Hey Mike Baby!
I'm pretty sure I talked to you on the forums over there at Macromedia. The AhFoo from Taiwan who was complaining about his missing dongle for using Chinese Authorware systems.
Anyway, I this is not the place to be chatting about missing dongles but it is the place to talk aobut GNULinux and Macromedia with a real live Macromedia rep.
I just wanted to let you know that the Authorware runtime works fabulously under Wine. I was shocked and I knew that the people over there on the corporate hosted News server didn't want to hear about it as they're decidedly windows centric. I came to that conclusion after getting flamed pretty hard for bringing up the codeweavers plug-in for the Authorware web player and general talk of making a real runtime for GNULinux. Anyhow, just thought I'd pass that along --Authorware and Director apps seem to work awesome under Wine so Macromedia is now the leading Icon/Flow Control based RichMedia Authoring platform for GNULinux! Yee haw. Tell the school districts all about it. No need to upgrade those Windows licenses to leverage existing courseware. Isn't this great news?! You folks hopped the fence without even trying.
I hope you good people at Macromedia do a fine job of spreading this great news to clients who might be in charge of spending the taxpayers money like the school district that you send your products to every year.
Keep up the good work Mike. And log in next time!
Re:0.13um is way outclass now
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Printing Chips
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· Score: 2
65nm
UMC has already started a joint venture with a German firn in Sinagapore at 65nm. Production is set to start in '04 or '05. Apparently people within IBM think this is getting towards the end of the line on CMOS shrinking for performance enhancement although further shrinkage would enable more transistors in a smaller area they wouldn't necessarily be faster. If you don't like to hear bad news, Intel will be happy to cheer you up. They say THz desktop chips are no problem and everybody is goingto want one, but I think they have a good reason to be deceptively optomistic. I tend to believe IBM over Intel in this debate and although they're also optomistic for gains over a long time scale, but they're pretty gloomy in near term prognostications. I seem to have read several places where they say yeah chips could be much faster, but not both cheaper and faster any time soon once we get past the.40nm CMOS process and apparently we're only a few years from that.
Personally, I think this is about it. Taiwan started moving everything to China several years ago and anybody who thinks the technology is going to be highly refined by transferring it to the Mainland has obviously never been to the two countries in question. Mainland is currently riding around on training wheels making chips using.5 micron technology. When Taiwan is absolutely positive there are no more decent profits in it, they'll hand it to the Mainland and say, OK, let's be friends now. This process started several years ago already with TSMC's relocation of a few fabs across the strait and is probably going to conclude in the next several years with both TSMC and UMC moving all operations to Mainland China. Prices will drop to level unthinkable to most Americans --two or three bucks for multi GHz CPUs-- but high end performance will become an elite game with overpriced specialty chips unsuited for the consumer market still being made in the US and Europe.
I want to play some more.
See, if a fixed wireless ISP builds out a network like this using 802.11a and say a cheap Cogent 1gbps backbone connection and they're capping the users at 256kbps which is still plenty in today's world, they could build out fast with minimal infrastructure by simply using their own subscribers as base stations. If the subscriber is limited to 256k you've got a nice chunk of trunk line a few hundred feet in every direction from every user Let's say roughly four thousand users and the bandwidth is only ten grand a month. With high enough penetration, you don't need any infrastructure at all. Compare that to a cell network. There is no comparison. The product is similar, but the technologies are fundamentally different and the costs are incomparable.
Now, imagine this fixed wireless ISP has all these users, let's say in LA they decide to buy up four or five separate 1 Gig lines and they've got 20K or so uers. Well, eventually a lot of those users are going to be within range of the freeways. Next thing you're competing with the cell networks for freeway access using your subscriber's base stations and you don't have to pay for real estate, or cell towers or network planners or any of that crap that makes cell netowrks expensive and filled with fully employed individuals so cocksure about the future.
But, wait! It gets better.
Now our imaginary fixed wireless ISP is offering mobile wireless to people on the freeway for their handhelds. Let's say we're in 2004 by now and handhelds are finally worth buying. Well holy shit, this is where it gets really freaky --and I did see that whuzzisname piece where he mentioned this same idea-- the cars are mobile in a completely separate sense than radio waves, but they're mobile nonetheles. The implications are bizarre.
Now our fixed line wireless provider who doesn't own any base stations anywhere except for the ones his users have in their homes and handheld devices is having his bandwidth carried right out of the freakin' city in a stream that is precisely defined by the freeway, but which can be tapped into by anyone next to the freeway as well. If traffic density can be guaranteed, as it often can in Los Angeles, reliable service could be carried literally hundreds of miles away.
Ahh! But here's the catch right? There's no fucking way any one company is going to get that density.
Touche! It doesn't have to be a single company. ISPs could allow users to cross back and forth between networks. Hey! That's why they call in the Internet. Wild stuff. But if even a quarter of the cars on the road were network access points with a thousand feet of radius we'd be seeing fairly robust networks and cellular would be for emergency use only.
I agree that 802.11b as it is today is not an alternative to GPRS or CDMA, but here we have Atheros claiming to have a solution for 802.11a that has up to five times the range of 802.11b without violating power restrictions. The technology this is based on was called 802.11h for awhile.
Besides, while flat out range is the easy way to compare cellular and WiFi if you're arguing from the former's perspective, it misses a key difference in the technologies that we see embodied within a mess of 802 standards: Quality of Service and Security. These latter points may be more dangerous for old school wireless providers than simple range comparisons. In 802.11e, we see Quality of Service being laid out for wireless LANs. Once you start adding QoS and 50Mbps bandwidth together with a technology that is inherently mobile the definition of LAN starts to get a bit arbitrary and leaks into MAN or WAN.
However, you might counter that even if QoS on ad hoc wireless networks was being handled with the kind of efficiency that's currently only found on backbone switches it still couldn't become some kind of giant mesh network. Why not? Well the answer is trust. Folks aren't going to share a piece of their connection even if it means lower prices for everyone. They just don't trust each other, right? Hmm. Well sometimes that's true, but it all depends on the details.
Enter the Dragon --no, wait it's just 802.11i and 802.1x but close enough. These bad puppies are about taking the need for trust out of the picture by securing up these protocols.
Fantasy! Rubbish! It's all lies! I hear the cynics amongst you. But you have to admit if these standards bodies have already been formed at the IEEE, then somebody is taking this seriously.
Sure, for now GPRS and CDMA --the cell phone sustems-- are the way to go for the tiny minority who would pay that much for wireless data services. But personally I think wireless devices will take off about the time they become cheap enough that you can stream MP3s off your home server and that will have to be very very cheap probably like $10 a month for all you can eat 256K streaming downloads and I believe 802.11 standards will make it happen and the user's devices themselves will be the access points. If you think it sounds far fetched, tell it to the IEEE. And, get that resume updated!
The vast majority of the handheld devices today are based on underpowered yesterday tech that require special software and is way overpriced.
For instance if they went with a StrongArm110 processor and 64Megs with GPRS wireless they'd probably be running CE. Dear God! I doubt most/.ers have played with these yet, but I have and it is a fact in my experience that if you write script at even a moderate pace on those little pieces of shit you will crash CE in no time. Total hang and all you have to do is write a few sentences, that's lame. If you treat it gingerly it works great, but if the user is supposed to treat it like a precious little toy that means it's not there yet. At the moment, these things are little more than expensive toys. Sure you can tell me that Palm is so stable but speaking of yesterday's tech. Adding names to a list is really important for certain people, but for most people it's not a huge sell. Expensive toys are great for expensive spoiled brats, but not for mandating in public schools.
Depite being fragile and nearly worthless for real world tasks like note taking, handhelds are mega bucks. The model I have sitting in front of me that runs CE with the GPRS built-in is about $600. Wow! That's like a fifth of per head ADA. (Average Daily Attendance, the rate by which schools are compensated by the government which has to be leveraged over all expenses including teacher salaries)
Now when we see them coming with CF modules over 512MB and running more intriguing software like that we see at handhelds.org perhaps it will beome more adviseable as a recommendation for students, but I doubt it even then. By the time they have WiFi and big memory, they'll be victims of their own success for classroom purposes.
Once they become powerful enough to be worthwhile and useful tools, they will also become full-fledged entertaniment devices. Can you possibly imagine a conflict if groups of students decided they'd rather play QuakeIII tournament instead of participate in class? Or how about DIY porn, little Joey is using the camera on his PDA to look up little Cindy's skirt and is broadcasting the action to little Timmy in the third row. The class is quiet, but nobody seems to be concentrating on the assignments. What could possibly be occupying everyone's attention?
I have one of the latest version of one of these babies sitting right in front of me and I'm sure that it's a great, though fragile, toy and little else. Everyone I've let play with it agrees. The people that make them are going to be failing consistantly until they start marketing them as toys and entertainment devices. There is no way I buy this khaki pants, blue work shirt mentality that these things are essential tools that are the Next Big Thing(TM) in the here and now. If jotting down names and phone numbers is the essence of your life you already have a Palm. If you're looking for something more get a laptop. If you want a toy, get a handheld. But if you want an entertaining toy then wait a few years and get a handheld when you can stream videos and MP3s off your home server. Then they'll be rocking toys, but you aint going to be doing that with GPRS.
I think GPRS will be struggling in two years and in hindsight will be quite a disapointment.
GPRS is finally a here and now solution in many parts of the US though not everywhere, but it's also pricey.
While many devices such as handhelds already support GPRS, almost every handheld manufacturer in Taiwan is promising 802.11x by the second end of 2002. So if this product is supposed to be hitting the maket in 2004 I think it's going to miss the boat.
I'm the first one to say that CPU advances are hitting the wall hard and progress will be slowing soon, but wireless networking is another story. Betting against a big uptick in genuine wireless broadband in favor of stop gap solutions like GPRS seems short sighted.
Let's keep this in perspective dear Vlad.
You see, corporate research labs are exactly that: corporate research. Their primary concern is how to make money. The vast majority of basic research is done by . . . hmm let's see oh yeah that's right universities. And at the universities who does the actual footwork? Yes, it's true the lions share of research in every scientific field including biotech and computers is done by graduate students who work for . . . grades, ie mere recognition. Hmm. What is this? Communism?
Sleight of hand.
After the dig on macroeconomics he goes onto generalize and speak in broad and extremely vague terms for the rest of the piece. It's a rhetorical trick. I'm not impressed. Give me some solid details and less of this posturing.
Alright, one more time but just because I'm bored with what's going on in the other window.
See the deal here is that I no longer get to see the lovely children of Taiwan when they decide to go to China. I can't tell them anything because I don't see them anymore. I miss them so much and wish they would come back to me and buy my Eengleeesh learning CeeDees, but they don't like me no more and I am suspecting it's got something to do with the end of chip technology from the west.
If there were students to see, I would tell them how great America is like I always have done in the past, but they don't come to see me about going to China. It's not my business anymore at that point. I don't have any role to play in their China plans.
But anyhow, telling the extremely racis... I mean nationalist and traditional Chinese people of Taiwan that they should be against mainland China is a tricky thing to be doing as a foreigner who actually has to live here and try to make some business. Just getting by is quite the achievement.
Uhm. You're missing it here buddy. I've been bit by the Taiwan students that are going to China. I don't profit from that in any way shape or form. I lose. I've already been bit. The students don't want to talk to me because they're not studying English and that's what the E in TOEFL is for and that's what I sell. Game over. Insert coin. Go home yankee, we don't need your Eenglish because your PC chip game has eneded. See, I've already been bit. That is to say, I have been bitten already. It's the past tense, you see. There is no speculation on this, it's a done deal.
I should point out though that I had an American wife at one point who also bit me --drew blood even. So, you can get bit wherever you go. But as the Rolling Stones once said... let it bleed. You get over it or you die. Either way nothing much changes.
I'd love to see good evidence to the contrary, but I've always heard the single largest cost for the telecoms is the billing infrastructure and it sounds quite reasonable. The billing adds all kinds of cost intensive human resources to the infrastructure that is supposed to be entirely automated. It requires receptionists, cashiers, accountants and all of the associated business crap. And how many hours do they spend arguing about bad bills and other make work? While the customer argues on their own time, they companies have to pay their represntatives. And so the customer not only has to argue about bad bills on their own time but is paying the salary of the person they are arguing with. That's where monopolies no longer serve the interests of the people. Simply because telecoms evolved from a labor instensive model doesn't mean they get to stay that way in order to create busy work. This is always the argument against communism is that state run enterprises create all thes useless make-work jobs. It seems the private telecoms of the US are striking example of this same make-work inefficiency. The argument of socialist -vs- free market is misleading and off-topic, the point is that any institution that affects the majority of the people and is clearly failing to function for the benefit of those people it influences over a period of decades should not be supported by the society. That has nothing to do with socialist -vs- free market. It's just common sense.
Well so much for annonymity.
I am a partner in one of Taiwan's largest TOEFL cram schools. I produce the only remaining viable TOEFL computer practice test in Taiwan. Our competitors had larger budgets, but they also spent money too fast, when it began drying up last year they kept going full speed ahead and lately our only major competitor dried up and disappeared. I'm the sole survivor. Ha ha ha, but the battlefield is covered in salt. There's no spoils to be had. Game over. Insert coin.
I've been sitting through interviews with all the competitors' teachers that have been laid off. We're not going to hire them because we don't have any students either, we just like to drill them for data.
As far as where the kids have gone --well that's no secret. Look at the eductaion ministry's home page for more info on the lifting of restriction to Mainland. It's been about two years now since that went through. I would suggest that most government statistical reports from the US are at least a year out of date. And I would also suggest that US statistics on mainland China's education are little more than guesses.
It's tough, but it's not all bad. I've always been a bit concerned with the emphasis on English although I used to profit from it, though never much by US standards. I've always felt that the Chinese language is beautiful and extremely poetic and I've spent many years studying it. So, perhaps a turn away from the West isn't so bad for people like myself who have solid Mandarin skills. In the end, my Mandarin skills may be more important than all my precious windows code. I'll believe in this awesome Chinese translation software when I see it.
The Economist has been going on for months in a row about the end of capitalism as we know it and has even run articles in which The Economist of London's staff reporters have said things like-- perhaps capitalism was never appropriate for many parts of the world.
In case you hadn't heard, Taiwan's chip fabs have gone renegade and are pushing the ultimate limits of nanotechnology in a period of months rather than the twenty years drawn out schedule set by IBM. I'm talking about the 65nm fab being built in Singapore as we speak. See the last few months of EETimes if you want some scarry stories. Yeah, that was nanotech, it went by so fast you hardly even saw it, eh?
While investment bankers are being charged with corruption, Wall Street is below where it was before the Gulf War and Israel is loading nuclear cruise missles onto a fleet of submarines in an effort to beat India and Pakistan to the headlines of being the second nation in history to use nuclear weapons for offensive purposes.
Who is suggesting to you that things are suddenly going to rebound?
Oh, did I mention that Taiwan students have stopped attending the TOEFL in vast droves and are now going to grad school in mainland China instead of the US? So much for that strategic partnership. And you can guess what this is going to look like a few years down the road when the chips market has been totally commoditized and relocated to mainland China and Taiwan has de-facto reunified by popular consent from within Taiwan. Americans are going to be like --when did everything suddenly change? Well guess what, it's changing by the minute and much of it is the seeds of bitter fruit that we Americans have ourselves planted with decades of irresponsible government that has allowed the sickness of monopoly to put our economy in grave danger.
I suggest you look outside of anything that has to do with software or hardware for money. For entertainment though --hey don't touch that dial babe. PCs are the entertainment value of choice and value is what we're all going to need lots of.
Not quite commensurate with open source? Sorry, not even close in practice.
You speak of disclosure as though people write patents intending to have their work reporoduced,but that would be a ridiculous assumption in patents that is true in open source.
In fact, the job of the patent attorney is to reduce discolsure to an absolute minimum through any and all deceptive practices. That's simply what patent attorneys are paid for. Contrast this with open source where very few, I'd assume very few, coders consult with a lawyers on how to make their code incomprehensible to their competitors.
This was the title of a Zine my friend Eddy Liddle in Japan used to keep. The title was in reference to the failures of semiotics because of the proliferation of symbols in the wake of the stunningly inexpensive media reproduction techniques that began to show up in the early twentiety century and are still proceding today in the likes of boradband, optical media and hard drives.
A similar idea is the basis of one of the chapters of Jameson's book Postmodernism although there are many earlier references along the same lines from many authors. The the general idea is that as language proliferates through the intervention of machines meaning becomes destabilized. The euphoria part is a choice made by the individual. You can love it or hate it although it becomes increasingly difficult to remain unmoved which is what most people seem to prefer.
The abundance of patent data to the point that it becomes a cloak of knowledge rather than a guiding light will lead to an overhaul of the system, but not until the majority of Americans are moved as they were in the early part of the last century. Obviously, that movement will only come with financial chaos.
On the bright side, (this is the euphoria part) we might not be that far away from reforms.
Re:duh - cable company bandwidth metering
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P2P Television?
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· Score: 2
Right, cable bandwidth metering is just a lousy business decision. Where I live DSL just keeps getting faster for the same price, we're at 512K for $30 a month right now and they definitely don't meter bandwidth. We're already getting ads for even faster wireless service. As if that weren't enough, we supposedly have some company that wants to wire the whole apartment in Cat5 and give us two megs ethernet to each apartment for ten bucks a month.
In a climate like that the cable companies are merely putting themselves out of business with these stupid policies. I assume they're thinking they can get away with it in certain areas where they control the markets for the moment, but that won't last as long as bandwidth gets cheaper and people are willing to switch to another company in order to get more of it.
If you don't think bandwidth is getting cheaper, check out Cogent's web page. A thousand bucks a month for 100Mbps, no oversubscription, no limits just internet bandwidth. And that's basically a retail deal. They encourage wireless ISPs to use their services and at those prices you could sell 1Meg up and down connections at cost for ten bucks. At twenty bucks a month to customers you'd be a lot cheaper and faster than cable and still be taking in fifty percent of the revenue. They handle all the peering, do DNS service and give you IPs. Seems pretty straightforward. I don't know any cable that fast and no way is it that cheap.
So, bandwidth isn't an issue except temporarily for some people in some locations but not for most people in most locations.
And as for TV shows, isn't this already going on over Kazaa? The idea of having everybody sell their showz is cute in a vicious sort of way, but luckily it's not the way the internet works. The problem is the net is too efficient. Financial transactions would slow everything down and create non-existing costs in the process. Media rights companies are outdated because their whole existence is based on a much slower exchange model where the fees they rely on were a minor issue in an otherwise costly endeavor of making a purchase.
Preparing to leave the house to buy a product means getting dressed, getting in the car and risking ones life in the process and then interacting with others in the retail world which is sometimes like walking into a jungle. Then you're forced to stand in a line and serve the retail interests as they see fit in the temple that they have built in the all holy retail shopping center. By the time you take place at center stage among your fellow creatures before the cash register, handing over some cash is the least of your concerns.
Contrast that with sitting at home in your drawers in your cozy coccoon selecting a range of a hundred or so media titles and pushing the get button and forgetting about it for a few hours till it starts to trickle in. Where's the motivation to pay there? There's no drama in it. You're not in public, nobody is impatiently standing behind you. There's no cash register making its pavlovian noises.
These media rights companies want to delude themselves that as the process of obtaining information becomes more efficient by orders of magnitude that their earlier business model will do the same, but that's ridiculous and probably schizophrenic by the definition set by the insurance companies who determine which individuals qualify for disability because of mental disorders. These guys should properly be turning to disability payments as they are mentally incapable of facing reality. When a homeless nut job tries to stop you on the street and starts telling you about his psychotic delusions do you suddenly drop everything and try to understand how everything went so wrong for the guy and decide to take on each case yourself as a private charity or do you assume that this is what disability is for?
I'm serious. When these whiners start talking about all the money that people are going to pay them for their collection of dirty booger rags, they should be given the number of an intern therapist and the address for social services and that's it. Do not even think about giving these nuts your money and if they start getting violent, well do what you have to do to protect yourself. Just remember, they've already demonstrated in public that they're totally delusional and out of touch with reality so watch out. If they do start acting out though, it's important that we, the members of the public, collectively make note of these disturbances in order to have these menacing potential offenders institutionalized when they begin causing real problems. If the media rights holders get out of hand, the terrorists have won.
Okay you skeptics. I hope you're right. I live in Taiwan and the economy will be totally trashed if I'm right and everything will be okay if you guys are right. So, let's hope I'm just being misled by IBM, EETimes and all these gossip rags sporting this "we're already doing nanotech and it's getting old fast" nonsense. However, let us not forget the boy who cried wolf. Just because people have called it wrong in the past doesn't mean it disappears. I didn't see anybody disputing that CPUs are already at nanoscale.
If someone can come along who is able to accept small micro-payments -- one of the credit-card type companies -- then it could be viable. Right now, that's probably the biggest impediment: There's a fixed cost for using a credit card that's bigger than what a lot of these payments would be.
Yeah SOMEONE needs to come along. He suggests "a credit-card type" company. Well gee, it's the year 2002 right about now. I wonder how long we're going to wait for this fucking genius solution to come tripping by. WTF?
Not to be pedantic, but here's section 8 of the US Constitution:
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to . . . coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
It seriously pisses me off when asshole motherfuckers like this dumb Liebowitch bitch go throwing these off-the-cuff solutions about some mega corporation is going to come and save all our asses with a fair and reasonable micro payment system when he knows he's full of shit and that the US Government is responsible for the currency of the nation. What a cock sucker.
Trivial point but. . .
TSMC is currently in production at 130nm, starting 90nm process by the end of this summer and jumping to 65nm process in 2005. IBM says 40nm is the final limit for CMOS transistor gates. If it is indeed the middle of 2002, then I don't think Moore's Law is going to be holding in five years.
Of course there's always multiple processor configurations, advances in circuit designs and better nanotech (since processor designs already are properly classified as nanotech at the 0.1 micron level) and all sorts of things to push the limits one more time, but Moore's Law and CMOS are more or less at the end of the road once you're dealing with resolutions of a few dozen atoms which is what you've got at 40nm. And that information is according to the people who have the most to gain by denying it --IBM, Intel, TSMC, UMC etc.
I think it's more appropriate to use language like independent OS than to refer specifically to Symbian. If they specified Symbian today, what's to stop them from specifying CE tomorrow? Symbian is rather obscure and unstandard when you compare it to something like a Debian distro which according to the Intimate distro featured at handlhelds.org is simply a matter of having big enough CF modules or a microdrive.
I think the chances of 512Meg CFs coming below the hundred dollar mark is a lot more likely than microdrives doing the same and being as rugged, but either way you could just boot Debian once you've got a 512MegCF. That's available today, just a pit pricey. But hardware prices can still only go one direction. You could argue Debian isn't for the masses, but no reason RedHat or this United Linux group could come up with their own handheld distros as well when it really looks like the market is getting juicy.
And for the Linux haters all covered in FUD and strung out on commercial dope, MS can make up a straight XP instead of CE. For nex gen handheld devices like the OQO that's already the plan according to Redmond. 320X240s screens are already doable with standard OSs which makes Symbian and all this Java stuff as well as CE irrelevant, check out KDE on the Intimate distro. It looks rad and you've got room for four desktops. That's pretty decent for a handheld.
I recently learned about a backbone provider called Cogent right here on Slashdot. Ethernet bandwidth from Cogent free from the "costs savings" of intentionally oversubscribed networks like cable is $1000 a month for 100Mbps up and down no caps no limits whatsoever. They target small ISPs looking to give the cable and Bells a black eye. How are you going to explain away real live competitors in the free market making these cable and telecoms fucks look like the liars and thieves that they are? Read 'em and weep.
Yeah, I'm confused why you fuckhead Conservative asswipes hang around Slashdot.
Re:The sad truth about "Cancer Cures'
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Kills Tumors Dead
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· Score: 2
Let's not be so crass now. Let's try it another way. I was just going through this with my Chinese wife. Instead of saying Americans only understand greed let's say that Americans often seem confused about the meaning of fair competition and there are as many resasons for this as there are diffent people in the US.
Many people are uncomfortable with the complexity of reality and they habitually try to simplify things. Competition is an idea that often gets represented as a value in and of itself rather than a tool that is only valuable within a carefully managed context. The context part sometimes gets thrown out the window and competition for its own sake becomes a sort of idol worship. In America most people believe that free competition is an important model for growth and the advocacy of a competition in which many may participate with equal chances of succeeding is generally agreed to be a good thing.
But it's the details of implementing what is and what is not a fair competition that the American system gets ugly to foreign observers. It has happened in the past that the US has given way to out-and-out monopolies. Indeed, most American children become familiar with the term monopoly through playing the board game Monopoly which, in turn, took its name from the abundance of powerful monopolies prior to the previous depression. To some, it seems the US has returned to this state of near total dominance by a select group of monopolies and so I understand your distaste.
But its truly unkind to suggest that the greed that is reflected in the tendency towards monopolism that so sadly infects our great nation is a characteristic of the people. I would hope that people outside the US would respect the notion that the people of the US must be perhaps somewhat gullible and lenient in their sense of relative prosperity to allow this situation to come into being in such a cyclical manner. Moreover, I would suggest that the people of the US, despite their many shortcomings, are quite capable of cleaning up their own messses and that all will be in order in good time.
Oh yes, and have a nice day.
Hmm, I didn't know about these guys, thanks for the info big trucker. I thought it looked doable for $1000 a month for DS3 level service. I got a link off an old/. story for some 802.11 based bridges that were supposed to go 40 miles for about five grand on unregulated bands and I thought, hey why not run an ISP into a rural area and then I found that PacBell and Cox both wanted five grand a month to hookup and there was no way it was profitable at that level. If it's true, you're right, that's very cheap and potentially profitable.
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Hey Mike Baby!
I'm pretty sure I talked to you on the forums over there at Macromedia. The AhFoo from Taiwan who was complaining about his missing dongle for using Chinese Authorware systems.
Anyway, I this is not the place to be chatting about missing dongles but it is the place to talk aobut GNULinux and Macromedia with a real live Macromedia rep.
I just wanted to let you know that the Authorware runtime works fabulously under Wine. I was shocked and I knew that the people over there on the corporate hosted News server didn't want to hear about it as they're decidedly windows centric. I came to that conclusion after getting flamed pretty hard for bringing up the codeweavers plug-in for the Authorware web player and general talk of making a real runtime for GNULinux. Anyhow, just thought I'd pass that along --Authorware and Director apps seem to work awesome under Wine so Macromedia is now the leading Icon/Flow Control based RichMedia Authoring platform for GNULinux! Yee haw. Tell the school districts all about it. No need to upgrade those Windows licenses to leverage existing courseware. Isn't this great news?! You folks hopped the fence without even trying.
I hope you good people at Macromedia do a fine job of spreading this great news to clients who might be in charge of spending the taxpayers money like the school district that you send your products to every year.
Keep up the good work Mike. And log in next time!
65nm .40nm CMOS process and apparently we're only a few years from that. .5 micron technology. When Taiwan is absolutely positive there are no more decent profits in it, they'll hand it to the Mainland and say, OK, let's be friends now. This process started several years ago already with TSMC's relocation of a few fabs across the strait and is probably going to conclude in the next several years with both TSMC and UMC moving all operations to Mainland China. Prices will drop to level unthinkable to most Americans --two or three bucks for multi GHz CPUs-- but high end performance will become an elite game with overpriced specialty chips unsuited for the consumer market still being made in the US and Europe.
UMC has already started a joint venture with a German firn in Sinagapore at 65nm. Production is set to start in '04 or '05. Apparently people within IBM think this is getting towards the end of the line on CMOS shrinking for performance enhancement although further shrinkage would enable more transistors in a smaller area they wouldn't necessarily be faster. If you don't like to hear bad news, Intel will be happy to cheer you up. They say THz desktop chips are no problem and everybody is goingto want one, but I think they have a good reason to be deceptively optomistic. I tend to believe IBM over Intel in this debate and although they're also optomistic for gains over a long time scale, but they're pretty gloomy in near term prognostications. I seem to have read several places where they say yeah chips could be much faster, but not both cheaper and faster any time soon once we get past the
Personally, I think this is about it. Taiwan started moving everything to China several years ago and anybody who thinks the technology is going to be highly refined by transferring it to the Mainland has obviously never been to the two countries in question. Mainland is currently riding around on training wheels making chips using
I want to play some more.
See, if a fixed wireless ISP builds out a network like this using 802.11a and say a cheap Cogent 1gbps backbone connection and they're capping the users at 256kbps which is still plenty in today's world, they could build out fast with minimal infrastructure by simply using their own subscribers as base stations. If the subscriber is limited to 256k you've got a nice chunk of trunk line a few hundred feet in every direction from every user Let's say roughly four thousand users and the bandwidth is only ten grand a month. With high enough penetration, you don't need any infrastructure at all. Compare that to a cell network. There is no comparison. The product is similar, but the technologies are fundamentally different and the costs are incomparable.
Now, imagine this fixed wireless ISP has all these users, let's say in LA they decide to buy up four or five separate 1 Gig lines and they've got 20K or so uers. Well, eventually a lot of those users are going to be within range of the freeways. Next thing you're competing with the cell networks for freeway access using your subscriber's base stations and you don't have to pay for real estate, or cell towers or network planners or any of that crap that makes cell netowrks expensive and filled with fully employed individuals so cocksure about the future.
But, wait! It gets better.
Now our imaginary fixed wireless ISP is offering mobile wireless to people on the freeway for their handhelds. Let's say we're in 2004 by now and handhelds are finally worth buying. Well holy shit, this is where it gets really freaky --and I did see that whuzzisname piece where he mentioned this same idea-- the cars are mobile in a completely separate sense than radio waves, but they're mobile nonetheles. The implications are bizarre.
Now our fixed line wireless provider who doesn't own any base stations anywhere except for the ones his users have in their homes and handheld devices is having his bandwidth carried right out of the freakin' city in a stream that is precisely defined by the freeway, but which can be tapped into by anyone next to the freeway as well. If traffic density can be guaranteed, as it often can in Los Angeles, reliable service could be carried literally hundreds of miles away.
Ahh! But here's the catch right? There's no fucking way any one company is going to get that density.
Touche! It doesn't have to be a single company. ISPs could allow users to cross back and forth between networks. Hey! That's why they call in the Internet. Wild stuff. But if even a quarter of the cars on the road were network access points with a thousand feet of radius we'd be seeing fairly robust networks and cellular would be for emergency use only.
I agree that 802.11b as it is today is not an alternative to GPRS or CDMA, but here we have Atheros claiming to have a solution for 802.11a that has up to five times the range of 802.11b without violating power restrictions. The technology this is based on was called 802.11h for awhile.
Besides, while flat out range is the easy way to compare cellular and WiFi if you're arguing from the former's perspective, it misses a key difference in the technologies that we see embodied within a mess of 802 standards: Quality of Service and Security. These latter points may be more dangerous for old school wireless providers than simple range comparisons. In 802.11e, we see Quality of Service being laid out for wireless LANs. Once you start adding QoS and 50Mbps bandwidth together with a technology that is inherently mobile the definition of LAN starts to get a bit arbitrary and leaks into MAN or WAN.
However, you might counter that even if QoS on ad hoc wireless networks was being handled with the kind of efficiency that's currently only found on backbone switches it still couldn't become some kind of giant mesh network. Why not? Well the answer is trust. Folks aren't going to share a piece of their connection even if it means lower prices for everyone. They just don't trust each other, right? Hmm. Well sometimes that's true, but it all depends on the details.
Enter the Dragon --no, wait it's just 802.11i and 802.1x but close enough. These bad puppies are about taking the need for trust out of the picture by securing up these protocols.
Fantasy! Rubbish! It's all lies! I hear the cynics amongst you. But you have to admit if these standards bodies have already been formed at the IEEE, then somebody is taking this seriously.
Sure, for now GPRS and CDMA --the cell phone sustems-- are the way to go for the tiny minority who would pay that much for wireless data services. But personally I think wireless devices will take off about the time they become cheap enough that you can stream MP3s off your home server and that will have to be very very cheap probably like $10 a month for all you can eat 256K streaming downloads and I believe 802.11 standards will make it happen and the user's devices themselves will be the access points. If you think it sounds far fetched, tell it to the IEEE. And, get that resume updated!
The vast majority of the handheld devices today are based on underpowered yesterday tech that require special software and is way overpriced. /.ers have played with these yet, but I have and it is a fact in my experience that if you write script at even a moderate pace on those little pieces of shit you will crash CE in no time. Total hang and all you have to do is write a few sentences, that's lame. If you treat it gingerly it works great, but if the user is supposed to treat it like a precious little toy that means it's not there yet. At the moment, these things are little more than expensive toys. Sure you can tell me that Palm is so stable but speaking of yesterday's tech. Adding names to a list is really important for certain people, but for most people it's not a huge sell. Expensive toys are great for expensive spoiled brats, but not for mandating in public schools.
For instance if they went with a StrongArm110 processor and 64Megs with GPRS wireless they'd probably be running CE. Dear God! I doubt most
Depite being fragile and nearly worthless for real world tasks like note taking, handhelds are mega bucks. The model I have sitting in front of me that runs CE with the GPRS built-in is about $600. Wow! That's like a fifth of per head ADA. (Average Daily Attendance, the rate by which schools are compensated by the government which has to be leveraged over all expenses including teacher salaries)
Now when we see them coming with CF modules over 512MB and running more intriguing software like that we see at handhelds.org perhaps it will beome more adviseable as a recommendation for students, but I doubt it even then. By the time they have WiFi and big memory, they'll be victims of their own success for classroom purposes.
Once they become powerful enough to be worthwhile and useful tools, they will also become full-fledged entertaniment devices. Can you possibly imagine a conflict if groups of students decided they'd rather play QuakeIII tournament instead of participate in class? Or how about DIY porn, little Joey is using the camera on his PDA to look up little Cindy's skirt and is broadcasting the action to little Timmy in the third row. The class is quiet, but nobody seems to be concentrating on the assignments. What could possibly be occupying everyone's attention?
I have one of the latest version of one of these babies sitting right in front of me and I'm sure that it's a great, though fragile, toy and little else. Everyone I've let play with it agrees. The people that make them are going to be failing consistantly until they start marketing them as toys and entertainment devices. There is no way I buy this khaki pants, blue work shirt mentality that these things are essential tools that are the Next Big Thing(TM) in the here and now. If jotting down names and phone numbers is the essence of your life you already have a Palm. If you're looking for something more get a laptop. If you want a toy, get a handheld. But if you want an entertaining toy then wait a few years and get a handheld when you can stream videos and MP3s off your home server. Then they'll be rocking toys, but you aint going to be doing that with GPRS.
I think GPRS will be struggling in two years and in hindsight will be quite a disapointment.
GPRS is finally a here and now solution in many parts of the US though not everywhere, but it's also pricey.
While many devices such as handhelds already support GPRS, almost every handheld manufacturer in Taiwan is promising 802.11x by the second end of 2002. So if this product is supposed to be hitting the maket in 2004 I think it's going to miss the boat.
I'm the first one to say that CPU advances are hitting the wall hard and progress will be slowing soon, but wireless networking is another story. Betting against a big uptick in genuine wireless broadband in favor of stop gap solutions like GPRS seems short sighted.
Let's keep this in perspective dear Vlad.
You see, corporate research labs are exactly that: corporate research. Their primary concern is how to make money. The vast majority of basic research is done by . . . hmm let's see oh yeah that's right universities. And at the universities who does the actual footwork? Yes, it's true the lions share of research in every scientific field including biotech and computers is done by graduate students who work for . . . grades, ie mere recognition. Hmm. What is this? Communism?
Sleight of hand.
After the dig on macroeconomics he goes onto generalize and speak in broad and extremely vague terms for the rest of the piece. It's a rhetorical trick. I'm not impressed. Give me some solid details and less of this posturing.
Alright, one more time but just because I'm bored with what's going on in the other window.
See the deal here is that I no longer get to see the lovely children of Taiwan when they decide to go to China. I can't tell them anything because I don't see them anymore. I miss them so much and wish they would come back to me and buy my Eengleeesh learning CeeDees, but they don't like me no more and I am suspecting it's got something to do with the end of chip technology from the west.
If there were students to see, I would tell them how great America is like I always have done in the past, but they don't come to see me about going to China. It's not my business anymore at that point. I don't have any role to play in their China plans.
But anyhow, telling the extremely racis... I mean nationalist and traditional Chinese people of Taiwan that they should be against mainland China is a tricky thing to be doing as a foreigner who actually has to live here and try to make some business. Just getting by is quite the achievement.
Uhm. .. let it bleed. You get over it or you die. Either way nothing much changes.
You're missing it here buddy. I've been bit by the Taiwan students that are going to China. I don't profit from that in any way shape or form. I lose. I've already been bit. The students don't want to talk to me because they're not studying English and that's what the E in TOEFL is for and that's what I sell. Game over. Insert coin. Go home yankee, we don't need your Eenglish because your PC chip game has eneded. See, I've already been bit. That is to say, I have been bitten already. It's the past tense, you see. There is no speculation on this, it's a done deal.
I should point out though that I had an American wife at one point who also bit me --drew blood even. So, you can get bit wherever you go. But as the Rolling Stones once said.
I'd love to see good evidence to the contrary, but I've always heard the single largest cost for the telecoms is the billing infrastructure and it sounds quite reasonable. The billing adds all kinds of cost intensive human resources to the infrastructure that is supposed to be entirely automated. It requires receptionists, cashiers, accountants and all of the associated business crap. And how many hours do they spend arguing about bad bills and other make work? While the customer argues on their own time, they companies have to pay their represntatives. And so the customer not only has to argue about bad bills on their own time but is paying the salary of the person they are arguing with. That's where monopolies no longer serve the interests of the people. Simply because telecoms evolved from a labor instensive model doesn't mean they get to stay that way in order to create busy work. This is always the argument against communism is that state run enterprises create all thes useless make-work jobs. It seems the private telecoms of the US are striking example of this same make-work inefficiency. The argument of socialist -vs- free market is misleading and off-topic, the point is that any institution that affects the majority of the people and is clearly failing to function for the benefit of those people it influences over a period of decades should not be supported by the society. That has nothing to do with socialist -vs- free market. It's just common sense.
Your kind recognition is as good as +5 mod points.
Thanks
Well so much for annonymity.
I am a partner in one of Taiwan's largest TOEFL cram schools. I produce the only remaining viable TOEFL computer practice test in Taiwan. Our competitors had larger budgets, but they also spent money too fast, when it began drying up last year they kept going full speed ahead and lately our only major competitor dried up and disappeared. I'm the sole survivor. Ha ha ha, but the battlefield is covered in salt. There's no spoils to be had. Game over. Insert coin.
I've been sitting through interviews with all the competitors' teachers that have been laid off. We're not going to hire them because we don't have any students either, we just like to drill them for data.
As far as where the kids have gone --well that's no secret. Look at the eductaion ministry's home page for more info on the lifting of restriction to Mainland. It's been about two years now since that went through. I would suggest that most government statistical reports from the US are at least a year out of date. And I would also suggest that US statistics on mainland China's education are little more than guesses.
It's tough, but it's not all bad. I've always been a bit concerned with the emphasis on English although I used to profit from it, though never much by US standards. I've always felt that the Chinese language is beautiful and extremely poetic and I've spent many years studying it. So, perhaps a turn away from the West isn't so bad for people like myself who have solid Mandarin skills. In the end, my Mandarin skills may be more important than all my precious windows code. I'll believe in this awesome Chinese translation software when I see it.
The Economist has been going on for months in a row about the end of capitalism as we know it and has even run articles in which The Economist of London's staff reporters have said things like-- perhaps capitalism was never appropriate for many parts of the world.
In case you hadn't heard, Taiwan's chip fabs have gone renegade and are pushing the ultimate limits of nanotechnology in a period of months rather than the twenty years drawn out schedule set by IBM. I'm talking about the 65nm fab being built in Singapore as we speak. See the last few months of EETimes if you want some scarry stories. Yeah, that was nanotech, it went by so fast you hardly even saw it, eh?
While investment bankers are being charged with corruption, Wall Street is below where it was before the Gulf War and Israel is loading nuclear cruise missles onto a fleet of submarines in an effort to beat India and Pakistan to the headlines of being the second nation in history to use nuclear weapons for offensive purposes.
Who is suggesting to you that things are suddenly going to rebound?
Oh, did I mention that Taiwan students have stopped attending the TOEFL in vast droves and are now going to grad school in mainland China instead of the US? So much for that strategic partnership. And you can guess what this is going to look like a few years down the road when the chips market has been totally commoditized and relocated to mainland China and Taiwan has de-facto reunified by popular consent from within Taiwan. Americans are going to be like --when did everything suddenly change? Well guess what, it's changing by the minute and much of it is the seeds of bitter fruit that we Americans have ourselves planted with decades of irresponsible government that has allowed the sickness of monopoly to put our economy in grave danger.
I suggest you look outside of anything that has to do with software or hardware for money. For entertainment though --hey don't touch that dial babe. PCs are the entertainment value of choice and value is what we're all going to need lots of.
Not quite commensurate with open source? Sorry, not even close in practice.
You speak of disclosure as though people write patents intending to have their work reporoduced,but that would be a ridiculous assumption in patents that is true in open source.
In fact, the job of the patent attorney is to reduce discolsure to an absolute minimum through any and all deceptive practices. That's simply what patent attorneys are paid for. Contrast this with open source where very few, I'd assume very few, coders consult with a lawyers on how to make their code incomprehensible to their competitors.
This was the title of a Zine my friend Eddy Liddle in Japan used to keep. The title was in reference to the failures of semiotics because of the proliferation of symbols in the wake of the stunningly inexpensive media reproduction techniques that began to show up in the early twentiety century and are still proceding today in the likes of boradband, optical media and hard drives.
A similar idea is the basis of one of the chapters of Jameson's book Postmodernism although there are many earlier references along the same lines from many authors. The the general idea is that as language proliferates through the intervention of machines meaning becomes destabilized. The euphoria part is a choice made by the individual. You can love it or hate it although it becomes increasingly difficult to remain unmoved which is what most people seem to prefer.
The abundance of patent data to the point that it becomes a cloak of knowledge rather than a guiding light will lead to an overhaul of the system, but not until the majority of Americans are moved as they were in the early part of the last century. Obviously, that movement will only come with financial chaos.
On the bright side, (this is the euphoria part) we might not be that far away from reforms.
Right, cable bandwidth metering is just a lousy business decision. Where I live DSL just keeps getting faster for the same price, we're at 512K for $30 a month right now and they definitely don't meter bandwidth. We're already getting ads for even faster wireless service. As if that weren't enough, we supposedly have some company that wants to wire the whole apartment in Cat5 and give us two megs ethernet to each apartment for ten bucks a month.
In a climate like that the cable companies are merely putting themselves out of business with these stupid policies. I assume they're thinking they can get away with it in certain areas where they control the markets for the moment, but that won't last as long as bandwidth gets cheaper and people are willing to switch to another company in order to get more of it.
If you don't think bandwidth is getting cheaper, check out Cogent's web page. A thousand bucks a month for 100Mbps, no oversubscription, no limits just internet bandwidth. And that's basically a retail deal. They encourage wireless ISPs to use their services and at those prices you could sell 1Meg up and down connections at cost for ten bucks. At twenty bucks a month to customers you'd be a lot cheaper and faster than cable and still be taking in fifty percent of the revenue. They handle all the peering, do DNS service and give you IPs. Seems pretty straightforward. I don't know any cable that fast and no way is it that cheap.
So, bandwidth isn't an issue except temporarily for some people in some locations but not for most people in most locations.
And as for TV shows, isn't this already going on over Kazaa? The idea of having everybody sell their showz is cute in a vicious sort of way, but luckily it's not the way the internet works. The problem is the net is too efficient. Financial transactions would slow everything down and create non-existing costs in the process. Media rights companies are outdated because their whole existence is based on a much slower exchange model where the fees they rely on were a minor issue in an otherwise costly endeavor of making a purchase.
Preparing to leave the house to buy a product means getting dressed, getting in the car and risking ones life in the process and then interacting with others in the retail world which is sometimes like walking into a jungle. Then you're forced to stand in a line and serve the retail interests as they see fit in the temple that they have built in the all holy retail shopping center. By the time you take place at center stage among your fellow creatures before the cash register, handing over some cash is the least of your concerns.
Contrast that with sitting at home in your drawers in your cozy coccoon selecting a range of a hundred or so media titles and pushing the get button and forgetting about it for a few hours till it starts to trickle in. Where's the motivation to pay there? There's no drama in it. You're not in public, nobody is impatiently standing behind you. There's no cash register making its pavlovian noises.
These media rights companies want to delude themselves that as the process of obtaining information becomes more efficient by orders of magnitude that their earlier business model will do the same, but that's ridiculous and probably schizophrenic by the definition set by the insurance companies who determine which individuals qualify for disability because of mental disorders. These guys should properly be turning to disability payments as they are mentally incapable of facing reality. When a homeless nut job tries to stop you on the street and starts telling you about his psychotic delusions do you suddenly drop everything and try to understand how everything went so wrong for the guy and decide to take on each case yourself as a private charity or do you assume that this is what disability is for?
I'm serious. When these whiners start talking about all the money that people are going to pay them for their collection of dirty booger rags, they should be given the number of an intern therapist and the address for social services and that's it. Do not even think about giving these nuts your money and if they start getting violent, well do what you have to do to protect yourself. Just remember, they've already demonstrated in public that they're totally delusional and out of touch with reality so watch out. If they do start acting out though, it's important that we, the members of the public, collectively make note of these disturbances in order to have these menacing potential offenders institutionalized when they begin causing real problems. If the media rights holders get out of hand, the terrorists have won.
Okay you skeptics. I hope you're right. I live in Taiwan and the economy will be totally trashed if I'm right and everything will be okay if you guys are right. So, let's hope I'm just being misled by IBM, EETimes and all these gossip rags sporting this "we're already doing nanotech and it's getting old fast" nonsense. However, let us not forget the boy who cried wolf. Just because people have called it wrong in the past doesn't mean it disappears. I didn't see anybody disputing that CPUs are already at nanoscale.
Yeah SOMEONE needs to come along. He suggests "a credit-card type" company. Well gee, it's the year 2002 right about now. I wonder how long we're going to wait for this fucking genius solution to come tripping by. WTF?
Not to be pedantic, but here's section 8 of the US Constitution:
It seriously pisses me off when asshole motherfuckers like this dumb Liebowitch bitch go throwing these off-the-cuff solutions about some mega corporation is going to come and save all our asses with a fair and reasonable micro payment system when he knows he's full of shit and that the US Government is responsible for the currency of the nation. What a cock sucker.
Trivial point but. . .
TSMC is currently in production at 130nm, starting 90nm process by the end of this summer and jumping to 65nm process in 2005. IBM says 40nm is the final limit for CMOS transistor gates. If it is indeed the middle of 2002, then I don't think Moore's Law is going to be holding in five years.
Of course there's always multiple processor configurations, advances in circuit designs and better nanotech (since processor designs already are properly classified as nanotech at the 0.1 micron level) and all sorts of things to push the limits one more time, but Moore's Law and CMOS are more or less at the end of the road once you're dealing with resolutions of a few dozen atoms which is what you've got at 40nm. And that information is according to the people who have the most to gain by denying it --IBM, Intel, TSMC, UMC etc.
I think it's more appropriate to use language like independent OS than to refer specifically to Symbian. If they specified Symbian today, what's to stop them from specifying CE tomorrow? Symbian is rather obscure and unstandard when you compare it to something like a Debian distro which according to the Intimate distro featured at handlhelds.org is simply a matter of having big enough CF modules or a microdrive.
I think the chances of 512Meg CFs coming below the hundred dollar mark is a lot more likely than microdrives doing the same and being as rugged, but either way you could just boot Debian once you've got a 512MegCF. That's available today, just a pit pricey. But hardware prices can still only go one direction. You could argue Debian isn't for the masses, but no reason RedHat or this United Linux group could come up with their own handheld distros as well when it really looks like the market is getting juicy.
And for the Linux haters all covered in FUD and strung out on commercial dope, MS can make up a straight XP instead of CE. For nex gen handheld devices like the OQO that's already the plan according to Redmond. 320X240s screens are already doable with standard OSs which makes Symbian and all this Java stuff as well as CE irrelevant, check out KDE on the Intimate distro. It looks rad and you've got room for four desktops. That's pretty decent for a handheld.
I recently learned about a backbone provider called Cogent right here on Slashdot. Ethernet bandwidth from Cogent free from the "costs savings" of intentionally oversubscribed networks like cable is $1000 a month for 100Mbps up and down no caps no limits whatsoever. They target small ISPs looking to give the cable and Bells a black eye. How are you going to explain away real live competitors in the free market making these cable and telecoms fucks look like the liars and thieves that they are? Read 'em and weep.
Yeah, I'm confused why you fuckhead Conservative asswipes hang around Slashdot.
Let's not be so crass now. Let's try it another way. I was just going through this with my Chinese wife. Instead of saying Americans only understand greed let's say that Americans often seem confused about the meaning of fair competition and there are as many resasons for this as there are diffent people in the US.
Many people are uncomfortable with the complexity of reality and they habitually try to simplify things. Competition is an idea that often gets represented as a value in and of itself rather than a tool that is only valuable within a carefully managed context. The context part sometimes gets thrown out the window and competition for its own sake becomes a sort of idol worship. In America most people believe that free competition is an important model for growth and the advocacy of a competition in which many may participate with equal chances of succeeding is generally agreed to be a good thing.
But it's the details of implementing what is and what is not a fair competition that the American system gets ugly to foreign observers. It has happened in the past that the US has given way to out-and-out monopolies. Indeed, most American children become familiar with the term monopoly through playing the board game Monopoly which, in turn, took its name from the abundance of powerful monopolies prior to the previous depression. To some, it seems the US has returned to this state of near total dominance by a select group of monopolies and so I understand your distaste.
But its truly unkind to suggest that the greed that is reflected in the tendency towards monopolism that so sadly infects our great nation is a characteristic of the people. I would hope that people outside the US would respect the notion that the people of the US must be perhaps somewhat gullible and lenient in their sense of relative prosperity to allow this situation to come into being in such a cyclical manner. Moreover, I would suggest that the people of the US, despite their many shortcomings, are quite capable of cleaning up their own messses and that all will be in order in good time.
Oh yes, and have a nice day.
Hmm, I didn't know about these guys, thanks for the info big trucker. I thought it looked doable for $1000 a month for DS3 level service. I got a link off an old /. story for some 802.11 based bridges that were supposed to go 40 miles for about five grand on unregulated bands and I thought, hey why not run an ISP into a rural area and then I found that PacBell and Cox both wanted five grand a month to hookup and there was no way it was profitable at that level. If it's true, you're right, that's very cheap and potentially profitable.