I've had both DirecTV and Time Warner cable, and I'm currently a digital cable subscriber with a Time Waner DVR. I would go back to DirecTV in a heartbeat but, alas, my apartment faces the wrong direction.
The only time that I ever lost signal on my dish was when I had set it up myself and didn't know what I was doing. Once I RTFM'd, I never lost signal even in driving rain or snow. The only time I can remember losing the signal is when a power surge came through the wall and fried the box.
I have had far more outages with digital cable, the DVR is very slow when changing channels, and the service is far more expensive. You'll get more basic channels (already in digital) for much less with DirecTV. By way of comparison, I was paying roughly $50/month with DirecTV for the basic, movie package and local channels. That same package with cable costs me $75/month, and they recently put the Speed channel in a special sports block, so I am now paying $80/month for cable. The money you save by going with satellite can pay for the TiVo fees.
That has been my experience. May you have better luck with your entertainment options.
My guess is that you are sitting on a nice fat pipe there at your school. If you were one of the unfortunate ones that is stuck with dial-up because a giant conglomerate refuses to develop the technology in one monopoly because the government won't hand them another, I'm sure you would be calling foul on the Baby Bells as well.
These companies have a responsibility to the public. It would be one thing if they did not have the infrastructure to support broadband or develop it. But to have it and not develop it simply because they want to be the only player on the block seems very irresponsible to me. And yet, they find it surprising that many people are dropping their Baby Bell-owned lines in favor of cellular phones and cable modem. If they're going to oust other broadband development out of business, it becomes their responsibility to develop the technology for the consumer. Sure they're out to turn a profit - but what profit do they make just sitting in the corner like little children throwing temper tantrums over not having all the cookies in the cookie jar?
If the Bells were doing their job, there would be far fewer of your crybabys yelling about lack of broadband access, and the broadband access would likely be higher quality to boot. That would allow you to download your mp3s even faster.
Here's to hoping that you get stuck on an old dial-up connection when the lustre and safety of academia wear off....
I had a Dell Inspiron 7500 previously, and it took about 6-8 months for the on-line time to go from around 2 hours per pattery to a paltry 30-40 minutes. I am currently running a T30, and I consistently get about 2.5 hours on a single charge. Granted, it's only about 3-4 months old.
Here are some tips for improving battery life, some of which may have already been mentioned. I used these on my Inspiron, and got some of my battery life back. Try this:
- Set any wireless or peripheral cards to use power-save mode whenever possible. Wireless cards REALLY suck up the battery power.
- Turn the screen brightness down a bit if you can.
- Using headphones while on battery power, especially the larger ones, can also have a noticeable impact on battery life. Consider going to smaller headphones, or none at all.
- Do the complete discharge/recharge method. This is hard when you have a docking station at work, and you're moving around a lot, but try to let the battery discharge completely before charging it whenever possible. Laptop batteries as well as cell phone batteries have memories...
- Set your power consumption settings to be pretty conservative when on battery power - short delays for disk spin-down, short delays for "idle" times, etc.
- Someone once told me that leaving a laptop plugged in all day with the battery in as well is bad for it, and shortens the life. I don't know about the veracity of this statement, but you might consider removing the battery (if possible) when keeping the laptop plugged in or on the dockign station. I'd be interested to know if anyone out there has any success with this, or notices any difference.
- Try to keep your laptop as cool as possible, so the fan doesn't kick in as much. Consider getting a lap board rather than that fluffy pillow to put between it and your lap, so that the heat from the thing doesn't end your dreams of ever having children. My Dell fan used to run ALL THE TIME.
Hope some of these help, and of course, some of them are long term solutions. You'll just have to work through the pain of complete discharges, etc.
I recently got ADSL through Southwestern Bell in the Austin, TX, area, and I'm getting 384K down/128K up for $40/month. I'm relatively far out from the CO, though, at 14,300+ feet. Normally, I get around 35K/sec download times, unless I use something like Download Accelerator. Then I get anywhere from 80K/sec to 125K/sec.
It certainly seems like there is some sort of speek cap on my service, though. When I'm downloading large files, it doesn't seem like I'm getting a constant stream. The activity lights aren't as solid as I would expect. I dunno. I wouldnt' be surprised if SBC was limiting the speeds.
Well, at the very least it could be considered a form of vandalism, I suppose. It's distracting from the actual use of the site. Kind of a stretch, I know...but I think a case could be made. But in today's "I want it, and I want it NOW!" economy, if a user cannot get into a site to order something, they'll go to the competition, and that translates to stealing from the affected site IMO.
Say Amazon.com is down and I want/need to order a book. BarnesandNoble.com is up, so I'll just go over there and make my purchase. Boom, Amazon is out $20, and B&N is $20 richer. Magnify that by (potentially) thousands of users, and you have a serious loss of cash. Besides, Amazon needs all the cash it can get so it can finally claim a respectable profit!!!
As for a profile, word from the hacker community (or is that h4x0r community?) is that this is some beginner cracker or whatever just flexing some media-hyped muscle. No one has even stepped forward to take credit for it yet. That's what the hacker community respects. This isnt' original, and actually seems to be disdained as the pointless antics of a "packet monkey". If it's a form of protest, the least the perp could do would be to put out something that says WHY they're doing this...
I'm guessin' that it's a teenager that has discovered some lit about DoS or packet flooding and is trying to see what he can get away with. He may be part of a local group, but by the fact that he's not left any sign for recognition or credit, he's afraid (really afraid) of getting caught.
Then again, I'm just a whitebread programmer in the burbs...what do I know?
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I've had both DirecTV and Time Warner cable, and I'm currently a digital cable subscriber with a Time Waner DVR. I would go back to DirecTV in a heartbeat but, alas, my apartment faces the wrong direction.
The only time that I ever lost signal on my dish was when I had set it up myself and didn't know what I was doing. Once I RTFM'd, I never lost signal even in driving rain or snow. The only time I can remember losing the signal is when a power surge came through the wall and fried the box.
I have had far more outages with digital cable, the DVR is very slow when changing channels, and the service is far more expensive. You'll get more basic channels (already in digital) for much less with DirecTV. By way of comparison, I was paying roughly $50/month with DirecTV for the basic, movie package and local channels. That same package with cable costs me $75/month, and they recently put the Speed channel in a special sports block, so I am now paying $80/month for cable. The money you save by going with satellite can pay for the TiVo fees.
That has been my experience. May you have better luck with your entertainment options.
and you need a spelling/grammer checker like no tomorrow.
doofus.
My guess is that you are sitting on a nice fat pipe there at your school. If you were one of the unfortunate ones that is stuck with dial-up because a giant conglomerate refuses to develop the technology in one monopoly because the government won't hand them another, I'm sure you would be calling foul on the Baby Bells as well.
These companies have a responsibility to the public. It would be one thing if they did not have the infrastructure to support broadband or develop it. But to have it and not develop it simply because they want to be the only player on the block seems very irresponsible to me. And yet, they find it surprising that many people are dropping their Baby Bell-owned lines in favor of cellular phones and cable modem. If they're going to oust other broadband development out of business, it becomes their responsibility to develop the technology for the consumer. Sure they're out to turn a profit - but what profit do they make just sitting in the corner like little children throwing temper tantrums over not having all the cookies in the cookie jar?
If the Bells were doing their job, there would be far fewer of your crybabys yelling about lack of broadband access, and the broadband access would likely be higher quality to boot. That would allow you to download your mp3s even faster.
Here's to hoping that you get stuck on an old dial-up connection when the lustre and safety of academia wear off....
I had a Dell Inspiron 7500 previously, and it took about 6-8 months for the on-line time to go from around 2 hours per pattery to a paltry 30-40 minutes. I am currently running a T30, and I consistently get about 2.5 hours on a single charge. Granted, it's only about 3-4 months old.
Here are some tips for improving battery life, some of which may have already been mentioned. I used these on my Inspiron, and got some of my battery life back. Try this:
- Set any wireless or peripheral cards to use power-save mode whenever possible. Wireless cards REALLY suck up the battery power.
- Turn the screen brightness down a bit if you can.
- Using headphones while on battery power, especially the larger ones, can also have a noticeable impact on battery life. Consider going to smaller headphones, or none at all.
- Do the complete discharge/recharge method. This is hard when you have a docking station at work, and you're moving around a lot, but try to let the battery discharge completely before charging it whenever possible. Laptop batteries as well as cell phone batteries have memories...
- Set your power consumption settings to be pretty conservative when on battery power - short delays for disk spin-down, short delays for "idle" times, etc.
- Someone once told me that leaving a laptop plugged in all day with the battery in as well is bad for it, and shortens the life. I don't know about the veracity of this statement, but you might consider removing the battery (if possible) when keeping the laptop plugged in or on the dockign station. I'd be interested to know if anyone out there has any success with this, or notices any difference.
- Try to keep your laptop as cool as possible, so the fan doesn't kick in as much. Consider getting a lap board rather than that fluffy pillow to put between it and your lap, so that the heat from the thing doesn't end your dreams of ever having children. My Dell fan used to run ALL THE TIME.
Hope some of these help, and of course, some of them are long term solutions. You'll just have to work through the pain of complete discharges, etc.
Good luck!
I recently got ADSL through Southwestern Bell in the Austin, TX, area, and I'm getting 384K down/128K up for $40/month. I'm relatively far out from the CO, though, at 14,300+ feet. Normally, I get around 35K/sec download times, unless I use something like Download Accelerator. Then I get anywhere from 80K/sec to 125K/sec. It certainly seems like there is some sort of speek cap on my service, though. When I'm downloading large files, it doesn't seem like I'm getting a constant stream. The activity lights aren't as solid as I would expect. I dunno. I wouldnt' be surprised if SBC was limiting the speeds.
Well, at the very least it could be considered a form of vandalism, I suppose. It's distracting from the actual use of the site. Kind of a stretch, I know...but I think a case could be made. But in today's "I want it, and I want it NOW!" economy, if a user cannot get into a site to order something, they'll go to the competition, and that translates to stealing from the affected site IMO.
Say Amazon.com is down and I want/need to order a book. BarnesandNoble.com is up, so I'll just go over there and make my purchase. Boom, Amazon is out $20, and B&N is $20 richer. Magnify that by (potentially) thousands of users, and you have a serious loss of cash. Besides, Amazon needs all the cash it can get so it can finally claim a respectable profit!!!
As for a profile, word from the hacker community (or is that h4x0r community?) is that this is some beginner cracker or whatever just flexing some media-hyped muscle. No one has even stepped forward to take credit for it yet. That's what the hacker community respects. This isnt' original, and actually seems to be disdained as the pointless antics of a "packet monkey". If it's a form of protest, the least the perp could do would be to put out something that says WHY they're doing this...
I'm guessin' that it's a teenager that has discovered some lit about DoS or packet flooding and is trying to see what he can get away with. He may be part of a local group, but by the fact that he's not left any sign for recognition or credit, he's afraid (really afraid) of getting caught.
Then again, I'm just a whitebread programmer in the burbs...what do I know?