Please stop linking to that website. I have taken in all the information on it, and yet I find systemd to be significantly easier to use than almost every other init system except Solaris' SMF (which has significant tradeoffs compared to systemd, so I'd consider it neither better nor worse). In both the RHEL7 and Debian Testing implementations, I find my system easier to diagnose, and I find it easier to set up new services when installing stuff (both from the package manager and from source).
I use GNU/Linux both as a desktop/laptop distro and for (headless) dedicated servers, and systemd has never once stood in the way of me getting shit done. In fact, it is better at that than any other init system I've ever used, and I distro shopped for a decade before I started to settle on Debian and CentOS as my main two (I also tried out all three main BSD variants -- Free, Open and Net -- and OpenSolaris).
Most of the criticisms on that site are completely immaterial to me because they're either philosophical, or the typical crybabying of "what about BSD?????". Well, now even the BSD folks can shut up, because uselessd is bcoming an actually useful piece of software that hopefully will maintain some degree of compatibility with systemd, as far as the integration points to systemd that other packages have to support. This should at least fix upstream GNOME3 on BSD.
The few valid technical arguments go along the lines of, "there are too many GNUisms in the code". Compiler and libc compatibility matters, so I can get behind that. But really, if you solely use GNU/Linux like I do, (and it's not even a "Red Hat" thing anymore with so many distros on the uptake), it's hard to consider this a priority. I'm glad that some people do, and have created uselessd as a result. Uselessd is the opposite of a parody, in my opinion: it's a confirmation that systemd is fundamentally useful and innovative; is here to stay; and is so useful that people want to implement at least some pieces of it on other OSes. More power to them!
Hopefully the uselessd developers will take their project in a direction that is pragmatic, resulting in a better overall init system. If they pull it off, the systemd developers might consider merging their work upstream, which is the ultimate compliment -- this happened with gcc, and now the gcc community is one big happy family. Mostly. Or at least a lot happier than before.
The work they're doing on uselessd is infinity percent better and more constructive than all you imbeciles sitting around complaining about something being "forced down your throat". FOSS, where forced obsolescence doesn't exist and licenses are free as in beer, and you talk about things being *forced* upon you? Fuck me. Go live in an actually oppressive society for a decade or so, and THEN you'll know the true definition of having something forced upon you. Everyone who thinks there is any sort of enforcement going on about using systemd needs to live in North Korea until they actually understand the words that come out of their own mouths.
Yeah, and dmix is as compatible with most ALSA apps (even before pulseaudio came along) as a minnow and an oak tree trying to get it on with each other.
He's the developer of Avahi, Pulseaudio, and Systemd, most prominently. These components are standard middleware (userspace programs, usually that run in the background, which provide useful services to make a Linux distro more useful than just providing a terminal). The first two were accepted mostly uncontroversially; I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio. Now that the most popular distros ship systemd by default, people who don't like it are railing against both the program and its author(s).
My main beef is that Verizon won't bring FiOS to my neighborhood. No amount of little people money (i.e., short of offering to bribe them with several million dollars) is going to convince them to bring FiOS to my suburban neighborhood. There's FiOS 1/8th of a mile down the road; in fact, my community is surrounded by people who have FiOS. But Verizon stopped expanding FiOS, and Comcast hasn't installed replacement copper cables in our area despite us being their customer for a decade and complaining about it on a bi-weekly basis.
So the copper sucks (it's unreliable); the ADSL sucks (the speeds are just too slow, AND it's unreliable); and the amount of money it would take to move Verizon to install FiOS simply isn't available.
Sprint in my area is extremely marginal. I'd have to find a Yagi LTE antenna and point it exactly in the direction of the tower -- and then I'd only have LTE through the house's wifi, but if I were out and about in town, I probably wouldn't have any data. The tower is several miles away and just barely registers as a signal at all, but usually we get no data. So I returned my Sprint device after trying this for several days.
What's left? Well, either live in the 20th century without access to the global economy; or use Verizon Wireless LTE. Verizon's refusal to expand FiOS has left me with no options.
Moving is not an option due to the immense cost of housing. Our house is paid off, and we spend the money we'd be paying on a mortgage, on other things. We would have to severely curtail online spending, luxury spending, penny pinch on utility use, etc. if we were to move. Having a paid-off house in a world where everything is expensive and everyone is living beyond their means, is the difference between being able to afford stuff and always being broke.
Unlimited data on LTE is really a lifesaver. But it's ultimately Verizon Wireless' parent company, Verizon, that is to blame for any undue congestion we may cause by using a combined 200 GB or so per month of LTE data. It's their greedy refusal to expand FiOS to neighborhoods that might take more than a few years to make ROI, despite receiving vast amounts of public funding that were earmarked for FiOS, then turning around and spending that money on LTE instead.
Hey. If they want to offer me a great service, at a great price, and live within the restrictions the FCC has placed on the airwaves, they can kindly shut up. Verizon Wireless has no right to complain about my usage of their service. I am acting entirely within the ToS and the law. I value that service and will continue to use it as long as they offer it. If they ever stop offering it, I'll have to see about bribing Comcast to replace the damaged copper that gives us about 50% uptime on a modern cable modem.
I am hopeful that, in the future, the spectral efficiency and tower density improvements can converge together sufficiently that Verizon will be able to offer a legitimate unlimited data plan to NEW customers, eliminating the fear that us grandfathered folks might soon be put out to pasture. If that's a pipe dream, then they better show up at the end of my street with a reel of fiber, or I'm going to see about taking public action to get my neighborhood some actually decent access to the 21st century economy.
The greatest tragedy of a capitalistic society is when nobody's selling what you're buying. Such wasted potential. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
While I still dislike most of the political rhetoric coming out of Verizon and Verizon Wireless, I have to concede that this is a huge benefit for me personally. I'm an unlimited 4G customer who uses my phone as my primary Internet connection (I pay an extra $30/month for the privilege of "legally" tethering via the built-in Mobile Hotspot app that comes standard with Android; the app is disabled if you don't pay up).
It's plenty fast enough for my needs, even when the network is congested. It's a perfectly viable primary Internet connection, with native IPv6, and can be shared with desktops, laptops, smart devices, tablets, and other phones using 802.11ac, Bluetooth, or USB RNDIS.
I'm perfectly fine with being temporarily slowed down if the tower I'm on is congested. All they have to do is use a fair queue algorithm, not too dissimilar to what the Linux kernel's I/O scheduler does. But what was being proposed was to single out unlimited data users who use more than a certain amount of data, and slow them down artificially even more than everyone else.
I think this brought me back from the brink of having to face the prospect of getting ADSL or cable again. The problem with these services, in my area at least, is that every time we've ever tried them, they prove to have about a 50% uptime. That is to say, they're very intermittently available. They may not go down for 2 weeks at a stretch every month, but you'll certainly experience 10, 20, or 30 different 2 or 3 minute dropout periods during the course of a single day; sometimes the dropouts are longer, and sometimes there are more or less of them. I experience nothing of the sort with LTE.
While it would take the construction of many more towers in suburban and urban areas to be able to offer *every* customer unlimited data on LTE (or even to increase the typical monthly cap from around 2 GB to around 200 GB), and some people think that it would require the construction of "too many" towers, I'm still glad that this decision benefits me.
I'm certainly not going to become a Verizon Wireless booster, singing their praises on high; but this gives me a little respite from the endless barrage of anti-consumer laws and corporate practices that have been coming down the pipe lately.
A little bit of sanity goes a long way, in this case. For me and thousands of others who still have unlimited data.
Unless there is some enormous revolution in battery technology that makes state-of-the-art Lithium Ion / Lithium Polymer batteries look as antiquated as lead-acid, AND is cheaply and easily mass-manufactured, Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs) are going to be a better option for most people through the 2010s and 2020s.
The reason is simple: When the range of your vehicle can be measured in a few hundred miles, you are going to need to refuel or recharge quite often. Problem is, the only place you can guarantee the availability of charging apparatus (and the permission to use it) is on your own personal property. If you're very very lucky, you might be able to secure access to this at your place of employment -- but if you switch jobs, all bets are off.
Since gasoline stations are omnipresent almost anywhere in the civilized world, not only in the U.S. but worldwide, having your vehicle ultimately rely on gasoline as a "fall-back" or "range extender" means that you could, in a pinch, get in your car that's out of battery juice and has 1 gallon of gas in the tank; go to the nearest refueling station; fill up; drive several hundred miles; and repeat that several times to get from one end of the country to the other. You'd only spend a total of about 30 minutes refueling throughout your long journey.
So a PHEV can be relied upon to have "virtually unlimited range" (assuming you have unlimited money to pay for the gas) if you have a sudden, pressing need to go a long distance. You cannot rely upon a pure EV because you have no idea where you'll be able to find a recharging station, and even if you do, assuming it's compatible, it will take at least 45 minutes to an hour to get a good charge going (until EV batteries are based on supercaps or something that can recharge in seconds, but that's yet to be commercialized, much less mass-manufactured).
200 miles isn't a lot. Back and forth to work; run some errands; drive across part of a mid-Atlantic state to visit a relative; and you've driven 200 miles. Better hope grandma can bring out a long extension cord to charge up your car on the 120V overnight (assuming the current draw doesn't pop her 1970s-era circuit breaker faster than an electric lawnmower will).
I want to see more PHEVs with a range long enough for your ordinary commute on pure EV, but with a range extender (basically a gasoline-powered electric generator) that can give you range competitive with traditional gasoline vehicles. The nice thing about PHEVs is that you can make the battery a little bit smaller than the enormous ones Tesla needs for a 200-mile EV, which cuts down the cost into the 30k range quite easily. Tack on a medium-sized government subsidy and you're looking at sub-30k prices for a vehicle that might only use gasoline weekly or bi-weekly if the driver can fit their round trip commute in on the EV.
This is possible TODAY. To avoid the appearance of a shill I am deliberately not mentioning any manufacturers or vehicle models. But I really don't think people will be able to buy pure EVs until there is an Earth-shattering revolution in battery technology that would enable 1000+ mile range OR near-instantaneous charging; and even then, we'll need to build up a near-omnipresent charging infrastructure before you'll see very much adoption.
Meanwhile, with PHEVs, smart owners can continue to demand that the infrastructure for EV charging will build up, while still having a fallback if absolutely needed. The fallback of gasoline gets about half the MPG (i.e., costs twice as much) as using electricity produced on the grid, so drivers have a financial motivation to ask their workplace, local convenience stores and gas stations, etc. to have advanced high-speed chargers. This demand and the resultant market response will help build up the infrastructure WHILE we are getting our ducks in a row to prepare for the full-on EV revolution. Therefore, we avoid the chicken and egg problem by phasing in the demand, and we don't inconvenience consumers in the near term by allowing them
What the fuck is wrong with *you*? Breaking the law is not a solution to social problems. It's a great way to land yourself in jail, where your "personal sanctity" will be mercilessly abused by homicidal men who actually *belong* in jail. Breaking the law just further validates the rhetoric being slung by the elite. Suddenly anyone who doesn't want to pay their $130 is a criminal, or a terrorist.
The solution is to make your voice heard. Join the Mayday SuperPAC. Write to your congress critters. Support the few companies out there that are offering content with sane licensing models, such as DRM-free, using open formats, "watch anywhere". You have to inflict positive change upon the system, which antagonizes and hurts the evil parts of it. Once they feel the burn, they start speaking out even more loudly in favor of their own positions, and their rhetoric can then be exposed to reason and it can be shown how ridiculous it is. If you instead choose to break the law, you are actively helping them dig in their heels, because now they can rally the ignorant public against a "rising threat"; they spin piracy as a common enemy of both the consumer and The Man, and use this as lube to get the public to agree to let them fuck them harder.
Pirating may appear to be the "best" short-term, self-interested solution to the problem of watching what you want without paying outlandish prices, but it creates a backswing that will hurt *every* consumer, whether they pirate or not, and helps ensure that the greedy actors who have put us in the position we're in now, will continue to wield enormous power over our society's decision-making systems.
You can stop at "more $". That's the real reason why students in MA do better than students in MS.
Not money that's used to buy kids iPads or Surfaces, mind you. Money that's spent to modernize schools built in the 1960s, or tear them down entirely and put up new ones. Money that's spent to pay teachers more, and attract better teaching talent. Money that's spent on the community and infrastructure to make teachers want to live there.
Also, it's much more profitable for the private companies that "public" education relies on these days, when they have a higher density of students in schools. It's simply not practical to have as many students in a school in rural MS as it is in a school in urban MA. The urbanites get better educations because the private companies that do fund raisers, home and school internet connectivity, buses, general contracting on the buildings, etc. are making more money when they have more students in one place. It's the same reason why Verizon rolled out FiOS to the top 30% most densely populated suburbs and left the rest in the dark.
You can't trust private corporations to do anything other than act in their own self interest. The public sector as originally conceived was supposed to fill in the gaps, working under the assumption that all human citizens of the great USA deserve the same opportunity to have access to high quality education and thus high quality jobs. But such an assumption requires you to accept that each human being is meritorious of their own moral standing, just by virtue of the fact that they exist and are living and breathing. Corporations aren't people, and they don't assign any moral standing to anything except their bottom line.
We wanted nice things and we got exactly what we wanted. But you see, if you're not living in urban America, you aren't worthy of moral concern because you aren't worth enough money to our corporate benefactors.
The message is awfully clear. If you want a chance to prosper in today's economy, jam yourself in a tiny apartment and bleat through the herd of thousands through the doors of your local well-funded school. Welcome to The Haves Caste, USA, citizen. You are entity number 126,438,921.
What world do you live in? I want some of what you're smoking. Fiber isn't "gaining traction"; major players in the fiber market, such as Verizon, are sitting on their hands, intentionally stopping their deployments. If you don't have Fiber today where you live, don't hold your breath for getting it any time in the future, unless there is a major regulatory upheaval that ousts the lobbyists from having a stranglehold over the organizations in government that are supposed to be regulating them.
Assholes. Verizon pocketed millions in public funding; spent it on executive bonuses and the rollout of their overpriced and extremely restrictive LTE that you can hardly use unless you're grandfathered unlimited; while talking out of both sides of their mouth that they are simultaneously a Title II carrier when it benefits them, and a Title I carrier when that benefits them more. Meanwhile they only paid token lip service to the folks who are actually demanding a fiber rollout, by serving about 20% of the customers that they currently offer ADSL to. And rather than at least upgrading their ADSL to something a wee bit faster than 7 Mbps, such as VDSL2, they've left the remaining 80% of their customers completely in the dark, stuck with an internet connection whose speed would be acceptable in about 2002.
Maybe things are better where you live, but I know Australia's telecoms are behaving the same way as Verizon and AT&T in the US. Fast access to the Internet is an on-ramp to the modern global economy; those without are basically living in the 20th century. And the term "fast" constantly changes; the bar is being raised year over year by increasingly large software downloads and media sizes. You can't simply sit on your laurels and reap the profits of the previous decade's investment; you have to constantly upgrade. But in many of the supposedly first-world countries with supposedly advanced industrial economies, lobbyists and lawyers have hamstrung the country's potential to participate in the global economy by making consumers' internet access options all but worthless. Fiber to the premises is a fantasy for the vast majority of the people on the planet, both those in industrialized countries and those in developing nations (though for different reasons). Hell, even 20 Mbps VDSL is a pipe dream for many people.
Where do you get the "75%+" number that people hate the UX changes? For what it's worth, I've used Firefox for years as my primary browser; I've used Chrome and IE only as necessary to test websites (or to use websites that are so poorly coded that they don't work with Firefox), and when I upgraded to FF 29 with the new UI, it took me about 15 minutes to get acclimated.
I keep hearing people lump the FF UI redesign in with things like GNOME 3 and the Windows 8 start screen. But it's nothing like them; nothing at all. The problem with those UIs is that they are trying to design a single UI that works both on tablets and desktops. That was never a design goal of the new Firefox UI. Do you see enormous pastel-colored buttons? Do you see common browser functionality that FORCES you to use mouse gestures like "swiping" to take basic actions? No -- none of that. They moved the tab bar to the top, bundled the menus into a much more streamlined and sensible layout (with the ability to fall back to the old menu style, to boot), and changed the style of the tab bar to save on vertical real estate. Big fucking deal. If anything, I find it easier and more natural to use Firefox with the enhancements -- and this is with a traditional keyboard and mouse on a dual-screen desktop.
I love it how people always think that "75%+" of the people agree with them, just because they hold a strong opinion on a topic. I'll be the first to admit I have no idea how many people feel the same way as I do about the UI redesign, but I don't think it is the primary reason for Firefox's decreasing market share (Chrome's perceived speed as well as it being preinstalled on many Lenovo and Dell systems out of the box, probably have more to do with it). I certainly won't claim that "75%+" of the people love the new UI, though. I don't have to pull numbers out of my ass to prop up my argument.
Your example assumes (incorrectly) two things which are untrue of the wireless industry, and there is absolutely no sign that it will ever change:
1. In order for your example to apply to the wireless industry, the wireless industry would have to NOT collude on policies and prices between vendors. If you think there is no collusion going on, you only have to look at the changes in policy and price that have happened over the past 5 years between AT&T and Verizon, and between T-Mo and Sprint. One vendor moves; the other quietly follows 3-6 months later so as not to look suspicious. Vendor collusion is real and it's a serious hamper on competition. In general, the moves being made are all anti-consumer, and rather than differentiate as a statement of "hey, we're not evil like them!", the carriers instead opt to reduce their service quality *down* to their competitor's new standard. The bar keeps lowering, not raising. It's the exact polar opposite of the downward pressure you describe.
For instance, compare: AT&T stops unlimited plans; then Verizon stops unlimited plans. AT&T disallows tethering on unlimited; then Verizon disallows tethering on unlimited. AT&T throttles; then Verizon throttles. Even within the limited data landscape, the only thing remotely reasonable that has happened in the last decade is that the price per GB when paid upfront has dropped from about $10 per GB to about $7.5 per GB, on average. That's not a large decrease. And overages have gone UP from $10/GB to $15/GB. Surcharges and other miscellaneous "fees" have also climbed in both number and amount, while the ToSes continue to become more and more hand-wavey about stating exactly what amount of your personal data they are going to keep private, and what they're going to sell to advertisers to make a quick buck.
2. In order for your example to apply to the wireless industry, the wireless industry would have to have actual competition. As it stands, even the carriers that advertise unlimited come with deal-breaking provisos on their plans (such as throttling and tethering restrictions), making them no better than the ones that outwardly advertise limits. The two big carriers -- Verizon and AT&T -- have similar network buildouts and availability; it's just that some areas are better served by one carrier than the other. Prices are similar; the available phones and tablets are similar; tower density is similar; and so on.
The hosting industry has TONS of competition, as I am well aware. In my opinion it is a shining example of a tech industry that has reached that sweet spot where the free, unregulated market truly and honestly works for it, and no regulation is needed, because there are so many different firms offering different competitive advantages that you can browse the internet for a whole week and still not decide on a hosting provider, because there are so many differences between them. Which version of PHP do they run? Do they limit the amount of traffic? Do they cater only to hosting professionals (like your company)? Do they offer rack hosting, cloud hosting, VPSes, dedicated servers, lease-to-own, shared hosting, pay-as-you-go cloud (AWS), cloud-based storage, colocation....? Not to mention there are so many different geographic areas to pick from, and each one has its own smattering of Tier1 ISPs available for the backhaul, all of them offering insanely low prices (I've seen unmetered 100 Mbps on servers priced at $100 - $200 per month now, which was unheard of 5 years ago).
You're basically comparing THE IDEAL technology-related industry that fits like a glove with the unregulated free market approach, to the antithesis of that in the wireless industry.
Imagine if the hosting industry consisted of 95% of people paying $7000/month for a Core 2 Quad in a Softlayer datacenter; and if you didn't go with Softlayer, your other choice would be to pay $7000/month for a Core 2 Quad with slightly different clock speed in a Rackspace datacenter. Imagine if those were your only two choices,
So, your "logic" is that it costs them less per customer if people would just use less data? That is basically a tautology; it is neither surprising nor meaningful.
The fact is, data usage is trending upwards at a fast pace, as well it should. I use 75 - 150 GB per month on 100% legal, above-board purposes, without wasting any of that data on frivolous "re-downloads" or anything of the sort (I only download games once through Steam, then copy them on the LAN to my other devices; other people aren't so responsible). The vast majority of that data is tied to financial transactions where I have paid (either through advertising, subscription, or direct per-content payments) for the delivery of the data.
The problem with the current situation is:
1. It doesn't cost them nearly as much as they're charging on a per-GB level on the limited plans for the transfer of the data, AFTER you subtract out their up-front costs; 2. I guarantee you (I will bet you any amount of money) that AFTER they have already run the service long enough to get their return on up-front costs *AND THEN SOME*, they will not lower prices at all; if anything, they will continue to INCREASE prices; 3. They are using public funding -- my tax payer dollars -- to help fund their up-front costs, and then double-charging me as a paying customer by paying for their up-front costs as part of the charge of the per-GB that flows through their network.
It would be like me paying $20,000 for a car -- up-front -- and then paying an additional $20,000 amortized over 5-6 years in added costs to the price of gasoline, and then continuing to pay at that rate long after I've paid off my car two, three, four times.
Except the car market doesn't work that way, because Chevy doesn't sell me my gas.
I'm fine with Verizon making a profit; I'm even fine with them making large ROI on their LTE towers. But do they *really* need to continue to bill people *as if* they are outlaying expenditures at an incredibly high rate, when in fact they are planning to rest on their laurels and soak up the profits long after they've made ROI?
My last beef with your post is that you spent half your post describing how Verizon could make a lot more money and how it would be good for THEM. To be perfectly honest, I couldn't give a flying fuck what's good for Verizon. I have absolutely no self-interested reason to value the self-interest of a large corporation that is extremely profitable already.
The self-interest tug of war between corporations and consumers is always ongoing, with one side making headway and the other losing out, and back and forth. Right now Verizon has pulled on their side so hard that consumers have fallen in the mud pit, and they continue to drag us along the muddy ground to celebrate their victory. The combined forces of regulatory capture, anti-competitive business practices, industry collusion, monopoly/duopoly, vendor lock-in, and price gouging, have made the wireless industry way more "valuable" (in terms of profit margins and raw revenue) than it should be. Having an uber-valuable corporation sounds mighty enticing to the capitalists here, but you have to remember that they are doing this at the consumer's expense. It doesn't HAVE to be this way. If you think it does, you are drinking their kool-aid. They've got you hook, line and sinker.
"The amount of data they are carrying on wireless today is far greater than the amount they were carrying in 2004 by over an order of magnitude. You are simply dead wrong about this. The retail caps were mostly meaningless when it was EVDO. It is because LTE is so much better that they matter."
I didn't claim that the carriers carry the same amount of data as they did in 2004. I claimed that the caps are the same. This is a fact. I remember the 5 GB cap on their "limited unlimited" plan when I first started using Verizon BroadbandAccess. Today on Verizon Wireless' website, the most data you can buy is 100 GB per month (which, let's be honest, is peanuts in 2014 for any Internet-connected service provider aside from cellular data) -- and for that you have to pay $750 per month. That works out to a rate of $7.5 per gigabyte. If you go over 100 GB, the rate is, exasperatingly, DOUBLE that, at $15 per gigabyte. That rate of $15 per gigabyte is HIGHER than it was in 2003 when I got my first Windows Mobile smartphone!
What I claimed, and what is correct and NOT "simply dead wrong", is that the value that the carriers place on transferring 1 GB of data over cellular data networks is valued somewhere in the ballpark of $10 per GB. In the best case, it's valued at 25% less (for your first 100 GB). In the worst case, it's valued at 50% more (for data overages). The failure here is that, while just about every other service in the world that has anything to do with computing has steadily reduced the price per unit of measurement -- price per FLOPS, price per GB of storage, price per GB of wireline data, price per GB of RAM, etc -- cellular data has remained stagnant. That's not innovation. In fact, it looks like inflation will continue to drive the price per GB of cellular data higher and higher as time goes on.
The fact that they are carrying an order of magnitude more traffic just means that more and more people are jumping on the cellular data bandwagon and using their 5 GB per month. If the carriers can't keep up with the demand, they should simply stop selling new plans, not oversubscribe their network to increasingly higher levels of saturation and then raise the price as demand keeps increasing. If too many people try to bring their kids into one pediatrician's office, to the point where they are totally booked for months, does the pediatrician raise the price of an office visit by 50%? No. He stops accepting new patients, OR he brings new doctors into his practice. It's really that simple.
"No you aren't. If you are using that much data buy a business plan. Verizon (or dozens of other carriers) will be happy to sell you as much ethernet landline bandwidth as you want you just have to pay for it."
A business plan of *what*, exactly? I went on Verizon's website and looked up the available business plans at my address. Oh, look, I can't get Business FiOS, but they can offer me overpriced ADSL at up to a whopping 7 Mbps! AFK while I go sign up for that./sarc
The fact is, if such and such a service isn't available at your address, saying "I'm a business!" isn't going to magically make the carriers fall over you to bring service to you. If the wires aren't in the ground, they're not going to dig up the street just because you declared yourself a Sole Proprietorship. And if they do, it's going to cost more than your mortgage. Also, I'm not using "that" much data -- 75 to 120 GB is in the range of what content consumers (as well as content creators) would want to use in a month, for at least the past 10 years. Ever hear of video? How about downloading 3 GB OS images? Yeah. The whole internet isn't made of gzipped plain text and HTML. Apparently VZW thinks it is, though.
"That's just not true. Verizon has done tremendous network expansion. Read their earnings reports."
I read their earnings reports. I saw record profits that far outstrip their expenditures. For a public utility that acts as a force multiplier for entire industries of the economy that depend on the
Not at all, yet, but I may have to if Verizon keeps pulling bait and switch tactics on its users every few years.
I should've let them rot with AT&T, who has been leading Verizon by the hand down the road of anti-consumer practices, with Verizon following their lead after 6 months or so. Oh, wait...
Maybe I should've let them get throttled with Sprint, after using -- what is it, 2 or 5 GB? -- on their "unlimited" plan. Oh, wait...
Or maybe I should've let them get no service at all with T-Mobile, which serves approximately 3 square inches of land with their vast LTE network. Oh, wait...
Your entire post is based on the fallacy that each bit I transmit costs them money. This is simply not true.
Fact 1: Major ISPs such as Verizon have peering agreements with other Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs that run in the millions of dollars, for terabits per second of bandwidth.
Fact 2: Even the heaviest mobile data users are a drop in the bucket, in terms of bandwidth usage, compared to a typical FiOS customer. Even DSL customers likely use more, because there's no cap, so they can happily stream 7 Mbps of movies 18 hours a day.
Fact 3: Population density is finite, and does not increase to infinity. Also, in the US, population density in all but a very small number of places (so-called "cities") is much lower than in densely populated areas of other countries. So even if your argument is that "without people like you, they could put more customers on their towers", it doesn't hold water because there are only so many people within the service area of a tower. If at any point that tower isn't saturated, that is called "waste" -- where there was a potential for bandwidth to be used during a given time slot, but it lay fallow for that period. Most towers outside of major gathering places, such as sports stadiums, have vast periods where they are not saturated, and are usually only mildly saturated even during peak hours. I can substantiate this because I have observed LTE throughput many times at different locations over a period of years, in areas where there's good signal strength, and I can count on one hand the number of times where I've seen oddly reduced throughput (that's not throttling; that's the tower physically being unable to give you the bandwidth you request because more throughput is being requested than is actually available). That includes going into two major East Coast cities several dozen times and testing the waters on the bandwidth while I'm there.
Fact 4: The maximum useful tower density is finite, because microwave radiation experiences gradual signal loss by traveling through the medium of the air, and by spreading out (diffusing) as it travels. The further it travels, the more loss there is. That's why you can't point a USB WiFi stick in the general direction of the UK from somewhere like New York and get a good signal from a Starbucks in London. The point is that many LTE towers, being at a distance of 10 to 15 miles apart from one another, are already near the limit of where they start experiencing too much signal loss due to distance. So basically Verizon has deployed the towers as far apart as physically possible, yet they are dragging their feet on deploying more towers to handle more capacity. There is an enormous amount of potential for the expansion of capacity that is simply not being used.
Consider this: if Verizon has an unmetered peering agreement with another Tier 1, which is not at 100% utilization, and the tower I'm connected to is not at 100% utilization, the only cost I am incurring upon Verizon by transmitting my data is the electricity to pass my packets from the tower through the network. It's very, very close to being free, and several orders of magnitude less than $10 per GB, which is the going rate for capped data overages.
All I'm doing is using the existing infrastructure more efficiently by not having it sit idle.
IF the utilization increases to the point where the tower is saturated, which is moderated by Fact 3 and easily relieved by deploying towers as suggested by Fact 4, then the tower will already -- by the necessities of physics -- "throttle" me, in the sense that I won't get the full throughput that I could be getting if the tower were not saturated. Isn't that enough? Why is it necessary to then further punish users with additional reductions? Just use a fair queue algorithm like the Linux kernel's scheduler. It's not rocket science.
It seems like you're saying Verizon won't mind losing my business because they make more per gigabyte off of you, but the fact stands that I incur very little cost to their business, s
Man, it must be nice to live in an area where Verizon doesn't have a monopoly over your choice of wire-line internet service, and then only offers you 7 Mbps ADSL that drops out when it rains.
Also, it's a *smartphone*, not a cellphone. We're not talking about sending 5 GB in text messages, here. Just having your phone on and connected to 4G will use up at least a few gigabytes per month downloading incessant updates to the **built-in apps** (most of which can't be disabled on many phones without voiding your warranty). If you actually wanted to, I don't know, download an app of your choice (or TWO?!) from the Play Store, and then actually use the latest version of that app, you're done. Cooked. 5 GB and beyond.
Chrome is 30+ MB. Verizon's own "My Verizon" app is something like 11 MB. Samsung has hundreds of megs of apps installed, and some of them update twice a week. Updates have to re-download the entire program, even resources that don't change, so you end up blowing through tons of data that way.
This type of thinking is wrong-headed. The question shouldn't be "what are you doing that takes 5 GB per month". The question should be "why haven't cellular data providers figured out a way to offer more than 5 GB per month at a reasonable price in the past decade". After all, Verizon argued that considering ISPs to be subject to Title II regulations would severely hinder innovation. By implication, by them being a Title I carrier, they've been innovating as fast as humanly possible. A decade of serious "innovation" in the wireless data space and we're still looking at exactly the same caps? Oh, excuse me, the $105/month plan is for a whopping 15 GB. That's enough for about five Netflix movies per month, assuming you disable all app updates.
You also don't seem to grok the raw convenience factor of tethering. Let's say you're on a bus, in your car, on a train, at a remote work location, whatever -- you're somewhere, and you either don't have the password to get access to the wireless network, or it's down, or there just ISN'T one. Well, you really need to do this one thing, see, and... if you HAD a phone that had unlimited data and 4G, you could just whip it out, turn on the hotspot, connect up your ultrabook, and away you go. But you don't, so you don't understand what you're missing. You just sigh and go "oh well, I'll drive back home and do it then" or something like that. Wasted potential.
Unlimited data (plus tethering) really creates a demand for it once you are exposed to it, just like Apple created a demand for high-res touchscreen mobile devices with the advent of the iPad and iPhone. It's understandable that the vast majority of the population can't comprehend why this would be useful, because the window during which unlimited data was available was very small (only a few years), and then it closed again.
Oh, there is one last "minor" thing that having unlimited data plus tethering enables you to do. It means that you no longer depend on your local monopoly to bring a high-speed fiber/coax/ethernet ISP to your house. Maybe they did a study and considered that your neighbors are luddites, and so you aren't worthy of their service. Well, if you don't have a cellular option, you're SOL. If you DO have a cellular option, it can be perfectly viable replacement for carriers' refusal to roll out their service to your *entire* town. I'm looking at you, FiOS. Gee, the company that advertises FiOS has an awfully similar name to the company that's turning the screws on unlimited data plans now. I wonder why that is.
P.S.: For those of you who say that "there's only so much spectrum", you are really missing the point. The point is this: given a certain number of users per square mile; the spectral efficiency of a protocol; the desired upstream/downstream targets for each user; and a spectrum width (in Hz), it is possible to calculate a finite number for the minimum tower density required to support each of the users in that area with truly unlimited data. Unlimited as in, they can
I'm definitely meeting all the conditions required to be throttled. I'm going to wait until October to see what the impact is for me. Whether or not I stay with Verizon will depend on the severity of the throttling, and how frequently the tower where I live suffers from saturation.
As long as I get at least EvDO speeds (over LTE, for the lower ping and IPv6), I'll probably stay with Verizon and continue my existing usage pattern. I use about 70 to 150 GB per month. I tether with the (legitimate) mobile hotspot feature, enabled by paying an extra $30/mo. I don't have a wireline Internet connection because Comcast is unreliable and doesn't care to fix it, and Verizon, despite telling me in 2007 that we could get FiOS in a matter of weeks, is still only offering us 7 Mbps ADSL.
I usually do most of my downloading/uploading at off-peak hours, anyway. I'm fine with firing off a 25 GB download on Steam at 11 PM and letting it run through the night. It's unlikely to be throttled at that time, because the tower won't be saturated. The population density where I live is strictly suburban (full-size houses, not town homes), so I don't think it'll be saturated very often.
If the throttling gives me so little bandwidth that I can't even stream 720p H264, I'm outta there. Might have to move to an area that has decent wireline service. But I can tell you for certain that it won't be Verizon or any company related to it in any way. Once I decide that Verizon has put the last straw on me, I am not going to spend another penny on that company for the rest of my life, and will go out of my way to ensure that nobody I know spends a penny on them, or at least make them seriously reevaluate their choice of service provider, for both cellular and wireline service.
Verizon's taking a real risk with this. If the throttling is only 50-60% of the normal speed, I probably won't even notice, since my bandwidth needs during prime time are usually modest (720p streaming video might be the MOST I ask for, and in many cases I'll just be surfing the web or coding). If the throttling is 90-95% of the potential throughput, they will convert a long-time advocate (since the Windows Mobile early EvDO days) into a bitter enemy, spewing vitriol and anti-Verizon word of mouth everywhere I go for the rest of my life. Are they prepared to live with that consequence?
Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly when I pay full retail to upgrade my phone. Hope they can live without that, too.
Oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill.
Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past, who already have a suitable wireline connection at home, to subscribe to Verizon limited data plans because they actually do offer more data for less money than their competitors, and the service reliability and availability is second to none.
Dear Verizon: if you're reading this, you better go easy on the throttling. If you don't, look to lose about $10,000 per month in revenue by the time I get done canceling my service and talking to my connections about Verizon and they start pulling the plug. I'm a very convincing and influential person. People follow my lead, especially when it comes to technology. I wonder how many other people like me out there are souring to your business by your anti-consumer practices. Are you really OK with staring into the abyss? Is it really your goal to force people who've loved your company for over a decade to do an about-face and tear you down?
All because you couldn't deploy a few more towers, because cost cutting and the bottom line. That type of reasoning is a plague that needs to be rooted out and eradicated, starting with deporting the MBAs who come up with this shit.
"Getting dilated" means they put drops in your eyes that temporarily increase the amount of dilation of your pupils, beyond the level of dilation that they are naturally at (which changes based on the intensity of the light in your environment). Normally your pupils will not be very dilated in a well-lit room, or with the doctor's flashlight shining right in your eye, or in a more natural setting, when the sun is out. When the pupil is not dilated, it isn't letting very much light through your eye -- most of it is blocked, to prevent sensory overload.
Without the pupil dilation mechanism, you would either be completely blind by dusk, or the sun would be so bright that you'd be unable to bear it (imagine natural sunlight being 10x brighter than normal; enough to be painful). Animals that adapted the pupil dilation mechanism could presumably be more adaptable to more extreme levels of light and dark, allowing them to evade predators and catch prey in more diverse ranges of illumination. This is necessary because of the classic problem with ANY sensor: if you make your sensor extremely sensitive to even tiny changes in the signal (i.e. illumination), you'll be able to see well in the dark, but the light of the sun would be so extreme as to throw all of your sensor's readings completely off the chart, thus you get "overloaded" and you can't process that amount of illumination. If you make your sensor extremely insensitive to changes in the signal, you'll be OK in the daytime, but once the sun drops below the horizon, your eyes are useless for hunting or evading predators. The pupil gives us the best of both worlds and allows us to develop a sensor that's moderately sensitive, and can give us very clear and detailed imaging capability at a huge range of illumination levels, ranging from moonlight to full sunlight on a clear day at noon.
Once the pupil is dilated, a trained ophthalmologist (a true eye doctor, not just an optometrist, which is the eye equivalent of a Nurse Practitioner in general medicine) can use special equipment to look inside your eye. They test for things such as glaucoma, cataracts, astigmatism, detached retina, and possibly other diseases or abnormalities of the eye.
Many other senses have something that functions equivalently to the pupil, by the way. The tensor tympani in the ear regulates how sensitive you are to sound. If a very loud, sudden sound occurs, like a gunshot or an explosion, the tympani can prevent hearing damage if it reacts fast enough, or at least reduce the amount of hearing damage. The difference is that the tympany is usually completely relaxed in the environments most of us live in, as if your pupil were entirely dilated all the time. That's why in a quiet house you can hear very faint sounds, but if you stand right next to a train as it goes roaring by, and then try to talk to someone mere seconds after it has passed and the sound level has dropped off, you'll still have trouble conversing with that person at an "inside voice" level of speech volume.
As trite as it sounds, it's true: in a professional context, if you wear glasses, your opinion will tend to be valued more. I've seen it both with male and female coworkers of many different races: in meetings, large and small, the folks who wear glasses can almost trivially get everyone to quiet down and listen when they open their mouth. A few words starting with "in my opinion" and everyone else is nodding their heads in agreement.
It's a subconscious thing that still pervades society due to the stigma of glasses-wearers being especially intelligent "book worms" (or now "computer geeks", I guess), but it's still a way to get a leg up in your career. I wore contacts for years, starting late in high school and up through part of college. Group discussions were miserable; I would speak, then get shouted down, and a few minutes later someone with glasses would meekly restate my suggestion and the group would dutifully follow along.
You may THINK that you don't treat glasses-wearers specially, but I can tell you from experience, if there were 100 people reading this message, at least 50 of you would subconsciously be more likely to accept analyses, opinions or facts if they are stated by someone wearing glasses. It doesn't matter if you're male or female, young or old, black, white, yellow, orange, Martian, transgendered, religious, atheist, whatever -- these attributes may also have an effect on the (positive or negative) biases your coworkers may place on you, BUT, if you wear glasses, you will, almost without fail, receive a "benefit of the doubt" when it comes to knowing WTF you're talking about (assuming that no one in the room has readily-available evidence that incontrovertibly contradicts your statements).
I wear glasses, and they only come off when I go to sleep at night.
Verizon Wireless got sued, and lost, a couple years ago for falsely advertising "Unlimited" data plans that were capped at 5 GB. They were court ordered to either remove the "Unlimited" language from their advertisements and provide a figure for the actual cap, or to make "Unlimited" plans truly "Unlimited" with no stipulations. The only stipulation they're allowed to make is that you aren't guaranteed your maximum theoretical downstream if the tower's saturated.
Basically, if the tower I'm connected to is not saturated and my signal strength is sufficient, I'm technically allowed to simultaneously download and upload as much data as I can use 24/7, and Verizon is court-ordered not to do a damn thing about it. If the tower is physically saturated, meaning all the available spectrum is occupied during the period of time I'm using it, then the band time-slots are "fairly" scheduled among the customers, where "fair" is in the computer science sense of fair (think of cgroups and Completely Fair Queue scheduling in the Linux kernel).
The court didn't order them to implement a fair queue algorithm, but they are also prohibited from artificially traffic-shaping customers of their 700 MHz LTE band (such as me), and fair queue scheduling is the most optimal way currently known for maximizing the use of a saturated resource, so they would be stupid to do something sub-optimal. The limitation on throttling comes from the license that they signed off on as part of the conditions they had to satisfy in order to purchase a license for the restricted 700 MHz spectrum that the majority of their LTE network runs on.
I'm currently sitting in a tiny little loophole in the cellular data plan world, where I have fantastic speed and coverage, great reception, virtually unlimited data, about 1/3 to 1/4 of FiOS speed (symmetrical), and paying less than some people pay for 15 GB data plans, while using many times more, because I'm grandfathered. The only downside is that I sometimes to have to pay full retail for a phone upgrade, but I'm more than willing to do that.
The thing that incenses me is that my situation SHOULD NOT HAVE TO BE a loophole! This should be the norm. It should be as common to be in my situation as it currently is to have, say, typical 50/10 cable with a 250 GB cap. We need to give the wireless carriers a huge legal or regulatory push, so hopefully one day my kids won't even realize how lucky they are to be able to sign up for an unlimited data plan and take it for granted.
And before you say "there's only so much spectrum" -- that's complete nonsense. There are tons of things we can do, with both current and near-future technology, to provide more than enough bandwidth to give everyone unlimited data, at least so that the cellular network can drive as much bandwidth as the cable network does today. You can: Increase tower density; increase spectral efficiency of the protocol; switch to millimeter band; retire antiquated and extremely low spectral efficiency radio protocols, reallocate them a much smaller band with a more efficient protocol and reclaim the rest of the spectrum for cellular data; and so on.
Carriers want you to think that what we have now is right up against the limitations of physics and that unlimited is impossible, so that you won't demand something that'll cost them an arm and a leg in capital to roll out. Besides, they're quite glad to charge you $120/month for 15 GB of data.
I'm a Verizon Wireless customer, and I'm probably going to sign up for this. Why? Because I very strongly suspect that, even if I choose to "opt out", they are still going to harvest the same data, or very close to the same type of data, and use it for marketing purposes. So now that they've graciously offered to provide me some financial incentive for it, I'm likely to eat it up. I will make a point not to go out of my way to do things I wouldn't normally do, or buy things I don't really need, but if a coupon or discount code comes up for something that I need anyway, that's money in my pocket.
This is a rather interesting business model that has only been exploited a few times thus far. I remember getting in-game credit (which is basically cash, since you'd have to pay money for that credit otherwise) in Star Trek Online by taking surveys. Most of the surveys wanted personal info. If it got TOO personal, I closed the survey. That excluded me from some "high-value" surveys, obviously, but a few were fairly benign or just wanted me to click through and read some webpages, and I got compensated in return.
When you think about it, the vast majority of advertising and market research trades privacy for a direct service. For instance, Google advertisements trade some privacy for the service of having free email with a ton of storage, and the best search engine in the world. But this new Verizon campaign is more or less trading privacy... for money. Money in the consumer's pocket. That's pretty new to me.
I guess I don't have a real beef with my "privacy" being "invaded" as long as the data doesn't wind up singling me out as an individual. If they just want to observe trends, then whatever -- go for it. If I start getting an elevated level of text messages, pop-ups on my phone, knocks on the door, phone calls or emails with solicitations that I did not request, then I will fight that tooth and nail until the people doing it are class-actioned out of business.
"Power outages". Think about that for a moment. In a disaster, there's no power. No power, and your "internet of things" is a bunch of fragile physical objects that are even less useful for bludgeoning looters over the head with than your grandfather's 5 pound flashlight with a lead-acid battery in it.
Sure, batteries last for a little while, but many of the "Internet of Things" devices aside from smartphones and tablets don't have any batteries; they just run off the mains. And if you need help beyond 8 or 10 hours after the initial loss of power, you're out of luck.
That's why I always keep my smartphone and a backup battery on my person. A smartphone that's water-resistant and in a durable case like an Otterbox Defender is actually a viable means of communication (as well as other resources; you could put an Army Survival Guide on it, use it as a flashlight, blare a loud horn to alert rescuers, and so on). If it's durable (and thus likely to survive the initial event that makes your situation a disaster), and either comes with a very long-lasting battery or you have a spare battery, ideally enough to last for a week (with the screen on min. brightness and powered off unless you have an immediate need for it), it'd be infinitely more generally useful than any "Internet of Things" device.
Then again, people throw around such general and semantically vague terms these days that I don't even know if TFA is including smartphones in "Internet of Things". Just like I don't know if my VPS is technically part of "the cloud". Back in the day we just called things what they were: my smartphone was a smartphone, and my server was a server (virtual or not, doesn't make a huge difference). Now they're both part of some wishy-washy, gooey, free-associative vague term like "Internet of Things" or "the Cloud". Depending on who you ask, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Please stop linking to that website. I have taken in all the information on it, and yet I find systemd to be significantly easier to use than almost every other init system except Solaris' SMF (which has significant tradeoffs compared to systemd, so I'd consider it neither better nor worse). In both the RHEL7 and Debian Testing implementations, I find my system easier to diagnose, and I find it easier to set up new services when installing stuff (both from the package manager and from source).
I use GNU/Linux both as a desktop/laptop distro and for (headless) dedicated servers, and systemd has never once stood in the way of me getting shit done. In fact, it is better at that than any other init system I've ever used, and I distro shopped for a decade before I started to settle on Debian and CentOS as my main two (I also tried out all three main BSD variants -- Free, Open and Net -- and OpenSolaris).
Most of the criticisms on that site are completely immaterial to me because they're either philosophical, or the typical crybabying of "what about BSD?????". Well, now even the BSD folks can shut up, because uselessd is bcoming an actually useful piece of software that hopefully will maintain some degree of compatibility with systemd, as far as the integration points to systemd that other packages have to support. This should at least fix upstream GNOME3 on BSD.
The few valid technical arguments go along the lines of, "there are too many GNUisms in the code". Compiler and libc compatibility matters, so I can get behind that. But really, if you solely use GNU/Linux like I do, (and it's not even a "Red Hat" thing anymore with so many distros on the uptake), it's hard to consider this a priority. I'm glad that some people do, and have created uselessd as a result. Uselessd is the opposite of a parody, in my opinion: it's a confirmation that systemd is fundamentally useful and innovative; is here to stay; and is so useful that people want to implement at least some pieces of it on other OSes. More power to them!
Hopefully the uselessd developers will take their project in a direction that is pragmatic, resulting in a better overall init system. If they pull it off, the systemd developers might consider merging their work upstream, which is the ultimate compliment -- this happened with gcc, and now the gcc community is one big happy family. Mostly. Or at least a lot happier than before.
The work they're doing on uselessd is infinity percent better and more constructive than all you imbeciles sitting around complaining about something being "forced down your throat". FOSS, where forced obsolescence doesn't exist and licenses are free as in beer, and you talk about things being *forced* upon you? Fuck me. Go live in an actually oppressive society for a decade or so, and THEN you'll know the true definition of having something forced upon you. Everyone who thinks there is any sort of enforcement going on about using systemd needs to live in North Korea until they actually understand the words that come out of their own mouths.
Yeah, and dmix is as compatible with most ALSA apps (even before pulseaudio came along) as a minnow and an oak tree trying to get it on with each other.
It's not great.
[citation needed]
This sounds like more bandwagoning just because it's fun to hate something.
He's the developer of Avahi, Pulseaudio, and Systemd, most prominently. These components are standard middleware (userspace programs, usually that run in the background, which provide useful services to make a Linux distro more useful than just providing a terminal). The first two were accepted mostly uncontroversially; I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio. Now that the most popular distros ship systemd by default, people who don't like it are railing against both the program and its author(s).
People need to get a life.
Addendum to what I said here -- http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
My main beef is that Verizon won't bring FiOS to my neighborhood. No amount of little people money (i.e., short of offering to bribe them with several million dollars) is going to convince them to bring FiOS to my suburban neighborhood. There's FiOS 1/8th of a mile down the road; in fact, my community is surrounded by people who have FiOS. But Verizon stopped expanding FiOS, and Comcast hasn't installed replacement copper cables in our area despite us being their customer for a decade and complaining about it on a bi-weekly basis.
So the copper sucks (it's unreliable); the ADSL sucks (the speeds are just too slow, AND it's unreliable); and the amount of money it would take to move Verizon to install FiOS simply isn't available.
Sprint in my area is extremely marginal. I'd have to find a Yagi LTE antenna and point it exactly in the direction of the tower -- and then I'd only have LTE through the house's wifi, but if I were out and about in town, I probably wouldn't have any data. The tower is several miles away and just barely registers as a signal at all, but usually we get no data. So I returned my Sprint device after trying this for several days.
What's left? Well, either live in the 20th century without access to the global economy; or use Verizon Wireless LTE. Verizon's refusal to expand FiOS has left me with no options.
Moving is not an option due to the immense cost of housing. Our house is paid off, and we spend the money we'd be paying on a mortgage, on other things. We would have to severely curtail online spending, luxury spending, penny pinch on utility use, etc. if we were to move. Having a paid-off house in a world where everything is expensive and everyone is living beyond their means, is the difference between being able to afford stuff and always being broke.
Unlimited data on LTE is really a lifesaver. But it's ultimately Verizon Wireless' parent company, Verizon, that is to blame for any undue congestion we may cause by using a combined 200 GB or so per month of LTE data. It's their greedy refusal to expand FiOS to neighborhoods that might take more than a few years to make ROI, despite receiving vast amounts of public funding that were earmarked for FiOS, then turning around and spending that money on LTE instead.
Hey. If they want to offer me a great service, at a great price, and live within the restrictions the FCC has placed on the airwaves, they can kindly shut up. Verizon Wireless has no right to complain about my usage of their service. I am acting entirely within the ToS and the law. I value that service and will continue to use it as long as they offer it. If they ever stop offering it, I'll have to see about bribing Comcast to replace the damaged copper that gives us about 50% uptime on a modern cable modem.
I am hopeful that, in the future, the spectral efficiency and tower density improvements can converge together sufficiently that Verizon will be able to offer a legitimate unlimited data plan to NEW customers, eliminating the fear that us grandfathered folks might soon be put out to pasture. If that's a pipe dream, then they better show up at the end of my street with a reel of fiber, or I'm going to see about taking public action to get my neighborhood some actually decent access to the 21st century economy.
The greatest tragedy of a capitalistic society is when nobody's selling what you're buying. Such wasted potential. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
While I still dislike most of the political rhetoric coming out of Verizon and Verizon Wireless, I have to concede that this is a huge benefit for me personally. I'm an unlimited 4G customer who uses my phone as my primary Internet connection (I pay an extra $30/month for the privilege of "legally" tethering via the built-in Mobile Hotspot app that comes standard with Android; the app is disabled if you don't pay up).
It's plenty fast enough for my needs, even when the network is congested. It's a perfectly viable primary Internet connection, with native IPv6, and can be shared with desktops, laptops, smart devices, tablets, and other phones using 802.11ac, Bluetooth, or USB RNDIS.
I'm perfectly fine with being temporarily slowed down if the tower I'm on is congested. All they have to do is use a fair queue algorithm, not too dissimilar to what the Linux kernel's I/O scheduler does. But what was being proposed was to single out unlimited data users who use more than a certain amount of data, and slow them down artificially even more than everyone else.
I think this brought me back from the brink of having to face the prospect of getting ADSL or cable again. The problem with these services, in my area at least, is that every time we've ever tried them, they prove to have about a 50% uptime. That is to say, they're very intermittently available. They may not go down for 2 weeks at a stretch every month, but you'll certainly experience 10, 20, or 30 different 2 or 3 minute dropout periods during the course of a single day; sometimes the dropouts are longer, and sometimes there are more or less of them. I experience nothing of the sort with LTE.
While it would take the construction of many more towers in suburban and urban areas to be able to offer *every* customer unlimited data on LTE (or even to increase the typical monthly cap from around 2 GB to around 200 GB), and some people think that it would require the construction of "too many" towers, I'm still glad that this decision benefits me.
I'm certainly not going to become a Verizon Wireless booster, singing their praises on high; but this gives me a little respite from the endless barrage of anti-consumer laws and corporate practices that have been coming down the pipe lately.
A little bit of sanity goes a long way, in this case. For me and thousands of others who still have unlimited data.
Unless there is some enormous revolution in battery technology that makes state-of-the-art Lithium Ion / Lithium Polymer batteries look as antiquated as lead-acid, AND is cheaply and easily mass-manufactured, Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs) are going to be a better option for most people through the 2010s and 2020s.
The reason is simple: When the range of your vehicle can be measured in a few hundred miles, you are going to need to refuel or recharge quite often. Problem is, the only place you can guarantee the availability of charging apparatus (and the permission to use it) is on your own personal property. If you're very very lucky, you might be able to secure access to this at your place of employment -- but if you switch jobs, all bets are off.
Since gasoline stations are omnipresent almost anywhere in the civilized world, not only in the U.S. but worldwide, having your vehicle ultimately rely on gasoline as a "fall-back" or "range extender" means that you could, in a pinch, get in your car that's out of battery juice and has 1 gallon of gas in the tank; go to the nearest refueling station; fill up; drive several hundred miles; and repeat that several times to get from one end of the country to the other. You'd only spend a total of about 30 minutes refueling throughout your long journey.
So a PHEV can be relied upon to have "virtually unlimited range" (assuming you have unlimited money to pay for the gas) if you have a sudden, pressing need to go a long distance. You cannot rely upon a pure EV because you have no idea where you'll be able to find a recharging station, and even if you do, assuming it's compatible, it will take at least 45 minutes to an hour to get a good charge going (until EV batteries are based on supercaps or something that can recharge in seconds, but that's yet to be commercialized, much less mass-manufactured).
200 miles isn't a lot. Back and forth to work; run some errands; drive across part of a mid-Atlantic state to visit a relative; and you've driven 200 miles. Better hope grandma can bring out a long extension cord to charge up your car on the 120V overnight (assuming the current draw doesn't pop her 1970s-era circuit breaker faster than an electric lawnmower will).
I want to see more PHEVs with a range long enough for your ordinary commute on pure EV, but with a range extender (basically a gasoline-powered electric generator) that can give you range competitive with traditional gasoline vehicles. The nice thing about PHEVs is that you can make the battery a little bit smaller than the enormous ones Tesla needs for a 200-mile EV, which cuts down the cost into the 30k range quite easily. Tack on a medium-sized government subsidy and you're looking at sub-30k prices for a vehicle that might only use gasoline weekly or bi-weekly if the driver can fit their round trip commute in on the EV.
This is possible TODAY. To avoid the appearance of a shill I am deliberately not mentioning any manufacturers or vehicle models. But I really don't think people will be able to buy pure EVs until there is an Earth-shattering revolution in battery technology that would enable 1000+ mile range OR near-instantaneous charging; and even then, we'll need to build up a near-omnipresent charging infrastructure before you'll see very much adoption.
Meanwhile, with PHEVs, smart owners can continue to demand that the infrastructure for EV charging will build up, while still having a fallback if absolutely needed. The fallback of gasoline gets about half the MPG (i.e., costs twice as much) as using electricity produced on the grid, so drivers have a financial motivation to ask their workplace, local convenience stores and gas stations, etc. to have advanced high-speed chargers. This demand and the resultant market response will help build up the infrastructure WHILE we are getting our ducks in a row to prepare for the full-on EV revolution. Therefore, we avoid the chicken and egg problem by phasing in the demand, and we don't inconvenience consumers in the near term by allowing them
What the fuck is wrong with *you*? Breaking the law is not a solution to social problems. It's a great way to land yourself in jail, where your "personal sanctity" will be mercilessly abused by homicidal men who actually *belong* in jail. Breaking the law just further validates the rhetoric being slung by the elite. Suddenly anyone who doesn't want to pay their $130 is a criminal, or a terrorist.
The solution is to make your voice heard. Join the Mayday SuperPAC. Write to your congress critters. Support the few companies out there that are offering content with sane licensing models, such as DRM-free, using open formats, "watch anywhere". You have to inflict positive change upon the system, which antagonizes and hurts the evil parts of it. Once they feel the burn, they start speaking out even more loudly in favor of their own positions, and their rhetoric can then be exposed to reason and it can be shown how ridiculous it is. If you instead choose to break the law, you are actively helping them dig in their heels, because now they can rally the ignorant public against a "rising threat"; they spin piracy as a common enemy of both the consumer and The Man, and use this as lube to get the public to agree to let them fuck them harder.
Pirating may appear to be the "best" short-term, self-interested solution to the problem of watching what you want without paying outlandish prices, but it creates a backswing that will hurt *every* consumer, whether they pirate or not, and helps ensure that the greedy actors who have put us in the position we're in now, will continue to wield enormous power over our society's decision-making systems.
Don't do it.
Since corporations are people too, when can it be placed on the public record that Hewlett-Packard has been officially incarcerated?
You can stop at "more $". That's the real reason why students in MA do better than students in MS.
Not money that's used to buy kids iPads or Surfaces, mind you. Money that's spent to modernize schools built in the 1960s, or tear them down entirely and put up new ones. Money that's spent to pay teachers more, and attract better teaching talent. Money that's spent on the community and infrastructure to make teachers want to live there.
Also, it's much more profitable for the private companies that "public" education relies on these days, when they have a higher density of students in schools. It's simply not practical to have as many students in a school in rural MS as it is in a school in urban MA. The urbanites get better educations because the private companies that do fund raisers, home and school internet connectivity, buses, general contracting on the buildings, etc. are making more money when they have more students in one place. It's the same reason why Verizon rolled out FiOS to the top 30% most densely populated suburbs and left the rest in the dark.
You can't trust private corporations to do anything other than act in their own self interest. The public sector as originally conceived was supposed to fill in the gaps, working under the assumption that all human citizens of the great USA deserve the same opportunity to have access to high quality education and thus high quality jobs. But such an assumption requires you to accept that each human being is meritorious of their own moral standing, just by virtue of the fact that they exist and are living and breathing. Corporations aren't people, and they don't assign any moral standing to anything except their bottom line.
We wanted nice things and we got exactly what we wanted. But you see, if you're not living in urban America, you aren't worthy of moral concern because you aren't worth enough money to our corporate benefactors.
The message is awfully clear. If you want a chance to prosper in today's economy, jam yourself in a tiny apartment and bleat through the herd of thousands through the doors of your local well-funded school. Welcome to The Haves Caste, USA, citizen. You are entity number 126,438,921.
What world do you live in? I want some of what you're smoking. Fiber isn't "gaining traction"; major players in the fiber market, such as Verizon, are sitting on their hands, intentionally stopping their deployments. If you don't have Fiber today where you live, don't hold your breath for getting it any time in the future, unless there is a major regulatory upheaval that ousts the lobbyists from having a stranglehold over the organizations in government that are supposed to be regulating them.
Assholes. Verizon pocketed millions in public funding; spent it on executive bonuses and the rollout of their overpriced and extremely restrictive LTE that you can hardly use unless you're grandfathered unlimited; while talking out of both sides of their mouth that they are simultaneously a Title II carrier when it benefits them, and a Title I carrier when that benefits them more. Meanwhile they only paid token lip service to the folks who are actually demanding a fiber rollout, by serving about 20% of the customers that they currently offer ADSL to. And rather than at least upgrading their ADSL to something a wee bit faster than 7 Mbps, such as VDSL2, they've left the remaining 80% of their customers completely in the dark, stuck with an internet connection whose speed would be acceptable in about 2002.
Maybe things are better where you live, but I know Australia's telecoms are behaving the same way as Verizon and AT&T in the US. Fast access to the Internet is an on-ramp to the modern global economy; those without are basically living in the 20th century. And the term "fast" constantly changes; the bar is being raised year over year by increasingly large software downloads and media sizes. You can't simply sit on your laurels and reap the profits of the previous decade's investment; you have to constantly upgrade. But in many of the supposedly first-world countries with supposedly advanced industrial economies, lobbyists and lawyers have hamstrung the country's potential to participate in the global economy by making consumers' internet access options all but worthless. Fiber to the premises is a fantasy for the vast majority of the people on the planet, both those in industrialized countries and those in developing nations (though for different reasons). Hell, even 20 Mbps VDSL is a pipe dream for many people.
Where do you get the "75%+" number that people hate the UX changes? For what it's worth, I've used Firefox for years as my primary browser; I've used Chrome and IE only as necessary to test websites (or to use websites that are so poorly coded that they don't work with Firefox), and when I upgraded to FF 29 with the new UI, it took me about 15 minutes to get acclimated.
I keep hearing people lump the FF UI redesign in with things like GNOME 3 and the Windows 8 start screen. But it's nothing like them; nothing at all. The problem with those UIs is that they are trying to design a single UI that works both on tablets and desktops. That was never a design goal of the new Firefox UI. Do you see enormous pastel-colored buttons? Do you see common browser functionality that FORCES you to use mouse gestures like "swiping" to take basic actions? No -- none of that. They moved the tab bar to the top, bundled the menus into a much more streamlined and sensible layout (with the ability to fall back to the old menu style, to boot), and changed the style of the tab bar to save on vertical real estate. Big fucking deal. If anything, I find it easier and more natural to use Firefox with the enhancements -- and this is with a traditional keyboard and mouse on a dual-screen desktop.
I love it how people always think that "75%+" of the people agree with them, just because they hold a strong opinion on a topic. I'll be the first to admit I have no idea how many people feel the same way as I do about the UI redesign, but I don't think it is the primary reason for Firefox's decreasing market share (Chrome's perceived speed as well as it being preinstalled on many Lenovo and Dell systems out of the box, probably have more to do with it). I certainly won't claim that "75%+" of the people love the new UI, though. I don't have to pull numbers out of my ass to prop up my argument.
Your example assumes (incorrectly) two things which are untrue of the wireless industry, and there is absolutely no sign that it will ever change:
1. In order for your example to apply to the wireless industry, the wireless industry would have to NOT collude on policies and prices between vendors. If you think there is no collusion going on, you only have to look at the changes in policy and price that have happened over the past 5 years between AT&T and Verizon, and between T-Mo and Sprint. One vendor moves; the other quietly follows 3-6 months later so as not to look suspicious. Vendor collusion is real and it's a serious hamper on competition. In general, the moves being made are all anti-consumer, and rather than differentiate as a statement of "hey, we're not evil like them!", the carriers instead opt to reduce their service quality *down* to their competitor's new standard. The bar keeps lowering, not raising. It's the exact polar opposite of the downward pressure you describe.
For instance, compare: AT&T stops unlimited plans; then Verizon stops unlimited plans. AT&T disallows tethering on unlimited; then Verizon disallows tethering on unlimited. AT&T throttles; then Verizon throttles. Even within the limited data landscape, the only thing remotely reasonable that has happened in the last decade is that the price per GB when paid upfront has dropped from about $10 per GB to about $7.5 per GB, on average. That's not a large decrease. And overages have gone UP from $10/GB to $15/GB. Surcharges and other miscellaneous "fees" have also climbed in both number and amount, while the ToSes continue to become more and more hand-wavey about stating exactly what amount of your personal data they are going to keep private, and what they're going to sell to advertisers to make a quick buck.
2. In order for your example to apply to the wireless industry, the wireless industry would have to have actual competition. As it stands, even the carriers that advertise unlimited come with deal-breaking provisos on their plans (such as throttling and tethering restrictions), making them no better than the ones that outwardly advertise limits. The two big carriers -- Verizon and AT&T -- have similar network buildouts and availability; it's just that some areas are better served by one carrier than the other. Prices are similar; the available phones and tablets are similar; tower density is similar; and so on.
The hosting industry has TONS of competition, as I am well aware. In my opinion it is a shining example of a tech industry that has reached that sweet spot where the free, unregulated market truly and honestly works for it, and no regulation is needed, because there are so many different firms offering different competitive advantages that you can browse the internet for a whole week and still not decide on a hosting provider, because there are so many differences between them. Which version of PHP do they run? Do they limit the amount of traffic? Do they cater only to hosting professionals (like your company)? Do they offer rack hosting, cloud hosting, VPSes, dedicated servers, lease-to-own, shared hosting, pay-as-you-go cloud (AWS), cloud-based storage, colocation....? Not to mention there are so many different geographic areas to pick from, and each one has its own smattering of Tier1 ISPs available for the backhaul, all of them offering insanely low prices (I've seen unmetered 100 Mbps on servers priced at $100 - $200 per month now, which was unheard of 5 years ago).
You're basically comparing THE IDEAL technology-related industry that fits like a glove with the unregulated free market approach, to the antithesis of that in the wireless industry.
Imagine if the hosting industry consisted of 95% of people paying $7000/month for a Core 2 Quad in a Softlayer datacenter; and if you didn't go with Softlayer, your other choice would be to pay $7000/month for a Core 2 Quad with slightly different clock speed in a Rackspace datacenter. Imagine if those were your only two choices,
So, your "logic" is that it costs them less per customer if people would just use less data? That is basically a tautology; it is neither surprising nor meaningful.
The fact is, data usage is trending upwards at a fast pace, as well it should. I use 75 - 150 GB per month on 100% legal, above-board purposes, without wasting any of that data on frivolous "re-downloads" or anything of the sort (I only download games once through Steam, then copy them on the LAN to my other devices; other people aren't so responsible). The vast majority of that data is tied to financial transactions where I have paid (either through advertising, subscription, or direct per-content payments) for the delivery of the data.
The problem with the current situation is:
1. It doesn't cost them nearly as much as they're charging on a per-GB level on the limited plans for the transfer of the data, AFTER you subtract out their up-front costs;
2. I guarantee you (I will bet you any amount of money) that AFTER they have already run the service long enough to get their return on up-front costs *AND THEN SOME*, they will not lower prices at all; if anything, they will continue to INCREASE prices;
3. They are using public funding -- my tax payer dollars -- to help fund their up-front costs, and then double-charging me as a paying customer by paying for their up-front costs as part of the charge of the per-GB that flows through their network.
It would be like me paying $20,000 for a car -- up-front -- and then paying an additional $20,000 amortized over 5-6 years in added costs to the price of gasoline, and then continuing to pay at that rate long after I've paid off my car two, three, four times.
Except the car market doesn't work that way, because Chevy doesn't sell me my gas.
I'm fine with Verizon making a profit; I'm even fine with them making large ROI on their LTE towers. But do they *really* need to continue to bill people *as if* they are outlaying expenditures at an incredibly high rate, when in fact they are planning to rest on their laurels and soak up the profits long after they've made ROI?
My last beef with your post is that you spent half your post describing how Verizon could make a lot more money and how it would be good for THEM. To be perfectly honest, I couldn't give a flying fuck what's good for Verizon. I have absolutely no self-interested reason to value the self-interest of a large corporation that is extremely profitable already.
The self-interest tug of war between corporations and consumers is always ongoing, with one side making headway and the other losing out, and back and forth. Right now Verizon has pulled on their side so hard that consumers have fallen in the mud pit, and they continue to drag us along the muddy ground to celebrate their victory. The combined forces of regulatory capture, anti-competitive business practices, industry collusion, monopoly/duopoly, vendor lock-in, and price gouging, have made the wireless industry way more "valuable" (in terms of profit margins and raw revenue) than it should be. Having an uber-valuable corporation sounds mighty enticing to the capitalists here, but you have to remember that they are doing this at the consumer's expense. It doesn't HAVE to be this way. If you think it does, you are drinking their kool-aid. They've got you hook, line and sinker.
"The amount of data they are carrying on wireless today is far greater than the amount they were carrying in 2004 by over an order of magnitude. You are simply dead wrong about this. The retail caps were mostly meaningless when it was EVDO. It is because LTE is so much better that they matter."
I didn't claim that the carriers carry the same amount of data as they did in 2004. I claimed that the caps are the same. This is a fact. I remember the 5 GB cap on their "limited unlimited" plan when I first started using Verizon BroadbandAccess. Today on Verizon Wireless' website, the most data you can buy is 100 GB per month (which, let's be honest, is peanuts in 2014 for any Internet-connected service provider aside from cellular data) -- and for that you have to pay $750 per month. That works out to a rate of $7.5 per gigabyte. If you go over 100 GB, the rate is, exasperatingly, DOUBLE that, at $15 per gigabyte. That rate of $15 per gigabyte is HIGHER than it was in 2003 when I got my first Windows Mobile smartphone!
What I claimed, and what is correct and NOT "simply dead wrong", is that the value that the carriers place on transferring 1 GB of data over cellular data networks is valued somewhere in the ballpark of $10 per GB. In the best case, it's valued at 25% less (for your first 100 GB). In the worst case, it's valued at 50% more (for data overages). The failure here is that, while just about every other service in the world that has anything to do with computing has steadily reduced the price per unit of measurement -- price per FLOPS, price per GB of storage, price per GB of wireline data, price per GB of RAM, etc -- cellular data has remained stagnant. That's not innovation. In fact, it looks like inflation will continue to drive the price per GB of cellular data higher and higher as time goes on.
The fact that they are carrying an order of magnitude more traffic just means that more and more people are jumping on the cellular data bandwagon and using their 5 GB per month. If the carriers can't keep up with the demand, they should simply stop selling new plans, not oversubscribe their network to increasingly higher levels of saturation and then raise the price as demand keeps increasing. If too many people try to bring their kids into one pediatrician's office, to the point where they are totally booked for months, does the pediatrician raise the price of an office visit by 50%? No. He stops accepting new patients, OR he brings new doctors into his practice. It's really that simple.
"No you aren't. If you are using that much data buy a business plan. Verizon (or dozens of other carriers) will be happy to sell you as much ethernet landline bandwidth as you want you just have to pay for it."
A business plan of *what*, exactly? I went on Verizon's website and looked up the available business plans at my address. Oh, look, I can't get Business FiOS, but they can offer me overpriced ADSL at up to a whopping 7 Mbps! AFK while I go sign up for that. /sarc
The fact is, if such and such a service isn't available at your address, saying "I'm a business!" isn't going to magically make the carriers fall over you to bring service to you. If the wires aren't in the ground, they're not going to dig up the street just because you declared yourself a Sole Proprietorship. And if they do, it's going to cost more than your mortgage. Also, I'm not using "that" much data -- 75 to 120 GB is in the range of what content consumers (as well as content creators) would want to use in a month, for at least the past 10 years. Ever hear of video? How about downloading 3 GB OS images? Yeah. The whole internet isn't made of gzipped plain text and HTML. Apparently VZW thinks it is, though.
"That's just not true. Verizon has done tremendous network expansion. Read their earnings reports."
I read their earnings reports. I saw record profits that far outstrip their expenditures. For a public utility that acts as a force multiplier for entire industries of the economy that depend on the
Not at all, yet, but I may have to if Verizon keeps pulling bait and switch tactics on its users every few years.
I should've let them rot with AT&T, who has been leading Verizon by the hand down the road of anti-consumer practices, with Verizon following their lead after 6 months or so. Oh, wait...
Maybe I should've let them get throttled with Sprint, after using -- what is it, 2 or 5 GB? -- on their "unlimited" plan. Oh, wait...
Or maybe I should've let them get no service at all with T-Mobile, which serves approximately 3 square inches of land with their vast LTE network. Oh, wait...
Crap, out of options.
Your entire post is based on the fallacy that each bit I transmit costs them money. This is simply not true.
Fact 1: Major ISPs such as Verizon have peering agreements with other Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs that run in the millions of dollars, for terabits per second of bandwidth.
Fact 2: Even the heaviest mobile data users are a drop in the bucket, in terms of bandwidth usage, compared to a typical FiOS customer. Even DSL customers likely use more, because there's no cap, so they can happily stream 7 Mbps of movies 18 hours a day.
Fact 3: Population density is finite, and does not increase to infinity. Also, in the US, population density in all but a very small number of places (so-called "cities") is much lower than in densely populated areas of other countries. So even if your argument is that "without people like you, they could put more customers on their towers", it doesn't hold water because there are only so many people within the service area of a tower. If at any point that tower isn't saturated, that is called "waste" -- where there was a potential for bandwidth to be used during a given time slot, but it lay fallow for that period. Most towers outside of major gathering places, such as sports stadiums, have vast periods where they are not saturated, and are usually only mildly saturated even during peak hours. I can substantiate this because I have observed LTE throughput many times at different locations over a period of years, in areas where there's good signal strength, and I can count on one hand the number of times where I've seen oddly reduced throughput (that's not throttling; that's the tower physically being unable to give you the bandwidth you request because more throughput is being requested than is actually available). That includes going into two major East Coast cities several dozen times and testing the waters on the bandwidth while I'm there.
Fact 4: The maximum useful tower density is finite, because microwave radiation experiences gradual signal loss by traveling through the medium of the air, and by spreading out (diffusing) as it travels. The further it travels, the more loss there is. That's why you can't point a USB WiFi stick in the general direction of the UK from somewhere like New York and get a good signal from a Starbucks in London. The point is that many LTE towers, being at a distance of 10 to 15 miles apart from one another, are already near the limit of where they start experiencing too much signal loss due to distance. So basically Verizon has deployed the towers as far apart as physically possible, yet they are dragging their feet on deploying more towers to handle more capacity. There is an enormous amount of potential for the expansion of capacity that is simply not being used.
Consider this: if Verizon has an unmetered peering agreement with another Tier 1, which is not at 100% utilization, and the tower I'm connected to is not at 100% utilization, the only cost I am incurring upon Verizon by transmitting my data is the electricity to pass my packets from the tower through the network. It's very, very close to being free, and several orders of magnitude less than $10 per GB, which is the going rate for capped data overages.
All I'm doing is using the existing infrastructure more efficiently by not having it sit idle.
IF the utilization increases to the point where the tower is saturated, which is moderated by Fact 3 and easily relieved by deploying towers as suggested by Fact 4, then the tower will already -- by the necessities of physics -- "throttle" me, in the sense that I won't get the full throughput that I could be getting if the tower were not saturated. Isn't that enough? Why is it necessary to then further punish users with additional reductions? Just use a fair queue algorithm like the Linux kernel's scheduler. It's not rocket science.
It seems like you're saying Verizon won't mind losing my business because they make more per gigabyte off of you, but the fact stands that I incur very little cost to their business, s
Man, it must be nice to live in an area where Verizon doesn't have a monopoly over your choice of wire-line internet service, and then only offers you 7 Mbps ADSL that drops out when it rains.
Also, it's a *smartphone*, not a cellphone. We're not talking about sending 5 GB in text messages, here. Just having your phone on and connected to 4G will use up at least a few gigabytes per month downloading incessant updates to the **built-in apps** (most of which can't be disabled on many phones without voiding your warranty). If you actually wanted to, I don't know, download an app of your choice (or TWO?!) from the Play Store, and then actually use the latest version of that app, you're done. Cooked. 5 GB and beyond.
Chrome is 30+ MB. Verizon's own "My Verizon" app is something like 11 MB. Samsung has hundreds of megs of apps installed, and some of them update twice a week. Updates have to re-download the entire program, even resources that don't change, so you end up blowing through tons of data that way.
This type of thinking is wrong-headed. The question shouldn't be "what are you doing that takes 5 GB per month". The question should be "why haven't cellular data providers figured out a way to offer more than 5 GB per month at a reasonable price in the past decade". After all, Verizon argued that considering ISPs to be subject to Title II regulations would severely hinder innovation. By implication, by them being a Title I carrier, they've been innovating as fast as humanly possible. A decade of serious "innovation" in the wireless data space and we're still looking at exactly the same caps? Oh, excuse me, the $105/month plan is for a whopping 15 GB. That's enough for about five Netflix movies per month, assuming you disable all app updates.
You also don't seem to grok the raw convenience factor of tethering. Let's say you're on a bus, in your car, on a train, at a remote work location, whatever -- you're somewhere, and you either don't have the password to get access to the wireless network, or it's down, or there just ISN'T one. Well, you really need to do this one thing, see, and... if you HAD a phone that had unlimited data and 4G, you could just whip it out, turn on the hotspot, connect up your ultrabook, and away you go. But you don't, so you don't understand what you're missing. You just sigh and go "oh well, I'll drive back home and do it then" or something like that. Wasted potential.
Unlimited data (plus tethering) really creates a demand for it once you are exposed to it, just like Apple created a demand for high-res touchscreen mobile devices with the advent of the iPad and iPhone. It's understandable that the vast majority of the population can't comprehend why this would be useful, because the window during which unlimited data was available was very small (only a few years), and then it closed again.
Oh, there is one last "minor" thing that having unlimited data plus tethering enables you to do. It means that you no longer depend on your local monopoly to bring a high-speed fiber/coax/ethernet ISP to your house. Maybe they did a study and considered that your neighbors are luddites, and so you aren't worthy of their service. Well, if you don't have a cellular option, you're SOL. If you DO have a cellular option, it can be perfectly viable replacement for carriers' refusal to roll out their service to your *entire* town. I'm looking at you, FiOS. Gee, the company that advertises FiOS has an awfully similar name to the company that's turning the screws on unlimited data plans now. I wonder why that is.
P.S.: For those of you who say that "there's only so much spectrum", you are really missing the point. The point is this: given a certain number of users per square mile; the spectral efficiency of a protocol; the desired upstream/downstream targets for each user; and a spectrum width (in Hz), it is possible to calculate a finite number for the minimum tower density required to support each of the users in that area with truly unlimited data. Unlimited as in, they can
I'm definitely meeting all the conditions required to be throttled. I'm going to wait until October to see what the impact is for me. Whether or not I stay with Verizon will depend on the severity of the throttling, and how frequently the tower where I live suffers from saturation.
As long as I get at least EvDO speeds (over LTE, for the lower ping and IPv6), I'll probably stay with Verizon and continue my existing usage pattern. I use about 70 to 150 GB per month. I tether with the (legitimate) mobile hotspot feature, enabled by paying an extra $30/mo. I don't have a wireline Internet connection because Comcast is unreliable and doesn't care to fix it, and Verizon, despite telling me in 2007 that we could get FiOS in a matter of weeks, is still only offering us 7 Mbps ADSL.
I usually do most of my downloading/uploading at off-peak hours, anyway. I'm fine with firing off a 25 GB download on Steam at 11 PM and letting it run through the night. It's unlikely to be throttled at that time, because the tower won't be saturated. The population density where I live is strictly suburban (full-size houses, not town homes), so I don't think it'll be saturated very often.
If the throttling gives me so little bandwidth that I can't even stream 720p H264, I'm outta there. Might have to move to an area that has decent wireline service. But I can tell you for certain that it won't be Verizon or any company related to it in any way. Once I decide that Verizon has put the last straw on me, I am not going to spend another penny on that company for the rest of my life, and will go out of my way to ensure that nobody I know spends a penny on them, or at least make them seriously reevaluate their choice of service provider, for both cellular and wireline service.
Verizon's taking a real risk with this. If the throttling is only 50-60% of the normal speed, I probably won't even notice, since my bandwidth needs during prime time are usually modest (720p streaming video might be the MOST I ask for, and in many cases I'll just be surfing the web or coding). If the throttling is 90-95% of the potential throughput, they will convert a long-time advocate (since the Windows Mobile early EvDO days) into a bitter enemy, spewing vitriol and anti-Verizon word of mouth everywhere I go for the rest of my life. Are they prepared to live with that consequence?
Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly when I pay full retail to upgrade my phone. Hope they can live without that, too.
Oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill.
Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past, who already have a suitable wireline connection at home, to subscribe to Verizon limited data plans because they actually do offer more data for less money than their competitors, and the service reliability and availability is second to none.
Dear Verizon: if you're reading this, you better go easy on the throttling. If you don't, look to lose about $10,000 per month in revenue by the time I get done canceling my service and talking to my connections about Verizon and they start pulling the plug. I'm a very convincing and influential person. People follow my lead, especially when it comes to technology. I wonder how many other people like me out there are souring to your business by your anti-consumer practices. Are you really OK with staring into the abyss? Is it really your goal to force people who've loved your company for over a decade to do an about-face and tear you down?
All because you couldn't deploy a few more towers, because cost cutting and the bottom line. That type of reasoning is a plague that needs to be rooted out and eradicated, starting with deporting the MBAs who come up with this shit.
"Getting dilated" means they put drops in your eyes that temporarily increase the amount of dilation of your pupils, beyond the level of dilation that they are naturally at (which changes based on the intensity of the light in your environment). Normally your pupils will not be very dilated in a well-lit room, or with the doctor's flashlight shining right in your eye, or in a more natural setting, when the sun is out. When the pupil is not dilated, it isn't letting very much light through your eye -- most of it is blocked, to prevent sensory overload.
Without the pupil dilation mechanism, you would either be completely blind by dusk, or the sun would be so bright that you'd be unable to bear it (imagine natural sunlight being 10x brighter than normal; enough to be painful). Animals that adapted the pupil dilation mechanism could presumably be more adaptable to more extreme levels of light and dark, allowing them to evade predators and catch prey in more diverse ranges of illumination. This is necessary because of the classic problem with ANY sensor: if you make your sensor extremely sensitive to even tiny changes in the signal (i.e. illumination), you'll be able to see well in the dark, but the light of the sun would be so extreme as to throw all of your sensor's readings completely off the chart, thus you get "overloaded" and you can't process that amount of illumination. If you make your sensor extremely insensitive to changes in the signal, you'll be OK in the daytime, but once the sun drops below the horizon, your eyes are useless for hunting or evading predators. The pupil gives us the best of both worlds and allows us to develop a sensor that's moderately sensitive, and can give us very clear and detailed imaging capability at a huge range of illumination levels, ranging from moonlight to full sunlight on a clear day at noon.
Once the pupil is dilated, a trained ophthalmologist (a true eye doctor, not just an optometrist, which is the eye equivalent of a Nurse Practitioner in general medicine) can use special equipment to look inside your eye. They test for things such as glaucoma, cataracts, astigmatism, detached retina, and possibly other diseases or abnormalities of the eye.
Many other senses have something that functions equivalently to the pupil, by the way. The tensor tympani in the ear regulates how sensitive you are to sound. If a very loud, sudden sound occurs, like a gunshot or an explosion, the tympani can prevent hearing damage if it reacts fast enough, or at least reduce the amount of hearing damage. The difference is that the tympany is usually completely relaxed in the environments most of us live in, as if your pupil were entirely dilated all the time. That's why in a quiet house you can hear very faint sounds, but if you stand right next to a train as it goes roaring by, and then try to talk to someone mere seconds after it has passed and the sound level has dropped off, you'll still have trouble conversing with that person at an "inside voice" level of speech volume.
As trite as it sounds, it's true: in a professional context, if you wear glasses, your opinion will tend to be valued more. I've seen it both with male and female coworkers of many different races: in meetings, large and small, the folks who wear glasses can almost trivially get everyone to quiet down and listen when they open their mouth. A few words starting with "in my opinion" and everyone else is nodding their heads in agreement.
It's a subconscious thing that still pervades society due to the stigma of glasses-wearers being especially intelligent "book worms" (or now "computer geeks", I guess), but it's still a way to get a leg up in your career. I wore contacts for years, starting late in high school and up through part of college. Group discussions were miserable; I would speak, then get shouted down, and a few minutes later someone with glasses would meekly restate my suggestion and the group would dutifully follow along.
You may THINK that you don't treat glasses-wearers specially, but I can tell you from experience, if there were 100 people reading this message, at least 50 of you would subconsciously be more likely to accept analyses, opinions or facts if they are stated by someone wearing glasses. It doesn't matter if you're male or female, young or old, black, white, yellow, orange, Martian, transgendered, religious, atheist, whatever -- these attributes may also have an effect on the (positive or negative) biases your coworkers may place on you, BUT, if you wear glasses, you will, almost without fail, receive a "benefit of the doubt" when it comes to knowing WTF you're talking about (assuming that no one in the room has readily-available evidence that incontrovertibly contradicts your statements).
I wear glasses, and they only come off when I go to sleep at night.
Verizon Wireless got sued, and lost, a couple years ago for falsely advertising "Unlimited" data plans that were capped at 5 GB. They were court ordered to either remove the "Unlimited" language from their advertisements and provide a figure for the actual cap, or to make "Unlimited" plans truly "Unlimited" with no stipulations. The only stipulation they're allowed to make is that you aren't guaranteed your maximum theoretical downstream if the tower's saturated.
Basically, if the tower I'm connected to is not saturated and my signal strength is sufficient, I'm technically allowed to simultaneously download and upload as much data as I can use 24/7, and Verizon is court-ordered not to do a damn thing about it. If the tower is physically saturated, meaning all the available spectrum is occupied during the period of time I'm using it, then the band time-slots are "fairly" scheduled among the customers, where "fair" is in the computer science sense of fair (think of cgroups and Completely Fair Queue scheduling in the Linux kernel).
The court didn't order them to implement a fair queue algorithm, but they are also prohibited from artificially traffic-shaping customers of their 700 MHz LTE band (such as me), and fair queue scheduling is the most optimal way currently known for maximizing the use of a saturated resource, so they would be stupid to do something sub-optimal. The limitation on throttling comes from the license that they signed off on as part of the conditions they had to satisfy in order to purchase a license for the restricted 700 MHz spectrum that the majority of their LTE network runs on.
I'm currently sitting in a tiny little loophole in the cellular data plan world, where I have fantastic speed and coverage, great reception, virtually unlimited data, about 1/3 to 1/4 of FiOS speed (symmetrical), and paying less than some people pay for 15 GB data plans, while using many times more, because I'm grandfathered. The only downside is that I sometimes to have to pay full retail for a phone upgrade, but I'm more than willing to do that.
The thing that incenses me is that my situation SHOULD NOT HAVE TO BE a loophole! This should be the norm. It should be as common to be in my situation as it currently is to have, say, typical 50/10 cable with a 250 GB cap. We need to give the wireless carriers a huge legal or regulatory push, so hopefully one day my kids won't even realize how lucky they are to be able to sign up for an unlimited data plan and take it for granted.
And before you say "there's only so much spectrum" -- that's complete nonsense. There are tons of things we can do, with both current and near-future technology, to provide more than enough bandwidth to give everyone unlimited data, at least so that the cellular network can drive as much bandwidth as the cable network does today. You can: Increase tower density; increase spectral efficiency of the protocol; switch to millimeter band; retire antiquated and extremely low spectral efficiency radio protocols, reallocate them a much smaller band with a more efficient protocol and reclaim the rest of the spectrum for cellular data; and so on.
Carriers want you to think that what we have now is right up against the limitations of physics and that unlimited is impossible, so that you won't demand something that'll cost them an arm and a leg in capital to roll out. Besides, they're quite glad to charge you $120/month for 15 GB of data.
I'm a Verizon Wireless customer, and I'm probably going to sign up for this. Why? Because I very strongly suspect that, even if I choose to "opt out", they are still going to harvest the same data, or very close to the same type of data, and use it for marketing purposes. So now that they've graciously offered to provide me some financial incentive for it, I'm likely to eat it up. I will make a point not to go out of my way to do things I wouldn't normally do, or buy things I don't really need, but if a coupon or discount code comes up for something that I need anyway, that's money in my pocket.
This is a rather interesting business model that has only been exploited a few times thus far. I remember getting in-game credit (which is basically cash, since you'd have to pay money for that credit otherwise) in Star Trek Online by taking surveys. Most of the surveys wanted personal info. If it got TOO personal, I closed the survey. That excluded me from some "high-value" surveys, obviously, but a few were fairly benign or just wanted me to click through and read some webpages, and I got compensated in return.
When you think about it, the vast majority of advertising and market research trades privacy for a direct service. For instance, Google advertisements trade some privacy for the service of having free email with a ton of storage, and the best search engine in the world. But this new Verizon campaign is more or less trading privacy ... for money. Money in the consumer's pocket. That's pretty new to me.
I guess I don't have a real beef with my "privacy" being "invaded" as long as the data doesn't wind up singling me out as an individual. If they just want to observe trends, then whatever -- go for it. If I start getting an elevated level of text messages, pop-ups on my phone, knocks on the door, phone calls or emails with solicitations that I did not request, then I will fight that tooth and nail until the people doing it are class-actioned out of business.
"Power outages". Think about that for a moment. In a disaster, there's no power. No power, and your "internet of things" is a bunch of fragile physical objects that are even less useful for bludgeoning looters over the head with than your grandfather's 5 pound flashlight with a lead-acid battery in it.
Sure, batteries last for a little while, but many of the "Internet of Things" devices aside from smartphones and tablets don't have any batteries; they just run off the mains. And if you need help beyond 8 or 10 hours after the initial loss of power, you're out of luck.
That's why I always keep my smartphone and a backup battery on my person. A smartphone that's water-resistant and in a durable case like an Otterbox Defender is actually a viable means of communication (as well as other resources; you could put an Army Survival Guide on it, use it as a flashlight, blare a loud horn to alert rescuers, and so on). If it's durable (and thus likely to survive the initial event that makes your situation a disaster), and either comes with a very long-lasting battery or you have a spare battery, ideally enough to last for a week (with the screen on min. brightness and powered off unless you have an immediate need for it), it'd be infinitely more generally useful than any "Internet of Things" device.
Then again, people throw around such general and semantically vague terms these days that I don't even know if TFA is including smartphones in "Internet of Things". Just like I don't know if my VPS is technically part of "the cloud". Back in the day we just called things what they were: my smartphone was a smartphone, and my server was a server (virtual or not, doesn't make a huge difference). Now they're both part of some wishy-washy, gooey, free-associative vague term like "Internet of Things" or "the Cloud". Depending on who you ask, anyway.
Soon enough (if not already), they will have "reasonable suspicion" to add all Slashdot users to the list.