Yes, but going by that logic there won't be an H.265 either, because the hardware support doesn't exist in current devices.
That would be true, except that a lot of the companies behind the H.26x standards are large hardware manufacturers. This gets around the chicken and egg problem that Theora faces because these big hardware manufacturers can add support to their products before there is wide adoption of the standard since pushing that adoption will result in future licensing profits.
For what it's worth, Landis' failed doping test is, at least a little, controversial. The lab that analyzed it was the same one that dug up a B sample of Lance Armstrong that was over a decade old and claimed it tested positive. The ensuing investigation concluded that the lab's practices were woefully inadequate and recommended that they not be used again.
That they were used to test A samples from such a high-profile event is disgraceful. That they test the B samples as well when the A samples are positive is borderline criminal. Given the prevalence of doping in the sport, labs results are assumed by everyone to be correct, even when there are good reasons to question them. Because of that, the tour and other sports-testing programs owe it to the athletes to get the science part right. They need to hold labs to account and, when labs are found to have been sloppy, discontinue using those labs. And they need to send the A and B samples to different labs so that they can be tested independently. And they need to ensure that the results are not made public until both A and B samples have tested positive.
I'm not naive enough to think that Landis didn't do it. Just based on that performance at the time, I thought there was something fishy going on since he basically collapsed the day before and less than 24 hours later he was beating everyone by 15 minutes. But I have zero confidence in the labs results and even less confidence in this hacking charge. The fact that this lab is still used is indicative of an agenda on the part of the event to target certain riders. Both parties have an incentive to lie and are almost completely untrustworthy.
The poster's problem is that he's going about protecting his privacy the wrong way. Trying to hide all personal information is a losing proposition, as he's noticed. The best way to protect your privacy is to drown the real bits in a sea of fake information.
If AT&T wants to monitor his viewing habits, write a script that will chose programming at random and switch the U-Verse box to that station while he's not watching it himself. Web analytics and ad servers are equally easy to poison with fake data. The health insurance records are a bit harder, but that's an area where we have more rights and is easier to push for laws that protect privacy.
If enough people did this, data mining would be almost worthless since you couldn't get reliable results. Of course that's a pipe dream, since not enough people have the technical acumen to do this, but those of us who can should be doing our part.
She seems to be paranoid that letting engineers set their own deadlines is a skiver's charter.
I don't think the point of planning poker is to let engineers set their own deadlines. Our deadlines are the end of each 2-week iteration, but the process should still work with other artificial deadlines imposed by someone outside of engineering. The point of planning poker is to figure out how much development can be accomplished by the deadline. If the result of the process yields an incomplete product, it's up to management to adjust the deadlines to accommodate more development.
From the sound of it, among other things, the big thing your manager missed is determining the team's velocity. Ideal days is just real-world hook for engineers to keep their estimates consistent. Any resemblance to any real-world concept in any other context is purely coincidental. What the manager should be doing is determining a velocity metric based off the team's historical performance. This is most easily accomplished when the time period when work is completed remains fairly constant (one reason why short iterations are nice), but it need not be the case. The key point to remember is that it's a process put in place to translate an engineer's, "I think that will take 3 days" into something reliable enough that business decisions can be made that rely on the work getting done.
The good news for you is that you might be able to help your PHB grok this while making her feel empowered rather than feeling like she's losing control. You just have to remind her that the process allows her or her superiors to set the deadlines and allows her to accurately figure out how much development can be done in that time period so that scheduling can be accurate and the expectations of her superiors can be set and met. Nowhere in the process is she losing control. It's just important for her to understand that asking engineers, even those with decades of experience, for time estimates will yield incorrect results. It's just too difficult for us to factor in meetings and the other daily interruptions and such. But since those interruptions are fairly consistent, you can adjust the estimates from engineers to account for the lost development time and end up with a reliable real-world estimate to use for scheduling development. Trust the process, figure out the team's velocity and then enjoy the bonuses and raises that come from being able to follow through on things you commit to.
We're an agile shop and we do Planning Poker meetings and it's worked out really well. In addition to the cards (purchased here), there's apps for the various smart phones that some of us use.
The basic idea is that the features are discussed and each developer independently comes up with an estimate of the number of days that a feature will take. It's not really important if those days match up exactly with what can actually be accomplished in one day, only that developers keep that concept consistent across estimates. The estimates are revealed and we reach a consensus on the right number. Sometimes there's a large difference between estimates and the developers at the extremes talk through their thought process until a compromise has been reached. But most of the time, we're pretty close.
At first, you try to match those day estimates up with actual developer days. But, over time, you figure out how many estimated days you can fit into an actual time period (velocity). After a few iterations, the velocity becomes pretty reliable and you get to the point where you can easily figure out how much work you can fit into the time allotted. We do these estimating sessions and they usually take up about a day of the time of the entire engineering team (so 4 days per year.) For larger teams, it's probably possible to get accurate estimates with a small group of engineers, but since we're small, everyone is involved.
In the past year, we've only estimated 2 2-week iterations poorly. One we had unclear specs and were told late in the iteration that what we built wasn't really what was desired and the other was the result of a developer discovering a third-party library that saved us the majority of the work we had planned. Other than those two, we've been very close all year. If we're under, we pick up minor unscheduled bugs to fill the time. If we're over, we either subtract a day or two from the next iteration or a developer picks it up on the weekend before QA gets it's hands on it. But more often than not, we're dead on. I realize we're not perfect and there's probably a lot we could be doing to accomplish more in the time we're given, but the reliability of our estimates has been very helpful to management who values predictable development. They see us as highly competent not because we're able to accomplish impressive things, but because if we say we can do something, it gets done.
Amazon wants to sell eBooks, and cheap books sell better than expensive ones (big shocker, right?).
I know that's the end goal, but I don't think that's the motivation behind their current fight with the publishers.
Having read one of the linked author's statements, I think he's being very short-sighted. He talks about how his books sell an order of magnitude less in eBook form than they do in print. But that's because the market is still small...only a small percentage of readers have eBook readers. As people have pointed out in previous Kindle discussions, the initial outlay of money is substantial and it takes a lot of savings on eBooks to recoup that initial cost. The number 1 question I get from people who don't have a Kindle about my Kindle isn't about the experience of using it or anything to do with the device itself. The question I get is, "How much are books and which books are available?"
If publishers are allowed to set whatever prices they want for their books, the answer to that question becomes more complicated and people are discouraged from buying eBook readers. But by pushing for a standard upper price limit, Amazon is trying to increase the number of people with an eBook reader. And if they're successful and a large percentage of the potential buyers of a book have an eBook reader, the authors will find that the order of magnitude difference between the two formats will all but disappear if not becoming reversed. Once the market exists, it won't matter what prices are charged so long as they're sufficiently discounted from the dead tree edition. But if Amazon allows the price variance now, the time it takes to reach that state will increase and we'll continue to see paper books outsell eBooks by a large margin.
As you've mentioned, the author's cut for eBooks should be fairly similar to their cut on a traditional book. The difference will be the cut taken by the publishers and the book sellers. I see this as a struggle between traditional production and distribution and Amazon and the other digital distributors. Amazon wants the future to be now and they are pushing the Kindle to create the market for digital distribution. Publishers see how this will marginalize them and are fighting it. As a Kindle owner, I'm happy to see lower prices, but I have no illusion that Amazon is fighting this for the benefit of customers like me. To say so is disingenuous. But it's just as disingenuous for publishers to explain their position by claiming they're fighting for authors. The reality is that authors and readers are the only two sympathetic parties in the system and both sides have justified their actions by appealing to people sympathy towards those two groups when it's really just greed on their part.
Moving ebooks (bought from Amazon) to a new reader from a different company is a matter of finding the tools (search MobiDeDRM) to strip the DRM. They're a bit hard to use if you're not familiar with the command line, but any Slashdotter should have no problems figuring them out. There may be DMCA implications to that, but it's pretty obviously within your fair use rights. When I got my Kindle as a gift, I was a bit worried about the DRM aspect of the product. But beyond the philosophical objection, there practically nothing to worry about in that regard.
Sharing ebooks with your wife is actually beyond simple if you've both got a Kindle. The key would be tying them both to the same Amazon account. Then you can both download any purchase made on that account directly from Amazon. If her reader is a different brand or not tied to the same account, then the tools mentioned above can easily accomplish what you want.
With regards to the third use case you mentioned, so long as the original purchase price for the ebook is less than the cost of the physical book less the resale cost, I could care less if I can resell it. The bigger concern would be the inability to buy used books.
I've come to look at the Kindle as a fully-featured eBook reader that also has an optional DRM-encumbered store which can be safely ignored if it annoys me sufficiently. Thanks to tools like Calibre, it's pretty trivial to convert ePubs you've bought elsewhere to Mobipocket for use on the Kindle (provided they're not DRM-protected). So at any time I can permanently turn off the wireless functionality and buy books from other sources which can easily be converted to work with the Kindle.
The iPad is not a general-purpose computing device.
No, but it is being pushed as an email client and web browser and, unless it's significantly changed from the current iPhone OS, it's missing some key features needed in those two applications.
Mainly, I see it missing the ability to deal with files and peripherals. Browsing the web without being able to download files is an incomplete experience. Using an email client without the ability to deal with attachments is an incomplete experience. Not being able to print out a file or web page again makes it an incomplete experience. Not being able to import photos from a digital camera makes it an incomplete experience.
I do see this device being tremendously useful for specific purposes, just not any of the purposes Apple lists. When I take my car to the dealership for service, the representatives all have expensive tablet computers that could easily be replaced by cheaper iPads. And if Apple were to come out with a version with a camera and GPS, it could be a very useful device for inspectors (building, health, appraisal, etc) to take with them when they're in the field. And it would be perfect for a doctor to take with him as he makes his rounds so that he can pull up/update medical history, lookup drug information, check his schedule and such. And I'm sure there's plenty of other highly specialized tasks that could benefit from something with the iPad's form factor, abilities, price and ease of development.
But, to me, it just seems significantly incomplete for web browsing, email, photo management, book reading (no eInk, no interest from me...I value my eyesight too much to read for significant periods of time on a device with active lighting) and a lot of the other uses that Apple is touting. Those things may not require a completely general-purpose computing device, but they do require more general-purpose features than the iPad seems to offer.
The question isn't whether you can fix it, but what happens in the time between when it breaks and when it gets fixed? How many people can't work? How many man-hours are wasted? How much money does the company lose due to the downtime?
Given that the discussion is over local admin rights, when something breaks, the answer to your question is 1 person can't work. The man hours wasted are equal to the number of hours it takes to fix. There's a dollar amount that goes along with it too, but it's not too high, especially when compared with the amount of time lost to having to ask IT to make changes to a locked-down machine (during which, 2 high-paid employees are occupied instead of 1.)
We're not talking about servers here. I think any competent developer understands the context they're working in. You don't want to make changes to critical servers with as little thought and preparation as you can give to changes to your local development machine.
Of course you can fix it. Anything can be fixed with enough time, money, and expertise
This is true, of course, but only holds in the case where the user is willing and capable of making the fix. For developers, this is likely the case. For the rest of the users that IT has to support, it's not. My point was that since we're able to fix things, we're more likely to try things that are likely to accomplish what we need rather than running to IT for help. And it's not, as you suggested, because we're so sure that the computer will act the way we believe it should act. Instead, it's because we believe that we can recover from any problems caused in making the change.
This argues for developers having local admin rights because any problems we create we clean up ourselves. We're not like the rest of users for whom having local admin rights would exacerbate the problems once IT is tasked with cleaning it up. There may be the rare case where that happens, but the more common case is that we prevent the need for IT to even get called for small and easily fixable problems. Of course that goes out the window when we're denied local admin rights because our computer need is so specialized that we're constantly hassling IT to make changes that would be trivial for us to do ourselves or, worse yet, we're forced to work around the problems we encounter because IT is unwilling to make the desired changes.
Having nothing ever break in the first place-- now that's a trick.
It's not a trick, it's impossible. But it's irrelevant when considering the question of how to best allocate a company's resources. However developers being able to fix their own machines is relevant since it allows them to have local admin rights and not burden the IT staff with maintaining their computers.
I think you've somewhat correctly identified the what while incorrectly attributing it the the why. As a developer, I have less fear of changing things or breaking things not because I feel that things should work in the way I expect, but, instead, because I have confidence that I can fix things if/when they become broken. Sometimes it takes some Googling, but I can't think of a time where I wasn't able to fix a software issue. This mentality applies not only to maintaining a system, but also to doing our jobs. Refactoring code is quite often an exercise in breaking it and fixing it in a more correct fashion.
So yes, I think we're much more likely to fiddle with settings and in the 95% case where it does what we expect it to do, no one notices. But that last 5% of the time where something unexpected happens, our minds are conditioned to work through the problem and fix it. We're not the email/web/office users who get scared when things stop working as expected. We're the ones that, in that situation, get curious as to what's going on and see it as a challenge to overcome.
But the one thing I can say with a certainty is that when restrictions are placed on my ability to maintain my own machine, I suffer far more down time in dealing with those restrictions than I do when I have complete control. It's why I won't work in a large, corporate environment anymore.
It might also be good to point out that Google has been very open about some of the key pieces of their search infrastructure, though not to the point of coughing up actual source code. They've published papers on MapReduce, GFS and BigTable that have allowed others to write their own implementations without too much difficulty. Projects like Apache's Hadoop/HBase probably wouldn't exist if Google hadn't shared as much as they did.
If you think about everything that goes into creating a search engine, Google has been very forthcoming about most of the things that can't be used by SEO companies to game the system. It's mostly that latter part of the equation that has been closely guarded.
Does the availability of extensions put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated, like many complain about with Firefox?
No. For a lot of us, that's like asking, "Does the ability to run JavaScript put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?" or even, "Does the ability to render HTML put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?"
Extensions are among the core featureset that a browser should support. With extensions, you simply make sure that everything is possible to accomplish with the extension API instead of implementing new features. That way, the user decides how bloated the browser becomes and doesn't have to put up with the bloat of unwanted features.
On the other hand, it does have one tremendous weakness that doesn't afflict music: consumers often watch films only once.
I see that as a strength. The reason people only watch films once is because a film occupies your attention in a way that listening to music doesn't. People mostly listen to music while driving, working, exercising and other situations where they're doing something else while they're listening to the music.
Movies are different. Movies are part of our culture in a way that music isn't. People don't come into work on Monday and discuss what albums they listened to over the weekend. People don't take their date to listen to music nearly as much as they do to watch a movie. And when they do, it's almost always live music that isn't re-listened-to. I could be wrong, but I don't think concert sales have taken nearly the hit that CD sales have.
Basically, movies are an activity and music is an accompaniment for other activities. This makes movies harder to replace than music. I also believe that the direction that both industries took benefits movies more. If you select performers based primarily on their physical appearance, it helps if the actual content makes use of the image of the performer.
In fact, I don't think jQuery addresses a single "lack" in Javascript
jQuery, like every other JavaScript library, gives you an extend function to address the lack of inheritance in JavaScript. It also offers functions like each that act on closures to iterate over a list/array...the language doesn't need these, but other languages offer them by default.
This is why Javascript gets a bad rap: pair it with DOM, and *any* language would look awful, because DOM is awful.
More than it being the DOM that makes JavaScript look bad, it's the fact that you have to target multiple implementations which are often incompatible. If there was just one JavaScript implementation that was shared between all browser vendors, things wouldn't be so bad. But JavaScript is lacking some basic functionality that it desperately needs. As mentioned above, native inheritance would be nice so that every library doesn't have to implement their own incompatible version. And namespaces and include, require, etc would be extremely helpful for larger projects where multiple team members work on the same codebase. And, as others have mentioned, JavaScript needs threading. The fact that developers are able to write responsive GUIs without threading is a minor miracle. Being able to have a dedicated UI thread is standard practice in other languages and it would make things easier in JavaScript as well.
However I just don't see the rationale for putting all this effort into making JavaScript a fully-featured modern language. There are quite a few languages that are already well established that need only have a DOM interface written for them. Life would be so much easier if browser vendors defined a language-neutral DOM abstraction and allowed scripting languages to be added as plug-ins. Then developers would be free to use <script language="python" src="script.py"... or <script language="java" src="script.jar"... and not only have the ability to code in their preferred language but also have the ability to leverage existing code in their applications.
Those modern LED TVs are what informed people call LCDs.
Informed people call them LED TVs because it's shorter than saying LED LCD or LCD with LED backlighting. LCD, for better or worse, refers to the first LCD-based displays which do not use LED backlighting. And while LED TVs use LCDs, we need a different term to refer to them, since the ownership experience is very different...both viewing, form factor (LED TVs tend to be very thin) and when the utility bills come. So we can either spit out a long-winded and technically correct string of words, or we can pick the one feature that differentiates them from all other TVs and use that term.
Guess which one the product marketing departments chose?
Until they get advanced enough to figure out what you meant rather than the closest dictionary word, spell check will be a feature that, when relied upon, can make a poor speller look very foolish.
That would be all well and good, except that we're talking about mobile phones. Pretty much by design, they tend to move around a bit. So it may be easy to tell how much overall capacity you'll need on your network, but it's not as simple as arriving at that result and deploying that amount...you need to figure out the property capacity for each location covered by your network.
And because of this, if you want to have the capacity to handle all traffic on your network, you'll need more capacity than the total that will be used by users. For instance, you'll need a lot of capacity in the financial districts of cities that will be largely unused at night. Also, you'll need a ton of capacity at ballparks and stadiums that will be almost entirely unused when there's no event taking place. And what do you do when everyone goes home for the holidays? Airports will almost certainly have to have greater capacity to handle the onslaught of travelers and I'm pretty sure more people go back east for the holidays than go west, so you have to account for the increased network usage caused by that temporary migration.
And, worse yet, things are in a constant state of flux. Buildings get built that block the signal from a tower to a certain area. Every day new customers are signing up and old customers are leaving so the distribution in the location of subscribers can change. And the demographics of your customer base can change too. Imagine you're in charge of planning the roll out of AT&T's towers and come into work one day to find that your company has signed an exclusive deal with a trendy hardware manufacturer to sell a phone which is really the first mainstream internet tablet even though it doubles as a phone. Suddenly the demands on your network have shifted significantly towards data from voice.
None of this is meant to suggest that a company the size of AT&T shouldn't be able to solve the problem, but only that the problem is much more difficult than you make it out to be. When you think through the problem, there's a lot more variables than you're realizing. Companies with fewer resources than AT&T solve harder problems all the time, so the fact that the problem is hard isn't an excuse.
That quote had little to do with the bill of rights and more to do with a government that acts in the best interests of its people and in which any citizen is eligible to serve.
In such a government, there is no constant struggle between the people and the government to maintain rights because the government officers are acting in what they believe to be the best interests of the people they represent. There will be times when those beliefs are wrong or only apply to a certain portion of the population and people are forced to stand up for what they believe, but those are supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
It was meant to contrast with the monarchies/oligarchies of Europe where many/most of the people are ineligible to participate in certain parts of government and where the interests of the common people were not the primary concern of government.
I agree with the GP that our government has long since represented the interests of the people, although since they've declared corporations to be people in most legal senses, it still represents the interests of those people. If Lincoln's government behaved like our current government, the war may have still been fought over the divide between the north and south on economic issues, but a campaign contributions from a PAC representing wealthy plantation owners in the south would have prevented the emancipation of the slaves from threatening their business model. Thankfully, that government did what was right for all people, not just the wealthy people who could afford to finance the re-election campaigns of the representatives.
American political system is so deeply, fundamentally broken, thanks to institutionalized bribery and corruption, that any attempts to create such a system are corrupted by corporate influence.
I'm don't think it is fundamentally broken, I think that it just doesn't scale up to the size of the country. We should have long ago scaled out rather than up.
The system we have can be made to work with smaller numbers. When that happens, the influence that an individual can have is not marginalized the way that it is now. Think about elections for city officials in large cities or even state elections for reasonably-sized states. Individuals can and do have an impact. And much more would try if there was more at stake (i.e. if most of what we currently think of as Federal powers were instead powers of states and municipalities.) We need the Federal Government to be more like the EU so that it only handles a few things that make sense at that level (currency, immigration, etc.)
It's not a fault of Democracy or even the way it's implemented in this country. No system of government has scaled well up to the size of the population of US. China, Russia, India...they're all dysfunctional and corrupt when they get to be that size. The governments in Europe work not because they're socialist but because they're a fraction of the size of the US and voters there are not marginalized by the sheer mass of the electorate.
3) Remove the unique constraint on app name and let companies use a dispute resolution system outside of Apple (i.e. civil courts) if it becomes a problem. If people want to reserve a name, they can trademark it.
As an iPhone user I'm perfectly capable of differentiating apps based on not only their name but their icon as well. Hell...I don't even look at either most of the time because I remember which apps are at which positions. I see no reason why multiple apps can't share the same name...would that really be so bad?
I would hope that the parents of an unschooled child would take some responsibility for guiding their children towards the necessary learning needed to enter a more structured school at a later date. I learned to read prior to grade school and learned entirely at home. This happened because my parents read to me every day from before I was born to the time that I started reading on my own. Eventually, I started following along with what they were reading and asking questions about words I was unsure of. By the time I was about 3 and a half years old, I was able to read on my own. From that point on, I learned vocabulary and grammar from the books I read and the dictionary I kept handy to look up words I didn't know.
The point being that it's entirely possible to learn things outside of a school setting...I'm pretty sure I learned more that way than I did in school. Much of my learning happened in this way because I was more advanced than my classmates in reading and math. My parents would take me to the library on the weekends and I'd check out books for the week ahead. I spent most of my math classes off reading math texts on my own because the work the rest of the class was doing was stuff I already knew. But none of it would have happened without the active participation of my parents. I was learning without being taught but I wasn't learning entirely on my own.
If parents of unschooled children take the time to supervise their unschooled child's education, there's no reason to believe that the child couldn't compete academically. It doesn't take much time to visit the library every weekend to check out the necessary books and then to check in with the child each day to find out what they learned. However that only covers the academic portion of a child's education which is only half of what school is good for. The other half is socializing with other children. Home schooling and unschooling need to address the social facet of a child's education too, which tends to get ignored in discussions about alternative education methods. For that reason, I know I'll send my children to a school of some sort but I'm also going to take an active role in ensuring that they get the best education possible. But if other parents find a way to address both the social education and the academic education of their children, I see nothing wrong with that.
While I agree with your sentiment regarding destroying the game, I disagree that it's the actual steroid abusers who are most to blame for it. To me, those most culpable are the representatives of the Commissioner's office and the MLBPA (basically, Bud Selig and Donald Fehr.) I believe that those people have done a masterful job of making the dirty players the scapegoat to hide their own complicit actions.
Steroid use rose to prominence as baseball was recovering from the strike. Those in charge of the league knew that Sosa and McGwire were using steroids but chose to ignore it because the nation's fascination with the HR chase was bringing fans back to the game. Once it was established that the MLB authorities would not crack down on steroid abusers, the door was open for more and more players to start using.
Meanwhile, the player's union blocked any form of drug testing program that was ever considered until Congress stepped in. Instead of representing the majority of their members, they represented the most wealthy and dirty players. They didn't consider the non-star players who were forced to choose between the steroid use and a minor league career because the level of competition was raised by those who abused drugs.
The players did play their part, but I'm hesitant to place too much blame on them. Many players grow up poor, either in this country or in Latin American countries. But when they get to the big leagues, the choice to use steroids can result in generational wealth with minimal immediate consequences. Other players are highly competitive and that drive is what got them to the big leagues to begin with. So when they get there and see other players out-performing them by using drugs, they're driven to drug use by their competitive urges. But in neither case would there be anywhere near as many players using if the environment surrounding baseball punished steroid users or even didn't encourage the behavior.
If players had to get tested once a week and knew that getting caught meant being out a season after the first failed tests and being banned after second positive test, there would be very few that would do it and that would've allowed those that were pressured into using to have made the choice to play clean.
We should also disabuse ourselves of the notion that the game was clean before steroids came along. Drugs have been a part of baseball ever since it became possible to earn a comfortable living playing the game. Early on, it was cocaine that was used but eventually players moved to amphetamines, which are still used today in addition to steroids. What changed with steroids is the drugs gave players abilities that hadn't been seen before. Rather than performing ordinary actions better than they would otherwise have performed them, players were performing extraordinary actions. Basically, the game as always been dirty, it was just dirty in a way that was much less visible to fans.
Sorry to rant, but I just feel compelled to every time people try to blame the steroid scandal on the players.
I too am a DirecTV subscriber and will be among the first in line to buy a TiVo that works with DirecTV. It's supposed to happen when the 2 year contract with NDS runs out (see this), but I haven't heard anything since the initial announcement.
I'm hoping that the fact that TiVo is going after Verizon/AT&T and not DirecTV/Cable is an indication that they'll be adding a DirecTV TiVo soon (i.e. they're only suing the companies that don't allow their customers to use TiVos.)
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Yes, but going by that logic there won't be an H.265 either, because the hardware support doesn't exist in current devices.
That would be true, except that a lot of the companies behind the H.26x standards are large hardware manufacturers. This gets around the chicken and egg problem that Theora faces because these big hardware manufacturers can add support to their products before there is wide adoption of the standard since pushing that adoption will result in future licensing profits.
Really? You might try telling that to Netgear or D-Link or any of the other companies that make Coaxial Ethernet Bridges.
This whole story could have been avoided if the poster knew the right term to Google.
For what it's worth, Landis' failed doping test is, at least a little, controversial. The lab that analyzed it was the same one that dug up a B sample of Lance Armstrong that was over a decade old and claimed it tested positive. The ensuing investigation concluded that the lab's practices were woefully inadequate and recommended that they not be used again.
That they were used to test A samples from such a high-profile event is disgraceful. That they test the B samples as well when the A samples are positive is borderline criminal. Given the prevalence of doping in the sport, labs results are assumed by everyone to be correct, even when there are good reasons to question them. Because of that, the tour and other sports-testing programs owe it to the athletes to get the science part right. They need to hold labs to account and, when labs are found to have been sloppy, discontinue using those labs. And they need to send the A and B samples to different labs so that they can be tested independently. And they need to ensure that the results are not made public until both A and B samples have tested positive.
I'm not naive enough to think that Landis didn't do it. Just based on that performance at the time, I thought there was something fishy going on since he basically collapsed the day before and less than 24 hours later he was beating everyone by 15 minutes. But I have zero confidence in the labs results and even less confidence in this hacking charge. The fact that this lab is still used is indicative of an agenda on the part of the event to target certain riders. Both parties have an incentive to lie and are almost completely untrustworthy.
The poster's problem is that he's going about protecting his privacy the wrong way. Trying to hide all personal information is a losing proposition, as he's noticed. The best way to protect your privacy is to drown the real bits in a sea of fake information.
If AT&T wants to monitor his viewing habits, write a script that will chose programming at random and switch the U-Verse box to that station while he's not watching it himself. Web analytics and ad servers are equally easy to poison with fake data. The health insurance records are a bit harder, but that's an area where we have more rights and is easier to push for laws that protect privacy.
If enough people did this, data mining would be almost worthless since you couldn't get reliable results. Of course that's a pipe dream, since not enough people have the technical acumen to do this, but those of us who can should be doing our part.
She seems to be paranoid that letting engineers set their own deadlines is a skiver's charter.
I don't think the point of planning poker is to let engineers set their own deadlines. Our deadlines are the end of each 2-week iteration, but the process should still work with other artificial deadlines imposed by someone outside of engineering. The point of planning poker is to figure out how much development can be accomplished by the deadline. If the result of the process yields an incomplete product, it's up to management to adjust the deadlines to accommodate more development.
From the sound of it, among other things, the big thing your manager missed is determining the team's velocity. Ideal days is just real-world hook for engineers to keep their estimates consistent. Any resemblance to any real-world concept in any other context is purely coincidental. What the manager should be doing is determining a velocity metric based off the team's historical performance. This is most easily accomplished when the time period when work is completed remains fairly constant (one reason why short iterations are nice), but it need not be the case. The key point to remember is that it's a process put in place to translate an engineer's, "I think that will take 3 days" into something reliable enough that business decisions can be made that rely on the work getting done.
The good news for you is that you might be able to help your PHB grok this while making her feel empowered rather than feeling like she's losing control. You just have to remind her that the process allows her or her superiors to set the deadlines and allows her to accurately figure out how much development can be done in that time period so that scheduling can be accurate and the expectations of her superiors can be set and met. Nowhere in the process is she losing control. It's just important for her to understand that asking engineers, even those with decades of experience, for time estimates will yield incorrect results. It's just too difficult for us to factor in meetings and the other daily interruptions and such. But since those interruptions are fairly consistent, you can adjust the estimates from engineers to account for the lost development time and end up with a reliable real-world estimate to use for scheduling development. Trust the process, figure out the team's velocity and then enjoy the bonuses and raises that come from being able to follow through on things you commit to.
We're an agile shop and we do Planning Poker meetings and it's worked out really well. In addition to the cards (purchased here), there's apps for the various smart phones that some of us use.
The basic idea is that the features are discussed and each developer independently comes up with an estimate of the number of days that a feature will take. It's not really important if those days match up exactly with what can actually be accomplished in one day, only that developers keep that concept consistent across estimates. The estimates are revealed and we reach a consensus on the right number. Sometimes there's a large difference between estimates and the developers at the extremes talk through their thought process until a compromise has been reached. But most of the time, we're pretty close.
At first, you try to match those day estimates up with actual developer days. But, over time, you figure out how many estimated days you can fit into an actual time period (velocity). After a few iterations, the velocity becomes pretty reliable and you get to the point where you can easily figure out how much work you can fit into the time allotted. We do these estimating sessions and they usually take up about a day of the time of the entire engineering team (so 4 days per year.) For larger teams, it's probably possible to get accurate estimates with a small group of engineers, but since we're small, everyone is involved.
In the past year, we've only estimated 2 2-week iterations poorly. One we had unclear specs and were told late in the iteration that what we built wasn't really what was desired and the other was the result of a developer discovering a third-party library that saved us the majority of the work we had planned. Other than those two, we've been very close all year. If we're under, we pick up minor unscheduled bugs to fill the time. If we're over, we either subtract a day or two from the next iteration or a developer picks it up on the weekend before QA gets it's hands on it. But more often than not, we're dead on. I realize we're not perfect and there's probably a lot we could be doing to accomplish more in the time we're given, but the reliability of our estimates has been very helpful to management who values predictable development. They see us as highly competent not because we're able to accomplish impressive things, but because if we say we can do something, it gets done.
Amazon wants to sell eBooks, and cheap books sell better than expensive ones (big shocker, right?).
I know that's the end goal, but I don't think that's the motivation behind their current fight with the publishers.
Having read one of the linked author's statements, I think he's being very short-sighted. He talks about how his books sell an order of magnitude less in eBook form than they do in print. But that's because the market is still small...only a small percentage of readers have eBook readers. As people have pointed out in previous Kindle discussions, the initial outlay of money is substantial and it takes a lot of savings on eBooks to recoup that initial cost. The number 1 question I get from people who don't have a Kindle about my Kindle isn't about the experience of using it or anything to do with the device itself. The question I get is, "How much are books and which books are available?"
If publishers are allowed to set whatever prices they want for their books, the answer to that question becomes more complicated and people are discouraged from buying eBook readers. But by pushing for a standard upper price limit, Amazon is trying to increase the number of people with an eBook reader. And if they're successful and a large percentage of the potential buyers of a book have an eBook reader, the authors will find that the order of magnitude difference between the two formats will all but disappear if not becoming reversed. Once the market exists, it won't matter what prices are charged so long as they're sufficiently discounted from the dead tree edition. But if Amazon allows the price variance now, the time it takes to reach that state will increase and we'll continue to see paper books outsell eBooks by a large margin.
As you've mentioned, the author's cut for eBooks should be fairly similar to their cut on a traditional book. The difference will be the cut taken by the publishers and the book sellers. I see this as a struggle between traditional production and distribution and Amazon and the other digital distributors. Amazon wants the future to be now and they are pushing the Kindle to create the market for digital distribution. Publishers see how this will marginalize them and are fighting it. As a Kindle owner, I'm happy to see lower prices, but I have no illusion that Amazon is fighting this for the benefit of customers like me. To say so is disingenuous. But it's just as disingenuous for publishers to explain their position by claiming they're fighting for authors. The reality is that authors and readers are the only two sympathetic parties in the system and both sides have justified their actions by appealing to people sympathy towards those two groups when it's really just greed on their part.
1 and 2 can be done.
Moving ebooks (bought from Amazon) to a new reader from a different company is a matter of finding the tools (search MobiDeDRM) to strip the DRM. They're a bit hard to use if you're not familiar with the command line, but any Slashdotter should have no problems figuring them out. There may be DMCA implications to that, but it's pretty obviously within your fair use rights. When I got my Kindle as a gift, I was a bit worried about the DRM aspect of the product. But beyond the philosophical objection, there practically nothing to worry about in that regard.
Sharing ebooks with your wife is actually beyond simple if you've both got a Kindle. The key would be tying them both to the same Amazon account. Then you can both download any purchase made on that account directly from Amazon. If her reader is a different brand or not tied to the same account, then the tools mentioned above can easily accomplish what you want.
With regards to the third use case you mentioned, so long as the original purchase price for the ebook is less than the cost of the physical book less the resale cost, I could care less if I can resell it. The bigger concern would be the inability to buy used books.
I've come to look at the Kindle as a fully-featured eBook reader that also has an optional DRM-encumbered store which can be safely ignored if it annoys me sufficiently. Thanks to tools like Calibre, it's pretty trivial to convert ePubs you've bought elsewhere to Mobipocket for use on the Kindle (provided they're not DRM-protected). So at any time I can permanently turn off the wireless functionality and buy books from other sources which can easily be converted to work with the Kindle.
The iPad is not a general-purpose computing device.
No, but it is being pushed as an email client and web browser and, unless it's significantly changed from the current iPhone OS, it's missing some key features needed in those two applications.
Mainly, I see it missing the ability to deal with files and peripherals. Browsing the web without being able to download files is an incomplete experience. Using an email client without the ability to deal with attachments is an incomplete experience. Not being able to print out a file or web page again makes it an incomplete experience. Not being able to import photos from a digital camera makes it an incomplete experience.
I do see this device being tremendously useful for specific purposes, just not any of the purposes Apple lists. When I take my car to the dealership for service, the representatives all have expensive tablet computers that could easily be replaced by cheaper iPads. And if Apple were to come out with a version with a camera and GPS, it could be a very useful device for inspectors (building, health, appraisal, etc) to take with them when they're in the field. And it would be perfect for a doctor to take with him as he makes his rounds so that he can pull up/update medical history, lookup drug information, check his schedule and such. And I'm sure there's plenty of other highly specialized tasks that could benefit from something with the iPad's form factor, abilities, price and ease of development.
But, to me, it just seems significantly incomplete for web browsing, email, photo management, book reading (no eInk, no interest from me...I value my eyesight too much to read for significant periods of time on a device with active lighting) and a lot of the other uses that Apple is touting. Those things may not require a completely general-purpose computing device, but they do require more general-purpose features than the iPad seems to offer.
The question isn't whether you can fix it, but what happens in the time between when it breaks and when it gets fixed? How many people can't work? How many man-hours are wasted? How much money does the company lose due to the downtime?
Given that the discussion is over local admin rights, when something breaks, the answer to your question is 1 person can't work. The man hours wasted are equal to the number of hours it takes to fix. There's a dollar amount that goes along with it too, but it's not too high, especially when compared with the amount of time lost to having to ask IT to make changes to a locked-down machine (during which, 2 high-paid employees are occupied instead of 1.)
We're not talking about servers here. I think any competent developer understands the context they're working in. You don't want to make changes to critical servers with as little thought and preparation as you can give to changes to your local development machine.
Of course you can fix it. Anything can be fixed with enough time, money, and expertise
This is true, of course, but only holds in the case where the user is willing and capable of making the fix. For developers, this is likely the case. For the rest of the users that IT has to support, it's not. My point was that since we're able to fix things, we're more likely to try things that are likely to accomplish what we need rather than running to IT for help. And it's not, as you suggested, because we're so sure that the computer will act the way we believe it should act. Instead, it's because we believe that we can recover from any problems caused in making the change.
This argues for developers having local admin rights because any problems we create we clean up ourselves. We're not like the rest of users for whom having local admin rights would exacerbate the problems once IT is tasked with cleaning it up. There may be the rare case where that happens, but the more common case is that we prevent the need for IT to even get called for small and easily fixable problems. Of course that goes out the window when we're denied local admin rights because our computer need is so specialized that we're constantly hassling IT to make changes that would be trivial for us to do ourselves or, worse yet, we're forced to work around the problems we encounter because IT is unwilling to make the desired changes.
Having nothing ever break in the first place-- now that's a trick.
It's not a trick, it's impossible. But it's irrelevant when considering the question of how to best allocate a company's resources. However developers being able to fix their own machines is relevant since it allows them to have local admin rights and not burden the IT staff with maintaining their computers.
I think you've somewhat correctly identified the what while incorrectly attributing it the the why. As a developer, I have less fear of changing things or breaking things not because I feel that things should work in the way I expect, but, instead, because I have confidence that I can fix things if/when they become broken. Sometimes it takes some Googling, but I can't think of a time where I wasn't able to fix a software issue. This mentality applies not only to maintaining a system, but also to doing our jobs. Refactoring code is quite often an exercise in breaking it and fixing it in a more correct fashion.
So yes, I think we're much more likely to fiddle with settings and in the 95% case where it does what we expect it to do, no one notices. But that last 5% of the time where something unexpected happens, our minds are conditioned to work through the problem and fix it. We're not the email/web/office users who get scared when things stop working as expected. We're the ones that, in that situation, get curious as to what's going on and see it as a challenge to overcome.
But the one thing I can say with a certainty is that when restrictions are placed on my ability to maintain my own machine, I suffer far more down time in dealing with those restrictions than I do when I have complete control. It's why I won't work in a large, corporate environment anymore.
It might also be good to point out that Google has been very open about some of the key pieces of their search infrastructure, though not to the point of coughing up actual source code. They've published papers on MapReduce, GFS and BigTable that have allowed others to write their own implementations without too much difficulty. Projects like Apache's Hadoop/HBase probably wouldn't exist if Google hadn't shared as much as they did.
If you think about everything that goes into creating a search engine, Google has been very forthcoming about most of the things that can't be used by SEO companies to game the system. It's mostly that latter part of the equation that has been closely guarded.
Does the availability of extensions put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated, like many complain about with Firefox?
No. For a lot of us, that's like asking, "Does the ability to run JavaScript put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?" or even, "Does the ability to render HTML put Chrome at risk of becoming bloated?"
Extensions are among the core featureset that a browser should support. With extensions, you simply make sure that everything is possible to accomplish with the extension API instead of implementing new features. That way, the user decides how bloated the browser becomes and doesn't have to put up with the bloat of unwanted features.
On the other hand, it does have one tremendous weakness that doesn't afflict music: consumers often watch films only once.
I see that as a strength. The reason people only watch films once is because a film occupies your attention in a way that listening to music doesn't. People mostly listen to music while driving, working, exercising and other situations where they're doing something else while they're listening to the music.
Movies are different. Movies are part of our culture in a way that music isn't. People don't come into work on Monday and discuss what albums they listened to over the weekend. People don't take their date to listen to music nearly as much as they do to watch a movie. And when they do, it's almost always live music that isn't re-listened-to. I could be wrong, but I don't think concert sales have taken nearly the hit that CD sales have.
Basically, movies are an activity and music is an accompaniment for other activities. This makes movies harder to replace than music. I also believe that the direction that both industries took benefits movies more. If you select performers based primarily on their physical appearance, it helps if the actual content makes use of the image of the performer.
In fact, I don't think jQuery addresses a single "lack" in Javascript
jQuery, like every other JavaScript library, gives you an extend function to address the lack of inheritance in JavaScript. It also offers functions like each that act on closures to iterate over a list/array...the language doesn't need these, but other languages offer them by default.
This is why Javascript gets a bad rap: pair it with DOM, and *any* language would look awful, because DOM is awful.
More than it being the DOM that makes JavaScript look bad, it's the fact that you have to target multiple implementations which are often incompatible. If there was just one JavaScript implementation that was shared between all browser vendors, things wouldn't be so bad. But JavaScript is lacking some basic functionality that it desperately needs. As mentioned above, native inheritance would be nice so that every library doesn't have to implement their own incompatible version. And namespaces and include, require, etc would be extremely helpful for larger projects where multiple team members work on the same codebase. And, as others have mentioned, JavaScript needs threading. The fact that developers are able to write responsive GUIs without threading is a minor miracle. Being able to have a dedicated UI thread is standard practice in other languages and it would make things easier in JavaScript as well.
However I just don't see the rationale for putting all this effort into making JavaScript a fully-featured modern language. There are quite a few languages that are already well established that need only have a DOM interface written for them. Life would be so much easier if browser vendors defined a language-neutral DOM abstraction and allowed scripting languages to be added as plug-ins. Then developers would be free to use <script language="python" src="script.py"... or <script language="java" src="script.jar"... and not only have the ability to code in their preferred language but also have the ability to leverage existing code in their applications.
I certainly hope an 11 inch $2500 TV could meet the standard.
I'm not sure where you shop, but for well under $2500, you can get a 55" LED-backlit TV.
Those modern LED TVs are what informed people call LCDs.
Informed people call them LED TVs because it's shorter than saying LED LCD or LCD with LED backlighting. LCD, for better or worse, refers to the first LCD-based displays which do not use LED backlighting. And while LED TVs use LCDs, we need a different term to refer to them, since the ownership experience is very different...both viewing, form factor (LED TVs tend to be very thin) and when the utility bills come. So we can either spit out a long-winded and technically correct string of words, or we can pick the one feature that differentiates them from all other TVs and use that term.
Guess which one the product marketing departments chose?
More like, Four those who cant spill.
Until they get advanced enough to figure out what you meant rather than the closest dictionary word, spell check will be a feature that, when relied upon, can make a poor speller look very foolish.
That would be all well and good, except that we're talking about mobile phones. Pretty much by design, they tend to move around a bit. So it may be easy to tell how much overall capacity you'll need on your network, but it's not as simple as arriving at that result and deploying that amount...you need to figure out the property capacity for each location covered by your network.
And because of this, if you want to have the capacity to handle all traffic on your network, you'll need more capacity than the total that will be used by users. For instance, you'll need a lot of capacity in the financial districts of cities that will be largely unused at night. Also, you'll need a ton of capacity at ballparks and stadiums that will be almost entirely unused when there's no event taking place. And what do you do when everyone goes home for the holidays? Airports will almost certainly have to have greater capacity to handle the onslaught of travelers and I'm pretty sure more people go back east for the holidays than go west, so you have to account for the increased network usage caused by that temporary migration.
And, worse yet, things are in a constant state of flux. Buildings get built that block the signal from a tower to a certain area. Every day new customers are signing up and old customers are leaving so the distribution in the location of subscribers can change. And the demographics of your customer base can change too. Imagine you're in charge of planning the roll out of AT&T's towers and come into work one day to find that your company has signed an exclusive deal with a trendy hardware manufacturer to sell a phone which is really the first mainstream internet tablet even though it doubles as a phone. Suddenly the demands on your network have shifted significantly towards data from voice.
None of this is meant to suggest that a company the size of AT&T shouldn't be able to solve the problem, but only that the problem is much more difficult than you make it out to be. When you think through the problem, there's a lot more variables than you're realizing. Companies with fewer resources than AT&T solve harder problems all the time, so the fact that the problem is hard isn't an excuse.
...because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments.
It may not be everything that IE has, but there are third-party builds of Firefox designed for enterprise deployment and management.
See here, for one example.
That quote had little to do with the bill of rights and more to do with a government that acts in the best interests of its people and in which any citizen is eligible to serve.
In such a government, there is no constant struggle between the people and the government to maintain rights because the government officers are acting in what they believe to be the best interests of the people they represent. There will be times when those beliefs are wrong or only apply to a certain portion of the population and people are forced to stand up for what they believe, but those are supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
It was meant to contrast with the monarchies/oligarchies of Europe where many/most of the people are ineligible to participate in certain parts of government and where the interests of the common people were not the primary concern of government.
I agree with the GP that our government has long since represented the interests of the people, although since they've declared corporations to be people in most legal senses, it still represents the interests of those people. If Lincoln's government behaved like our current government, the war may have still been fought over the divide between the north and south on economic issues, but a campaign contributions from a PAC representing wealthy plantation owners in the south would have prevented the emancipation of the slaves from threatening their business model. Thankfully, that government did what was right for all people, not just the wealthy people who could afford to finance the re-election campaigns of the representatives.
American political system is so deeply, fundamentally broken, thanks to institutionalized bribery and corruption, that any attempts to create such a system are corrupted by corporate influence.
I'm don't think it is fundamentally broken, I think that it just doesn't scale up to the size of the country. We should have long ago scaled out rather than up.
The system we have can be made to work with smaller numbers. When that happens, the influence that an individual can have is not marginalized the way that it is now. Think about elections for city officials in large cities or even state elections for reasonably-sized states. Individuals can and do have an impact. And much more would try if there was more at stake (i.e. if most of what we currently think of as Federal powers were instead powers of states and municipalities.) We need the Federal Government to be more like the EU so that it only handles a few things that make sense at that level (currency, immigration, etc.)
It's not a fault of Democracy or even the way it's implemented in this country. No system of government has scaled well up to the size of the population of US. China, Russia, India...they're all dysfunctional and corrupt when they get to be that size. The governments in Europe work not because they're socialist but because they're a fraction of the size of the US and voters there are not marginalized by the sheer mass of the electorate.
How about:
3) Remove the unique constraint on app name and let companies use a dispute resolution system outside of Apple (i.e. civil courts) if it becomes a problem. If people want to reserve a name, they can trademark it.
As an iPhone user I'm perfectly capable of differentiating apps based on not only their name but their icon as well. Hell...I don't even look at either most of the time because I remember which apps are at which positions. I see no reason why multiple apps can't share the same name...would that really be so bad?
I would hope that the parents of an unschooled child would take some responsibility for guiding their children towards the necessary learning needed to enter a more structured school at a later date. I learned to read prior to grade school and learned entirely at home. This happened because my parents read to me every day from before I was born to the time that I started reading on my own. Eventually, I started following along with what they were reading and asking questions about words I was unsure of. By the time I was about 3 and a half years old, I was able to read on my own. From that point on, I learned vocabulary and grammar from the books I read and the dictionary I kept handy to look up words I didn't know.
The point being that it's entirely possible to learn things outside of a school setting...I'm pretty sure I learned more that way than I did in school. Much of my learning happened in this way because I was more advanced than my classmates in reading and math. My parents would take me to the library on the weekends and I'd check out books for the week ahead. I spent most of my math classes off reading math texts on my own because the work the rest of the class was doing was stuff I already knew. But none of it would have happened without the active participation of my parents. I was learning without being taught but I wasn't learning entirely on my own.
If parents of unschooled children take the time to supervise their unschooled child's education, there's no reason to believe that the child couldn't compete academically. It doesn't take much time to visit the library every weekend to check out the necessary books and then to check in with the child each day to find out what they learned. However that only covers the academic portion of a child's education which is only half of what school is good for. The other half is socializing with other children. Home schooling and unschooling need to address the social facet of a child's education too, which tends to get ignored in discussions about alternative education methods. For that reason, I know I'll send my children to a school of some sort but I'm also going to take an active role in ensuring that they get the best education possible. But if other parents find a way to address both the social education and the academic education of their children, I see nothing wrong with that.
While I agree with your sentiment regarding destroying the game, I disagree that it's the actual steroid abusers who are most to blame for it. To me, those most culpable are the representatives of the Commissioner's office and the MLBPA (basically, Bud Selig and Donald Fehr.) I believe that those people have done a masterful job of making the dirty players the scapegoat to hide their own complicit actions.
Steroid use rose to prominence as baseball was recovering from the strike. Those in charge of the league knew that Sosa and McGwire were using steroids but chose to ignore it because the nation's fascination with the HR chase was bringing fans back to the game. Once it was established that the MLB authorities would not crack down on steroid abusers, the door was open for more and more players to start using.
Meanwhile, the player's union blocked any form of drug testing program that was ever considered until Congress stepped in. Instead of representing the majority of their members, they represented the most wealthy and dirty players. They didn't consider the non-star players who were forced to choose between the steroid use and a minor league career because the level of competition was raised by those who abused drugs.
The players did play their part, but I'm hesitant to place too much blame on them. Many players grow up poor, either in this country or in Latin American countries. But when they get to the big leagues, the choice to use steroids can result in generational wealth with minimal immediate consequences. Other players are highly competitive and that drive is what got them to the big leagues to begin with. So when they get there and see other players out-performing them by using drugs, they're driven to drug use by their competitive urges. But in neither case would there be anywhere near as many players using if the environment surrounding baseball punished steroid users or even didn't encourage the behavior.
If players had to get tested once a week and knew that getting caught meant being out a season after the first failed tests and being banned after second positive test, there would be very few that would do it and that would've allowed those that were pressured into using to have made the choice to play clean.
We should also disabuse ourselves of the notion that the game was clean before steroids came along. Drugs have been a part of baseball ever since it became possible to earn a comfortable living playing the game. Early on, it was cocaine that was used but eventually players moved to amphetamines, which are still used today in addition to steroids. What changed with steroids is the drugs gave players abilities that hadn't been seen before. Rather than performing ordinary actions better than they would otherwise have performed them, players were performing extraordinary actions. Basically, the game as always been dirty, it was just dirty in a way that was much less visible to fans.
Sorry to rant, but I just feel compelled to every time people try to blame the steroid scandal on the players.
I too am a DirecTV subscriber and will be among the first in line to buy a TiVo that works with DirecTV. It's supposed to happen when the 2 year contract with NDS runs out (see this), but I haven't heard anything since the initial announcement.
I'm hoping that the fact that TiVo is going after Verizon/AT&T and not DirecTV/Cable is an indication that they'll be adding a DirecTV TiVo soon (i.e. they're only suing the companies that don't allow their customers to use TiVos.)