After the long strike, and the time of never ending re-runs, it would seem that the writers would be eager to pump out some great new stuff. After all, how long can you think only about what you are going to do after leaving the picket line?

The problem is that we, as consumers, don’t hold these people’s feet to the fire - we don’t demand excellence anymore, especially on broadcast television. The public perception of commercial television is that it is something that the poor people watch, because they can’t do any better, or don’t have the intelligence to be watching public supported television.

So now we have a few new shows coming back, but with fewer episodes, and all looking like these were scripts that barely escaped the trash heap, back when the corporate denizens figured out that there was definitely going to be a strike. Why should we, as the ultimate contractors, accept any less than the full number of episodes this season? Would this be allowed in any other profession? Would a carpenter be allowed to delay the framing of houses, ‘until next season’, because he had been on strike? I think not. Name almost any other profession, and the results would be the same. If you don’t finish a job, you don’t walk away, saying that you’ll try again next year.

We are told that the number of new shows will be down next year. What does this mean? It means that without the same amount of new shows coming, a poor show, which would normally be obliterated over the summer, will now continue in its mediocrity. In some cases, it will mean that not only will this season be short, the next season will start later than normal - so again, more reruns.

The people who run the broadcast networks are complaining each year about the erosion of their audience to cable and satellite television.  What stupidity! Why would the audience not fade away when presented with better viewing choices?

What are you doing about this? Have your viewing habits changed?

I know that this sort of behavior is what has changed my viewing to many new shows on the non-premium cable channels, and extremely limited viewing of any programs on the broadcast networks. The silliest thing about this is that many of these shows spring up from the subsidiary networks. For example, I watch many shows that are on USA and SciFi, both of which are owned by NBC, yet I can’t name a show that I currently watch on NBC itself. There just isn’t anything there to get excited about. NBC seems to be the worst of the networks, bringing back loser shows from 20 years ago, using news shows as filler for hours otherwise uncovered, and reality shows that should have seen their last episode years ago.

If you are fed up with the poor programming that you are paying for (whether you like it or not) why not write a letter to the appropriate network - maybe all four! Because so many people are known to do nothing, the effectiveness of a well written letter is very high.

Give it a try.

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Technorati Tags: television habits,writer’s strike,short viewing season,broadcast networks,cable television,public supported television

Tags: television habits, writer’s strike, short viewing season, broadcast networks, cable television, public supported television

It seems that the Internet Engineering Task Force is doing some work on getting the IPv6 protocol implemented worldwide. A workshop, of sorts, is being run in Philadelphia, to show the people involved with implementation how much of the protocol works without a hitch, and the spots where trouble is being encountered.

On paper, everything works, as it has been worked out over a period of ten years. In practice, problems are occurring in hardware due to the idiosyncratic behavior of some firmware - which was designed to make things easier in the world of IPv4. The little tricks that made things smooth with 4 octets of information, just does not work correctly with 6. If instantaneous transformation could take place, no real difficulties would be encountered. Since a transformation period is required, some technical difficulties must be worked through.

One area where things have not been smoothed yet is the syntax of Zone IDs. A paper from Cisco is available for perusal in PDF format, which discusses the problems relating to the use of the percent character.

All concerned with the changeover are working feverishly, as it is estimated that less than two years is left before all the IPv4 octets are exhausted. This situation is not helped by the growing number of appliances which have internet connectivity - from refrigerators to washing machines. Private networking can only take care of this so long, so the task continues, and the address exhaustion looms.

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Tags: ipv6, ipv4, private networking, network address translation, cisco, internet engineering task force, icann

this little guy gives Tux fits!

Just released, and as of now not noted on the website, is PC-BSD 1.5, which is based on the FreeBSD 6 operating system. Not only is this an operating system with a Graphical User Interface, it is based on a real Unix (BSD 4.4).

As anyone who runs websites can tell you, FreeBSD has been rock solid through each iteration. Back in the days before widespread internet access, and when people used simple modems to access bulletin board systems, there was a repository called Walnut Creek, later CDROM.com. The system was huge, and ran on FreeBSD with an insane (for the time) amount of physical memory to service an (again, insane for the time) amazing number of users concurrently. The site was up for months at a time, without outages. This was back in the day when an errant sneeze would crash Windows 3.1!

The GUI of PC-BSD may not immediately grab you, but it is solid (basically KDE) and the OS works well with all but the most bleeding edge equipment. If you want to brag about your Unix skills, this would be a good place to start acquiring them, and like all the BSDs, it is much more easily changed to the user’s taste, using well documented operations.

For those crying that FreeBSD 7 is not the basis for this effort, be not afraid, the next revision will be based on 7. When that comes it will be easy to update the system, as BSD is easily and quickly upgraded - another difference from some Linux distributions.

The installer has been updated, and although still not as slick as Fedora or Ubuntu, gets the job done nicely.

Check it out and see what the really hardcore tweaks are using! (Almost - the really hardcore tweaks still use the command line exclusively - but you can pretend.)

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Tags: pc-bsd 1.5, freebsd, bsd 4.4, unix, ubuntu, fedora