Phasor Burn

I found the super secret Zooomr Mark III test site.

This might explain a few things . . . or not.

It appears that Zooomr is once again trying to break the land speed record for missing a published site-wide conversion/upgrade window. The other day they were to be down for 12-24 hrs and we’re somewhere past the 40 hour marker and still counting

I do want to see this fabled Zooomr MIII with my own eyes, caress it with my own mouse pointer, evaluate and see if I want to jump from flickr, but alas, it seems to be forever and ever vapourware.

I know that various murphy-factor events occur during major upgrades, but they can be minimized if you plan for them, but that takes experience, manpower, etc that a little 1-man-show doesn’t have the luxury to afford just yet. Hold, on. I think I’m repeating myself.

I suppose it wouldn’t be too bad to overshoot the window yet again, being that they are still learning how to do these site wide upgrades smoothly. Once that ‘beta’ tag comes off they can’t afford to do it this sloppily again.

I wouldn’t be posting anything at all about it, except that they went for the gusto and had a big article publicizing the new version in TechCrunch. Before the conversion was started.

Smooth move, Exlax.

Why do I enjoy other’s misfortune so much?

Ahh yes, it’s schadenfreude.

That explains it all. Right down to my urge to be Nelson with a ‘haw haw’ finger point.

Update: I found Zooomr’s super secret test website.

Update, May 28: They’ve been down a week now. Hmmm.

Yet another misinforming-the-public moment brought to you by the traditional big media :

Federal Heritage Minister Bev Oda […] also reiterated calls for Canada to switch to analog broadcast signals by the 2011 transition date fixed by the CRTC.

I think you meant “switch to digital broadcast signals” not analog. I don’t know who’s to blame for this one. Either Oda doesn’t know digital from analog (or her ass from a hole in the ground) or the reporter doesn’t know how to do fact checking.

I’ll lay bets that the reporter doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground either, as this just jumped right off the screen at me as being very obviously wrong.

Though the move will leave television viewers using antennas without access to any channels, Oda said the move is necessary to keep Canada from falling behind other countries such as France and the U.S.

WTF are you talking about, Willis?

What’s going on here? In the USA, analog NTSC broadcast frequencies are to be freed up and stations are to switch over to ATSC for over-the-air HD by Feb 17 2009 … in the guise of prodding broadcast tv along into full hd instead of stagnating in sd … and the CRTC just decided for Canada to do the same by Aug 31, 2011.

I have issue with Oda likely being misquoted or, being a typical Heritage cabinet minister not knowing wtf she’s doing in that post, or most likely the reporter being ignorant and failing to do proper fact checking. I’m tired of seeing such misinformation coming to joe-lunchpail who is probably freaking out that they have to go and replace all of their televisions within the next few years.

Anybody that wants to keep using their standard definition television will be able to buy an ATSC tuner/converter box that will capture over-the-air HDTV and downconvert it to standard def for their old 4:3 sets. Or they could go out and buy a new set with an ATSC tuner in it.

Or . . . if they have satellite or cable, the set top boxes from those providers will do the HDTV -> 4:3 down convert for you as well.

People on basic cable are using analog NTSC signals, but it is being delivered by cable and not broadcast, and thus will not be effected by the analog broadcast shutoff. Best case, the cable company will convert the digital signals from the tv stations back to analog (for the basic cable stations at least) or worst case they will require all their basic cable customers to obtain a new set top box that does the digital-to-analog downconvert at that point. Probably give you the option to buy or lease, as they do now with the digital tier boxes.

The USA will also have a consumer subsidy to help the people in rural areas, who are currently relying on broadcast NTSC signals, to purchase the ATSC - NTSC converter boxes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happened here.

About the only difference that I can think of between USA and here on this topic is that the USA has already sold off the analog broadcast tv frequencies to wimax and other interests, and as such they want to get everyone moved off of those old tv freq’s asap.

Anyways. Federal Ministers. Big media reporters. Ass from hole-in ground? Yeah…

Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.9 Generic May 2002
trever@hopper:~ $ uptime
2:00pm up 795 day(s), 1:07, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.02, 0.02

Not that uptime means anything much with this machine (V100), it’s been sitting mostly idle for the last few years actually. Time to wipe it out and put Solaris 10 Update 3 (aka 11/06) on it so that Lori can try out the latest Sun software stack, and see how Ruby on Rails fares on this platform.

Hmm, what’s this? The machine only has a cdrom? Drat, wasted hours downloading the DVD image. Guess it’ll be a few hours yet before Solaris9/Oracle9 goes bye bye.

Looks like the CRTC will be increasing the # minutes of commercials allowed per hour in primetime over the next couple of years and will remove the cap entirely September 1, 2009.

Great, just what we needed. Although on some of the channels we watch it appears that there are even more than the current 12 min max per hour in prime time. I guess those are likely American channels or purely satellite/cable and not Canadian broadcast channels.

Anyways, we’ll keep on skipping the commercials. PVR’s are a wonderful thing. Why watch live tv… watch something prerecorded when you want and skip all those commercials.

Beyond wearing out the skip-30sec-forward button we also tend to record stuff from Movie Central HD which airs series like Stargate Atlantis and Regenesis in HD, commercial free.

Mmmmmm commercial free HD goodness.

Yes, we do pay for that, and we also pay for some series on dvd etc.

I think straight up broadcasting that is supported by in-program advertising is on it’s way out, and will die the death it needs to die within the decade. One can hope anyways. I’d rather have a dozen or two dozen HD channels, commercial free than 300 mostly-sd with annoying commercials. If we could pay the same amount now for two dozen commercial free hd channels and drop all the other crap, I’d be happy. Probably buy a couple more PVR’s to handle recording it all, actually.

Before that would come to pass though, I think hd content will be available pay-per-show or pay-per-season via the internet. It does seem likely.

Oh, and Apple? Hurry the hell up with getting the distribution rights sorted out for movies and tv shows in Canada.

Even CBC would be nice for starters.

I’d love to buy tv and movies content from you via iTunes as soon as you get over that hurdle. Until then, BitTorrent is my friend.