We just built a new server room and the raised floor tiles are in and of themselves dangerous -- sheet metal covering concrete, 2 ft x 2ft. They must weight 40 lbs each, I wonder who the first person to drop one on their feet will be. I've already taken out some chunks of the newly painted wallboard in the course of swapping solid tiles for ones with grommeted holes.
The installer told me it was a good flooring system, but I wish it wasn't concrete. It takes a special coring machine to put round holes, square cuts require a wet-cut bandsaw.
Jet fuel is similar to kerosene and isn't explosive like gasoline. A neighbor works for the airlines and says you can throw lit mathes into it and it won't burn.
I've left my cell phone on during flights on numerous occasions with no ill effects. It was always accidental and not intentional. The first time I found it on when digging in my carry-on, and I was really suprised that I had not just a signal, but a full-power digital signal. Other times I just notice when I go to turn it on at my destination. Never has the plane landed in the wrong place, the crew announced "We can't communicate" or any other panicky indicator that their gear is getting jammed.
I figure if I've done it, zillions of others have, and the squawk about "interfering with this airplane's navigation and communications equipment" was total BS and just a rule designed to make people use the $5/min in-flight phone system.
There is a difference between nazism and communism.
It's unfortunate you don't know what it is.
Nazism killed a lot of people, the wish to eradicate groups of the population being an integral part of the nazi ideas.
Stalin might have done the same, but communism itself is not about killing or suppressing people.
"Nazism" is the expression of the political will of the National Socialists in Germany, which was a rather demented expression of a more general poltical philosophy which arose in early 20th century Europe known as Fascism. Nazism injected a lot of flawed ideas about racial supremacy and a number of very radical solutions to the problems presented by the supposition of Aryan racial supremacy.
It's possible (but incorrect) to argue that because the known governments that reasonably qualify as fascist (Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain) were all fairly repressive, dictatorial governments that fascism itself is a repressive, dictatorial political philosophy.
But the same arguments can thus be made of communism -- all of the communist governments I'm aware of all have abyssmal human rights histories that make Nazism look like a 5th grade civics project.
Stalin's purges killed millions, including deliberately and specifically targeting non-Russian ethnic groups like the Ukranians, Armenians, Jews, Central Asians in addition to "normal" political enemies of communism.
China killed millions in the cultural revolution and has a terrible track record of repression of non-Chinese minorities in the far western Muslim areas and in Tibet. Pol Pot slaughtered a third of the population.
Often the motivation for killing in communist countries isn't stated deliberately as promoting a racial hegemony but is instead phrased in propaganda as "fighting the enemies of the people" or "the enemies of the revolution", but strangely they're always the same ethnic group.
I bought a deck and portable player about 5 years ago, before MP3 got any real traction. I loved it at the time and still use it occasionally.
My guess is that it didn't really take off because about the time it started getting market traction (reasonable prices, Best Buy-type availability) MP3 began to really take off and stole its momentum.
My biggest wish was that Sony had embraced MP3 more openly. The portable MD players and media would be an awesome combination for playing MP3s -- a couple of hours of 128k MP3s per disc, and far far cheaper than flash memory, as well as more portable to other devices (car, etc) which things like the iPod can't do because they have fixed storage.
All they would have had to do was issue a portable and/or home deck recorder with a USB port and some basic software for transfering MP3 files directly to the media.
There was a great April fools mockup of a Palm/MD player that could play MP3s as well, it would have been dynamite.
IANAE, but what happens when major telcos start to go under?
As you point out, a telco asset is only valuable if it is complete, but if it is complete it is a very valuable asset.
The remaining telcos will buy the bankrupt assets for pennies on the dollar, gaining substantial marketshare and capacity. Since fewer players control more capacity, they can idle the existing capacity and raise prices (or not keep cutting them) to recover from their debt load. They also eliminate future debt by being able to bring on the idle capacity with drastically lower capital expansion costs.
"Bailouts" happen for a few reasons. (1) The misguided populist notion that we won't have phone service, (2) the egos and political capital invested in the current business, and (3) the demands of shareholders, bondholders and other investors who do not want to see their investments become essentially free investment in other businesses.
When I talk to Novell techs about when/why I should have to apply a patch, they basicaly tell me that they have poor change control and documentation procedures for their code, and many times, fixes for bugs and security issues get placed into production code, without it ever being documented.
Netware service packs for NW4.11 were always a kind of Russian roulette; IIRC, SP5 had at least three iterations. Breakage of the backup environment was routine; I think there was a period of 6-8 months where you couldn't patch a server running Arcserve due to conflicts between it and whatever was in the service pack. Given that Arcserve was *the* industry leader in a fading field of NW backup solutions, it was kind of stupid.
One of the main problems Novell have is that the market, and customers to a large extent, always associate them with Netware, which most corporation are activly retiring.
It's fairly recently that you could run their products without at least one Netware server around. I think even eDirectory was like that initially.
If they had *started out* with platform-independant products that had full functionality without Netware, they'd be in good shape. Unfortunately their early strategy was very MS-like and appeared designed to sell Netware licenses.
I think that the info tech world, except for a few places, has largely written them off the same way that Banyan was written off. Wasn't Vines/Streetalk lightyears ahead of anything else at the time?
Novell may have a barely positive operational cash flow (sales revnue - sales cost), but I'd almost bet that they have an overall negative cashflow, especially considering their investment holdings are probably taking a pounding.
I seriously doubt that there will be a Netware 7.
*I* think they should have ported the Netware file/print system to other OSs. Clearly Netware-the-OS tanked when the Internet got hot and people wanted a general purpose OS to run arbitrary server apps (db, web, ftp, mail, etc etc) on. Netware as an OS failed miserably (we tried!) to do those 'other' tasks well, so people bought NT/Unix.
They they found that NT/Unix did file sharing "good enough" and stopped buying Netware. Pretty much end of story.
Novell also fucked over Mac users with NW5, which is why we're on 2k. As awful as it can be, its better than what Novell had at the time for Mac support.
I loved Netware 4.11 and think that NDS even then is better than the next two iterations of Active Directory could hope to be.
However, Novell has been doing this "Me too!!!!" thing with bundling stuff for years. Perl, the whole Netscape server, some IBM web thing, etc and it means nothing.
I hate to agree with the trolls, but Novell is dying. There was even an article in the WSJ last Friday about companies trading *below* their hard asset valus, and guess who was on it? Novell was! The Wall Street logic apparently was that trading below asset value was the sign that you were a dead duck and that investors not only didn't think you would do well now, but thought you'd likely go bankrupt, too.
I have 2 year old CD-Rs burned as audio CDs that are just fine, in spite of being stored and handled in the worst possible manner: in my car.
I live in Minnesota, so we get 100 deg F heat in the summer, -30 F in the winter. I shove CDs 2-3 at a time into a single pocket in the visor holder, leave them on the seat, I park in the sun at home and at work and I have yet to have one quit on me.
I also buy the cheapest brand X generics I can find, so its not like I'm buying expensive archival quality media.
The only thing I do is burn them at 4x instead of 8x because they tend to skip more at 8x, but that's probably just a car/media/burner interaction problem.
How close are we to seeing a definitive end to the media standards questions between -R/RW and +R/RW?
This has been debated between friends of mine and we can't get a clear signal as to what might win out. With many drive prices still over $300 its kind of tough to commit to a standard that won't benefit from continuously declining media prices and market acceptance, particularly when it comes to digital media (set-top DVD).
We got something frozen delivered at work, and it came packed in about 5 kg of dry ice. We proceeded to put it into the urinals and and toilets for laughs. The urinals were the best, since warm piss worked better than cold water in the toilet.
The biggest problem is that CD/RW is a shitty rewritable medium. I don't think you can block erase the media (meaning it wouldn't work as a long term usage, reading, writing, erasing a lot of files) and it'd be god-awful slow.
El Torrito bootable CD has kind of always worked that way, hasn't it? You specify a floppy disk image when writing the CD and the BIOS loads that image as the A drive; further reading of the CD requires whatever software on the A drive to load drivers for the CD, it gets assigned another drive letter. / would be on the image and everything else would be mounted from the CD.
I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?
Floppy disk replacement isn't a matter of medium choice, there are plenty: zip, superdisk, orb, flash, et al. The problem arises from the lack of flexibilty of PC BIOS in being able to substitute those other mediums, which are often ATA/IDE based for the floppy disk.
A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive. Even better would be a modular BIOS that would allow BIOS-level drivers to be installed so that BIOS could boot off of other buses -- USB, 1394, and so on without an operating system-level driver.
One thing I'd like to know from BIOS experts is why this couldn't be done (especially the third "floppy" ATA connector) and what legacy OSes (*cough*DOS*cough*) would think of a floppy disk with > 2.88MB of available storage? Do they have hard-coded storage variables that can't deal with a "floppy" with capacities larger than 24 bits?
At a University macro level, it's hard to make any argument for "Exchange-type features" such as calendaring, scheduling, "public folders" and so on.
When I worked at a Big Ten University 70% of our interaction was within our own department, with another 20% in our building, and the rest a random scattershot interaction with the rest of the University. There were a few select people outside of our building we worked with a lot, otherwise it was a lot of "human" communication.
I'm not even sure regional centralization of POP/IMAP makes sense in those environments, especially from a scalability and fault-tolerance perspective. I remember the "main" UNIX system that much campus mail was on usually had system loads in 4.xx range; hitting a blank enter at a shell prompt often had a 10-15 second wait for the next enter prompt. Ouch.
Most hard-core Mac users - the kind who would pay for a ticket to the keynote, or pay to travel to New York/Boston - have Internet access and read MacCentral, MacRumors, etc.
We have problems getting travel approved to fix actual problems these days, or to do field office upgrades that are already paid for (eg, recycled hardware, paid-for software licenses, just needs installation/integration on site).
Junkets to trade shows (networld, macworld, etc) have been off the menu for a couple of years now, I wonder if they'll ever come back. They were more about schmoozing and boozing than meaningful learning anyway, so you miss a free vacation.
The trailers are awesome, although the trend toward commercials sucks.
My wife and I go to the same, megasuperduper stadium-seating theater every time. We even drive extra miles for it. The seats are comfy, no obstructed views, and the food is actually much, much better than it used to be in theaters (ice cream, nachos, free soda and popcorn refills -- where were those?).
All told, it's probably a cheaper experience than dining a tier above fast food, plus we get to watch a movie.
If we stayed home, rented a DVD and ordered a pizza it'd be about the same money. I just wish that there was a pizza+movie delivery service.
Although at the last apartment building I lived in, I saw it done in reverse. People on the 1st floor used to bitch about the heat -- 1920s building, heat rises to top floor, bad/no insulation, leaky roof door, etc.
The landlord couldn't fix it (short of a $200k remodel job), so the tenants ran an extension cord to the hallway circuit and ran a space heater in their apartment off of it. I saw it there most of the winter several winters in a row, so the landlord must have figured that an extra $10 on the monthly electric bill was better than bitchy tenants.
Strangely, these tenants were an elderly couple (late 60s) who had lived in the same apartment for like 35 years.
Wasn't the Asprin patent also swiped from Bayer AG in WWI? I seem to recall there were a number of German patents that were basically nullified in WWI.
I don't know how many were related to war materiels specifically and how many were just US businesses looking for a reason to steal something.
It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?"
Right, you get what you pay for, however in lots of cases you don't get what you pay for. The top tiers are always way more expensive than what's just underneath them despite often only *moderate* increases in performance or slight increases in functionality.
And this is an economic reality in every sphere, so every consumer is wise to it -- if you buy the top tier you pay a huge price differential for only a small performance differential, eroded in under six months, so why not save a few bucks?
Most purchases are made by people who don't know all that much about what they're buying, and everyone has been "sold" on something more expensive. It only takes a few trips to the sheeny to realize you've been had, so people don't want to listen to what may be good sales advice.
After all if I break it or worse, make it report incorrectly (intentially or not), I am probably to be charged with tampering and or fraud.
Our water meters here in Minneapolis actually have a tap into our phone lines so they can call in the meter readings.
I've been tempted to disconnect it on general principal (my phone line not yours, blah blah blah). Even funnier would be presenting them with a telecommunications bill of $50 per month.
As far as I know, I never signed an agreement with the municipal water company saying I'd provide telecommuncations services for their billing operation, nor do I recall anything that says I can't disconnect them from my phone line.
(I know, I know, it's in my benefit to let them make a 30 second call once per month vs. paying the tax money to build a seperate signalling system, and I'm not an unreasonable jerk, but its kind of weird how they just *assume* they can do this).
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We just built a new server room and the raised floor tiles are in and of themselves dangerous -- sheet metal covering concrete, 2 ft x 2ft. They must weight 40 lbs each, I wonder who the first person to drop one on their feet will be. I've already taken out some chunks of the newly painted wallboard in the course of swapping solid tiles for ones with grommeted holes.
The installer told me it was a good flooring system, but I wish it wasn't concrete. It takes a special coring machine to put round holes, square cuts require a wet-cut bandsaw.
Jet fuel is similar to kerosene and isn't explosive like gasoline. A neighbor works for the airlines and says you can throw lit mathes into it and it won't burn.
I've left my cell phone on during flights on numerous occasions with no ill effects. It was always accidental and not intentional. The first time I found it on when digging in my carry-on, and I was really suprised that I had not just a signal, but a full-power digital signal. Other times I just notice when I go to turn it on at my destination. Never has the plane landed in the wrong place, the crew announced "We can't communicate" or any other panicky indicator that their gear is getting jammed.
I figure if I've done it, zillions of others have, and the squawk about "interfering with this airplane's navigation and communications equipment" was total BS and just a rule designed to make people use the $5/min in-flight phone system.
There is a difference between nazism and communism.
It's unfortunate you don't know what it is.
Nazism killed a lot of people, the wish to eradicate groups of the population being an integral part of the nazi ideas. Stalin might have done the same, but communism itself is not about killing or suppressing people.
"Nazism" is the expression of the political will of the National Socialists in Germany, which was a rather demented expression of a more general poltical philosophy which arose in early 20th century Europe known as Fascism. Nazism injected a lot of flawed ideas about racial supremacy and a number of very radical solutions to the problems presented by the supposition of Aryan racial supremacy.
It's possible (but incorrect) to argue that because the known governments that reasonably qualify as fascist (Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain) were all fairly repressive, dictatorial governments that fascism itself is a repressive, dictatorial political philosophy. But the same arguments can thus be made of communism -- all of the communist governments I'm aware of all have abyssmal human rights histories that make Nazism look like a 5th grade civics project.
Stalin's purges killed millions, including deliberately and specifically targeting non-Russian ethnic groups like the Ukranians, Armenians, Jews, Central Asians in addition to "normal" political enemies of communism. China killed millions in the cultural revolution and has a terrible track record of repression of non-Chinese minorities in the far western Muslim areas and in Tibet. Pol Pot slaughtered a third of the population.
Often the motivation for killing in communist countries isn't stated deliberately as promoting a racial hegemony but is instead phrased in propaganda as "fighting the enemies of the people" or "the enemies of the revolution", but strangely they're always the same ethnic group.
I bought a deck and portable player about 5 years ago, before MP3 got any real traction. I loved it at the time and still use it occasionally.
My guess is that it didn't really take off because about the time it started getting market traction (reasonable prices, Best Buy-type availability) MP3 began to really take off and stole its momentum.
My biggest wish was that Sony had embraced MP3 more openly. The portable MD players and media would be an awesome combination for playing MP3s -- a couple of hours of 128k MP3s per disc, and far far cheaper than flash memory, as well as more portable to other devices (car, etc) which things like the iPod can't do because they have fixed storage.
All they would have had to do was issue a portable and/or home deck recorder with a USB port and some basic software for transfering MP3 files directly to the media.
There was a great April fools mockup of a Palm/MD player that could play MP3s as well, it would have been dynamite.
IANAE, but what happens when major telcos start to go under?
As you point out, a telco asset is only valuable if it is complete, but if it is complete it is a very valuable asset.
The remaining telcos will buy the bankrupt assets for pennies on the dollar, gaining substantial marketshare and capacity. Since fewer players control more capacity, they can idle the existing capacity and raise prices (or not keep cutting them) to recover from their debt load. They also eliminate future debt by being able to bring on the idle capacity with drastically lower capital expansion costs.
"Bailouts" happen for a few reasons. (1) The misguided populist notion that we won't have phone service, (2) the egos and political capital invested in the current business, and (3) the demands of shareholders, bondholders and other investors who do not want to see their investments become essentially free investment in other businesses.
When I talk to Novell techs about when/why I should have to apply a patch, they basicaly tell me that they have poor change control and documentation procedures for their code, and many times, fixes for bugs and security issues get placed into production code, without it ever being documented.
Netware service packs for NW4.11 were always a kind of Russian roulette; IIRC, SP5 had at least three iterations. Breakage of the backup environment was routine; I think there was a period of 6-8 months where you couldn't patch a server running Arcserve due to conflicts between it and whatever was in the service pack. Given that Arcserve was *the* industry leader in a fading field of NW backup solutions, it was kind of stupid.
One of the main problems Novell have is that the market, and customers to a large extent, always associate them with Netware, which most corporation are activly retiring.
It's fairly recently that you could run their products without at least one Netware server around. I think even eDirectory was like that initially.
If they had *started out* with platform-independant products that had full functionality without Netware, they'd be in good shape. Unfortunately their early strategy was very MS-like and appeared designed to sell Netware licenses.
I think that the info tech world, except for a few places, has largely written them off the same way that Banyan was written off. Wasn't Vines/Streetalk lightyears ahead of anything else at the time?
Novell may have a barely positive operational cash flow (sales revnue - sales cost), but I'd almost bet that they have an overall negative cashflow, especially considering their investment holdings are probably taking a pounding.
I seriously doubt that there will be a Netware 7.
*I* think they should have ported the Netware file/print system to other OSs. Clearly Netware-the-OS tanked when the Internet got hot and people wanted a general purpose OS to run arbitrary server apps (db, web, ftp, mail, etc etc) on. Netware as an OS failed miserably (we tried!) to do those 'other' tasks well, so people bought NT/Unix.
They they found that NT/Unix did file sharing "good enough" and stopped buying Netware. Pretty much end of story.
Novell also fucked over Mac users with NW5, which is why we're on 2k. As awful as it can be, its better than what Novell had at the time for Mac support.
I loved Netware 4.11 and think that NDS even then is better than the next two iterations of Active Directory could hope to be.
However, Novell has been doing this "Me too!!!!" thing with bundling stuff for years. Perl, the whole Netscape server, some IBM web thing, etc and it means nothing.
I hate to agree with the trolls, but Novell is dying. There was even an article in the WSJ last Friday about companies trading *below* their hard asset valus, and guess who was on it? Novell was! The Wall Street logic apparently was that trading below asset value was the sign that you were a dead duck and that investors not only didn't think you would do well now, but thought you'd likely go bankrupt, too.
I have 2 year old CD-Rs burned as audio CDs that are just fine, in spite of being stored and handled in the worst possible manner: in my car.
I live in Minnesota, so we get 100 deg F heat in the summer, -30 F in the winter. I shove CDs 2-3 at a time into a single pocket in the visor holder, leave them on the seat, I park in the sun at home and at work and I have yet to have one quit on me.
I also buy the cheapest brand X generics I can find, so its not like I'm buying expensive archival quality media.
The only thing I do is burn them at 4x instead of 8x because they tend to skip more at 8x, but that's probably just a car/media/burner interaction problem.
How close are we to seeing a definitive end to the media standards questions between -R/RW and +R/RW?
This has been debated between friends of mine and we can't get a clear signal as to what might win out. With many drive prices still over $300 its kind of tough to commit to a standard that won't benefit from continuously declining media prices and market acceptance, particularly when it comes to digital media (set-top DVD).
We got something frozen delivered at work, and it came packed in about 5 kg of dry ice. We proceeded to put it into the urinals and and toilets for laughs. The urinals were the best, since warm piss worked better than cold water in the toilet.
The biggest problem is that CD/RW is a shitty rewritable medium. I don't think you can block erase the media (meaning it wouldn't work as a long term usage, reading, writing, erasing a lot of files) and it'd be god-awful slow.
El Torrito bootable CD has kind of always worked that way, hasn't it? You specify a floppy disk image when writing the CD and the BIOS loads that image as the A drive; further reading of the CD requires whatever software on the A drive to load drivers for the CD, it gets assigned another drive letter. / would be on the image and everything else would be mounted from the CD.
It'll be useful for trading movies with your 3cm optical disks on your cellphone.
Dude, The replacement for the floppy disk is the CDROM.
But CD-ROM isn't a random-access read-write medium. Even packet-mode CD-RW will never be an adequate replacement for random-access r/w media.
I'm still waiting for something which can replace floppy disks. Will this do it?
Floppy disk replacement isn't a matter of medium choice, there are plenty: zip, superdisk, orb, flash, et al. The problem arises from the lack of flexibilty of PC BIOS in being able to substitute those other mediums, which are often ATA/IDE based for the floppy disk.
A simple solution would be to create add an additional ATA connector that the BIOS would treat as the floppy drive, depending on what was connected to it. At boot time if I disk was present and bootable, the system would boot off it and present it as the A drive. Even better would be a modular BIOS that would allow BIOS-level drivers to be installed so that BIOS could boot off of other buses -- USB, 1394, and so on without an operating system-level driver.
One thing I'd like to know from BIOS experts is why this couldn't be done (especially the third "floppy" ATA connector) and what legacy OSes (*cough*DOS*cough*) would think of a floppy disk with > 2.88MB of available storage? Do they have hard-coded storage variables that can't deal with a "floppy" with capacities larger than 24 bits?
At a University macro level, it's hard to make any argument for "Exchange-type features" such as calendaring, scheduling, "public folders" and so on.
When I worked at a Big Ten University 70% of our interaction was within our own department, with another 20% in our building, and the rest a random scattershot interaction with the rest of the University. There were a few select people outside of our building we worked with a lot, otherwise it was a lot of "human" communication.
I'm not even sure regional centralization of POP/IMAP makes sense in those environments, especially from a scalability and fault-tolerance perspective. I remember the "main" UNIX system that much campus mail was on usually had system loads in 4.xx range; hitting a blank enter at a shell prompt often had a 10-15 second wait for the next enter prompt. Ouch.
Most hard-core Mac users - the kind who would pay for a ticket to the keynote, or pay to travel to New York/Boston - have Internet access and read MacCentral, MacRumors, etc.
We have problems getting travel approved to fix actual problems these days, or to do field office upgrades that are already paid for (eg, recycled hardware, paid-for software licenses, just needs installation/integration on site).
Junkets to trade shows (networld, macworld, etc) have been off the menu for a couple of years now, I wonder if they'll ever come back. They were more about schmoozing and boozing than meaningful learning anyway, so you miss a free vacation.
I wonder who goes to them now and why.
The trailers are awesome, although the trend toward commercials sucks.
My wife and I go to the same, megasuperduper stadium-seating theater every time. We even drive extra miles for it. The seats are comfy, no obstructed views, and the food is actually much, much better than it used to be in theaters (ice cream, nachos, free soda and popcorn refills -- where were those?).
All told, it's probably a cheaper experience than dining a tier above fast food, plus we get to watch a movie.
If we stayed home, rented a DVD and ordered a pizza it'd be about the same money. I just wish that there was a pizza+movie delivery service.
That's common, I'm sure.
Although at the last apartment building I lived in, I saw it done in reverse. People on the 1st floor used to bitch about the heat -- 1920s building, heat rises to top floor, bad/no insulation, leaky roof door, etc.
The landlord couldn't fix it (short of a $200k remodel job), so the tenants ran an extension cord to the hallway circuit and ran a space heater in their apartment off of it. I saw it there most of the winter several winters in a row, so the landlord must have figured that an extra $10 on the monthly electric bill was better than bitchy tenants.
Strangely, these tenants were an elderly couple (late 60s) who had lived in the same apartment for like 35 years.
Wasn't the Asprin patent also swiped from Bayer AG in WWI? I seem to recall there were a number of German patents that were basically nullified in WWI.
I don't know how many were related to war materiels specifically and how many were just US businesses looking for a reason to steal something.
It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?"
Right, you get what you pay for, however in lots of cases you don't get what you pay for. The top tiers are always way more expensive than what's just underneath them despite often only *moderate* increases in performance or slight increases in functionality.
And this is an economic reality in every sphere, so every consumer is wise to it -- if you buy the top tier you pay a huge price differential for only a small performance differential, eroded in under six months, so why not save a few bucks?
Most purchases are made by people who don't know all that much about what they're buying, and everyone has been "sold" on something more expensive. It only takes a few trips to the sheeny to realize you've been had, so people don't want to listen to what may be good sales advice.
After all if I break it or worse, make it report incorrectly (intentially or not), I am probably to be charged with tampering and or fraud.
Our water meters here in Minneapolis actually have a tap into our phone lines so they can call in the meter readings.
I've been tempted to disconnect it on general principal (my phone line not yours, blah blah blah). Even funnier would be presenting them with a telecommunications bill of $50 per month.
As far as I know, I never signed an agreement with the municipal water company saying I'd provide telecommuncations services for their billing operation, nor do I recall anything that says I can't disconnect them from my phone line.
(I know, I know, it's in my benefit to let them make a 30 second call once per month vs. paying the tax money to build a seperate signalling system, and I'm not an unreasonable jerk, but its kind of weird how they just *assume* they can do this).