If these specification didn't include draconian provisions for protecting the interests of copyright holders, it's more likely because corporations are sometimes slow to move and even slower to build consensus within an industry, not because they don't want to do it.
Actually, it's more simple than that. Hollywood and the cable providers have been pushing for really draconian protections. The hardware makers have been refusing to implement them, because they know consumers don't want them, don't want the extra cost (significant), and the extra design time (which equates to even more cost).
The FCC has been pushing the industry to come to a resolution on its own for 3 years now. And threatening to impose one if they didn't (hah - yeah, right... the entire industry knew the FCC was bullshitting, since they haven't imposed a government created standard on the TV/cable industry in decades).
I haven't checked the various industry sources yet, but I suspect that this is a big win for consumers and DTV in general.
So lets share secrets. Yours first. Social security number, date of birth, credit card numbers, etc. It's all just information.
If you tell someone something and ask them to keep it a secret, you get pissed at them when they don't. When you do the same thing and have them sign a legal affidavit saying that they won't tell anyone else the secret, then if they do you have the power of the court behind you.
And, you know what? They didn't have to promise not to tell the secret. You didn't have to share it with them either at that point. But once you promise, damn right you're going to get torched for breaking that promise.
Oh, and before you start going off on non-sequitors, the law does provide for breaking contracts when revealing wrongdoing. There's an entire section of law dealing with whistle blowing, so as to protect and encourage people to report illegal activity.
And it's not legally binding if you do that -- if you don't point out the changes then there's no contract whatsoever.
And don't think this gets you off the hook... because you've now attempted to enter into a contract under bad faith, and/or attempted to defraud, and their lawyer is going to eat you for breakfast.
IANAL, and so some of the above may be offbase, but I doubt it's far offbase.
Oh, and hoping you'll read this... I'm rather surprised you didn't point this stuff out. Being CEO of Xiph you know this already.
And, as a side note, is Ogg too CPU heavy to run on the Intel Strongarm processor? The Turtle beach guys are claiming that the Audiotron can't handle Ogg because of this. It's one of the major reasons I haven't yet purchased one. I'm still looking for pretty much what you asked for -- a box that will play whatever format I chose. If the Audiotron (or similar) supported OGG and FLAC then I'd buy 2 or 3 of the boxes and start ripping all my CDs to a server.
TI has general purpose DSPs and CPUs available that can do whatever you need today as well as a good bit of what you may need tomorrow. Of course, you're going to pay for that flexibility - not only in price, but also in size, power consumption, and heat.
This is why purpose-specific DSPs are so popular in the marketplace, particularly the portable one. Lessee... I can build a device that can be reprogrammed to read any number of formats, but it's going to have twice the build cost and a quarter the battery life. Oh, and if I'm reading from a small media format like SecureMedia, then my chip layout has just doubled the size of the device because the chip's so much bigger now.
Or I can just go buy that MP3/WAV/Orange book chip over there, which is half the price, has competitive power consumption, requires less design (don't have to bother with updates, with coding other formats, etc), and will fit into my micro-sized device.
Which one do you think companies go for?
There are plenty of general purpose DSPs/CPUs. There are plenty of slightly specialized ones as well (which is more likely to be what you want anyway). But they all have tradeoffs. For the portable market the upside almost never makes up for the downsides. The standalone unit is different, and that's why you see devices like the Turtlebeach Audiotron, Rio Receiver, etc. with more powerful CPUs/DSPs.
Oh, and as for your NDA/compiler issue -- most don't have horrendous NDAs unless you get them in the pre-release cycle. And a lot use GCC for a compiler too, since it's a helluva lot cheaper to do what's necessary to cross-compile with a proven compiler than it is to create your own from scratch.
Well, while I agree with the gist of your arguement, I wish it was that easy on Windows...
At home, with XP Pro, I installed QT first since I knew it wasn't on my box. Needed it to watch video clips from my digital camera anyway. So I download it, let it install itself, and try to watch the movie. No go. The webpage in the main story does nothing - at one point it said that it needed an additional component for QT, but the software wasn't available. Whatever. Never got it working.
At work (Win2k) I clicked on the link first, it asked me about a QT ActiveX plugin, then to install QT. Fine. Let it do its thing. Reload the page -- warning that it may not display correctly due to the page asking for some insecure information and my ActiveX security permissions preventing this. Joy.
I eventually got it working at work - open QT, paste the URL provided by the parent post.
And yes, I'm sure I could beat things into submission if I wished. But I long ago learned that tweaking shit just isn't worth the time and I prefer for my computer to just work like the appliance it's supposed to be. Which is one major reason I run Windows instead of Linux on my main PC. Needless to say this kind of thing annoys me.
Or perhaps I can set up a wardialer and start charging people "protection money".
Please do. When you call the wrong numbers consecutively the FTC and local phone company will be quite happy to cart you off to jail for interfering with emergency numbers (hint - wardialiling too many hospital, fire station, police, or other lines is a violation of federal law -- I used to work at a hospital and it's a bad thing when the entire unit's phone lines are tied up by some telemarketer).
Er... duh. I forgot that slander/libel (the former in this case, since it was spoken) was civil and not criminal. You might be able to press the DA to take her to court for "false witness" or similar, but I doubt that's more than a misdemeanor, and the DA may be unwilling to press charges in the first place.
And I doubt the parents were loaded either -- and while you can get a settlement in this case, the hard part is always in the collection. Even with a court document, garnishing wages, seizing assets, and so forth is a difficult proposition at best.
It might actually be best if he just moved on, although it means moving to an entirely different part of the country, leaving family and friends behind.
And I'm rather stunned that this deeply offtopic thread has gotten modded up...
Your (or "Tom's") motive might be vengeful, but that wouldn't make it an entirely appropriate and constructive way to handle this sort of apalling injustice
Er, I think you miswrote this sentence -- I believe you meant to say:
"... but that wouldn't mean it's not an entirely appropriate and constructive way..."
And yes, I agree with you. Which is why I'd probably do it. I doubt the counselor will though. Shame.
Actually, the only reason I can think of not to pursue the case was invalidated. I dislike making parents pay for the crimes of idiot teenagers, but in this case the mother was as idiotic as the daughter. If she hadn't insisted the case move forward he may've been able to cobble his life back together.
If true, then he has one hell of a slander case, and it's pretty much open-and-shut.
Loss of livelihood, emotional trauma, yadda yadda yadda -- it would pretty much ruin the parents.
Of course, he may not want to do that to them, or they may not have enough to make it worthwhile. I'd consider suing the kid just to get her convicted of a felony, which gets to go on her permanent record and fucks her life about as squarely as she just fucked his.
But that's me, and I can be a vengeful asshole if you screw me first.
Yes, but those are sub-channels on the main channel. You're not going to find Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC all multiplexing off channel 40, so you're not going to see any reduction in bandwidth usage. You may see an increase in channels available over-the-air, but if the subchannels are riding on the local network carriers then they'll be switched off whenever the network prime-time programming comes on (which, with the exception of Fox, is in HD).
Thats why nowhere in the world except th US is bothering about HDTV
Whatever you want to believe. Quite a few countries have rolled out or are rolling out high definition broadcast TV. The UK's failed initially, possibly due to corporate politics, but it's likely to come back. Japan has high-def broadcast, but it's analog. The EU as a whole is now looking at HD digital broadcast as well -- they're unlikely to adopt the ATSC standard because: A) it sucks, B) NIH syndrome (on both sides of the pond -- c.f. point A).
Oh, and you can't just turn up the compression -- the MPEG-2 codec has definite lower limits before you start seeing massive degredation. And they can't just throw away data since the standard defines resolutions. Nor can you switch to a different compression (like MPEG-4) since the standard doesn't incorporate anything but MPEG-2.
Frankly, if you look at the current stations broadcasting in digital, none of them are using the multiplexing feature. Yeah, a lot of them mumble about using it, but it's not being done.
Oh, and DTV does not use any less bandwidth than analog - it's still spec'd at a 6 MHz band, because it requires that much for 1080i HDTV (yes, I do understand the difference between DTV and HD, but they're broadcast using the exact same standard and on the same frequency - it's just up to the broadcaster to chose the resolution). The sideband protection is less though, since there's considerably less concern for interference now.
As for digital tuners - all TVs 36" and up will have digital tuners in 2004. By 2007 all TVs will incorporate digital tuners, period. This was one of the more recent FCC decisions, and one of the most controversial (since the vast majority of the American public no longer uses the built in tuner for TV reception, but instead gets TV via cable or sat). Stand alone digital receivers are already available, although for $300+. Mass production will cut that price drastically, and I don't think you're far off with the $50 figure.
You have two different stations that you have to broadcast currently, and to do that you need two towers. Especially since they're on different frequencies.
As for how many broadcast digitally - most of the stations got extentions last May. Since then the number has been slowly climbing. And while some do broadcast analog via digital, all of the major networks (except Fox) do have true HDTV content for at least a few hours a night. Rubert Murdoch, being the jackass he is, refuses to broadcast anything better than 480p on Fox, so they're rapidly becoming the bastard stepchild of the DTV industry. Hell, even WB and UPN are doing better.
2006? Nah. 2012? Probably. The 2006 figure was never taken seriously by anybody with a clue. Screw replacing the TVs - that's chump change. Replacing every bit of electronics in the broadcast chain, including the tower, in 10 years? When there was absolutely nothing available in 1996? No f'ing way.
But if you think that DTV is going to outright fail, well, you're just as blind as those who thought it would be nationwide by 2006.
Re:DSL companies WANT to miss out on customers
on
DSL Rising
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· Score: 2
If we were starting from scratch, we could set up monopolies to own and operate the lines, and allow free competition in provision of services over the lines. Any business would be free to offer any service it could move over the lines, EXCEPT the line-owning monopoly
Nifty in theory, but it doesn't always work out well in reality.
This exact scenario occurred a few years ago with natural gas in Georgia. The monopoly was ended, with it controlling only the pipes. You buy your gas from any one of a half dozen companies. The company providing the gas cannot, by law, service end users - they just get a "pipeline fee" that's part of your bill.
Sounds great, right? Georgia should have a highly competitive, low priced, high customer service natural gas industry because of this...
But we don't. In fact, the whole deregulation was done so badly that we paid twice as much as the rest of the country last year for natural gas. And we had a mild winter. Customer service is crap - by and large worse than it was with the monopoly. And of the 20 or so companies that started offering service, less than half a dozen are left. Because the billing system was so screwed up for the first two years (and probably still is) that a lot of companies folded while waiting for money from customers -- and a lot of customers failed to pay the bills because they were so absurdly high.
I still like the idea of deregulation, but pretty much every effort to deregulate utilities has stopped after the dual failures in California (which, in retrospect, is due purely to Enron manipulation) and Georgia.
Re:Uptake slow because telco at capacity on DSL
on
DSL Rising
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· Score: 2
In my local area, the telco, Qwest, appears to be at capacity for providing DSL
Perhaps. But if they're turning customers away, don't you think they'd install more capacity?
So, why don't they install more capacity? Maybe because, in the US, it makes absolutely no sense for a phone company to invest in DSL -- because they aren't able to recoup the money.
See, the FCC passed down a judgement that stated that the phone companies had to allow other ISPs access to their DSL systems. Which, for the consumer, should be a good thing since you're not tied into whatever ISP the phone company wants to dump on you. However the baby bells charged absurd rates to the ISPs for access, which meant that the ISP would lose money if they offered DSL at the same price as the phone company. Of course, if they offered it for more then they'd get fewer customers.
This went on for awhile until the FCC passed down another ruling stating that the phone company couldn't charge for anything more than the cost to provide the line -- essentially the last mile. Suddenly it became viable (if not horribly profitable) for ISPs to offer competitive DSL service through telco POPs.
So what's the issue? Simply put - the telco loses money everytime they upgrade an area for DSL. They can only charge for the circuit, they can't charge for doing the work to upgrade the circuit to DSL capability, or for any of their hardware that has to be in place for DSL (some can be, some cannot - I'm not positive of where the line is). So the phone company spends a ton on upgrading, but then can't recoup the costs. Tell me again why the phone company should bother with the upgrade?
So, all of that said, why are cable modems still doing well? Because the FCC explicitly denied the right for ISPs to offer service over the cable infrastructure. In most areas if you sign up for a cable modem you have no choice about the ISP. Their way or the highway. A few (and very few) markets have allowed local ISPs access, but since it's not required by law don't expect that to expand -- there's absolutely no incentive for the cable provider to do so.
refusing to signup people who don't request MSN as their ISP
That would be illegal in the US, and would be trivial to prove true or false. And by illegal, I mean that the FCC would beat the crap out of Qwest for doing it.
Personally, I've had both and I'd never use a cable modem again. The ISP was beyond incompetent. Of course, the cable provider has changed since then, as has the ISP, so things are probably better now. But excepting an occasional problem my DSL service has been great. And while my friends on cable aren't having problems when I am, I'm not having problems when they are. And we have roughly the same amount and degree of problems when they do occur.
No, it's not news. It's a port of a crappy game, it's not being done for a good commercial reason, and it's not going to set the Linux community (or even gaming community) on storm.
Furthermore, posting it without noting the relationship is bad journalism. It's a conflict of interest. At least when/. reports on stuff that their parent company or even distant cousin companies do they note the relationship. Frankly, Michael shouldn't have been the one to approve the story, and whoever did should've noted the relationship between a/. editor and the story.
Of course, it's Michael. Why is anyone surprised? At all?
Well, show her that it's a recoverable expense -- if you wanted to upgrade to a newer TiVo in the future then you can sell the old one on eBay and get the entire cost of the lifetime service back. You can't do that for monthly fees.
Oh, and if you (or anyone else) does go looking to buy a TiVo - check out the returns at local stores. We bought my wife's that way and saved about $50.
Well, I suspect you left out the value of the lifetime sub in your analysis.
If you have a TiVo w/ lifetime then your $250 is, essentially, recoverable. Unless the unit has a massive failure (as in, the MB fries itself) then if you sell the TiVo you can get your money back out.
If you're paying monthly then it's money down the drain -- you've paid for it but won't get it back in any manner.
As it happens, I paid $200 for lifetime, but I'll get $250 back if I ever sell my TiVo. Not bad!
This, of course, assumes that TiVo continues indefinitely (if they go under then the lifetime sub is worthless), and that the hardware doesn't have a serious failure for a long, long time.
Slashdot Mirror
If these specification didn't include draconian provisions for protecting the interests of copyright holders, it's more likely because corporations are sometimes slow to move and even slower to build consensus within an industry, not because they don't want to do it.
Actually, it's more simple than that. Hollywood and the cable providers have been pushing for really draconian protections. The hardware makers have been refusing to implement them, because they know consumers don't want them, don't want the extra cost (significant), and the extra design time (which equates to even more cost).
The FCC has been pushing the industry to come to a resolution on its own for 3 years now. And threatening to impose one if they didn't (hah - yeah, right... the entire industry knew the FCC was bullshitting, since they haven't imposed a government created standard on the TV/cable industry in decades).
I haven't checked the various industry sources yet, but I suspect that this is a big win for consumers and DTV in general.
Duh.
Doesn't mean some obvious points can't be made.
I mean, information wants to be free, right?
Oh, of course.
So lets share secrets. Yours first. Social security number, date of birth, credit card numbers, etc. It's all just information.
If you tell someone something and ask them to keep it a secret, you get pissed at them when they don't. When you do the same thing and have them sign a legal affidavit saying that they won't tell anyone else the secret, then if they do you have the power of the court behind you.
And, you know what? They didn't have to promise not to tell the secret. You didn't have to share it with them either at that point. But once you promise, damn right you're going to get torched for breaking that promise.
Oh, and before you start going off on non-sequitors, the law does provide for breaking contracts when revealing wrongdoing. There's an entire section of law dealing with whistle blowing, so as to protect and encourage people to report illegal activity.
And it's not legally binding if you do that -- if you don't point out the changes then there's no contract whatsoever.
And don't think this gets you off the hook... because you've now attempted to enter into a contract under bad faith, and/or attempted to defraud, and their lawyer is going to eat you for breakfast.
IANAL, and so some of the above may be offbase, but I doubt it's far offbase.
Oh, and hoping you'll read this... I'm rather surprised you didn't point this stuff out. Being CEO of Xiph you know this already.
And, as a side note, is Ogg too CPU heavy to run on the Intel Strongarm processor? The Turtle beach guys are claiming that the Audiotron can't handle Ogg because of this. It's one of the major reasons I haven't yet purchased one. I'm still looking for pretty much what you asked for -- a box that will play whatever format I chose. If the Audiotron (or similar) supported OGG and FLAC then I'd buy 2 or 3 of the boxes and start ripping all my CDs to a server.
Uh... it's all about cost.
TI has general purpose DSPs and CPUs available that can do whatever you need today as well as a good bit of what you may need tomorrow. Of course, you're going to pay for that flexibility - not only in price, but also in size, power consumption, and heat.
This is why purpose-specific DSPs are so popular in the marketplace, particularly the portable one. Lessee... I can build a device that can be reprogrammed to read any number of formats, but it's going to have twice the build cost and a quarter the battery life. Oh, and if I'm reading from a small media format like SecureMedia, then my chip layout has just doubled the size of the device because the chip's so much bigger now.
Or I can just go buy that MP3/WAV/Orange book chip over there, which is half the price, has competitive power consumption, requires less design (don't have to bother with updates, with coding other formats, etc), and will fit into my micro-sized device.
Which one do you think companies go for?
There are plenty of general purpose DSPs/CPUs. There are plenty of slightly specialized ones as well (which is more likely to be what you want anyway). But they all have tradeoffs. For the portable market the upside almost never makes up for the downsides. The standalone unit is different, and that's why you see devices like the Turtlebeach Audiotron, Rio Receiver, etc. with more powerful CPUs/DSPs.
Oh, and as for your NDA/compiler issue -- most don't have horrendous NDAs unless you get them in the pre-release cycle. And a lot use GCC for a compiler too, since it's a helluva lot cheaper to do what's necessary to cross-compile with a proven compiler than it is to create your own from scratch.
Well, while I agree with the gist of your arguement, I wish it was that easy on Windows...
At home, with XP Pro, I installed QT first since I knew it wasn't on my box. Needed it to watch video clips from my digital camera anyway. So I download it, let it install itself, and try to watch the movie. No go. The webpage in the main story does nothing - at one point it said that it needed an additional component for QT, but the software wasn't available. Whatever. Never got it working.
At work (Win2k) I clicked on the link first, it asked me about a QT ActiveX plugin, then to install QT. Fine. Let it do its thing. Reload the page -- warning that it may not display correctly due to the page asking for some insecure information and my ActiveX security permissions preventing this. Joy.
I eventually got it working at work - open QT, paste the URL provided by the parent post.
And yes, I'm sure I could beat things into submission if I wished. But I long ago learned that tweaking shit just isn't worth the time and I prefer for my computer to just work like the appliance it's supposed to be. Which is one major reason I run Windows instead of Linux on my main PC. Needless to say this kind of thing annoys me.
And they should stop for free too
They do. Send snail mail. Costs you a stamp.
Or perhaps I can set up a wardialer and start charging people "protection money".
Please do. When you call the wrong numbers consecutively the FTC and local phone company will be quite happy to cart you off to jail for interfering with emergency numbers (hint - wardialiling too many hospital, fire station, police, or other lines is a violation of federal law -- I used to work at a hospital and it's a bad thing when the entire unit's phone lines are tied up by some telemarketer).
Oh please... I doubt the EQ community was there that much last night. Way, way too busy doing raids.
I mean, really. You've got to get your priorities straight!
Er... duh. I forgot that slander/libel (the former in this case, since it was spoken) was civil and not criminal. You might be able to press the DA to take her to court for "false witness" or similar, but I doubt that's more than a misdemeanor, and the DA may be unwilling to press charges in the first place.
And I doubt the parents were loaded either -- and while you can get a settlement in this case, the hard part is always in the collection. Even with a court document, garnishing wages, seizing assets, and so forth is a difficult proposition at best.
It might actually be best if he just moved on, although it means moving to an entirely different part of the country, leaving family and friends behind.
And I'm rather stunned that this deeply offtopic thread has gotten modded up...
Your (or "Tom's") motive might be vengeful, but that wouldn't make it an entirely appropriate and constructive way to handle this sort of apalling injustice
Er, I think you miswrote this sentence -- I believe you meant to say:
"... but that wouldn't mean it's not an entirely appropriate and constructive way..."
And yes, I agree with you. Which is why I'd probably do it. I doubt the counselor will though. Shame.
Actually, the only reason I can think of not to pursue the case was invalidated. I dislike making parents pay for the crimes of idiot teenagers, but in this case the mother was as idiotic as the daughter. If she hadn't insisted the case move forward he may've been able to cobble his life back together.
If true, then he has one hell of a slander case, and it's pretty much open-and-shut.
Loss of livelihood, emotional trauma, yadda yadda yadda -- it would pretty much ruin the parents.
Of course, he may not want to do that to them, or they may not have enough to make it worthwhile. I'd consider suing the kid just to get her convicted of a felony, which gets to go on her permanent record and fucks her life about as squarely as she just fucked his.
But that's me, and I can be a vengeful asshole if you screw me first.
Yes, but those are sub-channels on the main channel. You're not going to find Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC all multiplexing off channel 40, so you're not going to see any reduction in bandwidth usage. You may see an increase in channels available over-the-air, but if the subchannels are riding on the local network carriers then they'll be switched off whenever the network prime-time programming comes on (which, with the exception of Fox, is in HD).
Thats why nowhere in the world except th US is bothering about HDTV
Whatever you want to believe. Quite a few countries have rolled out or are rolling out high definition broadcast TV. The UK's failed initially, possibly due to corporate politics, but it's likely to come back. Japan has high-def broadcast, but it's analog. The EU as a whole is now looking at HD digital broadcast as well -- they're unlikely to adopt the ATSC standard because: A) it sucks, B) NIH syndrome (on both sides of the pond -- c.f. point A).
Oh, and you can't just turn up the compression -- the MPEG-2 codec has definite lower limits before you start seeing massive degredation. And they can't just throw away data since the standard defines resolutions. Nor can you switch to a different compression (like MPEG-4) since the standard doesn't incorporate anything but MPEG-2.
Frankly, if you look at the current stations broadcasting in digital, none of them are using the multiplexing feature. Yeah, a lot of them mumble about using it, but it's not being done.
confusing digital television with HDTV
Nope, I understand the difference quite clearly.
Oh, and DTV does not use any less bandwidth than analog - it's still spec'd at a 6 MHz band, because it requires that much for 1080i HDTV (yes, I do understand the difference between DTV and HD, but they're broadcast using the exact same standard and on the same frequency - it's just up to the broadcaster to chose the resolution). The sideband protection is less though, since there's considerably less concern for interference now.
As for digital tuners - all TVs 36" and up will have digital tuners in 2004. By 2007 all TVs will incorporate digital tuners, period. This was one of the more recent FCC decisions, and one of the most controversial (since the vast majority of the American public no longer uses the built in tuner for TV reception, but instead gets TV via cable or sat). Stand alone digital receivers are already available, although for $300+. Mass production will cut that price drastically, and I don't think you're far off with the $50 figure.
Yes, including the tower.
You have two different stations that you have to broadcast currently, and to do that you need two towers. Especially since they're on different frequencies.
As for how many broadcast digitally - most of the stations got extentions last May. Since then the number has been slowly climbing. And while some do broadcast analog via digital, all of the major networks (except Fox) do have true HDTV content for at least a few hours a night. Rubert Murdoch, being the jackass he is, refuses to broadcast anything better than 480p on Fox, so they're rapidly becoming the bastard stepchild of the DTV industry. Hell, even WB and UPN are doing better.
Whatever.
2006? Nah. 2012? Probably. The 2006 figure was never taken seriously by anybody with a clue. Screw replacing the TVs - that's chump change. Replacing every bit of electronics in the broadcast chain, including the tower, in 10 years? When there was absolutely nothing available in 1996? No f'ing way.
But if you think that DTV is going to outright fail, well, you're just as blind as those who thought it would be nationwide by 2006.
If we were starting from scratch, we could set up monopolies to own and operate the lines, and allow free competition in provision of services over the lines. Any business would be free to offer any service it could move over the lines, EXCEPT the line-owning monopoly
Nifty in theory, but it doesn't always work out well in reality.
This exact scenario occurred a few years ago with natural gas in Georgia. The monopoly was ended, with it controlling only the pipes. You buy your gas from any one of a half dozen companies. The company providing the gas cannot, by law, service end users - they just get a "pipeline fee" that's part of your bill.
Sounds great, right? Georgia should have a highly competitive, low priced, high customer service natural gas industry because of this...
But we don't. In fact, the whole deregulation was done so badly that we paid twice as much as the rest of the country last year for natural gas. And we had a mild winter. Customer service is crap - by and large worse than it was with the monopoly. And of the 20 or so companies that started offering service, less than half a dozen are left. Because the billing system was so screwed up for the first two years (and probably still is) that a lot of companies folded while waiting for money from customers -- and a lot of customers failed to pay the bills because they were so absurdly high.
I still like the idea of deregulation, but pretty much every effort to deregulate utilities has stopped after the dual failures in California (which, in retrospect, is due purely to Enron manipulation) and Georgia.
In my local area, the telco, Qwest, appears to be at capacity for providing DSL
Perhaps. But if they're turning customers away, don't you think they'd install more capacity?
So, why don't they install more capacity? Maybe because, in the US, it makes absolutely no sense for a phone company to invest in DSL -- because they aren't able to recoup the money.
See, the FCC passed down a judgement that stated that the phone companies had to allow other ISPs access to their DSL systems. Which, for the consumer, should be a good thing since you're not tied into whatever ISP the phone company wants to dump on you. However the baby bells charged absurd rates to the ISPs for access, which meant that the ISP would lose money if they offered DSL at the same price as the phone company. Of course, if they offered it for more then they'd get fewer customers.
This went on for awhile until the FCC passed down another ruling stating that the phone company couldn't charge for anything more than the cost to provide the line -- essentially the last mile. Suddenly it became viable (if not horribly profitable) for ISPs to offer competitive DSL service through telco POPs.
So what's the issue? Simply put - the telco loses money everytime they upgrade an area for DSL. They can only charge for the circuit, they can't charge for doing the work to upgrade the circuit to DSL capability, or for any of their hardware that has to be in place for DSL (some can be, some cannot - I'm not positive of where the line is). So the phone company spends a ton on upgrading, but then can't recoup the costs. Tell me again why the phone company should bother with the upgrade?
So, all of that said, why are cable modems still doing well? Because the FCC explicitly denied the right for ISPs to offer service over the cable infrastructure. In most areas if you sign up for a cable modem you have no choice about the ISP. Their way or the highway. A few (and very few) markets have allowed local ISPs access, but since it's not required by law don't expect that to expand -- there's absolutely no incentive for the cable provider to do so.
refusing to signup people who don't request MSN as their ISP
That would be illegal in the US, and would be trivial to prove true or false. And by illegal, I mean that the FCC would beat the crap out of Qwest for doing it.
Personally, I've had both and I'd never use a cable modem again. The ISP was beyond incompetent. Of course, the cable provider has changed since then, as has the ISP, so things are probably better now. But excepting an occasional problem my DSL service has been great. And while my friends on cable aren't having problems when I am, I'm not having problems when they are. And we have roughly the same amount and degree of problems when they do occur.
Ya... I bought the troll, hook, line, and sinker.
Oops.
No, it's not news. It's a port of a crappy game, it's not being done for a good commercial reason, and it's not going to set the Linux community (or even gaming community) on storm.
/. reports on stuff that their parent company or even distant cousin companies do they note the relationship. Frankly, Michael shouldn't have been the one to approve the story, and whoever did should've noted the relationship between a /. editor and the story.
Furthermore, posting it without noting the relationship is bad journalism. It's a conflict of interest. At least when
Of course, it's Michael. Why is anyone surprised? At all?
Well, show her that it's a recoverable expense -- if you wanted to upgrade to a newer TiVo in the future then you can sell the old one on eBay and get the entire cost of the lifetime service back. You can't do that for monthly fees.
Oh, and if you (or anyone else) does go looking to buy a TiVo - check out the returns at local stores. We bought my wife's that way and saved about $50.
Hrm... well when my GF (now wife) moved in I had a TiVo. She didn't know what it was, and thought it was just a toy.
About a month later we went out and bought a second one, with lifetime service.
And no, I doubt I'm in a different social bracket than you. But I do know when it makes sense to do a capital outlay upfront.
I wonder what kind of nasty stuff they have cooked up in this Tivo 2 of theirs....
Hey, look ma! It's slander.
Unless, of course, you can prove it. Which you can't, because there is no "nasty stuff".
TiVo tracks every button press from the remote.
So, yes, they do know how many times you play something back. At least, in aggregate.
Unfortunately for you, everyone else appears to have put 3 thumbs down on Family Guy.
Well, I suspect you left out the value of the lifetime sub in your analysis.
If you have a TiVo w/ lifetime then your $250 is, essentially, recoverable. Unless the unit has a massive failure (as in, the MB fries itself) then if you sell the TiVo you can get your money back out.
If you're paying monthly then it's money down the drain -- you've paid for it but won't get it back in any manner.
As it happens, I paid $200 for lifetime, but I'll get $250 back if I ever sell my TiVo. Not bad!
This, of course, assumes that TiVo continues indefinitely (if they go under then the lifetime sub is worthless), and that the hardware doesn't have a serious failure for a long, long time.