Digital TV get a 4 month delay

(image found on Wired)
With the mad dash for Digital converter boxes the government has run out of coupons for the upgrade leaving around 2.5 million American viewers on a long waiting list. So the senate has gone and given the official date of February 17th a hold until June 12th for the big conversion. If people don't have the digital converter box and antenna by that time they can still be safe if they are using Satellite or cable to watch their programs.

President Obama made a request for the hold and the great thing is someone listened. People were first warned about the conversion to digital back in 2005.

"Senate Commerce Chairman John Rockefeller said delaying the TV switch is the right thing to do because the United States is not yet ready to make the transition.

"The Senate acted responsibly to give the Obama administration time to attempt to bring order to a mismanaged process," the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement.

Many lawmakers worry that an estimated 20 million mostly poor, elderly and rural households are not ready for the switch, which requires owners of older television sets receiving over-the-air signals to buy a converter box or subscribe to cable or satellite TV.

Broadcasters are moving from analog to digital signals to give public safety officials more spectrum, especially useful for emergencies, and to improve viewing quality."

I have had the digital converter boxes for a few months now and the only strange thing i have encountered is that here in Chicago I can not get Channel 2 at all and also Channel 7 goes in and out all the time. The other channels appear to be working fine and I've noticed that many of them have several sub-version channels offered too.

Senate OKs digital TV Delay (bizjournals)

Digital TV Switchover Delay Gathers Steam in Congress (Wired)

Senate passes bill to delay digital TV switch (Reuters)

Obama Brings Change to You Tube

(image found on igngear.com website)
With the success of our new President Barack Obama, google is presented with an amazing opportunity to test a download option on its famed video website YouTube. If a visitor goes to the Barack Obama You Tube Channel one of the options they will now see will be a "Click to download" link on the lower left side of the video play button on the individual videos offered for viewing.

The video format for download will be in a compressed MPEG4 format with H.264 so what you see in your video web page review is what you get when you download the video. This will be an awesome time to see how popular the download option really is to people and what kind of content is desired and not so desired in the download option.

In another political experiment on Monday "YouTube will be launching two new web pages in conjunction with Congress this upcoming Monday, one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. Each Congress member will be given the opportunity to create their own channel, and then allowed complete control over it, including the ability to host live events such as a community chat."

This is a pretty amazing time now for millions of viewers to get more politically in tune with the times and also learn a lot more first hand by viewing things as they happen in politics to be as well informed as we can as the American public can be. I am personally glad to see the US government working with Google in this effort and finally coming on line. Who knows this may open the door to other governments coming on with their political channels on YouTube too in the soon future. Knowledge is power and a well informed public is a priceless option.

New Features coming to YouTube? (IGN gear.com)
The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? (Wired.com)
YouTube rolls out download feature on Barack Obama Channel (tgdaily)

Cloud Computing an alternative for Government Computing

(image for cloud computing center found on brajeshwar.com)

President Obama's tech team is looking into incorporating cloud computing for Government use and efficiency. Cloud computing gives users a great advantage of security and ease of use from anywhere when requested. Check out the YouTube video by the Obama Tech Team.

Cloud computing has been around for a while now, more and more people are starting to look into the valuable use it offers. One of the great things is basically having as much computing power as you need and only paying for what you use. Allowing a company to put on their own custom version of the operating system they require and even create custom versions of various OS's and then leasing it out to perspective customers too.

I was at a lecture last year at my Chicago Java Users Group and we had Mike Culver a representative from Amazons Cloud computing giving us a great talk on the in's and out's of using this technology.

One of the great examples he gave was a well known newspaper's desire to digitize a great amount of old papers into pdf format. By incorporating cloud computing into the mix they were able to use an array of super computing processing for a small cost to get what they need done. The interesting thing was the whole process which would have taken weeks on regular PCs took just 24 hours using cloud computing technology from Amazon. They realized that there was a mistake in how they did something in their process and ended up re-doing it in another 24 hours and still saved a bundle on the whole process.

I am glad to see government finally start to look out at the great technology that is available for use at a fraction of the cost of purchasing aging hardware and replacing it as its breaks down.

More about cloud computing at Obama Tech Teams Touts Cloud Computing