I don't have HDTV, because when I visited the local big box retailer, I was not at all impressed with the quality. The channel I was watching had a HDnet bug, so I'm pretty sure it was a native HD signal and not upconverted. However, the quality was just horrendous. The picture had visible artifacts throughout - not typical pixelization you see on a bad MPEG-2 SD feed, but just general fuzziness that was not at all like the crisp, sharp picture everybody says HDTV has. The 36" NTSC TV next to the HDTV had a far cleaner picture.
Granted, the difference could be chalked up to signal quality, but if they can't get a clean signal at the store, I don't think I'd have better luck at home.
I'm not going to pay $2500 more for a DRM-restricted TV with worse picture quality than the current standard.
I don't live in Atlanta, and yet we have the same procedure here. I actually don't mind all that much because it's not taking operators away from handling emergency calls. The first thing you're asked after Police, Fire or Ambulance is whether you're calling to report an emergency. If you say no, they transfer you to the non-emergency call center, which has a different (smaller?) pool of operators.
Calling the police for non-emergencies using 911 is actually encouraged by the police chief, and since my cell phone company is picking up the airtime, I'm only too happy to oblige.
IT clearly does. A wide variety of prominent people who do computer programming, web design, and so forth get hired based on their online work - especially by Google.
I agree with you, except for this last sentence...
Third, the bandwidth costs for, say, the iTunes music store, were it distributing everything in "lossless" format, would be astounding, to say the least.
If that's the case, how can iTunes Music Store afford to sell TV shows (which Steve Jobs said were equal in size to six songs) for only $1 more? I imagine Apple must be getting a good discount for the amount of bandwidth they purchase, and I can't imagine a FLAC file being larger than an iPod-formatted TV show. If bandwidth was truly the problem, Apple could easily sell songs for a 99 cent basic version, or $1.99 premium version.
Well, for "high end solutions" from 20 years ago, you're absolutely right. The bar for high end has continued to move for businesses, however. Cheap, easy-to-use systems typically cost about $5,000 per room today. However, better stuff is often used, and this costs much, much more.
State-of-the-art videoconferencing systems today can send and receive broadcast-quality video from multiple sites. These rooms can have multiple cameras, staff in a hidden control room to operate the cameras and participant microphones, and fat network pipes to send the video.
Much of my job revolves around videoconferencing, and on a typical day, it's not at all uncommon for us to support multicast traffic between 5 sites at a rate of 45 megabits per second. No consumer broadband is even close to being able to handle that.
Rollover cables are used to talk to the console port of a router. You make them by "rolling over" the connector on one side of the cable, upside down. The pinout is therefore 12345678 to 87654321.
Whatever happened to the much-hyped Al Gore TV network?
I watched Current when it launched. I guess I'm not the target market, but it really wasn't that entertaining to me. Only a fraction of the programming is actually submitted by viewers - the rest is professionally-produced. The commercials were very, very frequent - it wasn't uncommon to get a spot between every "pod." I almost prefer a long block of commercials at the same time. There's also been some controversy about the launch - altered policies resulted in producers having less control of their shows and less viewer created content than originally planned.
The funny thing is, during the two weeks before Current launched, I really began to respect NewsWorld International (the news channel Current bought out and cancelled as an easy way to get channel space). They provided an alternative perspective to CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and they did so very well. During the brief period I watched the two networks, I decided that NewsWorld matched my tastes much more closely. I miss them.
I don't know for sure, but based on the channel listing on the web site, it doesn't look like they picked up any new cable systems since the launch.
It was a good idea, but I don't think Current is ready for prime-time yet. Current's goal was to enable people to get their voice out. Public access does a better job of this.
Our optical ballot system notices when your ballot is spoiled, and gives you the opportunity to void it and start over. It has all the benefits of touch-screen voting plus reliability.
Yes, sometimes deleting files should be a crime. If you're the only person with control of an important document owned by your company, and you intentionally delete the file knowing this, you should be held liable for the damage it causes. This is especially true if your company has a policy against doing this.
That said, in TFA, it says the contract specifically said that he was to return or destroy confidential data, so the above argument doesn't seem to apply in this case.
Of course, IANAL, and lawyers can make anything "apply" when they want to.
UltraVNC does one better - they provide a small server app that only runs when the user is calling in to you. All of the settings - IP, port, you name it - are custom-compiled into the EXE, meaning they're locked out. You just double-click the program and push the shiny "Connect button." It even supports built-in encryption.
I've run into two problems that make it a challenge to use, for now: the encryption is buggy and sometimes won't connect, and as far as I know, the VNC protocol it serves has some non-standard stuff that won't run on Mac or *NIX VNC clients.
Why does it have to look like XP or Vista? [emphasis in original]
Because if it doesn't, employees have to be retrained, and retraining incurs significant costs. You have to pay the salaries of both the trainer and the trainees. You have to be accept the decreased productivity of those workers, both during the actual training and for some period after, while they feel their way around the new software. Remember, most Windows and Office users are not technically inclined, so even small changes like renaming a menu option or having a different icon on a button can cause problems. Many users have learned the steps to complete a task, but won't be comfortable doing so if any of the precise steps to follow are changed. Some people can't even cope with the movable toolbars in Office.
You also have to train the helpdesk or system administration staff to field questions about the new software. If the replacement isn't completely compatible with the original program, then some employee is going to have to convert and/or recreate documents in the new format.
At first glance, these costs may not seem significant, but for a medium to large company, the loss of productivity adds up to real dollars. The financial incentive is often significant enough that it makes more sense to pay for an upgrade to Office than to switch to the "free" alternative.
I agree with a poster further up, however...this is an excellent time to cut over to open source if you're a medium or large company. Vista is going to be different enough that it's going to take just as much retraining to get people back to their same levels of productivity.
I'm certain that the cross platform support in OOo is at least part of the problem, but I don't accept that it's unfixable. Firefox works just fine for me on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu.
any spyware or whatever is the trendy thing to have nowadays No.
which oo.org version Similar results on the latest 1 series (don't recall what version that was), 2.0, and 2.0.1, on both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. 2.0 fixed some, but not all, of the display artifacts.
have you tried to reproduce this in a fresh user account ? It does this on virgin installs of XP from a system restore CD, and Ubuntu, with OS patches applied in each case.
if you can relieably reproduce this, submit a bugreport. I believe that I did, but it was closed as WORKSFORME.
In retrospect, "leaps and bounds" was probably too strong an assertion. I also have to apologize to the other child poster, because I did indeed miss the original point of the post I replied to. I've been using Office XP since 2002, and just recently upgraded to Office 2003 only because a relative had an extra license. I do think upgrading from Office 97 to XP is a good idea. I've used 97, and I've had problems with documents getting corrupted and other similar problems. However, I was very happy with XP and wouldn't have upgraded to 2003 unless somebody gave me a copy.
I still would select Microsoft Office over OpenOffice.org on a machine that had both installed, purely for stability and speed reasons. Office is better optimized and rarely crashes. With the preloaders off, it takes 2 seconds to start Microsoft Word and 14 seconds to start OpenOffice Writer on my machine. (I've timed it.) I'm really not that fast a typist - I do about 60 WPM on average - yet OOo doesn't keep up with my typing. I can usually get through 3/4 of a line before the letters appear on screen. Menus are equally slow - it takes about two seconds from the time I hit Alt+Letter to when the menu is done drawing. I've also noticed fairly significant display corruption - parts of the screen that don't update until I resize the window, or random lines being drawn across the toolbar. Office (Office 2003, at least) doesn't have these glitches.
I acknowledge that these delays aren't that significant, especially considering that Microsoft is probably using undocumented stuff to speed up Office, but they're just annoying enough to make me uncomfortable using OpenOffice.org on a regular basis.
OOo is a good product, and I've recommended it to people who couldn't afford Office. They've all been fairly happy with it, though they do complain about some of the same glitches.
With a bit of polish, OOo can be a serious competitor to Office someday. I look forward to it.
(I do apologize for my incoherent posts - it's late for me.)
I'm going to respectfully disagree. Office works really well. The UI is clean and polished, it operates quickly on a decent machine, and it's reliable. I really, really don't like Microsoft for their business practices, and I probably wouldn't shell out any amount of money for Office 12, but I think Microsoft Office is leaps and bounds ahead of OpenOffice.org today. I hope they can catch up eventually, because OpenDocument looks like a superior format. It just needs to be paired with a rock-solid office suite.
Fortunately, I'm a cable subscriber, so I'm not too worried about any direct effects...yet. However, BellSouth's position on net neutrality isn't much better than AT&T's. They start by proclaiming themselves strong supporters of net neutrality, then go on to define exceptions to that support:
However, BellSouth opposes those proponents of net neutrality who seek to render DSL service as nothing more than a "dumb pipe." Under BellSouth's view of net neutrality, the essential consumer protection is clear disclosure in the service plan agreement...Broadband networks providers should be able to manage bandwidth...[and] should be able to curb network usage (such as peer-to-peer file sharing) that consumes a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and may adversely impact other network users....Broadband network providers should be able to offer different plans that feature enhanced levels of service or that promote their own brand names and products or the services of selected vendors. For example, BellSouth should be able to enter into arrangements with content providers by which the content provider pays for special treatment, such as preferential listing or faster downloads from that provider's website or receiving a higher quality of service. (emphasis and length-editing mine)
If not an "invisible man", then what? The big bang? Where did the energy for the big bang come from? There has to be an origin for it, right? You argue that it's crazy to believe in God, but I believe it's even crazier to posit that the universe came into existence on its own, purely by chance. I think one has to accept that there is some forces or materials that transcend time, that have always been there, because if you linerally follow history, you have to have something that was there, in the beginning, that doesn't have a "parent" or ancestral force. It makes much more sense to me that this uncreated force would be intelligent, than it does to assume that billions of chance interactions between quarks would randomly lead to DNA being assembled to make you and me.
The Bible is actually very logical, and its entire focus is to defend the message that you dispute. God gave life to a perfect universe and to humanity as an expression of love. He gave us the ability to choose so that we would have the ability to worship him. Worship requires free will - if people don't have the ability to reject God, then worship is impossible, and humanity is no better than a collection of computers.
With this free will, humanity has chosen to reject God, because we have presumed that we can make perfect decisions ourselves. The trouble is, our decisions reflect our own will, and it's usually impossible for everybody to have our own way.
God does not force himself on people because he loves them enough to give them choice. If you choose to live your life apart from him, he will not force you to live with him after you leave this world either.
The point of God coming to Earth as Jesus was to demonstrate the perfect way to live, but also to pay the penalty for humanity's disobedience so that we could choose to submit to God, even after the wrong choices we've made in our lives that have been rejecting God.
Christianity is all about choice and logic. No Christian who understands and believes what he or she practices believes that people can be forced to believe. The reason they are Christians is because the message they've been told makes sense to them.
Government isn't something that Christians should worship, and it isn't our friend, but it ultimately serves a positive purpose and Christians are directed to submit to it. (A large part of Romans 13 deals with this.)
You're right that our governments are increasingly taking the place of God, but just because that's true doesn't mean that the institution of government is in and of itself a bad thing. Romans was written when the government was Rome.
And thats what we have the judicial branch for. If its unconstitutional, bye bye law. Hooray! Democracy wins again!
That's a nice thought, but it suffers from the same root problem as the bad patents - it costs money to bring a case to court, and many people can't afford the fees, even if they know they're right.
line item veto. The trouble with the line-item veto is that when you have a strongly partisan President, it's trivial to erase all the suggestions from the other side of the aisle.
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I don't have HDTV, because when I visited the local big box retailer, I was not at all impressed with the quality. The channel I was watching had a HDnet bug, so I'm pretty sure it was a native HD signal and not upconverted. However, the quality was just horrendous. The picture had visible artifacts throughout - not typical pixelization you see on a bad MPEG-2 SD feed, but just general fuzziness that was not at all like the crisp, sharp picture everybody says HDTV has. The 36" NTSC TV next to the HDTV had a far cleaner picture.
Granted, the difference could be chalked up to signal quality, but if they can't get a clean signal at the store, I don't think I'd have better luck at home.
I'm not going to pay $2500 more for a DRM-restricted TV with worse picture quality than the current standard.
...but, alas, they do not have email!
Yes, but do you think he would have understood the bounce message? SMTP errors are even harder to comprehend than Apache default pages.
I don't live in Atlanta, and yet we have the same procedure here. I actually don't mind all that much because it's not taking operators away from handling emergency calls. The first thing you're asked after Police, Fire or Ambulance is whether you're calling to report an emergency. If you say no, they transfer you to the non-emergency call center, which has a different (smaller?) pool of operators.
Calling the police for non-emergencies using 911 is actually encouraged by the police chief, and since my cell phone company is picking up the airtime, I'm only too happy to oblige.
Unfortunately, you missed the previous command:
root@notmine>pwd
/home/Darth_brooks
kill -66 /dev/clones
IT clearly does. A wide variety of prominent people who do computer programming, web design, and so forth get hired based on their online work - especially by Google.
I agree with you, except for this last sentence...
Third, the bandwidth costs for, say, the iTunes music store, were it distributing everything in "lossless" format, would be astounding, to say the least.
If that's the case, how can iTunes Music Store afford to sell TV shows (which Steve Jobs said were equal in size to six songs) for only $1 more? I imagine Apple must be getting a good discount for the amount of bandwidth they purchase, and I can't imagine a FLAC file being larger than an iPod-formatted TV show. If bandwidth was truly the problem, Apple could easily sell songs for a 99 cent basic version, or $1.99 premium version.
Assuming three folds, that'll cost you 54 cents. You might as well put a stamp on it before you send it on its merry way.
Well, for "high end solutions" from 20 years ago, you're absolutely right. The bar for high end has continued to move for businesses, however. Cheap, easy-to-use systems typically cost about $5,000 per room today. However, better stuff is often used, and this costs much, much more.
State-of-the-art videoconferencing systems today can send and receive broadcast-quality video from multiple sites. These rooms can have multiple cameras, staff in a hidden control room to operate the cameras and participant microphones, and fat network pipes to send the video.
Much of my job revolves around videoconferencing, and on a typical day, it's not at all uncommon for us to support multicast traffic between 5 sites at a rate of 45 megabits per second. No consumer broadband is even close to being able to handle that.
Rollover cables are used to talk to the console port of a router. You make them by "rolling over" the connector on one side of the cable, upside down. The pinout is therefore 12345678 to 87654321.
That's intentional. One of the primary points of Acid 2 is to test that the browser breaks correctly when it gets certain kinds of invalid markup.
There's a guide to how the tests work.
Whatever happened to the much-hyped Al Gore TV network?
I watched Current when it launched. I guess I'm not the target market, but it really wasn't that entertaining to me. Only a fraction of the programming is actually submitted by viewers - the rest is professionally-produced. The commercials were very, very frequent - it wasn't uncommon to get a spot between every "pod." I almost prefer a long block of commercials at the same time. There's also been some controversy about the launch - altered policies resulted in producers having less control of their shows and less viewer created content than originally planned.
The funny thing is, during the two weeks before Current launched, I really began to respect NewsWorld International (the news channel Current bought out and cancelled as an easy way to get channel space). They provided an alternative perspective to CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and they did so very well. During the brief period I watched the two networks, I decided that NewsWorld matched my tastes much more closely. I miss them.
I don't know for sure, but based on the channel listing on the web site, it doesn't look like they picked up any new cable systems since the launch.
It was a good idea, but I don't think Current is ready for prime-time yet. Current's goal was to enable people to get their voice out. Public access does a better job of this.
Our optical ballot system notices when your ballot is spoiled, and gives you the opportunity to void it and start over. It has all the benefits of touch-screen voting plus reliability.
Yes, sometimes deleting files should be a crime. If you're the only person with control of an important document owned by your company, and you intentionally delete the file knowing this, you should be held liable for the damage it causes. This is especially true if your company has a policy against doing this.
That said, in TFA, it says the contract specifically said that he was to return or destroy confidential data, so the above argument doesn't seem to apply in this case.
Of course, IANAL, and lawyers can make anything "apply" when they want to.
UltraVNC does one better - they provide a small server app that only runs when the user is calling in to you. All of the settings - IP, port, you name it - are custom-compiled into the EXE, meaning they're locked out. You just double-click the program and push the shiny "Connect button." It even supports built-in encryption.
I've run into two problems that make it a challenge to use, for now: the encryption is buggy and sometimes won't connect, and as far as I know, the VNC protocol it serves has some non-standard stuff that won't run on Mac or *NIX VNC clients.
Why does it have to look like XP or Vista? [emphasis in original]
Because if it doesn't, employees have to be retrained, and retraining incurs significant costs. You have to pay the salaries of both the trainer and the trainees. You have to be accept the decreased productivity of those workers, both during the actual training and for some period after, while they feel their way around the new software. Remember, most Windows and Office users are not technically inclined, so even small changes like renaming a menu option or having a different icon on a button can cause problems. Many users have learned the steps to complete a task, but won't be comfortable doing so if any of the precise steps to follow are changed. Some people can't even cope with the movable toolbars in Office.
You also have to train the helpdesk or system administration staff to field questions about the new software. If the replacement isn't completely compatible with the original program, then some employee is going to have to convert and/or recreate documents in the new format.
At first glance, these costs may not seem significant, but for a medium to large company, the loss of productivity adds up to real dollars. The financial incentive is often significant enough that it makes more sense to pay for an upgrade to Office than to switch to the "free" alternative.
I agree with a poster further up, however...this is an excellent time to cut over to open source if you're a medium or large company. Vista is going to be different enough that it's going to take just as much retraining to get people back to their same levels of productivity.
I'm certain that the cross platform support in OOo is at least part of the problem, but I don't accept that it's unfixable. Firefox works just fine for me on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu.
do you have problems with other applications
No.
any spyware or whatever is the trendy thing to have nowadays
No.
which oo.org version
Similar results on the latest 1 series (don't recall what version that was), 2.0, and 2.0.1, on both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. 2.0 fixed some, but not all, of the display artifacts.
have you tried to reproduce this in a fresh user account ?
It does this on virgin installs of XP from a system restore CD, and Ubuntu, with OS patches applied in each case.
if you can relieably reproduce this, submit a bugreport.
I believe that I did, but it was closed as WORKSFORME.
In retrospect, "leaps and bounds" was probably too strong an assertion. I also have to apologize to the other child poster, because I did indeed miss the original point of the post I replied to. I've been using Office XP since 2002, and just recently upgraded to Office 2003 only because a relative had an extra license. I do think upgrading from Office 97 to XP is a good idea. I've used 97, and I've had problems with documents getting corrupted and other similar problems. However, I was very happy with XP and wouldn't have upgraded to 2003 unless somebody gave me a copy.
I still would select Microsoft Office over OpenOffice.org on a machine that had both installed, purely for stability and speed reasons. Office is better optimized and rarely crashes. With the preloaders off, it takes 2 seconds to start Microsoft Word and 14 seconds to start OpenOffice Writer on my machine. (I've timed it.) I'm really not that fast a typist - I do about 60 WPM on average - yet OOo doesn't keep up with my typing. I can usually get through 3/4 of a line before the letters appear on screen. Menus are equally slow - it takes about two seconds from the time I hit Alt+Letter to when the menu is done drawing. I've also noticed fairly significant display corruption - parts of the screen that don't update until I resize the window, or random lines being drawn across the toolbar. Office (Office 2003, at least) doesn't have these glitches.
I acknowledge that these delays aren't that significant, especially considering that Microsoft is probably using undocumented stuff to speed up Office, but they're just annoying enough to make me uncomfortable using OpenOffice.org on a regular basis.
OOo is a good product, and I've recommended it to people who couldn't afford Office. They've all been fairly happy with it, though they do complain about some of the same glitches.
With a bit of polish, OOo can be a serious competitor to Office someday. I look forward to it.
(I do apologize for my incoherent posts - it's late for me.)
I'm going to respectfully disagree. Office works really well. The UI is clean and polished, it operates quickly on a decent machine, and it's reliable. I really, really don't like Microsoft for their business practices, and I probably wouldn't shell out any amount of money for Office 12, but I think Microsoft Office is leaps and bounds ahead of OpenOffice.org today. I hope they can catch up eventually, because OpenDocument looks like a superior format. It just needs to be paired with a rock-solid office suite.
If not an "invisible man", then what? The big bang? Where did the energy for the big bang come from? There has to be an origin for it, right? You argue that it's crazy to believe in God, but I believe it's even crazier to posit that the universe came into existence on its own, purely by chance. I think one has to accept that there is some forces or materials that transcend time, that have always been there, because if you linerally follow history, you have to have something that was there, in the beginning, that doesn't have a "parent" or ancestral force. It makes much more sense to me that this uncreated force would be intelligent, than it does to assume that billions of chance interactions between quarks would randomly lead to DNA being assembled to make you and me.
The Bible is actually very logical, and its entire focus is to defend the message that you dispute. God gave life to a perfect universe and to humanity as an expression of love. He gave us the ability to choose so that we would have the ability to worship him. Worship requires free will - if people don't have the ability to reject God, then worship is impossible, and humanity is no better than a collection of computers.
With this free will, humanity has chosen to reject God, because we have presumed that we can make perfect decisions ourselves. The trouble is, our decisions reflect our own will, and it's usually impossible for everybody to have our own way.
God does not force himself on people because he loves them enough to give them choice. If you choose to live your life apart from him, he will not force you to live with him after you leave this world either.
The point of God coming to Earth as Jesus was to demonstrate the perfect way to live, but also to pay the penalty for humanity's disobedience so that we could choose to submit to God, even after the wrong choices we've made in our lives that have been rejecting God.
Christianity is all about choice and logic. No Christian who understands and believes what he or she practices believes that people can be forced to believe. The reason they are Christians is because the message they've been told makes sense to them.
Government isn't something that Christians should worship, and it isn't our friend, but it ultimately serves a positive purpose and Christians are directed to submit to it. (A large part of Romans 13 deals with this.)
You're right that our governments are increasingly taking the place of God, but just because that's true doesn't mean that the institution of government is in and of itself a bad thing. Romans was written when the government was Rome.
And thats what we have the judicial branch for. If its unconstitutional, bye bye law. Hooray! Democracy wins again!
That's a nice thought, but it suffers from the same root problem as the bad patents - it costs money to bring a case to court, and many people can't afford the fees, even if they know they're right.
line item veto.
The trouble with the line-item veto is that when you have a strongly partisan President, it's trivial to erase all the suggestions from the other side of the aisle.