, and criticized over the tiniest detail.
IMHO, the best compromise would be to enable people who actively care about maintaining their copyright to do so forever, but ensure that anything that gets forgotten about quickly, unambiguously, and permanently falls out of copyright.
Example:
1. All works are automatically protected by copyright for one year from the moment of their creation. The creator doesn't have to DO anything to enjoy this first year of protection. By the same token, if you stumble across something that you want to use commercially, but have no idea who owns it (or whether it's copyrighted at all), you could get it timestamped and notarized, then sit on it for a year and proceed to step 2.
2. At any point before the first year ends, the work can be formally copyrighted for 5 years. Registration requires the online submission of the proper form, nominal fee, and searchable digital copy of the work. For things like books/stories/poetry/etc, this means the extracted text, so that someone who comes across your work in the future and makes a good-faith effort to determine its ownership can go to the copyright office's website, begin entering a sample of text from it, and quickly narrow it down to a few possibilities. For images, this means a high-res copy in jpeg form. For movies, this means a copy that's at least as good as the best copy that gets distributed commercially. Furthermore, like music, there's a split between the work and its physical expression. If you write a story, then I license the rights to publish it, you'd copyright the story, and I'd copyright its exact typeset presentation. If you allow the copyright to lapse, I can still renew the copyright on my expression of it... meaning anyone can typeset/format their own copy of it, but someone who tries to literally tweak and redistribute MY copy can be sued.
3. At least 4, but fewer than 5, years after a work is copyrighted, its registration can be renewed for another 20 years for approximately $100. The copyright holder has a one year grace period during year 6 to renew if he/she fails to do so before year 5 ends. HOWEVER, during that year, the work is subject to compulsory licensing as long as the licensee can prove that he or she made a good-faith effort to determine its copyright status, and discovered that it had, in fact, fallen out of copyright.
4. Beyond year 25, copyright must be renewed during each 10th anniversary year (no sooner, no later), at rates that double for each 10-year renewal based upon the current year's fee for the first 20-year extension. So, if the first 20-year renewal costs $100, and the fee goes unchanged, it costs $200 for years 26-35, $400 for years 36-45, $800 for years 46-55, $1600 for years 56-65, $3200 for years 66-75, $6400 for years 76-85, $12800 for years 96-105, and so on. By year 155, it would cost Disney $409600... assuming of course that it still cost $100 to register that first 20-year extension.
By year 200, not even DISNEY would find it likely to be be worthwhile to keep extending Steamboat Willie's copyright. Most low-value content would fall out of copyright within 5 years. As a practical matter, I'd expect just about everything to fall out of copyright after 45-75 years. In theory, big media syndicates could buy up old copyrights for a pittance and renew them for a few more decades, but at some point even those syndicates are going to face the reality that the don't have the cash flow to renew millions of copyrights forever... if the transaction costs of hiring/paying armies of people to oversee the actual work didn't deter them, the perpetually-doubling renewal fees eventually WOULD.
Another key element I alluded to earlier is a requirement that works be submitted in digitally-indexable form. The idea is to make it cheap and easy for anyone to make a good-faith effort to determine copyright status and attempt to license it, but simultaneously leave a clear legal path for the use of "orphaned" works. Say, by payment into escrow of nominal compulsory licensing fees upon demonstration that a work'
When confronted by an iPhone-brandishing evangelist, smile while pulling out your Android-running HTC Touch and tell them, "At least MY phone didn't have to be jailbroken to run whatever software I want"...
IMHO, the fact that patent licenses aren't automatically recursive is absolutely perverse. Under current law, if you buy something made with a patented part, modify it, and sell it, you can be sued for infringement even though the part in question was fully licensed at the time of purchase. That's perverse. The mere fact that most people are shocked (if they even believe you) when you tell them shows that our elected officials have become seriously disconnected from society's consensus about IP law.
If I want to create mashups of movies by George Lucas and Disney, and do so by purchasing a retail copy of every DVD from which footage is ripped, then render them unusable and package them along with my mashup copy, it should be absolutely 100% legal. Ditto, if I make a cool dance remix of a Metallica song. If every copy of my remix CD is backed up by a purchased & destroyed copy of Metallica's CD, Metallica will have lost nothing. They made their money from the sale of the media that was purchased, then rendered unplayable. If someone purchases my mashup instead of the original, the copyright owner would be no worse off, because I would have purchased a copy of THEIR original on behalf of whomever purchased a copy of MY mashup.
Licensing should be recursive, for both patent and copyright law. IP law needs to be reformed so that any licensed item is automatically and recursively licensed in perpetuity, as long as there is no net increase in licensed content. If I use content from five CDs to make one of my own, proof of purchasing a complete set of those five CDs prior to their official destruction should be an automatic defense against allegations of infringement.
The problem, of course, with SACD (besides the divergence in music preferences between their apparent audience and everyone else), is the fact that they fail miserably at reason #2 for buying physical media: the acquisition of a flawless master from which to make all your format-shifted copies. If the only place where I can meaningfully listen to a purchased SACD is my living room, during daylight hours when it won't disturb the neighbors, its value to me is approximately $2.
Insofar as blind quality tests go, yeah... I'm assuming the comparison is being done on an audio system that didn't come in a single box, with speakers whose diameter is at least equal to the diameter of the disc being played.
Really, it hurts to see the relentless downward slide into poor audio quality. I also put part of the blame on the fact that consumers under 25 years old never really experienced digital audio as a profound, "oh my god" improvement over what they had before, because to them, CDs have always been the norm. They've grown up with earbuds, tinny laptop speakers, and audio gear whose biggest selling point is either its size, color, or price.
I still remember the look my youngest cousin (17) gave me when I forced him to listen to a CD wearing the huge, ugly earmuff-like headphones I bought when I was in college (remember? the ones that weighed about 5 pounds due to the rigid metal shells and HUGE samarium cobalt magnets?) to show him what music through headphones was SUPPOSED to sound like. He was blown away. He'd literally never experienced headphones that could give you the kind of listening experience you'd otherwise have to make your neighbors hate you for having. That Christmas, I bought him a $250 pair for his own. It was a small investment in a better future... he's now a music engineering major at my alma mater, determined to help fight the music industry's race to the bottom. :-)
> Uh...hello? What exactly is the point, then? Last I heard, portable CD players have been made completely and utterly obsolete
> due to the advent of portable MP3 players, which are now cheaper, smaller, and can hold a whole CD binder worth of music in a
> device smaller than a cellphone.
Not... quite...
The main reason why more and more people think mp3 audio sounds as good as CD audio is because the audio fidelity of CDs has gone down the toilet over the past decade. It's as if the recording engineers of the world have completely forgotten EVERYTHING they learned during the previous 25 years. Modern CDs have CLIPPING, for god's sake. That's inexcusable. Combine sloppy mastering with media of diminishing quality and players whose quality basically ceased to exist 5 years ago, and you have the reason why most current CDs sound like crap. Modern CD players never skip, because they have big ram buffers so they can recover from skips before the listener realizes it happened at all, but pretty much every other spec meaningful to CD players has gone downhill since the mid-90s.
Find a DDD Telarc disc from the early 90s that was intended to show off the capabilities of CD players back then -- wide dynamic range, basically 0% cross-channel interference, the works. Now rip it, and try to make the best-quality mp3/ogg encoding possible. Now do a blind comparison of the two. I guarantee you'll be able to tell the difference. You might have a hard time telling which is which if you hear it in isolation, but side by side you'll have no problem figuring out which one is compressed.
Put another way, the quality of compressed audio hasn't increased... the quality of CD audio has fallen compared to the quality it had during its golden era. 15 years ago, record companies spent lots of money trying to master perfect CDs, because they knew every disc they released was going to be scrutinized for the tiniest audio imperfection. Now, they don't even bother trying... and wonder why their customers don't bother *buying*.
If every new Britney Spears & Madonna disc had the production standards and "reach out and touch the music" clarity that the best Telarc discs had 20 years ago, people would STILL be buying them at stores, even if they intended to rip them to mp3 for convenience. Why? The added value of a flawless, premium-quality master from which to rip at will. We'd probably even start seeing "mp3" players that can play raw PCM, and people taking advantage of SDHC media's capacity to "rip them raw". Even a 2 gigabyte microSD card can hold ~3 CDs worth of uncompressed data.
> Why not just shoot them?
We need every crocodile (and alligator) we can get to help keep the python population under control. ;-)
> is to get companies to start using a different FS on memory cards
It's not going to happen, and here's why:
* The royalties are capped. Beyond a certain point, it costs SanDisk, Minolta, and the others nothing in additional royalties for cards produced during a given year.
* As a practical matter, Microsoft can only force you to pay royalties if you sell the card preformatted. Leave it up to the end user to format the drive himself, and Microsoft can't make you pay them a cent. Technically, the end user would be responsible for paying the royalties himself if he formats the card with FAT32, but as a practical matter Microsoft isn't going to come knocking on his door.
Thus, it's self-limiting for large users, and there's a de-facto escape hatch for small users. The limit is high enough to make Microsoft lots of money, but low enough to not be worth the development and support costs of any alternate filesystem for the large users.
In any case, I'll be shocked if Microsoft ever launches into an all-out assault on Linux. Frankly, Microsoft BENEFITS from having a small & noisy group of people loudly insisting there are alternatives to Windows. It lets them point and say, "See, we aren't REALLY a monopoly!
That's interesting. I had the exact opposite experience (circa mid-1997). On the average, I managed to pull off ~20-45 minutes between Netscape 4 crashes. IE4, in contrast, usually managed to avoid crashing for 2 or 3 hours. On the other hand, at least once or twice a week, Netscape crashed badly enough to take Windows down with it (god only knows what it actually did to make THAT happen). That, personally, was the last straw that got me to delete Netscape 4 and never look at it again. IE4 was buggy, but at least it never crashed the entire computer.
The truth of the matter is, in 1997, IE4 was a shiny, brand new browser, and Netscape 4 was the creaky, rotting carcass of Spyglass... with ugly hacks stapled onto kludges held in place with metaphorical duct tape. ~6 years later, IE6 was the hulking undead monstrosity, and Firefox 2 was the shiny new browser mostly devoid of legacy baggage. Unfortunately, Firefox is now getting kind of creaky, its UI is *still* single-threaded and hangs if Acrobat Reader gets launched & takes too long to produce something renderable, and IE8 isn't giving me the same happy vibe IE4 did ~11 years ago (to tell the truth, I never really warmed up to IE7 after installing Vista, and kept using Firefox. There's just something about the way they reorganized IE's UI that annoys & irritates me, though I can't quite put my finger on what it is).
Netscape 4 was beyond bad. It was dreadful. It was *so awful*, if Microsoft ported IE4 to Linux and sold copies for $89.95 (the same as a copy of Windows), they would have ended up making almost as much money from a copy of Linux as they made from a copy of Windows, because nearly everyone running Linux would have ended up holding their noses in disgust and buying a copy anyway, just to be rid of Netscape once and for all. Go check out archived usenet postings to Linux newsgroups circa 1997-98. The #1 question splattered *everywhere* was whether Microsoft had a version of IE that ran under Linux. I still remember the jubilation over Konqueror... a browser everyone thought was pretty lame, but used anyway because it was *still* a billion times better than Netscape.
> No, *that* is *specifically* opinion. Last I checked, there was no "adjudicated fact" that demonstrated
> that Microsoft's *current* actions, today, are resulting in an "ongoing downside for the industry and
> consumers". Only that their previous actions have done so.
Point of order... from what I remember, there were plenty of examples that Microsoft's conduct was financially devastating to its competitors (particularly Novell), but I seem to remember that the vast majority of examples given of alleged harm suffered by real consumers were largely fabricated and contrived. For every struggling poor person with no need of networking allegedly harmed by having to pay an alleged $2.17 more for a copy of Windows because networking was foisted upon him, there were several hundred or thousand consumers who owned 2 or more computers and had them all networked precisely because networking WAS free.
Step back for a moment and envision a world where just about everything related to Windows was a-la-carte. Hmmm, CD/DVD writing comes to mind as a particularly good example of an area where Microsoft -- paranoid of adding fuel to their accusers' fires -- bent over backwards to avoid encroaching into areas with commercial applications. The result was the optical media mess (specifically, UDF discs that were only partly compatible with those formatted/written by other drivers) that's just now starting to finally get sorted out. Now, suppose Microsoft had eliminated the really BIG barrier to entry (the actual disc writing) back in 1999 with Windows 2000 Pro and Windows ME, and exposed the whole API so anyone with a copy of Visual Basic could hack together a disc-writing app. Would it have devastated Ahead (Nero's maker)? Almost certainly. It would have beaten up Adaptec pretty badly, too. But actual consumers would be able to go online and download any of several thousand freeware apps hacked together to take advantage of the OS-level support for disc reading/writing the way they do NOW.
IMHO, the best thing Microsoft can do for real consumers is to sweep away the big, hard barriers to different kinds of apps (they have bargaining power with licensors that peons like you and I will never have, and even companies as big as Adobe and Corel occasionally find themselves getting snubbed by the Sonys, Samsungs, and Matsushitas of the world), make them free (to use) parts of Windows, and expose them all via public APIs so the rest of us can put them to good use.
Ditto, for browsers. Is there anyone who'll even TRY to argue that Netscape 4 didn't completely suck in every meaningful way possible compared to IE4? Opera was commercial, yet its standards support was no better than IE's -- and when you factor things like client-side XSLT, was pretty lame compared to IE. Opera's developers treated standards as limits rather than minimum goals, and probably did more to make normal users think standards were something that made web pages look ugly than anything Microsoft has ever done (by the way, I own and use Opera Mobile daily, and regard it as a "Must Have" app alongside S2U2 and Winterface for anyone with a touchscreen WM6 phone).
Of course, if someone manages to find a way to use Microsoft's official status as a convicted monopolist to make them sell a DRM-free edition of Windows 7, I just might start beating the war drums against them, too... ;-)
Yeah, you'd use a "Y" cable to feed the left & right stereo signals to both the TV and VCR. You could do the same thing with the composite video if you wanted to use it to feed both the TV and VCR. If you had a last-generation VCR with 19uM-heads capable of pseudo-S-video, you could also split the s-video & use it to feed both the TV and VCR... but for that case, I'd recommend a Radio Shack 1x4 distribution amp, like this one: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103065
Radio Shack is a pale shadow of what it used to be, but for things like AV cables & accessories, they're usually the best place to go if you need it *today* and don't want to burn the afternoon hitting a half-dozen stores. Price and quality-wise, they're kind of the sweet spot between Wal Mart (cheap, but garbage) and Best Buy (their good stuff is hideously overpriced). Radio Shack's cables aren't sexy, but they work as well as Monster at roughly half the price.
Don't forget the biggest mistake of all: the merger.
Had the merger not occurred, Sirius would be mostly breaking even today. Still operating at a slight loss, but its existence as a going concern would not be in jeopardy. XM, on the other hand, would have gone bankrupt a few months ago, and now be in the hands of new owners. The big debt that's coming due in a few days is *XM* debt. Sirius' original debt wasn't due to cause problems for a few more years.
Mel has destroyed Sirius as a company. He took on XM and its debt load, and achieved nothing besides alienating the customers of both networks for no good reason. The amount of money he saved by consolidating channels was literally pocket change compared to the cost of owning two sets of satellites. I'll give Sirius a pass on Howard for the moment, because he probably WAS worth it to pre-merger Sirius. Remember, before Howard, XM was clearly in #1, and Sirius was the struggling "also-ran". By the end of Year H+1, Sirius was in the lead, and almost making a profit (mostly through creative accounting, but that's still better than XM could do). He wanted XM's bandwidth to launch seatback Barney videos for kids, but ended up gutting the audio quality of both services to add more channels with lower audio fidelity.
The REAL cost savings would have been for Sirius to sell off both of XM's geostationary satellites & broadcast the two data streams formerly handled by them using Sirius' Molniya satellites(*). Rural indoor users would have either needed a proper outdoor antenna with view of the entire sky, or had to move the antenna puck from windowsill to windowsill like Sirius users do, but it would have improved XM's mobile coverage in mountainous areas (where cars were in the shadow of mountains relative to geostationary satellites) and literally saved them hundreds of millions of dollars.
---
(*) Sirius has a constellation of 4 satellites in modified Molniya orbits. Basically, one satellite is a spare, and the other 3 are arranged so that at any given moment, one satellite is (more or less) "straight up" (relative to Iowa), one satellite is near the horizon, and one is on the other side of the earth. XM's constellation consisted of two satellites in conventional geostationary orbits over the equator.
Sirius and XM divided their bands into 3 slices, each of which carried the full bitstream. Two slices were broadcast by satellite, and the third slice was broadcast via terrestrial repeaters. I'd be seriously shocked if Sirius' satellites were physically incapable of broadcasting a slice of XM's band, and vice-versa. For one thing, satellite transmitters tend to be designed with fairly open-ended capabilities ANYWAY (they're so expensive to launch, with so much lead time, that the satellite's owner would be financially suicidal to not launch them with a "Plan B" in case the original user falls through. For another, I'm sure XM and Sirius both entertained the prospect that the other's satellites could be knocked out by space debris, solar flare, or some other malfunction... and faced with the prospect of shutting down or paying the other extortionate fees to carry their signal, would grudgingly pay the fees.
How to use an old VCR to record TV shows with a digital converter box ("box" hereafter):
1. Buy a digital converter box with s-video and composite video outputs.
2. Connect the box's s-video output to the TV's s-video input.
3. Connect the box's composite output to the VCR's composite input.
Now, let's assume you want to record channel 5 every Tuesday from 8pm to 9pm:
4a) Program the box to change to channel 5 every Tuesday at 8pm, send the remote code to turn on the VCR, and send the remote code for the VCR to begin recording. At 9pm, it sends the remote code to stop recording. You connect what's basically an infrared LED connected to a headphone jack to a port on the back of the box labeled something like "IR LINK", and tape the business end of the LED to the front of the VCR in front of its infrared sensor. As far as the VCR is concerned, the converter box is a remote control.
4b) If your box is brain dead and doesn't have programming capabilities, all is not lost... you just need a better universal remote. For ~$50-100, you can get one with LCD panel that can ITSELF be programmed to do your recording. You tell the remote when the program comes on, ends, and its channel, then leave the remote somewhere it can be seen by the VCR and converter box. At the appropriate time, the remote sends the code to turn on the VCR, turn on the converter box, change the VCR's input to composite, change the box's channel to 5, and begin recording. At 9pm, it sends the code to the VCR to stop recording.
Frankly, if it came down to buying a better remote, I'd advise you to just buy a used TiVo on eBay. Once you update the firmware, it'll know how to control the converter box on its own, and the total cost won't be much more than you would have spent on the remote alone.
Added bonus from Digital TV for people with old TVs: broadcast TV won't be high-definition, but it WILL be "dvd quality". It'll still be interlaced, and still have a nominal resolution of 704x480, but the color fidelity will be ENORMOUSLY better than the mangled mush broadcast NTSC was able to provide.
Tip for anyone in Hurricane-prone areas: buy a Hauppauge Win-TV HVR-950Q. They're ~$67 on eBay and can tune over the air HDTV, unencrypted QAM HDTV from cable, broadcast NTSC (not that it'll matter much longer, but it's there), and do video capture from composite or s-video. When the power goes out, plug it into your laptop's USB port, and watch TV with your laptop (it works just fine with the 1.6GHz Atom on my MSI Wind netbook). Buy a couple of battery jumpstarters from Radio Shack or Wal Mart to keep your laptop running a few hours longer (and run the 12v fan later so you can actually get a little bit of sleep without air conditioning), and take advantage of their cigarette lighter jacks to power a car adapter (or cheap inverter into which your laptop's normal supply would be plugged). I bought one a few weeks ago, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I can get all but one local channel from SW Broward inside the house using only the provided antenna. I specifically recommend the Hauppauge 950q, because it ALSO can work directly with Windows Media Center (no need to screw with some buggy, proprietary app that won't be supported 6 months from now) and has a normal 75-ohm coax connector on it (no fragile dongle to break or get lost). I've never tried it, but I assume that anything that can be made to work with Windows Media Center can also be made to work (sooner or later) with Linux.
> So if the pricing of the eBooks reflects the reduction in production costs,
> it might be far cheaper
Keep dreaming. Read any forum about eBooks, and the #1 thing everyone complains about endlessly is the fact that they're usually the same cost as the printed book... maybe, MAYBE a buck less... if you're lucky. By the time the eBook price goes down, the paperback edition is already in the 70% off pile at Borders.
I guarantee... when college textbook publishers jump on the eBook bandwagon, they'll drop the price a tiny bit at first, then eliminate printed editions, then quickly jack the eBook edition's price up to what it would have been ANYWAY had it been printed, instead.
Right now, the ONLY thing keeping publishers halfway honest is the fact that used books can be purchased nationwide from Amazon.com and other sources. Take away second-sale rights, and they can jack the price up to extortionate levels within a few years.
Remember, college textbooks are a fairly inelastic, noncompetitive market. By the time you find out what textbooks a professor wants you to buy, it's too late to go shopping for a new professor. Assuming, of course, that you'd even consider changing your schedule or a good professor on the basis of textbook prices. Most students aren't, and the textbook publishers KNOW it.
The other problem is that current ebook readers basically suck for anything besides reading stories page by page. Just TRY jumping around in a programming book with an e-ink reader. The 700+ms it takes to go from page - to -- page --- to ----page will drive you insane.
What we REALLY need is for someone like O'Reilly & Manning to throw their weight against Amazon to open up Kindle's UI architecture. In other words, treat the document as a black box that can have UI gadgets and notes overlaid on top, but otherwise enable anyone with a free SDK to rewrite the UI code so the buttons, touchscreen, etc do what THEY think they should do. Within a year or two, the better UI ideas will bubble up and become more popular, and the bad UI ideas (or compromised UI ideas that aren't really ideal for anything, in a "one size fits nobody" kind of way) fall by the wayside.
All I can say is, god help us all if Microsoft ends up behind a dominant eReader platform. We'll end up having to navigate through 3 levels of menus just to jump to the next chapter or set a bookmark, 2/3 of each page will be filled with EULA-mandated legal notices, and the search won't allow explicit boolean operators or clauses... it'll try to guess what you mean, be egregiously wrong at least half the time, and force you to constantly try outsmarting it to get the results you want (anyone who's ever used MSDN's search engine knows what I'm talking about...)