Analog over-the-air television broadcasting is going away. The OP is confusing SDTV (Standard Definition digital TV) with Analog. SDTV is still digital - it's just at the same resolution as analog NTSC - 480 visible scan lines (525 including non-visible vertical blanking interval).
SDTV is not going away: stand-alone SDTV tuners will allow you to receive digital TV and convert it to analog for display on your old TV, or for recording on you even older VCR.
It's lights-out for analog TV over-the-air broadcasting in 2009. Analog via cable is another matter. As long as the cable companies can squeeze dollars from that turnip, it will continue.
I have a hard time with the MPAA's and the RIAA's use of the term stealing. If I steal something from you, I deprive you of its use. When someone "pirates" something of yours, they deprive you of some potential revenue - quite a different scenario than "stealing".
And when someone tries to equate 11% of 1400 theater releases being filmed by camcorder-wielding pirates to an 11% shrink rate, well that's called FUD . Now, if the box-office receipts of 179 theaters were stolen by thieves - that I'd call an 11% shrink rate!!!
But then again, switching a single word of yours: I seriously doubt you'd find a business of any decent size that would convert to Windows Vista en mass is probably true as well.
Togas? Hell, you don't even have to take a toga off to strangle a flight attendant with it. Now, skin-tight latex pants for all the young females, and you might have something there!
Free beer is a fallacy loosed on the world by RMS. Beer is really only rented. Everyone knows you always have to give it back. Even if you are not charged for it you have to either return it, or leave it for someone else to worry about.
I can hardly attribute the recent merger and conglomeration of AT&T as a bad thing. I see it like this: 60 years ago as our country was coming out of a war that pushed technology to advance at the rate it is currently moving at today, AT&T stepped up with Bell Labs to convert that push into a very large, very succesful invention push that brought this country far ahead of our overseas brethren in terms of accomplishment and overall technological capability. If not for AT&T and its Bell Labs, we would not have the transistor, C (programming), UNIX... in reality, AT&T is the creator of the modern programmable computer. TDMA and CDMA, Fiber Optics, LEDs, CCDs.
Basically you're right there - except that I'd say (1) the merger, while not a bad thing in and of itself, will lead to bad things. Large monopolies just can't help themselves. Hell, look at Microsoft. And (2) AT&T's inventions were the enabler of the modern programmable computer. Bell System management, while right to give Bell Labs free reign to dive into basic research (with the help of the federal government), just didn't have the vision to market many of their inventions. Jack Morton, head of Bell Labs in the 50's/60's, just didn't think integrated circuits were worth pursuing. Discrete components were more reliable and he thought ICs never would be.
CDMA? Heck, Hollywood had almost as much to do with that as AT&T did. Heidi Lamarr and George Antheil invented spread spectrum communications (the enabler for CDMA) back in 1942. Qualcomm and Interdigital did more to make it a reality in the commercial world than AT&T ever did.
Bell Labs is pretty much the forefront of the technological community.
I assume you meant was.
The antitrust suit, although directed in a manner to allow AT&T to step into the computer arena and step slightly out of the phone arena, made bell labs cripple. In the past 10 years, the US has fallen behind in telecommunications.
Yes. The 1956 Consent Decree kept AT&T out of the computer business. Judge Harold Greene's Modified Final Judgment leading to Divestiture on 1 January 1984 gave them the green light. That little deal was precipitated by Bill McGowan and the original MCI. And it enabled AT&T to try its hand in the computer area. Remember that little debacle called NCR?
AT&T's antitrust suit was primarily due to their advancement into the computer industry. After the suit, their worth dropped SIGNIFICANTLY. The baby bells were nearly worthless, with the exception of SBC and BellSouth. The only others, were in too small of areas to really compete. Although there are a few others, the AT&T breakup is probably the biggest disagreement I have with some of the antitrust decisions of the last 100 years.
You're contradicting yourself. The original consent decree (see my remarks above) got them out of the computer biz. The 1982 consent decree let them back in. And the Baby Bells worthless? By the time of the Telecom Boom of the 90's, the aggregate worth of the former RBOCs was much greater than AT&T. Throw Lucent back in the mix and you're getting closer. But then again, Carly Fiorina and her buddys literally killed that company with their inept management. Worrying about their options and quarterly bonuses, they conveniently forgot what the telecom industry was. For them, Lucent was a vehicle to stock manipulation, er, appreciation. And don't get me started on what Compaq and she did to H-P...
AT&T had the "lucrative long distance market". The Baby Bells were "stuck with billions of worthless outside plant". That was 1984 thinking. We all saw how wrong that was. By 1997, the cost of all the back-end accounting to actually meter a voice call was EQUAL to the cost of the electronics and outside plant to actually place that
Why do you think Russia's such a hot destination for Evangelical Christian missionary programs? With all those years of Stalinism keeping religion under its heel, it's ripe for the picking. And naturally, ID and Creationism follows fundamental evangelical Christian teachings around the globe.
Want to bet on the chances that when the onion is peeled back, Focus On The Family or some other famous US-based evangelical organization is behind the suit? "Send us your dollars so we can do God's work in Russia and force their schools to teach Creationism rather than the Devil's work, Evolution!"
"Micro evolution" (if you want to use that term) involves the spread of a trait throughout a population.
Be careful when you say that - creationists will take that to mean you're implying that genetic traits spread through an existing population as a virus or other contagion does, infecting others in the population rather than being passed down to their progeny and the population in general over time.
That's why your entire network infrastructure should run on Zulu time (UTC). All hardware clocks - especially if your network spans multiple time zones. Let the OS for each handle time zones if you want to, but Zulu simplifies everything.
And no, I won't comment on how "nice" Windows XP time works for a non-admin user!
Most of the Notices for Proposed Rulemaking and various license submission forms and other public documents at the FCC's website are in WordPerfect format, though they're changing to PDF. Goes to show that even back in the day, people released finished publications in editing formats rather than final display formats.
But it's in there because Caldera (a.k.a. The SCO Group) put it there. Caldera employees were contributors to the kernel. Plus, Caldera was a founding member of Linux International. And Caldera even stated in their SEC filings that they wanted to make Linux every bit as enterprise ready as Unix. SMP support, RCU - put there by Caldera/SCOG.
The last few years in court have basically been nothing but trying to convince everyone they're not Caldera - they're the Santa Cruz Operation. Of course, SCO changed their name to Tarantella after selling their money-losing Unix operations to Caldera, and have since been acquired by Sun...
Oracle was available on RH only, it didn't sideline any FOSS database project at all, Oracle even had to buy some afterwards !! It didn't kill culture of openness and freedom either. That's complete wishful thinking on your part, that goes contrary to factual evidence.
Get your history straight. Oracle was available long before Red Hat was around. Hell, it was available long before Linux was around. Hell, I attended an Oracle workshop back in 1986 when the company I was with was implementing Oracle on a VAX-11/785. It originally ran on a PDP-11 under RSX. The only *nix on an Intel-based PC was Xenix on an AT
You can somewhat redeem yourself if you identify who produced the VAX and PDP, and the founder of the company.
BTW if you release under the GPL then no commercial organization can use your code. To avoid it being used as a cudgel, you have to also prevent it from being used for legitimate commercial purposes. That is the moral problem with the GPL. It is a paranoid license which assumes all companies are as bad as a few large ones. It would be better to simply not license the code to those specific organizations than to prevent smaller companies from making a proper product from your base code.
I really, really want to hear you defend - logically - what you just said. You know why? Because you can't. At least, you can't without (a) sounding like an idiot because you don't know what you're talking about, or (b) lying, because what you wrote is a flat out lie and you can only defend it by lying further.
Which will it be?
For example, tens of thousands of businesses use Samba internally (Novell, employer of Jeremy Allison, for one). And some contribute back to the project. IBM is another. Red Hat is doing pretty well also. Look at all the internet appliances out there that use Linux and a host of other GPL packages (Cisco-Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear, etc.). They seem to be doing just fine - making money selling products for a profit.
Don't you guys know anything about SMTP e-mail headers?
The purpose of inspecting the plaintiff's hard drive is to recover evidence that the e-mails were not sent by the defendant, right? And the plaintiff states the spam was sent to his webmail account, right?
There's no way that his browser cache would contain enough verifiable evidence to determine the true origin of the spam. What his browser downloads is an HTML representation of the original e-mail text, and a snippet of info from the mail headers. You won't be able to see all the mail headers in the file. The only way would be to download the e-mails from Yahoo and Hotmail via POP3, or IMAP, or possibly using HTTP if supported, to an authentic e-mail client on the plaintiff's PC - like Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, Eudora, etc... Are you still with me?
The only thing the defendant can hope to show is that the plaintiff lied to the court about downloading copies of the actual e-mails including the headers...
Somebody needs to use a clue stick on the judge. Why would somebody go to the trouble of faking e-mail headers to "extort" a measly $500 from an alleged spammer? Well, SCO maybe - but at least they publicly said they'd get 5 billion dollars, not 5 hundred...
NAT actually breaks security. How can you truly know that the IPSec-capable host you're talking to behind that NAT router is the host you think it is? Authentication and non-repudiation are also part and parcel of security. It's a two-way street - both parties have to be confident they're talking to the right entity...
The DoD has lot's of money invested in Red Hat Linux - it's much more popular in the DoD than SuSE is. Perhaps since both have EAL-4 certifications in the works or on tap, we'll see a balance between the two, but for now, RH has the edge...
"Right now, somewhere in Redmond, a Microsoft programmer is infringing on IBM patents."
Remember - there's a big difference between patents and copyright. With copyright, the copyright holder can sue a distributor for infringing on his copyrights. IBM -> Microsoft. But in patent law, the patent holder can go after anyone who USES a patent-infringing product. IBM -> Microsoft's customers.
Of course, IBM and MS have cross-licensed parts of their patent portfolios. But even so, IBM could threaten some of Microsoft's largest customers (who probably also happen to be IBM customers).
I think all this talk about the patent wars beginning is at this point premature. Right now it's just a little test exchange of conventional weapons across the DMZ. Detente' may be a bit frazzled around the edges, but MAD has yet to begin. In the meantime, the tech world just got a whole lot more interesting.
Actually, I'd bet that Ubuntu has a higher desktop share than Vista does, as Vista hasn't been released yet:-)
I think you mean "when the desktop title passes from XP to Vista", which probably won't happen until 2009 or later. XP will be the desktop champ for some time...
If you would have said a GPL challenge hasn't yet reached a US court, then I think you would be correct. However, a court in Germany has upheld the GPL.
The only reason a GPL challenge hasn't reached a US court yet is because in every case so far, the violator has ended up settling. And, no - despite what you've heard, the SCO vs IBM case is not about the GPL. Darl McBride's letter to the US Congress about how the GPL was unconstitutional was greeted with a big fat "so what?"
Force - by law - the database itself to accessible to independent verification software. Better yet - force, by law, again - for the vote accumulation software - the front end that the voters use, to be separate from the vote tabulation software - i.e. separate suppliers. And force it down to the precinct level. Diebold records the votes, ESS or heck, IBM even, tabulates the data. In the next precinct, vice versa. Then have multiple independent verifiers check the accuracy by tabulating the raw data on a county by county and state by state basis.
And for even better security, have the voter front-end system, the tabulator, and the verifier all publish SHA-1 or MD5 checksums to verify the database wasn't tampered with.
Umm, not according to this CNN story on the NORC Florida recount study. And remember that CNN is not exactly a bastion of Republican thinking.
The article opens with:
A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
Further in is what you're looking for:
According to the study, 5,277 voters made a clean punch for Gore and a clean punch for Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan, candidates whose political philosophies are poles apart. An additional 1,650 voters made clean punches for Bush and Buchanan. If many of the Buchanan votes were in error brought on by a badly designed ballot, a CNN analysis found that Gore could have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.
But it goes on to say that all those 5,277 votes were deemed invalid by any interpretation of existing Florida state law. It seems your statement "That recount used six possible criteria for spoiled ballots and found that Al Gore won the state under all six scenarios" is false. Now, I didn't read the article in its entirety. Care to point out what I'm missing?
Now, I still believe that enough of a majority of Americans wanted to vote for Kerry (or against Bush, like I did). But in many, many local precincts many voters were deemed ineligible or "discouraged" from voting. One common law I have a problem with: denying those with previous felony convictions the right to vote. I'd dead-set against giving convicts in jail the right to vote - but when they get out and have "paid their debt to society", then their right to vote should be restored. Unless, of course, the reason they went to jail in the first place was for election fraud...
Abraham Lincoln was born Feb. 12, 1809 in Kentucky. Which, by the way, was not one of the original 13 colonies. It was the second state/territory to join the union in 1792.
Other than that - your post is dead-on. Not only are the founding fathers collectively rolling in their graves right now; they are weeping over the fact that their creation - arguably the greatest country the world has ever seen - is now enjoying an inevitable slide into mediocrity. I honestly don't know how it can be reversed. No one with any capability would ever take the job. Can we find our own Zaphod Beeblebrox? Of course, one could argue he's already holding the job...
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Wasn't that a Shatner quote from TOG? :-)
Analog over-the-air television broadcasting is going away. The OP is confusing SDTV (Standard Definition digital TV) with Analog. SDTV is still digital - it's just at the same resolution as analog NTSC - 480 visible scan lines (525 including non-visible vertical blanking interval).
SDTV is not going away: stand-alone SDTV tuners will allow you to receive digital TV and convert it to analog for display on your old TV, or for recording on you even older VCR.
It's lights-out for analog TV over-the-air broadcasting in 2009. Analog via cable is another matter. As long as the cable companies can squeeze dollars from that turnip, it will continue.
And when someone tries to equate 11% of 1400 theater releases being filmed by camcorder-wielding pirates to an 11% shrink rate, well that's called FUD . Now, if the box-office receipts of 179 theaters were stolen by thieves - that I'd call an 11% shrink rate!!!
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=8 254
But then again, switching a single word of yours: I seriously doubt you'd find a business of any decent size that would convert to Windows Vista en mass is probably true as well.
Togas? Hell, you don't even have to take a toga off to strangle a flight attendant with it. Now, skin-tight latex pants for all the young females, and you might have something there!
}:->
Basically you're right there - except that I'd say (1) the merger, while not a bad thing in and of itself, will lead to bad things. Large monopolies just can't help themselves. Hell, look at Microsoft. And (2) AT&T's inventions were the enabler of the modern programmable computer. Bell System management, while right to give Bell Labs free reign to dive into basic research (with the help of the federal government), just didn't have the vision to market many of their inventions. Jack Morton, head of Bell Labs in the 50's/60's, just didn't think integrated circuits were worth pursuing. Discrete components were more reliable and he thought ICs never would be.
CDMA? Heck, Hollywood had almost as much to do with that as AT&T did. Heidi Lamarr and George Antheil invented spread spectrum communications (the enabler for CDMA) back in 1942. Qualcomm and Interdigital did more to make it a reality in the commercial world than AT&T ever did.
I assume you meant was.
Yes. The 1956 Consent Decree kept AT&T out of the computer business. Judge Harold Greene's Modified Final Judgment leading to Divestiture on 1 January 1984 gave them the green light. That little deal was precipitated by Bill McGowan and the original MCI. And it enabled AT&T to try its hand in the computer area. Remember that little debacle called NCR?
You're contradicting yourself. The original consent decree (see my remarks above) got them out of the computer biz. The 1982 consent decree let them back in. And the Baby Bells worthless? By the time of the Telecom Boom of the 90's, the aggregate worth of the former RBOCs was much greater than AT&T. Throw Lucent back in the mix and you're getting closer. But then again, Carly Fiorina and her buddys literally killed that company with their inept management. Worrying about their options and quarterly bonuses, they conveniently forgot what the telecom industry was. For them, Lucent was a vehicle to stock manipulation, er, appreciation. And don't get me started on what Compaq and she did to H-P...
AT&T had the "lucrative long distance market". The Baby Bells were "stuck with billions of worthless outside plant". That was 1984 thinking. We all saw how wrong that was. By 1997, the cost of all the back-end accounting to actually meter a voice call was EQUAL to the cost of the electronics and outside plant to actually place that
Want to bet on the chances that when the onion is peeled back, Focus On The Family or some other famous US-based evangelical organization is behind the suit? "Send us your dollars so we can do God's work in Russia and force their schools to teach Creationism rather than the Devil's work, Evolution!"
And no, I won't comment on how "nice" Windows XP time works for a non-admin user!
Most of the Notices for Proposed Rulemaking and various license submission forms and other public documents at the FCC's website are in WordPerfect format, though they're changing to PDF. Goes to show that even back in the day, people released finished publications in editing formats rather than final display formats.
The last few years in court have basically been nothing but trying to convince everyone they're not Caldera - they're the Santa Cruz Operation. Of course, SCO changed their name to Tarantella after selling their money-losing Unix operations to Caldera, and have since been acquired by Sun...
Those PC's were my wife's Dell laptop, my Grandmother-in-laws HP, my moms laptop, and my custom built PC.
Um, what about the server platforms? ;-)
Get your history straight. Oracle was available long before Red Hat was around. Hell, it was available long before Linux was around. Hell, I attended an Oracle workshop back in 1986 when the company I was with was implementing Oracle on a VAX-11/785. It originally ran on a PDP-11 under RSX. The only *nix on an Intel-based PC was Xenix on an AT
You can somewhat redeem yourself if you identify who produced the VAX and PDP, and the founder of the company.
I really, really want to hear you defend - logically - what you just said. You know why? Because you can't. At least, you can't without (a) sounding like an idiot because you don't know what you're talking about, or (b) lying, because what you wrote is a flat out lie and you can only defend it by lying further.
Which will it be?
For example, tens of thousands of businesses use Samba internally (Novell, employer of Jeremy Allison, for one). And some contribute back to the project. IBM is another. Red Hat is doing pretty well also. Look at all the internet appliances out there that use Linux and a host of other GPL packages (Cisco-Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear, etc.). They seem to be doing just fine - making money selling products for a profit.
I call your FUD and raise it with Facts.
Don't you guys know anything about SMTP e-mail headers?
The purpose of inspecting the plaintiff's hard drive is to recover evidence that the e-mails were not sent by the defendant, right? And the plaintiff states the spam was sent to his webmail account, right?
There's no way that his browser cache would contain enough verifiable evidence to determine the true origin of the spam. What his browser downloads is an HTML representation of the original e-mail text, and a snippet of info from the mail headers. You won't be able to see all the mail headers in the file. The only way would be to download the e-mails from Yahoo and Hotmail via POP3, or IMAP, or possibly using HTTP if supported, to an authentic e-mail client on the plaintiff's PC - like Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, Eudora, etc... Are you still with me?
The only thing the defendant can hope to show is that the plaintiff lied to the court about downloading copies of the actual e-mails including the headers...
Somebody needs to use a clue stick on the judge. Why would somebody go to the trouble of faking e-mail headers to "extort" a measly $500 from an alleged spammer? Well, SCO maybe - but at least they publicly said they'd get 5 billion dollars, not 5 hundred...
NAT actually breaks security. How can you truly know that the IPSec-capable host you're talking to behind that NAT router is the host you think it is? Authentication and non-repudiation are also part and parcel of security. It's a two-way street - both parties have to be confident they're talking to the right entity...
And tell all your dead friends and relatives, also!
The DoD has lot's of money invested in Red Hat Linux - it's much more popular in the DoD than SuSE is. Perhaps since both have EAL-4 certifications in the works or on tap, we'll see a balance between the two, but for now, RH has the edge...
Remember - there's a big difference between patents and copyright. With copyright, the copyright holder can sue a distributor for infringing on his copyrights. IBM -> Microsoft. But in patent law, the patent holder can go after anyone who USES a patent-infringing product. IBM -> Microsoft's customers.
Of course, IBM and MS have cross-licensed parts of their patent portfolios. But even so, IBM could threaten some of Microsoft's largest customers (who probably also happen to be IBM customers).
I think all this talk about the patent wars beginning is at this point premature. Right now it's just a little test exchange of conventional weapons across the DMZ. Detente' may be a bit frazzled around the edges, but MAD has yet to begin. In the meantime, the tech world just got a whole lot more interesting.
Actually, I'd bet that Ubuntu has a higher desktop share than Vista does, as Vista hasn't been released yet :-)
I think you mean "when the desktop title passes from XP to Vista", which probably won't happen until 2009 or later. XP will be the desktop champ for some time...
The only reason a GPL challenge hasn't reached a US court yet is because in every case so far, the violator has ended up settling. And, no - despite what you've heard, the SCO vs IBM case is not about the GPL. Darl McBride's letter to the US Congress about how the GPL was unconstitutional was greeted with a big fat "so what?"
Force - by law - the database itself to accessible to independent verification software. Better yet - force, by law, again - for the vote accumulation software - the front end that the voters use, to be separate from the vote tabulation software - i.e. separate suppliers. And force it down to the precinct level. Diebold records the votes, ESS or heck, IBM even, tabulates the data. In the next precinct, vice versa. Then have multiple independent verifiers check the accuracy by tabulating the raw data on a county by county and state by state basis.
And for even better security, have the voter front-end system, the tabulator, and the verifier all publish SHA-1 or MD5 checksums to verify the database wasn't tampered with.
The article opens with:
Further in is what you're looking for:
But it goes on to say that all those 5,277 votes were deemed invalid by any interpretation of existing Florida state law. It seems your statement "That recount used six possible criteria for spoiled ballots and found that Al Gore won the state under all six scenarios" is false. Now, I didn't read the article in its entirety. Care to point out what I'm missing?
Now, I still believe that enough of a majority of Americans wanted to vote for Kerry (or against Bush, like I did). But in many, many local precincts many voters were deemed ineligible or "discouraged" from voting. One common law I have a problem with: denying those with previous felony convictions the right to vote. I'd dead-set against giving convicts in jail the right to vote - but when they get out and have "paid their debt to society", then their right to vote should be restored. Unless, of course, the reason they went to jail in the first place was for election fraud...
Other than that - your post is dead-on. Not only are the founding fathers collectively rolling in their graves right now; they are weeping over the fact that their creation - arguably the greatest country the world has ever seen - is now enjoying an inevitable slide into mediocrity. I honestly don't know how it can be reversed. No one with any capability would ever take the job. Can we find our own Zaphod Beeblebrox? Of course, one could argue he's already holding the job...