Cox Crow

In a BusinessWeek article on how Microsoft is causing SBC to fall behind schedule — thanks, Bill — the authors don’t question a key market assumption.

Most analysts believe Net-delivered programming is the future of TV since it potentially will allow providers to deliver many more channels than are currently available.

Most analysts are idiots. Is there such demand for millions more channels of the same old shit?

In other news, it looks like the AP has made the same error in their story on the FCC‘s changing the deadline for digital television equipment.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Television viewers who crave the crisp, clear pictures of digital TV got a boost Thursday when the government ordered manufacturers to include the technology in all midsize models by next spring.

Video afficionados already have digital equipment, so they have no bearing on this regulation.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 4-0 to require televisions with screens from 25 inches to 36 inches be digital-ready by March 1. That is four months earlier than the commission decreed in 2002.

The article notes that there is little market demand for the new equipment, because televisions without the digital tuners are, surprise, less expensive.

Why, one wonders, are we mandating the inclusion of digital broadcast tuners in television equipment when only

[a]bout 12 percent of U.S. households rely exclusively on over-the-air broadcast signals for their television, according to a CEA survey. Eighty-six percent have cable or satellite TV subscriptions, and 2 percent do not have any television.

Oh, that’s right, because

Once traditional analog signals end, households without a digital TV that rely on over-the-air signals would have to purchase a converter box to continue using their analog sets. Those boxes can run upward of $100.

So I should spend $400 on a new unit with the digital tuner when I can wait until the analog broadcast stops and then spend only $100? That doesn’t sound fiscally sound.

At least the Chairman recognizes some sort of market pressure.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said if Congress sets a deadline to end analog broadcasts, the resulting demand for converter boxes would drive down the price.

But then, here’s the kicker:

Congress also is considering a subsidy program to help offset converter costs for low-income households.

WHAT?! We’re going to pay the poor to watch TV?! Because we’ve artificially increased the cost of their boob tube?

Does anyone pay attention to SGI anymore?

Some years ago, SGI decided to discontinue development of systems using the MIPS processor, and to pursue development of Intel Architecture systems. Their first models ran Windows NT, but nobody cared, so they switched to Linux. Linux is an easier migration path for developers who wrote for IRIX. But it was still work to move from IRIX on MIPS to Linux on IA-64.

Now, with the use of Transitive‘s product QuickTransit, those legacy applications can run seamlessly on SGI’s new Prism line of “visualization systems.”

David Sucher wonders, in response to my post from the other night, if anyone has mapped the real estate bubbles.

The realtors release pricing information from the MLS, but that tends to emphasize the median prices for a region. What would be interesting would be sales data broken down by, perhaps, census tract, if one is unable to distinguish between neighborhoods. My assessment wasn’t based on a map, but on watching the listings for the past three years: prices appear to have increased more in older neighborhoods on the rail lines.

Well, hell, I’m surprised.

I’m not surprised that

Apple has been developing all versions of OS X since its inception to run on both Intel and PowerPC chips.

Maintaining support for more than one processor was obvious from Darwin, and consistent with the BSDs in general. Why throw out support that’s already there?

What I do find surprising is to move to Intel. Granted, I’m not as familiar with their roadmap as Mr. Jobs appears to be. But I am familiar with IBM’s, and I like what I see there. It appears that Mr. Gates does as well.

Anyway, Leander Kahney thinks it has to do with DRM. That pretty much rules out selling to the educated customer, doesn’t it?

TidBITS has more details, as does Tom Yager, from the keynote.

About this housing bubble (via The Big Picture), David Sucher asks, should you buy or sell? That’s a very good question, and I tend to agree with his analysis, for the most part.

The prices do reflect the lack of supply and an increase in demand, and the supply is not increasing as fast as the demand is. However, I tend to think, just from watching the market, that the inflated prices in some parts of the New York metropolitan area are side-effects of the reduced supply elsewhere. That is, the price of my house is higher not simply because the demand for my house is higher, but because the demand for houses in the general area is higher, and that demand is due to several factors, not the least of which is the limited supply of houses in walkable neighborhoods. What happens is that customers look for a home in a specific area, find that properties are unavailable or that prices are too high for them, and then look in the next town over. They see that prices are rising, and fear that if they don’t buy now, the house will be even further out of reach tomorrow, and so settle for a different location. Oh, the house’s amenities are nice, but instead of a 30 minute commute, now it’s an hour.

One day the buyers will become patient, refuse to pay, and demand at the outer limits will begin to fall. If you’re speculating, I suggest Hedge Street, via Curbed.

We’ve got pests.

These little buggers are disgusting, twitchy, and eating the hell out of my pines.

COLD SPRING   $434,000   914-271-4433
3BR, 1Full Bath ranch, beautiful 1acre property. Move in condition! HW floors throughout. Basement easily finished. Easily expanded to your dream home. Close to shopping, town and railroad. (2509823) HOULIHAN LAWRENCE CROTON-ON-HUDSON www.houlihanlawrence.com

For $50,000 more you can get this duplex in the village.

Last year around this time, prices in Cold Spring, New York, were about $100,000 cheaper. Prices in this side of Putnam County have not gone up as quickly as those on the Hudson, which to my mind, is to be expected. Location is everything.

I have never been able to convince Excel to draw the graphs that I expect it should draw. I have a set of data which I want to use for the values of x, and another set that I want to use for y, and a third set to graph which shows the relation of x to y. Is this too much to ask?

The particular application in this case is to show how the cost of a house changes in relation to changes in the rate of taxation and in the financed price of the property, with the mortgage rate being a fixed value. The curve should be relatively flat; that is, as the price goes down, and the taxes go up, the costs remain similar.

So what am I missing?

The Yahoo! Music Engine description says,

Transfer music to your portable player in seconds; it’s compatible with the most popular devices (Rio, Sony, Phillips, Zen, and more)

That statement is misleading, as the antecedent Yahoo! refers to by “it” is Windows Media Audio wrapped in Microsoft’s DRM, which is not compatible with the most popular device. While I wonder how much success Yahoo will have by restricting themselves to the small portion of the portable music device market not owned by Apple, some other player could come out of nowhere and take that share, but it must be both easier and cheaper.

Meanwhile, my Panasonic RP-HS41 headphones have a short in them, so I’ll have to mosey on over to Radio Shack and pick up a new set.

Jenny asks

So what are you doing to help the iPod*-owning-soccer-moms in your community? Are you thinking that far ahead? As a profession, we’d better start figuring out how to circulate digital music files to patron players.

As of last week, the Big Sister is playing soccer, so that officially makes us soccer parents. And as of Sunday, D has a pink iPod Mini. I suppose this makes us the exact patrons to whom Mahopac Library needs to cater. After all, the girls are already there twice a week for story time and such.

Meanwhile, Y! Music has launched some sort of thing that I’m not too interested in, seeing as how it doesn’t use any of my equipment, and This Sort of Thing is not welcome on the Company’s equipment. They’re welcome to use all the DRM they want: I hope it costs them an arm and a leg.

* the iPod is an MP3 player.

In a discussion on UNIX’s uid, which is a 32-bit unsigned integer unique only within a certain namespace, usually defined by the /etc/passwd file. These namespaces collide when one uses NFS.

That’s not very intelligent, is it?

No, it’s evolutionary. It’s an argument against Intelligent Design.

Phil Ringnalda‘s simile comparing GET and POST with light switches and firealarms, reminds me of the situation at the head of our stairs.

Making the fire alarm look just like a light switch isn’t an example of daring and innovative design; it’s just dangerous.

At the head of our stairs are two switches. One, a light switch, turns the lights on and off. The other, with a red faceplate, turns the oil furnace on and off. The only difference between the two, aside from the label on the furnace switch, is the color. They both switch things between two states, but the effect of the latter is somewhat more impressive during the winter. I could stand there and flip either switch all day, and the effect would not vary. Somehow I don’t think you can say the same of launching the nuclear weapons.

(I find it somewhat amusing that the same folks we’ve had to bludgeon into using GET instead of POST have finally realized that the URI is a fantastic thing, and now want to shove things properly POSTed into the URI.)

Bonjour?

On April 12, 2005, Microsoft released MS05-019 to address several vulnerabilities in the IP implementation. One of the issues addressed was CVE CAN-2004-1060, a denial-of-service vulnerability in Path MTU Discovery. According to Microsoft, their patch

The update removes the vulnerability by restricting the minimum value of the MTU to 576 bytes. This update also modifies the way that the affected operating systems validate ICMP requests.

It fails regression tests, and the following caveats have been identified. In particular, network connectivity between clients and servers may not work.

Connectivity may fail because the Path MTU Discovery is failing. When the upstream router tells the sender to send a smaller packet, the sender doesn’t.

It would be nice if they would identify what it is that they changed, rather than beating around the bush about it.

Sometimes you just want to reach across the Net with your Mighty Clue-by-Four and revise all incorrect, or partial, examples in one fell swoop.

Here’s one. O’Reilly offers some enterprise best practices for Java developers, and in this sage advice on using Content-Disposition:, they suggest the following.

// Set the headers.
res.setContentType("application/x-download");
res.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + filename);

// Send the file.
OutputStream out = res.getOutputStream(  );
returnFile(filename, out);  // Shown earlier in the chapter

No! Not + filename! The filename may contain spaces and other special characters, and the value of filename= is, in the ASCII case, a token or a quoted string.

But these are “enterprise” recommendations, so why should I be surprised?

This must be the season for private bills.

Sen. Santorum (R) of Pennsylvania has introduced a bill that would ban the federal government’s meteorologists from making this information available for free since that creates a problem for outfits like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather, which want to sell it.

As Josh Marshall puts it,

Your tax dollars fund a massive apparatus of meteorological data collection for reasons ranging from agriculture to disaster safety to keeping airplanes in the air — everything under the sun.

Which pretty much covers why this bill is wrong. The only outfit that I know which does not simply republish the National Weather Service‘s data is Weatherbug, which instead siphons it from weather stations at local schools around the country.

I must first disclaim that I have not read Mr. Barnett’s book, but I have skimmed his web site. Therefore with something approaching more authority than most pretend to have, I offer these two observations.

The first, regarding the SysAdmin force, is more a question. Where in the First Principles of System Administration do we state that we look for more work? A sysadmin is, first and foremost, lazy.

Secondly, I beg to differ regarding his analysis of the election of Benedictum XVI. Mr. Barnett writes,

Until a real New Core or Gap pope succeeds Ratzinger … the papacy will decline in global relevancy to an amazing degree.

The peoples of the Southern hemisphere tend to be more extreme in their beliefs than those of us here in the Mid-Atlantic States. They are, to an extent, in conflict with the Church’s orthodoxy, but more out of ignorance of the finer points of theology than because of any essential disagreement with it. As the Society of Jesus was crucial to the success of the Counter-Reformation, and the Order of Preachers was to the Inquisition, so may be Benedict XVI to his time. There is tension there, between those historical precedents; the question is how it will be resolved. I think he was the obvious choice.

Now, speaking strictly as a sysadmin, one of the Church’s problems is that the priesthood does not scale. We Protestants have got y’all beat on scalability.

So the other day, Little Sister did y, and so we said she couldn’t watch a show. She didn’t particularly care about missing 64 Zoo Lane. She missed her sister.

I want Emmy! I want to snuggle!

Little Sister, there’s a special visitor coming to tumbling class this morning. Guess who it is.

Daddy!

No, but good guess.

😀