Well, except that an overseas phone won't work here in the US, unless it's a GSM variant, and then you have to choose between T-mobile and AT&T, and that only works if the phone is GSM *and* includes support for the US bands. I've not used non-US phones, so I am not sure how much of the above is a given.
I saw this and was immediately reminded of the MPFC sketch where Terry Jones is talking to his colleagues about other things that could be taxed besides smoking and drinking. The sketch ends with Eric Idle saying, "Well, it'll certainly make chartered accountancy a more interesting job."
I thought that with the transition, the old analog frequencies were being reclaimed.
DTV is still going to be in the same channels from 2-51. Channels 52-69 were auctioned off. This whole transition was done to pack the broadcasters into a smaller space, among other things. The adjacent channel allocation rules for DTV are less cumbersome than they were for analog. Here in the Bay Area, Sutro Tower will transmit signals on 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44 and 45 (that's not the complete list, just the adjacent ones). That was impossible before.
So are they delaying the completion of the transition to allow for this nightlight service?
No. Only stations whose analog frequencies will remain unused and won't interfere with post-transition DTV operations will be allowed to do it.
When will we have our stations at their final frequencies?
And of course, none of those analog-to-digital converter boxes can be battery powered,
Sure they can. If they're powered by a DC wall-wart, then just replace that with a suitably sized battery. If not, plug them into a UPS.
so a battery-powered TV (yes, they do exist, generally in analog B&W) doesn't help.
Mine does. Actually, I have an older Insignia 7" ATSC TV. Plugged into a proper antenna, it works just fine (alas, like most TVs in this form factor, the whip antenna it comes with is entirely useless).
Analog TV has much better range than Digital TV, and has much better tolerances with a bad signal.
Not really. It's just that people have low standards. It is true that you can get a crappy, mostly monochrome snowy picture beyond the range where a DTV receiver would snap over to blue, but in general people who are watching signals like that are outside of the service range of that station anyway, or are using substandard antennas. With DTV, you can't be lazy and trade antenna gain for signal quality because there's nothing between "0" and "1".
I've got a great idea. How about the government makes a list of the most important issues facing the United States today. Hell, I'll even be happy to let the party in power at the moment dictate the order of this list.
Where do you all think internet poker falls on that list? Is it even in the top thousand?!?!
I like the idea of ditching the Vonage line we have (we already ditched the POTS service for our primary voice line) and going cell phone only. But when I'm home, I'd prefer to use the cordless phone system with the handsets strewn around the house, and leave my cell phone plugged into the computer to charge.
To that end, I bought an XLink bluetooth gateway box. The idea behind this box is that it provides dialtone and ringing to your POTS phones and then places the calls over between 1 and 3 bluetooth-paired phones. An excellent concept, but alas, it was plagued with reliability issues, at least for us. Maybe in a year or so either there will be a competitor or they'll have updated their firmware or something.
So at least for now, we still have the Vonage line.
I thought the iPhone already had an autofocus camera in it,
No, it has a fixed focus camera.
and that it had a GPS (thus making a compas possible).
GPS can only act as a compass while you're moving. a magnetic compass can do that job while you're standing still.
The two together can potentially be teh aw3som3, since knowing your GPS location can allow you to compute the magnetic correction automatically for your location, giving you a true compass heading, not just a magnetic one.
Well, let's take the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty that 150 countries signed 30 years ago
30 years ago, the United States was 3 years past celebrating its bicentennial.
To be somewhat more fair, the bill of rights wasn't fully ratified until 1791, but that's still a far longer standing tradition than you've cited.
Many countries, most notable of them being the United Kingdom, in fact have legislatures that have full sovereignty. A fully sovereign legislature means that they have no constitution to restrain their authority. There's nothing at all to suggest that any law they pass today cannot be repealed tomorrow, so there is no way to guarantee civil rights at all. Parliament could pass a law with the same text as the first amendment, and it would be a completely meaningless gesture.
Now, I am not suggesting that the author of TFA is correct. But I absolutely would place more faith in a constitutionally restrained legislature than a fully sovereign one every day of the week.
There's nothing wrong with DNS at all. The only issue at hand is who controls the root zone. In fact, if you want to do so, you can use someone else's root zone without altering a single line of source code (unless your DNS server has the ICANN root IP addresses hard-coded).
There's nothing at all in the IP protocol that says that the collection of IP addresses in the current root zone are the only options. If someone thinks they can run it better, they should just set one up. It's not as if this hasn't happened before. Yes, the current root is a fairly well entrenched monopoly, but if enough people really considered their practices unacceptable, I'm confident that an alternate root would be able to moot them fairly quickly.
The oldest thing I have is a PCPI Applicard that I bought circa 1984.
I actually overclocked the thing to 10 MHz by replacing the CPU with a Z80-H, replacing the RAM with faster chips, replacing the crystal with a 20 MHz one, and replacing the NOT gate chip being used to oscillate the crystal with a mil-spec version that could go that fast. At the time, it was able to compile code in Turbo Pascal so fast that you couldn't see the line numbers from under the blur of the overstriking cursor. I brought it into school one day and it was actually faster at compiling code than the then reasonably state of the art PCs they had on hand.
In fact, the Applicard was a CP/M machine of its own writ small. It was a Z-80 with 64K of RAM and communicated over a single-byte parallel port with the host. The 6502 ran full speed while acting more or less as an I/O coprocessor for the Applicard. I even wrote some 6502 device drivers for it so that I could run CP/M from my hard disk and could use the 800K 3.5" floppies. I even got it working with my old Apple Cat at one point.
Alas, I no longer have an Apple ][ to use it in, so it just collects dust in the garage.:(
The difference between an iMac and a tower is not just the slots.
You have yet to actually cite one.
You talked about performance. I maintain that the performance of the iMac (maximally configured, it's got 8 GB RAM, 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB) is close enough to the minimally configured mac pro that it is unnecessary to try and shoehorn another machine between the two (I am NOT saying the iMac is the performance equivalent to a minimal mac pro, only that you need not catalog a machine between them).
You talked about consolidating multiple computers without any sort of hint as to how this tower aids in that.
You talked about separable displays, and when I pointed out that the current minis met your requirements you then gave us a howler about a $500 price premium over equivalent PCs (You do realize the minis start at $599, right? So you're saying a mac mini is equivalent to a $99 PC? Really?) and then threw up a strawman about Apple changing specs on future machines (what, are you saying that the next rev of the OS is going ti disable the 2nd monitor port on the mini you presumably would have already paid for?!).
Every couple years, something amazing comes out that actually needs good integration. Nobody knows what it will be yet. But everyone with an iMac will have to settle for the external USB2 version that barely kinda works.
The problem has been that every couple of years the busses change too. A couple years ago, it was PCI-X and before that it was wide PCI, and AGP for video. If tomorrow's hot new thing is available only with tomorrow's hot new bus, it doesn't matter how many PCIe slots you've got, you're still hosed.
The trend has actually been away from internal bus based expansion and towards network (via Ethernet and WiFi) and external expansion (via USB, Firewire or bluetooth). In that sense, Apple has (once again) been leading the industry.
1. They want to consolidate multiple computers (Windows PC for gaming, Mac for other stuff) into a single box.
I fail to see how PCIe slots help that.
2. They want more performance than an iMac.
Cue the Mac Pro.
3. They don't want a built-in screen (and/or want to connect 2+ screens and/or need to connect particular types of screens).
We, for example, considered moving our staff onto Macs to take advantage of some Mac-only software. But since a) all our staff use dual screens in a portrait configuration and b) quite a few of them need to have "medically certified" screens, that would mean everyone has to get a Mac Pro, which is ridiculous when in every other way, a Mac Mini would have been sufficient.
Then the new mac minis satisfy your requirements - they can drive dual displays now since they have a mini DVI and mini display port.
But do you really want that much GPU hardware with a machine that only has a single 2-3 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU? Wouldn't you do better with at least 4 cores with such monstrous graphics hardware? Say... like in a Mac Pro?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, except that an overseas phone won't work here in the US, unless it's a GSM variant, and then you have to choose between T-mobile and AT&T, and that only works if the phone is GSM *and* includes support for the US bands. I've not used non-US phones, so I am not sure how much of the above is a given.
I saw this and was immediately reminded of the MPFC sketch where Terry Jones is talking to his colleagues about other things that could be taxed besides smoking and drinking. The sketch ends with Eric Idle saying, "Well, it'll certainly make chartered accountancy a more interesting job."
Yeah. The last time the Germans had a government that exercised control over the press worked out so well for them.
I thought that with the transition, the old analog frequencies were being reclaimed.
DTV is still going to be in the same channels from 2-51. Channels 52-69 were auctioned off. This whole transition was done to pack the broadcasters into a smaller space, among other things. The adjacent channel allocation rules for DTV are less cumbersome than they were for analog. Here in the Bay Area, Sutro Tower will transmit signals on 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44 and 45 (that's not the complete list, just the adjacent ones). That was impossible before.
So are they delaying the completion of the transition to allow for this nightlight service?
No. Only stations whose analog frequencies will remain unused and won't interfere with post-transition DTV operations will be allowed to do it.
When will we have our stations at their final frequencies?
Tomorrow.
And of course, none of those analog-to-digital converter boxes can be battery powered,
Sure they can. If they're powered by a DC wall-wart, then just replace that with a suitably sized battery. If not, plug them into a UPS.
so a battery-powered TV (yes, they do exist, generally in analog B&W) doesn't help.
Mine does. Actually, I have an older Insignia 7" ATSC TV. Plugged into a proper antenna, it works just fine (alas, like most TVs in this form factor, the whip antenna it comes with is entirely useless).
Analog TV has much better range than Digital TV, and has much better tolerances with a bad signal.
Not really. It's just that people have low standards. It is true that you can get a crappy, mostly monochrome snowy picture beyond the range where a DTV receiver would snap over to blue, but in general people who are watching signals like that are outside of the service range of that station anyway, or are using substandard antennas. With DTV, you can't be lazy and trade antenna gain for signal quality because there's nothing between "0" and "1".
I've got a great idea. How about the government makes a list of the most important issues facing the United States today. Hell, I'll even be happy to let the party in power at the moment dictate the order of this list.
Where do you all think internet poker falls on that list? Is it even in the top thousand?!?!
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
landline is legally much more difficult for authorities to eavesdrop on
[citation needed]
the kind of radio where you can listen to ideas too far off in the ideological fringes to make it onto the Internet
Alas, it looks like the fringes have already arrived.
I like the idea of ditching the Vonage line we have (we already ditched the POTS service for our primary voice line) and going cell phone only. But when I'm home, I'd prefer to use the cordless phone system with the handsets strewn around the house, and leave my cell phone plugged into the computer to charge.
To that end, I bought an XLink bluetooth gateway box. The idea behind this box is that it provides dialtone and ringing to your POTS phones and then places the calls over between 1 and 3 bluetooth-paired phones. An excellent concept, but alas, it was plagued with reliability issues, at least for us. Maybe in a year or so either there will be a competitor or they'll have updated their firmware or something.
So at least for now, we still have the Vonage line.
Do you know of any cameras that don't have autofocus?
The iPhone 1G and 3G phones don't. They have a fixed focus camera, which is not the same thing.
I thought the iPhone already had an autofocus camera in it,
No, it has a fixed focus camera.
and that it had a GPS (thus making a compas possible).
GPS can only act as a compass while you're moving. a magnetic compass can do that job while you're standing still.
The two together can potentially be teh aw3som3, since knowing your GPS location can allow you to compute the magnetic correction automatically for your location, giving you a true compass heading, not just a magnetic one.
How can you compare something that costs $80,000 (plus running costs) to something that costs $800?
You're on /. and you're questioning a car analogy?!
Well, let's take the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty that 150 countries signed 30 years ago
30 years ago, the United States was 3 years past celebrating its bicentennial.
To be somewhat more fair, the bill of rights wasn't fully ratified until 1791, but that's still a far longer standing tradition than you've cited.
Many countries, most notable of them being the United Kingdom, in fact have legislatures that have full sovereignty. A fully sovereign legislature means that they have no constitution to restrain their authority. There's nothing at all to suggest that any law they pass today cannot be repealed tomorrow, so there is no way to guarantee civil rights at all. Parliament could pass a law with the same text as the first amendment, and it would be a completely meaningless gesture.
Now, I am not suggesting that the author of TFA is correct. But I absolutely would place more faith in a constitutionally restrained legislature than a fully sovereign one every day of the week.
There's nothing wrong with DNS at all. The only issue at hand is who controls the root zone. In fact, if you want to do so, you can use someone else's root zone without altering a single line of source code (unless your DNS server has the ICANN root IP addresses hard-coded).
There's nothing at all in the IP protocol that says that the collection of IP addresses in the current root zone are the only options. If someone thinks they can run it better, they should just set one up. It's not as if this hasn't happened before. Yes, the current root is a fairly well entrenched monopoly, but if enough people really considered their practices unacceptable, I'm confident that an alternate root would be able to moot them fairly quickly.
We hams still can sometimes be found sending Baudot around over HF. I used to play with AMTOR just shy of 20 years ago.
Nowadays I still play with digital HF, but it's with PSK31, which has its own, variable length character set.
The oldest thing I have is a PCPI Applicard that I bought circa 1984.
I actually overclocked the thing to 10 MHz by replacing the CPU with a Z80-H, replacing the RAM with faster chips, replacing the crystal with a 20 MHz one, and replacing the NOT gate chip being used to oscillate the crystal with a mil-spec version that could go that fast. At the time, it was able to compile code in Turbo Pascal so fast that you couldn't see the line numbers from under the blur of the overstriking cursor. I brought it into school one day and it was actually faster at compiling code than the then reasonably state of the art PCs they had on hand.
In fact, the Applicard was a CP/M machine of its own writ small. It was a Z-80 with 64K of RAM and communicated over a single-byte parallel port with the host. The 6502 ran full speed while acting more or less as an I/O coprocessor for the Applicard. I even wrote some 6502 device drivers for it so that I could run CP/M from my hard disk and could use the 800K 3.5" floppies. I even got it working with my old Apple Cat at one point.
Alas, I no longer have an Apple ][ to use it in, so it just collects dust in the garage. :(
Better Microvision than Macrovision.
The difference between an iMac and a tower is not just the slots.
You have yet to actually cite one.
You talked about performance. I maintain that the performance of the iMac (maximally configured, it's got 8 GB RAM, 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB) is close enough to the minimally configured mac pro that it is unnecessary to try and shoehorn another machine between the two (I am NOT saying the iMac is the performance equivalent to a minimal mac pro, only that you need not catalog a machine between them).
You talked about consolidating multiple computers without any sort of hint as to how this tower aids in that.
You talked about separable displays, and when I pointed out that the current minis met your requirements you then gave us a howler about a $500 price premium over equivalent PCs (You do realize the minis start at $599, right? So you're saying a mac mini is equivalent to a $99 PC? Really?) and then threw up a strawman about Apple changing specs on future machines (what, are you saying that the next rev of the OS is going ti disable the 2nd monitor port on the mini you presumably would have already paid for?!).
Every couple years, something amazing comes out that actually needs good integration. Nobody knows what it will be yet. But everyone with an iMac will have to settle for the external USB2 version that barely kinda works.
The problem has been that every couple of years the busses change too. A couple years ago, it was PCI-X and before that it was wide PCI, and AGP for video. If tomorrow's hot new thing is available only with tomorrow's hot new bus, it doesn't matter how many PCIe slots you've got, you're still hosed.
The trend has actually been away from internal bus based expansion and towards network (via Ethernet and WiFi) and external expansion (via USB, Firewire or bluetooth). In that sense, Apple has (once again) been leading the industry.
1. They want to consolidate multiple computers (Windows PC for gaming, Mac for other stuff) into a single box.
I fail to see how PCIe slots help that.
2. They want more performance than an iMac.
Cue the Mac Pro.
3. They don't want a built-in screen (and/or want to connect 2+ screens and/or need to connect particular types of screens).
We, for example, considered moving our staff onto Macs to take advantage of some Mac-only software. But since a) all our staff use dual screens in a portrait configuration and b) quite a few of them need to have "medically certified" screens, that would mean everyone has to get a Mac Pro, which is ridiculous when in every other way, a Mac Mini would have been sufficient.
Then the new mac minis satisfy your requirements - they can drive dual displays now since they have a mini DVI and mini display port.
But do you really want that much GPU hardware with a machine that only has a single 2-3 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU? Wouldn't you do better with at least 4 cores with such monstrous graphics hardware? Say... like in a Mac Pro?
Replacing the video card (or simply having the BTO option for a better one) is the most obvious example of why the slots are useful.
Um, iMacs do have BTO options for alternate video "cards."