Slashback: Suffrage, Product, Broadcasting

Ah, there you are! You must have come to hear the details about selling your vote online? No, perhaps then you'd like to know what LinuxWorld thought was coolest at LWCE, or what words ESR has added to the infamous Jargon File. All below, folks, all below.

Good thing politicians are in such strong ethical trim. In case you were thinking of selling your vote (early and often) in the next national election, it seems that there are legal barriers. Sort of like at least certain other activities which are legal if you do them for fun, but illegal if you take cash, the lawmakers seem to like the prostitution on their side of the castle wall. Or do they always vote their consciences?

GMontag writes: "This Wired story tells how Voteauction.com has shut itself down after public pressure and threats from various bureaucrats.

A telling quote by Doug Kellner, a Manhattan representative on the New York City Board of Elections: 'The message to get out to the public is that posting (intent to sell votes) to a website even in jest is a serious matter. It could subject you to prosecution, or in New York you could forfeit your vote,' Kellner said, referring to a New York state law that imposes a one-year forfeiture on vote buyers and sellers.

So, this is more political speech that is 'illegal'? So far, it has been nothing but a discussion of vote auctioning and a college paper. Amazing that the bureaucrats what to 'do something' about this, but rounding up car thieves keeps 'slipping through the cracks.'"

Note to non-U.S. citizens: since this law probably doesn't apply to you, feel free to sell your votes online.

Radio Radio it's a sad salvation. wodelltech writes "With regard to the recent VMSK article/comments, readers might find the announcement at http://ibiquitydigital.com interesting."

Basically, this is an announcement of the merger of Lucent Digital Radio (which, little did I know, is just a few miles from my present dwelling) and USA Digital Radio, which sounds like an interesting step toward better choices in local radio. (Can't someone please give me good talk, all day?) Here's a snippet:

Today, radio in the United States is broadcast using analog signals. iBiquity Digital will enable broadcasters to send a digital signal, capable of containing CD-quality audio with crystal clear reception and additional wireless data for a variety of consumer applications such as station and program content, stock and news information, local traffic and weather, and much more, over existing radio frequencies, without denigrating transmission of current analog programming.

But is there a downloadable palm module? A Klingon translation? Anomie-ous Cow-ard writes "The ever-popular Jargon File has been updated to version 4.2.2."

So if you want to correctly use terms like "smoot," "ANSI standard pizza," and "dirty genitals," make sure to arm yourself with ESR's help. And you can look at the file's change log here.

Buzzword compliance is certainly a mission-critical optimization *ahem, mumble* ... Captain_Carnage writes "The LinuxWorld website has an article about itstop five productstoday. Featured are a rollable rubber keyboard from Broumand (only an e-mail address given), a user resource allocation/accounting tool from Aurema, an IDE-based RAID card from 3ware, a Linux-based router/VPN box from Linux Wizardry, and a High-Availability clustering product from Mission Critical Linux."

These all seem like cool products, but slashdot readers have known about the rubber keyboard for months. As for the others, any other nominations for the coolest products recently released? If the field is open, I have to say the pneumatic chair at the Loki booth, even if it isn't yet available and will cost 5 or 10 grand, and Slackware folding frisbees.

Re:Radio

Not only does the IBOC system degrade the analog signal, it also does not provide CD quality, and USADR's own people admit it. I attended a seminar at the 1999 NAB convention where this was discussed. The USADR system provides 32kHz sample rate audio. This is no better than the existing analog system. Digital stations will be processed just as heavily as analog ones, so they'll still sound like a punching bag.

In addition, the analog system cannot be turned off because the digital stream takes SEVERAL SECONDS to lock when you change stations. So when you punch the button to the next station on your car radio, the radio has to switch back to analog mode (so you have to delay the analog signal to match...) until the decoder locks up. Eureka does not have this problem since everything comes out one data stream. IBOC is a piece of crap.

No one thought of how IBOC's five second delay affects how you run a radio station. How do you monitor off-air when the signal is delayed five seconds? How do you do a remote broadcast when you can't put the radio station on the PA system because it's five seconds delayed?

IBOC sucks, but it does one thing: It keeps the existing broadcasters in power.

Corporations win, listeners lose. God Bless America!

Rubber keyboard?

How could Slashdot readers have known about the rubber keyboard for months when Slashdot has only posted *one* story about it? We need to be reminded of these things from time to time, you know... at least one story a week should do it :-)

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Those 3ware cards are such a crock . .

They look like a real neat idea from the outset.

Then you learn the nitty gritty. Like price. And capabilities.

The basic model has two channels. These cards only let you put one drive on each channel. So you've paid $200 for two drives. A two drive raid. whoop-de-effin-do.

The prices ramp up very quickly from there. Close to $400 for a four-drive controller. You're not saving a red cent vs. comparible scsi. You'd be better off with a couple Promise controllers and software raid.

UW scsi is comparable to UDMA66 in terms of throughput, even with multiple drives on the channel. UW scsi is considered old-crappy-junk by the RAID array set. Thus, UW scsi based raid controllers are selling quite cheap. I have personally purchased (for my employer) several AMI Megaraid 2 channel UW scsi raid controllers for $115 each. It's quite common to find them for less than $200.

Don't bother with this IDE raid malarky. It's pointless and silly. If you insist on RAIDing IDE drives, just use software raid, linux is quite good at it.

Radio

The merger of USADR and LDR to form iBiquity Digital Corporation doesn't portend more choice for American listeners. It portends less.

While the rest of the world rushes to embrace the Eureka 147 digital audio broadcast (DAB) standard, America has floundered for years to develop its own digital system. Why this departure? Greed.

The Eureka system uses a single transmitter facility that is used by all broadcasters in a geographical area. Each of the participants in the system also share a common coverage area. Everyone competes on the basis of the quality of the programming they offer and not the signal available to listeners.

By contrast, powerful, entrenched American broadcasters detest the idea of fair competition. The huge corporate multi-station operators (MSO's) that own hundreds of local radio stations each, have oligopoly power and intend to keep it. They own the big, powerful stations in each market, and dominate the airwaves.

Small stations, which don't have the broadcast reach of their MSO competitors, are left marginalized by the current scheme. Thus, the choices available to the listening public are limited by technical constraints. It matters not whether the smaller broadcaster offers superior programming.

The iBiquity system is designed to perpetuate this order. All it does is piggyback a digital audio signal on the existing analog one. The result is the degradation of the analog signal. This is done so that a digital signal that is vastly technically inferior to Eukeka can be delivered in a coverage pattern that duplicates the existing one.

Add to this the deregulation of US media ownership and the result is a concentration of media power that only worsens by the day.

No entry for slashdot effect yet...

but I'm sure it's being considered.

As for the downloadable Palm module, IIRC the Jargon File isn't much more than 5 MB total, so it's theoretically possible on a higher-end model. Is there any sort of text reader thingy that does on-the-fly compression/expansion, or is the Palm not powerful enough yet for such a program?