Sounds like the UW-Madison CS course although I'm sure many are similar (same TCP and interrupt projects and same languages). I thought it was a good undergrad program although I was disappointed how much is left to grad school.
Broadcast HD tv maxes out at approximately 19 Megabits (yes, bits not bytes) per second. That is the total bandwidth but many stations have multiple channels sharing that bandwidth.
If the summary is true then why not get a Masters degree (in CS, CE, etc)? It doesn't take long, doesn't need to be very expensive and is likely to pay for itself over time if you can leverage it.
Get a job on campus working in research groups to avoid tech support.
Obviously, this won't work for everyone but if it works for your life situation I'd say you could do far worse.
"kept up with all the updates and tweaks, despite the constant hassle."
kept up = constant hassle
I've got a MythTV setup and once I got over the geeky fun I just left it alone. I'll update a couple times a year at most. Now I have some more free time so I'll probably create some more hassle:).
For older TVs it is simple: Buy an Nvidia card that has S-Video out (ie 6200-TC) and you're set. Component should be better but my old TV has problems with component and the S-Video out of the Nvidia cards has better quality than anything else I've used (recent Phillips DVD players, older DVD players, Roku/Netflix player, etc).
Don't buy an ATI card for this purpose. It's that simple. Read the mailing list if you think that is fanboyism.
Welcome to living a public life. No model releases are required if the photo is being used for an editorial purpose. You might care about looking bad one day but really how much does it affect you? All of these annoyances you've listed are no doubt a concern for you but how about everyone else? Nobody is going to notice these things you mention and no magazine/newspaper is going to publish an embarrassing photo unless you're a celebrity.
I don't particularly like being the subject of photos and video but I recognize that in public another person has the right to that activity and I can always walk away or turn away.
My advice is to try concentrating on one area and doing the best job you can at it. This may be contrary to a lot of advice but I think that advice is aimed at least experienced people who are still looking for their niche. It looks like you just haven't found your niche yet or haven't concentrated on it.
The benefits of concentrating in one area is that you can spend less time keeping up to date with the other areas. Reading news sites,/., blogs and so forth takes up a lot of time. Add to that the time you spend thinking about all these new technology changes and other issues. It can be a massive waste of time.
It is scary letting go to "everything" but it can be done. The odd thing is that you'll also find that many items you come across in your day to day work in your niche will show up on/. or other news sites weeks or months later. So it isn't like you'll loose complete touch. Just with all the cruft that perhaps doesn't matter so much to you now that you have a family and other responsibilities.
One final benefit of concentrating is that it often leads to a clear career path, increased pay and responsibility. My message is basically: "a little bit of everything can be great early in a career but eventually it often makes sense to focus."
Re:For those of you that are going to ask
on
eBay Sues Craigslist
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
eBay is scared of Craigslist because it is a powerful local market (in many areas) which they do not control and therefor can't take a 10-25% chunk of any transaction as fees. Craigslist is a real alternative to people who are fed up with eBay and the ever increasing cost of doing business on their platform. The purchase of PayPal by eBay did little to help this and the blatant lock out of Google's payment scheme revealed just how low eBay would stoop to protect their interests at the cost of their customers.
eBay jumped the shark but the problem is that there are few alternatives to it. As small as Craigslist is, it is really one of the few viable world-wide local markets on the web.
I'd say this means digital TV is all using mpeg-4 encoding. either that or TV channels are so clear due to FCC regs that they get double the bandwidth of a polluted 2.4 ghz frequency If by "digital TV" you mean broadcast digital (ATSC) then they actually use MPEG2:
They also use multiple MPEG2 streams identified by different pids so that they can squeeze more subchannels in. Our local PBS station (Madison, Wisconsin) actually broadcasts 5 channels with 2 of them occasionally featuring HDTV programming. At some forums those users with the larger HDTV screens have complained about the quality "stolen" but too many subchannels from the HDTV streams (not in regards to the PBS channel mentioned but more in general terms).
Well many Amercians subscribe to Netflix and they offer a "Watch Now" feature which streams movies and TV shows (all also available as rentals which arrive via the postal system). Not all of their catalog is enabled for streaming but a sizable chunk is. It adapts to bandwidth but at the higher bit rates it can take up to 800 MB or more for about 60 minutes of content. There is also iTunes from Appple which offers similar functionality along with a number of other providers. There are also some cable companies experimenting with IP delivery of video content in major cities.
The use of illegal p2p networks to trade files is also very popular here. The overall bandwidth use for video and audio is a huge portion of the backbone even in the USA. So I suspect the demand for bandwidth for these services is very high.
Not all locations have really poor service. I'm in a rural city with 11,000 people and I can get 10 MB down/1 MB up service which is relatively unconstrained (if you exceed 250-300 GB/month the ISP will notice). That is from the cable company. The local telco is rolling out fiber to homes in our city. We are some sort of trial (fiber to the home is not common in rural America) but it is happening.
I think that a multicast-type approach makes the most sense. Unfortunately, multicast assumes each party is watching the same content at the same time. One could buffer things but inevitably it won't work as it isn't flexible enough to provide the same interaction as a direct connection. There needs to be some sort of intelligent caching going on with multicast to the caches. At a certain point though, one has to weigh the cost of intelligent caches versus the cost of more bandwidth. Long term, more bandwidth and more direct peering is probably the most realistic response but I don't know the numbers.
But peering is a non-static idea. Basically, if one ISP sees 10% of their traffic going to one site then they should establish the most efficient peer with that site. Ideally, a direct peering relationship. There is no sound reason to hand cash off to third parties to carry the bits if it is such a huge chunk of ISPs overall bandwidth.
But the good news is in an open market another company will offer a more competitive package and lure the customers away from the evil/lazy/gluttonous ISP. This of course assumes there is an open market. If there isn't, I don't see how one can put the blame at the feet of capitalism.
What kind of antenna do you have? The house we brought came with an old tower with thankfully a new antenna mounted at the top. We're 40-45 miles from the broadcasters and the quality is great using Air2PC ATSC tuner cards which I'm fairly certain are not the newest generation of tuners. So you should look into upgrading your antenna. There are a few glitches during storms (digital degrades much worse than analog in that regard) but as those are rare and digital looks about 1000x better than analog at 45 miles...
It depends. I moved into a house with a large old TV antenna from the former owner that had a new antenna installed. I hooked up my MythTV box, dropped in some ATSC PCI tuners, and I'm receiving HDTV from 35-40 miles away without any issue besides the occasionally storm-related blips and pops. I'd agree that digital degrades poorly compared to analog but for regular usage I'll take digital any day. The analog broadcast quality with the same antenna is horrible with all kinds of ghosting.
On a good night, I can tune in cities more than 100 miles away. With more antennas for directional aiming, I could tune in more cities. But there isn't much point considering it's typically the same Fox, NBC, CBS, etc with slightly different schedules.
ATSC can indeed carry more than one stream/subchannel per channel and, as you hypothesized, the total capacity of the channel is reduced by each additional subchannel. In my area (Madison, Wisconsin), PBS broadcasts 5 streams. One or two occasionally have HD content while the rest have SD content. Another channel broadcasts their regular analog channel contents along with a second subchannel that has low bit rate weather content. According to various posts over at avsforum, the equipment at that channel can dynamically allocate bandwidth to subchannels as required to ensure a consistent level of quality.
The hair in the pudding though is that a "consistent level of quality" is a judgment call. I watch all of the ATSC content via S-Video on a SD 27" television but according to those that have HD sets the quality impact of subchannels "stealing bits" from the main HD content is noticeable. So we're back to the similar problem seen with over compressed HD (and SD) content from DBS providers (Dish, DirecTV, etc).
On a/. note, there is work going on with MythTV to enable recording of more than one subchannel from the same channel with a single tuner. It makes sense that the total channel is a bit stream and the content is multiplexed into that bitstream. So a single tuner should be able to demultiplex and write to disk all of the subchannels or the desired one(s). I think it's actually already in SVN or as a branch in SVN.
You know I spent a couple of years bitching about how slow Debian is to upgrade. Now I say let them be slow. They serve some market and plenty of other distributions serve those that want more up to date systems. Why change Debian? Slow releases are a core feature.
If you have no test system and the machine is providing service to users then do not upgrade to.0 releases. It's simple common sense. Maybe you had some overwhelming need to get this release that goes against the need to keep service reliable but you didn't mention it so I'll assume not. Let other people do the testing of that.0 release to find all the bugs and huge gotchas that are basically inevitable.
I brought 4 CRV3 rechargeable batteries and a recharger all branded by Juice for a decent price on eBay. I think rechargeable lithium is the way to go for cameras if your camera is compatible (apparently, some have a slightly higher voltage than regular CRV3 lithium but they are working fine in my Pentax DSLR).
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Sounds like the UW-Madison CS course although I'm sure many are similar (same TCP and interrupt projects and same languages). I thought it was a good undergrad program although I was disappointed how much is left to grad school.
Broadcast HD tv maxes out at approximately 19 Megabits (yes, bits not bytes) per second. That is the total bandwidth but many stations have multiple channels sharing that bandwidth.
If the summary is true then why not get a Masters degree (in CS, CE, etc)? It doesn't take long, doesn't need to be very expensive and is likely to pay for itself over time if you can leverage it.
Get a job on campus working in research groups to avoid tech support.
Obviously, this won't work for everyone but if it works for your life situation I'd say you could do far worse.
"kept up with all the updates and tweaks, despite the constant hassle."
kept up = constant hassle
I've got a MythTV setup and once I got over the geeky fun I just left it alone. I'll update a couple times a year at most. Now I have some more free time so I'll probably create some more hassle :).
For older TVs it is simple: Buy an Nvidia card that has S-Video out (ie 6200-TC) and you're set. Component should be better but my old TV has problems with component and the S-Video out of the Nvidia cards has better quality than anything else I've used (recent Phillips DVD players, older DVD players, Roku/Netflix player, etc).
Don't buy an ATI card for this purpose. It's that simple. Read the mailing list if you think that is fanboyism.
Welcome to living a public life. No model releases are required if the photo is being used for an editorial purpose. You might care about looking bad one day but really how much does it affect you? All of these annoyances you've listed are no doubt a concern for you but how about everyone else? Nobody is going to notice these things you mention and no magazine/newspaper is going to publish an embarrassing photo unless you're a celebrity.
I don't particularly like being the subject of photos and video but I recognize that in public another person has the right to that activity and I can always walk away or turn away.
My advice is to try concentrating on one area and doing the best job you can at it. This may be contrary to a lot of advice but I think that advice is aimed at least experienced people who are still looking for their niche. It looks like you just haven't found your niche yet or haven't concentrated on it.
/., blogs and so forth takes up a lot of time. Add to that the time you spend thinking about all these new technology changes and other issues. It can be a massive waste of time.
/. or other news sites weeks or months later. So it isn't like you'll loose complete touch. Just with all the cruft that perhaps doesn't matter so much to you now that you have a family and other responsibilities.
The benefits of concentrating in one area is that you can spend less time keeping up to date with the other areas. Reading news sites,
It is scary letting go to "everything" but it can be done. The odd thing is that you'll also find that many items you come across in your day to day work in your niche will show up on
One final benefit of concentrating is that it often leads to a clear career path, increased pay and responsibility. My message is basically: "a little bit of everything can be great early in a career but eventually it often makes sense to focus."
eBay is scared of Craigslist because it is a powerful local market (in many areas) which they do not control and therefor can't take a 10-25% chunk of any transaction as fees. Craigslist is a real alternative to people who are fed up with eBay and the ever increasing cost of doing business on their platform. The purchase of PayPal by eBay did little to help this and the blatant lock out of Google's payment scheme revealed just how low eBay would stoop to protect their interests at the cost of their customers.
eBay jumped the shark but the problem is that there are few alternatives to it. As small as Craigslist is, it is really one of the few viable world-wide local markets on the web.
What exactly is ATSC?
They also use multiple MPEG2 streams identified by different pids so that they can squeeze more subchannels in. Our local PBS station (Madison, Wisconsin) actually broadcasts 5 channels with 2 of them occasionally featuring HDTV programming. At some forums those users with the larger HDTV screens have complained about the quality "stolen" but too many subchannels from the HDTV streams (not in regards to the PBS channel mentioned but more in general terms).
Well many Amercians subscribe to Netflix and they offer a "Watch Now" feature which streams movies and TV shows (all also available as rentals which arrive via the postal system). Not all of their catalog is enabled for streaming but a sizable chunk is. It adapts to bandwidth but at the higher bit rates it can take up to 800 MB or more for about 60 minutes of content. There is also iTunes from Appple which offers similar functionality along with a number of other providers. There are also some cable companies experimenting with IP delivery of video content in major cities.
The use of illegal p2p networks to trade files is also very popular here. The overall bandwidth use for video and audio is a huge portion of the backbone even in the USA. So I suspect the demand for bandwidth for these services is very high.
Not all locations have really poor service. I'm in a rural city with 11,000 people and I can get 10 MB down/1 MB up service which is relatively unconstrained (if you exceed 250-300 GB/month the ISP will notice). That is from the cable company. The local telco is rolling out fiber to homes in our city. We are some sort of trial (fiber to the home is not common in rural America) but it is happening.
I think that a multicast-type approach makes the most sense. Unfortunately, multicast assumes each party is watching the same content at the same time. One could buffer things but inevitably it won't work as it isn't flexible enough to provide the same interaction as a direct connection. There needs to be some sort of intelligent caching going on with multicast to the caches. At a certain point though, one has to weigh the cost of intelligent caches versus the cost of more bandwidth. Long term, more bandwidth and more direct peering is probably the most realistic response but I don't know the numbers.
But peering is a non-static idea. Basically, if one ISP sees 10% of their traffic going to one site then they should establish the most efficient peer with that site. Ideally, a direct peering relationship. There is no sound reason to hand cash off to third parties to carry the bits if it is such a huge chunk of ISPs overall bandwidth.
But the good news is in an open market another company will offer a more competitive package and lure the customers away from the evil/lazy/gluttonous ISP. This of course assumes there is an open market. If there isn't, I don't see how one can put the blame at the feet of capitalism.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Yeah, like it would work real well to do a lot of start stop cycles in the COLDEST FREAKING PLACE.
What kind of antenna do you have? The house we brought came with an old tower with thankfully a new antenna mounted at the top. We're 40-45 miles from the broadcasters and the quality is great using Air2PC ATSC tuner cards which I'm fairly certain are not the newest generation of tuners. So you should look into upgrading your antenna. There are a few glitches during storms (digital degrades much worse than analog in that regard) but as those are rare and digital looks about 1000x better than analog at 45 miles...
It depends. I moved into a house with a large old TV antenna from the former owner that had a new antenna installed. I hooked up my MythTV box, dropped in some ATSC PCI tuners, and I'm receiving HDTV from 35-40 miles away without any issue besides the occasionally storm-related blips and pops. I'd agree that digital degrades poorly compared to analog but for regular usage I'll take digital any day. The analog broadcast quality with the same antenna is horrible with all kinds of ghosting.
On a good night, I can tune in cities more than 100 miles away. With more antennas for directional aiming, I could tune in more cities. But there isn't much point considering it's typically the same Fox, NBC, CBS, etc with slightly different schedules.
That sounds kick ass. Did you ever make it into a vimscript because I'd be loading that one up to try.
ATSC can indeed carry more than one stream/subchannel per channel and, as you hypothesized, the total capacity of the channel is reduced by each additional subchannel. In my area (Madison, Wisconsin), PBS broadcasts 5 streams. One or two occasionally have HD content while the rest have SD content. Another channel broadcasts their regular analog channel contents along with a second subchannel that has low bit rate weather content. According to various posts over at avsforum, the equipment at that channel can dynamically allocate bandwidth to subchannels as required to ensure a consistent level of quality.
/. note, there is work going on with MythTV to enable recording of more than one subchannel from the same channel with a single tuner. It makes sense that the total channel is a bit stream and the content is multiplexed into that bitstream. So a single tuner should be able to demultiplex and write to disk all of the subchannels or the desired one(s). I think it's actually already in SVN or as a branch in SVN.
The hair in the pudding though is that a "consistent level of quality" is a judgment call. I watch all of the ATSC content via S-Video on a SD 27" television but according to those that have HD sets the quality impact of subchannels "stealing bits" from the main HD content is noticeable. So we're back to the similar problem seen with over compressed HD (and SD) content from DBS providers (Dish, DirecTV, etc).
On a
If you're doing a "Hey, watch this" with a motorcycle you put on a fucking helmet. It's not rocket science.
I can join you. I'm totally worthless :).
I remember Postum fondly from my youth. No, I don't want a cup right now. Lets just keep it as a fond memory.
You know I spent a couple of years bitching about how slow Debian is to upgrade. Now I say let them be slow. They serve some market and plenty of other distributions serve those that want more up to date systems. Why change Debian? Slow releases are a core feature.
If you have no test system and the machine is providing service to users then do not upgrade to .0 releases. It's simple common sense. Maybe you had some overwhelming need to get this release that goes against the need to keep service reliable but you didn't mention it so I'll assume not. Let other people do the testing of that .0 release to find all the bugs and huge gotchas that are basically inevitable.
I brought 4 CRV3 rechargeable batteries and a recharger all branded by Juice for a decent price on eBay. I think rechargeable lithium is the way to go for cameras if your camera is compatible (apparently, some have a slightly higher voltage than regular CRV3 lithium but they are working fine in my Pentax DSLR).