It's really a question of the type of task at hand. Computers are very good at simple mathematical calculations and they do them much quicker and more reliably than any human can do.
On the other hand, humans are much better at perceptual analysis (e.g. pattern recognition, visual-spatial perception, etc.) and making reasonable decisions based on incomplete and possibly conflicting data. These are the types of tasks that computers fail miserably at.
If I had to add 1,000 numbers, I'd take a computer over a human any day. But if I had a complicated situation where decisions need to be made quickly and with ambiguous data where there's often no "single, clear" solution, I'd much prefer a human.
I submit that surgery is like the latter situation, so even a "med school flunky" would be better than a robot.
That said, this is a moot point since the robot we're talking about isn't autonomous and makes *zero* decisions by itself. It's closer to a remote control device that allows surgeons to make more precise movements and also see better inside the chest without having to open it up.
I don't know if this is the original article you were talking about... (posted on Slashdot by me several years ago)
Some of us old farts on slashdot may remember when Wired Magazine actually ran insightful articles. Here was one that I thought was particularly good. It's called The Great HDTV Swindle. I very highly recommend reading it if you're interested in the whole process by which the HDTV standard in this country was established, in all its ugly detail.
Basically, here's the gist: Broadcast companies could care less about broadcasting HDTV. For all their talk about drastically improving the quality of television, their eyes are on the really big asset they're sitting on: their spectrum.
First, a little history. (Sorry for the slight tangent, but bear with me:-) Unbeknownst to most people, network TV stations are the only companies in the country that get free transmission spectrum. This was done in 1932 (or sometime around then) when there were few other uses for the bandwidth and the government wanted to encourage broadcasting because they felt it would be in the public good to have universal access to this new communications medium. Since then, of course, that spectrum has become incredibly valuable, but the broadcasters continue to get it for free.
Enter HDTV. Using modern compression standards, broadcasters can fit the entire datastream of an HDTV picture into the same 6MHz T.V. channel currently used for NTSC. But broadcast companies started looking at it the other way around. Using modern compression standards, they could fit 6 NTSC channels into one spectrum slice. Or... they could fit 1 NTSC channel into 1/6 the slice, and use the other 5/6 slice for other services e.g. data transmission, cell phones, etc. After all, they're getting a full 6Mhz for free; if they can continue their current broadcasts (thereby continuing their current revenue) and add other profitable services without having to pay for the spectrum, why not?
Look at it this way: they could either use the 6Mhz to a) transmit 1 HDTV channel b) transmit 6 NTSC channels c) transmit 1 NTSC channel and a bunch of other services. It's clear that options b & c would be far more profitable than option a. This is why there is no one HDTV standard, but a whole spectrum of standards. Note how NTSC defines one picture standard, but HDTV defines 18 (all of which must be supported by a TV in order for it to be sold as an "HDTV")! One of those happens to include compressed, digitized NTSC...
Grease the palms of our honorable legislators enough, and it's not hard to get a sweet deal. And the networks are sitting on an incredibly sweet deal. First of all, they can decide which picture standard to use (ranging in quality from crappy NTSC to fullblown HDTV) assured that consumers have paid for the expensive decoder chips to watch whichever standard they choose to broadcast. Secondly, they can decide which mix of channels/services/etc. is the most profitable for them with no regulation whatsoever that forces them to use their spectrum for actually broadcasting HDTV. And they can do it all on free spectrum that otherwise would have cost them $70 billion (according to estimates of how much that spectrum would have fetched the government if it was auctioned)!
Are you feeling sick? Do you want to lead a consumer revolt by not buying HDTV sets? Don't worry; they have that covered too. In 10-15 years, by law, all NTSC broadcasts will be halted and everyone will be forced to switch over to HDTV. Unless you want to quit watching TV of any kind, you *must* purchase an HDTV set. Note how if you have a B&W T.V. from the 40's, you can still watch T.V. today, but 10 years from now, your NTSC set will be useless; why do you think they couldn't come up with a way to maintain backward compatibility when they were defining the HDTV standard? Or at least allow the market to determine the rate of HDTV acceptance as it saw fit? Perhaps because broadcasters knew that once people began to see that they essentially bought expensive new sets in order to watch the same crappy TV just so that the network companies could make more money off their spectrum, no one would buy HDTV sets and networks may have to continue broadcasting NTSC and miss out on all their extra profits...
So to segue back on-topic, broadcasters could care less about the quality of TV transmission and the details about penetration rates, signal quality, etc. etc. Because no matter how bad the transmission quality is, in 10 years, everyone will be forced to adopt the new standard anyway. And why should they care if half the people in their station area can't receive their TV signal and are thus not watching their advertising? They'll be making far more from all those extra services they'll be selling on their newfound $70 billion bandwidth horde...
Perhaps I've been reading too much Slashdot but something doesn't sit right with their justifications for why they're doing this.
So far I've seen several reasons given:
1) It will make it easier for students to find each other on such a large campus.
Problem: UCSD, although a large campus, is by no means one of the largest schools out there (I believe Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State, etc. are much larger). I've had friends at these large campuses, and even went to visit them several times. Locating people is not that big an issue. Most friends (this service is for tracking one's friends only, right?) know what each others' schedules are and typically make plans about where they'll meet or what they're doing after classes.
Secondly, as another poster already pointed out, these days, almost everyone has cell phones so you could easily give your friend a call and say "hey, where are you? You want to meet at the cafeteria?" Much more informative and useful than following a dot on a screen.
2) HP wants to figure out what people in the future will use this technology for. Quoted from the article: "What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow."
Problem: Any 35 year old out there living their life like they did when they were 18, please raise your hand... (and doing it in your dreams doesn't count:-) The fact is what's important and cool and worthwhile when you're 18 is not the same as when you're 35. It would be far more useful to find a subset of 35 year old people who can be identified as "trendsetters" and follow them. This is not to say that the 18-24 year old demographic should be ignored (indeed, that age group is the focus of nearly every marketer out there) but HP's justification of their involvement doesn't seem quite accurate.
So far the reasons seem pretty weak. At best, this is a "gee-whiz, look what I can do" type of demonstration with no real benefit but which is otherwise benign (which is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps these college students will actually figure out a completely new and useful purpose for this technology, and besides, they're getting a free PDA. What's not to like?:-). At worst, this is a harbinger of colleges monitoring their students' movements to address "security" issues. Already, we have high school students submitted to daily metal detectors and pat-downs, plus random urine testing and spot locker checks in the name of the "War on Drugs". Who knows what school officials will be able to justify in the name of the "War on Terrorism". Just think, all those intelligent, impressionable young students just ripe to be picked by evil Al-Quaida operatives to become HENCHMEN OF THE AXIS OF EVIL(tm)!!! And this is not even addressing the very real concern that no matter how many security features they build into this, someone will figure out a way to hack it.
Perhaps I'm just being paranoid or cynical, but like the saying goes "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're *not* after you":-).
The reason for this is because as "third world" economies that are still developing, it's difficult to ask them to accept higher restrictions while they're still trying to develop.
The economies of these countries are in a different phase than ours. They're in the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. This means much of their development is in the form of low-tech basic industries such as steel production, textiles, raw materials, etc. These also happen to be the most polluting type of industries. However, they are well suited in poorer countries that need large, low-tech, established industries that can employ vast numbers of relatively less educated workers.
In contrast, the U.S., and Europe have moved into a postindustrial economy where much of the GDP is generated by service industries and by a highly educated workforce engaged in "information" industries (or whatever the buzzword is these days:-).
Given that, it's easier for the first world to impose higher environmental restrictions on their economies since they are less dependent on the high pollution ones and since they are wealthier than the others. But it's harder to ask developing countries to do the same.
Furthermore, there's also a sense of fairness at play. Keep in mind that the U.S. and Europe went through an industrial age as well (the time of the so called Robber barons and monopolies and Carnegie and Rockefeller) before being able to generate the wealth that allowed them to transition to a service economy. And they did this before there were any environmental controls. To ask the third world to suddenly accept tight restrictions whereas the rest of the world never had to before is a little disingenous. Of course one could argue that we didn't know about these things before and regardless of what happened in the past, it's up to all of us to correct it now. While that's true, I think some concession for the different development stages of different economies is not a bad thing.
What's more, it's highly ironic that "fuel efficient" american SUV's are being compared to "black smoke belching" thirld world cars seeing as how the average third world resident uses non-polluting walking as his primary mode of transportation:-) But seriously, what's more unfair? Asking Americans to give up their SUV's for slightly less gargantuan cars, or asking an Indian to give up the wood he uses to cook food for his family because it burns dirty?
Can anyone comment on how SpamAssassin compares to Spambouncer?
It sounds approximately the same (i.e. filtering based on a weighted score including the blacklists and various phrases found in the message body).
I've been using spambouncer for a while and it works pretty well but I'd be interested to know if there are significant differences between the two.
First of all, don't believe everything you read. People who write books like this (i.e. business subjects) are in the business of selling books. Ever notice how when the economy is tanking, a bunch of gloomy books predicting further demise come out, and when the economy is cresting, a bunch of books talking about the "Dawn of a New, Glorious Age" come out? The publishers are just printing what they think people want to read at that time. So take it with a grain of salt.
That said, as for the merits of the argument itself, I find them lacking. All you need to do is look back at history to realize that many such cycles of change have happened before and the country didn't collapse. The bottom line is that people and business find new ways to co-exist. After all, people can't survive without gainful employment, and businesses can't survive without gainfully employed consumers with money to buy their products.
Many of the same arguments could be raised about earlier revolutions in our economy. The advent of factories, which was made possible by mechanized machines powered by steam and later electricity, meant that the previous model of skilled artisans self-employed producing small quantities of goods was no longer economically viable. Furthermore, the advent of the railroad and easier cross-country shipping meant that goods made from one part of the country could be easily shipped to other parts of the country. Now, the local cobbler had to compete not just with the local cobblers within a couple mile radius, but with giant shoe companies who set up factories wherever the conditions most suited them. I'm sure back then there were protests in Atantla, for example, about how factories in Boston were putting the local producers out of business with their manufacturing processes that relied on low-skilled labor from the urban slums that no skilled artisan could compete with. Sound familiar?
Now that we are undergoing a new revolution of no less profound dimensions, it's inevitable that there will be upheaval and some turmoil until we settle into a new pattern that will carry us through until the next Big Thing. But to think that this is the end of world is nonsense.
Nevertheless, the pain experienced by those people who are being displaced by the changes in our economy is very real. And we should try to mitigate that as much as possible. But inevitably, I believe the economy will once again settle down into something more predictable and stable, both for business and their employees.
Further, since the Moxi incorporates the content management that studios lust after, it is likely to be very well received. It's easy to imagine studios providing all sorts of exclusive offerings for the Moxi to undercut interest in vanilla Tivo and Replay systems.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I hate to be a pessimist but in the end, I think the platform that will win out won't be the most technologically sophisticated or the easiest to use. Rather, it's going to be whichever platform best panders to the media conglomerates and incorporates all the digital rights management policies that they want implemented. Then they'll get access to exclusive content and be able to work closely with the cable and satellite providers to make sure their systems are compatible while everyone else's mysteriously can't record shows properly.
Sounds like Mr. Perlman (founder of Moxie) is no fool. By creating an integrated solution that can completely control the entire process of recording/accessing/transmitting media he's given the media companies exactly what they want. In return, I expect they'll be very good to him too. If you dont believe me, just notice how every article about this new product spends almost as much time touting its copyright protection abilities as it does describing its features.
The New York Times has an article on this server as well. The article is partly about this new server and also about the upcoming new products from Apple, Inc. and how there's a battle shaping up between the TV/consumer electronics companies vs. the computer companies to be the uber-media command center for your home. Interesting read.
As for my 2 cents, I'd prefer the computer as the ultimate command center. Why? Like other people have mentioned, pretty much all the pieces are already there. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the software and hardware in the computer world are standardized commodities that can be mixed and matched to your preference (e.g. you can have a linux/windows/mac box with your choice of graphics cards, DVD drives, and PVR software) allowing for competition and best-of-breed components. This is in comparison to the "black box" philosophy of cable boxes and their ilk. Furthermore, as for resolution of display, TV sucks compared to even the lowest resolution monitors these days...
On the other hand, I guess I can understand that not everyone is able to mix and match components and put together their own customized system and would like nothing more than to plug in an appliance that does everything they want it to do.
I guess it boils down to the same debate between people who build their own computers specifying everything down to the CPU fan vs. those who buy a complete system pre-loaded and configured with every software program they need to run.
There are at least 4 reasons why this person doesn't deserve anything more than a passing laugh:
1) McDonald's may be the "international symbol of globalization" but as far as evil corporations, they are one of the more benign ones out there. After all, all they provide is food for people who are *willing* to pay for it because they want to eat it. Not only that, but while keeping recipes fairly standardized, McDonald's purchases most of its food from local sources, thus actually helping to contribute to the agricultaral economy that Jose is so fighting to protect. Besides, what's wrong with providing access to "American" food to people outside the U.S.? New Yorkers pride themselves on having Indian/Chinese/whatever food as good as from the native country. Yet how come no one's bombing the local chinese takeout counter as a "symbol of homogenization and mediocrity"? Although McDonald's may seem banal and mediocre to us in the U.S., it's seen as exotic around the world. Just like the crappy food sold in sidewalk food stalls on the streets of Ethiopia is seen as exotic and unusual here.
2) If you really want to speak out about the evils of globalization and the wholesale, naked pursuit of cash without any concern for anything else, there are plenty of companies to choose from. For example, ever hear of Dutch Shell? They are a European oil company that also happens to be the largest oil company in Nigeria. Being that large, you'd think that they would use their power to push Nigeria toward better governance and fewer human rights abuses. Yet they actively support the Nigerian military regime (with everything from money to arms), have looked the other way at the numerous human rights abuses, and has returned very little of the billions of dollars worth of oil that it has extracted from the country back to the local Nigerians. They continue to do this despite extensive international condemnation of the Nigerian government, thus helping to prop up a military junta that the international community is trying to remove. But as long as the oil flows to power distant SUV's and cars, who cares, right? But people choosing to eat Big Macs? The Horror!! Check out these links for more info: http://www.cohdn.ca/news/1-1/6.html http://www.pirc.co.uk/shellmar.htm http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Boycotts/Flames_ Shell.html
3) This guy is a trade unionist who was protesting the U.S. regulating the import of french cheese. In other words, he wants to throw McDonald's out of France but wants French cheese unfettered access to U.S. markets. See the hypocrisy? This guy isn't protesting globalization. He's protesting the fact that it's the Americans who are doing the globalization. If the entire world spoke French, ate the cheese that he grows in his farm, and washed it down with champagne purchased from his beloved country, he'd have no problems with that. Ironically, Americans are lot more culturally diverse than the French. After all, we have no qualms adopting words like "que pasa?" and "hasta la vista" (and of course "cojones":-) from a foreign language while the French have an entire government organization dedicated to keeping the French language pure of such cross-cultural "contamination". The French defending cultural diversity? Please....
4) Finally, even if despite all this, you wished to protest McDonald's, this is the stupidest way to do so. First of all, I question the moral foundation of a person who resorts to violent means to achieve his supposedly moral purpose. But even setting that aside, from a purely Machiavellian point of view, he still went about things the wrong way. As other posters have pointed out, what will really hurt McDonald's is bad publicity, and government action (e.g. denying building permits, etc.) If this so-called champion of farmers was able to document how McDonald's was hurting the livelihood of local farmers and was destroying their ability to live, and this was publicized, he would have done far more damage to McDonald's than his current actions. But of course that actually takes some hard work. Much easier to lob a little bomb and go down as a "martyr". So he bombed one store and went to jail for it. So what? McDonald's will simply build another one. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this sleepy little town became a tourist attraction simply because of its newfound notoriety. And what will those tourists eat?;-)
I apologize in advance if this message sounds like a troll, because it isn't. I'm just fed up with people who adopt a cause without really thinking about it and then wonder why things don't change. Hell, even the people protesting Nike were smarter than this guy. After all, they were protesting a serious characteristic of globalization (child labor) and they went about it in a way that brought about change, however small. This guy has done nothing good for the anti-globalization movement and to hold him up as a hero of the movement insults those who are actually doing something productive.
Trust me, I'll be the first one to argue that globalization has its problems (although I'll also argue that there are many benefits:-). But to protest McDonald's as the epitome of those problems only cheapens the very real concerns that need to be addressed.
To add to what you're saying, in a sense, countries decide to go to war when the perceived national self-interest benefit outweighs the expected costs of the war (in terms of soldiers' lives, especially). I think the problem with the concept of the "virtual war" is that it makes the expected costs look so minimal that all of a sudden, even goals with minimal expected "benefits" look appealing to undertake.
General Robert E. Lee, while watching thousands of Union soldiers sent to the slaughter at Fredericksburg during the Civil War, remarked "It is well that war is so terrible lest we grow too fond of it."
If you look at our current foreign policy, I think we've grown too fond of war. We're led to believe that war is no longer so terrible, and I think that's the problem. Quite frankly, wars should be terrible, awful things because only then will we reserve intervention for things we really consider important. What I mean by that is not that we shouldn't try to minimize our casualties or something like that. But we need to be willing to allow a war to become terrible. If given that possibility we still wish to pursue our goals, then that's a worthy intervention. The problem with the concept of the "virtual war" is that we the public are promised a nice, neat, tidy war so that we really won't ask ourselves the hard questions about our true goals and determine our true resolve before entering the conflict.
One of the assertions that seems to keep coming up is that higher quality code (i.e. more stable, predictable, etc.) always means more expense or time to create. That's not necessarily true. To take an example from the car industry: in the 60's/70's American car makers made cars by building them on the assembly line, and then having "quality inspectors" at the end of the line who would check for defective parts which would then get fixed. Using this model, it was always assumed that achieving higher quality naturally meant higher costs (you would have to spend more to hire more inspectors, and you'd have to replace more parts), and longer time (adding new checkpoints in the line would increase the time to manufacture a car).
But then the Japanese came along with a radical new idea: if there are defective parts coming down the line, then we should figure out why they were created defectively in the first place and fix that. Then the number of defective parts at the end of the line would be less, thus you would need *fewer* inspectors and *less* time at the end of the assembly line. (Ironically, this principle came from an American named Edward Deming; unfortunately American companies were too successful during his lifetime for them to take him seriously:-) So the Japanese were able to build cheaper cars quicker than the Americans while actually having higher quality.
I think that's very analogous to the current argument. Under the current system of coding, you basically hack together something that sorta works, and then use sophisticated debuggers/development tools to figure out which parts are buggy. Using that system, it's true that higher quality requires more cost and time.
But I think the point of this article is that that is the wrong way to approach programming. First, figure out why defective code gets written in the first place (be it poor client specifications, poor management, poor documentation, whatever) and then fix those processes, and you'll turn out quality code without having to spend any more time or money!
As a practical example, I first learned C under a CompSci Ph.D. who was a quality fanatic. In order to teach me to code properly, he would give me projects and then not allow me to use a debugger. Nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. The only thing I was allowed was to place print statements within my program wherever I wanted to see what was going on. As a result, I spend *a lot* of my time planning my code out, and reviewing it over and over again before even compiling it, because I knew that if there were bugs in it, I couldn't just fire up a debugger and take a look.
And secondly, if there were bugs, I couldn't just trace through the entire program or create a watch list of every variable. I had to study the bug and understand it, look at the code and figure out where the bug most likely was, and then use selective print statements to look at the most suspicious stuff. That way, when I encountered bugs, I'd be forced to actually understand what the bug was and then analyze my code to figure out where that error most likely was.
If this sounds like a programming class from hell, believe me, it was incredible! I couldn't believe how much of my code worked the first time it compiled. And when there were bugs, I actually fixed the underlying flaw in the logic rather than just applying a temporary patch. What's more, since the rest of my program was well planned and documented, there were no "hidden" effects: if I found a bug, I knew exactly which parts of the program it affected, and perhaps more importantly, *how* it affected those parts. Thus they were very easy to fix.
Believe it or not, it took me less time to program this way than using debuggers, and the resulting code was much more stable and understood.
If you look at commercial software these days, it's not uncommon for the debugging period to take longer than the actual coding. In other words, there are more quality inspectors than there are assembly workers, and the time the code spends in inspection stations is longer than it spends being produced. It's tough to say that this is the "efficient" method of programming...
If you want to see where this is heading, just turn once again to the car industry: once American companies got their asses kicked by the Japanese, they adopted their techniques, and Surprise! Cars now come out of their factories with higher quality, in less time, and at less cost (adjusted for inflation and new features:-). Who would've believed it?:-)
Wow, someone else mentioned Gene Wolf as well. He doesn't seem to be too well known, and I'm not sure why. I'd agree that the Book of the New Sun is somewhat too complex for a 13 year old, but I'd highly recommend it to anyone older.
The Book of the New Sun series (4 original books + 1 added later) is sort of a combination sci fi/fantasy (it won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards I believe). Wolf uses a combination of modern and archaic english to paint an incredibly vivid and detailed picture of a society that is set so far in the future that the Sun is burning out, yet resembles Europe of the Middle Ages.
Simply put, his works would be worth reading just to marvel at his use of language, nevermind the story and the ideas he explores. (Plus you'll realize where my slashdot nickname comes from:-)
Some of us old farts on slashdot may remember when Wired Magazine actually ran insightful articles. Here was one that I thought was particularly good. It's called The Great HDTV Swindle. I very highly recommend reading it if you're interested in the whole process by which the HDTV standard in this country was established, in all its ugly detail.
Basically, here's the gist: Broadcast companies could care less about broadcasting HDTV. For all their talk about drastically improving the quality of television, their eyes are on the really big asset they're sitting on: their spectrum.
First, a little history. (Sorry for the slight tangent, but bear with me:-) Unbeknownst to most people, network TV stations are the only companies in the country that get free transmission spectrum. This was done in 1932 (or sometime around then) when there were few other uses for the bandwidth and the government wanted to encourage broadcasting because they felt it would be in the public good to have universal access to this new communications medium. Since then, of course, that spectrum has become incredibly valuable, but the broadcasters continue to get it for free.
Enter HDTV. Using modern compression standards, broadcasters can fit the entire datastream of an HDTV picture into the same 6MHz T.V. channel currently used for NTSC. But broadcast companies started looking at it the other way around. Using modern compression standards, they could fit 6 NTSC channels into one spectrum slice. Or... they could fit 1 NTSC channel into 1/6 the slice, and use the other 5/6 slice for other services e.g. data transmission, cell phones, etc. After all, they're getting a full 6Mhz for free; if they can continue their current broadcasts (thereby continuing their current revenue) and add other profitable services without having to pay for the spectrum, why not?
Look at it this way: they could either use the 6Mhz to a) transmit 1 HDTV channel b) transmit 6 NTSC channels c) transmit 1 NTSC channel and a bunch of other services. It's clear that options b & c would be far more profitable than option a. This is why there is no one HDTV standard, but a whole spectrum of standards. Note how NTSC defines one picture standard, but HDTV defines 18 (all of which must be supported by a TV in order for it to be sold as an "HDTV")! One of those happens to include compressed, digitized NTSC...
Grease the palms of our honorable legislators enough, and it's not hard to get a sweet deal. And the networks are sitting on an incredibly sweet deal. First of all, they can decide which picture standard to use (ranging in quality from crappy NTSC to fullblown HDTV) assured that consumers have paid for the expensive decoder chips to watch whichever standard they choose to broadcast. Secondly, they can decide which mix of channels/services/etc. is the most profitable for them with no regulation whatsoever that forces them to use their spectrum for actually broadcasting HDTV. And they can do it all on free spectrum that otherwise would have cost them $70 billion (according to estimates of how much that spectrum would have fetched the government if it was auctioned)!
Are you feeling sick? Do you want to lead a consumer revolt by not buying HDTV sets? Don't worry; they have that covered too. In 10-15 years, by law, all NTSC broadcasts will be halted and everyone will be forced to switch over to HDTV. Unless you want to quit watching TV of any kind, you *must* purchase an HDTV set. Note how if you have a B&W T.V. from the 40's, you can still watch T.V. today, but 10 years from now, your NTSC set will be useless; why do you think they couldn't come up with a way to maintain backward compatibility when they were defining the HDTV standard? Or at least allow the market to determine the rate of HDTV acceptance as it saw fit? Perhaps because broadcasters knew that once people began to see that they essentially bought expensive new sets in order to watch the same crappy TV just so that the network companies could make more money off their spectrum, no one would buy HDTV sets and networks may have to continue broadcasting NTSC and miss out on all their extra profits...
So to segue back on-topic, broadcasters could care less about the quality of TV transmission and the details about penetration rates, signal quality, etc. etc. Because no matter how bad the transmission quality is, in 10 years, everyone will be forced to adopt the new standard anyway. And why should they care if half the people in their station area can't receive their TV signal and are thus not watching their advertising? They'll be making far more from all those extra services they'll be selling on their newfound $70 billion bandwidth horde...
I think that regardless of whether Intel fixes the RamBus bugs or not, it's a poor technology. The problem with memory speed breaks down to two issues: latency and bandwidth. Although everyone salivates at the thought of enormous bandwidth, in today's systems, what really causes problems is memory latency. And ironically, although RamBus promises higher bandwidth than SDRAM, it's actually has *higher* latency.
There are some great articles regarding bandwith vs. latency in general and RamBus in particular at Tom's Hardware. To summarize the articles, even today's current SDRAM architecture provides more than enough bandwidth, especially with the current sophisticated cache systems that reduce memory accesses dramatically. However, what's tying up the CPU is latency, especially as CPU's get faster.
In other words, CPUs generally request small amounts of data with any given request, but it has to wait a long time for that request to get back. As CPU speed has increased, better cache systems have mitigated the resulting increased bandwidth demands but nothing has helped the resulting latency problems. So the way to speed up memory is to decrease latency and don't worry too much about bandwidth just yet. Unfortunately, RamBus goes in the exact opposite direction.
That said, I guess we should never underestimate the power of a behemoth like Intel to force acceptance of poor technologies:-/
All this conjecture about the inner workings of the NSA is fun, but let's face it. The NSA is cloaked in a veil of secrecy and the average slashdot'er (myself included:-) is too lazy to do the grunt work to actually get at the truth.
But for all you lazy but curious people out there, you should check out the book _The Puzzle Palace_ by James bramford (here's the link on Amazon.com).
Bramford chronicles the history of the Agency all the way from its origins in a couple of military intelligence organizations in WWII through its founding by a secret executive order by Harry s. Truman all the way to the present (or to the 80's at least:-) Apparently, he filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act petitions to declassify material (so much so that the NSA fought the release of the book) and disects the agency very nicely.
I read it back in college when I first discovered pgp and wanted to learn more about cryptography. IMHO, both threads in this discussion (the NSA is an all powerful cabal of geniuses monitoring your every move vs. it's just another stupid govt. beauracracy) are partially true.
For an example of the former, apparently, in the 1950's or so, all international phone traffic was handled through just a couple of trunk lines laid down in the ocean connecting America and Europe. The NSA secretly approached the commuication companies (mainly AT&T and Western Union) and got them to allow the NSA to tap the trunk lines. After that, the NSA was able to monitor *every* phone call between Europe and America. Without such hassles as legal warrants... They also listened in on domestic phone calls without legal warrants despite the express prohibition written in their charter against domestic intelligence gathering (that's the FBI's job).
On the flip side, as an example of dumb beauracracy, the actual head honchos in the agency are supposed to be secret. They're given other "official" positions like colonel so-and-so in the U.S. Army, etc. etc. However, like any large corporation, they have designated parking spots for all these big guys (this space reserved for director of XXX, etc.) . Of course, any Russian spy satellite can easily pick off the license plate numbers of the cars parked there, run them through the Maryland or Virginia DMV and figure out who each person is.
Very interested stuff. If you have a serious interest in the NSA, read this book.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, humans are much better at perceptual analysis (e.g. pattern recognition, visual-spatial perception, etc.) and making reasonable decisions based on incomplete and possibly conflicting data. These are the types of tasks that computers fail miserably at.
If I had to add 1,000 numbers, I'd take a computer over a human any day. But if I had a complicated situation where decisions need to be made quickly and with ambiguous data where there's often no "single, clear" solution, I'd much prefer a human.
I submit that surgery is like the latter situation, so even a "med school flunky" would be better than a robot.
That said, this is a moot point since the robot we're talking about isn't autonomous and makes *zero* decisions by itself. It's closer to a remote control device that allows surgeons to make more precise movements and also see better inside the chest without having to open it up.
Some of us old farts on slashdot may remember when Wired Magazine actually ran insightful articles. Here was one that I thought was particularly good. It's called The Great HDTV Swindle. I very highly recommend reading it if you're interested in the whole process by which the HDTV standard in this country was established, in all its ugly detail.
Basically, here's the gist: Broadcast companies could care less about broadcasting HDTV. For all their talk about drastically improving the quality of television, their eyes are on the really big asset they're sitting on: their spectrum.
First, a little history. (Sorry for the slight tangent, but bear with me :-) Unbeknownst to most people, network TV stations are the only companies in the country that get free transmission spectrum. This was done in 1932 (or sometime around then) when there were few other uses for the bandwidth and the government wanted to encourage broadcasting because they felt it would be in the public good to have universal access to this new communications medium. Since then, of course, that spectrum has become incredibly valuable, but the broadcasters continue to get it for free.
Enter HDTV. Using modern compression standards, broadcasters can fit the entire datastream of an HDTV picture into the same 6MHz T.V. channel currently used for NTSC. But broadcast companies started looking at it the other way around. Using modern compression standards, they could fit 6 NTSC channels into one spectrum slice. Or... they could fit 1 NTSC channel into 1/6 the slice, and use the other 5/6 slice for other services e.g. data transmission, cell phones, etc. After all, they're getting a full 6Mhz for free; if they can continue their current broadcasts (thereby continuing their current revenue) and add other profitable services without having to pay for the spectrum, why not?
Look at it this way: they could either use the 6Mhz to a) transmit 1 HDTV channel b) transmit 6 NTSC channels c) transmit 1 NTSC channel and a bunch of other services. It's clear that options b & c would be far more profitable than option a. This is why there is no one HDTV standard, but a whole spectrum of standards. Note how NTSC defines one picture standard, but HDTV defines 18 (all of which must be supported by a TV in order for it to be sold as an "HDTV")! One of those happens to include compressed, digitized NTSC...
Grease the palms of our honorable legislators enough, and it's not hard to get a sweet deal. And the networks are sitting on an incredibly sweet deal. First of all, they can decide which picture standard to use (ranging in quality from crappy NTSC to fullblown HDTV) assured that consumers have paid for the expensive decoder chips to watch whichever standard they choose to broadcast. Secondly, they can decide which mix of channels/services/etc. is the most profitable for them with no regulation whatsoever that forces them to use their spectrum for actually broadcasting HDTV. And they can do it all on free spectrum that otherwise would have cost them $70 billion (according to estimates of how much that spectrum would have fetched the government if it was auctioned)!
Are you feeling sick? Do you want to lead a consumer revolt by not buying HDTV sets? Don't worry; they have that covered too. In 10-15 years, by law, all NTSC broadcasts will be halted and everyone will be forced to switch over to HDTV. Unless you want to quit watching TV of any kind, you *must* purchase an HDTV set. Note how if you have a B&W T.V. from the 40's, you can still watch T.V. today, but 10 years from now, your NTSC set will be useless; why do you think they couldn't come up with a way to maintain backward compatibility when they were defining the HDTV standard? Or at least allow the market to determine the rate of HDTV acceptance as it saw fit? Perhaps because broadcasters knew that once people began to see that they essentially bought expensive new sets in order to watch the same crappy TV just so that the network companies could make more money off their spectrum, no one would buy HDTV sets and networks may have to continue broadcasting NTSC and miss out on all their extra profits...
So to segue back on-topic, broadcasters could care less about the quality of TV transmission and the details about penetration rates, signal quality, etc. etc. Because no matter how bad the transmission quality is, in 10 years, everyone will be forced to adopt the new standard anyway. And why should they care if half the people in their station area can't receive their TV signal and are thus not watching their advertising? They'll be making far more from all those extra services they'll be selling on their newfound $70 billion bandwidth horde...
1) It will make it easier for students to find each other on such a large campus.
Problem: UCSD, although a large campus, is by no means one of the largest schools out there (I believe Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State, etc. are much larger). I've had friends at these large campuses, and even went to visit them several times. Locating people is not that big an issue. Most friends (this service is for tracking one's friends only, right?) know what each others' schedules are and typically make plans about where they'll meet or what they're doing after classes.
Secondly, as another poster already pointed out, these days, almost everyone has cell phones so you could easily give your friend a call and say "hey, where are you? You want to meet at the cafeteria?" Much more informative and useful than following a dot on a screen.
2) HP wants to figure out what people in the future will use this technology for. Quoted from the article: "What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow." :-) The fact is what's important and cool and worthwhile when you're 18 is not the same as when you're 35. It would be far more useful to find a subset of 35 year old people who can be identified as "trendsetters" and follow them. This is not to say that the 18-24 year old demographic should be ignored (indeed, that age group is the focus of nearly every marketer out there) but HP's justification of their involvement doesn't seem quite accurate.
Problem: Any 35 year old out there living their life like they did when they were 18, please raise your hand... (and doing it in your dreams doesn't count
So far the reasons seem pretty weak. At best, this is a "gee-whiz, look what I can do" type of demonstration with no real benefit but which is otherwise benign (which is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps these college students will actually figure out a completely new and useful purpose for this technology, and besides, they're getting a free PDA. What's not to like? :-). At worst, this is a harbinger of colleges monitoring their students' movements to address "security" issues. Already, we have high school students submitted to daily metal detectors and pat-downs, plus random urine testing and spot locker checks in the name of the "War on Drugs". Who knows what school officials will be able to justify in the name of the "War on Terrorism". Just think, all those intelligent, impressionable young students just ripe to be picked by evil Al-Quaida operatives to become HENCHMEN OF THE AXIS OF EVIL(tm)!!! And this is not even addressing the very real concern that no matter how many security features they build into this, someone will figure out a way to hack it.
Perhaps I'm just being paranoid or cynical, but like the saying goes "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're *not* after you" :-).
The economies of these countries are in a different phase than ours. They're in the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. This means much of their development is in the form of low-tech basic industries such as steel production, textiles, raw materials, etc. These also happen to be the most polluting type of industries. However, they are well suited in poorer countries that need large, low-tech, established industries that can employ vast numbers of relatively less educated workers.
In contrast, the U.S., and Europe have moved into a postindustrial economy where much of the GDP is generated by service industries and by a highly educated workforce engaged in "information" industries (or whatever the buzzword is these days :-).
Given that, it's easier for the first world to impose higher environmental restrictions on their economies since they are less dependent on the high pollution ones and since they are wealthier than the others. But it's harder to ask developing countries to do the same.
Furthermore, there's also a sense of fairness at play. Keep in mind that the U.S. and Europe went through an industrial age as well (the time of the so called Robber barons and monopolies and Carnegie and Rockefeller) before being able to generate the wealth that allowed them to transition to a service economy. And they did this before there were any environmental controls. To ask the third world to suddenly accept tight restrictions whereas the rest of the world never had to before is a little disingenous. Of course one could argue that we didn't know about these things before and regardless of what happened in the past, it's up to all of us to correct it now. While that's true, I think some concession for the different development stages of different economies is not a bad thing.
What's more, it's highly ironic that "fuel efficient" american SUV's are being compared to "black smoke belching" thirld world cars seeing as how the average third world resident uses non-polluting walking as his primary mode of transportation :-) But seriously, what's more unfair? Asking Americans to give up their SUV's for slightly less gargantuan cars, or asking an Indian to give up the wood he uses to cook food for his family because it burns dirty?
I've been using spambouncer for a while and it works pretty well but I'd be interested to know if there are significant differences between the two.
I'd like to make two points here.
First of all, don't believe everything you read. People who write books like this (i.e. business subjects) are in the business of selling books. Ever notice how when the economy is tanking, a bunch of gloomy books predicting further demise come out, and when the economy is cresting, a bunch of books talking about the "Dawn of a New, Glorious Age" come out? The publishers are just printing what they think people want to read at that time. So take it with a grain of salt.
That said, as for the merits of the argument itself, I find them lacking. All you need to do is look back at history to realize that many such cycles of change have happened before and the country didn't collapse. The bottom line is that people and business find new ways to co-exist. After all, people can't survive without gainful employment, and businesses can't survive without gainfully employed consumers with money to buy their products.
Many of the same arguments could be raised about earlier revolutions in our economy. The advent of factories, which was made possible by mechanized machines powered by steam and later electricity, meant that the previous model of skilled artisans self-employed producing small quantities of goods was no longer economically viable. Furthermore, the advent of the railroad and easier cross-country shipping meant that goods made from one part of the country could be easily shipped to other parts of the country. Now, the local cobbler had to compete not just with the local cobblers within a couple mile radius, but with giant shoe companies who set up factories wherever the conditions most suited them. I'm sure back then there were protests in Atantla, for example, about how factories in Boston were putting the local producers out of business with their manufacturing processes that relied on low-skilled labor from the urban slums that no skilled artisan could compete with. Sound familiar?
Now that we are undergoing a new revolution of no less profound dimensions, it's inevitable that there will be upheaval and some turmoil until we settle into a new pattern that will carry us through until the next Big Thing. But to think that this is the end of world is nonsense.
Nevertheless, the pain experienced by those people who are being displaced by the changes in our economy is very real. And we should try to mitigate that as much as possible. But inevitably, I believe the economy will once again settle down into something more predictable and stable, both for business and their employees.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I hate to be a pessimist but in the end, I think the platform that will win out won't be the most technologically sophisticated or the easiest to use. Rather, it's going to be whichever platform best panders to the media conglomerates and incorporates all the digital rights management policies that they want implemented. Then they'll get access to exclusive content and be able to work closely with the cable and satellite providers to make sure their systems are compatible while everyone else's mysteriously can't record shows properly.
Sounds like Mr. Perlman (founder of Moxie) is no fool. By creating an integrated solution that can completely control the entire process of recording/accessing/transmitting media he's given the media companies exactly what they want. In return, I expect they'll be very good to him too. If you dont believe me, just notice how every article about this new product spends almost as much time touting its copyright protection abilities as it does describing its features.
As for my 2 cents, I'd prefer the computer as the ultimate command center. Why? Like other people have mentioned, pretty much all the pieces are already there. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the software and hardware in the computer world are standardized commodities that can be mixed and matched to your preference (e.g. you can have a linux/windows/mac box with your choice of graphics cards, DVD drives, and PVR software) allowing for competition and best-of-breed components. This is in comparison to the "black box" philosophy of cable boxes and their ilk. Furthermore, as for resolution of display, TV sucks compared to even the lowest resolution monitors these days...
On the other hand, I guess I can understand that not everyone is able to mix and match components and put together their own customized system and would like nothing more than to plug in an appliance that does everything they want it to do.
I guess it boils down to the same debate between people who build their own computers specifying everything down to the CPU fan vs. those who buy a complete system pre-loaded and configured with every software program they need to run.
1) McDonald's may be the "international symbol of globalization" but as far as evil corporations, they are one of the more benign ones out there. After all, all they provide is food for people who are *willing* to pay for it because they want to eat it. Not only that, but while keeping recipes fairly standardized, McDonald's purchases most of its food from local sources, thus actually helping to contribute to the agricultaral economy that Jose is so fighting to protect. Besides, what's wrong with providing access to "American" food to people outside the U.S.? New Yorkers pride themselves on having Indian/Chinese/whatever food as good as from the native country. Yet how come no one's bombing the local chinese takeout counter as a "symbol of homogenization and mediocrity"? Although McDonald's may seem banal and mediocre to us in the U.S., it's seen as exotic around the world. Just like the crappy food sold in sidewalk food stalls on the streets of Ethiopia is seen as exotic and unusual here.
2) If you really want to speak out about the evils of globalization and the wholesale, naked pursuit of cash without any concern for anything else, there are plenty of companies to choose from. For example, ever hear of Dutch Shell? They are a European oil company that also happens to be the largest oil company in Nigeria. Being that large, you'd think that they would use their power to push Nigeria toward better governance and fewer human rights abuses. Yet they actively support the Nigerian military regime (with everything from money to arms), have looked the other way at the numerous human rights abuses, and has returned very little of the billions of dollars worth of oil that it has extracted from the country back to the local Nigerians. They continue to do this despite extensive international condemnation of the Nigerian government, thus helping to prop up a military junta that the international community is trying to remove. But as long as the oil flows to power distant SUV's and cars, who cares, right? But people choosing to eat Big Macs? The Horror!!_ Shell.html
Check out these links for more info:
http://www.cohdn.ca/news/1-1/6.html
http://www.pirc.co.uk/shellmar.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Boycotts/Flames
3) This guy is a trade unionist who was protesting the U.S. regulating the import of french cheese. In other words, he wants to throw McDonald's out of France but wants French cheese unfettered access to U.S. markets. See the hypocrisy? This guy isn't protesting globalization. He's protesting the fact that it's the Americans who are doing the globalization. If the entire world spoke French, ate the cheese that he grows in his farm, and washed it down with champagne purchased from his beloved country, he'd have no problems with that. Ironically, Americans are lot more culturally diverse than the French. After all, we have no qualms adopting words like "que pasa?" and "hasta la vista" (and of course "cojones" :-) from a foreign language while the French have an entire government organization dedicated to keeping the French language pure of such cross-cultural "contamination". The French defending cultural diversity? Please....
4) Finally, even if despite all this, you wished to protest McDonald's, this is the stupidest way to do so. First of all, I question the moral foundation of a person who resorts to violent means to achieve his supposedly moral purpose. But even setting that aside, from a purely Machiavellian point of view, he still went about things the wrong way. As other posters have pointed out, what will really hurt McDonald's is bad publicity, and government action (e.g. denying building permits, etc.) If this so-called champion of farmers was able to document how McDonald's was hurting the livelihood of local farmers and was destroying their ability to live, and this was publicized, he would have done far more damage to McDonald's than his current actions. But of course that actually takes some hard work. Much easier to lob a little bomb and go down as a "martyr". So he bombed one store and went to jail for it. So what? McDonald's will simply build another one. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this sleepy little town became a tourist attraction simply because of its newfound notoriety. And what will those tourists eat? ;-)
I apologize in advance if this message sounds like a troll, because it isn't. I'm just fed up with people who adopt a cause without really thinking about it and then wonder why things don't change. Hell, even the people protesting Nike were smarter than this guy. After all, they were protesting a serious characteristic of globalization (child labor) and they went about it in a way that brought about change, however small. This guy has done nothing good for the anti-globalization movement and to hold him up as a hero of the movement insults those who are actually doing something productive.
Trust me, I'll be the first one to argue that globalization has its problems (although I'll also argue that there are many benefits :-). But to protest McDonald's as the epitome of those problems only cheapens the very real concerns that need to be addressed.
General Robert E. Lee, while watching thousands of Union soldiers sent to the slaughter at Fredericksburg during the Civil War, remarked "It is well that war is so terrible lest we grow too fond of it."
If you look at our current foreign policy, I think we've grown too fond of war. We're led to believe that war is no longer so terrible, and I think that's the problem. Quite frankly, wars should be terrible, awful things because only then will we reserve intervention for things we really consider important. What I mean by that is not that we shouldn't try to minimize our casualties or something like that. But we need to be willing to allow a war to become terrible. If given that possibility we still wish to pursue our goals, then that's a worthy intervention. The problem with the concept of the "virtual war" is that we the public are promised a nice, neat, tidy war so that we really won't ask ourselves the hard questions about our true goals and determine our true resolve before entering the conflict.
But then the Japanese came along with a radical new idea: if there are defective parts coming down the line, then we should figure out why they were created defectively in the first place and fix that. Then the number of defective parts at the end of the line would be less, thus you would need *fewer* inspectors and *less* time at the end of the assembly line. (Ironically, this principle came from an American named Edward Deming; unfortunately American companies were too successful during his lifetime for them to take him seriously :-) So the Japanese were able to build cheaper cars quicker than the Americans while actually having higher quality.
I think that's very analogous to the current argument. Under the current system of coding, you basically hack together something that sorta works, and then use sophisticated debuggers/development tools to figure out which parts are buggy. Using that system, it's true that higher quality requires more cost and time.
But I think the point of this article is that that is the wrong way to approach programming. First, figure out why defective code gets written in the first place (be it poor client specifications, poor management, poor documentation, whatever) and then fix those processes, and you'll turn out quality code without having to spend any more time or money!
As a practical example, I first learned C under a CompSci Ph.D. who was a quality fanatic. In order to teach me to code properly, he would give me projects and then not allow me to use a debugger. Nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. The only thing I was allowed was to place print statements within my program wherever I wanted to see what was going on. As a result, I spend *a lot* of my time planning my code out, and reviewing it over and over again before even compiling it, because I knew that if there were bugs in it, I couldn't just fire up a debugger and take a look.
And secondly, if there were bugs, I couldn't just trace through the entire program or create a watch list of every variable. I had to study the bug and understand it, look at the code and figure out where the bug most likely was, and then use selective print statements to look at the most suspicious stuff. That way, when I encountered bugs, I'd be forced to actually understand what the bug was and then analyze my code to figure out where that error most likely was.
If this sounds like a programming class from hell, believe me, it was incredible! I couldn't believe how much of my code worked the first time it compiled. And when there were bugs, I actually fixed the underlying flaw in the logic rather than just applying a temporary patch. What's more, since the rest of my program was well planned and documented, there were no "hidden" effects: if I found a bug, I knew exactly which parts of the program it affected, and perhaps more importantly, *how* it affected those parts. Thus they were very easy to fix.
Believe it or not, it took me less time to program this way than using debuggers, and the resulting code was much more stable and understood.
If you look at commercial software these days, it's not uncommon for the debugging period to take longer than the actual coding. In other words, there are more quality inspectors than there are assembly workers, and the time the code spends in inspection stations is longer than it spends being produced. It's tough to say that this is the "efficient" method of programming...
If you want to see where this is heading, just turn once again to the car industry: once American companies got their asses kicked by the Japanese, they adopted their techniques, and Surprise! Cars now come out of their factories with higher quality, in less time, and at less cost (adjusted for inflation and new features :-). Who would've believed it? :-)
The Book of the New Sun series (4 original books + 1 added later) is sort of a combination sci fi/fantasy (it won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards I believe). Wolf uses a combination of modern and archaic english to paint an incredibly vivid and detailed picture of a society that is set so far in the future that the Sun is burning out, yet resembles Europe of the Middle Ages.
Simply put, his works would be worth reading just to marvel at his use of language, nevermind the story and the ideas he explores. (Plus you'll realize where my slashdot nickname comes from :-)
Basically, here's the gist: Broadcast companies could care less about broadcasting HDTV. For all their talk about drastically improving the quality of television, their eyes are on the really big asset they're sitting on: their spectrum.
First, a little history. (Sorry for the slight tangent, but bear with me :-) Unbeknownst to most people, network TV stations are the only companies in the country that get free transmission spectrum. This was done in 1932 (or sometime around then) when there were few other uses for the bandwidth and the government wanted to encourage broadcasting because they felt it would be in the public good to have universal access to this new communications medium. Since then, of course, that spectrum has become incredibly valuable, but the broadcasters continue to get it for free.
Enter HDTV. Using modern compression standards, broadcasters can fit the entire datastream of an HDTV picture into the same 6MHz T.V. channel currently used for NTSC. But broadcast companies started looking at it the other way around. Using modern compression standards, they could fit 6 NTSC channels into one spectrum slice. Or... they could fit 1 NTSC channel into 1/6 the slice, and use the other 5/6 slice for other services e.g. data transmission, cell phones, etc. After all, they're getting a full 6Mhz for free; if they can continue their current broadcasts (thereby continuing their current revenue) and add other profitable services without having to pay for the spectrum, why not?
Look at it this way: they could either use the 6Mhz to a) transmit 1 HDTV channel b) transmit 6 NTSC channels c) transmit 1 NTSC channel and a bunch of other services. It's clear that options b & c would be far more profitable than option a. This is why there is no one HDTV standard, but a whole spectrum of standards. Note how NTSC defines one picture standard, but HDTV defines 18 (all of which must be supported by a TV in order for it to be sold as an "HDTV")! One of those happens to include compressed, digitized NTSC...
Grease the palms of our honorable legislators enough, and it's not hard to get a sweet deal. And the networks are sitting on an incredibly sweet deal. First of all, they can decide which picture standard to use (ranging in quality from crappy NTSC to fullblown HDTV) assured that consumers have paid for the expensive decoder chips to watch whichever standard they choose to broadcast. Secondly, they can decide which mix of channels/services/etc. is the most profitable for them with no regulation whatsoever that forces them to use their spectrum for actually broadcasting HDTV. And they can do it all on free spectrum that otherwise would have cost them $70 billion (according to estimates of how much that spectrum would have fetched the government if it was auctioned)!
Are you feeling sick? Do you want to lead a consumer revolt by not buying HDTV sets? Don't worry; they have that covered too. In 10-15 years, by law, all NTSC broadcasts will be halted and everyone will be forced to switch over to HDTV. Unless you want to quit watching TV of any kind, you *must* purchase an HDTV set. Note how if you have a B&W T.V. from the 40's, you can still watch T.V. today, but 10 years from now, your NTSC set will be useless; why do you think they couldn't come up with a way to maintain backward compatibility when they were defining the HDTV standard? Or at least allow the market to determine the rate of HDTV acceptance as it saw fit? Perhaps because broadcasters knew that once people began to see that they essentially bought expensive new sets in order to watch the same crappy TV just so that the network companies could make more money off their spectrum, no one would buy HDTV sets and networks may have to continue broadcasting NTSC and miss out on all their extra profits...
So to segue back on-topic, broadcasters could care less about the quality of TV transmission and the details about penetration rates, signal quality, etc. etc. Because no matter how bad the transmission quality is, in 10 years, everyone will be forced to adopt the new standard anyway. And why should they care if half the people in their station area can't receive their TV signal and are thus not watching their advertising? They'll be making far more from all those extra services they'll be selling on their newfound $70 billion bandwidth horde...
There are some great articles regarding bandwith vs. latency in general and RamBus in particular at Tom's Hardware. To summarize the articles, even today's current SDRAM architecture provides more than enough bandwidth, especially with the current sophisticated cache systems that reduce memory accesses dramatically. However, what's tying up the CPU is latency, especially as CPU's get faster.
In other words, CPUs generally request small amounts of data with any given request, but it has to wait a long time for that request to get back. As CPU speed has increased, better cache systems have mitigated the resulting increased bandwidth demands but nothing has helped the resulting latency problems. So the way to speed up memory is to decrease latency and don't worry too much about bandwidth just yet. Unfortunately, RamBus goes in the exact opposite direction.
That said, I guess we should never underestimate the power of a behemoth like Intel to force acceptance of poor technologies :-/
But for all you lazy but curious people out there, you should check out the book _The Puzzle Palace_ by James bramford (here's the link on Amazon.com).
Bramford chronicles the history of the Agency all the way from its origins in a couple of military intelligence organizations in WWII through its founding by a secret executive order by Harry s. Truman all the way to the present (or to the 80's at least :-) Apparently, he filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act petitions to declassify material (so much so that the NSA fought the release of the book) and disects the agency very nicely.
I read it back in college when I first discovered pgp and wanted to learn more about cryptography. IMHO, both threads in this discussion (the NSA is an all powerful cabal of geniuses monitoring your every move vs. it's just another stupid govt. beauracracy) are partially true.
For an example of the former, apparently, in the 1950's or so, all international phone traffic was handled through just a couple of trunk lines laid down in the ocean connecting America and Europe. The NSA secretly approached the commuication companies (mainly AT&T and Western Union) and got them to allow the NSA to tap the trunk lines. After that, the NSA was able to monitor *every* phone call between Europe and America. Without such hassles as legal warrants... They also listened in on domestic phone calls without legal warrants despite the express prohibition written in their charter against domestic intelligence gathering (that's the FBI's job).
On the flip side, as an example of dumb beauracracy, the actual head honchos in the agency are supposed to be secret. They're given other "official" positions like colonel so-and-so in the U.S. Army, etc. etc. However, like any large corporation, they have designated parking spots for all these big guys (this space reserved for director of XXX, etc.) . Of course, any Russian spy satellite can easily pick off the license plate numbers of the cars parked there, run them through the Maryland or Virginia DMV and figure out who each person is.
Very interested stuff. If you have a serious interest in the NSA, read this book.