Re:Was there really anything important on there?
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 1
Was there anything important... Hmm, well the ABC television network uses it to send most of their programming and news stuff to affiliates. It had a fair amount of New Frontier's stuff on it. (porn).. And theres probably other stuff on it I know nothing about.
I worked at a TV station when Galaxy 4 went down in the late 90s. We got most of our syndicated programming off that and Telstar 5. We had ONE dish setup to receive just G4 and T5 which were 2 degrees apart on the satellite arc. All of a sudden, the fax machine starts exploding with faxes flying out furiously, due to critical failure -- the feed will be on xxx @ this time.
So:
1. You needed to reset all the regular recording events that use to be timed such that we never ran out of VCRs or dishes to get them with. Now we had 10 events occurring at once and 4 VCRs to record them with. It screwed everything up, even stuff that had nothing to do with Galaxy 4.
2. Instead of 1 dish pointed a stationary space -- we now needed 4 dishes pointed at 4 different places. We didn't have them.
So, in answer to the question "was there anything important out there." Nahh, not really.
I would like to have a communication method that was so cheap that it could be built into everything. My $10 alarm clock for example. I'd like to hold it next to a Palm or something and have automatically sync to my time and alarm wake-up already set in the Palm Pilot. (Which is of couse syncronized through NTP or direct GPS connection.)
So lets say I go to a hotel, and the hotel has an alarm clock that I can't figure out how to set correctly (happens a lot) -- I could just beam the current time and alarm time on to the alarm clock. It would save me from actually trying to set the thing correctly, which I haven't figured out how to do.
Put a whole Bluetooth implementation on it and your already out of price range.
Another thing, my POTS phone.. It has all these memory buttons that you can program. I'm not gonna waste my time trying to figure it out. But if I could set the phone to accept entries from Outlook or something.. That'd be great. USB or Bluetooth is just too damn much for my little $12 phone with 20 memories. But that would be the only way I'd ever make use of the memory function. It would also be cool to be able to import my caller ID stuff before deleting it.
I figured it out a long time ago. Engineers and programmers could be outsourced, replaced, or outright eliminated if needed. There are lots of bright English speakers in India who need jobs. They want mine. They've probably already got it.
There are a few places where you can't practically outsource a job. Ever tried outsourcing your car repair to India to fix its air conditioning? Fixing things like air conditioning can be very labor intensive, easily a full day in some cases. It was 105 degrees here in CA today, if my A/C was broken it'd be winter by the time someone in India could have in fixed and back to me. (Including the ocean voyage.)
Another case is health care, if you're sick in a hospital in San Francisco, does it matter that there are nurses in a 3rd World Country? Nope, all the matters is that we don't have enough nurses HERE.
You can't outsource the ice cream shop down the street, you can't outsource the gas station, you can't outsource moving someone from one house to another to somebody in India. You can't outsource services that require a "personal touch."
Here's the plan: Develop the "personal touch" that the person in India can't. Expect to have to change careers. Accept that the 90s are over and you can't work at Starbucks for $10/hr until the economy improves. What you did in the past may not necessarily be what you do in the future, but make a plan for when the future throws you a curve ball.
The ramifications of an National ID card are that the benefits outweigh the downside. I get 6 credit reports a year (3 credit bureaus x 2 times a year) just to make sure that someone isn't opening up Visa cards in my name.
Why do I have to do this? Because the world we live in currently uses my SSN, mothers maiden name, and a computer generated FICO score to determine whether to insure me and extend credit. When this "credit info" is wrong, and so far I've found literally constant errors. It takes 6 months to resolve them.
And anyone can get credit info fairly easily. We absolutely need to implement a national ID system as a way of combatting identity theft and forgery. My SSN and Mothers Maiden Name is not a good security system.
Additionally, flagging everyone named "David Nelson" at the airport because the name is on a no fly list is equally ridiculous. Figure out which David Nelson is your problem and let the other 500 people with the same name go about their business.
The time has come for a National ID card and biometric identifiers for all. I'd rather hold the government responsible for verifying my identity than say Experian or Equifax who can't even figure out which credit cards I have but won't hesistate to generate an inaccurate score based on their wrong information.
I figure that if the government sold off all the TV (VHF/UHF) spectrum, minimally subsidized and launched several spot beam Ka Band satellites to hold the 1600? or so TV stations, and then provided receiviers and dishes (which are cheap) for anyone who couldn't afford one. The problem would be solved.
So, everyone without cable would get their local station from Ka-band satellite for free and your 80 yr old on a fixed income could still watch TV -- for free.
Live on the fringe of town, no problem the spot beam is plenty big enough so that everyones digital picture still looks great.
Terrestrial broadcasting has been a hinderence for far too long. It didn't make sense to do this in the 1930s when TV was in its infancy -- but with current satellite technology I believe it makes sense today.
Maybe we could finally move into the 21st century.. Nahh, why would we do that?
I knew I wanted to be an engineer since I was 12. I survived 6 hellish years and graduated. I couldn't get a job.
Had I known the tech industry was headed towards implosion, I think I would have been a Nutrition major. Not because I care about nutrition, but I might have met some attractive women that way!
And jobwise, I doubt I'd be in any different place.
How long did the record companies rake us over the coals with obscene prices for CDs that weren't very good? $18 for one decent song sounds pretty criminal to me and I endured it. My CD collection would be a lot smaller if Napster had been around 10 years ago.
The record companies violated consumers for years. I don't have a problem with "payback." So really, who is stealing from whom? None of these companies are terribly altruistic.
The RIAA is fighting a losing battle. A battle they can't win, so they sue.
Here in beautiful Sacramento, CA we have something very few others have -- a choice.
Winfirst, purchased by SureWest Broadband, delivers phone / data / cable TV to thousands of Sacramento residents via fiber to the home. Comcast and SBC also offer service, but SureWest is better!
SureWest's data rate for home users is 10 Mbps symmetrical. (And it's pretty rare that I can max that out for any period of time.) I believe I am limited to 30 GB a month before I incur additional charges. I would't know because I can't find 30 GB worth of crap to download in a month.
I would imagine that eventually 100 Mbps service will be available here -- the infrastructure for it already exists. But really -- who needs 100 Mbps at home? You're not serving CNN to millions.
Oh and the price -- the package of cable + 10 Mbps data + 1 phone line comes in at about $100 a month.
All in this lovely community we call Sacramento.. Err the Future Greater Bay Area.
InterTrust own a whole bunch of patents. In fact, that is about all they own. They derive basically all their income from suing other companies who in any way attempt to limit the copying and transferrability of works in the digital space. (a.k.a. Digital Rights Management)
I expect them to sue: Microsoft, OpenTV, Liberate, PowerTV, Nagravision, NDS, Canal Plus, and just about anyone who has anything to do with conditional access if they haven't already.
You can thank overly broad patent protection that allows you to patent an idea (remember 1-click ordering), instead of forcing the patent holder to develop a product or implementation that actually utilizes the idea.
The only thing InterTrust has ever done is create a major payday for lawyers.
Hey, the rest of us got by with Vivarin, Jolt, Mountain Dew, Mr. Pibb and even coffee before the advent of Red Bull..
I could never survive a few of my college programming classes again. 2 1/2 solid days of coding and 4 hour of sleep intermixed just won't work anymore.
Skills are the problem. Companies don't want to hire people with vast experience. They hire someone to do a specific job and then dispose of them when the job is done.
There is no employer who understands the value of experience, breadth, or anything else. They understand "Codes in C#/C++/C/Java/COM/DCOM/Sys Admin".. Not -- designed and built some elaborate system to serve as a backbone using a wide range of technologies they've never heard of! As it's not directly applicable to "coding in C#, C++, blah blah blah".
The FCC didn't screw up terrerstrial DTV. It was probably unnecessary from the start -- It simply wasn't something the market wanted. Especially since the digital TV signals (QAM/QPSK) from cable/satellite provide crystal clear pictures.
We should have obliterated terrestrial broadcasting altogether and put local stations up on spot beamed satellites. (wait a minute, Dish Network's doing that -- how clever)
So COFDM just needed a box with rabbit ears and everything would be just peachy... Right? Nope.
1. COFDM requires SUBSTANTIALLY more power to replicate existing NTSC coverage than 8-VSB. You think broadcasters spend a lot on power? They would have spent even more under COFDM to attempt to replicate their NTSC coverage area.
2. Your $99 box doesn't exist because nobody wants to build it or buy it. The ICs exist and cheap directional phased array antennas work. (My $4 Silver Sensor antenna gets 8-VSB in some pretty nasty multipath conditions.) The percentage of people who subscribe to cable/satellite makes over the air reception nearly meaningless.
3. COFDM gives you fewer Mbps for a given number of MHz. 8-VSB gives you 19.39 Mbps in 6 Mhz, COFDM requies more spectrum to deliver the same data rate.
4. The 3G spectrum would have been sold off whether the standard was ATSC 8-VSB or COFDM. Europe is a lot smaller than the United States. You can get away with usign COFDM there because you don't have 210 markets (often with very large coverage areas) and a ton of auxilary transmitters to serve the backwoods..
8-VSB, after years of discussion was chosen as the lesser of two evils.
It sounds like this guy found out its much more rewarding to work than to go to school. And doing both just plain sucks. There is no balance -- you pick one and do it seriously. Or you do your 40-50 hours a week at work and take a single class. Yeah, it takes forever, I went to school with a guy who spent about 10 yrs getting his BS doing just that.
I tried to balance school and work for a couple years, it didn't work. It hurt me in school and I was over stressed at work from my school demands. I finished college and quit working to do it.
It kicks ass. Its everything FTTH was supposed to be. I'd heard the pipe dreams about how FTTH was gonna change my life and how everything would be reliable and just work -- guess what -- it does.
I have fiber-to-the-home. It's great. It never goes out. I actually GET 10 Mbps throughput (as advertised)... It is rolled together in a package with my Basic Cable + HBO/Cinemax, + Phone Service (w/ 100 minutes LD included) all for about $130 a month. One company, one bill, & a company where people who answer the phone.. Once you've got it, you find it's undesirable to live without. And the price, it's about what I use to pay for 2 phone lines, Dial-Up Internet Access, and Cable TV. So for the same money, I get a lot more. (No longer need the second phone line since the computers no longer need to dial up. But if I did, it's only another $10/mo and I can have up to 4 lines with no additional equipment.)
The company did some Cat 5 wiring for me as part of the install and the couple of computers in the house plug into a NAT box.
You wouldn't believe how fast those Microsoft Service Packs download!
Why Fiber? Because AT&T Broadband couldn't deliver me a dedicated 10 Mbps (in both directions) in their wildest dreams. You think you can get by with less, but when I was a kid, those guys with 2400 baud modems were on the bleeding edge! Then it was 9600, then 28.8k. Now I've got 10 Mbps and wonder if they'll be swapping out my home demarcation unit for one that delivers 100 Mbps instead in a couple of years.
The guy in the article had an MBA. Still -- He was paid well. However, this doesn't mean graduating engineers deserve to make 50k if they are extrordinarily lucky. (Entry level jobs are scarse, people will mortgages to pay will take them when all else fails..)
There is some middle ground between $25k and $125k and the $25k deserves to go to the person who partied for 4 years while the rest of us studied.
This is just sad.. Going from making $125k to making crepes.
I know it's happening more and more. Why did I go to college for 6 years? It doesn't seem to improve my job prospects over all those liberal arts majors I thought were slackers.. At least they were content to enter the economy and make crepes..
The over the air terrestrial standard is NTSC. When the transmitters are digital, it will be 8-VSB. However, cable TV operators utilize QAM-64 and QAM-256 to pack more bits into a given channel. The digital cable box you rent is there to decode QAM. Wouldn't it make sense if the QAM decoder were integrated into the TV set? You would no longer need the cable box. Adding 8-VSB capability to a TV wouldn't change the fact that most people will STILL get their digital signals via QAM, not 8-VSB.
Since most cable systems send their digital tiers in QAM, shouldn't the manufacturers be concentrating on that, considering on how few people receive their TV off the air?
I recently ditched my WD 8.4 GB drive. Not that there was anything wrong with it, nor had I even filled it. In fact, I had only used up 4 of the 8.4 GB is the 4 years I'd had it.
Why did I get rid of it? Because the WD 80 GB model was only $100 after rebate. And now that I have all this space, guess how much of it I use? 8 GB. This is after I loaded every conceivable thing I had (and every option available in each program. Yep, Street Atlas no longer needs a CD to run.
And so, after putting everything I had on the thing. I still can't fill it. Maybe a TiVo needs it, but I've probably got enough hard drive space to last me another 5 years.. That's gotta be music to the ears of hard drive manufacturers struggling to make a profit!
I might just have to infringe on this guys patent now that I know it exists.. I'm upset that he doesn't credit Isaac Newton for our basic laws of physics, without which, his invention would be impossible.
This is a pretty good example of whats wrong with patents..
Here in lovely Sacramento, we have one thing I've never seen anywhere else.. A choice.
1. AT&T offers cable modems 2. Pac Bell offers phone/DSL 3. A new company called WinFirst (now in Ch. 11, but still operating) offers FTTH.
Heres what I get for about $130/mo.
1 - Phone line with 100 minutes LD, voice mail, caller ID, etc, etc, etc.
2 - All the basic local & Cable TV + 26 HBO/Cinemax.
3 - 10 Mbps symmetrical Internet access. And if only I could find a server that could keep up! I'm limited to 30 GB per month, but you can buy more. But 30 GB goes pretty far.
4. All delivered on fiber by a company who answers the phone. The cable system is crystal clear. Has VOD services.. It's quite cool.
1. DWDM -- OC768 is coming your way and a lot of badly beat down telecom providers want to sell it.. BAD. Think they'll give ya a discount if yo buy a bunch of units?
2. Theres so much fiber in the ground on long haul routes that if there is ever anything resembling a shortage in my lifetime, I'd be impressed.
3. It's not nearly as expensive as the article poses to setup electronics on fiber. It's not $1 to install a fiber and $20 to put electronics on it. It just doesn't work like that.. Dug up the street lately? It costs a fortune.. Attaching the fiber to the Gigabit Ethernet port is far less.
4. Greed -- If there is money to be made, the bandwidth will be created.. It's called the law of supply and demand..
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Was there anything important... Hmm, well the ABC television network uses it to send most of their programming and news stuff to affiliates. It had a fair amount of New Frontier's stuff on it. (porn).. And theres probably other stuff on it I know nothing about.
I worked at a TV station when Galaxy 4 went down in the late 90s. We got most of our syndicated programming off that and Telstar 5. We had ONE dish setup to receive just G4 and T5 which were 2 degrees apart on the satellite arc. All of a sudden, the fax machine starts exploding with faxes flying out furiously, due to critical failure -- the feed will be on xxx @ this time.
So:
1. You needed to reset all the regular recording events that use to be timed such that we never ran out of VCRs or dishes to get them with. Now we had 10 events occurring at once and 4 VCRs to record them with. It screwed everything up, even stuff that had nothing to do with Galaxy 4.
2. Instead of 1 dish pointed a stationary space -- we now needed 4 dishes pointed at 4 different places. We didn't have them.
So, in answer to the question "was there anything important out there." Nahh, not really.
I would like to have a communication method that was so cheap that it could be built into everything. My $10 alarm clock for example. I'd like to hold it next to a Palm or something and have automatically sync to my time and alarm wake-up already set in the Palm Pilot. (Which is of couse syncronized through NTP or direct GPS connection.)
So lets say I go to a hotel, and the hotel has an alarm clock that I can't figure out how to set correctly (happens a lot) -- I could just beam the current time and alarm time on to the alarm clock. It would save me from actually trying to set the thing correctly, which I haven't figured out how to do.
Put a whole Bluetooth implementation on it and your already out of price range.
Another thing, my POTS phone.. It has all these memory buttons that you can program. I'm not gonna waste my time trying to figure it out. But if I could set the phone to accept entries from Outlook or something.. That'd be great. USB or Bluetooth is just too damn much for my little $12 phone with 20 memories. But that would be the only way I'd ever make use of the memory function. It would also be cool to be able to import my caller ID stuff before deleting it.
I figured it out a long time ago. Engineers and programmers could be outsourced, replaced, or outright eliminated if needed. There are lots of bright English speakers in India who need jobs. They want mine. They've probably already got it.
There are a few places where you can't practically outsource a job. Ever tried outsourcing your car repair to India to fix its air conditioning? Fixing things like air conditioning can be very labor intensive, easily a full day in some cases. It was 105 degrees here in CA today, if my A/C was broken it'd be winter by the time someone in India could have in fixed and back to me. (Including the ocean voyage.)
Another case is health care, if you're sick in a hospital in San Francisco, does it matter that there are nurses in a 3rd World Country? Nope, all the matters is that we don't have enough nurses HERE.
You can't outsource the ice cream shop down the street, you can't outsource the gas station, you can't outsource moving someone from one house to another to somebody in India. You can't outsource services that require a "personal touch."
Here's the plan: Develop the "personal touch" that the person in India can't. Expect to have to change careers. Accept that the 90s are over and you can't work at Starbucks for $10/hr until the economy improves. What you did in the past may not necessarily be what you do in the future, but make a plan for when the future throws you a curve ball.
The ramifications of an National ID card are that the benefits outweigh the downside. I get 6 credit reports a year (3 credit bureaus x 2 times a year) just to make sure that someone isn't opening up Visa cards in my name.
Why do I have to do this? Because the world we live in currently uses my SSN, mothers maiden name, and a computer generated FICO score to determine whether to insure me and extend credit. When this "credit info" is wrong, and so far I've found literally constant errors. It takes 6 months to resolve them.
And anyone can get credit info fairly easily. We absolutely need to implement a national ID system as a way of combatting identity theft and forgery. My SSN and Mothers Maiden Name is not a good security system.
Additionally, flagging everyone named "David Nelson" at the airport because the name is on a no fly list is equally ridiculous. Figure out which David Nelson is your problem and let the other 500 people with the same name go about their business.
The time has come for a National ID card and biometric identifiers for all. I'd rather hold the government responsible for verifying my identity than say Experian or Equifax who can't even figure out which credit cards I have but won't hesistate to generate an inaccurate score based on their wrong information.
I figure that if the government sold off all the TV (VHF/UHF) spectrum, minimally subsidized and launched several spot beam Ka Band satellites to hold the 1600? or so TV stations, and then provided receiviers and dishes (which are cheap) for anyone who couldn't afford one. The problem would be solved.
So, everyone without cable would get their local station from Ka-band satellite for free and your 80 yr old on a fixed income could still watch TV -- for free.
Live on the fringe of town, no problem the spot beam is plenty big enough so that everyones digital picture still looks great.
Terrestrial broadcasting has been a hinderence for far too long. It didn't make sense to do this in the 1930s when TV was in its infancy -- but with current satellite technology I believe it makes sense today.
Maybe we could finally move into the 21st century.. Nahh, why would we do that?
Because ham radio operators don't pay spectrum fees to line the coffers of our government..
I knew I wanted to be an engineer since I was 12. I survived 6 hellish years and graduated. I couldn't get a job.
Had I known the tech industry was headed towards implosion, I think I would have been a Nutrition major. Not because I care about nutrition, but I might have met some attractive women that way!
And jobwise, I doubt I'd be in any different place.
Yeah stealing is stealing, but:
How long did the record companies rake us over the coals with obscene prices for CDs that weren't very good? $18 for one decent song sounds pretty criminal to me and I endured it. My CD collection would be a lot smaller if Napster had been around 10 years ago.
The record companies violated consumers for years. I don't have a problem with "payback." So really, who is stealing from whom? None of these companies are terribly altruistic.
The RIAA is fighting a losing battle. A battle they can't win, so they sue.
God Bless America.
Here in beautiful Sacramento, CA we have something very few others have -- a choice.
Winfirst, purchased by SureWest Broadband, delivers phone / data / cable TV to thousands of Sacramento residents via fiber to the home. Comcast and SBC also offer service, but SureWest is better!
SureWest's data rate for home users is 10 Mbps symmetrical. (And it's pretty rare that I can max that out for any period of time.) I believe I am limited to 30 GB a month before I incur additional charges. I would't know because I can't find 30 GB worth of crap to download in a month.
I would imagine that eventually 100 Mbps service will be available here -- the infrastructure for it already exists. But really -- who needs 100 Mbps at home? You're not serving CNN to millions.
Oh and the price -- the package of cable + 10 Mbps data + 1 phone line comes in at about $100 a month.
All in this lovely community we call Sacramento.. Err the Future Greater Bay Area.
InterTrust own a whole bunch of patents. In fact, that is about all they own. They derive basically all their income from suing other companies who in any way attempt to limit the copying and transferrability of works in the digital space. (a.k.a. Digital Rights Management)
I expect them to sue: Microsoft, OpenTV, Liberate, PowerTV, Nagravision, NDS, Canal Plus, and just about anyone who has anything to do with conditional access if they haven't already.
You can thank overly broad patent protection that allows you to patent an idea (remember 1-click ordering), instead of forcing the patent holder to develop a product or implementation that actually utilizes the idea.
The only thing InterTrust has ever done is create a major payday for lawyers.
Hey, the rest of us got by with Vivarin, Jolt, Mountain Dew, Mr. Pibb and even coffee before the advent of Red Bull..
I could never survive a few of my college programming classes again. 2 1/2 solid days of coding and 4 hour of sleep intermixed just won't work anymore.
But I did turn in a mostly working project!
Skills are the problem. Companies don't want to hire people with vast experience. They hire someone to do a specific job and then dispose of them when the job is done.
.. Not -- designed and built some elaborate system to serve as a backbone using a wide range of technologies they've never heard of! As it's not directly applicable to "coding in C#, C++, blah blah blah".
There is no employer who understands the value of experience, breadth, or anything else. They understand "Codes in C#/C++/C/Java/COM/DCOM/Sys Admin"
The FCC didn't screw up terrerstrial DTV. It was probably unnecessary from the start -- It simply wasn't something the market wanted. Especially since the digital TV signals (QAM/QPSK) from cable/satellite provide crystal clear pictures.
We should have obliterated terrestrial broadcasting altogether and put local stations up on spot beamed satellites. (wait a minute, Dish Network's doing that -- how clever)
So COFDM just needed a box with rabbit ears and everything would be just peachy... Right? Nope.
1. COFDM requires SUBSTANTIALLY more power to replicate existing NTSC coverage than 8-VSB. You think broadcasters spend a lot on power? They would have spent even more under COFDM to attempt to replicate their NTSC coverage area.
2. Your $99 box doesn't exist because nobody wants to build it or buy it. The ICs exist and cheap directional phased array antennas work. (My $4 Silver Sensor antenna gets 8-VSB in some pretty nasty multipath conditions.) The percentage of people who subscribe to cable/satellite makes over the air reception nearly meaningless.
3. COFDM gives you fewer Mbps for a given number of MHz. 8-VSB gives you 19.39 Mbps in 6 Mhz, COFDM requies more spectrum to deliver the same data rate.
4. The 3G spectrum would have been sold off whether the standard was ATSC 8-VSB or COFDM. Europe is a lot smaller than the United States. You can get away with usign COFDM there because you don't have 210 markets (often with very large coverage areas) and a ton of auxilary transmitters to serve the backwoods..
8-VSB, after years of discussion was chosen as the lesser of two evils.
It sounds like this guy found out its much more rewarding to work than to go to school. And doing both just plain sucks. There is no balance -- you pick one and do it seriously. Or you do your 40-50 hours a week at work and take a single class. Yeah, it takes forever, I went to school with a guy who spent about 10 yrs getting his BS doing just that.
I tried to balance school and work for a couple years, it didn't work. It hurt me in school and I was over stressed at work from my school demands. I finished college and quit working to do it.
Your mileage may vary.
I've got WinFirst, now Surewest Broadband.
It kicks ass. Its everything FTTH was supposed to be. I'd heard the pipe dreams about how FTTH was gonna change my life and how everything would be reliable and just work -- guess what -- it does.
I have fiber-to-the-home. It's great. It never goes out. I actually GET 10 Mbps throughput (as advertised)... It is rolled together in a package with my Basic Cable + HBO/Cinemax, + Phone Service (w/ 100 minutes LD included) all for about $130 a month. One company, one bill, & a company where people who answer the phone.. Once you've got it, you find it's undesirable to live without. And the price, it's about what I use to pay for 2 phone lines, Dial-Up Internet Access, and Cable TV. So for the same money, I get a lot more. (No longer need the second phone line since the computers no longer need to dial up. But if I did, it's only another $10/mo and I can have up to 4 lines with no additional equipment.)
The company did some Cat 5 wiring for me as part of the install and the couple of computers in the house plug into a NAT box.
You wouldn't believe how fast those Microsoft Service Packs download!
Why Fiber? Because AT&T Broadband couldn't deliver me a dedicated 10 Mbps (in both directions) in their wildest dreams. You think you can get by with less, but when I was a kid, those guys with 2400 baud modems were on the bleeding edge! Then it was 9600, then 28.8k. Now I've got 10 Mbps and wonder if they'll be swapping out my home demarcation unit for one that delivers 100 Mbps instead in a couple of years.
Hey, at least it's an option for me!
The guy in the article had an MBA. Still -- He was paid well. However, this doesn't mean graduating engineers deserve to make 50k if they are extrordinarily lucky. (Entry level jobs are scarse, people will mortgages to pay will take them when all else fails..)
There is some middle ground between $25k and $125k and the $25k deserves to go to the person who partied for 4 years while the rest of us studied.
Just my 2 cents.
6 years including about 18 months of full time work in the REAL WORLD.. Plus changing schools, and changing majors.
If I had started where I finished, I would have been done in 3 1/2, class availability permitting.
In California, 5 to 5 1/2 years is about the norm for someone in Engineering. Not including going to work FULL TIME.
This is just sad.. Going from making $125k to making crepes.
I know it's happening more and more. Why did I go to college for 6 years? It doesn't seem to improve my job prospects over all those liberal arts majors I thought were slackers.. At least they were content to enter the economy and make crepes..
The over the air terrestrial standard is NTSC. When the transmitters are digital, it will be 8-VSB. However, cable TV operators utilize QAM-64 and QAM-256 to pack more bits into a given channel. The digital cable box you rent is there to decode QAM. Wouldn't it make sense if the QAM decoder were integrated into the TV set? You would no longer need the cable box. Adding 8-VSB capability to a TV wouldn't change the fact that most people will STILL get their digital signals via QAM, not 8-VSB.
Hopefully I've better clarified my position.
Since most cable systems send their digital tiers in QAM, shouldn't the manufacturers be concentrating on that, considering on how few people receive their TV off the air?
I recently ditched my WD 8.4 GB drive. Not that there was anything wrong with it, nor had I even filled it. In fact, I had only used up 4 of the 8.4 GB is the 4 years I'd had it.
Why did I get rid of it? Because the WD 80 GB model was only $100 after rebate. And now that I have all this space, guess how much of it I use? 8 GB. This is after I loaded every conceivable thing I had (and every option available in each program. Yep, Street Atlas no longer needs a CD to run.
And so, after putting everything I had on the thing. I still can't fill it. Maybe a TiVo needs it, but I've probably got enough hard drive space to last me another 5 years.. That's gotta be music to the ears of hard drive manufacturers struggling to make a profit!
I might just have to infringe on this guys patent now that I know it exists.. I'm upset that he doesn't credit Isaac Newton for our basic laws of physics, without which, his invention would be impossible.
This is a pretty good example of whats wrong with patents..
Here in lovely Sacramento, we have one thing I've never seen anywhere else.. A choice.
1. AT&T offers cable modems
2. Pac Bell offers phone/DSL
3. A new company called WinFirst (now in Ch. 11, but still operating) offers FTTH.
Heres what I get for about $130/mo.
1 - Phone line with 100 minutes LD, voice mail, caller ID, etc, etc, etc.
2 - All the basic local & Cable TV + 26 HBO/Cinemax.
3 - 10 Mbps symmetrical Internet access. And if only I could find a server that could keep up! I'm limited to 30 GB per month, but you can buy more. But 30 GB goes pretty far.
4. All delivered on fiber by a company who answers the phone. The cable system is crystal clear. Has VOD services.. It's quite cool.
1. DWDM -- OC768 is coming your way and a lot of badly beat down telecom providers want to sell it.. BAD. Think they'll give ya a discount if yo buy a bunch of units?
2. Theres so much fiber in the ground on long haul routes that if there is ever anything resembling a shortage in my lifetime, I'd be impressed.
3. It's not nearly as expensive as the article poses to setup electronics on fiber. It's not $1 to install a fiber and $20 to put electronics on it. It just doesn't work like that.. Dug up the street lately? It costs a fortune.. Attaching the fiber to the Gigabit Ethernet port is far less.
4. Greed -- If there is money to be made, the bandwidth will be created.. It's called the law of supply and demand..