I have a sign in my office, been up for many years, that says...

Good
Fast
Cheap

Pick any two.

Your example is flawed. Michigan ranks 22nd in square miles of *land* area, barely within the top 50 percentile. We are talking about roads here, after all. If you eliminate the UP (and some would argue that we should, but that's another story) it's even smaller.

I bought a 2002 Toyata Tacoma pickup truck primarily because I could get the "features" I wanted -- manual (crank) windows, no power door locks, five speed stick, no cruise control, rear wheel drive. I would have liked a carburetor and mechanical ignition as well, but that was the best I could do. Bias ply tires were also not an option.

Please don't call me a dittohead, but I couldn't have stated this better myself. I serve on a Safety Net panel in a medium sized city in Georgia. We are currently trying to build an HIE between the two local large hospitals, the local FQHCs, and the county Health Department. What makes us different from any other HIE in this area (don't call us a RHIO -- inside joke) is that a hospital isn't the lead dog in this effort, but rather the county health department. I'm the only rabid FOSSer on the board, and in spite of my best efforts to educate, I am still not confident that most of my colleagues even truly understand what open source is. What I do know is that all of the proposals we've received so far, with one exception, include Microsoft or Oracle in some fashion. What happened to the FOSS solution? It was eliminated in the first round of culling proposals. It was my #1 choice for many reasons, simplicity being the greatest, and I got laughed at when we compared evaluations.

We used Liberum for several years, but I wanted off the IIS model. We completely rewrote it as a pure LAMP app running on an OpenSUSE 9.3 box, and have made a few tweaks over the years. Still running it now, and it looks for all the world like Liberum to this day. We did adjust the colors a bit, just for a changeup.

I followed it and it was fun! So much fun, in fact, I decided to include it in the Goodbye Email I'm sending out as a link to my entire organization, under "Here's how to contact me..."

Thanks for the response. Boy, you're not kidding about BB's accessory cable pricing...S-video cables for $40 and up ($1 on the Web) and HDMI cables for $80 and up.

Sounds good in theory, but how do you connect the RCA audio L / R output jacks of the converter box to both devices? I would have to assume with a "Y" cables, yes? I'd like to be able to hear the DTV signal as well as the VCR without having to swap cables every time.

I am one of those people, though only partly due to the excellent picture quality. We tried satellite, but were never entirely satisfied with the QOS. My wife particularly hated the large tuners and additional cabling required, so we went back to our local cable company (think the Brown Crescent of Quality). I was unhappy with their Internet service and traffic throttling practices, not to mention HD compression, horrible customer service, ridiculously inflated bills, and lack of choice in content selection -- 120 channels, and nothing on.

Beginning last October, I began educating myself about digital OTA television. I applied for, and received, two DTV coupons. I researched outdoor antennas and found several excellent websites that helped locate broadcast towers within 50 miles of our home, which in turn indicated what antenna would work best. Armed with this information, I purchased and erected the ~$100 antenna on our roof, and spent ~$125 on four Apex converter boxes (two with the coupons, two at full price.)

While we no longer have 1080i on the one television that will support it (the boxes that are coupon qualified are restricted to S-video max) the picture quality is excellent, and we have no monthly TV bill. We're currently receiving 15 channels, and expect a few more to come online after the switch. I have documented the process and hardware for friends and family, and know of at least two who are doing the same thing now, for pretty much the same reasons that we did. If it weren't for the DTV switch, we would have continued to grumble along paying a cable bill and receiving lousy service.

From 1978-1982 I worked in a Central Office in south Georgia that only supported Rotary (pulse) dial telephones (we even had "party" lines back then.) The reason was, the entire phone switching system was electro-mechanical. When you rotated and released the dial on your black or beige Stromberg-Carlson model 500 phone, an entire set of X-Y stepper switches, housed in a building the size of a small gymnasium, mechanically moved to complete the connection. The noise was unbelievable, >90dB at all times, and I have hearing loss to this day from my four years of working in that concrete building. When a backhoe operator cut a large cable somewhere, we immediately knew when there was about to be a lot of trouble tickets, because the sound of many banks of switches slamming shut simultaneously could not be ignored. I still love the old, heavy, tough rotary phones, because they are, in fact, a representation of the old, heavy, tough switch buildings that very few people have ever seen in action. For the most part, they're gone now, but once upon a time in technology, they worked extremely well. I'm fascinated by this retro curiosity in rotary dial handsets.