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A little late, but I wish a happy 10th birthday to PHP. This is something that might not seem very significant to a lot of people, but a large cross section of web sites and online tools in use today, including what you are reading now, would not be possible without it.

Of course, PHP has advanced a long way since then.

Those of who have flat panel LCD displays, PDAs, or are very particular about their digital cameras will probably identify with my plight on this topic. The rest, probably won’t care.

Human technological development, as we all know, is far from perfect. As things get manufactured, items with defects do occur. And this cannot be more true in any other field than in electronics. Right now, the limits are being pushed pretty hard by things like LCD displays and digicams, because of the millions of tiny components that make up the individual displays and sensing elements in these devices.

So now, some of you know where I’m getting at. You pay, $300 and up for a good high performance digital camera or flat panel display, or $1,000-pus for a good laptop, and then when you turn it on, you see it, nagging at you: a dead or hot pixel.

Up until this past month, I’ve been extremely lucky. Every gadget I purchased that was susceptible had failed to produce any bad pixels (or, I was simply unable to notice them). Then, I buy a laptop… and it yields one solitary, bright green bad pixel, off to the upper left edge of the screen, but still bright enough to laugh at and taunt me every time I use that laptop.

Then, I buy a digital camera, and discover that it, too, has issues. Yeah, most of you aren’t going to notice what I’m illustrating in that link. You have to zoom in, REALLY zoom in to the image to see what I’m talking about.

To both the manufacturer of the laptop and the digital camera, these failures are within acceptable limits. So, I’m stuck with these annoyances, like it or not. Nikon even cautions that bad pixels are commonly found in the type of photography I had engaged in to obtain the pictures I sought; low-light, long-exposure shots.

So, I have to learn to be less of an anal-retentive perfectionist, and live with (and learn to love) my camera’s flaws. That, or get really good at Adobe Photoshop’s clone-stamping tool, and continue to remind myself that 8 bad pixels on a 7.1 megapixel camera is really pretty good, considering it amounts to only a 0.001% failure rate.

Satellite radio has the traditional radio corporations scrambling for listeners. There’s no doubt about that. With repetetive playlists, increases in the time devoted to advertising and annoying-as-hell DJs, terrestrial radio is shedding listeners fast. Who would have thought just a few years ago that people would be so fed up with the state of radio that they would actually pay for new equipment and a subscription in order to get away from the wasteland that is FM today?

Unfortunately, the terrestrial broadcasting companies still don’t get it. After losing more and more people to satellite, which seems to really know what listeners want, terrestrial has decided that the Jack FM fad will save them. What is Jack FM? Well, it defies explanation really… it’s more of a “we play whatever we want” format… with, of course, all the heavy commercials, repetetive playlists, and annoying DJs still there.

And now they’re gotten so desperate, that they took the nations #1-rated oldies station, WCBS-FM, and without warning, converted it… to Jack-FM. In the process, they pissed off and alienated the entire listener base that CBS-FM had built up over the years.

Way to go, Inifinity Broadcasting. I’m no fan of oldies by any stretch, as I prefer much newer stuff, but I had generally assumed that it made good business sense to convert the struggling radio stations that have no lsiteners into different formats, rather than taking a successful market and turning it on its head.