Lower cost. Better service. Potential for innovative competition. Yeah, I'd call that a good description of "best case scenario" in anyone's book. What is your objection?
Marginally lower cost. A possibility of better service. I'm not sure how companies who only are able to provide service because they're a middle man connecting you into the main ISP's pipes can be "innovative".
My objection? That the odds of this improving anything are pretty slim, and the odds of it making it worse (going back to paying per minute or having data caps, or both) are good.
In a low density area, there isn't much demand, therefore there won't be much money to be made. As such, those who do choose to provide their service (internet, gas, groceries, etc) charge more than usual to make up for the lower number of units being sold.
In extremely dense areas it's easy to provide service, but due to the high value of land (read up on urban economics if you have questions as to why land would cost more), people are paid much more than usual to make up for the high cost of land / housing - ss a result of a higher COL, companies will charge more to compensate (because it costs more for their businesses / their employees to live in the area). It doesn't matter how much competition you have in the case of high density cities (like NY or LA), the prices will still be higher than in a much less dense city due to the higher cost of land / higher salaries required by employees.
Also keep in mind that most people around here can support a wife, kid, and house on around $40k a year.
You'd have a hard time doing it (you'd have to be careful with your spending) but it IS possible (I live in Cincinnati / Dayton, OH). Though, not being insulting, if people have such a hard time with it, then the wife should get a job unless there's a damn good reason for her not to.
Adjust your cost of living prices accordingly
COL is about the same for our cities (yours might be lower actually due to the recession hitting Michigan the hardest). Also, internet isn't a necessity by far - when I wasn't making as much money, I didn't have internet until my new job required me to occasionally work from home.
The only one that sounds expensive is the $57 for 15 Mbps. Though, I just did the math and how many Mbps you get per $1 increases WAY faster than their pricing, so as you go higher up the tiers you get way more bang for your buck (though it does cost more).
Yes, and where do you live? If you live in a place like LA or NYC (which have higher cost of living and as a result pay way more), then even at $50 / month you're still paying WAY less of your income for internet than people living in the rest of the country paying $25 / month.
I suspect with competition the price will be about the same, but the bandwidth you get for that price will go up. In fact, I would wager that 50 Mbps would start to be come common for 20 bucks a month pretty.
You do realize that the providers already there will charge the new companies to use their pipes, right? Best case scenario is you get the same bandwidth for maybe a couple bucks less a month.
I live in Marina Del Rey, on the west side of Los Angeles. I have 2 options for broadband access: DSL and TimeWarner cable. TimeWarner charges $39.99/mo
Yea, everything is more expensive out there in CA - but you get paid more to compensate for it.
I have had the same pricing experiences in Cincinnati, Ohio. So please, show me what city you're getting better pricing in.
Ironically enough, I live in Cincinnati (well, did, I moved to south Dayton recently, but that's like a whopping 10 miles away and the prices are the same). Time Warner has 4 tiers ranging from 768 kbps for $20 / month to 15 Mbps for $57 / month.
If you don't like the pricing in the country (due to lack of supply, which is a result of the low population resulting in a lack of demand), then move to a city. No one is stopping you.
It is bad enough that we pay astronomical amounts just for internet access.
$20-$25 a month is "astronomical"? Even at minimum wage, that's not even half a days pay. If you consider that to be so horrible, I can only assume that you don't have a cell phone, cable, purchase dvd's / cd's, go to the movies, etc. Entry level broadband (like 80-90 KB/s downloads) costs less than a tank of gas and about as much as the typical dvd. Hell, if you go out to eat for lunch each day during a 5 day work week, you probably spend more money than you would for internet.
Every game that I had installed under the beta that had an issue worked fine under the RC. You may still have the occasional game with issues, but the RC was much better for old games and I'm expecting the final version to be better still.
I found many XP games were a real pain to get working in 7, or just plain didn't work at all.
What version of Win 7 were you using? I had the 64-bit beta and had a few games that wouldn't run, now that I'm using the 64-bit RC, I've only had one game that doesn't work 100% right (Starcraft has a graphics glitch). I've even been running Win 95 games on Win 7 64-bit with no trouble.
I never said all. I said "basically everything". Any time you go from one OS to another, you'll have a few programs that don't work right. Your utilities are probably like most utility programs and are written by people who, while it may be a good program, don't do much in the way of support.
Don't blame Win 7 because the people who wrote those utilities didn't do a better job / failed to update their software to be compatible to changes in Win 7.
As someone who's used the beta / RC of Win 7 64-bit since it came out, it has plenty of useful things.
The easisest to see, and one of the nicest changes, is the new taskbar. The quick launch toolbar has been merged with the taskbar (sort of like the dock in OS X). All open tabs go under the icon for the program running and if you mouse over the icon you see a preview of every open window (and in the case of IE, each open tab as well) which you can then click to select or close. It makes things cleaner and it makes it faster when searching for an open window. Also the "show desktop" is now a part of the taskbar (on the far right edge) so it's nice and clean.
Windows Update does an amazing job of finding the right drivers for your system and with one click you can download them all and after one reboot, you're good to go. Much nicer than downloading individual drivers and installing them when you do a clean install, especially for hard to find drivers like the video card on a laptop.
Probably the best part is that it's a 64-bit OS where basically everything 32-bit works 100%, so you don't have to worry about legacy software not running after switching to 64-bit for more RAM (especially important for gamers since you can buy a new video card with 2 GB of RAM on it).
It's also incredibly responsive - much faster than XP when it comes to opening programs.
Another feature that will become much more important as time goes on is that it does a great job of load balancing with multi-core processors, especially when it comes to quad-core processors.
I use Windows (for gaming), OS X, and Linux regularly. I promote Linux use all the time (which gets me lots of flack from my fellow IT guys at work who've never tried Linux) and am about to purchase a new Macbook Pro, but Win 7 is the first OS from Microsoft that I intend to pay money for.
Well, each campaign is supposed to be as long as all three campagins combined from SC, so while it's not a new "game", it definitely qualifies as long enough for an expansion / sequel. I just hope that they charge at least a little less for the second two - say $40 instead of $50-60.
And if Blizzard goes to digital distribution only, I will stop being a customer. I have every Blizzard game, but I'm considering not buying Starcraft 2 because you have to activate it online (meaning that Blizzard can take away your right to install the game at any time they choose).
DRM, online activation, and digital distribution will eventually be prevalent enough that I stop gaming. Explain how that's supposed to make companies money?
Rich does not necessarily equal "powerful". Yes, powerful politicians stay in power at the expense of everyone else, but that's not how it is with business owners.
I know this will come as a shock to a collectivist who thinks that business owners are the enemy, but business owners create jobs. If Joe doesn't start his pizza company, there's no delivery boys, no waitresses, no cooks, no cashiers. Fact of life is that rich people are the ones creating jobs for most of the population.
First, there was less money going around - not "we made less and someone else made more".
Secondly, the job market always lags behind all other areas of the economy when going into a recovery. There will be jobs again, it just takes time to get back to where companies feel confident enough to hire / have enough business to justify hiring new people.
As for your last bit, that only applies if they somehow had TONS of money invested and sold it ALL at the same time. If you had that much invested, you wouldn't be the type to sell it all at once. Also, your last bit just sums up your jealousy that some people have more money than you.
Try doing some research on economics before you speak next time.
The rich tend to lose the most during recessions, due to most of their wealth being in stocks. That's why it has been shown many times throughout history that the wealth gap shrinks after recessions because stocks lose so much value and many people sell what they had instead of holding it because they are worried about losing ALL of the money in stocks.
Secondly, as businesses lose money, they lay people off (or go bankrupt) which means less people have jobs and so on. When people stop having money coming in, they can't pay bills. When they can't pay bills (wait for it!) the person they owe money to loses money . That's why we're in this mess - people bought more than they could afford and then started defaulting on bills, due to the defaults companies laid people off, defaults increased - add to that people then being afraid to spend money due to fear of losing their job, and it spiraled to where we are now (though we are slowly recovering).
All you did in your post was show a complete ignorance of Economics.
I wouldn't hire, or work for, a person who treats programming as a 9 to 5 activity. Life is short, and the craft so long to learn.
I wouldn't work for someone like you, who expects me to spend all of my free time working without pay. It doesn't matter what the job is or how much you enjoy it - there comes a point where you just get sick of doing NOTHING but X 24/7. I enjoy my job in IT and still do plenty of stuff with computers in my free time........but I also do a hell of a lot of things outside of computers in my free time. Sound like you wouldn't hire me just because I date / spend time with friends / play games (video, board, card, anything) / read non-computer books / write / watch movies / exercise / work on my car / etc.
Feel free to be the guy who runs around going "I'm so much better than you because I work literally all day every day, even if I'm not getting paid". Why? Because I know that in 20 years, you'll be the one burnt out and just wanting to lay down and die, while I'll be just happy because I used my free time to relax and enjoy life.
What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay.
No, what we have is a generation that believe it should all be reasonably priced.
So much media today has ridiculously inflated costs just because the MPAA / RIAA / Microsoft / Apple CAN increase the cost. That's why I pretty much never buy music anymore (I virtually never pirate music) and I simply listen to the stuff I have - occasionally I hear something worth buying and pick it up, but at most that's 2-3 cd's a year. I do collect movies, so I still buy dvd's, but I always find them for the lowest price possible and or use rewards certificates / coupons to buy them. Software is pretty much like music, I rarely buy any new stuff. However, with Microsoft, I don't feel bad in the slightest when I pirate their stuff (the only company I pirate from). Why? Because they charge about 2-3 times what the product should actually cost. $100 for Windows or for Office is perfectly fine. $350 for Windows 7 Ultimate is bullshit, plain and simple.
Sorry, but I don't understand the hate for WGA. Windows is pretty much THE most pirated software out there, and WGA is a very basic attempt to make it at least a little hard for pirates. It causes no problems to people with a legit copy of XP (or the pirates smart enough to use a WGA crack) and only hounds pirates (or again, the pirates not smart enough to use a WGA crack). Who gives a rats ass if you can't patch without having a small WGA check? It checks your system to see what patches you need, how is checking WGA any different?
Microsoft wants to verify "something", god knows what, every time I try to access patches.
They want to take literally 1 second to check that you have a legit copy of Windows (or in the case of using a crack, what WGA is told is a legit copy). 1 second. Even the President isn't so busy that he's going to foam at the mouth over waiting literally 1 second.
Complaining about WGA is as stupid as people complaining about having to put the cd / dvd in to play a game. It's a very minor form of copy protection that causes no inconvenience to users - well, users that don't like to bitch about the massive effort of having to put a disc in to play a game.......I can only imagine the moaning they do over having to put a dvd in to watch a movie or put a cd in the stereo to listen to music.
I'm pretty much the biggest anti-DRM person that there is. But as long as you own a legit copy, WGA in no way impedes your ability to use Windows, nor does it impede your ability to install without an internet connection.
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Lower cost. Better service. Potential for innovative competition. Yeah, I'd call that a good description of "best case scenario" in anyone's book. What is your objection?
Marginally lower cost. A possibility of better service. I'm not sure how companies who only are able to provide service because they're a middle man connecting you into the main ISP's pipes can be "innovative".
My objection? That the odds of this improving anything are pretty slim, and the odds of it making it worse (going back to paying per minute or having data caps, or both) are good.
In a low density area, there isn't much demand, therefore there won't be much money to be made. As such, those who do choose to provide their service (internet, gas, groceries, etc) charge more than usual to make up for the lower number of units being sold.
In extremely dense areas it's easy to provide service, but due to the high value of land (read up on urban economics if you have questions as to why land would cost more), people are paid much more than usual to make up for the high cost of land / housing - ss a result of a higher COL, companies will charge more to compensate (because it costs more for their businesses / their employees to live in the area). It doesn't matter how much competition you have in the case of high density cities (like NY or LA), the prices will still be higher than in a much less dense city due to the higher cost of land / higher salaries required by employees.
Also keep in mind that most people around here can support a wife, kid, and house on around $40k a year.
You'd have a hard time doing it (you'd have to be careful with your spending) but it IS possible (I live in Cincinnati / Dayton, OH). Though, not being insulting, if people have such a hard time with it, then the wife should get a job unless there's a damn good reason for her not to.
Adjust your cost of living prices accordingly
COL is about the same for our cities (yours might be lower actually due to the recession hitting Michigan the hardest). Also, internet isn't a necessity by far - when I wasn't making as much money, I didn't have internet until my new job required me to occasionally work from home.
The only one that sounds expensive is the $57 for 15 Mbps. Though, I just did the math and how many Mbps you get per $1 increases WAY faster than their pricing, so as you go higher up the tiers you get way more bang for your buck (though it does cost more).
Yes, and where do you live? If you live in a place like LA or NYC (which have higher cost of living and as a result pay way more), then even at $50 / month you're still paying WAY less of your income for internet than people living in the rest of the country paying $25 / month.
I suspect with competition the price will be about the same, but the bandwidth you get for that price will go up. In fact, I would wager that 50 Mbps would start to be come common for 20 bucks a month pretty.
You do realize that the providers already there will charge the new companies to use their pipes, right? Best case scenario is you get the same bandwidth for maybe a couple bucks less a month.
And what city might this be?
I live in Marina Del Rey, on the west side of Los Angeles. I have 2 options for broadband access: DSL and TimeWarner cable. TimeWarner charges $39.99/mo
Yea, everything is more expensive out there in CA - but you get paid more to compensate for it.
I have had the same pricing experiences in Cincinnati, Ohio. So please, show me what city you're getting better pricing in.
Ironically enough, I live in Cincinnati (well, did, I moved to south Dayton recently, but that's like a whopping 10 miles away and the prices are the same). Time Warner has 4 tiers ranging from 768 kbps for $20 / month to 15 Mbps for $57 / month.
If you don't like the pricing in the country (due to lack of supply, which is a result of the low population resulting in a lack of demand), then move to a city. No one is stopping you.
It is bad enough that we pay astronomical amounts just for internet access.
$20-$25 a month is "astronomical"? Even at minimum wage, that's not even half a days pay. If you consider that to be so horrible, I can only assume that you don't have a cell phone, cable, purchase dvd's / cd's, go to the movies, etc. Entry level broadband (like 80-90 KB/s downloads) costs less than a tank of gas and about as much as the typical dvd. Hell, if you go out to eat for lunch each day during a 5 day work week, you probably spend more money than you would for internet.
Every game that I had installed under the beta that had an issue worked fine under the RC. You may still have the occasional game with issues, but the RC was much better for old games and I'm expecting the final version to be better still.
I found many XP games were a real pain to get working in 7, or just plain didn't work at all.
What version of Win 7 were you using? I had the 64-bit beta and had a few games that wouldn't run, now that I'm using the 64-bit RC, I've only had one game that doesn't work 100% right (Starcraft has a graphics glitch). I've even been running Win 95 games on Win 7 64-bit with no trouble.
I never said all. I said "basically everything". Any time you go from one OS to another, you'll have a few programs that don't work right. Your utilities are probably like most utility programs and are written by people who, while it may be a good program, don't do much in the way of support.
Don't blame Win 7 because the people who wrote those utilities didn't do a better job / failed to update their software to be compatible to changes in Win 7.
As someone who's used the beta / RC of Win 7 64-bit since it came out, it has plenty of useful things.
The easisest to see, and one of the nicest changes, is the new taskbar. The quick launch toolbar has been merged with the taskbar (sort of like the dock in OS X). All open tabs go under the icon for the program running and if you mouse over the icon you see a preview of every open window (and in the case of IE, each open tab as well) which you can then click to select or close. It makes things cleaner and it makes it faster when searching for an open window. Also the "show desktop" is now a part of the taskbar (on the far right edge) so it's nice and clean.
Windows Update does an amazing job of finding the right drivers for your system and with one click you can download them all and after one reboot, you're good to go. Much nicer than downloading individual drivers and installing them when you do a clean install, especially for hard to find drivers like the video card on a laptop.
Probably the best part is that it's a 64-bit OS where basically everything 32-bit works 100%, so you don't have to worry about legacy software not running after switching to 64-bit for more RAM (especially important for gamers since you can buy a new video card with 2 GB of RAM on it).
It's also incredibly responsive - much faster than XP when it comes to opening programs.
Another feature that will become much more important as time goes on is that it does a great job of load balancing with multi-core processors, especially when it comes to quad-core processors.
I use Windows (for gaming), OS X, and Linux regularly. I promote Linux use all the time (which gets me lots of flack from my fellow IT guys at work who've never tried Linux) and am about to purchase a new Macbook Pro, but Win 7 is the first OS from Microsoft that I intend to pay money for.
Really? Here in Ohio you can get 15 Mb/s for $57 a month from Time Warner.
Well, each campaign is supposed to be as long as all three campagins combined from SC, so while it's not a new "game", it definitely qualifies as long enough for an expansion / sequel. I just hope that they charge at least a little less for the second two - say $40 instead of $50-60.
And if Blizzard goes to digital distribution only, I will stop being a customer. I have every Blizzard game, but I'm considering not buying Starcraft 2 because you have to activate it online (meaning that Blizzard can take away your right to install the game at any time they choose).
DRM, online activation, and digital distribution will eventually be prevalent enough that I stop gaming. Explain how that's supposed to make companies money?
Rich does not necessarily equal "powerful". Yes, powerful politicians stay in power at the expense of everyone else, but that's not how it is with business owners.
I know this will come as a shock to a collectivist who thinks that business owners are the enemy, but business owners create jobs. If Joe doesn't start his pizza company, there's no delivery boys, no waitresses, no cooks, no cashiers. Fact of life is that rich people are the ones creating jobs for most of the population.
Your failure to understand economics or finance makes me sad.....
Go on Amazon, buy some Econ, banking, and stock market text books. Please. It'll make everyone happier, yourself included.
First, there was less money going around - not "we made less and someone else made more".
Secondly, the job market always lags behind all other areas of the economy when going into a recovery. There will be jobs again, it just takes time to get back to where companies feel confident enough to hire / have enough business to justify hiring new people.
As for your last bit, that only applies if they somehow had TONS of money invested and sold it ALL at the same time. If you had that much invested, you wouldn't be the type to sell it all at once. Also, your last bit just sums up your jealousy that some people have more money than you.
Try doing some research on economics before you speak next time.
The rich tend to lose the most during recessions, due to most of their wealth being in stocks. That's why it has been shown many times throughout history that the wealth gap shrinks after recessions because stocks lose so much value and many people sell what they had instead of holding it because they are worried about losing ALL of the money in stocks.
Secondly, as businesses lose money, they lay people off (or go bankrupt) which means less people have jobs and so on. When people stop having money coming in, they can't pay bills. When they can't pay bills (wait for it!) the person they owe money to loses money . That's why we're in this mess - people bought more than they could afford and then started defaulting on bills, due to the defaults companies laid people off, defaults increased - add to that people then being afraid to spend money due to fear of losing their job, and it spiraled to where we are now (though we are slowly recovering).
All you did in your post was show a complete ignorance of Economics.
You do realize that the guy you're defending has a rating of 40% troll and 30% overrated, right?
Sadly you're the only one who thought he was saying something worthwhile....
I wouldn't hire, or work for, a person who treats programming as a 9 to 5 activity. Life is short, and the craft so long to learn.
I wouldn't work for someone like you, who expects me to spend all of my free time working without pay. It doesn't matter what the job is or how much you enjoy it - there comes a point where you just get sick of doing NOTHING but X 24/7. I enjoy my job in IT and still do plenty of stuff with computers in my free time........but I also do a hell of a lot of things outside of computers in my free time. Sound like you wouldn't hire me just because I date / spend time with friends / play games (video, board, card, anything) / read non-computer books / write / watch movies / exercise / work on my car / etc.
Feel free to be the guy who runs around going "I'm so much better than you because I work literally all day every day, even if I'm not getting paid". Why? Because I know that in 20 years, you'll be the one burnt out and just wanting to lay down and die, while I'll be just happy because I used my free time to relax and enjoy life.
What most people don't understand is we've grown an entire generation that believes it all should be free and will never, ever pay.
No, what we have is a generation that believe it should all be reasonably priced .
So much media today has ridiculously inflated costs just because the MPAA / RIAA / Microsoft / Apple CAN increase the cost. That's why I pretty much never buy music anymore (I virtually never pirate music) and I simply listen to the stuff I have - occasionally I hear something worth buying and pick it up, but at most that's 2-3 cd's a year. I do collect movies, so I still buy dvd's, but I always find them for the lowest price possible and or use rewards certificates / coupons to buy them. Software is pretty much like music, I rarely buy any new stuff. However, with Microsoft, I don't feel bad in the slightest when I pirate their stuff (the only company I pirate from). Why? Because they charge about 2-3 times what the product should actually cost. $100 for Windows or for Office is perfectly fine. $350 for Windows 7 Ultimate is bullshit, plain and simple.
Sorry, but I don't understand the hate for WGA. Windows is pretty much THE most pirated software out there, and WGA is a very basic attempt to make it at least a little hard for pirates. It causes no problems to people with a legit copy of XP (or the pirates smart enough to use a WGA crack) and only hounds pirates (or again, the pirates not smart enough to use a WGA crack). Who gives a rats ass if you can't patch without having a small WGA check? It checks your system to see what patches you need, how is checking WGA any different?
Microsoft wants to verify "something", god knows what, every time I try to access patches.
They want to take literally 1 second to check that you have a legit copy of Windows (or in the case of using a crack, what WGA is told is a legit copy). 1 second. Even the President isn't so busy that he's going to foam at the mouth over waiting literally 1 second.
Complaining about WGA is as stupid as people complaining about having to put the cd / dvd in to play a game. It's a very minor form of copy protection that causes no inconvenience to users - well, users that don't like to bitch about the massive effort of having to put a disc in to play a game.......I can only imagine the moaning they do over having to put a dvd in to watch a movie or put a cd in the stereo to listen to music.
I'm pretty much the biggest anti-DRM person that there is. But as long as you own a legit copy, WGA in no way impedes your ability to use Windows, nor does it impede your ability to install without an internet connection.