Right, after all, Shaw never has any problems on their end and they _never_ tell the customer to call Vonage. It isn't like Shaw oversells their service and ignores the obvious QoS problem that could easily be solved by buying a bit more bandwidth (but, you know, that would cost Shaw money, which, seeing as a Tier 2 "tech" apparantly costs C$75/hour, they don't exactly spend it wisely) It isn't like your upstream rates - even without the QoS problems - are a fucking joke - and when people call in with problems with voip (or problems with pretty much any other protocol invented since HTML 1.1) there is this magical $10 a month package (actually, 2 of 'em) that they are told to buy to make their problems go away. It also isn't like Shaw doesn't use packet shapers on damn near every other protocol and has would never cripple any technology. And, let us not forget, their mail servers, which are used as examples in educational institutions and technical schools worldwide.
I bet your shit smells like a fucking bouquet of roses and lavender too./Why the hell did I receive much, much, much better service (defined as "faster, less problems and support people actually picking up the phone") in 1998 for $40 a month? My monthly cheque to Shaw today is a cunt hair shy of $100 and the service is horrid.
Yes, "optional" as in "do you want to use your voip phone or not"?
Before you start, keep in mind that Shaw cut (in damn near half) the service for all of their customers a few months ago. The cut the speeds, they dropped the bandwidth limit to a paltry 30 gigs, and then - they offered to sell you the level of service you had 6 months ago for an extra $10 a month (and, actally, 6 months ago, the bandwidth cap was 80 gigs, so you can't get the same level of service).
They degraded your service to the point where VOIP was virtually unusable and then decided to extort their customers out of another $120 a year.
And for those who say "go to the competition", it is sort of funny how Telus (the one and only "competitor") matches - often in under a week - the customer abusive policies that Shaw implements. Both companies have, over the last two years, slowly decreased the bandwidth limits and speeds to where they stand today. Makes you wonder if they are working together.... Furthermore, people from shaw WILL call you and threaten you with "excessive usage fines" (these aren't defined _anywhere_) and will also threaten you with disconnection. The best part is those who are locked into contracts are well and trully fucked. The level of service decreased, you keeep on paying or cough up the vulgar termination fee.
You can ftp a print job to most of the higher end laserjets (print to file and upload the.prn,.pcl or.ps - whatever the printer supports) and more often than not (I've never seen it off) anonymous login is enabled. Of course, you need to be at least on the same subnet, but that is a way to completely sidestep any o/s layer based blocking.
And how will a new programmer understand how to use that option, why it should be on, or even what it does? If you've got them in a classroom, you can force all the machines to be configured that way, but how much of their education will consist of them screwing around at home?
I dunno, maybe because their teacher / prof / whathaveyou will tell them to have those options set and will refuse to grade anything without Option Strict set? Might not work so well with people learning by themselves, but I'd be surprised if your average "self taught" book doesn't tell newbies to turn these options on, since they can save newbies a lot of frustration and time, which, in turn, lets people experiment and actually code more.
I've seen full T-1s for $220 a month (not that fractional crap) available to small businesses. If you're out in the sticks, a T1 might cost that much, but it was pretty cheap the last time I looked.
Skype says that the packets are encrypted end to end, so there might be a wee bit of overhead for that. Still, wasn't surprised that something like this happened shortly after ebay bought them.
At what exactly did NTP develop? Oh, that's right, they don't actually make any products, they are just a bunch of lawyers who write patents (and poorly, I might add, their patents were ruled invalid) all day.
These companies are nothing but scum, and I would be perfectly happy if their executive board had their knees shattered.
If 10% have ever read it (understanding is a bit much), I'd be surprised. Of course, they show pictures of it in history books, but most students view that picture as relevant to their daily lives as a picture of the sculpture of David.
Um, because we live an imperfect world where 99.9% of all legislation is flawed and the result of numerous comrpomises between different factions because we don't live in a one party state?
No, it is because your lawmakers are lazy. Either that or they are more interested in sneaking in pork and pet project riders to bills than actually reading the entire text (or even a portion) of the bill. This should be inexcusable, but apparantly the American public don't care whether their politicians read the actual laws they are voting on or not.
Apologist horseshit. It isn't like there isn't fiber around the country that the telcos could use. They just don't want to have to pay for additional equipment, even though they have had hundreds of thousands of people start using (and paying) for their service in the last year. This isn't a matter of technical problems, it (just like the tiered internet / extortition idea) has everything to do with a bean counter's slanted view of reality.
Hehe, I noticed that in the latest Azureus build. Good stuff. Even so, Comcast can still kill the QoS on packets going to a known location (i.e. Vonage IPs or known bittorrent trackers) You'd also need to re-design a bunch of hardware and make it a bit more beefier. And from what I understand, the Comcast phone box is basically like another cable modem, so they can ensure that data boxes get this QoS and their phone boxes get better QoS. Such a set up makes it quite difficult to prove that comcast is killing QoS for data (and ultimately) vonage packets.
Oh, I completely agree, my ISP does suck, comcast sucked and the "competition" here also sucks, even if all 3 of those do beat dialup.
I'm just saying that as ISPs try to mooch as much as they can from their customers (lowering speeds, packet shaping and the such), eventually there will become a point where you're going to have to spring for a "premium" package in order to get some things working. To me, especially since I know that X,Y and Z worked once upon a time, and the only thing that has changed is the level of service provided by the ISP, it feels a lot like extortion. In fact, when you call in and complain to Shaw about poor VoIP quality, they will suggest that you order their "Extreme" package. I don't recall if it was Comcast or Verizon (I had both while living in the same house in Portland) who suggested something similar - but I do recall that when the agent bumped me to the next tier of service everything started working as it did before their service level changed. I really can't tell you whether it is intentional or accidental, but I do know it pisses me off.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the power companies increased Comcast's pole rental rates when the contract came to renewal? After all, maintaining those power poles costs money, and, well... wouldn't it be a shame if Comcast's equipment started falling off power poles. There could even be a tiered pricing scheme;)
Yeah, that is true, and I was going to mention it. But I had problems with Vonage under Comcast (and with my new connection up here) even when I set the bitrate to lowest quality. Besides, a good chunk of the problems is the voip box having an intermittent connection with the server.
I don't want to sound like I'm advertising skype, but I've been on 3 way conference calls with people on dialup lines in Germany and haven't had any issues with sound quality and I've used skype quite a bit when my vonage service was out and I just felt like making a call and not screwing around with the voip box again.
Technically, they can argue that using a packetshaper and reducing the QoS on vonage bound packets isn't blocking. Wouldn't be surprised if this was the case.
It's just when you oversell your service, everyone ends up with shitty QoS - and since Vonage's protocol likes bandwidth (skype has much, much lower bandwidth reqs), naturally, their stuff doesn't work all that well.
That said, they have been jacking their rates while at the same time killing off features - newsgroups, static ip addresses, and of course, the ever decreasing transfer limit (I don't believe there is a place in the USA where you are allowed to transfer more than 80 gigs combined up / down monthly and some areas have a much lower transfer limit) which is usually magically secret.
Just be glad you still have an alternative and that DSL is available and has slightly friendier terms of service - I've recently moved up to Canada where the Cable and DSL offerings are virtually the same - both pretty much useless - 30 gigs combined transfer, high latency and very slow speeds during the day. In fact, just a couple months ago, Shaw decided to cut speeds, and then, at the same time, brought out a "Extreme" package for another $10 a month. They advertised it a lot, but forgot to mention that the speed "increase" was just "increasing it to what you had before we chopped it". And just like in comcast's case vonage doesn't work all that well..
All I'm saying is that this ever decreasing level of service is inevitable, you have Bell South playing games, and, of course, comcast. These big ISPs have finaly realized that they are the only broadband providers out there for a majority of their customers and can do pretty much anything they want and people won't switch because they can't./ex-victim of comcast//Now I wish someone would go on a shooting spree at Shaw///Would be ok if the same thing happened to some of the Comcast folks.
Not sure if you know that Vmware player and a beta of their server (used to be gsx?) are free. They still charge for their ESX server, workstation and some higher end products, but if you want to just run a virtual machine, you can just download the player free of charge. If you want to create, the server beta is available.
Whatever you say;) I just know I bought 12 dell desktops with monitors for $330 each for a client last summer and didn't pay a dime in shipping. That said, they have increased their prices a bit recently. If you look at the fatwallet hot deals forum, you'll see similar come by every week or so, often during the weekends.
No, not really. If you look around for a bit, you'll be able to find free or cheap ($25 or so) shipping deals on lower end dells. If you just go to the dell site and click the "I wanna computa" button, you're going to get screwed. It took me less than 2 minutes to find a Dimension 5150 Desktop for $599 + $24 shipping = $623 Pentium-4 3.0GHz HT, 512MB DDR2, 80GB SATA, 16x DVD+/-RW, Intel Video 10/100 Ethernet, 19" E196FP Analog Flat Panel Yeah, it's $100 more, but has a 19" flat panel. If you look around, you can find something cheaper with a smaller display.
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Right, after all, Shaw never has any problems on their end and they _never_ tell the customer to call Vonage.
/Why the hell did I receive much, much, much better service (defined as "faster, less problems and support people actually picking up the phone") in 1998 for $40 a month? My monthly cheque to Shaw today is a cunt hair shy of $100 and the service is horrid.
It isn't like Shaw oversells their service and ignores the obvious QoS problem that could easily be solved by buying a bit more bandwidth (but, you know, that would cost Shaw money, which, seeing as a Tier 2 "tech" apparantly costs C$75/hour, they don't exactly spend it wisely)
It isn't like your upstream rates - even without the QoS problems - are a fucking joke - and when people call in with problems with voip (or problems with pretty much any other protocol invented since HTML 1.1) there is this magical $10 a month package (actually, 2 of 'em) that they are told to buy to make their problems go away.
It also isn't like Shaw doesn't use packet shapers on damn near every other protocol and has would never cripple any technology.
And, let us not forget, their mail servers, which are used as examples in educational institutions and technical schools worldwide.
I bet your shit smells like a fucking bouquet of roses and lavender too.
this fee is optional
Yes, "optional" as in "do you want to use your voip phone or not"?
Before you start, keep in mind that Shaw cut (in damn near half) the service for all of their customers a few months ago.
The cut the speeds, they dropped the bandwidth limit to a paltry 30 gigs, and then - they offered to sell you the level of service you had 6 months ago for an extra $10 a month (and, actally, 6 months ago, the bandwidth cap was 80 gigs, so you can't get the same level of service).
They degraded your service to the point where VOIP was virtually unusable and then decided to extort their customers out of another $120 a year.
And for those who say "go to the competition", it is sort of funny how Telus (the one and only "competitor") matches - often in under a week - the customer abusive policies that Shaw implements. Both companies have, over the last two years, slowly decreased the bandwidth limits and speeds to where they stand today. Makes you wonder if they are working together....
Furthermore, people from shaw WILL call you and threaten you with "excessive usage fines" (these aren't defined _anywhere_) and will also threaten you with disconnection.
The best part is those who are locked into contracts are well and trully fucked. The level of service decreased, you keeep on paying or cough up the vulgar termination fee.
You can ftp a print job to most of the higher end laserjets (print to file and upload the .prn, .pcl or .ps - whatever the printer supports) and more often than not (I've never seen it off) anonymous login is enabled.
Of course, you need to be at least on the same subnet, but that is a way to completely sidestep any o/s layer based blocking.
And how will a new programmer understand how to use that option, why it should be on, or even what it does? If you've got them in a classroom, you can force all the machines to be configured that way, but how much of their education will consist of them screwing around at home?
I dunno, maybe because their teacher / prof / whathaveyou will tell them to have those options set and will refuse to grade anything without Option Strict set?
Might not work so well with people learning by themselves, but I'd be surprised if your average "self taught" book doesn't tell newbies to turn these options on, since they can save newbies a lot of frustration and time, which, in turn, lets people experiment and actually code more.
And use the tv.yahoo's tivo scheduling.
Wow... $5 a month?
I've seen full T-1s for $220 a month (not that fractional crap) available to small businesses. If you're out in the sticks, a T1 might cost that much, but it was pretty cheap the last time I looked.
Skype says that the packets are encrypted end to end, so there might be a wee bit of overhead for that.
Still, wasn't surprised that something like this happened shortly after ebay bought them.
Haha, nice karma troll. Haven't seen that many -1's in a while.
If you want your opinion "heard", tell it to Guido and give him $1000.
At what exactly did NTP develop?
Oh, that's right, they don't actually make any products, they are just a bunch of lawyers who write patents (and poorly, I might add, their patents were ruled invalid) all day.
These companies are nothing but scum, and I would be perfectly happy if their executive board had their knees shattered.
Pretty sure you can't install Google Desktop if you're not running as admin on a local box, so that solves at least the installation problem.
If 10% have ever read it (understanding is a bit much), I'd be surprised. Of course, they show pictures of it in history books, but most students view that picture as relevant to their daily lives as a picture of the sculpture of David.
Um, because we live an imperfect world where 99.9% of all legislation is flawed and the result of numerous comrpomises between different factions because we don't live in a one party state?
No, it is because your lawmakers are lazy. Either that or they are more interested in sneaking in pork and pet project riders to bills than actually reading the entire text (or even a portion) of the bill.
This should be inexcusable, but apparantly the American public don't care whether their politicians read the actual laws they are voting on or not.
Apologist horseshit.
It isn't like there isn't fiber around the country that the telcos could use.
They just don't want to have to pay for additional equipment, even though they have had hundreds of thousands of people start using (and paying) for their service in the last year. This isn't a matter of technical problems, it (just like the tiered internet / extortition idea) has everything to do with a bean counter's slanted view of reality.
Hehe, I noticed that in the latest Azureus build. Good stuff. Even so, Comcast can still kill the QoS on packets going to a known location (i.e. Vonage IPs or known bittorrent trackers) You'd also need to re-design a bunch of hardware and make it a bit more beefier.
And from what I understand, the Comcast phone box is basically like another cable modem, so they can ensure that data boxes get this QoS and their phone boxes get better QoS. Such a set up makes it quite difficult to prove that comcast is killing QoS for data (and ultimately) vonage packets.
Oh, I completely agree, my ISP does suck, comcast sucked and the "competition" here also sucks, even if all 3 of those do beat dialup.
I'm just saying that as ISPs try to mooch as much as they can from their customers (lowering speeds, packet shaping and the such), eventually there will become a point where you're going to have to spring for a "premium" package in order to get some things working.
To me, especially since I know that X,Y and Z worked once upon a time, and the only thing that has changed is the level of service provided by the ISP, it feels a lot like extortion. In fact, when you call in and complain to Shaw about poor VoIP quality, they will suggest that you order their "Extreme" package.
I don't recall if it was Comcast or Verizon (I had both while living in the same house in Portland) who suggested something similar - but I do recall that when the agent bumped me to the next tier of service everything started working as it did before their service level changed. I really can't tell you whether it is intentional or accidental, but I do know it pisses me off.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the power companies increased Comcast's pole rental rates when the contract came to renewal? ;)
After all, maintaining those power poles costs money, and, well... wouldn't it be a shame if Comcast's equipment started falling off power poles. There could even be a tiered pricing scheme
Yeah, that is true, and I was going to mention it. But I had problems with Vonage under Comcast (and with my new connection up here) even when I set the bitrate to lowest quality. Besides, a good chunk of the problems is the voip box having an intermittent connection with the server.
I don't want to sound like I'm advertising skype, but I've been on 3 way conference calls with people on dialup lines in Germany and haven't had any issues with sound quality and I've used skype quite a bit when my vonage service was out and I just felt like making a call and not screwing around with the voip box again.
Technically, they can argue that using a packetshaper and reducing the QoS on vonage bound packets isn't blocking.
Wouldn't be surprised if this was the case.
It's just when you oversell your service, everyone ends up with shitty QoS - and since Vonage's protocol likes bandwidth (skype has much, much lower bandwidth reqs), naturally, their stuff doesn't work all that well.
/ex-victim of comcast //Now I wish someone would go on a shooting spree at Shaw ///Would be ok if the same thing happened to some of the Comcast folks.
That said, they have been jacking their rates while at the same time killing off features - newsgroups, static ip addresses, and of course, the ever decreasing transfer limit (I don't believe there is a place in the USA where you are allowed to transfer more than 80 gigs combined up / down monthly and some areas have a much lower transfer limit) which is usually magically secret.
Just be glad you still have an alternative and that DSL is available and has slightly friendier terms of service - I've recently moved up to Canada where the Cable and DSL offerings are virtually the same - both pretty much useless - 30 gigs combined transfer, high latency and very slow speeds during the day.
In fact, just a couple months ago, Shaw decided to cut speeds, and then, at the same time, brought out a "Extreme" package for another $10 a month. They advertised it a lot, but forgot to mention that the speed "increase" was just "increasing it to what you had before we chopped it".
And just like in comcast's case vonage doesn't work all that well..
All I'm saying is that this ever decreasing level of service is inevitable, you have Bell South playing games, and, of course, comcast. These big ISPs have finaly realized that they are the only broadband providers out there for a majority of their customers and can do pretty much anything they want and people won't switch because they can't.
You think the prices will drop for consumers after this is implemented? Are you retarded?
Not sure if you know that Vmware player and a beta of their server (used to be gsx?) are free.
They still charge for their ESX server, workstation and some higher end products, but if you want to just run a virtual machine, you can just download the player free of charge. If you want to create, the server beta is available.
Whatever you say ;)
I just know I bought 12 dell desktops with monitors for $330 each for a client last summer and didn't pay a dime in shipping. That said, they have increased their prices a bit recently. If you look at the fatwallet hot deals forum, you'll see similar come by every week or so, often during the weekends.
Perhaps just a small nitpick, but Burio Szyfrow translates as "Office of Cyphers". No doubt it was part of the intelligence service, but...
No, not really.
If you look around for a bit, you'll be able to find free or cheap ($25 or so) shipping deals on lower end dells. If you just go to the dell site and click the "I wanna computa" button, you're going to get screwed.
It took me less than 2 minutes to find a Dimension 5150 Desktop for $599 + $24 shipping = $623
Pentium-4 3.0GHz HT, 512MB DDR2, 80GB SATA, 16x DVD+/-RW, Intel Video
10/100 Ethernet, 19" E196FP Analog Flat Panel
Yeah, it's $100 more, but has a 19" flat panel. If you look around, you can find something cheaper with a smaller display.