Boston was supposedly the first metro area they rolled out FiOS, and while almost every suburb has it around here their urban penetration has been exactly ZERO.
While Slashdotters are often more interested in FiOS internet service, it's cable television services which call the shots. To offer cable in a locality, Verizon must first obtain a license from the city or town. As of now, the City of Boston has not granted them a license. Looking at the City's website, I don't see any evidence that Verizon has applied for a license either.
Maybe you should call them to see where the licensing procedure stands?
No, it has more to do with which carriers are dominant in different regions.
Verizon is the successor to two of the regional operating companies spun off after the 1984 AT&T divestiture, Bell Atlantic, which covered the mid-Atlantic region, and NYNEX, which merged New England Telephone and New York Telephone. That means the east coast (north of Virginia) has much more FiOS penetration than the rest of the US.
Comcast also has a large presence in the northeast. Regardless of your opinion of their policies, Comcast has offered cable internet service for many years now.
So I suspect the higher speeds on the east coast have more to do with which providers serve these areas than anything else.
The cited study, by the Communication Workers of America, is based on tests taken by people who visited their web site the chance to measure their speeds. Well, I don't know about you, but I've never visited the CWA site, but I bet a lot of CWA members do, and I bet most of them have pretty high-speed connections. Studies like this with self-selected respondents have only minimal "external validity" since the results aren't based on random sampling methods. ("External validity" concerns whether the results of a study can be generalized to some larger universe of interest. In the case of the CWA study, they cannot.)
The thing that's different with Facebook / MySpace spam is that often, they're definitely stealing someone's password to post stuff as them. That is (or should be) squarely in the realm of "breaking into a computer system".
Whether violations of a site's terms of service should be considered actionable under the terms of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Acts is now being litigated in the Justice Department's suit against Lori Drew. Many civil libertarians like myself oppose this suit because it looks like overreaching on the part of the Justice Department. If the Drew prosecution is successful, it puts the power of Federal law behind the private terms of service between an online provider and its members.
Stealing passwords might be more plausibly criminalized, but how would you handle someone like Drew who set up bogus MySpace accounts to harass as young girl? What if she used those accounts to send spam instead?
Sorry, but I think the Federal government has its nose in too much of our lives already, and I'm not willing to say that whatever onerous terms of service some website operator comes up with deserves the protection of Federal statutes.
What's perhaps more surprising is the total failure of "teletext" and other "videotext" projects that employed the vertical blanking interval in television broadcasts. Using broacast systems was obviously preferable to 300-baud modems, but these technologies didn't prosper either. As a guess, I suspect the deep-seated suspicion, perhaps even hostility, between newspaper and broadcast organizations played an important role here.
The other technological dead-end of this period was "interactive" cable services like Warner's CUBE system that was tested in Ohio during the 1980's. The FCC had long mandated that cable operators include technologies to enable upstream communications that could have provided a wide array of on-demand services, but they simply failed to materialize. Some cable operators did use these technologies for things like alarm systems in competition with ADT and Brinks, but few if any ever implemented even menu-driven information systems, never mind services like online shopping or banking. Again I think organizational imperatives played a significant role here; cable operators were interested in delivering content to passive audiences. Like the other traditional media organizations they just weren't able to comprehend that the audience might have something to say as well.
There are a variety of IP surveillance systems on the market designed for people who want to monitor their vacation homes, etc. Most of these are pretty inexpensive and easy to configure. That might be easier than building your own system using PCs.
This company seems to offer a wide variety of solutions, some standalone, some PC based: www.fgeng.com
Any ideas about whether the RHEL compromise threatened the integrity of the CentOS repositories? My guess is probably not, since CentOS has a separate signing key, etc., but it would be nice to hear someone say so officially.
I have a 20/5 business FiOS account. I have yet to visit any server (other than speed testing sites) that can saturate my connnection. I can reach 1+ Mbyte/sec download speeds with well-populated torrents, but that's still far below my 20 Mbit download speed. I could upgrade to higher speeds, but what difference would it actually make in practice?
My understanding is that the content industries have often stressed the export value of their products more than their contribution to domestic revenues. I've tried once again in vain to find the statistical backing for these claims, but I cannot find any tables at either the Census Bureau or the trade-related agencies that break out data for things like overseas music and movie royalties. The only data I can find is for licensing fees for all types of intellectual property, which includes many other things like patent licenses.
Nevertheless as US merchandise exports, particularly manufacturing exports, fell over the past couple of decades, the contribution to exports from intellectual property grew substantially. I believe the content industries often stress this fact in lobbying more than the contribution of their member companies to total GDP.
So gmail has its own blog; you'd be hard-pressed to discover that fact on the "About Google" page. You can find a link to it on the Google Blog page, but it's buried among dozens of other blogs.
So I did miss this one, but it's not like Google felt the need to explain themselves in a visible manner.
I scan Slashdot nearly every day and didn't remember seeing anything about outages at Google this past week. A search through the story history confirmed that fact. So I thought I'd visit google.com and see what Google itself had to say. Nothing on the blog; nothing in the press section.
So why is this the first time these outages have been discussed here? From reading the article it appears we're talking about multiple outages over the past couple of weeks. Doing a Google search for "google outages" brings up one blog posting about these recent events. The blog posting includes this unsourced quotation, "Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said via e-mail that 'a small number' of Gmail users and 'some' Apps users were impacted by the problem, which is still outstanding and being worked on as of 5:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Friday."
So all these events seem rather shrouded in mystery. How big was the outage? What explanations did Google give for the outage? I've certainly had servers go down, lost network connectivity, etc., etc., but I don't maintain huge server farms with enormous redundancy and multiple high-bandwith connections to the Internet. I don't recall search on Google ever going down; what's up with gmail and Apps?
The suspicious among us might start to think that outside parties might be responsible. After all, if companies start migrating to the "cloud," disrupting those services could have a substantial, economy-wide impact.
it's dead simple (compared to other OSes) to remote-administer (which is a huge feature Windows over virtually all other OSes, and I think the number one reason it's so popular among corporations.)
So what have I been doing this past decade using SSH to edit configuration files on remote machines? I guess that doesn't constitute remote administration in your view. Also, I doubt this is why Windows is "so popular" among corporations. I can probably come up with a dozen more pertinent reasons than this one, starting with the inertia that derives from having a workforce that has largely known nothing else in their lives other than Windows.
Not if you're a sysadmin and you want to change, or disable, a setting across 30,000 computers at once.
I can think of lots of ways to do this. The most appealing method would be to learn how to use a package manager and an updater like yum or synaptic. Set up a local repository in your corporation for configuration data and have the machines update automatically each night.
Or you could just run a script on the machine that uses wget to download the changes each night. Really, it's not that hard unless you're committed to the GUI as the only means of configuration.
And this is an advantage to system manufacturers how, exactly?
The entire PC world has operated for years with a business model that relies on very short product lifespans and repeated replacement and upgrades. If your business is selling hardware, why would you want to encourage people to retain their older machines?
Add to that the synergy that comes from Microsoft rewriting Windows every few years so that it requires all that new hardware to run properly. The pressure to replace "outmoded" computers with new ones far outweighs the desire to keep running the same old machines with the same old software.
You're right; ffmpeg/mplayer does do just about anything out of the box. (I'm really not sure why more distros, especially Ubuntu, don't include it.)
It's not legal to distribute ffmpeg (or a variety of other codecs like MP3) in the United States without paying licensing fees. So any totally-free distribution cannot include them. As for DVDs, libdvdcss not only infringes, it's also illegal to distribute under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act since it is based on reverse-engineering an encryption technology.
While distros could build different versions that could be shipped into different countries depending on their legal regimes, in practice this is probably more work than it's worth. I'd love to be able to buy a copy of Fedora or Ubuntu with a complete suite of licensed codecs and support for viewing DVDs (and Blu-Rays, too). What we have instead is more of a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" system where the proprietary bits are kept on servers outside the US.
I'd add to this the question as to why everyone keeps concentrating on home users in the discussion of desktop Linux. There are millions of desktops in businesses all around the world. Whether Linux supports gaming isn't really a relevant question for them. A bigger problem is communicating with people who use the moving target known as Microsoft Office. I can't get one of my clients to even consider moving their desktops to Linux because they have to deal with files sent by their customters, and nowadays these come in Office 2007 formats. Since most of their desktop users have trouble opening and printing a file, never mind converting between formats, Linux won't be a desktop contender for this client. Desktop virtualization might help, but why bother since you'd need a Windows license anyway?
And, playing games has nothing to do with this decision.
Every discussion of desktop Linux on Slashdot comes down to whining about playing PC games. Trust me, there are a lot of computers in use out there for which gaming is not only unnecessary but also undesireable.
Well I know of a least one line of media players that supports Ogg (and FLAC, Matroska, etc.), and I haven't heard of their being sued for it. Perhaps it's because they're a Korean company, but I'd be surprised if that's the only reason. Why isn't the chipset manufacturer being sued?
So why don't Motorola or Scientific Atlanta sell their set-top boxes directly to consumers? You don't seem particularly disturbed by your comment that "the companies that make the boxes are under contract with the service providers to only distribute their boxes to those companies." To me that sounds like a restraint of trade.
Isn't it at least an open question whether the requirement that I lease a box from my cable operator constitutes an illegal "tying arrangement?" I'd be more than happy to buy a Moto DVR direct from Motorola or from a retailer instead of leasing one from my cable operator. Why shouldn't I be able to do that?
The broadcasts have commercials because the cable subscription fees go to the cable company. Broadcasters only get money if they are a Pay-per view service or a separate subscription (usually movie channels like HBO).
Surely you realize that the cable operators also pay the programming services for the rights to carry their programs? For the most popular channels like ESPN, these fees are quite substantial. Disney reported recently that carriage fees and ESPN ad revenues were "the company's single largest profit driver" in the second quarter of 2008. In fact, Disney has been leveraging ESPN's popularity to force cable operators to carry all its cable networks if they want to carry ESPN.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but many local teams have moved their games to pay services. Some of these channels (like the New England Sports Network) are advertiser-supported and carried on cable programming tiers, while a few are still a pay-per-channel service similar to HBO.
In the case of the Boston Red Sox, probably some 140 or more of their 162 games are on NESN. The national outlets, Fox and ESPN, carry the occasional game (usually Red Sox vs. Yankees), but certainly not enough to satisfy the desires of most fans who want complete season coverage.
In the Boston market, neither the Red Sox nor the Celtics are available on local television. The Patriots (football) are on the local CBS and FOX affiliates, but that's because the NFL has a league-wide deal with its broadcast outlets. When the Red Sox were sold to their new owners a couple of years back, one of the most important parts of the package was NESN. At the time it was valued at about $750 million, or about a quarter of the entire price of $3 billion. After ending the World Series drought in 2004, NESN's value increased substantially. Since there are only a fixed number of seats in Fenway Park, much of the potential for revenue growth potential lies in services like NESN and expansion to international markets like Japan.
Sadly, American sports commentators have been told that "dead air" is absolutely the worst possible thing that could happen during a telecast. I don't really know why this has become the norm in the US. Dead air was obviously anathema to radio, but with television it makes little sense. Other countries' networks seem perfectly happy simply to show the events unfold on screen with an occasional comment from the announcers. I have to assume the American practice shows how little regard the producers have for their viewers, since the producers appear to believe we cannot fathom what we see on screen without the comments of some retired athlete to guide us.
I find myself making this comment in every discussion about voting systems.
Americans face a much more complicated ballot than voters in most other countries, especially those with parliamentary systems like Canada. In parliamentary elections, voters cast a ballot for just a single office -- the representative of their constituency, riding, etc. American ballots often contain contests for a number of different offices as well as referenda and initiative petitions.
Counting ballots for single office by hand is a much easier task than counting and recounting those ballots perhaps a dozen different times to tally all the various contents. That said, we already have a quite reliable technology to facilitate vote counting, the optical-scan device. All the evidence suggests that optically-scanned ballots are quick to count and have high reliability.
Banks have a lot more money to spend on ATMs than election officials have to spend on voting machines. Banks also have a lot more to lose if the machines malfunction.
I still find the antivirus explanation laughable. Was the AV software running on the voting machines? Was it running on the server to which the results failed to be sent? When I buy a voting system, isn't the manufacturer responsible for both ends of this connection?
The only virus I can think of that might infect a voting machine is the kind Ed Felten created to demonstrate how vulnerable these things are, and to install that you had to open the machine.
I wondered the same thing when Microsoft announced the end of its service.
Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires some type of licensing fees as long as the server is available online? Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires them to take the server down once the music service itself is discontinued? I can imagine either or both of these being true.
The link points not to any decision, but to a dissent by Byron White objecting to the Supreme Court's decision not to hear on the case on appeal. The Court never explains why it chooses not hear a case, but Justices can publish a dissent from that decision if they feel it's warranted. There is no precedent established here, at least in the sense of a Supreme Court ruling.
Moreover, if you read White's dissent, he points out that tying agreements are not always per se illegal and can in some cases be pro-competitive. If anything his dissent, and the fact that the Court did not take on the Data General case, tells me that the law here is sufficiently murky that the relevance of this decision to the Apple/Psystar case is debatable.
Do you really think that, if the law is as clear-cut as you think, Apple would be undertaking this litigation? My guess is that Apple's attorneys believe that the DG case does not provide a sufficient precedent to decide automatically in favor of Psystar. We'll see if the courts agree.
ABC/ESPN chose 720p because they claimed it handled live motion sequences like sporting events better than 1080i. NBC and CBS are both in 1080i, I believe. I think Fox is 720p as well.
I can't tell what the native resolutions are any more since my Motorola box from FiOS upscales everything to 1080i. Personally I'd rather let the scaler in my nice Sony HDTV handle this function rather than some crappy circuitry in a set-top box. Comcast, in contrast, used a Moto box that passed through the HD signals and let the TV handle them. OTOH, Comcast is well known for compressing HD content to fit additional channels into its infrastructure; FiOS claims that it does not further compress its retransmitted content. If you're interested in these matters, I recommend spending some time browsing AVS Forum.
This makes it sound like you think moving from Windows to Linux is akin to a religious conversion. I'd bet a good fraction of Linux users have no clue what the definition of "Open Source" is according to the OSI website. Why should they? How about those Taiwanese housewives purchasing Asus Eee PCs we read about here the other day? Do they need to read the OSI website? How about folks running a router that uses Linux?
People want to use the computers to accomplish tasks. I know this bothers people like Richard Stallman, but it doesn't trouble me one iota. I advocate "open" and "free" solutions as often as possible, but there are many cases where there is no open alternative. I have a friend who is a psychotherapist who uses a program called Therapist Helper. It basically owns the market for practice-management software in its field, and it runs on Windows. She's looking to buy a new, lightweight notebook, and I'm hoping we can get Therapist Helper to run under Wine so she can use a Linux Eee PC. I guess that makes me a sell-out in the eyes of the only-Free-Software crowd, but I don't really care. What it would also mean is that, for the vast array of other things she uses a computer for, she can be running open software. Why isn't that a net benefit to her and to the developers of open applications?
Slashdot Mirror
Boston was supposedly the first metro area they rolled out FiOS, and while almost every suburb has it around here their urban penetration has been exactly ZERO.
While Slashdotters are often more interested in FiOS internet service, it's cable television services which call the shots. To offer cable in a locality, Verizon must first obtain a license from the city or town. As of now, the City of Boston has not granted them a license. Looking at the City's website, I don't see any evidence that Verizon has applied for a license either.
Maybe you should call them to see where the licensing procedure stands?
No, it has more to do with which carriers are dominant in different regions.
Verizon is the successor to two of the regional operating companies spun off after the 1984 AT&T divestiture, Bell Atlantic, which covered the mid-Atlantic region, and NYNEX, which merged New England Telephone and New York Telephone. That means the east coast (north of Virginia) has much more FiOS penetration than the rest of the US.
Comcast also has a large presence in the northeast. Regardless of your opinion of their policies, Comcast has offered cable internet service for many years now.
So I suspect the higher speeds on the east coast have more to do with which providers serve these areas than anything else.
The cited study, by the Communication Workers of America, is based on tests taken by people who visited their web site the chance to measure their speeds. Well, I don't know about you, but I've never visited the CWA site, but I bet a lot of CWA members do, and I bet most of them have pretty high-speed connections. Studies like this with self-selected respondents have only minimal "external validity" since the results aren't based on random sampling methods. ("External validity" concerns whether the results of a study can be generalized to some larger universe of interest. In the case of the CWA study, they cannot.)
The thing that's different with Facebook / MySpace spam is that often, they're definitely stealing someone's password to post stuff as them. That is (or should be) squarely in the realm of "breaking into a computer system".
Whether violations of a site's terms of service should be considered actionable under the terms of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Acts is now being litigated in the Justice Department's suit against Lori Drew. Many civil libertarians like myself oppose this suit because it looks like overreaching on the part of the Justice Department. If the Drew prosecution is successful, it puts the power of Federal law behind the private terms of service between an online provider and its members.
Stealing passwords might be more plausibly criminalized, but how would you handle someone like Drew who set up bogus MySpace accounts to harass as young girl? What if she used those accounts to send spam instead?
Sorry, but I think the Federal government has its nose in too much of our lives already, and I'm not willing to say that whatever onerous terms of service some website operator comes up with deserves the protection of Federal statutes.
What's perhaps more surprising is the total failure of "teletext" and other "videotext" projects that employed the vertical blanking interval in television broadcasts. Using broacast systems was obviously preferable to 300-baud modems, but these technologies didn't prosper either. As a guess, I suspect the deep-seated suspicion, perhaps even hostility, between newspaper and broadcast organizations played an important role here.
The other technological dead-end of this period was "interactive" cable services like Warner's CUBE system that was tested in Ohio during the 1980's. The FCC had long mandated that cable operators include technologies to enable upstream communications that could have provided a wide array of on-demand services, but they simply failed to materialize. Some cable operators did use these technologies for things like alarm systems in competition with ADT and Brinks, but few if any ever implemented even menu-driven information systems, never mind services like online shopping or banking. Again I think organizational imperatives played a significant role here; cable operators were interested in delivering content to passive audiences. Like the other traditional media organizations they just weren't able to comprehend that the audience might have something to say as well.
There are a variety of IP surveillance systems on the market designed for people who want to monitor their vacation homes, etc. Most of these are pretty inexpensive and easy to configure. That might be easier than building your own system using PCs.
This company seems to offer a wide variety of solutions, some standalone, some PC based: www.fgeng.com
Any ideas about whether the RHEL compromise threatened the integrity of the CentOS repositories? My guess is probably not, since CentOS has a separate signing key, etc., but it would be nice to hear someone say so officially.
I have a 20/5 business FiOS account. I have yet to visit any server (other than speed testing sites) that can saturate my connnection. I can reach 1+ Mbyte/sec download speeds with well-populated torrents, but that's still far below my 20 Mbit download speed. I could upgrade to higher speeds, but what difference would it actually make in practice?
My understanding is that the content industries have often stressed the export value of their products more than their contribution to domestic revenues. I've tried once again in vain to find the statistical backing for these claims, but I cannot find any tables at either the Census Bureau or the trade-related agencies that break out data for things like overseas music and movie royalties. The only data I can find is for licensing fees for all types of intellectual property, which includes many other things like patent licenses.
Nevertheless as US merchandise exports, particularly manufacturing exports, fell over the past couple of decades, the contribution to exports from intellectual property grew substantially. I believe the content industries often stress this fact in lobbying more than the contribution of their member companies to total GDP.
So gmail has its own blog; you'd be hard-pressed to discover that fact on the "About Google" page. You can find a link to it on the Google Blog page, but it's buried among dozens of other blogs.
So I did miss this one, but it's not like Google felt the need to explain themselves in a visible manner.
I scan Slashdot nearly every day and didn't remember seeing anything about outages at Google this past week. A search through the story history confirmed that fact. So I thought I'd visit google.com and see what Google itself had to say. Nothing on the blog; nothing in the press section.
So why is this the first time these outages have been discussed here? From reading the article it appears we're talking about multiple outages over the past couple of weeks. Doing a Google search for "google outages" brings up one blog posting about these recent events. The blog posting includes this unsourced quotation, "Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said via e-mail that 'a small number' of Gmail users and 'some' Apps users were impacted by the problem, which is still outstanding and being worked on as of 5:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Friday."
So all these events seem rather shrouded in mystery. How big was the outage? What explanations did Google give for the outage? I've certainly had servers go down, lost network connectivity, etc., etc., but I don't maintain huge server farms with enormous redundancy and multiple high-bandwith connections to the Internet. I don't recall search on Google ever going down; what's up with gmail and Apps?
The suspicious among us might start to think that outside parties might be responsible. After all, if companies start migrating to the "cloud," disrupting those services could have a substantial, economy-wide impact.
it's dead simple (compared to other OSes) to remote-administer (which is a huge feature Windows over virtually all other OSes, and I think the number one reason it's so popular among corporations.)
So what have I been doing this past decade using SSH to edit configuration files on remote machines? I guess that doesn't constitute remote administration in your view. Also, I doubt this is why Windows is "so popular" among corporations. I can probably come up with a dozen more pertinent reasons than this one, starting with the inertia that derives from having a workforce that has largely known nothing else in their lives other than Windows.
Not if you're a sysadmin and you want to change, or disable, a setting across 30,000 computers at once.
I can think of lots of ways to do this. The most appealing method would be to learn how to use a package manager and an updater like yum or synaptic. Set up a local repository in your corporation for configuration data and have the machines update automatically each night.
Or you could just run a script on the machine that uses wget to download the changes each night. Really, it's not that hard unless you're committed to the GUI as the only means of configuration.
And this is an advantage to system manufacturers how, exactly?
The entire PC world has operated for years with a business model that relies on very short product lifespans and repeated replacement and upgrades. If your business is selling hardware, why would you want to encourage people to retain their older machines?
Add to that the synergy that comes from Microsoft rewriting Windows every few years so that it requires all that new hardware to run properly. The pressure to replace "outmoded" computers with new ones far outweighs the desire to keep running the same old machines with the same old software.
You're right; ffmpeg/mplayer does do just about anything out of the box. (I'm really not sure why more distros, especially Ubuntu, don't include it.)
It's not legal to distribute ffmpeg (or a variety of other codecs like MP3) in the United States without paying licensing fees. So any totally-free distribution cannot include them. As for DVDs, libdvdcss not only infringes, it's also illegal to distribute under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act since it is based on reverse-engineering an encryption technology.
While distros could build different versions that could be shipped into different countries depending on their legal regimes, in practice this is probably more work than it's worth. I'd love to be able to buy a copy of Fedora or Ubuntu with a complete suite of licensed codecs and support for viewing DVDs (and Blu-Rays, too). What we have instead is more of a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" system where the proprietary bits are kept on servers outside the US.
I'd add to this the question as to why everyone keeps concentrating on home users in the discussion of desktop Linux. There are millions of desktops in businesses all around the world. Whether Linux supports gaming isn't really a relevant question for them. A bigger problem is communicating with people who use the moving target known as Microsoft Office. I can't get one of my clients to even consider moving their desktops to Linux because they have to deal with files sent by their customters, and nowadays these come in Office 2007 formats. Since most of their desktop users have trouble opening and printing a file, never mind converting between formats, Linux won't be a desktop contender for this client. Desktop virtualization might help, but why bother since you'd need a Windows license anyway?
And, playing games has nothing to do with this decision.
Every discussion of desktop Linux on Slashdot comes down to whining about playing PC games. Trust me, there are a lot of computers in use out there for which gaming is not only unnecessary but also undesireable.
Well I know of a least one line of media players that supports Ogg (and FLAC, Matroska, etc.), and I haven't heard of their being sued for it. Perhaps it's because they're a Korean company, but I'd be surprised if that's the only reason. Why isn't the chipset manufacturer being sued?
So why don't Motorola or Scientific Atlanta sell their set-top boxes directly to consumers? You don't seem particularly disturbed by your comment that "the companies that make the boxes are under contract with the service providers to only distribute their boxes to those companies." To me that sounds like a restraint of trade.
Isn't it at least an open question whether the requirement that I lease a box from my cable operator constitutes an illegal "tying arrangement?" I'd be more than happy to buy a Moto DVR direct from Motorola or from a retailer instead of leasing one from my cable operator. Why shouldn't I be able to do that?
The broadcasts have commercials because the cable subscription fees go to the cable company. Broadcasters only get money if they are a Pay-per view service or a separate subscription (usually movie channels like HBO).
Surely you realize that the cable operators also pay the programming services for the rights to carry their programs? For the most popular channels like ESPN, these fees are quite substantial. Disney reported recently that carriage fees and ESPN ad revenues were "the company's single largest profit driver" in the second quarter of 2008. In fact, Disney has been leveraging ESPN's popularity to force cable operators to carry all its cable networks if they want to carry ESPN.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but many local teams have moved their games to pay services. Some of these channels (like the New England Sports Network) are advertiser-supported and carried on cable programming tiers, while a few are still a pay-per-channel service similar to HBO.
In the case of the Boston Red Sox, probably some 140 or more of their 162 games are on NESN. The national outlets, Fox and ESPN, carry the occasional game (usually Red Sox vs. Yankees), but certainly not enough to satisfy the desires of most fans who want complete season coverage.
In the Boston market, neither the Red Sox nor the Celtics are available on local television. The Patriots (football) are on the local CBS and FOX affiliates, but that's because the NFL has a league-wide deal with its broadcast outlets. When the Red Sox were sold to their new owners a couple of years back, one of the most important parts of the package was NESN. At the time it was valued at about $750 million, or about a quarter of the entire price of $3 billion. After ending the World Series drought in 2004, NESN's value increased substantially. Since there are only a fixed number of seats in Fenway Park, much of the potential for revenue growth potential lies in services like NESN and expansion to international markets like Japan.
Sadly, American sports commentators have been told that "dead air" is absolutely the worst possible thing that could happen during a telecast. I don't really know why this has become the norm in the US. Dead air was obviously anathema to radio, but with television it makes little sense. Other countries' networks seem perfectly happy simply to show the events unfold on screen with an occasional comment from the announcers. I have to assume the American practice shows how little regard the producers have for their viewers, since the producers appear to believe we cannot fathom what we see on screen without the comments of some retired athlete to guide us.
I find myself making this comment in every discussion about voting systems.
Americans face a much more complicated ballot than voters in most other countries, especially those with parliamentary systems like Canada. In parliamentary elections, voters cast a ballot for just a single office -- the representative of their constituency, riding, etc. American ballots often contain contests for a number of different offices as well as referenda and initiative petitions.
Counting ballots for single office by hand is a much easier task than counting and recounting those ballots perhaps a dozen different times to tally all the various contents. That said, we already have a quite reliable technology to facilitate vote counting, the optical-scan device. All the evidence suggests that optically-scanned ballots are quick to count and have high reliability.
Banks have a lot more money to spend on ATMs than election officials have to spend on voting machines. Banks also have a lot more to lose if the machines malfunction.
I still find the antivirus explanation laughable. Was the AV software running on the voting machines? Was it running on the server to which the results failed to be sent? When I buy a voting system, isn't the manufacturer responsible for both ends of this connection?
The only virus I can think of that might infect a voting machine is the kind Ed Felten created to demonstrate how vulnerable these things are, and to install that you had to open the machine.
I wondered the same thing when Microsoft announced the end of its service.
Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires some type of licensing fees as long as the server is available online? Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires them to take the server down once the music service itself is discontinued? I can imagine either or both of these being true.
The link points not to any decision, but to a dissent by Byron White objecting to the Supreme Court's decision not to hear on the case on appeal. The Court never explains why it chooses not hear a case, but Justices can publish a dissent from that decision if they feel it's warranted. There is no precedent established here, at least in the sense of a Supreme Court ruling.
Moreover, if you read White's dissent, he points out that tying agreements are not always per se illegal and can in some cases be pro-competitive. If anything his dissent, and the fact that the Court did not take on the Data General case, tells me that the law here is sufficiently murky that the relevance of this decision to the Apple/Psystar case is debatable.
Do you really think that, if the law is as clear-cut as you think, Apple would be undertaking this litigation? My guess is that Apple's attorneys believe that the DG case does not provide a sufficient precedent to decide automatically in favor of Psystar. We'll see if the courts agree.
ABC/ESPN chose 720p because they claimed it handled live motion sequences like sporting events better than 1080i. NBC and CBS are both in 1080i, I believe. I think Fox is 720p as well.
I can't tell what the native resolutions are any more since my Motorola box from FiOS upscales everything to 1080i. Personally I'd rather let the scaler in my nice Sony HDTV handle this function rather than some crappy circuitry in a set-top box. Comcast, in contrast, used a Moto box that passed through the HD signals and let the TV handle them. OTOH, Comcast is well known for compressing HD content to fit additional channels into its infrastructure; FiOS claims that it does not further compress its retransmitted content. If you're interested in these matters, I recommend spending some time browsing AVS Forum.
This makes it sound like you think moving from Windows to Linux is akin to a religious conversion. I'd bet a good fraction of Linux users have no clue what the definition of "Open Source" is according to the OSI website. Why should they? How about those Taiwanese housewives purchasing Asus Eee PCs we read about here the other day? Do they need to read the OSI website? How about folks running a router that uses Linux?
People want to use the computers to accomplish tasks. I know this bothers people like Richard Stallman, but it doesn't trouble me one iota. I advocate "open" and "free" solutions as often as possible, but there are many cases where there is no open alternative. I have a friend who is a psychotherapist who uses a program called Therapist Helper. It basically owns the market for practice-management software in its field, and it runs on Windows. She's looking to buy a new, lightweight notebook, and I'm hoping we can get Therapist Helper to run under Wine so she can use a Linux Eee PC. I guess that makes me a sell-out in the eyes of the only-Free-Software crowd, but I don't really care. What it would also mean is that, for the vast array of other things she uses a computer for, she can be running open software. Why isn't that a net benefit to her and to the developers of open applications?