I think someone should fund an international campaign with a ticker that shows a running count of the number of children who have suffered and died as a result of Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine campaign. Get it up on billboards in major cities and run some sort of "how many kids did you kill today?" campaign on TV. Shame Jenny and celebrities like her into using their influence to spread the truth to even even wider than they spread their initial lies. Saying "Oops, my bad" and walking away doesn't make up for the carnage.
That and the LA service area is just starting to come online. They recently filled in the gaps between my home and office. A month ago, there was a big dead zone and my house was on the edge of their coverage area. Now my house is in the middle of a Best Coverage area.
My home and portable Clear adapters get 8-9m down and 0.90-0.095m up very consistently. Latency is a tad high at 60-70ms but it beats the heck out of 3G. Just did a test and it's 68ms, 8.68 down, 0.94 up on my portable adapter.
If you're really desperate for an alternative and can't get Clear, there's always satellite. I think WildBlue is the current leader in price and data allowance.
I think it's less about upselling than about giving people a new reason to go to the theater. I can rent a blu-ray from RedBox for a buckfiddy and watch it on my 1080p dispay and 5.1 audio system. (Yeah, I'm way behind on the audio.) But 3D would require both a new display and a new player and I'm not likely to do that until the current units break or wear out. So that's the new hook. If I want to see it in 3D, I have to go to the theater.
It's not just postage. You have to figure in the cost of handling as well. Picking the product. Packing the product. Unpacking the product. Shelving the product. Goto 10.
Heh. Your description of the work computer takes me back to a conversation I had with one of our developers. I wanted to get an idea what improvements to the developers' machines would provide the greatest benefits. More cores? More RAM? Faster storage? Faster network? I was really hoping for an excuse to build a six-core, 16 gig, RevoDrive X2 beast. Nope. Just faster network access and a faster development server. They've already got gigabit in the cubes/offices and I don't manage the development servers so I don't get to build anything cool.
1) Ownership is critical. If an employee quits, how do you deal with the issue of company data and IP on someone's personal desktop/laptop? "Sorry, Bob, you're going to have to leave that here so we can securely wipe the hard drive. Including all of your family photos, music, and that novel you've been writing." Yeah, good luck with that. Same situation if you fire them.
2) Anything outside the tested/proven hardware and software configuration is a PITA. I've got 4 flavors of workstation. If there's a problem with a workstation, I can replace it in about an hour. And that's my "Scotty" estimate which assumes something more important (read: A VP with a printing problem) will interrupt me at least twice during the setup. Blast an image, apply updates, configure their mail, deploy. If I have to do a custom load of XP or Win7 (or freakin' Vista), it'll be half a day. Assuming I can get the OEM install discs for the OS. And they'll probably be pissed that 10 years' of un-backed-up family photos just got wiped out. Nevermind having to deal with operating systems that can't connect to a domain or aren't compatible with one of our software packages.
3) Who's responsible if it breaks? I sure didn't authorize a $4000 six-core, RAID-0 SSD, 16 gig, SLI-video beast for QA Intern #3 but QA Intern #2 just spilled his ultra-venti quintuple-shot skim mocha late on it and all the smoke leaked out. "Sorry, kid, sucks to be you. Help yourself to a DECWriter."
I could keep going forever but any one of those is a dealbreaker. Three and four year old workstations do the job just fine. Hell, the vast majority of office drones are doing the same things with their computers now that they were doing 10 years ago. Email, word processing, spreadsheets, and surfing the web. Any P4 or better with a gig of RAM will get the job done. The few people in my company who actually need more powerful machines already have them. I've been rockin' the same P4 at work since 2006 and it does everything I need. Heck, I'm running Windows 7 and Office 2010 on it for testing and evaluation and I just opened an excel document from a cold start (excel hadn't been run once this boot) in 5 seconds. A warm start with the same document took less than 3 seconds. No SSD, no quad-core CPU. Just an old single-core P4 and an 80 gig hard drive set to "quiet".
You sound like an apologist. Compare Verizon's marketing material to the product they actually provide and tell me with a straight face that what they're doing is right and ethical.
"Into movies? Stream your favorite director's cut without annoying buffering. Or better yet, download and view full-length HD quality movies. Is music your thing? Download a song in 4 seconds. Skype a lot? Experience videoconferencing without jitter or stutter. Is social networking your life? Upload a photo in just 6 seconds. Watch live TV in mobile high-def right on your laptop."
But if you go to their service plans, 10 gigs will cost you $80/month. And $10/gig after that. This is criminal! Joe Sixpack doesn't know what a gigabyte is or how many of them he's going to suck up watching Air Bud in 1080 on his laptop.
Reminds me of a time years ago when my company had a creaky old HeaP color inkjet with a cheap print server dongle. The IT consultant set up the machines to print directly to the TCP/IP address of the print server which was all well and good except NT didn't spool network print jobs and it was printing to a device with a buffer that was probably measured in bytes. Since the job wouldn't spool and couldn't be buffered, the application printing graphs and charts would sit there, unusable, until the job was complete. At about 5 minutes per page.
One day, I overheard one of the techs saying he couldn't process anything for an hour or so because he was printing off the color reports. "Hey, I can fix that."
net use lpt3: \\10.1.1.240\printer/persistent:yes
Change the printer port to LPT3 and bingo. Nearly instantaneous spooling of his color print jobs. 30 seconds and his application was freed up and ready to rock.
He was not happy that I'd wiped out his daily hour or so of slack time.
Then don't live in the boonies if you want the infrastructure benefits of an urban area. My grandpa spent thousands on a huge satellite dish and receiver system back in the 80s and never bitched about the cost because he felt the high cost of bringing in all those television channels was far outweighed by the benefits of living in a beautiful, rural area. If you're gonna live in the sticks, paying more for services and having less choice is reality.
But even that doesn't hold so much any more. The cable company wired his area back in the 90s and he's been on a cablemodem for 5 years. There's also a wireless provider that's been there for years (some sort of 802.x system), satellite for over a decade (from as many as 3 B2C providers at one time, in addition to the B2B providers), and, most recently, 3G service from several cellular carriers.
Honestly, with consumer grade two-way satellite available at a starting price of $50/month from multiple providers, there are very, very few areas in the US that only have a single source of entartube access.
One day, some old-timey soldier noticed that he could reflect the sun off his shield if he polished it real good and it made it hard for the enemy to see if he reflected the sun into the eyes of enemy soldiers. Same way we used to reflect the sun off our watches and shine it in people's faces when we were kids. So a few soldiers started doing this when the sun happened to be at the proper angle and, presto, we've got a death ray. 'cause the enemy has to come up with some reason to explain why they got their asses kicked so easily. "It was a death ray, majesty! It burned the eyes of our soldiers and set ships on fire!"
Like I said, the only reason I'm pounding Clear's service is because of rumors that they're throttling heavy users and the language they're using when communicating with customers about this topic is identical to the language used by another company that was discovered to have been intentionally reducing performance for "heavy" users. Since the user experience (reduced speed at specific thresholds) and corporate response (deny, deny, deny, obfuscate) looked identical, the only way I can find out the truth is to experiment and draw my own conclusions. So I downloaded the Debian DVD ISOs. Perfectly legal and legitimate use.
The fact that YOU never use 20 gigs in a month doesn't mean that other people don't have legitimate reasons to move that much data. Before I signed up, I told Clear that I needed to be able to move 50-100 gigs of data a month. "I know clear offers service in my area but I need to know whether Clear will be able to consistently deliver 50-100 gigs of data per month or if I will be subject to limits on the amount of data I can transfer." "Yes we certainly can." So I've got users reporting 7-10 gig caps on one side and a sales rep telling me they can certainly deliver 50-100 gigs of data per month on the other. How do I determine which claim is true? Experiment.
And, with HD video streaming becoming the norm rather than the exception, 50-100 gigs per month seems like a reasonable estimate. Streaming an HD movie from Netflix runs about 1.5-2 gigs for a 90 minute movie. If I watch 2 movies a week, that's 12-16 gigs right there from one person, not counting anything else at all. Clear markets their service as a cable/DSL replacement so they shouldn't be shocked by that kind of use.
100 megs of cellular data transfer on an internet device? What is it with the magically shrinking data caps these days? Verizon's been hyping LTE for months then cut off it's own nuts with 5 and 10 gig data caps and insane overage charges. AT&T's selling 2 gig plans with their ipads and iphones like that's going to be enough for these media-heavy devices.
I'm currently testing Clear's 4G service and, while the performance is excellent so far, there is strong evidence that they're throttling heavy users after they've moved about 10 gigs of data and calling it "network management". So far, I'm approaching 20 gigs (7 yesterday, 13 today) without a hitch but I may be in what we used to call the "honeymoon period" back in the DirecPC days. (Before they disclosed their throttling policy DPC sometimes didn't throttle new customers until they were past the return period.) Clear also just flipped the switch in my area so it's possible there isn't enough traffic to trigger the "management" protocols. The sad thing is that if Clear wasn't so "clearly" regurgitating DirecPC's playbook regarding throttling, I wouldn't feel the need to pound the crap out of their service to see if they'll cut me off. I pulled WAY more data through DirecPC's satellites just probing and testing their Fair Access Policy than I ever would have moved if the system just worked as advertised. Or if they'd just been honest about what they were doing.:)
Just one more generation and we'll finally have a true HD console (one rendering at 1920x1080, not scaling up from a much lower rez). I don't want to build another gaming computer. Give me a console that can do what my current rig can do and I'll be set.
My equipment can run for a few days without me being there to monitor every little transaction. In 5 years with my current company, I've been required to deal with IT stuff after hours twice. All other after-hours work has been scheduled and I shifted my time by coming in late or leaving early. That's averaging about once per year. So my stress levels are low.
Serious question. It sounds like these guys put a lot of effort and financial resources into this. It seems as if they were using their own equipment (NOT A BOTNET!!!) and there's no indication in the article that they were using stolen credit cards or other stolen funds to pay for the ticket purchases. Didn't it occur to any of them at any point in cooking up this plan that they could start a legitimate business with the same amount of work and they'd never have to worry about getting caught.
I only got to go to camp once. And it turned out to be a Christian camp but nobody told me that. I guess I should have known something was up when grandma suggested I take a bible but I was so excited, I said, "Yeah, sure, whatever." I was focused on the fact that I was going to sleepaway camp and that my friend David would be there. I hadn't seen him since he'd been hit by a car like six months earlier. But mom failed to mention that, due to the coma and brain damage, David most likely wouldn't remember me. I found this out when he said, "Do I know you?" Turns out he didn't. And he had a completely different personality. Now he was all into pulling mean pranks. Which I mostly went along with because it reduced my chances of being on the receiving end. Just as I was coming to grips with that, the first bible study session was called. Man, that was an awkward two weeks.
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To be fair, it is a nice ass.
I think someone should fund an international campaign with a ticker that shows a running count of the number of children who have suffered and died as a result of Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine campaign. Get it up on billboards in major cities and run some sort of "how many kids did you kill today?" campaign on TV. Shame Jenny and celebrities like her into using their influence to spread the truth to even even wider than they spread their initial lies. Saying "Oops, my bad" and walking away doesn't make up for the carnage.
That and the LA service area is just starting to come online. They recently filled in the gaps between my home and office. A month ago, there was a big dead zone and my house was on the edge of their coverage area. Now my house is in the middle of a Best Coverage area.
My home and portable Clear adapters get 8-9m down and 0.90-0.095m up very consistently. Latency is a tad high at 60-70ms but it beats the heck out of 3G. Just did a test and it's 68ms, 8.68 down, 0.94 up on my portable adapter.
If you're really desperate for an alternative and can't get Clear, there's always satellite. I think WildBlue is the current leader in price and data allowance.
Came here to post the same. Except replace "dongle" with "spot". And my home system is still connected.
OMG, somebody is wrong on the Internet!
I think it's less about upselling than about giving people a new reason to go to the theater. I can rent a blu-ray from RedBox for a buckfiddy and watch it on my 1080p dispay and 5.1 audio system. (Yeah, I'm way behind on the audio.) But 3D would require both a new display and a new player and I'm not likely to do that until the current units break or wear out. So that's the new hook. If I want to see it in 3D, I have to go to the theater.
It's not just postage. You have to figure in the cost of handling as well. Picking the product. Packing the product. Unpacking the product. Shelving the product. Goto 10.
Then how the heck an I supposed to write a seven-dimensional array? (Wow. Really pulled that one out of the way-back machine.)
Heh. Your description of the work computer takes me back to a conversation I had with one of our developers. I wanted to get an idea what improvements to the developers' machines would provide the greatest benefits. More cores? More RAM? Faster storage? Faster network? I was really hoping for an excuse to build a six-core, 16 gig, RevoDrive X2 beast. Nope. Just faster network access and a faster development server. They've already got gigabit in the cubes/offices and I don't manage the development servers so I don't get to build anything cool.
1) Ownership is critical. If an employee quits, how do you deal with the issue of company data and IP on someone's personal desktop/laptop? "Sorry, Bob, you're going to have to leave that here so we can securely wipe the hard drive. Including all of your family photos, music, and that novel you've been writing." Yeah, good luck with that. Same situation if you fire them.
2) Anything outside the tested/proven hardware and software configuration is a PITA. I've got 4 flavors of workstation. If there's a problem with a workstation, I can replace it in about an hour. And that's my "Scotty" estimate which assumes something more important (read: A VP with a printing problem) will interrupt me at least twice during the setup. Blast an image, apply updates, configure their mail, deploy. If I have to do a custom load of XP or Win7 (or freakin' Vista), it'll be half a day. Assuming I can get the OEM install discs for the OS. And they'll probably be pissed that 10 years' of un-backed-up family photos just got wiped out. Nevermind having to deal with operating systems that can't connect to a domain or aren't compatible with one of our software packages.
3) Who's responsible if it breaks? I sure didn't authorize a $4000 six-core, RAID-0 SSD, 16 gig, SLI-video beast for QA Intern #3 but QA Intern #2 just spilled his ultra-venti quintuple-shot skim mocha late on it and all the smoke leaked out. "Sorry, kid, sucks to be you. Help yourself to a DECWriter."
I could keep going forever but any one of those is a dealbreaker. Three and four year old workstations do the job just fine. Hell, the vast majority of office drones are doing the same things with their computers now that they were doing 10 years ago. Email, word processing, spreadsheets, and surfing the web. Any P4 or better with a gig of RAM will get the job done. The few people in my company who actually need more powerful machines already have them. I've been rockin' the same P4 at work since 2006 and it does everything I need. Heck, I'm running Windows 7 and Office 2010 on it for testing and evaluation and I just opened an excel document from a cold start (excel hadn't been run once this boot) in 5 seconds. A warm start with the same document took less than 3 seconds. No SSD, no quad-core CPU. Just an old single-core P4 and an 80 gig hard drive set to "quiet".
You sound like an apologist. Compare Verizon's marketing material to the product they actually provide and tell me with a straight face that what they're doing is right and ethical.
"Into movies? Stream your favorite director's cut without annoying buffering. Or better yet, download and view full-length HD quality movies. Is music your thing? Download a song in 4 seconds. Skype a lot? Experience videoconferencing without jitter or stutter. Is social networking your life? Upload a photo in just 6 seconds. Watch live TV in mobile high-def right on your laptop."
But if you go to their service plans, 10 gigs will cost you $80/month. And $10/gig after that. This is criminal! Joe Sixpack doesn't know what a gigabyte is or how many of them he's going to suck up watching Air Bud in 1080 on his laptop.
Yeah. Sounds pompous and faggy to me.
Reminds me of a time years ago when my company had a creaky old HeaP color inkjet with a cheap print server dongle. The IT consultant set up the machines to print directly to the TCP/IP address of the print server which was all well and good except NT didn't spool network print jobs and it was printing to a device with a buffer that was probably measured in bytes. Since the job wouldn't spool and couldn't be buffered, the application printing graphs and charts would sit there, unusable, until the job was complete. At about 5 minutes per page.
One day, I overheard one of the techs saying he couldn't process anything for an hour or so because he was printing off the color reports. "Hey, I can fix that."
net use lpt3: \\10.1.1.240\printer /persistent:yes
Change the printer port to LPT3 and bingo. Nearly instantaneous spooling of his color print jobs. 30 seconds and his application was freed up and ready to rock.
He was not happy that I'd wiped out his daily hour or so of slack time.
The Mormons were my first thought. Tho some would find their reason for collecting this information to be somewhat distasteful.
Then don't live in the boonies if you want the infrastructure benefits of an urban area. My grandpa spent thousands on a huge satellite dish and receiver system back in the 80s and never bitched about the cost because he felt the high cost of bringing in all those television channels was far outweighed by the benefits of living in a beautiful, rural area. If you're gonna live in the sticks, paying more for services and having less choice is reality.
But even that doesn't hold so much any more. The cable company wired his area back in the 90s and he's been on a cablemodem for 5 years. There's also a wireless provider that's been there for years (some sort of 802.x system), satellite for over a decade (from as many as 3 B2C providers at one time, in addition to the B2B providers), and, most recently, 3G service from several cellular carriers.
Honestly, with consumer grade two-way satellite available at a starting price of $50/month from multiple providers, there are very, very few areas in the US that only have a single source of entartube access.
One day, some old-timey soldier noticed that he could reflect the sun off his shield if he polished it real good and it made it hard for the enemy to see if he reflected the sun into the eyes of enemy soldiers. Same way we used to reflect the sun off our watches and shine it in people's faces when we were kids. So a few soldiers started doing this when the sun happened to be at the proper angle and, presto, we've got a death ray. 'cause the enemy has to come up with some reason to explain why they got their asses kicked so easily. "It was a death ray, majesty! It burned the eyes of our soldiers and set ships on fire!"
Like I said, the only reason I'm pounding Clear's service is because of rumors that they're throttling heavy users and the language they're using when communicating with customers about this topic is identical to the language used by another company that was discovered to have been intentionally reducing performance for "heavy" users. Since the user experience (reduced speed at specific thresholds) and corporate response (deny, deny, deny, obfuscate) looked identical, the only way I can find out the truth is to experiment and draw my own conclusions. So I downloaded the Debian DVD ISOs. Perfectly legal and legitimate use.
The fact that YOU never use 20 gigs in a month doesn't mean that other people don't have legitimate reasons to move that much data. Before I signed up, I told Clear that I needed to be able to move 50-100 gigs of data a month. "I know clear offers service in my area but I need to know whether Clear will be able to consistently deliver 50-100 gigs of data per month or if I will be subject to limits on the amount of data I can transfer." "Yes we certainly can." So I've got users reporting 7-10 gig caps on one side and a sales rep telling me they can certainly deliver 50-100 gigs of data per month on the other. How do I determine which claim is true? Experiment.
And, with HD video streaming becoming the norm rather than the exception, 50-100 gigs per month seems like a reasonable estimate. Streaming an HD movie from Netflix runs about 1.5-2 gigs for a 90 minute movie. If I watch 2 movies a week, that's 12-16 gigs right there from one person, not counting anything else at all. Clear markets their service as a cable/DSL replacement so they shouldn't be shocked by that kind of use.
100 megs of cellular data transfer on an internet device? What is it with the magically shrinking data caps these days? Verizon's been hyping LTE for months then cut off it's own nuts with 5 and 10 gig data caps and insane overage charges. AT&T's selling 2 gig plans with their ipads and iphones like that's going to be enough for these media-heavy devices.
I'm currently testing Clear's 4G service and, while the performance is excellent so far, there is strong evidence that they're throttling heavy users after they've moved about 10 gigs of data and calling it "network management". So far, I'm approaching 20 gigs (7 yesterday, 13 today) without a hitch but I may be in what we used to call the "honeymoon period" back in the DirecPC days. (Before they disclosed their throttling policy DPC sometimes didn't throttle new customers until they were past the return period.) Clear also just flipped the switch in my area so it's possible there isn't enough traffic to trigger the "management" protocols. The sad thing is that if Clear wasn't so "clearly" regurgitating DirecPC's playbook regarding throttling, I wouldn't feel the need to pound the crap out of their service to see if they'll cut me off. I pulled WAY more data through DirecPC's satellites just probing and testing their Fair Access Policy than I ever would have moved if the system just worked as advertised. Or if they'd just been honest about what they were doing. :)
Now where did I put that onion?
It's not small, no, no, no.
That was my first thought. Every GenX geek is humming that song right now.
That's why I only call my mom's sex line. She won't rat me out.
Just one more generation and we'll finally have a true HD console (one rendering at 1920x1080, not scaling up from a much lower rez). I don't want to build another gaming computer. Give me a console that can do what my current rig can do and I'll be set.
My equipment can run for a few days without me being there to monitor every little transaction. In 5 years with my current company, I've been required to deal with IT stuff after hours twice. All other after-hours work has been scheduled and I shifted my time by coming in late or leaving early. That's averaging about once per year. So my stress levels are low.
As much as you'd like to stop looking, you can't turn away. The horror!
Serious question. It sounds like these guys put a lot of effort and financial resources into this. It seems as if they were using their own equipment (NOT A BOTNET!!!) and there's no indication in the article that they were using stolen credit cards or other stolen funds to pay for the ticket purchases. Didn't it occur to any of them at any point in cooking up this plan that they could start a legitimate business with the same amount of work and they'd never have to worry about getting caught.
I only got to go to camp once. And it turned out to be a Christian camp but nobody told me that. I guess I should have known something was up when grandma suggested I take a bible but I was so excited, I said, "Yeah, sure, whatever." I was focused on the fact that I was going to sleepaway camp and that my friend David would be there. I hadn't seen him since he'd been hit by a car like six months earlier. But mom failed to mention that, due to the coma and brain damage, David most likely wouldn't remember me. I found this out when he said, "Do I know you?" Turns out he didn't. And he had a completely different personality. Now he was all into pulling mean pranks. Which I mostly went along with because it reduced my chances of being on the receiving end. Just as I was coming to grips with that, the first bible study session was called. Man, that was an awkward two weeks.
It's all fun and games until you find out he's not phobic at all. Wink wink, nudge nudge.