Category: Random Ramblings

It’s a small step forward, but hopefully this is the beginning of something good – NBC will offer some of its programming for free download the night of broadcast with viewing possible for up to a week after each show airs.

NBC’s move comes as companies throughout the television business search for new economic models in the face of enormous changes in the business. Networks continue to lose audience share, and viewers – especially many of the highly prized viewers under 30 years old – are increasingly demanding control of their program choices, insisting on being able to watch shows when, where and how they want.

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Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group, said, “The shift from programmer to consumer controlling program choices is the biggest change in the media business in the past 25 or 30 years.”

That comment is the biggest challenge facing the content producing industries right now. As technologies have improved for capturing, storing, time- and place-shifting, copying, and working with this content (i.e. music and television programs), the producers of the content have lost so much of the control over how this content is used. So many big-wigs in the companies affected by this fear it and have resorted to tactics like legislating loss of consumer rights (I’m thinking of you, DMCA) rather than trying to find ways to make consumer choice work to the industry’s advantage.

Continue reading “NBC to offer free content downloads briefly after shows air”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Death Blossom strategy, which, sadly, has nothing to do with The Last Starfighter and everything to do with Sudoku.

This strategy is based on extending Aligned Pair Exclusion but uses Almost Locked Sets to make some clever reductions. From the components used it could be named Aligned ALS Exclusion but Mike Barker, who formulated it first in this thread, hit on “Death Blossom” because it starts with a cell designated as the “stem” which points to Almost Locked Sets, or the “petals”, and is a great deal more flowery.

That’s right – a Sudoku strategy given the same name as the ultimate weapon in The Last Starfighter is actually based on an advanced strategy for Sudoku seemingly (but not really) named after primates. And it’s an even more advanced strategy. That makes for some crazy ultimate weapon monkies, or something.

And the provider of all this Sudoku strategy awesomeness apparently has a new book coming out soon for more Sudoku madness. If you aren’t doing Sudoku, you should be – and this book could be the perfect introduction for you.

[tags]Sudoku, Death Blossom, Crazy ultimate weapon monkies, The Logic of Sudoku[/tags]

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In the future, we can expect some great advances in automotive technology.

LIGHTER, more powerful and comfortable cars, that will cost less, run further without adjustment and will be easier to handle, are being forecast, by automotive engineers.

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In Europe automobiles have been made to run as far as eighty miles to the gallon of gasoline. Supercharging, or forcing the gas into the cylinders instead of allowing it to be drawn in by the suction of the piston, has enabled the weight of the motor to be cut down and resulted in performance undreamed of a few years ago.

Puts the cars we suffer with now to shame, doesn’t it? We’ll soon see improvements in pick-up, quieter and more fuel-efficient city driving, longer lasting tires, more resilient finishes on the paint jobs, and better long-term driving.

Continue reading “The car of the future – details today”