Techdirt:More CD Copy Protections Coming: No More CDs Here
The music industry does nothing but alienate more customers every day. The consistently show that they are clueless how to handle the internet age.
If you live anywhere in the US without broadband access which is the vast majority of the country, geographically speaking, you know the pain of dial-up or ISDN connections. I see a change coming in the next several years.
Currently, if your neighborhood isn’t served by DSL or cable your options are limited. You can use dial-up, which once you’ve used broadband you can hardly call dial-up an option, you can use ISDN which is OK…128kbps up and down with around 70-100 ms latency, or you can use satellite which is maybe 1.5mbps down with maybe 128kbps up but latency approaching 1000ms. ISDN can be pricy (I currently pay around $140/month). Satellite is also pricey. Five hundred dollar set-up/equipment fees aren’t unusual. Few areas are served by wireless internet services.
Perhaps the cellular operators will be our savior. As much as I dislike having to deal with the mobile carriers, they are rolling out 3G networks at a reasonable pace. I expect that within a couple years, I’ll be able to tap into a 3G signal with my cell in most areas of the country. All of the talk I see about 3G is focused mainly on it’s ability to deliver high-speed content to cellular devices, however the first thing that came into my mind when I heard about 3G years ago was “rural high-speed”. Right now Cingular’s unlimited UMTS plan runs around 80 dollars/month. This is perhaps double what you’d pay for DSL or cable, but it’s not a terrible price, and by the time UMTS is available in many rural areas I’m sure this price will be down much further as long as Cingular builds the data capacity to match the data availability.
UMTS promises over 10mbit/sec download rates (that is when Cingular updates with UMTS HDSPA) with very good upload rates. Additionally UMTS HDSPA will provide decent latency of maybe 60-100 ms.
Maybe this is all a pipe-dream, but I’m sure there’s some people at Cingular thinking the same things…
AnandTech: WWDC 2005 – Apple to Move to Intel Processors in 2006
Seems like everyone on the internet is interested in this news today. Apparently, Apple is transitioning from IBM’s PowerPC processor to Intel’s x86 (Pentium) processor. All this does for me is raise more questions.
Why Intel? AMD is widely acknowledged to be superior in the x86 space for most applications. A couple of reasons I can think of includes Intel’s slight lead on many content-creation applications…a market Apple has a large toe-hold in. Secondly, while AMD is overall the performance leader in x86, Apple desperately needs a high-performance platform for it’s Powerbook notebook line which is currently still running on the old G4 processor because the newer G5 is just too hot to shoe-horn into a compact notebook. Intel’s mobile platforms are widely acknowledged as being best-of-breed, so this probably weighed heavily in Apple’s decisions.
Another question that comes to mind is, are some enterprising hackers going to be able to get OS X running on generic PC hardware? While this announcement is about Apple using Intel processors, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to just go out and buy a copy of OS X to run on the PC you’re running right now. Most likely, Apple will have their own proprietary system architecture, but this move to Intel processors has got to make it easier to port OS X to the PC world.
For those of you not in the know, OS X is considered by many to be superior to Windows XP in many areas, not least of which is it’s user-friendliness. Plus, it’s pretty.
Airbags associated with increased probability of death in accidents, study finds
Interesting study shows that mandatory airbags in the US have actually increased death rate. And I quote the authors reasoning behind why the study contrasts so sharply with the NHTSA’s studies:
“Making everyone have airbags and then verifying the effectiveness using only fatal crashes in FARS is like making everyone get radiation and then estimating the lives saved by looking only at people who have cancer. Overall, there will be more deaths if everyone is given radiation, but in the cancer subset, radiation will be effective.”
I’ve been loving my Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW LCD monitor. It’s just amazing how good things look on it. Unfortunately I ran into a big problem.
I was just sitting here at the PC using Picasa 2 to do some minor photo-editing and all of a sudden the monitor went whacky. Pure-white sections of the screen show a faint pattern of scrolling horizontal lines (which incidentally become vertical scrolling lines when you rotate the monitor to portrait mode and rotate the desktop with the display drivers) and [b]severe[/b] color-banding. It’s almost like I set the color-depth to 8-bits.
So I call Dell tech support. The guy I speak to first has me go through some steps which include unplugging the DVI cable from the PC. This pops up a self-test screen which consists of a red, blue, green, and white colored bars. After trying some other obvious things he says that the problem is my PC, not the monitor. I explain to him that to troubleshoot this problem I went out and bought a brand new video card, which when installed shows the same problem. He insists that the problem is the PC. I’m barely willing to accept this, but I suppose it’s somehow possible that maybe the motherboard or some other device in the PC began interferring with the video card in some manner. Plus it’s like 12:30 AM and I’m tired so I get off the phone with them.
Now before I go to bed I start thinking about this some more and realize I think it’s crazy so to prove my point I hook the monitor up to my Ubuntu box. After I figure out how to reconfigure for a new monitor I see that the color-banding problem still exists along with some pretty sever shimmering effects. The shimmering is maybe attributable to the fact that the video card in that PC only has an analog output, but the color-banding is the exact same thing. So I call Dell back, armed with this new information.
Despite the fact that I provided them with my case number I had to go through all the basic troubleshooting steps that I had to go through with the previous fellow. I also laid my incontrivertible evidence on the table about how the monitor behaved the same on two different PCs. This bit of information basically got me nothing except some additional hold time while the guy tried to figure out what the problem was. His conclusion was that the monitor was not the problem because his holy self-test screen appeared to be fine. So he tells me to call the vendor of my PC. I ask him which PC vendor he’d like me to call since the problem was visible on both PCs. His basic response was that I should call the vendor which would give me a resolution to my problem. To his credit he did offer to call me back the next day (today) to make sure they fixed my problem. I was tired since it was now 1:30 am so I just went to bed.
First thing this morning I took the monitor over to my brother’s house and hooked up to one of his PC’s and unsurprisingly the issues were still apparent. I called Dell back a third time with this evidence. After being on hold for 45 minutes I finally got through to a lady who made me go through the same basic troubleshooting steps yet again. I explained to her that I had now tried the monitor on three PCs with several different data cables and video cards . After a total of aproximately 2 hours of phone time they finally admitted that the monitor was “probably” at fault and that they would send me a new one.
Now I just hope the new one is as perfect as the old one…no dead pixels or backlight leakage.
Broadband Crawling Its Way To Exurbs
This article in the Washington Post details the problems rural America is facing when it comes to Internet Access and hints at some things that St. Francois county needs to implement.
As it stands now, broadband access is limited to select residents of in-town Farmington, Bonne Terre, Desloge, Park Hills, etc. Basically if you set foot out of city limits, you’re up a creek without a way to access the Internet in any way but dial-up. While dial-up works per se, it pales in comparison to the internet experience over broadband. As Morpheus says in The Matrix: “Unfortunately no one can be told what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.” I can tell you that broadband internet access is dozens of times faster than what you’re currently experiencing over dial-up, but the profound effect that this has on the usefulness of the Internet has to be seen to be believed.
St. Francois county would be staking a claim for the future if it would implement a policy similar to the ideas laid out in the above-linked article. Appointing someone with a passion for enabling people and a mind for such technical matters to coordinate and plan methods for enabling widespread broadband availability would go a long way to ensuring that the residents of the County are fully-equipped to meet the demands of living in the 21st century.
This post by on Bloggin’ Branton has kind of got me excited about Visual Studio. I’m definitely going to give the links he gives a shot. Apparently MS has some versions of Visual Studio called their Express versions available for download. Coupled with the tutorial videos that Microsoft has put up, this may turn out to be quite a learning experience.
I wonder if Express versions will always be a free download or if this is just something that will exist during Visual Studio 2005’s beta stage…
Mr. Geek thinks podcasting is the future of the world. I think he’s on crack.
I tried many podcasts, and to tell you the truth, I get nothing out of it. I can take in information by reading it so much more efficiently than listening to someone. After an informal survey of many of the people I know, and the large majority of the people I know are just regular folks who couldn’t give a crap about technology, they think the whole idea of podcasting sounds like a solution for an imaginary problem.
Yes, I think podcasting is a fad, or if not a fad, something that will be for just a very limited audience. So, it’s Mr. Geek’s prediction vs my prediction. I’m sure we’ll all remember to check these posts in a couple years to see who was right.
