These PCs are definitely not going into living rooms.
I'll second that. I recently helped my brother pick out a box for transfering loads of home videos. He wouldn't take my recommendation for a Mac, so we went to Microcenter. The best thing there for what he wanted was a Sony with ridiculous muscle -- p4 3.something hyperthreading, 800 FSB, the whole lot for about $1000, and running MCE.
My brother lives in the Dominican Republic, and I know he'll never use the MCE part of the pckage -- there is no decent media editor, the TV tuner is irrelevant, and it will not be hooked up to a TV or stereo. He only bought the machine (instead of one less powered (without MCE) to edit together some home videos to burn them to DVD (he's got Ulead software, I think).
He liked this particular one for the front-side composite ports that he's used to using with his camcorder. He didn't have a choice between XP Pro and MCE, there were no machines without MCE that could do what he wanted.
Although I run MythTV (and you'll pry it from my cold, dead hands) I can understand most everyoe else just isn't interested. They don't want or need a central system for managing and playing media.
People want to be able to play around with their pictures and with their home movies, and burn them so others can see. This does not put MCE in the livingroom, though I agree with you that the promotion of them, the price level of some (which must be damn near cost), and the inclusion of monitors is a deliberate attempt to boost sales figures, if only so it looks good in the annual report.
PDF is not meant to be edited, it's meant to be final document format so whoever reads it knows they are reading an original and unaltered document. This is a feature -- electronic documents don't mean much unless there is a certainty that the document is legitimate. You cannot get this with an editable document, but you can with pdf.
They might do that eventually, but right now they will just give the software away to the state for free.....IT managers like free, and it avoids TCO arguments.
Since when has a state government been concerned with saving money?
Wouldn't be surprised if the Republican spin machine manages to turn it in to a story of the Bush administration stepping in to save the day and blame everything that went wrong on the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana. I assure you Rove and Co. were thinking about the political implications of this disaster from the get go.
That's what they're already trying to do. But it's going to be very difficult for Bush to answer why it took four days to get any kind of significant Federal presence on the ground, or why he was still on holiday Wednesday morning, a good 24 hours after the extent of the damage in New Orleans was reasonably known (48 hours for the Mississippi coast), or why people were dying in the streets for lack of water and food before significant numbers of the National Guard were mobilized.
This one is going to hurt Bush, mainly because he doesn't have a cushion to fall back on, the lack of command-and-control stemmed directly from the National Guard (which is not designed for fighting wars overseas) being overseas fighting wars, because there is a good long paper trail of warnings and things the Federal Government could have done to prevent a disaster of this magnitude but chose not to in favor of fighting wars overseas, and the crippling of FEMA by making it an aparatus of Homeland Security, though FEMA will get a well-deserved share of blame.
This one will not blow over so easily for Bush. Americans will put up with a lot, but not with extreme incompetence from public officials, especially when the people harmed are 'just like me'.
And Google could very well do the exact same thing with gmail accounts.
Google cannot do the same thing, since they do not collect this kind of information when you sign up for gmail. It's been a while since I got my gmail account, but I don't recall having to give them a single piece of information that I didn't want to (as opposed to Hotmail, which requires entries for things like age, gender, physical location, etc.)
If you took a good look at Hotmail user data (and nothing else) you'd probably be surprised how many 90+ year-old women in Albania are using the service. Google does not have this problem since they never intended any ridiculous implementation like MSN Passport.
What's disgusting is not the DRM, it's the blatantly misleading advertising which deliberatly hides some key facts of the products/services sold.
Yes, Yes, Yes (except that it's whats more disgusting than DRM . ..
My personal favorites are all the ads from ISPs (particularly Verizon and Comcast in my area) talking about how their service provides "blazing speeds" for dowloading music and other media. The suggestion seems to be that with Verizon FIOS, I can get a song in seconds, and a film in minutes. There is nothing to indicate that there aren't any legitimate sources for downloading Hollywood movies, or that getting all the music I want involves extra cost (on top of the extortionist rates they already charge).
But remember, those "easily" converted music CDs are starting to include DRM mechanisms as well.
What follows is most of a post I sent to a mailing list not long ago about copy protected CDs, and what (if anything) you can do about it:
The only real answer is to stop buying, and let the record stores and production companies know why you've stopped buying.
I actually had a fairly amusing experience not too long ago along
these lines. I was at the mall waiting for my wife to finish looking
for something or other and I wandered into the music shop. It's the
first time I've been in a cookie-cutter mall music shop in probably 10
years. They haven't got any better.
But anyway, I had no intention of buying anything, but wanted to see
what would happen. So I picked up some copy-protected disc (can't
remember which one) and headed over to the counter. The converstion
went something like this:
Me: Hi. Do you have this record in a Compact Disc format?
Salesdrone: That is a Compact Disc.
Me: No it isn't. [showing the disc] There's no CD logo on it, it isn't
red-book compliant.
SD: That is a music CD, it will play in your CD player.
Me: I didn't ask for a music disc, I asked for a Compact Disc. Do you have one?
SD: That is a compact disc.
Me: This is most definitely not a Compact Disc. A Compact Disc has an
emblem on it indicating that it's compliant with the red-book CD Audio
standard. This has no emblem, so it's not red-book compliant,
therefore it's not a CD. Do you have a CD?
[I have since learned that this is not strictly true -- a lot of red-book CDs do have the emblem on the packaging, but not all. However, the emblem will be on the disc itself. If there is no emblem on the disc, then you can be fairly sure that it's not a red-book CD, i.e. it's been DRMed]
SD: That is a CD. Would you like to buy it?
Me: Let me talk to the manager.
SD: [grumble, grumble, goes to get manager]
Manager: How can I help you.
Me: Sorry to be a bother, I'm just trying to find out if you have this
record on Compact Disc.
Mngr: That is a compact disc.
Me: As I explained to your colleague, it is not a Compact Disc because
there is no emblem indicating red-book CD Audio compliance. Do you
have it on Compact Disc?
Mngr: Ah. Well this is better than Compact Disc [I nearly lost it when
he said that, but kept my composure and plugged along].
Me: How?
Mngr: You can play it on your computer and keep the tracks as
high-quality Windows media files.
Me: But I can play a Compact Disc on my computer, and I don't run Windows.
Mngr: Look, This is a music disc that will play in any CD player.
Would you like to buy it.
Me: No. I'd like to buy a Compact Disc. Do you have one?
Mngr: If you look around, I'm sure you'll find a lot of Compact Discs
in the store.
Me: But not this one?
Mngr: No, I guess not.
Me: Thanks anyway for your time. [leaves]
When we went by the shop a little later, I noticed some of the
employees were looking very closely at CD boxes. I can only hope they
were looking for the logo.
The moral of the story is that I have very little power against the
music companies, and the only power I can excercise is to not purchase
their goods. Along the same lines, I don't download their goods
either. A legal download gives them cash and legitimacy, while an
illicit download gives them ammunition. All I want to give them is the
finger.
Instead, I've been gradually filling my Myth box with music from my
local library. They've got tens of thousands of CDs [though I've never
seen any of these better-than-CDs there], and don't seem to want to
tell me where and how to listen them. My current crop is The Miles
Davis Quintet box set, The The's Dusk, Tom Waits' Alice, and Falling
in Love with Duke Ellington.
If it came down to it, I'd rather live without music than do anything
that would help the current major record labels.
What is needed right now are funds to help the responible agencies, not spurious projects started up by folks who have no experience with logistics of this level.
Unfortunately, at the moment FEMA looks rather like a "spurious project set up by folks who have no experience with logistics of this level."
Also, I was under the impression that the phones weren't working, nor any other form of communication and that this has been one of the biggest problems.
As it is I fully expect the tragedy to be laid at the feet of the Bush administration without regard to the local government evidently collapsing on itself in the crucial first hours of the aftermath.
Well, it's not Bush's fault there was a hurricane, but FEMA is a Federal Agency under the control of the executive branch, and FEMA has made a complete cock-up of the situation, so yes, it IS the Chief Executive who deserves the blame (not to mention the soon-to-be-former head of FEMA). There's one reason this lands squarely on Bush's desk.
Another reason is the inexplicable four-day delay in getting any significant numbers of National Guard on the ground. They should have been mobilized in numbers before the storm, and deployed to NO and surroundings in force by Monday night, not Friday. The National Guard is under the control of the Commander-in-Chief, so this also lands squarely on Bush's desk.
Bush also deserves a sound slapping for continuing to say that 'no one could have predicted this', when in fact, the very scenario we are witnessing has been predicted numerous times by academics, Federal agencies, climate specialists and others, and reported to the President on a regular basis going back at least to the Clinton administration.
This is not to say that local and state officials are blameless, but Bush is a president who likes to model himself as someone who 'gets things done', and he has not got things done. He was still on holiday Wednesday morning.
Bush is also a president under whom no one is ever held responsible for any mistakes, quite the contrary. The executive branch pressed the CIA into fudging intelligence on Iraq so the war case was stronger, so who took the fall when the snow job melted? Cheney? Rumsfeld? Wolfowitz? How about high-ranking folks at Langley who were warning all along that the WMD case wasn't airtight, high-ranking military leaders who said the US would need a hell of a lot more that 150k troops and a few months to secure Iraq, and pretty much everyone in upper levels of government who disputed the 'they'll toss roses at us' vision of the Iraq occupation.
Not to mention that there would be a whole hell of a lot more help on the ground if our National Guard (which isn't really designed for fighting offensive wars and occupying foreign countries) wasn't off fighting offensive wars and occupying foreign coutries. This is Bush's fault.
And not to mention that, whether or not it would have made any difference, the storm defence system of NO was not as strong as it could have been because the budget for it had been repeatedly slashed in order to pay for costly offensive wars and foreign occupation. This is absolutely Bush's fault.
Once the immediate issues of health and human saftey have been dealt with, there will be plenty of blame to go around, believe me. And Bush will do everything he can to protect himself and his loyal lieutenants.
But make no mistake, Bush has already failed this one for the reasons above and many more. I have never been a supporter of his, but I did view him with a grudging admiration for the way he rose to challenge in September, 2001. It is September, 2005, however, and he has simply dropped the ball. I sincerely hope that, for once, he has to pay the price.
Give me just ONE example of where COPYRIGHT (NOT trademarks, and NOT patents) prevents innovation. Just one. In fact, I'll settle for a conceptual model.
Alright, I'll bite. I've had MythTV running for about a year and a half now, and I must say it's jolly good fun.
I'll also say that it was far from simple to get everything up and running just right.
I'll also say that the thought has occured to me on many occasions that a tidy little business could be built off of MythTV -- not selling boxes on ebay, but a legitimate, local, service business. And not by locking the source, but by providing the benefits of my own experience and expertise -- in much the same way that the knowledge of how to change the oil in a car is not proprietary, but most people are unwilling to do it themselves.
But the major thing that prevents me from doing this is what my box is capable of, and what that means in Good Ole Litigious USA.
By selling a machine that is capable of recording copyrighted materials in an unencrypted, non-DRMed, and easily duplicable format, I would leave myself open to a situation where I'm held liable for a separate instance of copyright violation for every single program recorded by every single client, let alone DMCA-related charges for what Myth can do if the user installs a very small bit of code that lets it play (and archive) DVDs (not to mention the fact that Linux doesn't even register the new CD copy-protection schemes, which may in itself be a DMCA violation).
Because of that, I have not started a business around it, and so am not working full-time to innovate on it, and have not hired others to work full-time innovating (the benefits of which would, of course, be released back to the community under the GPL).
Remeber that this machine was not designed to distribute copyrighted content without consent, but to time-shift (or format-shift) content that the user has already bought. This used to be legal. MythTV can also catalog and play back your music collection, as well as burn compilation CDs (which also used to be legal).
That is a very concrete and very real situation demonstrating how the current interpretation of copyright is harming innovation.
There, you've had your example so humbly suggest that you 'can it'. I also suggest you put together something a bit more edifying and worthwhile that a collection of cheat codes for video games before you start considering yourself literary.
And I'm assuming that all the tips you found on the internet and included in your books were properly documented, and the sources properly compensated. Right?
. . . And while recording artists are treated quite poorly in comparison to authors and actors, every time some music is pirated, it IS money that would have otherwise gone to the artist (and a lot more that would have gone to the recording studio, of which quite a bit should be going to the artist instead in my opinion, but that's another issue).
Oh boy, I don't even know where to begin with this one. Let's start with the 'every time music is pirated bit'. Are you talking about piracy (the wholesale duplication of materials for illicit sale) or are you talking about file sharing (which doesn't invlove any money in the first place)? It is utter nonsense to say that that every song swapped is money that doesn't go to the artist, since there's no money involved, and a song copied does NOT equal a song not sold.
I like to borrow CDs from my local library. Does it mean that I've deprived the estate of Otis Redding $50 because I borrowed the box set? What makes you think I would have bought it? Do you think Otis Redding is unhappy with me? How much of that non-existent $50 that I didn't spend would have gone to his estate anyway?
As far as payments to recording studios go, you apparently don't have much of an idea how the business works. A top producer can get a couple points on a record. Top shelf session musicians can get a point or two also, but in both cases it is a trade-off -- lower rates up front in exchange for the possiblility of fat royalties. The studio itself (and the recording engineer, mastering engineer, and musicians and producers without big time clout (or who choose) get a daily or hourly rate. These are not really excessive and are negotiated well in advance. Tour musicians don't get any points but are paid a daily rate.
This works more or less the same way for actors. I've got a buddy who had a supporting role in City Slickers, for example. Apparently the studio didn't think the film would do much, so they offered the actors generous (relatively) royalty deals so they wouldn't have to pay so much up front. It makes me feel good that every time that film comes on TV now (which seems like every other month) my buddy gets a check.
Your beef is more with the labels, which are run like a cartel, not the recording studios, which are run more like dentists' offices or car repair shops. If you don't pay your mechanic, your car doesn't leave the shop, and if you don't pay the recording studio, your master doesn't leave.
The problem in music is how this particular equation works. When an artist gets a major label contract, that sack with a $ on it is a loan, not a payment. Worse, the label decides how the money is spent, not the artist. Further, the artist is responsible for paying back everything that is spent out of future royalties, after the recording studios, sessions musicians, producers, engineers, video directors and crew, radio promoters, roadies, truck rentals, venue rentals, caterers, etc, etc, (and I mean etc) are paid. The labels have ways of working this so that the contracted artist is never quite out of debt.
There was quite a bit more I wanted to say on topics of 'ends not justifying means', particularly where the ends are so inexplicable (why do companies that sell music not want people getting exposed to music?), and about wondering how you, an author, intend to make people want to buy your work if they've never heard of you or read you before, but I've spent long enough on this already.
IIRC, Google's translator works from a source of documents from the UN. By cross referencing the same set of documetents in all kinds of different languages, it is able to do a pretty solid translation built on the work of goodness knows how many professional translators.
What is a little more confusing to me is how machine translation can deal with finer points in language, like different words in a target language where the source language has only one. English for example has the word "to know" but many languages use different words depending on whether it is a thing or a person that is known. Or words that relate to the same physical object but carry very different cultural connotations -- the word for female dog is not derogatory in every language, for example, but some other animals can be extremely profane depending on who you talk to.
Or situations where two entirely different real-world concepts mean similar things in their respective language -- in English, for example, you're up shit creek, but in Slavic languages you're in the pussy.
I've done translation work before (Slovak -> English), and there's much more going on than differences in words and grammar. There are whole conceptual frameworks in languages that just don't translate, and this is frustrating for anyone learning a language, let alone trying to translate. English is very precise (when used as directed) in matters of time and sequence -- we have more than 20 verb tenses where most languages get away with three.
Consider this:
I was having breakfast when my sister, whom I hadn't seen in five years, called and asked if I was going to the county fair this weekend. I told her I wasn't because I'm having the painters come on Saturday. They'll have finished by 5:00, I told her, so we can get together afterwords.
These three sentences use six different tenses: past continuous, past perfect, past simple, present continuous, future perfect, and present simple, and are further complicated by the fact that you have past tenses refering to the future, present tenses refering to the future, and the wonderful future perfect tense that refers to something that will be in the past from an arbitrary future perspective, but which hasn't actually happened yet. Still following?
On the other hand, English is much less precise in things like prepositions and objects, and utterly inexplicable when it comes to things like articles, phrasal verbs, and required word order -- try explaining why:
I'll pick you up after work
I'll pick the kids up after work
I'll pick up the kids after work
are all OK, but
I'll pick up you after work
is not.
Machine translation will be a wonderful thing for a lot of reasons, but because of these kinds of differences in languages, it will be limited to certain types of writing. You may be able to get a computer to translate the words of Shakespeare, but a rose, by whatever name, is not equally sweet in every language.
You're right that it's not as easy as it looks (not by any stretch), but the FAA charts are incredibly useful. Yes, when looking at highways and rivers it can be tricky to figure out just where you are relative to the highway or river, but the charts have bridges and large structures on them, as well as power lines, towers, and anything else that is identifiable from the air. I'm a guy who loves maps, and FAA sectionals are some of my favorites.
Flying by dead reckoning is not easy, but it is the fundamental skill of any pilot -- any jackass can read an altimeter, for example, but it takes a special skill and lots of practice to accurately determine altitude and speed by looking out the window (let alone being able to accurately measure wind direction and speed by looking out the window and at the airspeed indicator, or knowing the RPM by the sound of the engine).
Before I did my first cross country-solo, I went up with my instructor and we did about an hour with me using the hood -- attitude and flight control by instrument. Part of this invloved assuming various headings using VOR, but I didn;t know where the VORs were. The instructor made sure that we were somewhere we hadn't been before, then had me remove the hood, figure out where we were by dead reckoning, and take us home.
I was completely lost at first -- nothing but farms and roads. But look around, study your maps. Ah ha, there are hills to the west, a highway running N-S, and the highway crosses a small river just south of a town that has a water tower next to a radio tower. Bingo.
GPS is great, as are all the other navigational aids. But knowing what to do when they fail is important, and knowing where you are and how to get where you want to go with just a map and compass gives you the warm and fuzzies.
It's happened twice in the last few months -- private pilots accidentally venturing into restricted airspace. In both cases (that I know of) the pilots were intercepted by fighters and forced to land, then went through some rather unpleasant conversations with agents from three-letter agencies. Also, the White House and Congress were evacuated.
I can't remember exactly, but I think in one of the cases, maybe both, the pilot had his license revoked.
there are about 5 times per flight where I have no clue where I am
If this is true, you really need to pay more attention to your charts and dead reckoning, not to mention your VORs or even your directional beacon. You should always know where you are, and should always confirm your location with multiple means.
This was particularly important where I learned to fly, just outside of Washington. If you don't know where you are for even five or ten minutes, you may accidentally fly into the controlled airspace around the DC airports, or worse, into the restricted space over DC or Camp David.
Or more to the point, does it bother anyone that our tax dollars will be used to pay for people who do have insurance, because the insurance companies will run to the government to bail them out when that $20 billion bill comes due?
It's not helping the folks who have no insurance that bothers me. It's helping out comapnies whose business is selling risk, but who end up short on cash when their policies have to be paid out.
People who purchase Windows expect certain features in a modern OS, such as web browsing, video editing, photo manipulation, multimedia playback, etc.-- why is it wrong for Microsoft to include these features in an OS _they_ made and sold?
First off, MS is a convicted monopolist; Apple is not. This means that Apple has a whole lot more flexibility in what software they can bundle -- since Apple doesn't own 19 of 20 desktops, nobody can claim that shipping OS X with iMovie is blocking out competitors (particularly since pro-quality video editing suites sell rather well on the Mac platform).
It isn't illegal to be a monopoly per se. If everyone in the market decides your product is the best, then more power to you. What is most certainly illegal, however, is using a dominant position in one market (such as, oh say operating systems) to leverage a dominant position in other markets (like, oh say media players and web browsers). Laws on this matter are clear, and MS has had more than a fair trial in both the US and EU and was convicted each time. Unfortunately, the punishment in the US amounted to MS being sent to bed without supper for a night a few years ago.
See, Microsoft isn't bothered with creating a superior media player or browser. They'd rather just subvert existing standards to run only on their software (eg (among many).asf,.wmv, dhtml, etc, etc). This isn't illegal because MS makes the OS and WMP, but because MS uses their OS dominance to ensure that everyone uses WMP instead of any other media app, and that providers create content that is compatible with (and only with) WMP. It didn't work with html, and it's not going to work with media, but that doesn't mean that they won't try.
Second, of the things you mention, only web browsing and media playback come bundled with MS Windows. There is no included video editing and no included photo manipulation -- at least nothing capable of doing anything serious.
Anyone buying MS Windows and expecting to be able to edit photos and home videos out of the box is going to be sorely dissapointed. The fact that these come standard with other operating systems only proves the point that people who "expect certain features in a modern OS" would be better off with a truly modern OS like OS X or GNU/Linux
That's not it. In older versions of Office, each spreadsheet was a separate instance, which was very handy if you use two monitors and have a whole lot of open documents spread across them.
I haven't used XP in a while and can't remember if it was the same, but in 2003, Excel likes to open all the spreadsheets inside the same parent widow, whether or not they're displayed as separate on the taskbar. It's complicated and frustrating to try and get multiple spreadsheets in multiple windows. And there is the pesky close-one-close-all problem the GP was talking about.
Maybe it makes more sense to someone to do it the way it does, but I have loads of stuff open at any given time -- several spreadsheets, a document or two, maybe a pdf reader and two or three browsers, each with multiple tabs. I like each of them to be seaprate so I can move them around and put each wherever, next to whatever. MS Office 2003 makes this difficult to do, but OO.org does it very well.
You can try Knoppmyth, which is a Knoppix-based installer and bootable front end. Be aware, though, that MythTV requires some specific hardware, and if you try to run it with a lot of the stock MS MCE machines they're selling these days, you're going to run into problems.
To get a truly hassle-free setup, you need a Linux-compatible capture card with hardware encoding. These (the Hauppage PVR series are the best supported, particularly the PVR-250) do not come standard in cheap MCE machines. There are also issues with on-board video and with ATI cards. You'll need a good, supported graphics card like the nvidia gf or fx series, particularly if you plan on going out to a TV or to HD.
If everything is compatible and everything is plugged in just right, you can get Knoppmyth running within a couple hours.
In the long run, though, it's better if not to build it yourself than at least put the pieces together yourself. Many, many people have done this following Jarod Wilson's excellent guide for Fedora. If you do it this way, you have a much better idea how to fix things that go wrong (they will), and how to upgrade and extend functions when you want to (you will).
MythTV is not a simple thing to get running, and it is certainly not low maintenance. It is, though, the most powerful media engine on the planet at the moment, and is entirely open-source.
There is a business model for MythTV, with a subscription service available through LxM Suite -- they give you six months of TV listings data as well as other services for a $30 fee. The money, minus operating costs, goes in a pool to pay for bounties. Subscribers get a number of points to vote for what proposed features get funded -- i.e. paying somebody to do some of the more tedious coding, but the subscribers decide what code gets priority.
Running MythTV will take a lot more of your time than you might expect, particularly as you learn to use the CD and video archiving tools. But it is well worth the time. I've had my box running for over a year now, and can't imagine what I'd do without it.
But if DSL is just one technology. Already cable and DSL companies are locked in a heated battle over who will dominate residential broadband. Even if the local phone carrier and the local cable carrier are effectively monopolies, they're still in competition with each other, right?
Yes, and a long-distance bus company is in competition with an airline. But imagine if the Commerce Dept decided that Delta Airlines had the exclusive right to operate planes out of Atlanta. Other companies could negotiate deals with Delta on an individual basis, but there would be no base price that all companies would be subject to, and a single corportate entity would run both the physical infrastructure (airport) and the trasport operation (airline).
Now imagine that Commerce granted the same exclusive right to operate busses on on Interstate Highways to Greyhound. Sure, someone else could negotiate a deal with Greyhound and buy a bunch of busses, but again, this would be case-by-case, not by means of an open reference price.
Need to get out of Atlata? It's either Delta or Greyhound. Competition?
Of course, Commerce would base their decision on the idea that it really would be good for consumers by driving innovation(!). If I'm determined to run a transport company but am blocked by the incumbents from using either the airport or the highways, then for sure I'll have my hydrogen-powered hover taxis running in no time. Thank goodness for competition.
The analogy is a bit of a stretch, but Verizon had as much to do with the building of the POTS network as Grehound had to do with the construction of the interstate highway system.
This decision (and the earlier one regarding cable companies) gives the incumbents control over what goes into to the pipe, as well as the pipe itself. This works fine with a heavily regulated utility like water and sewage, since everyone wants basically the same service -- the taps work and the toilet flushes. But it doesn't work with data, where people's goals can be entirely different.
I don't subscribe to cable because I won't pay $50/month for the few channels that I want, all of which are supported with advertisements. Similarly, I don't want my DSL bill to subsidize the creation and operation of services that I'm not intrested in. As long as the lines are open, I can find a provider who will create a package based on my needs, not their own. For example, maybe I don't need a superfat pipe, but I do need a static IP. I'm not willing to pay extra so that Verizon has cash for FTTH.
While USF is a nice theory, in practice it is used as a method to defray costs for the incumbent telcos in serving desired markets. Can anyone provide several examples of rural CLECs or WISPs receiving USF dollars to support their efforts?
More to the point, can anyone offer examples of USF money going to the actual deplyoment of new lines? As fas as I can see, there's lots of new cell towers (with much higher margins) going up in rural America, but very little new wired infrastructure.
think of it as having the option of fixing a computer with a full history of what has been done to it or fixing a computer with no knowledge of who has used it or what has been installed on it.
On a few occasions recently I've had to return computer gear to a well known retailer. On each of these, there was nothing tehnically wrong with the product in question, just that it either didn't run in Linux or wasn't the piece I was looking for.
Specifically, there was an 802.11 card that was the same model but different version (therefore different chipset -- Broadcom instead of Prism) than indicated on the box, a sound card that just wouldn't work (my fault for not researching), and a graphics card that had a fan even though the picture on the box showed a heatsink.
Anyway, all three times, they accepted my explanation and let me exchange for what I wanted, but they never actualy opened the boxes and looked at what I had returned, at least not while I was there.
On top of that, I paid cash each time, and declined to give them my name and address.
The third time, when I was returning the video card, I was actually tempted to swap it for an older card -- I was pretty sure they wouldn't look, and they had no way to trace me.
Of course the temptation only lasted a few seconds; I am not a thief, and the deed I was considering is really, really slimy. All the same, it doesn't surprise me at all that other people do this.
My wife works in retail, and has truely wonderful stories about customer returns. One of my favorites is the one about someone who returned a chiped coffee cup that the shop hadn't had in stock for at least 10 years, but it had the store's name written on the bottom. And they granted the refund.
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These PCs are definitely not going into living rooms.
I'll second that. I recently helped my brother pick out a box for transfering loads of home videos. He wouldn't take my recommendation for a Mac, so we went to Microcenter. The best thing there for what he wanted was a Sony with ridiculous muscle -- p4 3.something hyperthreading, 800 FSB, the whole lot for about $1000, and running MCE.
My brother lives in the Dominican Republic, and I know he'll never use the MCE part of the pckage -- there is no decent media editor, the TV tuner is irrelevant, and it will not be hooked up to a TV or stereo. He only bought the machine (instead of one less powered (without MCE) to edit together some home videos to burn them to DVD (he's got Ulead software, I think).
He liked this particular one for the front-side composite ports that he's used to using with his camcorder. He didn't have a choice between XP Pro and MCE, there were no machines without MCE that could do what he wanted.
Although I run MythTV (and you'll pry it from my cold, dead hands) I can understand most everyoe else just isn't interested. They don't want or need a central system for managing and playing media.
People want to be able to play around with their pictures and with their home movies, and burn them so others can see. This does not put MCE in the livingroom, though I agree with you that the promotion of them, the price level of some (which must be damn near cost), and the inclusion of monitors is a deliberate attempt to boost sales figures, if only so it looks good in the annual report.
What is a marketing claptrap?
Bollocks. Shite. Twaddle. Crap. Bull. Balderdash. Hokum. Hogwash. Rubbish. Baloney. Gobledegook.
Putting 'marketing' in front of the 'claptrap' makes it a little redundant.
PDF is not meant to be edited, it's meant to be final document format so whoever reads it knows they are reading an original and unaltered document. This is a feature -- electronic documents don't mean much unless there is a certainty that the document is legitimate. You cannot get this with an editable document, but you can with pdf.
They might do that eventually, but right now they will just give the software away to the state for free.....IT managers like free, and it avoids TCO arguments.
Since when has a state government been concerned with saving money?
Wouldn't be surprised if the Republican spin machine manages to turn it in to a story of the Bush administration stepping in to save the day and blame everything that went wrong on the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana. I assure you Rove and Co. were thinking about the political implications of this disaster from the get go.
That's what they're already trying to do. But it's going to be very difficult for Bush to answer why it took four days to get any kind of significant Federal presence on the ground, or why he was still on holiday Wednesday morning, a good 24 hours after the extent of the damage in New Orleans was reasonably known (48 hours for the Mississippi coast), or why people were dying in the streets for lack of water and food before significant numbers of the National Guard were mobilized.
This one is going to hurt Bush, mainly because he doesn't have a cushion to fall back on, the lack of command-and-control stemmed directly from the National Guard (which is not designed for fighting wars overseas) being overseas fighting wars, because there is a good long paper trail of warnings and things the Federal Government could have done to prevent a disaster of this magnitude but chose not to in favor of fighting wars overseas, and the crippling of FEMA by making it an aparatus of Homeland Security, though FEMA will get a well-deserved share of blame.
This one will not blow over so easily for Bush. Americans will put up with a lot, but not with extreme incompetence from public officials, especially when the people harmed are 'just like me'.
And Google could very well do the exact same thing with gmail accounts.
Google cannot do the same thing, since they do not collect this kind of information when you sign up for gmail. It's been a while since I got my gmail account, but I don't recall having to give them a single piece of information that I didn't want to (as opposed to Hotmail, which requires entries for things like age, gender, physical location, etc.)If you took a good look at Hotmail user data (and nothing else) you'd probably be surprised how many 90+ year-old women in Albania are using the service. Google does not have this problem since they never intended any ridiculous implementation like MSN Passport.
What's disgusting is not the DRM, it's the blatantly misleading advertising which deliberatly hides some key facts of the products/services sold.
Yes, Yes, Yes (except that it's whats more disgusting than DRM . . .
My personal favorites are all the ads from ISPs (particularly Verizon and Comcast in my area) talking about how their service provides "blazing speeds" for dowloading music and other media. The suggestion seems to be that with Verizon FIOS, I can get a song in seconds, and a film in minutes. There is nothing to indicate that there aren't any legitimate sources for downloading Hollywood movies, or that getting all the music I want involves extra cost (on top of the extortionist rates they already charge).
But remember, those "easily" converted music CDs are starting to include DRM mechanisms as well.
What follows is most of a post I sent to a mailing list not long ago about copy protected CDs, and what (if anything) you can do about it:
The only real answer is to stop buying, and let the record stores and production companies know why you've stopped buying.
I actually had a fairly amusing experience not too long ago along these lines. I was at the mall waiting for my wife to finish looking for something or other and I wandered into the music shop. It's the first time I've been in a cookie-cutter mall music shop in probably 10 years. They haven't got any better.
But anyway, I had no intention of buying anything, but wanted to see what would happen. So I picked up some copy-protected disc (can't remember which one) and headed over to the counter. The converstion went something like this:
Me: Hi. Do you have this record in a Compact Disc format?
Salesdrone: That is a Compact Disc.
Me: No it isn't. [showing the disc] There's no CD logo on it, it isn't red-book compliant.
SD: That is a music CD, it will play in your CD player.
Me: I didn't ask for a music disc, I asked for a Compact Disc. Do you have one?
SD: That is a compact disc.
Me: This is most definitely not a Compact Disc. A Compact Disc has an emblem on it indicating that it's compliant with the red-book CD Audio standard. This has no emblem, so it's not red-book compliant, therefore it's not a CD. Do you have a CD?
SD: That is a CD. Would you like to buy it?
Me: Let me talk to the manager.
SD: [grumble, grumble, goes to get manager]
Manager: How can I help you.
Me: Sorry to be a bother, I'm just trying to find out if you have this record on Compact Disc.
Mngr: That is a compact disc.
Me: As I explained to your colleague, it is not a Compact Disc because there is no emblem indicating red-book CD Audio compliance. Do you have it on Compact Disc?
Mngr: Ah. Well this is better than Compact Disc [I nearly lost it when he said that, but kept my composure and plugged along].
Me: How?
Mngr: You can play it on your computer and keep the tracks as high-quality Windows media files.
Me: But I can play a Compact Disc on my computer, and I don't run Windows.
Mngr: Look, This is a music disc that will play in any CD player. Would you like to buy it.
Me: No. I'd like to buy a Compact Disc. Do you have one?
Mngr: If you look around, I'm sure you'll find a lot of Compact Discs in the store.
Me: But not this one?
Mngr: No, I guess not.
Me: Thanks anyway for your time. [leaves]
When we went by the shop a little later, I noticed some of the employees were looking very closely at CD boxes. I can only hope they were looking for the logo.
The moral of the story is that I have very little power against the music companies, and the only power I can excercise is to not purchase their goods. Along the same lines, I don't download their goods either. A legal download gives them cash and legitimacy, while an illicit download gives them ammunition. All I want to give them is the finger.
Instead, I've been gradually filling my Myth box with music from my local library. They've got tens of thousands of CDs [though I've never seen any of these better-than-CDs there], and don't seem to want to tell me where and how to listen them. My current crop is The Miles Davis Quintet box set, The The's Dusk, Tom Waits' Alice, and Falling in Love with Duke Ellington.
If it came down to it, I'd rather live without music than do anything that would help the current major record labels.
Just my $0.02.
What is needed right now are funds to help the responible agencies, not spurious projects started up by folks who have no experience with logistics of this level.
Unfortunately, at the moment FEMA looks rather like a "spurious project set up by folks who have no experience with logistics of this level."
Also, I was under the impression that the phones weren't working, nor any other form of communication and that this has been one of the biggest problems.
As it is I fully expect the tragedy to be laid at the feet of the Bush administration without regard to the local government evidently collapsing on itself in the crucial first hours of the aftermath.
Well, it's not Bush's fault there was a hurricane, but FEMA is a Federal Agency under the control of the executive branch, and FEMA has made a complete cock-up of the situation, so yes, it IS the Chief Executive who deserves the blame (not to mention the soon-to-be-former head of FEMA). There's one reason this lands squarely on Bush's desk.
Another reason is the inexplicable four-day delay in getting any significant numbers of National Guard on the ground. They should have been mobilized in numbers before the storm, and deployed to NO and surroundings in force by Monday night, not Friday. The National Guard is under the control of the Commander-in-Chief, so this also lands squarely on Bush's desk.
Bush also deserves a sound slapping for continuing to say that 'no one could have predicted this', when in fact, the very scenario we are witnessing has been predicted numerous times by academics, Federal agencies, climate specialists and others, and reported to the President on a regular basis going back at least to the Clinton administration.
This is not to say that local and state officials are blameless, but Bush is a president who likes to model himself as someone who 'gets things done', and he has not got things done. He was still on holiday Wednesday morning.
Bush is also a president under whom no one is ever held responsible for any mistakes, quite the contrary. The executive branch pressed the CIA into fudging intelligence on Iraq so the war case was stronger, so who took the fall when the snow job melted? Cheney? Rumsfeld? Wolfowitz? How about high-ranking folks at Langley who were warning all along that the WMD case wasn't airtight, high-ranking military leaders who said the US would need a hell of a lot more that 150k troops and a few months to secure Iraq, and pretty much everyone in upper levels of government who disputed the 'they'll toss roses at us' vision of the Iraq occupation.
Not to mention that there would be a whole hell of a lot more help on the ground if our National Guard (which isn't really designed for fighting offensive wars and occupying foreign countries) wasn't off fighting offensive wars and occupying foreign coutries. This is Bush's fault.
And not to mention that, whether or not it would have made any difference, the storm defence system of NO was not as strong as it could have been because the budget for it had been repeatedly slashed in order to pay for costly offensive wars and foreign occupation. This is absolutely Bush's fault.
Once the immediate issues of health and human saftey have been dealt with, there will be plenty of blame to go around, believe me. And Bush will do everything he can to protect himself and his loyal lieutenants.
But make no mistake, Bush has already failed this one for the reasons above and many more. I have never been a supporter of his, but I did view him with a grudging admiration for the way he rose to challenge in September, 2001. It is September, 2005, however, and he has simply dropped the ball. I sincerely hope that, for once, he has to pay the price.
Give me just ONE example of where COPYRIGHT (NOT trademarks, and NOT patents) prevents innovation. Just one. In fact, I'll settle for a conceptual model.
Alright, I'll bite. I've had MythTV running for about a year and a half now, and I must say it's jolly good fun.
I'll also say that it was far from simple to get everything up and running just right.
I'll also say that the thought has occured to me on many occasions that a tidy little business could be built off of MythTV -- not selling boxes on ebay, but a legitimate, local, service business. And not by locking the source, but by providing the benefits of my own experience and expertise -- in much the same way that the knowledge of how to change the oil in a car is not proprietary, but most people are unwilling to do it themselves.
But the major thing that prevents me from doing this is what my box is capable of, and what that means in Good Ole Litigious USA.
By selling a machine that is capable of recording copyrighted materials in an unencrypted, non-DRMed, and easily duplicable format, I would leave myself open to a situation where I'm held liable for a separate instance of copyright violation for every single program recorded by every single client, let alone DMCA-related charges for what Myth can do if the user installs a very small bit of code that lets it play (and archive) DVDs (not to mention the fact that Linux doesn't even register the new CD copy-protection schemes, which may in itself be a DMCA violation).
Because of that, I have not started a business around it, and so am not working full-time to innovate on it, and have not hired others to work full-time innovating (the benefits of which would, of course, be released back to the community under the GPL).
Remeber that this machine was not designed to distribute copyrighted content without consent, but to time-shift (or format-shift) content that the user has already bought. This used to be legal. MythTV can also catalog and play back your music collection, as well as burn compilation CDs (which also used to be legal).
That is a very concrete and very real situation demonstrating how the current interpretation of copyright is harming innovation.
There, you've had your example so humbly suggest that you 'can it'. I also suggest you put together something a bit more edifying and worthwhile that a collection of cheat codes for video games before you start considering yourself literary.
And I'm assuming that all the tips you found on the internet and included in your books were properly documented, and the sources properly compensated. Right?
. . . And while recording artists are treated quite poorly in comparison to authors and actors, every time some music is pirated, it IS money that would have otherwise gone to the artist (and a lot more that would have gone to the recording studio, of which quite a bit should be going to the artist instead in my opinion, but that's another issue).
Oh boy, I don't even know where to begin with this one. Let's start with the 'every time music is pirated bit'. Are you talking about piracy (the wholesale duplication of materials for illicit sale) or are you talking about file sharing (which doesn't invlove any money in the first place)? It is utter nonsense to say that that every song swapped is money that doesn't go to the artist, since there's no money involved, and a song copied does NOT equal a song not sold.
I like to borrow CDs from my local library. Does it mean that I've deprived the estate of Otis Redding $50 because I borrowed the box set? What makes you think I would have bought it? Do you think Otis Redding is unhappy with me? How much of that non-existent $50 that I didn't spend would have gone to his estate anyway?
As far as payments to recording studios go, you apparently don't have much of an idea how the business works. A top producer can get a couple points on a record. Top shelf session musicians can get a point or two also, but in both cases it is a trade-off -- lower rates up front in exchange for the possiblility of fat royalties. The studio itself (and the recording engineer, mastering engineer, and musicians and producers without big time clout (or who choose) get a daily or hourly rate. These are not really excessive and are negotiated well in advance. Tour musicians don't get any points but are paid a daily rate.
This works more or less the same way for actors. I've got a buddy who had a supporting role in City Slickers, for example. Apparently the studio didn't think the film would do much, so they offered the actors generous (relatively) royalty deals so they wouldn't have to pay so much up front. It makes me feel good that every time that film comes on TV now (which seems like every other month) my buddy gets a check.
Your beef is more with the labels, which are run like a cartel, not the recording studios, which are run more like dentists' offices or car repair shops. If you don't pay your mechanic, your car doesn't leave the shop, and if you don't pay the recording studio, your master doesn't leave.
The problem in music is how this particular equation works. When an artist gets a major label contract, that sack with a $ on it is a loan, not a payment. Worse, the label decides how the money is spent, not the artist. Further, the artist is responsible for paying back everything that is spent out of future royalties, after the recording studios, sessions musicians, producers, engineers, video directors and crew, radio promoters, roadies, truck rentals, venue rentals, caterers, etc, etc, (and I mean etc) are paid. The labels have ways of working this so that the contracted artist is never quite out of debt.
There was quite a bit more I wanted to say on topics of 'ends not justifying means', particularly where the ends are so inexplicable (why do companies that sell music not want people getting exposed to music?), and about wondering how you, an author, intend to make people want to buy your work if they've never heard of you or read you before, but I've spent long enough on this already.
IIRC, Google's translator works from a source of documents from the UN. By cross referencing the same set of documetents in all kinds of different languages, it is able to do a pretty solid translation built on the work of goodness knows how many professional translators.
What is a little more confusing to me is how machine translation can deal with finer points in language, like different words in a target language where the source language has only one. English for example has the word "to know" but many languages use different words depending on whether it is a thing or a person that is known. Or words that relate to the same physical object but carry very different cultural connotations -- the word for female dog is not derogatory in every language, for example, but some other animals can be extremely profane depending on who you talk to.
Or situations where two entirely different real-world concepts mean similar things in their respective language -- in English, for example, you're up shit creek, but in Slavic languages you're in the pussy.
I've done translation work before (Slovak -> English), and there's much more going on than differences in words and grammar. There are whole conceptual frameworks in languages that just don't translate, and this is frustrating for anyone learning a language, let alone trying to translate. English is very precise (when used as directed) in matters of time and sequence -- we have more than 20 verb tenses where most languages get away with three.
Consider this:
I was having breakfast when my sister, whom I hadn't seen in five years, called and asked if I was going to the county fair this weekend. I told her I wasn't because I'm having the painters come on Saturday. They'll have finished by 5:00, I told her, so we can get together afterwords.
These three sentences use six different tenses: past continuous, past perfect, past simple, present continuous, future perfect, and present simple, and are further complicated by the fact that you have past tenses refering to the future, present tenses refering to the future, and the wonderful future perfect tense that refers to something that will be in the past from an arbitrary future perspective, but which hasn't actually happened yet. Still following?
On the other hand, English is much less precise in things like prepositions and objects, and utterly inexplicable when it comes to things like articles, phrasal verbs, and required word order -- try explaining why:
I'll pick you up after work
I'll pick the kids up after work
I'll pick up the kids after work
are all OK, but
I'll pick up you after work
is not.
Machine translation will be a wonderful thing for a lot of reasons, but because of these kinds of differences in languages, it will be limited to certain types of writing. You may be able to get a computer to translate the words of Shakespeare, but a rose, by whatever name, is not equally sweet in every language.You're right that it's not as easy as it looks (not by any stretch), but the FAA charts are incredibly useful. Yes, when looking at highways and rivers it can be tricky to figure out just where you are relative to the highway or river, but the charts have bridges and large structures on them, as well as power lines, towers, and anything else that is identifiable from the air. I'm a guy who loves maps, and FAA sectionals are some of my favorites.
Flying by dead reckoning is not easy, but it is the fundamental skill of any pilot -- any jackass can read an altimeter, for example, but it takes a special skill and lots of practice to accurately determine altitude and speed by looking out the window (let alone being able to accurately measure wind direction and speed by looking out the window and at the airspeed indicator, or knowing the RPM by the sound of the engine).
Before I did my first cross country-solo, I went up with my instructor and we did about an hour with me using the hood -- attitude and flight control by instrument. Part of this invloved assuming various headings using VOR, but I didn;t know where the VORs were. The instructor made sure that we were somewhere we hadn't been before, then had me remove the hood, figure out where we were by dead reckoning, and take us home.
I was completely lost at first -- nothing but farms and roads. But look around, study your maps. Ah ha, there are hills to the west, a highway running N-S, and the highway crosses a small river just south of a town that has a water tower next to a radio tower. Bingo.
GPS is great, as are all the other navigational aids. But knowing what to do when they fail is important, and knowing where you are and how to get where you want to go with just a map and compass gives you the warm and fuzzies.
Now, where did I leave my sextant?
It's happened twice in the last few months -- private pilots accidentally venturing into restricted airspace. In both cases (that I know of) the pilots were intercepted by fighters and forced to land, then went through some rather unpleasant conversations with agents from three-letter agencies. Also, the White House and Congress were evacuated.
I can't remember exactly, but I think in one of the cases, maybe both, the pilot had his license revoked.
there are about 5 times per flight where I have no clue where I am
If this is true, you really need to pay more attention to your charts and dead reckoning, not to mention your VORs or even your directional beacon. You should always know where you are, and should always confirm your location with multiple means.
This was particularly important where I learned to fly, just outside of Washington. If you don't know where you are for even five or ten minutes, you may accidentally fly into the controlled airspace around the DC airports, or worse, into the restricted space over DC or Camp David.
Or more to the point, does it bother anyone that our tax dollars will be used to pay for people who do have insurance, because the insurance companies will run to the government to bail them out when that $20 billion bill comes due?
It's not helping the folks who have no insurance that bothers me. It's helping out comapnies whose business is selling risk, but who end up short on cash when their policies have to be paid out.
People who purchase Windows expect certain features in a modern OS, such as web browsing, video editing, photo manipulation, multimedia playback, etc.-- why is it wrong for Microsoft to include these features in an OS _they_ made and sold?
First off, MS is a convicted monopolist; Apple is not. This means that Apple has a whole lot more flexibility in what software they can bundle -- since Apple doesn't own 19 of 20 desktops, nobody can claim that shipping OS X with iMovie is blocking out competitors (particularly since pro-quality video editing suites sell rather well on the Mac platform).
It isn't illegal to be a monopoly per se. If everyone in the market decides your product is the best, then more power to you. What is most certainly illegal, however, is using a dominant position in one market (such as, oh say operating systems) to leverage a dominant position in other markets (like, oh say media players and web browsers). Laws on this matter are clear, and MS has had more than a fair trial in both the US and EU and was convicted each time. Unfortunately, the punishment in the US amounted to MS being sent to bed without supper for a night a few years ago.
See, Microsoft isn't bothered with creating a superior media player or browser. They'd rather just subvert existing standards to run only on their software (eg (among many) .asf, .wmv, dhtml, etc, etc). This isn't illegal because MS makes the OS and WMP, but because MS uses their OS dominance to ensure that everyone uses WMP instead of any other media app, and that providers create content that is compatible with (and only with) WMP. It didn't work with html, and it's not going to work with media, but that doesn't mean that they won't try.
Second, of the things you mention, only web browsing and media playback come bundled with MS Windows. There is no included video editing and no included photo manipulation -- at least nothing capable of doing anything serious.
Anyone buying MS Windows and expecting to be able to edit photos and home videos out of the box is going to be sorely dissapointed. The fact that these come standard with other operating systems only proves the point that people who "expect certain features in a modern OS" would be better off with a truly modern OS like OS X or GNU/Linux
Tools | Options | View | Windows in Taskbar.
That's not it. In older versions of Office, each spreadsheet was a separate instance, which was very handy if you use two monitors and have a whole lot of open documents spread across them.
I haven't used XP in a while and can't remember if it was the same, but in 2003, Excel likes to open all the spreadsheets inside the same parent widow, whether or not they're displayed as separate on the taskbar. It's complicated and frustrating to try and get multiple spreadsheets in multiple windows. And there is the pesky close-one-close-all problem the GP was talking about.
Maybe it makes more sense to someone to do it the way it does, but I have loads of stuff open at any given time -- several spreadsheets, a document or two, maybe a pdf reader and two or three browsers, each with multiple tabs. I like each of them to be seaprate so I can move them around and put each wherever, next to whatever. MS Office 2003 makes this difficult to do, but OO.org does it very well.
Joe Sixpack can rebuild a carburator with his eyes closed. It's little Joey Jr that will be customizing the radio.
You can try Knoppmyth, which is a Knoppix-based installer and bootable front end. Be aware, though, that MythTV requires some specific hardware, and if you try to run it with a lot of the stock MS MCE machines they're selling these days, you're going to run into problems.
To get a truly hassle-free setup, you need a Linux-compatible capture card with hardware encoding. These (the Hauppage PVR series are the best supported, particularly the PVR-250) do not come standard in cheap MCE machines. There are also issues with on-board video and with ATI cards. You'll need a good, supported graphics card like the nvidia gf or fx series, particularly if you plan on going out to a TV or to HD.
If everything is compatible and everything is plugged in just right, you can get Knoppmyth running within a couple hours.
In the long run, though, it's better if not to build it yourself than at least put the pieces together yourself. Many, many people have done this following Jarod Wilson's excellent guide for Fedora. If you do it this way, you have a much better idea how to fix things that go wrong (they will), and how to upgrade and extend functions when you want to (you will).
MythTV is not a simple thing to get running, and it is certainly not low maintenance. It is, though, the most powerful media engine on the planet at the moment, and is entirely open-source.
There is a business model for MythTV, with a subscription service available through LxM Suite -- they give you six months of TV listings data as well as other services for a $30 fee. The money, minus operating costs, goes in a pool to pay for bounties. Subscribers get a number of points to vote for what proposed features get funded -- i.e. paying somebody to do some of the more tedious coding, but the subscribers decide what code gets priority.
Running MythTV will take a lot more of your time than you might expect, particularly as you learn to use the CD and video archiving tools. But it is well worth the time. I've had my box running for over a year now, and can't imagine what I'd do without it.
But if DSL is just one technology. Already cable and DSL companies are locked in a heated battle over who will dominate residential broadband. Even if the local phone carrier and the local cable carrier are effectively monopolies, they're still in competition with each other, right?
Yes, and a long-distance bus company is in competition with an airline. But imagine if the Commerce Dept decided that Delta Airlines had the exclusive right to operate planes out of Atlanta. Other companies could negotiate deals with Delta on an individual basis, but there would be no base price that all companies would be subject to, and a single corportate entity would run both the physical infrastructure (airport) and the trasport operation (airline).
Now imagine that Commerce granted the same exclusive right to operate busses on on Interstate Highways to Greyhound. Sure, someone else could negotiate a deal with Greyhound and buy a bunch of busses, but again, this would be case-by-case, not by means of an open reference price.
Need to get out of Atlata? It's either Delta or Greyhound. Competition?
Of course, Commerce would base their decision on the idea that it really would be good for consumers by driving innovation(!). If I'm determined to run a transport company but am blocked by the incumbents from using either the airport or the highways, then for sure I'll have my hydrogen-powered hover taxis running in no time. Thank goodness for competition.
The analogy is a bit of a stretch, but Verizon had as much to do with the building of the POTS network as Grehound had to do with the construction of the interstate highway system.
This decision (and the earlier one regarding cable companies) gives the incumbents control over what goes into to the pipe, as well as the pipe itself. This works fine with a heavily regulated utility like water and sewage, since everyone wants basically the same service -- the taps work and the toilet flushes. But it doesn't work with data, where people's goals can be entirely different.
I don't subscribe to cable because I won't pay $50/month for the few channels that I want, all of which are supported with advertisements. Similarly, I don't want my DSL bill to subsidize the creation and operation of services that I'm not intrested in. As long as the lines are open, I can find a provider who will create a package based on my needs, not their own. For example, maybe I don't need a superfat pipe, but I do need a static IP. I'm not willing to pay extra so that Verizon has cash for FTTH.
While USF is a nice theory, in practice it is used as a method to defray costs for the incumbent telcos in serving desired markets. Can anyone provide several examples of rural CLECs or WISPs receiving USF dollars to support their efforts?
More to the point, can anyone offer examples of USF money going to the actual deplyoment of new lines? As fas as I can see, there's lots of new cell towers (with much higher margins) going up in rural America, but very little new wired infrastructure.
think of it as having the option of fixing a computer with a full history of what has been done to it or fixing a computer with no knowledge of who has used it or what has been installed on it.
Yes, but the fix is the same in both cases.
On a few occasions recently I've had to return computer gear to a well known retailer. On each of these, there was nothing tehnically wrong with the product in question, just that it either didn't run in Linux or wasn't the piece I was looking for.
Specifically, there was an 802.11 card that was the same model but different version (therefore different chipset -- Broadcom instead of Prism) than indicated on the box, a sound card that just wouldn't work (my fault for not researching), and a graphics card that had a fan even though the picture on the box showed a heatsink.
Anyway, all three times, they accepted my explanation and let me exchange for what I wanted, but they never actualy opened the boxes and looked at what I had returned, at least not while I was there.
On top of that, I paid cash each time, and declined to give them my name and address.
The third time, when I was returning the video card, I was actually tempted to swap it for an older card -- I was pretty sure they wouldn't look, and they had no way to trace me.
Of course the temptation only lasted a few seconds; I am not a thief, and the deed I was considering is really, really slimy. All the same, it doesn't surprise me at all that other people do this.
My wife works in retail, and has truely wonderful stories about customer returns. One of my favorites is the one about someone who returned a chiped coffee cup that the shop hadn't had in stock for at least 10 years, but it had the store's name written on the bottom. And they granted the refund.