For one thing, instead of 20 Million, they have only 1/4 million spent on product development so far. That cuts out a lot of expense. Now if they can avoid the temptaion to have a big blow-out party at the Hard Rock Cafe in the by-ward market.
AFAIK, the nice folks at
Noranda
have a big plant in Quebec that grinds this stuff up, Burns off the plastic, and runs the metal though a copper smelter to get out the metal content. The plant is suposed to have suficent scrubbers to make chemical feedstocks out of the plastic smoke.
One day, my trusty case power supply just gave up on me. "Oh well," I thought, "Must have blown a fuse." (I was pulling some serious power through the poor thing.) So with gleeful abandon I grabbed the nearest sharp, pointy tool and began to remove screws. I carefully grounded and
opened up the power supply to change the fuse- Lo And Behold, the stupid thing was soldered in place!
In adition to the lower cost as another poster mentioned, soldered parts are often required in order to obtain the required
UL or
CSA approval. If the part is in a socket, someone could stick the wrong one in, if you have to solder it in, you have a better chance of being a real tech who knows not to over-fuse.
Some items have expensive tranformers with a fusable link hidden in the winding for the same reason. You can't jumper the fuse, but must replace the part (or more likey the entire unit) but you won't be setting yourself up for a fire!
E-Bay is perhaps the example of the changes that the web is making in society. E-bay enables individuals to trade items with other individuals.
I can buy items that fit my hobby, Alan Cox can get the weird hardware he needs to debug Linux problems, This guy can find Quilts, someone else can find a dashboard for a 57 Pontiac. This is either a new form of capitalism, or the end of Capitalism as it has previously been practiced.
Look up the Bagel Effect Power is slowly moving to the edges of the system away from the centre. Folks like the RIAA, and the MPAA are fighting the web precisly because their business plan is based on their living in the center and colecting rents. No center, no business.
E-bay is at the center - but is very careful to only provide the minimal anount of glue that is needed to hold the system together. (Other services like payments are options) Once I find an item and bid on it - if I win, I deal with the seller, and e-bay is no longer involved. (although I am encouraged to contribute to the trust ranking of the seller).
The web has changed everything, but it is such a subtle change that it is hard to pinpoint.
I live just a bit north of the "you nice states" and have had occasions when someone has sent me somthing via UPS. After a 50 mile round trip to the depot to pick the item up, I find that I have been charged 40 bucks for "brokerage" to file the GST. (40 bucks to pay for 2 dollars taxes)
The post office charges 5 for the same "service" and has an arrangement where the package is available for pickup at the drug store in my neighbourhood shopping centre.
It seems the USPS has a bad repuation in the USA, while my experience over the last 30 years has been uniformly good, with only about one package going missing in that time. Most packages even arive with the corners of the boxes still square.
Every package I have ever received via UPS, including domestic shipments has arrived looking as if it traveled via afganistan.
Of course, since marconi claimed to have used a base in Newfoundland, and Fessenden was a Canadian, I guess we can just say that the Canadians did it again.
Was the old HP Computer games books that used HP 3000 basic. (of course the basic many of them were using was a copy of a DEC basic from a outfit started by a young Ivy league dropout.
Actually, The french Sytem, "Sequential avec memory.." sends each color separatly, and then the TV set puts them together again..It is used in france and some Eastern European Jurisdictions (for political rather than technical reasons)
The rest of Europe uses PAL, Phase alternation line, which is an upgrade of the system used in North America and Japan, Called NTSC (National Televison Systems Committee). NTSC and PAL hide the colour information on a subcarier, and use the finest compresion that was avalible in the 1950s to only send the minimum amount of color information. PAL adds a method to correct for Phase shifts in transmission.
NTSC came out in 1954 replacing the earlier CBS system, CBS recalled the few sets thay had sold. The CBS system was not compatible with existing Black and White Sets.
The NTSC signal combines the three colour chanels into one Black and White signal, and computes the color signals as a differnce signal (much the same way as FM stereo works)
As I recall, there were a few single tube colour cameras, which used a grating in front of the Vidicon to create a color signal which could be prosessed into a a NTSC signal. Broadcast cameras tended to use three pickup tubes, at first Orthocons, and later Plumbicons. It took quite a while for CCD sensors to reach the point where they could surplant camera tubes.
CCD sensors can be made with individual filters on each cell.
The CBS colour TV system used a color wheel, to present sequental views through three filters. The principle is still used in France and Russia, (electronicaly) with a system called SECAM
The very early Technicolor® process only used two colors, at the time it was hard to get pancromatic film. They shot two strips of film, though color filters and combined them for presentaion.
RED BLUE and GREEN, and cyan, yellow and magenta. are the complements of each other. Cyan looks like "Sky Blue" and magenta looks like a "redish purple"
Cyan is the "opposite" of RED.
Yellow is the "opposite" of BLUE
Magenta is the "opposite" of GREEN
Adding them up you will find that red and green will look Yellow, for example.
Would I love to see the logos go poof? Sure. Do I think they will? No way. Not unless you want to
pay for the right to have a TV (ala the UK) or pay for every channel you receive.
But these logos mostly apper in the digital channels, I _DO_ pay to see them. Some are 5 cents a month!
1)Photographers taking time out to edit when they should be studing the event.
2)Photos not being saved because of digital storage limitations or transmission limitations.
3) Longevity of the media
4) Accesibility of the media.
On 1, a news photographer burns through a large quanity of film, Press film comes in boxes of 50 rolls of 36, and a good phtographer can re-load in under 10 seconds. With film, the photographer is always on the alert for the next shot, and probaly has 10 rolls in his/her pocket.(300 shots avalable) With digital, the camera has a limited capacity, and even with memory cards, it is hard to be sure that one can find the shots later (see 4) this may result in a photographer taking time out to delete some shots that they consider duff, even though those shots might prove interesting in the morning. (Think someone arriving at an event, who gets arrested the next day) The photgrapher may miss a shot becasue of this distraction.
2) Transmission. On Film, you Fed-ex your shoot to the lab, with digital you send the shots via INAMRSAT. Only the top 10 get sent because of transmission cost, it is likely that the rest may never get sent even by Mail. Again, the culled images would have got a free ride into storage if they were invisible traces on a roll of film.
3) Storage. Even C-41 film, stuffed into a file drawer, is likely to be useable at least in Black and white in 50 years. With a little care, and some digital correction, one can expect to recover technicaly good images if the frame has something of interest. On film, a photographer will have set-up shots to remind the editor of the venue. Shots of folks arriving, every speaker when the come on stage. every surprise. Some of these may be of no interest, but as they are all on the same strips of film, they will be on the same proof sheet, and the researcher in 5 years will be able to locate them. Since the film is 36 shots at the time, it is even posible to say that frame 24 was shot before frame 30, should that later prove important. The folder they are in will have any handwritten notes along, perhaps including the printed programm for the event. (with notes that tie specific rolls to specific parts of the event.)
A digital storage media may lose this meta info, and if a decison is needed to allow an image to be kept, only the key shots will be there. The rest which may be of interest historicaly- even if they are terible photos are likely to not be stored. AND lets not get into the issues of the cost of migration to new media needed to keep the information accessible. (Film from the 1950's is exactly the same format as current film) try that 50 years from now.
4) Accessibility here is where I greatly disagree with a previous poster. A photo editor who grabs a proof sheet can study 36 phots at a glance, and quickly zero in on ones of interest. they can select 2 or 3 for a better look by the time they would wait for one image to render on a computer screen.
In places where this has worked, the municipality has often had public hydro utility, or GAS supply utility.
In both cases, they have a place where they can string fibre. Electrrical utilities were early users of fibre as it is immune from the noise problems that can be expected with low-votage signaling in a tunnel beside a high-voltage power line. The gas folks can also run fibre INSIDE the gas pipes, as their is no sparking hazard.
A utility is already sending bills, so billing is an incremental cost rather than a major project.
The cost of installing broadband is mostly in the cost of initial install of the infrastucture.
Actually, If you read ye olde tubbe manual, they say that those tubes (like the 6DQ6) were intended for a 15% duty cycle....
The Output puts out a pulse, and that sweeps the beam part way across, then as the field in the yoke decays, the Damper (say a 6AX4) starts conducting to finish the sweep. The yoke is connected with a Horizontal output transformer (the flyback) and that also provides the high voltage needed for the (anode) of the picture tube.
Solid state versions tend more towards square wave drive but it is still the inductors that do the work.
The *LU8 was a vertical sweep tube as I recall.
One of the real problems with colour CRTs is that the three beams have to come through a shadow mask, or simalar so that they reach only the correct phosphor, (red on red, blue on blue, green on green) so high deflection angles are more difficult to acheive. Many computer tubes are still at 90 degrees for example. The very thin (114 degree) Black and white tubes were very hard to set up for an undistorted picture, not really a problem for TV but harder to deal with for computer use. (The Philco Predicta is an example of a very high deflection angle TV set)
I looked at Sarnoff.com and they have no details on this new technology.
Actually, the reply envelopes are charged for when recived back. Thats why they can distribute them with abandon. As others have pointed out the curent rules seem to require that whatever is sent is enclosed in the envelope.
Sending hazardous substances is not allowed, and can get you in trouble if caught. The sand, or glue tricks might work, or very well might not, as such an envelope would be lopsided enough to get out of the stack in the opening machine. (a totaly empty envelope may just be chewed to bits by the same machine. Very few places that expect a lot of mail will open envelopes manualy.)
You will also find that by returning your address label, you run a good chance of having an order placed in your name.
My opinion is that just like e-spam, you are unlikely to persuade a dedicated mass maller to give up the practice. You may be able get off their list, but even that is not likely, as the lists are rented out at so much per thousand names.. And so taking you off the list is a loss of revenue for the agency that rents out the lists.
Netscape was HATED by the online community in the mid-90's
Exactly! because the product of that day was not interoperable.
Now we have another company, which happens to have a lot of weight to throw around, trying the same old tired trick.
Netscape eventualy got a clue, and the newer version is attempting to be 100% standards based. Meanwhile other folks are tring to create the MS internet.NET
In many commercial settings, Netscape is the standard, and so other browsers are not allowed. Persumably in a lot of other places, other products like Opera may be prefered. I suspect hat most folks reading websites don't have a choice, or perhaps dont even know that there is a choice.
Now as for what to do, well I include a link to Any Browser on any web site I have control over. and I write a to the odd webmaster who is clueless.
I will say my reading of this particular case is that the webmaster who went to all the trouble in this case, is probaly not clueless, but may be trying to bring attention to his or her self.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, instead of 20 Million, they have only 1/4 million spent on product development so far. That cuts out a lot of expense.
Now if they can avoid the temptaion to have a big blow-out party at the Hard Rock Cafe in the by-ward market.
AFAIK, the nice folks at Noranda have a big plant in Quebec that grinds this stuff up, Burns off the plastic, and runs the metal though a copper smelter to get out the metal content. The plant is suposed to have suficent scrubbers to make chemical feedstocks out of the plastic smoke.
.....for this.
If all you can get is temporary DVD's - e-bay is forced out of the DVD business
One day, my trusty case power supply just gave up on me. "Oh well," I thought, "Must have blown a fuse." (I was pulling some serious power through the poor thing.) So with gleeful abandon I grabbed the nearest sharp, pointy tool and began to remove screws. I carefully grounded and opened up the power supply to change the fuse- Lo And Behold, the stupid thing was soldered in place!
In adition to the lower cost as another poster mentioned, soldered parts are often required in order to obtain the required UL or CSA approval. If the part is in a socket, someone could stick the wrong one in, if you have to solder it in, you have a better chance of being a real tech who knows not to over-fuse.
Some items have expensive tranformers with a fusable link hidden in the winding for the same reason. You can't jumper the fuse, but must replace the part (or more likey the entire unit) but you won't be setting yourself up for a fire!
Funny, Archive.org seems to manage.
E-Bay is perhaps the example of the changes that the web is making in society. E-bay enables individuals to trade items with other individuals.
I can buy items that fit my hobby, Alan Cox can get the weird hardware he needs to debug Linux problems, This guy can find Quilts, someone else can find a dashboard for a 57 Pontiac. This is either a new form of capitalism, or the end of Capitalism as it has previously been practiced. Look up the Bagel Effect Power is slowly moving to the edges of the system away from the centre. Folks like the RIAA, and the MPAA are fighting the web precisly because their business plan is based on their living in the center and colecting rents. No center, no business.
E-bay is at the center - but is very careful to only provide the minimal anount of glue that is needed to hold the system together. (Other services like payments are options) Once I find an item and bid on it - if I win, I deal with the seller, and e-bay is no longer involved. (although I am encouraged to contribute to the trust ranking of the seller).
The web has changed everything, but it is such a subtle change that it is hard to pinpoint.
Has got to be the UPS centric shipping plan.
I live just a bit north of the "you nice states" and have had occasions when someone has sent me somthing via UPS. After a 50 mile round trip to the depot to pick the item up, I find that I have been charged 40 bucks for "brokerage" to file the GST. (40 bucks to pay for 2 dollars taxes)
The post office charges 5 for the same "service" and has an arrangement where the package is available for pickup at the drug store in my neighbourhood shopping centre.
It seems the USPS has a bad repuation in the USA, while my experience over the last 30 years has been uniformly good, with only about one package going missing in that time. Most packages even arive with the corners of the boxes still square.
Every package I have ever received via UPS, including domestic shipments has arrived looking as if it traveled via afganistan.
Several folks will claim the title, but consider the claim of "The Father of Radio Broadcasting", Reginald Fessenden.
see for example: this link
Of course, since marconi claimed to have used a base in Newfoundland, and Fessenden was a Canadian, I guess we can just say that the Canadians did it again.
Was the old HP Computer games books that used HP 3000 basic. (of course the basic many of them were using was a copy of a DEC basic from a outfit started by a young Ivy league dropout.
Where their are so many cuts to the movie that the viewer does not have a clue what is going on..
I wonder how the Directors Guild will react?
Actually, The french Sytem, "Sequential avec memory.." sends each color separatly, and then the TV set puts them together again..It is used in france and some Eastern European Jurisdictions (for political rather than technical reasons)
The rest of Europe uses PAL, Phase alternation line, which is an upgrade of the system used in North America and Japan, Called NTSC (National Televison Systems Committee). NTSC and PAL hide the colour information on a subcarier, and use the finest compresion that was avalible in the 1950s to only send the minimum amount of color information. PAL adds a method to correct for Phase shifts in transmission.
NTSC came out in 1954 replacing the earlier CBS system, CBS recalled the few sets thay had sold. The CBS system was not compatible with existing Black and White Sets.
The NTSC signal combines the three colour chanels into one Black and White signal, and computes the color signals as a differnce signal (much the same way as FM stereo works)
As I recall, there were a few single tube colour cameras, which used a grating in front of the Vidicon to create a color signal which could be prosessed into a a NTSC signal. Broadcast cameras tended to use three pickup tubes, at first Orthocons, and later Plumbicons. It took quite a while for CCD sensors to reach the point where they could surplant camera tubes.
CCD sensors can be made with individual filters on each cell.
The CBS colour TV system used a color wheel, to present sequental views through three filters. The principle is still used in France and Russia, (electronicaly) with a system called SECAM
The very early Technicolor® process only used two colors, at the time it was hard to get pancromatic film. They shot two strips of film, though color filters and combined them for presentaion.
RED BLUE and GREEN, and cyan, yellow and magenta. are the complements of each other. Cyan looks like "Sky Blue" and magenta looks like a "redish purple"
Cyan is the "opposite" of RED.
Yellow is the "opposite" of BLUE
Magenta is the "opposite" of GREEN
Adding them up you will find that red and green will look Yellow, for example.
Blue and green will look Cyan
Red and green will look Yellow.
Would I love to see the logos go poof? Sure. Do I think they will? No way. Not unless you want to pay for the right to have a TV (ala the UK) or pay for every channel you receive.
But these logos mostly apper in the digital channels, I _DO_ pay to see them. Some are 5 cents a month!
1)Photographers taking time out to edit when they should be studing the event.
2)Photos not being saved because of digital storage limitations or transmission limitations.
3) Longevity of the media
4) Accesibility of the media.
On 1, a news photographer burns through a large quanity of film, Press film comes in boxes of 50 rolls of 36, and a good phtographer can re-load in under 10 seconds. With film, the photographer is always on the alert for the next shot, and probaly has 10 rolls in his/her pocket.(300 shots avalable) With digital, the camera has a limited capacity, and even with memory cards, it is hard to be sure that one can find the shots later (see 4) this may result in a photographer taking time out to delete some shots that they consider duff, even though those shots might prove interesting in the morning. (Think someone arriving at an event, who gets arrested the next day) The photgrapher may miss a shot becasue of this distraction.
2) Transmission. On Film, you Fed-ex your shoot to the lab, with digital you send the shots via INAMRSAT. Only the top 10 get sent because of transmission cost, it is likely that the rest may never get sent even by Mail. Again, the culled images would have got a free ride into storage if they were invisible traces on a roll of film.
3) Storage. Even C-41 film, stuffed into a file drawer, is likely to be useable at least in Black and white in 50 years. With a little care, and some digital correction, one can expect to recover technicaly good images if the frame has something of interest. On film, a photographer will have set-up shots to remind the editor of the venue. Shots of folks arriving, every speaker when the come on stage. every surprise. Some of these may be of no interest, but as they are all on the same strips of film, they will be on the same proof sheet, and the researcher in 5 years will be able to locate them. Since the film is 36 shots at the time, it is even posible to say that frame 24 was shot before frame 30, should that later prove important. The folder they are in will have any handwritten notes along, perhaps including the printed programm for the event. (with notes that tie specific rolls to specific parts of the event.)
A digital storage media may lose this meta info, and if a decison is needed to allow an image to be kept, only the key shots will be there. The rest which may be of interest historicaly- even if they are terible photos are likely to not be stored. AND lets not get into the issues of the cost of migration to new media needed to keep the information accessible. (Film from the 1950's is exactly the same format as current film) try that 50 years from now.
4) Accessibility here is where I greatly disagree with a previous poster. A photo editor who grabs a proof sheet can study 36 phots at a glance, and quickly zero in on ones of interest. they can select 2 or 3 for a better look by the time they would wait for one image to render on a computer screen.
In places where this has worked, the municipality has often had public hydro utility, or GAS supply utility.
In both cases, they have a place where they can string fibre. Electrrical utilities were early users of fibre as it is immune from the noise problems that can be expected with low-votage signaling in a tunnel beside a high-voltage power line. The gas folks can also run fibre INSIDE the gas pipes, as their is no sparking hazard.
A utility is already sending bills, so billing is an incremental cost rather than a major project.
The cost of installing broadband is mostly in the cost of initial install of the infrastucture.
Actually, If you read ye olde tubbe manual, they say that those tubes (like the 6DQ6) were intended for a 15% duty cycle....
The Output puts out a pulse, and that sweeps the beam part way across, then as the field in the yoke decays, the Damper (say a 6AX4) starts conducting to finish the sweep. The yoke is connected with a Horizontal output transformer (the flyback) and that also provides the high voltage needed for the (anode) of the picture tube.
Solid state versions tend more towards square wave drive but it is still the inductors that do the work.
The *LU8 was a vertical sweep tube as I recall.
One of the real problems with colour CRTs is that the three beams have to come through a shadow mask, or simalar so that they reach only the correct phosphor, (red on red, blue on blue, green on green) so high deflection angles are more difficult to acheive. Many computer tubes are still at 90 degrees for example. The very thin (114 degree) Black and white tubes were very hard to set up for an undistorted picture, not really a problem for TV but harder to deal with for computer use. (The Philco Predicta is an example of a very high deflection angle TV set)
I looked at Sarnoff.com and they have no details on this new technology.
Actually, the reply envelopes are charged for when recived back. Thats why they can distribute them with abandon. As others have pointed out the curent rules seem to require that whatever is sent is enclosed in the envelope.
Sending hazardous substances is not allowed, and can get you in trouble if caught. The sand, or glue tricks might work, or very well might not, as such an envelope would be lopsided enough to get out of the stack in the opening machine. (a totaly empty envelope may just be chewed to bits by the same machine. Very few places that expect a lot of mail will open envelopes manualy.)
You will also find that by returning your address label, you run a good chance of having an order placed in your name.
My opinion is that just like e-spam, you are unlikely to persuade a dedicated mass maller to give up the practice. You may be able get off their list, but even that is not likely, as the lists are rented out at so much per thousand names.. And so taking you off the list is a loss of revenue for the agency that rents out the lists.
Netscape was HATED by the online community in the mid-90's
Exactly! because the product of that day was not interoperable.
Now we have another company, which happens to have a lot of weight to throw around, trying the same old tired trick.
Netscape eventualy got a clue, and the newer version is attempting to be 100% standards based. Meanwhile other folks are tring to create the MS internet.NET
In many commercial settings, Netscape is the standard, and so other browsers are not allowed. Persumably in a lot of other places, other products like Opera may be prefered. I suspect hat most folks reading websites don't have a choice, or perhaps dont even know that there is a choice.
Now as for what to do, well I include a link to Any Browser on any web site I have control over. and I write a to the odd webmaster who is clueless.
I will say my reading of this particular case is that the webmaster who went to all the trouble in this case, is probaly not clueless, but may be trying to bring attention to his or her self.