There's just no competition really. AT&T does help a bit with u-verse, slower speeds for the equivalent prices, but at least it's not Comcast. But if you not close enough to AT&T fiber then you're stuck with only one option that's "broadband".
They did sign up for AT&T DSL and got 5Mbps down, better than normal ADSL but not quite VDSL.
As for asking, given that most of their neighbors are either tech or internet enabled companies and the landlord never mentioned anything, they probably assumed that was internet available. It's sort of like finding our your 20 person office space doesn't have any toilets.
But who is dumb enough to open up "new office space" without already having utilities hooked up? I've worked near that location and used to jog on that street, and they most certainly have good internet service in that neighborhood. However there were some older buildings near there that may not have had that particular street upgraded. But the photos show refurbished buildings. The buildings owners should have done the necessary work to get internet ready while they were refurbishing. Seriously, the place is maybe a couple hundred yards from where the very first chip maker set up to create Silicon Valley (Fairchild), so not having decent service there sounds fishy. I suspect that if you cross the road that they have great internet on the other side.
Comcast also is not a novice here. They know what permitting is like since there are hundreds of internet enabled businesses in that city. The probably just did a lackluster job in trying to get the work done, putting the customer at the bottom of the priority list, maybe checking back with the city once a month to see how the permitting was going. Any decent company would have jumped to attention once the original snafu showed up and there was no internet service as they claimed, but maybe cheating customers is so ingrained to Comcast that they didn't care.
Every parent knows that the kids shoes need to be replaced very often. So an expensive pair of shoes that get thrown again in a few months versus teaching the kid how to tie the damn shoes...
Law enforcement gets easy wins by going after the dumb criminals. They've done this forever. Everyong applauds for having the suspect found so quickly. The evil mastermind however has always been hard to catch, and when they're caught it's because someone else was stupid (like printing out the plaintext). Where law enforcement is panicking is because cryptography is so common place now that even the dumb criminals have access to it. Not as much low hanging fruit anymore.
It's important to learn the concepts. The pre common core way required you to learn by rote without learning concepts, if you did manage to learn the concept it was by accident. Of course common core is screwing stuff up too but it's not necessarily worse than the old way.
But the original common core was not a strict "do it this way or else" approach, the problem is that schools don't seem to want to give teachers much freedom and so they try to dictate what the daily lesson plans are going to be.
Math... Latin... Wait, does this mean we're going to have to use Roman numerals again? Do you know how hard it is to compute prime pairs using Roman numerals?
I don't work for stock options, I want a salary instead of promises. I have never worked for any company that wasn't incredibly stupid in some area or other. That's just the nature of things. If the job is good and my coworkers are decent I'll stick with it even if the upper management keep walking into walls. I've had a few times where it was difficult to find jobs so I'm still in that mode where I'm not going to take it all for granted.
The things I care about more would be what is the actual team I'm going to work with be like, am I going to end up being the smartest person in the room or will I actually have people with good ideas about how to do things, is the code base an incomprehensible ball of accretions or will doing the work actually be interesting, am I maintaining old orphaned products or helping to design new products, things like that. A lot of companies don't understand that, they seem to think that they need to mention who all their original founders and investors were.
Overall software has dumbed down for many jobs. Thus there is a shortgage for people who remember how to program for real and not just link two APIs together with some glue code. I'm finding that EE graduates are much more able to program halfway decently compared to CS graduates; their eyes don't glaze over when asked to work with hardware or a low level language.
IT (which is a nebulous term I know) has a very large percentage of workers that are easily interchanged. And the IT workers seem to want it this way. Standardize around using only Microsoft products, base hiring and job hunting decisions upon MS certificates, and so forth, then they act surprised that they're easily outsourced.
IT workers are interchangeable commodities though. They all want you to accept their MS Certifications in lieu of actual experience and they hop between jobs faster than engineers do. All the IT jobs can be outsourced pretty easily. Whereas engineering jobs are much more difficult to outsource than service jobs; all those top Indian and Chinese engineers are already in the US. Learn to be a great programmer, learn to design hardware, learn to design networking protocols, learn how to make the tools that people want to buy, then you'll get more job security.
Doesn't mean we'll be able to retire easily on that salary though. If you invested well you can (but I suck at it), but quite a lot of people plan to move away after retirement. In Montana you'd be quite wealthy with that salary, but in Silicon Valley you're in a small condo, and in San Francisco you're renting with roommates, which is why we have some people who commute 2 hours or more each way so that they can have a nice house for the spouse and kids.
The media completely misunderstands Silicon Valley. Even the media within the Bay Area gets it all wrong. They think it's a society full of entrepreneurs when those people are a very small minority. Most jobs here are not at startups, and most people seem to prefer that. Salary is better than stock options. We don't hang out at parties and discuss business ventures as some media stories seem to to imply. Silicon Valley also isn't as high tech as it once was. I mean everyone treats Google as their darling but it's a freaking advertising delivery service. Smugness is up in San Francisco, though again the media gets confused and seems to think it is a part of Silicon Valley (at the same time that they think Twitter and Uber are high tech).
It's an ad, it's not something necessary to include in a security update! It's a banner, which is an advertisement. How can you say this is not an advertisement when it's there for the sole purpose of persuading customers to use a new product. A product doesn't have to cost money for it to be an ad. And it's malware because it behaves exactly like malware, it shows up unwanted, gets in your way, is difficult to remove, and keeps evolving to avoid defenses against it.
I also went and hid that security update because nothing in it applied to me as I don't use IE anyway. Microsoft has subverted their own security by hijacking the security updates to serve ads.
Automatic updates are a problem when the updates are known to cause problems when it's not from a company I trust. So I check each update manually. And every other week or so there is yet another Get Windows 10 shennanigan. They are proving that they can not be trusted.
Not installing important updates is stupid, yes. But Microsoft makes it hard to decide what is important and what is fluff. With Windows 10 home and pro, you have don't even get the option of only installing important update as you're required to install ALL updates even the stupid ones. Even the updates that brick your computer have to be accepted (and this was shown to happen in their preview). As one tech site pointed out, Windows 10 Pro lets you defer updates for awhile so that Windows 10 Home users can act as your beta testers.
Sure herd immunity are good for preventing illness. However when the guy giving out the shots is dressed as a clown then maybe you want to find a more reputable doctor.
Wow, I was relying on that very chart below which I had seen on a different page by itself from nationalpriorities.org... Anyway, I still think we spend too much on the military. Very liberal too as it spends our hard earned tax dollars to give poor people jobs:-)
Which reminds me updates. So I went to look. Oh, 23 updates waiting. Every single one of them it titled "Update for Windows 8.1 for x64-based systems (KB3xxxxxx). Every single one of them is described as "Install this update to resolve issues in Windows. For a complete listing o fthe issues that are included in this update, see the associated Microsoft Knowledge Base article for more information. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer."
Seriously every single update looks like this. It's been that way for a long time now, with the only variants being whether it's a basic, critical, or security update. Every. Single. Update! They do not want the user to easily read what's in the updates. And I can tell you that I have seem many of these updates which did NOT resolve issues in Windows unless "issue" is very loosely interpreted (such as needing an upgrade to support Azerbaijan language).
And "you may have to restart" means exactly that: you may or may not need to restart. They don't want to actually come out and tell you which it is. Any other company would get excoriated over this sort of support.
I think Microsoft has lost the advantage it had when newer releases actually had a lot of improvements. But now that Windows 7 and 8.1 are good enough to stick with, it's not getting a lot of voluntary upgrades. It's hard to market this new version. Even the most pro-Windows technology sites listing "the 10 best things of Windows 10" can only come up with some rather ho-hum features. But so what, we don't use their new product and that should be the end of the story. They almost learned a lesson from the Windows 8 debacle but then promptly forgot it. There's someone at Microsoft that must be getting a performance bonus based upon how many people upgrade because otherwise no one would work this hard to push unwanted upgrades on people.
If Microsoft really is honest that forced or mistaken upgrades should not be happening, then they need to fire that out of control employee of theirs that's doing this.
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There's just no competition really. AT&T does help a bit with u-verse, slower speeds for the equivalent prices, but at least it's not Comcast. But if you not close enough to AT&T fiber then you're stuck with only one option that's "broadband".
They did sign up for AT&T DSL and got 5Mbps down, better than normal ADSL but not quite VDSL.
As for asking, given that most of their neighbors are either tech or internet enabled companies and the landlord never mentioned anything, they probably assumed that was internet available. It's sort of like finding our your 20 person office space doesn't have any toilets.
But who is dumb enough to open up "new office space" without already having utilities hooked up? I've worked near that location and used to jog on that street, and they most certainly have good internet service in that neighborhood. However there were some older buildings near there that may not have had that particular street upgraded. But the photos show refurbished buildings. The buildings owners should have done the necessary work to get internet ready while they were refurbishing. Seriously, the place is maybe a couple hundred yards from where the very first chip maker set up to create Silicon Valley (Fairchild), so not having decent service there sounds fishy. I suspect that if you cross the road that they have great internet on the other side.
Comcast also is not a novice here. They know what permitting is like since there are hundreds of internet enabled businesses in that city. The probably just did a lackluster job in trying to get the work done, putting the customer at the bottom of the priority list, maybe checking back with the city once a month to see how the permitting was going. Any decent company would have jumped to attention once the original snafu showed up and there was no internet service as they claimed, but maybe cheating customers is so ingrained to Comcast that they didn't care.
Most permitting rules are set by the cities, not the state.
And yet people claim he's a great business person despite the actual evidence of all his failures.
Leeeeeerooooy Jeeeeeenkins... for President!
Yes, let's encrypt all the power lines.
Velcro straps, those work well. Also the spiral laces, those work too. With no batteries either.
Every parent knows that the kids shoes need to be replaced very often. So an expensive pair of shoes that get thrown again in a few months versus teaching the kid how to tie the damn shoes...
We act like fools for awhile and then when we lull them into a false sense of security we strike!
Law enforcement gets easy wins by going after the dumb criminals. They've done this forever. Everyong applauds for having the suspect found so quickly. The evil mastermind however has always been hard to catch, and when they're caught it's because someone else was stupid (like printing out the plaintext). Where law enforcement is panicking is because cryptography is so common place now that even the dumb criminals have access to it. Not as much low hanging fruit anymore.
It's important to learn the concepts. The pre common core way required you to learn by rote without learning concepts, if you did manage to learn the concept it was by accident. Of course common core is screwing stuff up too but it's not necessarily worse than the old way.
But the original common core was not a strict "do it this way or else" approach, the problem is that schools don't seem to want to give teachers much freedom and so they try to dictate what the daily lesson plans are going to be.
Math... Latin... Wait, does this mean we're going to have to use Roman numerals again? Do you know how hard it is to compute prime pairs using Roman numerals?
I'm just glad I'm not on Facebook. Don't be jealous.
I don't work for stock options, I want a salary instead of promises. I have never worked for any company that wasn't incredibly stupid in some area or other. That's just the nature of things. If the job is good and my coworkers are decent I'll stick with it even if the upper management keep walking into walls. I've had a few times where it was difficult to find jobs so I'm still in that mode where I'm not going to take it all for granted.
The things I care about more would be what is the actual team I'm going to work with be like, am I going to end up being the smartest person in the room or will I actually have people with good ideas about how to do things, is the code base an incomprehensible ball of accretions or will doing the work actually be interesting, am I maintaining old orphaned products or helping to design new products, things like that. A lot of companies don't understand that, they seem to think that they need to mention who all their original founders and investors were.
Overall software has dumbed down for many jobs. Thus there is a shortgage for people who remember how to program for real and not just link two APIs together with some glue code. I'm finding that EE graduates are much more able to program halfway decently compared to CS graduates; their eyes don't glaze over when asked to work with hardware or a low level language.
IT (which is a nebulous term I know) has a very large percentage of workers that are easily interchanged. And the IT workers seem to want it this way. Standardize around using only Microsoft products, base hiring and job hunting decisions upon MS certificates, and so forth, then they act surprised that they're easily outsourced.
IT workers are interchangeable commodities though. They all want you to accept their MS Certifications in lieu of actual experience and they hop between jobs faster than engineers do. All the IT jobs can be outsourced pretty easily. Whereas engineering jobs are much more difficult to outsource than service jobs; all those top Indian and Chinese engineers are already in the US. Learn to be a great programmer, learn to design hardware, learn to design networking protocols, learn how to make the tools that people want to buy, then you'll get more job security.
Doesn't mean we'll be able to retire easily on that salary though. If you invested well you can (but I suck at it), but quite a lot of people plan to move away after retirement. In Montana you'd be quite wealthy with that salary, but in Silicon Valley you're in a small condo, and in San Francisco you're renting with roommates, which is why we have some people who commute 2 hours or more each way so that they can have a nice house for the spouse and kids.
The media completely misunderstands Silicon Valley. Even the media within the Bay Area gets it all wrong. They think it's a society full of entrepreneurs when those people are a very small minority. Most jobs here are not at startups, and most people seem to prefer that. Salary is better than stock options. We don't hang out at parties and discuss business ventures as some media stories seem to to imply. Silicon Valley also isn't as high tech as it once was. I mean everyone treats Google as their darling but it's a freaking advertising delivery service. Smugness is up in San Francisco, though again the media gets confused and seems to think it is a part of Silicon Valley (at the same time that they think Twitter and Uber are high tech).
It's an ad, it's not something necessary to include in a security update! It's a banner, which is an advertisement. How can you say this is not an advertisement when it's there for the sole purpose of persuading customers to use a new product. A product doesn't have to cost money for it to be an ad. And it's malware because it behaves exactly like malware, it shows up unwanted, gets in your way, is difficult to remove, and keeps evolving to avoid defenses against it.
I also went and hid that security update because nothing in it applied to me as I don't use IE anyway. Microsoft has subverted their own security by hijacking the security updates to serve ads.
Automatic updates are a problem when the updates are known to cause problems when it's not from a company I trust. So I check each update manually. And every other week or so there is yet another Get Windows 10 shennanigan. They are proving that they can not be trusted.
Not installing important updates is stupid, yes. But Microsoft makes it hard to decide what is important and what is fluff. With Windows 10 home and pro, you have don't even get the option of only installing important update as you're required to install ALL updates even the stupid ones. Even the updates that brick your computer have to be accepted (and this was shown to happen in their preview). As one tech site pointed out, Windows 10 Pro lets you defer updates for awhile so that Windows 10 Home users can act as your beta testers.
Sure herd immunity are good for preventing illness. However when the guy giving out the shots is dressed as a clown then maybe you want to find a more reputable doctor.
Wow, I was relying on that very chart below which I had seen on a different page by itself from nationalpriorities.org... :-)
Anyway, I still think we spend too much on the military. Very liberal too as it spends our hard earned tax dollars to give poor people jobs
Which reminds me updates. So I went to look. Oh, 23 updates waiting. Every single one of them it titled "Update for Windows 8.1 for x64-based systems (KB3xxxxxx). Every single one of them is described as "Install this update to resolve issues in Windows. For a complete listing o fthe issues that are included in this update, see the associated Microsoft Knowledge Base article for more information. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer."
Seriously every single update looks like this. It's been that way for a long time now, with the only variants being whether it's a basic, critical, or security update. Every. Single. Update! They do not want the user to easily read what's in the updates. And I can tell you that I have seem many of these updates which did NOT resolve issues in Windows unless "issue" is very loosely interpreted (such as needing an upgrade to support Azerbaijan language).
And "you may have to restart" means exactly that: you may or may not need to restart. They don't want to actually come out and tell you which it is. Any other company would get excoriated over this sort of support.
I think Microsoft has lost the advantage it had when newer releases actually had a lot of improvements. But now that Windows 7 and 8.1 are good enough to stick with, it's not getting a lot of voluntary upgrades. It's hard to market this new version. Even the most pro-Windows technology sites listing "the 10 best things of Windows 10" can only come up with some rather ho-hum features. But so what, we don't use their new product and that should be the end of the story. They almost learned a lesson from the Windows 8 debacle but then promptly forgot it. There's someone at Microsoft that must be getting a performance bonus based upon how many people upgrade because otherwise no one would work this hard to push unwanted upgrades on people.
If Microsoft really is honest that forced or mistaken upgrades should not be happening, then they need to fire that out of control employee of theirs that's doing this.
That's possibly what's going on. If you click on neither button for accept or reject it may assumes the default is to accept.