Slice it, dice it, and spin it any way you want, but: When it's all said and done, every bloody red penny spent to correct the Deepwater Horizon snafu will have been paid by The People.
Somewhat amusingly, my contacts all sync just fine (automagically over whatever available network) between my iPod Touch, my Droid, and all of Google's stuff, without no additional software beyond what the shipped OS provides.
By extension, this would also work with an iPad or an iPhone.
You're not quite as locked in as you think . . .
But given the amount of flexibility I had with an old Palm OS device almost a decade ago, I must say I'm really not all that impressed with any of the PDA functionality of any modern smartphone that I've had a chance to use.
You must live a very simple life, wherein you only ever do one. thing. at. a. time.
Which is cool, and all. I'm not here to judge. But just because you do one. thing. at. a. time. does not mean that the rest of the world behaves in the same fashion. You should try to look around more often.
As a cable user, no. Someone will have to provide you the 'last mile' and since you get that through cable you will not be able to use this as is. If they offer last mile service, either as fiber or anything else, then you can use that. You might even find that a local phone company will be able to use their service, and offer DSL or some other connection.
As a cable user, yes. Someone will have to provide the 'backhaul' and since it's traditionally very expensive to [lease|build|maintain] long distance links, it's likely that cable ISPs will jump all over this. Since Allied doesn't offer last mile service, either as fiber or anything else, then the cable company won't be helping their competitors. You might even find that a regional or national phone company will be able to use their service, and offer reduced rates or more bandwidth with DSL or some other connection.
I thought the whole point of having a girlfriend was to play with them, while having another place to go and live when not playing.
What you describe sounds more like a wife. I have one of those. It's the opposite problem: I get to use the Internet on my phone to avoid having to come home.:)
Your argument relies upon the flawed assumption that folks will only watch exactly one thing per day. It also assumes that I'm torrenting movies and games, instead of some other random Large Things. And, you assume that this is a complete and factual list of everything we do here with Teh Intarwebs, instead of just a concise example.
Fact is: The boy watches Netflix movies, plural. The brother in law watches things on TV shack, plural. The daughter watches TV shows on Hulu, plural. Some of us run Electric Sheep as a screensaver, which chews up a bunch of bandwidth. All of us get updates for our OS, software, and various devices. I stream my music library to my phone while I'm driving, and I drive a lot: The system I use pre-caches whole 320Kbps albums at once and only keeps them for a short time, so that uses a meaningful amount of bandwidth. Not to mention porn, which I suspect also uses a fair bit of bandwidth for some people here.
And you forget that on Patch Day, it's best (fastest) to open a port up so WoW can use P2P. Add to that the fact that there's actually three of us here that play the game on different systems, and a 100MB patch can easily use 600MB of bandwidth.
Plus every other goddamn little thing out there, from weather widgets to Pandora to just reading email, surfing around, and doing whatever it is folks do with a modern Internet-connected PC.
How much data do we transfer in a month, exactly? I honestly don't know. My provider doesn't make such statistics available to me, and I haven't bothered to set up MRTG to keep track of it since my 6M/1M VDSL is unmetered and without a cap.
But: If we combine my reality with your math, 250GB just ain't enough. Even if our typical monthly usage does fit within 250GB, the margin will be close enough that there won't be much room for occasional overhead.
You must live alone. That's OK; it's Slashdot. At least you're out of Mom's basement.
At my house, folks watch movies. The boy might be watching something on Netflix in HD, my brother in law might be watching something on tvshack.com, while my daughter is digging on something on Hulu, my wife is downloading a WoW update, and I'm pulling down a few torrents.
The original Xbox remote and controllers (and memory cards, FWIW) were all USB. Just solder some USB A connectors on, or buy some cheap Xbox controller extensions and hack those instead.
I haven't researched this, but I'd place a bet on the notion that someone has written the necessary glue software to integrate these peripherals with XBMC running on whatever OS on a PC.
So, if you want the same behavior (only faster), there's an easy route to do it.
If performance were the only metric one needed when selecting a product, we'd all be driving Bugatti Veyrons when we wanted to go fast, Unimogs when we want to move lots of stuff slow, and AMG Mercedes-Benz SUVs when we want to move stuff along with people.
Over here in reality, though, price is a factor. And so, Toyotas, the Hyundais, and the Chevys are a much better deal for most folks.
So, even if Bugatti made a more inexpensive and practical vehicle that I might be interested in, the fact that they also may produce the Veyron does not influence my buying decisions when comparing their offerings to those of more serene brands like Toyota.
Likewise with CPUs: I don't care what manufacturer makes the fastest chip. If the features that I'm interested in are close enough to the same, then I only I care about how much performance I can get for the amount that I'm willing to spend, and sometimes with an eye toward the power consumption.
To that end, AMD generally wins. That AMD does not have a metaphorical Veyron in their lineup does not mean that they do not produce chips which are cheap and fast for the entire gamut of typical home applications.
Thank you for posting this, I forgot how to log into my bank on Netscape. But it doesn't work. I tried your link to my bank account, and got some weird thing on my screen instead. I even rebooted and defragged and it still doesn't work.
I often go back later and remember only a vague picture of the information that I wanted, and (as you note) using the search tool is not always useful.
So, while reading, I just tend to keep track of where I'm at in the book. Whether it be a chapter number, or the position of the scroll bar, or even the shape of the table of contents on the left hand side. This keeps me roughly aware of where I'm at in the document as I read it. Later, I can quickly jump to approximately that same point and do some quick paging around to find the exact passage that I'm looking for.
Works for me, but then I've never had to learn to make efficient use of textbooks since I've done nearly all of my learning for the past 16 years using a computer. Not having to unlearn any familiarity with textbooks might have helped me with that...
(Alas, this doesn't work on a Kindle since it's so slow for non-linear reading, but that's more a problem of the display tech than of electronic books in general.)
I don't want to stand up for the phone company, here (or anywhere else). I really, really don't -- especially not one with a Deathstar for a logo.
But I'm quite certain that installing U-Verse at my house, and making it work, cost AT&T a lot more than $150. (Note, however: IIRC, instead of me paying $150 to install, at the time, they paid ME to have them install it. I forget if it was a rebate or a credit or what, but that's how it went.)
We're pretty far from the VRAD, very nearly completely out-of-spec, so we (expectedly) had line issues. They easily had 10 man hours involved in the initial install to make it work. They replaced the drop to the house, replaced the line to my patch panel, and did whatever else they did that day. At one point, the driveway was stuffed full of AT&T trucks, driven by people who were motivated to make it work.
And, lo, it did work. And it was good. Except port 25 was blocked, so I had to call and get that fixed, which was very painless. (With U-Verse, you only get Tier-1 support script-readers if there aren't higher-level techs available to talk at that moment. Otherwise, chances are high that you'll talk to someone with a clue. I got someone with a clue straight away.)
Things were good until it got hot out. On the warmer days in spring, and the hottest days of summer, it would drop. Completely. Sometimes, for hours. It seemed to have something to do with the angle of the sun, but then it'd also be out for periods when the sun was down.
I troubleshot the shit out of it myself, using their gateway's built-in diagnostics and my own knowledge of grounding, EMI/RFI, and heat effects on electronics. So, I called tech support.
And so began a long series of phone calls, unfortunately starting with the Tier-1 "let's go ahead and reboot your TV" support. Once transferred to tier 3, though, things turned better:
Me: "This doesn't work when it's hot out." Them: "Yes, I think I see that trend. Can we send someone out to fix it tomorrow?"
A very long story somewhat shorter: There were many calls to tech support, and they gave me their internal number for tier-3 so I wouldn't have to fuck with the chance of getting a Mexican script reader. Every single time a tech showed up, he gave me his business card, including a cell phone number. Every single time I called them, they tried to fix it (I watched, asked questions, and provided insight while trying not to cross the line into being a nosy, pesky customer). There was a lot of fail, but a whole lot of effort and good will, even on Sundays.
When I called their billing department to get refunded for a complete month of service, they didn't have a problem with that, either. And they made a point of calling the local u-verse manager to make sure that things were moving along fine -- while I was on the phone.
It turns out that the cables in my neighborhood are just very old. There's more than a thousand feet of ancient lead-sheathed cable between me and the VRAD, for instance. This, combined with my overall distance to the nearest VRAD, were complicit in making things difficult (and the intermittency of the problem certainly didn't help narrow it down).
So, one of the techs finally stopped trying to fix pairs, and just started trying them one by one until he had improved numbers. It's the sledgehammer approach, but it worked, and for now at least, it's been rather stable for most of a year.
In conclusion, I just want to say that I had a hell of a difficult time getting U-Verse to work properly at my house, but that their enduring efforts (and, eventually, very stable service) generated enough goodwill that I'd recommend them in a heartbeat.
Which blows my fucking mind, since it's Ma Bell, but, feh. I'm experienced enough to know that the steps they took were the correct steps, and that solving intermittent problem on long lines is a motherfucker no matter what. Did it take a long time for them fix it? Yes. Was that reasonabl
IMHO, printers need to have handled a few more pages than that before they become worth bragging about. My Laserjet 5 has more than 73,000 pages on the clock, and was even once half-submerged in water for two days during a flood. I wouldn't even be mentioning it if the datapoints everyone keeps throwing out there weren't so low, since even 73k just isn't a very large number of pages for a good printer.
For that matter, I remember going through several 5,000 sheet boxes of pinfeed on the old Star NX1000 9-pin dot matrix that I had way-back-when.
Slashdot Mirror
Slice it, dice it, and spin it any way you want, but: When it's all said and done, every bloody red penny spent to correct the Deepwater Horizon snafu will have been paid by The People.
That's not an "actual limit," per se, but just a stepping stone.
"Actual limits" are things like the speed of light, not the capabilities of some random gear that happens to be installed at an ISP.
Five nines? From a car?
What sort of alternate reality do you live in? I mean, seriously: I want to sign up.
Um.
Buy a faster Linux box, if that's what you think need.
You're welcome.
That's a good idea.
And then, you can lease out your basement as co-lo space, and keep your house warm with the waste heat.
Feh.
It may also spur new competition, or a new battle between pre-existing competitors.
Slice it any way you want, but generally speaking: More competition, at any level, is good for the end consumer.
Somewhat amusingly, my contacts all sync just fine (automagically over whatever available network) between my iPod Touch, my Droid, and all of Google's stuff, without no additional software beyond what the shipped OS provides.
By extension, this would also work with an iPad or an iPhone.
You're not quite as locked in as you think . . .
But given the amount of flexibility I had with an old Palm OS device almost a decade ago, I must say I'm really not all that impressed with any of the PDA functionality of any modern smartphone that I've had a chance to use.
bbn,
You must live a very simple life, wherein you only ever do one. thing. at. a. time.
Which is cool, and all. I'm not here to judge. But just because you do one. thing. at. a. time. does not mean that the rest of the world behaves in the same fashion. You should try to look around more often.
As a cable user, yes. Someone will have to provide the 'backhaul' and since it's traditionally very expensive to [lease|build|maintain] long distance links, it's likely that cable ISPs will jump all over this. Since Allied doesn't offer last mile service, either as fiber or anything else, then the cable company won't be helping their competitors. You might even find that a regional or national phone company will be able to use their service, and offer reduced rates or more bandwidth with DSL or some other connection.
I thought the whole point of having a girlfriend was to play with them, while having another place to go and live when not playing.
What you describe sounds more like a wife. I have one of those. It's the opposite problem: I get to use the Internet on my phone to avoid having to come home. :)
*sigh*
Your argument relies upon the flawed assumption that folks will only watch exactly one thing per day. It also assumes that I'm torrenting movies and games, instead of some other random Large Things. And, you assume that this is a complete and factual list of everything we do here with Teh Intarwebs, instead of just a concise example.
Fact is: The boy watches Netflix movies, plural. The brother in law watches things on TV shack, plural. The daughter watches TV shows on Hulu, plural. Some of us run Electric Sheep as a screensaver, which chews up a bunch of bandwidth. All of us get updates for our OS, software, and various devices. I stream my music library to my phone while I'm driving, and I drive a lot: The system I use pre-caches whole 320Kbps albums at once and only keeps them for a short time, so that uses a meaningful amount of bandwidth. Not to mention porn, which I suspect also uses a fair bit of bandwidth for some people here.
And you forget that on Patch Day, it's best (fastest) to open a port up so WoW can use P2P. Add to that the fact that there's actually three of us here that play the game on different systems, and a 100MB patch can easily use 600MB of bandwidth.
Plus every other goddamn little thing out there, from weather widgets to Pandora to just reading email, surfing around, and doing whatever it is folks do with a modern Internet-connected PC.
How much data do we transfer in a month, exactly? I honestly don't know. My provider doesn't make such statistics available to me, and I haven't bothered to set up MRTG to keep track of it since my 6M/1M VDSL is unmetered and without a cap.
But: If we combine my reality with your math, 250GB just ain't enough. Even if our typical monthly usage does fit within 250GB, the margin will be close enough that there won't be much room for occasional overhead.
Must be some girlfriend, if you'd rather play with your phone than play with her.
You must live alone. That's OK; it's Slashdot. At least you're out of Mom's basement.
At my house, folks watch movies. The boy might be watching something on Netflix in HD, my brother in law might be watching something on tvshack.com, while my daughter is digging on something on Hulu, my wife is downloading a WoW update, and I'm pulling down a few torrents.
Every day.
250GB/mo ain't gonna cut it.
The original Xbox remote and controllers (and memory cards, FWIW) were all USB. Just solder some USB A connectors on, or buy some cheap Xbox controller extensions and hack those instead.
I haven't researched this, but I'd place a bet on the notion that someone has written the necessary glue software to integrate these peripherals with XBMC running on whatever OS on a PC.
So, if you want the same behavior (only faster), there's an easy route to do it.
It is very nice. And it was around for a long, long time before people started using it for everyday television (IPTV). We used to call it the Mbone.
It doesn't matter what's at the top.
If performance were the only metric one needed when selecting a product, we'd all be driving Bugatti Veyrons when we wanted to go fast, Unimogs when we want to move lots of stuff slow, and AMG Mercedes-Benz SUVs when we want to move stuff along with people.
Over here in reality, though, price is a factor. And so, Toyotas, the Hyundais, and the Chevys are a much better deal for most folks.
So, even if Bugatti made a more inexpensive and practical vehicle that I might be interested in, the fact that they also may produce the Veyron does not influence my buying decisions when comparing their offerings to those of more serene brands like Toyota.
Likewise with CPUs: I don't care what manufacturer makes the fastest chip. If the features that I'm interested in are close enough to the same, then I only I care about how much performance I can get for the amount that I'm willing to spend, and sometimes with an eye toward the power consumption.
To that end, AMD generally wins. That AMD does not have a metaphorical Veyron in their lineup does not mean that they do not produce chips which are cheap and fast for the entire gamut of typical home applications.
Hi.
Thank you for posting this, I forgot how to log into my bank on Netscape. But it doesn't work. I tried your link to my bank account, and got some weird thing on my screen instead. I even rebooted and defragged and it still doesn't work.
How do I log into my bank on Netscape?
:)
A God could make things worse. Make good bad. Make you feel new pain. That hardship harder. Cause sickness. And all you have to do is believe!
I do the same thing when reading PDFs on the PC:
I often go back later and remember only a vague picture of the information that I wanted, and (as you note) using the search tool is not always useful.
So, while reading, I just tend to keep track of where I'm at in the book. Whether it be a chapter number, or the position of the scroll bar, or even the shape of the table of contents on the left hand side. This keeps me roughly aware of where I'm at in the document as I read it. Later, I can quickly jump to approximately that same point and do some quick paging around to find the exact passage that I'm looking for.
Works for me, but then I've never had to learn to make efficient use of textbooks since I've done nearly all of my learning for the past 16 years using a computer. Not having to unlearn any familiarity with textbooks might have helped me with that...
(Alas, this doesn't work on a Kindle since it's so slow for non-linear reading, but that's more a problem of the display tech than of electronic books in general.)
Dude, I know. My prior printer was a Laserjet III with 1.6 million pages.
You preach to the choir.
I don't want to stand up for the phone company, here (or anywhere else). I really, really don't -- especially not one with a Deathstar for a logo.
But I'm quite certain that installing U-Verse at my house, and making it work, cost AT&T a lot more than $150. (Note, however: IIRC, instead of me paying $150 to install, at the time, they paid ME to have them install it. I forget if it was a rebate or a credit or what, but that's how it went.)
We're pretty far from the VRAD, very nearly completely out-of-spec, so we (expectedly) had line issues. They easily had 10 man hours involved in the initial install to make it work. They replaced the drop to the house, replaced the line to my patch panel, and did whatever else they did that day. At one point, the driveway was stuffed full of AT&T trucks, driven by people who were motivated to make it work.
And, lo, it did work. And it was good. Except port 25 was blocked, so I had to call and get that fixed, which was very painless. (With U-Verse, you only get Tier-1 support script-readers if there aren't higher-level techs available to talk at that moment. Otherwise, chances are high that you'll talk to someone with a clue. I got someone with a clue straight away.)
Things were good until it got hot out. On the warmer days in spring, and the hottest days of summer, it would drop. Completely. Sometimes, for hours. It seemed to have something to do with the angle of the sun, but then it'd also be out for periods when the sun was down.
I troubleshot the shit out of it myself, using their gateway's built-in diagnostics and my own knowledge of grounding, EMI/RFI, and heat effects on electronics. So, I called tech support.
And so began a long series of phone calls, unfortunately starting with the Tier-1 "let's go ahead and reboot your TV" support. Once transferred to tier 3, though, things turned better:
Me: "This doesn't work when it's hot out."
Them: "Yes, I think I see that trend. Can we send someone out to fix it tomorrow?"
A very long story somewhat shorter: There were many calls to tech support, and they gave me their internal number for tier-3 so I wouldn't have to fuck with the chance of getting a Mexican script reader. Every single time a tech showed up, he gave me his business card, including a cell phone number. Every single time I called them, they tried to fix it (I watched, asked questions, and provided insight while trying not to cross the line into being a nosy, pesky customer). There was a lot of fail, but a whole lot of effort and good will, even on Sundays.
When I called their billing department to get refunded for a complete month of service, they didn't have a problem with that, either. And they made a point of calling the local u-verse manager to make sure that things were moving along fine -- while I was on the phone.
It turns out that the cables in my neighborhood are just very old. There's more than a thousand feet of ancient lead-sheathed cable between me and the VRAD, for instance. This, combined with my overall distance to the nearest VRAD, were complicit in making things difficult (and the intermittency of the problem certainly didn't help narrow it down).
So, one of the techs finally stopped trying to fix pairs, and just started trying them one by one until he had improved numbers. It's the sledgehammer approach, but it worked, and for now at least, it's been rather stable for most of a year.
In conclusion, I just want to say that I had a hell of a difficult time getting U-Verse to work properly at my house, but that their enduring efforts (and, eventually, very stable service) generated enough goodwill that I'd recommend them in a heartbeat.
Which blows my fucking mind, since it's Ma Bell, but, feh. I'm experienced enough to know that the steps they took were the correct steps, and that solving intermittent problem on long lines is a motherfucker no matter what. Did it take a long time for them fix it? Yes. Was that reasonabl
Thank you for explaining that so clearly. You may have posted the single-most insightful comment on this topic, ever.
If only I had mod points...
2,000 pages? That's only 4 reams of paper.
IMHO, printers need to have handled a few more pages than that before they become worth bragging about. My Laserjet 5 has more than 73,000 pages on the clock, and was even once half-submerged in water for two days during a flood. I wouldn't even be mentioning it if the datapoints everyone keeps throwing out there weren't so low, since even 73k just isn't a very large number of pages for a good printer.
For that matter, I remember going through several 5,000 sheet boxes of pinfeed on the old Star NX1000 9-pin dot matrix that I had way-back-when.
*shrug*
That's cool, and all, but: The device in question uses USB, and not Bluetooth.
How do I connect this to a Droid?