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Comment Re:That's not relevant (Score 1) 80

Assuming you can't get the other broadcaster to cooperate, you can't broadcast with the same "quality" (as defined by resolution and frequency-of-scene-changes) as you could if you controlled the entire 6MHz channel.

There is only one broadcaster. There is only one MPEG2 transport stream, now containing both programs. They must cooperate, as they are sharing one piece of transmission gear. It's not like a cellular network where two different entities are sharing time slices of a common spectrum. Also, I'm not aware of any broadcaster that uses 1080p.

Comment Re:Sharing channel == worse picture quality (Score 1) 80

Channels don't exist on a carrier. The data stream exists on the carrier, the (MPEG2) transport stream is encoded in the data stream, and as many audio and video streams of whatever resolution you want are multiplexed into that transport stream. Only practicality limits you to two 720p60 MPEG2 video streams in a single 6MHz 8VSB band, as the compression levels needed to push further down than that on typical content starts to become very noticeable.

Comment Re:Of course they don't need the full spectrum (Score 1) 80

78s and 45s are still better than digital.

Old 78s and 45s were never better than digital, in any fashion. They added weight and ceremony to listening to music, because of the care needed in using them. They added distortions that people like to call "warmth". Both of these are form, and run in direct violation to their primary function as a storage medium.

Comment Re:Of course they don't need the full spectrum (Score 1) 80

I'm somewhat confused. Each ATSC channel is a fixed 6 MHz wide spectrum. They can either do one HD channel or four SD channels

There's no explicit maximum, or at least none that you could ever reasonably reach. It all comes down to how much you compress the data. You can run dozens of HD channels on a single multiplex if they look like shit, or are primarily static images.

Comment Re:Seconded! (Score 1) 80

At the end of the day, all I know is that stations which once were viewable (some even perfect) under analog are no longer viewable under digital.

That sounds like other changes were made at the same time, independent of the digital transition. Their new transmitters are cheap shit. They dropped to a lower transmit power. They moved to a different antenna or frequency that results in increased interference.

Comment Re:Unfamiliar (Score 1) 370

Are you sure about that? ZFS has a "copies" parameter as well. It just means it stores two copies of the block somewhere in the pool. If you give it multiple disks in a pool, it will try to place those copies on different disks, but it will not guarantee it. It's a measure to prevent data loss when you have a damaged sector, not a full disk failure.

If you have disks of different sizes with copies=2, will it refuse to write if you only have one disk with free space remaining?

Comment Re:definition of "customer" (Score 4, Interesting) 290

In the US, if you receive something of monetary value in exchange for a service, you have received income, and that income is taxed. If Google is not being taxed on the data it receives for its free services, then the government itself is saying there is no monetary value on that data. No value means no sale, and thus no customer. Just because you have a contract does not require that one party be a customer.

Comment Re:Unfamiliar (Score 1) 370

The argument against allowing expansion of parity arrays is that if you find yourself wanting to add a single disk to a parity array, you didn't properly plan for expansion when you designed the system. ZFS was originally designed for enterprise customers, for whom that was not a feature that would rarely ever see use. It was not intended for the home user piecing together spare parts for a file server.

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