With Business service, you're paying extra for a higher level of support, therefore, they get to dictate what hardware is used as CPE, so they can monitor it.
That's just a lame excuse. It has no basis in reality.
I have business-class DSL, and Covad (or whatever they're called now) doesn't dictate what hardware is used as a CPE, and they sure as h*** don't require me to rent it from them. They do provide recommendations. If you stray outside those recommendations, it becomes your problem if things don't work.
Besides, Comcast Business Internet service, unless you buy into one of their special high-end tiers, doesn't come with an SLA. They don't give you a higher level of support. They just give you a connection without port blocking, data caps, etc.
There's absolutely no reason for an SLA-free Internet service to require you to rent a modem. The problem is that Comcast uses a fundamentally broken and insecure technology for routing, wherein your cable modem has custom firmware with a crypto key in it that lets it do encrypted RIP for router advertisements upstream. Instead of setting up their network correctly, with a properly maintained centralized routing database, they propagate routing changes by sending an IP range to your cable modem and letting it propagate it upstream to the router.
I'm sure there's some advantage to Comcast in terms of being able to rewire things and your cable modem automatically being able to fix routes when it reaches a different head end or something, but it is a security nightmare, can potentially be abused easily by a malicious user to bring down their entire network (at least within a region), and on top of that, forces everyone to rent cable modems from them.
TL/DR, they force you to rent because they don't know what they're doing.
It was a great plan until they changed which docsis standard they were using and my modem was rendered useless, and along with it any savings I might have realized over the next few years.
Huh??? DOCSIS requires backwards compatibility, both for the head end and the modems themselves. Any DOCSIS n hardware is compatible with n+k and n-k for all values of k. There's absolutely no reason for your cable company's head end to not negotiate a connection with your existing cable modem. You just won't get the faster speeds provided by the newer standard.
Besides, at $6 a month, it doesn't take years to recover the cost. It takes just a few months. Unless you're doing something special, a cable modem typically costs only forty or fifty bucks. That's only about seven or eight months of service. Unless your cable company requires you to rent one (e.g. Comcast when using multiple static IPs), you're a chump if you rent from the cable company. The break-even point is probably about a dollar a month.
Correct. And this town's response should be to lease access to an ISP (ideally owned by a local) under the condition that they provide service under the same terms as the municipal service for at least 3 years, and with the condition that their exclusive access to the lines ends at the end of those three years.
You also can't have a go-to streaming service when studios are going to make better money with their own streaming service.
Studios only think that they are going to make better money. The reality is that they might, but only in the very short term. The more studios go to that model, the more companies you'll have competing for a limited entertainment budget. Eventually, those studios are going to get squeezed, and viewers are going to start subscribing for two months to each one, then dropping them, and other similar tactics to allow them to subscribe to more services than they can afford to subscribe to continuously.
At that point, the only difference between running your own streaming service and making your content available through Netflix is the profit that Netflix takes, but that mostly gets eaten up by the advertising budget that you have to spend trying to convince people to try your one-off service that has only limited content.
In the long run, the content providers are doomed without a small number of common providers. The "everybody provides their own subscription service" model is unsustainable. An "everybody provides their own DRM-free download service" might be sustainable, but the content providers won't touch that with a ten-meter pole.
What they really need is the equivalent of buying a DVD for digital content.
The problem is, then Netflix would not only have to keep all of their active content available for streaming, but also all of their historical content, just in case somebody bought it and wants to redownload it. I mean yes, they could have it on fewer servers, but still, it isn't clear how that benefits consumers over, for example, buying it from the iTunes Store's video section unless they can somehow convince the movie studios to discard their blind trust in DRM and sell the content in a more usable format without all the vendor lock-in.
That's a little extreme, maybe, but in principle, there's no reason we couldn't teach the basics of algebra right alongside the basics of math in first or second grade, while kids still have the mental flexibility to become good at abstract thinking. Teach it in terms of computer programming, where you aren't thinking of variables as placeholders,but as something more concrete initially. Then become progressively more abstract over the years so that we can be teaching calculus by junior high.
Of course, we don't do these things—largely because most K-8 teachers don't have a strong enough math background to teach them, rather than because the students can't learn such things at that age.
Treat the light as a roundabout, stagger car timing to ensure that they are packetized, speed traffic up or slow it down to achieve gaps in traffic long enough for cross traffic to go through... the exactly solution varies from road to road. Either way, in every case, the lights themselves exist only to tell humans what to do.
Yes, but the primary reason for speed limits on highways is because humans suck at driving. That and the gas crisis in the 1970s. Either way, the only valid reason to have speed limits on highways is because humans suck at driving and frequently aren't smart enough to slow down when road conditions are bad.
No optical drive is "more useful" than having one? Because that's one of the examples Apple gave of things they dropped first, that most followed.
An external optical drive that is used three or four times a year is better than an internal one that you have to carry with you, yes. They add a fairly significant amount of weight.
That said, even though I rarely used the internal drive, and even though they were kind of flaky, I still wish Apple made a single Retina model with a spinning hard drive and an optical drive. The last pre-Retina model is, IMO, the ultimate Mac laptop when configured with a 2 TB SSD in the hard drive bay and a 2 TB (or if they made it just a few mm thicker, 3 TB) spinning hard drive in the optical drive bay. Compared with that, the Retina MBP with its 1 TB SSD looks like an absolute toy.
But then how do you know if the battery checker app is working correctly? Really, Samsung should have a firmware update that shows the battery RED if there is a problem, plus a separate app that just tells you if the battery is defective model (or not).
For added entertainment value, they could make it red if there's a problem, green if it works correctly. Then, hope that none of their customers have red-green colorblindness.:-)
But seriously, an app does seem like the right solution, but I could see the airlines wanting something they can glance at as a safety check, and most users would delete the app after they determine that their device doesn't need repair, so I guess a colored icon makes sense, too.
Autonomous vehicles could solve a number of problems. They'd reduce the amount of space required for parking and would potentially greatly reduce the need for internal combustion engines.
And provide mobility for people with visual or physical impairment, eliminate drunk driving deaths and most of the deaths caused by driver error, too, dramatically reduce the delays caused by traffic lights, dramatically increase average road speed by reducing accidents and driving at faster speeds with shorter spacing between cars and speeding up more quickly when the car in front of you does, and dramatically increase fuel economy as a result of those other improvements.
But seriously, I like my KM color laser printer, and I like my old Brother black-and-white laser. I'd pick either of them or Canon over anybody else any day of the week (not counting the inkjet printers from any of these companies; inkjets suck).
Poor people live in urban areas. Urban areas have fast broadband because it's easy and cheaper per residence to run more lines in high density population zones.
Your first sentence is factually incorrect, and the implication of the second one—that poor people in urban areas have access to fast broadband—is also frequently factually incorrect.
First, for at least the past several decades, the percentage of people living in poverty in non-urban areas has been higher than in urban areas. There are still way more poor people in urban areas than in rural areas, but only because urban areas have way more people in general. Country folks are typically four or five percent more likely to be poor than city folks (Source: U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey via USDA).
Second, poor people living in urban areas tend to live in specific neighborhoods within those urban areas. They tend to be clustered, and telecoms can't be bothered with upgrading the infrastructure to serve them better, because they would get more return by spending the same amount of money to run new lines to a rich suburb. This is an ongoing problem to such a degree that New York City recently said that it is considering suing one of its major utilities (I forget which one) for being years behind schedule at rolling out fiber to the entire city as promised. Other cities have had similar issues.
Technically the NSA was not doing anything illegal with it's efforts to collect call meta data because they were not specifically barred from doing so.
You mean except by that pesky thing called the fourth amendment, where it says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized," I assume.... That specifically bars them from doing so.
The term "papers" as used in the fourth amendment referred to all forms of non-face-to-face communication. At the time the Constitution was authored, the current state of technology limited the forms of such communication to printed matter, such as pamphlets and snail mail (as affirmed in Ex Parte Jackson, 1876).
These days, private long-distance communication can also take the form of phone calls, Internet communication, and so on. These new forms of "papers" are fundamentally the same sort of construct as personal papers and letters—the very things that the fourth amendment was explicitly designed to protect. As such, there is absolutely no plausible legal reasoning by which one could rationally argue that these newer forms of papers should be treated differently from the forms that existed when the Constitution was created, for precisely the same reason that your Internet communication and phone calls are protected under freedom of speech laws even though they are being carried over wires as a series of ones and zeroes—something that the Founding Fathers would never have understood as being speech at the time.
Therefore, it should be clear to any reasonable person that third-party doctrine is fundamentally flawed reasoning. Any argument to the contrary must involve some plausible reason why the law should treat a company's personal papers (telephone logs) differently than your own.
Nearly every day, I have headphones attached to my MBP while composing music. There's no viable alternative to a headphone jack for me.
Bluetooth latency would make the computer unusable for that purpose, and the battery impact of running music editing software is huge (~4x idle power, on average), which means adding Bluetooth's power consumption on top of that would be a BIG problem.
And compression artifacts would make it hard to hear the telltale signs of unexpected dissonances buried in complex arrangements, which makes any compressed headphone system a complete non-starter.
Well, since GLOBAL supplies of the iPhone 7 (Plus) are already sold-out [reuters.com], I would say that Apple is probably feeling that pulling the 3.5mm jack is not a "deal breaker" for most people. And they'd be right.
If anybody thought for one minute that *any* product change, no matter how major, would impact sales in the short term, then they don't understand how sales works. Some key points:
Most people buy a phone because they need one, whether because the old one broke or whatever.
Most folks don't read the tech press, and don't know about the headphone jack at all.
Only about 20-30% of users care, and even if all of those 20% users left the platform, Apple would still sell out on opening weekend, because demand outstrips supply by far more than that.
Most people who use the headphone jack will likely try to work around its absence initially rather than going through the pain of switching platforms (and run the risk of other manufacturers imitating Apple, leaving them no better off for all that pain).
The truly interesting question is whether the folks in that last group have a higher return rate, and whether their experience is bad enough to make them change platforms in two or three years when they decide to upgrade again. In other words, we won't truly know the impact of removing the headphone jack until at least 2018, realistically.
Considering Apple dropped the audio input because nobody was using it, I wouldn't hold my breath. Besides, I wouldn't trust Apple to build a high-end audio interface to save their lives. They'd spend all their time making the enclosure look pretty, while trying to convince us that the audio jacks only break because we're yanking the cords wrong.
Huh? The optical output from the 1/8" headphone jack on a MacBook Pro is 192kHz/24-bit. I'm not aware of any audio formats in existence that are higher quality than that.... And digital data is digital data; the fact that it came from the Mac's built-in audio hardware just means that it is more robust against dropouts than a controller attached to USB....
Slashdot Mirror
Must be nice to have less total data than my photo collection for CY2016 alone. :-)
That's just a lame excuse. It has no basis in reality.
I have business-class DSL, and Covad (or whatever they're called now) doesn't dictate what hardware is used as a CPE, and they sure as h*** don't require me to rent it from them. They do provide recommendations. If you stray outside those recommendations, it becomes your problem if things don't work.
Besides, Comcast Business Internet service, unless you buy into one of their special high-end tiers, doesn't come with an SLA. They don't give you a higher level of support. They just give you a connection without port blocking, data caps, etc.
There's absolutely no reason for an SLA-free Internet service to require you to rent a modem. The problem is that Comcast uses a fundamentally broken and insecure technology for routing, wherein your cable modem has custom firmware with a crypto key in it that lets it do encrypted RIP for router advertisements upstream. Instead of setting up their network correctly, with a properly maintained centralized routing database, they propagate routing changes by sending an IP range to your cable modem and letting it propagate it upstream to the router.
I'm sure there's some advantage to Comcast in terms of being able to rewire things and your cable modem automatically being able to fix routes when it reaches a different head end or something, but it is a security nightmare, can potentially be abused easily by a malicious user to bring down their entire network (at least within a region), and on top of that, forces everyone to rent cable modems from them.
TL/DR, they force you to rent because they don't know what they're doing.
Huh??? DOCSIS requires backwards compatibility, both for the head end and the modems themselves. Any DOCSIS n hardware is compatible with n+k and n-k for all values of k. There's absolutely no reason for your cable company's head end to not negotiate a connection with your existing cable modem. You just won't get the faster speeds provided by the newer standard.
Besides, at $6 a month, it doesn't take years to recover the cost. It takes just a few months. Unless you're doing something special, a cable modem typically costs only forty or fifty bucks. That's only about seven or eight months of service. Unless your cable company requires you to rent one (e.g. Comcast when using multiple static IPs), you're a chump if you rent from the cable company. The break-even point is probably about a dollar a month.
Correct. And this town's response should be to lease access to an ISP (ideally owned by a local) under the condition that they provide service under the same terms as the municipal service for at least 3 years, and with the condition that their exclusive access to the lines ends at the end of those three years.
Studios only think that they are going to make better money. The reality is that they might, but only in the very short term. The more studios go to that model, the more companies you'll have competing for a limited entertainment budget. Eventually, those studios are going to get squeezed, and viewers are going to start subscribing for two months to each one, then dropping them, and other similar tactics to allow them to subscribe to more services than they can afford to subscribe to continuously.
At that point, the only difference between running your own streaming service and making your content available through Netflix is the profit that Netflix takes, but that mostly gets eaten up by the advertising budget that you have to spend trying to convince people to try your one-off service that has only limited content.
In the long run, the content providers are doomed without a small number of common providers. The "everybody provides their own subscription service" model is unsustainable. An "everybody provides their own DRM-free download service" might be sustainable, but the content providers won't touch that with a ten-meter pole.
The problem is, then Netflix would not only have to keep all of their active content available for streaming, but also all of their historical content, just in case somebody bought it and wants to redownload it. I mean yes, they could have it on fewer servers, but still, it isn't clear how that benefits consumers over, for example, buying it from the iTunes Store's video section unless they can somehow convince the movie studios to discard their blind trust in DRM and sell the content in a more usable format without all the vendor lock-in.
That's a little extreme, maybe, but in principle, there's no reason we couldn't teach the basics of algebra right alongside the basics of math in first or second grade, while kids still have the mental flexibility to become good at abstract thinking. Teach it in terms of computer programming, where you aren't thinking of variables as placeholders,but as something more concrete initially. Then become progressively more abstract over the years so that we can be teaching calculus by junior high.
Of course, we don't do these things—largely because most K-8 teachers don't have a strong enough math background to teach them, rather than because the students can't learn such things at that age.
Treat the light as a roundabout, stagger car timing to ensure that they are packetized, speed traffic up or slow it down to achieve gaps in traffic long enough for cross traffic to go through... the exactly solution varies from road to road. Either way, in every case, the lights themselves exist only to tell humans what to do.
Yes, but the primary reason for speed limits on highways is because humans suck at driving. That and the gas crisis in the 1970s. Either way, the only valid reason to have speed limits on highways is because humans suck at driving and frequently aren't smart enough to slow down when road conditions are bad.
An external optical drive that is used three or four times a year is better than an internal one that you have to carry with you, yes. They add a fairly significant amount of weight.
That said, even though I rarely used the internal drive, and even though they were kind of flaky, I still wish Apple made a single Retina model with a spinning hard drive and an optical drive. The last pre-Retina model is, IMO, the ultimate Mac laptop when configured with a 2 TB SSD in the hard drive bay and a 2 TB (or if they made it just a few mm thicker, 3 TB) spinning hard drive in the optical drive bay. Compared with that, the Retina MBP with its 1 TB SSD looks like an absolute toy.
For added entertainment value, they could make it red if there's a problem, green if it works correctly. Then, hope that none of their customers have red-green colorblindness. :-)
But seriously, an app does seem like the right solution, but I could see the airlines wanting something they can glance at as a safety check, and most users would delete the app after they determine that their device doesn't need repair, so I guess a colored icon makes sense, too.
Customers were told that they wanted thinner, stronger, and water resistant.
FTFY.
"I would buy a new iPhone if it were just a little bit thinner," said no Apple customer ever.
What do you expect when the phone doesn't have a headphone jack?
So... what you're saying is that you want a language where indentation is illegal? Sort of the anti-Python?
And provide mobility for people with visual or physical impairment, eliminate drunk driving deaths and most of the deaths caused by driver error, too, dramatically reduce the delays caused by traffic lights, dramatically increase average road speed by reducing accidents and driving at faster speeds with shorter spacing between cars and speeding up more quickly when the car in front of you does, and dramatically increase fuel economy as a result of those other improvements.
Palm, Yahoo, SGI, Sun, SCO....
So Konica Minolta, then. :-D
But seriously, I like my KM color laser printer, and I like my old Brother black-and-white laser. I'd pick either of them or Canon over anybody else any day of the week (not counting the inkjet printers from any of these companies; inkjets suck).
Let me rephrase that. We'll never know whether it would have had an impact on their sales.
In which case we'll never know whether they were right or wrong.
Your first sentence is factually incorrect, and the implication of the second one—that poor people in urban areas have access to fast broadband—is also frequently factually incorrect.
First, for at least the past several decades, the percentage of people living in poverty in non-urban areas has been higher than in urban areas. There are still way more poor people in urban areas than in rural areas, but only because urban areas have way more people in general. Country folks are typically four or five percent more likely to be poor than city folks (Source: U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey via USDA).
Second, poor people living in urban areas tend to live in specific neighborhoods within those urban areas. They tend to be clustered, and telecoms can't be bothered with upgrading the infrastructure to serve them better, because they would get more return by spending the same amount of money to run new lines to a rich suburb. This is an ongoing problem to such a degree that New York City recently said that it is considering suing one of its major utilities (I forget which one) for being years behind schedule at rolling out fiber to the entire city as promised. Other cities have had similar issues.
You mean except by that pesky thing called the fourth amendment, where it says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized," I assume.... That specifically bars them from doing so.
The term "papers" as used in the fourth amendment referred to all forms of non-face-to-face communication. At the time the Constitution was authored, the current state of technology limited the forms of such communication to printed matter, such as pamphlets and snail mail (as affirmed in Ex Parte Jackson, 1876).
These days, private long-distance communication can also take the form of phone calls, Internet communication, and so on. These new forms of "papers" are fundamentally the same sort of construct as personal papers and letters—the very things that the fourth amendment was explicitly designed to protect. As such, there is absolutely no plausible legal reasoning by which one could rationally argue that these newer forms of papers should be treated differently from the forms that existed when the Constitution was created, for precisely the same reason that your Internet communication and phone calls are protected under freedom of speech laws even though they are being carried over wires as a series of ones and zeroes—something that the Founding Fathers would never have understood as being speech at the time.
Therefore, it should be clear to any reasonable person that third-party doctrine is fundamentally flawed reasoning. Any argument to the contrary must involve some plausible reason why the law should treat a company's personal papers (telephone logs) differently than your own.
Nearly every day, I have headphones attached to my MBP while composing music. There's no viable alternative to a headphone jack for me.
Bluetooth latency would make the computer unusable for that purpose, and the battery impact of running music editing software is huge (~4x idle power, on average), which means adding Bluetooth's power consumption on top of that would be a BIG problem.
And compression artifacts would make it hard to hear the telltale signs of unexpected dissonances buried in complex arrangements, which makes any compressed headphone system a complete non-starter.
If anybody thought for one minute that *any* product change, no matter how major, would impact sales in the short term, then they don't understand how sales works. Some key points:
The truly interesting question is whether the folks in that last group have a higher return rate, and whether their experience is bad enough to make them change platforms in two or three years when they decide to upgrade again. In other words, we won't truly know the impact of removing the headphone jack until at least 2018, realistically.
Considering Apple dropped the audio input because nobody was using it, I wouldn't hold my breath. Besides, I wouldn't trust Apple to build a high-end audio interface to save their lives. They'd spend all their time making the enclosure look pretty, while trying to convince us that the audio jacks only break because we're yanking the cords wrong.
Huh? The optical output from the 1/8" headphone jack on a MacBook Pro is 192kHz/24-bit. I'm not aware of any audio formats in existence that are higher quality than that.... And digital data is digital data; the fact that it came from the Mac's built-in audio hardware just means that it is more robust against dropouts than a controller attached to USB....