Punch cards

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 11 April 2008, Tim wrote:
>On Thu, 2008-04-10 at 15:05 -0500, James Kaufman wrote:
>> "Cable companies were authorized by the FCC in late 2007 to continue
>> their analog feed service for another 5 years (up to 2012) if they
>> prefer, but they are not obliged to do so."
>
>You'd think a cable service could do what they like, it's their cable,
>not a broadcast signal.

Here in the good old Hugh Ess of A. Tim, it all gets tangled up in the 
copyrights to the material being carried, so it can be the final say-so by 
the cable folks, but often such signals do pass through a broadcaster on 
their way to the cable facility.

Here, the battle is to get the carriage in the first place because with so 
much trash material (including what we broadcast) available, they are always 
pleading insufficient bandwidth of their systems to carry both the analog and 
the digital versions we broadcast.  At the same time, while out broadcast 
signal's format is optimized for a 6 mhz wide channel even in digital, they 
originally set a different signal standard for their systems for the digital, 
and that standard isn't capable of delivering our HD signal over the same 
facilities they use for their HD format (like DiscoveryHD) without an 
expensive and quality lowering conversion.

That was no accident, this is a very competitive business, and AFA the cable 
people are concerned, we are NOT a vital part of their business plan, and 
haven't been since the first of the cable only broadcasters was found to be 
profitable for all concerned. 

>> That might be where the idea of 2012 came from.
>
>In my case, as I stated, 2013 is the latest date set for the switchover
>in Australia.
>
>> What does this have to do with punch cards? :-)
>
>Methinks the government probably dropped the bundle...   ;-)

And has no idea how to sort the cards they do manage to pick up again, missing 
those that fluttered down behind the file cabinet entirely.  It may have been 
readable in the original form to those who understood the code, but they 
don't, and the result is of course, predictable. GIGO.

>--
>(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
> important to the thread.)
>
>Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
>I read messages from the public lists.



-- 
Cheers, Gene
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