Went down to the local OfficeMax the other day... No SATA optical drives at all. Ditto for Staples. The industry needs a big kick in the nuts to dump old legacy shit. Seagate dumping IDE is a kick in the nuts to OfficeMax and other retailers to wake the fuck up, and start carrying modern accessories. Even buying a DVI cable is a painful process - you are lucky if you have ONE to choose from (there are 8325 flavors of the frickin pinout, with monitors and cards keyed so only ONE cable type works...)
If you have a legacy IDE system, you can always get IDE to sata converters. Ditto for PS/2 to USB.
Really old legacy PC's just are not worth the trouble. If you have need for a low-end firewall box (always the stated use for an ancient box) you are better off with an embedded device running openWRT or something similar. A big old Pentium 133 that can't boot off a CD just needs to be retired already.
I'm just blown away that nearly every modern motherboard still has IDE, parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports. Hard to find ones that don't. I don't want the interrupts wasted! I don't want the board real estate wasted! I want more USB and ESATA ports on the back panel instead... Heck, if you feel you REALLY need the ports on the motherboard, put them on a header that I can extend to a few jacks on a PCI slot bracket, but I would prefer that they not be there at all.
365 Main provides modern power and cooling infrastructure.
As opposed to their competition, whose datacenter's were all designed in 1914, and therefore have ancient power and cooling infrastructure? Squirrels running on a wheel and naked women waving palm fronds???
A tornado hit the AT&T datacenter in Virginia a few years back... Didn't take out the whole building, but did take a big chunk out of unoccupied space, and did have water pouring in on some of the servers (not ours.) Utility power was out for almost 2 days but our servers never lost connectivity.
Dark fiber, unless you are crossing the country, IS pretty cheap. In SF, there are about 784255 different fiber vendors, all with their own fiber in the street, which is why they are always digging everything up.
Oh, nice troll. In fact, you can get commercial support from Novell, Cononical, Redhat, and many other professional organizations. Pick one. No screaming needed.
Why bother, when one can write one check to GatesCo and be done with it?
You think one check is going to resolve all your Windows support needs???? Really??? In fact, a company just needs to resign itself to the fact that it will get repeatedly anal raped by Microsoft over and over. That first check to Microsoft is just the bending over stage... Now some people obviously think getting anal raped feels good, and for them MS may just be the best option. More power to ya!
Vista fan boy's are easy to spot. They have this wonderful selective memory...
A quick google search of "vista DRM" is quite enlightening. You are telling me that A) you don't believe it, or B) you never heard of it. A) gets you fanboy status, B) loses you credibility. That puts everything else you say in context.
Corp Activation, is a pain in the ass for remote offices, remote users, traveling users, etc. Why should I need to run yet another server just so I can use my legally purchased clients? What, EXACTLY, is the benefit to ME of activation and that additional server / service that I have to maintain, provide remote access to, debug, etc.? It certainly will NOT quickly shut down machines that leave the office.
What exactly is the purpose of the virtualization restrictions? It's quite simple - make it more expensive to continue to run Windows applications for those migrating to alternative platforms. Virtualization users don't NEED anything more than home basic functionality, but you want them to pay for ultimate or business??? Why? To bolster MS's stock?
I suggest you Diff the XP and Vista EULA's. Quite enlightening. It is a VERY well known fact that Windows EULA's have become more and more draconian, and it's more than the virtualization restrictions... Again, google provides lots of info. One of the more major items is that Vista Retail only allows you ONE transfer to a new machine. So no constant hardware upgrades for gamers, unless you want to buy windows over and over and over again. But there is more - google for it.
Does Vista have SOME good new features? Sure. Are any of those features SO good that any sane, knowledgeable person would want to deal with the other shit? In my opinion, and the opinion of thousands of other professionals, the answer is no.
You can try to skate around the truth and sugar coat the negative aspects of Vista all you want - unfortunately the truth is still there for anyone willing to look for it. I also expect the other vista fanboy's out there to mod me down in a lame attempt to hide from the truth. But answer me this: Even if you have unfettered love for Bill G, MS, and Windows, wouldn't you want a version of vista without DRM, spyware, activation, GA, and an overly restrictive EULA? If not, why not?
In order to continue to be able to buy OEM licenses at rock bottom prices (and therefore compete in the market,) Dell has NO CHOICE but to "recommend" Vista. Do their Tech people "recommend" it? Nope - just Marketing.
That said, you are 100% correct that it's EASY to buy a XP loaded Dell. XP is a standard option. The same is NOT the case at the local Bad Buy, Officemax, etc. where the only option is Vista, preloaded on all machines.
I'm telling them to wait until the draconian DRM, Activation on corp editions, MS Spyware, and other cruft gets removed, and the EULA gets updated so it's closer to the old XP / win2k version. Since that won't happen, people will just be forced to continue to be happy with XP. Since there is no compelling reason to upgrade, why choose a version that has these shitty attributes?
My organization will *NEVER* migrate to vista because of that crap.
Seven? Try two or three. A number of years ago, my daughter overheard a few words from my brother who was visiting and started saying "Awe fuck." Luckily it didn't last long, but is was long enough that Grandma heard it. It was kind of funny, but it's not what you want your 2 year old saying randomly.
That said, it's one thing for the occasional slip of the tongue, another for common, normal speech. This bill goes way too far.
Wallwarts are DUMB. They have a transformer and a rectifier and sometimes a couple caps / resistors, and occasionally (but rarely) a voltage regular. That's it.
USB and modern PoE systems can negotiate for current draw. That's kind of what I am talking about.
My little cage at the colo doesn't have 5 servers. It has hundreds. I'm also sharing that datacenter with many many other companies that have cages with hundreds of servers. We deal with SAN / iSCSI, NAS, backups over networks, etc. With the noise and limited bandwidth available in a shared frequency space, I seriously doubt any type of wireless will be very useful in a datacenter - especially since everything is already connected via hard-wired connections.
It also won't be very useful in my home, where wires are already easy to run for the short-distance devices, and noise / distance prohibits the use in cases where I could really use and WANT high-speed wireless.
So it does sound like a neat trick, but what is a valid, viable use case for it?
I could REALLY use something much different. I want to get rid of the 20 or so wall-wart power supplies under my desk. I want one larger power supply that I can run small cables to all the devices. Why can't devices negotiate for how much voltage / current they need?
Home cooking eats* into scarce leisure time. If you only have two free hours a day, you don't want to use it up cooking, it wouldn't leave you much time to even eat it, let alone anything else. Add the time it takes to get all the obscure ingredients as well...
This assumes you *hate* cooking. It also assumes that you plan and execute poorly, and never make things in bulk and freeze / store. Yes, making you own pizza takes more time than slapping a frozen pizza in the oven, but the difference in the result is huge. When I make pizza sauce, I make about a gallon which is enough for about 30 pizzas, and costs under $5. Ditto for just about all my sauces. If you make a wine reduction sauce 15 times for 15 meals, you are doing it wrong.
Any sit down restaurant better than a fast food joint will probably take you an hour anyway... You have to get there, wait for a seat, wait to place your order, wait for it to come, wait for your check, etc. Most of my meals take less than 30 mins to make, and a good portion of that time I can do other things while something cooks, etc.
You certainly don't have to make complicated time-consuming dishes for every single meal... That would be stupid. You can also make your OWN "premade" dishes (like anything you buy in the freezer case) in batches to reheat later. It will STILL be better than the store shit. Better quality meat, veggies, etc.
Then you've got all the pots and pans to clean up, and plates.
Never takes more than 5-10 mins. Oh boy. What a challenge.
Plus the cost of all the ingredients.
If you tried to buy the ingredients to make ONE pizza, then yeah, you are left with leftovers to make 20 more, so it will cost you more. But you don't buy and cook that way, and you don't calculate costs that way.
At the end of it all, you're left with something that's bland and badly-cooked compared to something premade.
If things you made are bland and badly-cooked, then you either have a shitty recipe or you didn't even TRY to cook right. Taste and season things as you go along... If you don't taste and season your pizza sauce while you are making it, prior to slathering it all over your pizza, don't be surprised if your pizza turns out like shit.
Unless you're telling me you can outcook professional chefs with decades of experience, as well as all the equipment you don't have at home (i.e. hot pizza ovens, deep-fat fryers, vertical spits, sharp knives).
I can make something that tastes better than ANYTHING you can buy in a freezer case, yes. I can also make a better pizza than most pizza joints - CERTAINLY better than anything from any of the national chains. Even a lot of the "woodfired" pizza places make shit pizza. Furthermore, I never said that I can ALWAYS make things better, I said "sometimes". Ever had a bad meal from a restaurant? Overcooked food? Bland? Over salted? Cooked with ingredients you don't care for? Even high-end restaurants where you wind up with a $300 tab for two can be disappointing. So yes, "sometimes" I can cook things that taste better, even than things I get from professional chefs in a restaurant. Is every meal perfect? Nope, but that's life - nothing is perfect all the time, but the vast majority are quite good.
To address your equipment issue, Hot pizza ovens - a regular oven with a stone (cheap unglazed quarry tile from a tile store - $2) works just fine. I've also cooked pizza's on the grill. Deep-fat fryer - check, although a large pot on the stove works too. You just can't do massive quantities at once - unless you are feeding 30 people, it's a non-issue. Vertical spit - definitely a nitch item, but a BBQ grill or broiler works fine, such as for Gyros which I have made. As for sharp knives, I don't understand your problem... All my knives are quite sharp. If you can't figure out how to use a stone or one of the other bazillions of sharpening devices, you can find a shop that will do this simplistic task for you. Sharpening is a basic kitchen ski
But the GP is right too. You don't HAVE to buy pre-processed foods. 95% of the crap sold in grocery stores just isn't good for you. You can buy the ingredients and make it yourself like your mother may have done. In fact, you may find that it tastes better, is less expensive, as well as being better for you. My wife and I enjoy cooking together, recreating some of the things we had in fine restaurants. Sometimes it's even better since it's not mass produced. Good food is aphrodisiac...
You have 80,000 or so meals in your life, and they may as well be good for you and great tasting.
I love the patent, for different reasons. It ensures that nobody but Microsoft will put such stupid and irresponsible technology in their media players.
Does anyone else out there wonder WHY MS is doing so much anti-consumer, anti-user technology? We also have the new Colonel kernel service too that is CERTAINLY hostile, along with the other well-known invasive and overly restrictive DRM systems in Windows.
Rural infrastructure (backbones) isn't an issue NOW. We already have TONS of infrastructure fiber. Damn near every town over pop 200 has fiber. The issue is the last mile. This article is about the last mile. The FA is not about stringing 40Gb fiber from New York to Chicago, it's about lighting up granny's house. It's totally reasonable to be stringing fiber 5km aerially to get to the farm house. The cable cost really isn't the issue - it's the costs if installing ANYTHING. The old copper is already there therefore it is cheap to use.
You may think it's a stupid idea, but they have specially made aerial fiber cable. It has been designed and tested to last many many many years in this application. They can string 100 miles of fiber aerially for the cost of trenching 1. The cost of fixing it when it breaks is factored in. It's still a much cheaper and faster way of getting fiber service to the last mile anywhere.
Fibre is fragile. It goes in hardened, insulated tubes that are always in the ground.
Someone may want to tell Verizon, Pacbell (now AT&T), and all the other telcos that because they have aerial fiber all over the place. So sorry, you are wrong. I have fiber out on the pole in front of my house. It's all over this town. I agree that it is most protected in the ground, but it CAN and IS being strung aerially all over the world.
I dunno, Ethiopia is where you'd have to be now to only have 384/1.5. With basic 1Mb/10Mb costing pennies who would have such a dismal service?
I had a house in San Jose, CA (silicon valley) where I couldn't get cablemodem service, was too far for ADSL, and could only get IDSL (144kb/144kb) for $140 / month as my ONLY "better than dial-up" service. I was less than 5 minutes down the road from Ebay's corp. headquarters. That was 3 years ago and I think that house can now get cablemodem, but it still can't get high-speed DSL.
PacBell, SBC, AT&T, or whatever they want to call themselves this week SUCKS.
I think the POINT of this article is that it may not be for long. Keep in mind that fiber prices are coming down and the price of copper is going up. Existing fiber and copper have relatively short length limits before repeaters too. With current tech, they have to have remote terminals / DLC's etc. all over the place to extend the reach of the CO. This new fiber tech can go 2000km without a repeater. That's huge! That shitcans all the "in the middle" equipment so it could be just the CO and the premise (house, business.) Now in reality, they will keep a bunch of that remote equipment so they can reduce the number of fiber lines from the CO and tree out, but the old existing limits of unrepeated fiber and copper are effectively a non-issue with the new tech.
So yeah, right now, today, copper is cheaper, but copper can't do what fiber can do so it's a moot point anyway. If you want 1/10th the speed of fiber, it's still going to cost you 10 times more to do it in copper right now (talking last mile here...) If that cheap.
I don't know about you, but some of us geeks have more than one PC, more than one TV, more than one phone, etc.
40Gb seems like a lot TODAY, but what about in 20 years? Don't know about you, but I sure don't want to be stuck at a measly 384Kb/1.5Mb DSL connection 20 years from now. Some areas of the country don't even have that! Unless we start an ambitious FTTP project nation wide in the US, including rural, we are going to be a backwater country on par with Ethiopia.
Assuming that you will be able to get the disks for under $1. Considering that DL disks are still about $2 and Blue ray are over $10, my guess is "not for many many years." You will probably be able to buy 500G flash drives in common formats well before this drive is even available. Keep in mind that disks are still very fragile too (scratches.)
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Went down to the local OfficeMax the other day... No SATA optical drives at all. Ditto for Staples. The industry needs a big kick in the nuts to dump old legacy shit. Seagate dumping IDE is a kick in the nuts to OfficeMax and other retailers to wake the fuck up, and start carrying modern accessories. Even buying a DVI cable is a painful process - you are lucky if you have ONE to choose from (there are 8325 flavors of the frickin pinout, with monitors and cards keyed so only ONE cable type works...)
If you have a legacy IDE system, you can always get IDE to sata converters. Ditto for PS/2 to USB.
Really old legacy PC's just are not worth the trouble. If you have need for a low-end firewall box (always the stated use for an ancient box) you are better off with an embedded device running openWRT or something similar. A big old Pentium 133 that can't boot off a CD just needs to be retired already.
I'm just blown away that nearly every modern motherboard still has IDE, parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports. Hard to find ones that don't. I don't want the interrupts wasted! I don't want the board real estate wasted! I want more USB and ESATA ports on the back panel instead... Heck, if you feel you REALLY need the ports on the motherboard, put them on a header that I can extend to a few jacks on a PCI slot bracket, but I would prefer that they not be there at all.
Project Blackbox. Own dogfood eat you must.
365 Main provides modern power and cooling infrastructure.
As opposed to their competition, whose datacenter's were all designed in 1914, and therefore have ancient power and cooling infrastructure? Squirrels running on a wheel and naked women waving palm fronds???
Yeah yeah, joke... But bricks suck for earthquakes, which is why all the brick buildings in SF got major steel retrofits.
A tornado hit the AT&T datacenter in Virginia a few years back... Didn't take out the whole building, but did take a big chunk out of unoccupied space, and did have water pouring in on some of the servers (not ours.) Utility power was out for almost 2 days but our servers never lost connectivity.
Depends on the cost of being down, doesn't it?
Dark fiber, unless you are crossing the country, IS pretty cheap. In SF, there are about 784255 different fiber vendors, all with their own fiber in the street, which is why they are always digging everything up.
Oh, nice troll. In fact, you can get commercial support from Novell, Cononical, Redhat, and many other professional organizations. Pick one. No screaming needed.
Why bother, when one can write one check to GatesCo and be done with it?
You think one check is going to resolve all your Windows support needs???? Really??? In fact, a company just needs to resign itself to the fact that it will get repeatedly anal raped by Microsoft over and over. That first check to Microsoft is just the bending over stage... Now some people obviously think getting anal raped feels good, and for them MS may just be the best option. More power to ya!
Vista fan boy's are easy to spot. They have this wonderful selective memory...
G A-20-Windows-Vista-Features-and-Services-Harvest-U ser-Data-for-Microsoft-58752.shtml
A quick google search of "vista DRM" is quite enlightening. You are telling me that A) you don't believe it, or B) you never heard of it. A) gets you fanboy status, B) loses you credibility. That puts everything else you say in context.
Corp Activation, is a pain in the ass for remote offices, remote users, traveling users, etc. Why should I need to run yet another server just so I can use my legally purchased clients? What, EXACTLY, is the benefit to ME of activation and that additional server / service that I have to maintain, provide remote access to, debug, etc.? It certainly will NOT quickly shut down machines that leave the office.
What exactly is the purpose of the virtualization restrictions? It's quite simple - make it more expensive to continue to run Windows applications for those migrating to alternative platforms. Virtualization users don't NEED anything more than home basic functionality, but you want them to pay for ultimate or business??? Why? To bolster MS's stock?
I suggest you Diff the XP and Vista EULA's. Quite enlightening. It is a VERY well known fact that Windows EULA's have become more and more draconian, and it's more than the virtualization restrictions... Again, google provides lots of info. One of the more major items is that Vista Retail only allows you ONE transfer to a new machine. So no constant hardware upgrades for gamers, unless you want to buy windows over and over and over again. But there is more - google for it.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Forget-about-the-W
Your answer is to firewall Microsoft??? How about MS not being spyware to begin with? Wouldn't that be better? Why yes, yes it would. Maybe users want to be able to get updates and not report everything back to MS...
Does Vista have SOME good new features? Sure. Are any of those features SO good that any sane, knowledgeable person would want to deal with the other shit? In my opinion, and the opinion of thousands of other professionals, the answer is no.
You can try to skate around the truth and sugar coat the negative aspects of Vista all you want - unfortunately the truth is still there for anyone willing to look for it. I also expect the other vista fanboy's out there to mod me down in a lame attempt to hide from the truth. But answer me this: Even if you have unfettered love for Bill G, MS, and Windows, wouldn't you want a version of vista without DRM, spyware, activation, GA, and an overly restrictive EULA? If not, why not?
In order to continue to be able to buy OEM licenses at rock bottom prices (and therefore compete in the market,) Dell has NO CHOICE but to "recommend" Vista. Do their Tech people "recommend" it? Nope - just Marketing.
That said, you are 100% correct that it's EASY to buy a XP loaded Dell. XP is a standard option.
The same is NOT the case at the local Bad Buy, Officemax, etc. where the only option is Vista, preloaded on all machines.
I'm telling them to wait until the draconian DRM, Activation on corp editions, MS Spyware, and other cruft gets removed, and the EULA gets updated so it's closer to the old XP / win2k version. Since that won't happen, people will just be forced to continue to be happy with XP. Since there is no compelling reason to upgrade, why choose a version that has these shitty attributes?
My organization will *NEVER* migrate to vista because of that crap.
Seven? Try two or three. A number of years ago, my daughter overheard a few words from my brother who was visiting and started saying "Awe fuck." Luckily it didn't last long, but is was long enough that Grandma heard it. It was kind of funny, but it's not what you want your 2 year old saying randomly.
That said, it's one thing for the occasional slip of the tongue, another for common, normal speech. This bill goes way too far.
No, they don't "negotiate".
Wallwarts are DUMB. They have a transformer and a rectifier and sometimes a couple caps / resistors, and occasionally (but rarely) a voltage regular. That's it.
USB and modern PoE systems can negotiate for current draw. That's kind of what I am talking about.
My little cage at the colo doesn't have 5 servers. It has hundreds. I'm also sharing that datacenter with many many other companies that have cages with hundreds of servers. We deal with SAN / iSCSI, NAS, backups over networks, etc. With the noise and limited bandwidth available in a shared frequency space, I seriously doubt any type of wireless will be very useful in a datacenter - especially since everything is already connected via hard-wired connections.
It also won't be very useful in my home, where wires are already easy to run for the short-distance devices, and noise / distance prohibits the use in cases where I could really use and WANT high-speed wireless.
So it does sound like a neat trick, but what is a valid, viable use case for it?
I could REALLY use something much different. I want to get rid of the 20 or so wall-wart power supplies under my desk. I want one larger power supply that I can run small cables to all the devices. Why can't devices negotiate for how much voltage / current they need?
The worst offenders are baking and broiling pans. Cleaning those will give you exercise.
Soaking works wonders, as does non-stick spray, parchment paper, "release" foil, etc.
Home cooking eats* into scarce leisure time. If you only have two free hours a day, you don't want to use it up cooking, it wouldn't leave you much time to even eat it, let alone anything else. Add the time it takes to get all the obscure ingredients as well...
This assumes you *hate* cooking. It also assumes that you plan and execute poorly, and never make things in bulk and freeze / store. Yes, making you own pizza takes more time than slapping a frozen pizza in the oven, but the difference in the result is huge. When I make pizza sauce, I make about a gallon which is enough for about 30 pizzas, and costs under $5. Ditto for just about all my sauces. If you make a wine reduction sauce 15 times for 15 meals, you are doing it wrong.
Any sit down restaurant better than a fast food joint will probably take you an hour anyway... You have to get there, wait for a seat, wait to place your order, wait for it to come, wait for your check, etc. Most of my meals take less than 30 mins to make, and a good portion of that time I can do other things while something cooks, etc.
You certainly don't have to make complicated time-consuming dishes for every single meal... That would be stupid. You can also make your OWN "premade" dishes (like anything you buy in the freezer case) in batches to reheat later. It will STILL be better than the store shit. Better quality meat, veggies, etc.
Then you've got all the pots and pans to clean up, and plates.
Never takes more than 5-10 mins. Oh boy. What a challenge.
Plus the cost of all the ingredients.
If you tried to buy the ingredients to make ONE pizza, then yeah, you are left with leftovers to make 20 more, so it will cost you more. But you don't buy and cook that way, and you don't calculate costs that way.
At the end of it all, you're left with something that's bland and badly-cooked compared to something premade.
If things you made are bland and badly-cooked, then you either have a shitty recipe or you didn't even TRY to cook right. Taste and season things as you go along... If you don't taste and season your pizza sauce while you are making it, prior to slathering it all over your pizza, don't be surprised if your pizza turns out like shit.
Unless you're telling me you can outcook professional chefs with decades of experience, as well as all the equipment you don't have at home (i.e. hot pizza ovens, deep-fat fryers, vertical spits, sharp knives).
I can make something that tastes better than ANYTHING you can buy in a freezer case, yes. I can also make a better pizza than most pizza joints - CERTAINLY better than anything from any of the national chains. Even a lot of the "woodfired" pizza places make shit pizza. Furthermore, I never said that I can ALWAYS make things better, I said "sometimes". Ever had a bad meal from a restaurant? Overcooked food? Bland? Over salted? Cooked with ingredients you don't care for? Even high-end restaurants where you wind up with a $300 tab for two can be disappointing. So yes, "sometimes" I can cook things that taste better, even than things I get from professional chefs in a restaurant. Is every meal perfect? Nope, but that's life - nothing is perfect all the time, but the vast majority are quite good.
To address your equipment issue, Hot pizza ovens - a regular oven with a stone (cheap unglazed quarry tile from a tile store - $2) works just fine. I've also cooked pizza's on the grill. Deep-fat fryer - check, although a large pot on the stove works too. You just can't do massive quantities at once - unless you are feeding 30 people, it's a non-issue. Vertical spit - definitely a nitch item, but a BBQ grill or broiler works fine, such as for Gyros which I have made. As for sharp knives, I don't understand your problem... All my knives are quite sharp. If you can't figure out how to use a stone or one of the other bazillions of sharpening devices, you can find a shop that will do this simplistic task for you. Sharpening is a basic kitchen ski
But the GP is right too. You don't HAVE to buy pre-processed foods. 95% of the crap sold in grocery stores just isn't good for you. You can buy the ingredients and make it yourself like your mother may have done. In fact, you may find that it tastes better, is less expensive, as well as being better for you. My wife and I enjoy cooking together, recreating some of the things we had in fine restaurants. Sometimes it's even better since it's not mass produced. Good food is aphrodisiac...
You have 80,000 or so meals in your life, and they may as well be good for you and great tasting.
I love the patent, for different reasons. It ensures that nobody but Microsoft will put such stupid and irresponsible technology in their media players.
Does anyone else out there wonder WHY MS is doing so much anti-consumer, anti-user technology? We also have the new Colonel kernel service too that is CERTAINLY hostile, along with the other well-known invasive and overly restrictive DRM systems in Windows.
Rural infrastructure (backbones) isn't an issue NOW. We already have TONS of infrastructure fiber. Damn near every town over pop 200 has fiber. The issue is the last mile. This article is about the last mile. The FA is not about stringing 40Gb fiber from New York to Chicago, it's about lighting up granny's house. It's totally reasonable to be stringing fiber 5km aerially to get to the farm house. The cable cost really isn't the issue - it's the costs if installing ANYTHING. The old copper is already there therefore it is cheap to use.
You may think it's a stupid idea, but they have specially made aerial fiber cable. It has been designed and tested to last many many many years in this application. They can string 100 miles of fiber aerially for the cost of trenching 1. The cost of fixing it when it breaks is factored in. It's still a much cheaper and faster way of getting fiber service to the last mile anywhere.
Fibre is fragile. It goes in hardened, insulated tubes that are always in the ground.
Someone may want to tell Verizon, Pacbell (now AT&T), and all the other telcos that because they have aerial fiber all over the place. So sorry, you are wrong. I have fiber out on the pole in front of my house. It's all over this town. I agree that it is most protected in the ground, but it CAN and IS being strung aerially all over the world.
I dunno, Ethiopia is where you'd have to be now to only have 384/1.5. With basic 1Mb/10Mb costing pennies who would have such a dismal service?
I had a house in San Jose, CA (silicon valley) where I couldn't get cablemodem service, was too far for ADSL, and could only get IDSL (144kb/144kb) for $140 / month as my ONLY "better than dial-up" service. I was less than 5 minutes down the road from Ebay's corp. headquarters. That was 3 years ago and I think that house can now get cablemodem, but it still can't get high-speed DSL.
PacBell, SBC, AT&T, or whatever they want to call themselves this week SUCKS.
In rural areas, copper is cheaper
I think the POINT of this article is that it may not be for long. Keep in mind that fiber prices are coming down and the price of copper is going up. Existing fiber and copper have relatively short length limits before repeaters too. With current tech, they have to have remote terminals / DLC's etc. all over the place to extend the reach of the CO. This new fiber tech can go 2000km without a repeater. That's huge! That shitcans all the "in the middle" equipment so it could be just the CO and the premise (house, business.) Now in reality, they will keep a bunch of that remote equipment so they can reduce the number of fiber lines from the CO and tree out, but the old existing limits of unrepeated fiber and copper are effectively a non-issue with the new tech.
So yeah, right now, today, copper is cheaper, but copper can't do what fiber can do so it's a moot point anyway. If you want 1/10th the speed of fiber, it's still going to cost you 10 times more to do it in copper right now (talking last mile here...) If that cheap.
I don't know about you, but some of us geeks have more than one PC, more than one TV, more than one phone, etc.
40Gb seems like a lot TODAY, but what about in 20 years? Don't know about you, but I sure don't want to be stuck at a measly 384Kb/1.5Mb DSL connection 20 years from now. Some areas of the country don't even have that! Unless we start an ambitious FTTP project nation wide in the US, including rural, we are going to be a backwater country on par with Ethiopia.
Whoosh.
Assuming that you will be able to get the disks for under $1. Considering that DL disks are still about $2 and Blue ray are over $10, my guess is "not for many many years." You will probably be able to buy 500G flash drives in common formats well before this drive is even available. Keep in mind that disks are still very fragile too (scratches.)
The problem where this comes into play is when a rival company uses a spamming service to advertise your company
So make it 50 years and a $100M fine for THAT fraudulent act.