Not to turn this into a flamewar, but the G4s of that vintage Benchmarked significantly faster than their Pentium counterparts at the same clockspeed, and could address up to 2GB of RAM, which was a ridiculous amount in 1999.
I still use it because it's perfectly adequate for what I need it for. Although Apple succumbed to a great deal of bloat in 10.5, OS X runs remarkably well on older hardware.
I'm running 10.3 on that machine, because there's not much I do on it that would benefit from a new version (and mainly because I'm too lazy to upgrade).
Unlike Windows, and like Linux an OS X installation doesn't get "stale" after a while, and continues to run perfectly adequately. Although I don't use the machine to encode video, it's perfectly capable for day-to-day tasks.
In fact, I had a big video editing project a year or two back that required the use of several machines at once. Remarkably, Final Cut Pro has absurdly modest system requirements. Although encoding and rendering complex effects was predictably slow as a dog, the main interface remained as fast, snappy, and useful as it was on the top-of-the-line G5s I was using.
If you're not doing super-CPU-intensive tasks, old macs tend to do reasonably well.
Failing all that, they make fantastic Linux boxes if you can live without Flash. Add UbuntuPPC and XFce, and you've got yourself an even faster, and still quite capable machine.
A surprising number of "Classic" Macs are still out there and still being used, although even I consider that a bit extreme.
Apple Hardware is typically comparable to hardware from other vendors at the same price point. There sure as heck isn't a $1,000 markup.
Whether or not it's necessary for Apple to use Xeon processors and server-grade components in the Mac Pro is an entirely different debate. However, you're paying for more than just OS X.
In my own unqualified and unscientific opinion, I've found Apple hardware (back in the PPC days) to generally outlive its PC counterparts by a good margin. It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but I think that most other users claims back me up. I have a 450 Mhz G4 tower that's still running nearly unmodified, and still generally useful, nearly 10 years after its original purchase.
Russia has (or at least had) a good heavy-lift system in the form of the Energia rocket.
One of the primary advantages of Russia's shuttle system was that the Energia boosters didn't necessarily need to lift a shuttle. They could lift all sorts of other cargo.
Its makers claim that they can still build one if there is the interest for it.
A Dell Precision T5400 configured as close as I could get to the $2800 Mac Pro (Two quad-core Xeon 2.8ghz/2gb RAM/320gb HDD) priced out to $4315.
Although it is indeed frustrating that Apple doesn't offer a "normal" desktop box, their machines seem to be a good value for the money, provided that you fit the profile of one of their offerings.
The eeePC has pretty terrible specs, but makes up for it by being extremely portable. I doubt I'd take my laptop nearly as many places as I do if it were larger than it is (I use a 12" Powerbook. Before that, I used a Dell Latitude LS, which fit the bill just as well, but was also equally expensive).
A PC below the Macbook's price-range will very likely weigh twice as much.
This is only sort-of true. They won't service machines that have 3rd-party RAM installed, but don't mind if you remove the RAM, and then give it to them. They don't want to waste time diagnosing problems caused by 3rd-party components, which seems perfectly reasonable.
In my case from a few years ago, the tech removed the RAM for me, and returned it in a static bag separately.
Their current lineup is fairly competitively priced.
Go ahead and spec out a similar machine from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. When comparing apples to apples (heh), they might not necessarily be the best deal around, but are certainly competitive, and definitely not a ripoff.
Military/aerospace-grade components are built to an absurdly high standard, and have to be tolerant of extreme physical forces and high levels of electromagnetic radiation.
Take a look at what gets put onto satellites (including ones not built by governments). You'll see a lot of radiation-hardened Pentiums and 486s.
A year or two ago, an amateur satellite got sent up using off-the-shelf components, and many (including those who built it) were astonished when the chips lasted a whole month before finally succumbing.
The military is one area where the government actually wants to succeed, as opposed to the many other agencies that were intentionally set up for failure during the Reagan years.
Yes. Daikatana did indeed suck without the expansion pack.
Actually, come to think of it.......
(But seriously, Nintendo were one of RAMBUS's first customers, with the N64 being the first widespread application of their RDRAM technology. If you'll also remember back a few years, RDRAM was hella expensive, not very good, and the company engaged in some shady dealings with Intel to force it on consumers. After that failed, they (literally) sued every other memory company in existence. This all probably has a great deal to do with the N64's limited amount of built-in memory)
He says in this article that GNOME was chosen for how easy to use it is. He's saying that the widget set doesn't dictate that
In my experience, that doesn't necessarily seem to be true.
The UI Paradigms used in various applications seem to be very much a function of their underlying toolkits.
Windows apps have traditionally been heavily toolbar-driven, and allow for extensive keyboard navigation. Contextual menus are also used quite often (although less so these days). Many of the UI paradigms left-over from the pre-multitasking days are still around, as many apps (eg. Photoshop) still use nestled windows, and users are encouraged to "maximize" whichever application they are using.
MacOS (X) apps have never made use of nestled windows, and there is much encouragement for applications to seamlessly interact via drag & drop, and such. Contextual menus are present, but not extensively used (no right mouse button!). Cocoa applications are easily distinguishable from Carbon apps, and applications that make use of neither stick out like a sore thumb.
Perhaps due to its perceived "weaknesses," GTK applications tend to take a minimalistic approach. In my own opinion, this has resulted in a more user-friendly environment, where apps do exactly what they need to, and nothing more. Once you learn to work within its bounds, Xfce is also a fantastic environment, simultaneously being "modern" and extremely "minimalistic" if that's the sort of thing you want.
KDE and QT both feel like they borrow many of their UI paradigms from Pre-XP windows. The underpinnings are solid (and also C++), but the apps tend to suffer from feature bloat, making them daunting to new users, and visually unappealing. (Too many toolbars, and not enough pixel artists results lots of identical blue blobs at the top of the screen!) KDE4 seems to be a step in the right direction, though I do think that the KDE folks still need to rethink their strategy.
One of Java's primary historical weaknesses has been the lack of a coherent toolkit or consistent set of UI paradigms. One commonly-heard joke is that Java's portability enables it to be equally ugly and slow on all platforms. Fortunately, SWT fixes much of this, and provides perhaps the only successful cross-platform UI library to date, though not all Java apps implement it......
Hmm.... I never realized it was quite so prestigious to own a copy of Britannica...
In fact, this list seems to indicate that it's even more important than the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which DeBakey received in 1969, but isn't on the list.
I dunno. Those sort of things immediately jump to mind as "whatcouldpossiblygowrong"
It sounds a whole lot like those experiments that the Navy did to attempt to increase the efficiency of sub crews by "fine-tuning" their sleep patterns. It worked great for about two weeks, and afterward, the crews went raving mad (but thankfully recovered eventually).
Pushing the limits of human endurance for non-lifesaving purposes seems like awfully risky business to me. It's no surprise that DARPA stayed well away from it for so long.
As correct as you may be, it seems that the 10th is only invoked whenever the ruling party doesn't like something.
Although the idea of states' rights is very much open to debate, the wording of the law should be amended to reflect the status quo that's been present ever since the end of the Civil War (remember folks, the constitution is not scripture, and was explicitly designed to be updated as needed).
For one thing, the 10th was drafted long before the sparsely-populated western states were annexed. Many of these states simply don't have the population to support all these agencies, and it would be fairly inefficient to duplicate the efforts of an agency such as the EPA or FDA 50 times over.
As long as the federal agencies are focusing on the issues that affect the majority of the states, I honestly see no problem. States certainly should be able to run their own agencies to tackle their own problems (that's the point after all), though it does make a lot of sense to have a federally-run agency to focus on the big-picture issues.
The reason why Skype and the official NX Client are still around, and in widespread use is simply because they are already free-as-in-beer, and don't have any serious deficiencies. In both cases, they're perfectly adequate for 99.99% of their users.
If either of those things changes, development on a FOSS client will pick up.
NX is a really good example of this, because it's an open protocol, and there are virtually no practical issues impeding development of a good open-source client.
People care about results, not ideology. If the non-free NX client is already good enough, why bother reproducing what's already there?
At risk of self-deprecation, I find Feynmann's lectures to be far too brief to gain a sufficient understanding of the subject, and that the lectures would almost immediately dive off into a fairly advanced treatment of the material, and provided few if any examples.
If you're looking for an introduction to the subject, I can't say that I give them the same sort of recommendations as others are giving here. They're certainly not horrible, but they also take a very different approach to the material than most texts do, especially at the undergraduate level.
If you want a comprehensive "survey" of Physics, I'd more highly recommend the Landau/Lifshitz series of texts (although these too are somewhat different from what you'd find being taught in a classroom in the UK or US).
Failing that, there are a few widely-used undergraduate texts that are hard to go wrong with (Griffiths, Kittel, Shankar, etc....), especially given that most of your colleagues will have learned from them as well.
Also consider that I've never heard of Feynman being taught at a UK university, and that it's not particularly popular in the US, apart from at Caltech (which is where he wrote them).
Although I can give a wholehearted recommendation for the Griffiths and Kittel books (and have heard good things about the Shankar QM book), I had some *serious* qualms about Thornton/Marion's Classical Dynamics book.
Attempting to work my way through their reasoning, proofs, and explanations was an exercise in frustration and futility. Some important sections were barely described at all, while other trivial topics were covered to death. The texts by Goldstein and Landau/Lifshitz are both vastly better, especially for somebody coming from a Maths background. Your local library should have a copy of both, as they've been around for quite some time.
It seems like far too many politicians are actively attempting to destroy the economy in order to make this happen.
How about attempting to fix things, rather than forcing us to start from scratch? Can't we simply admit that Reganomics is simply digging us into a deeper and deeper hole?
+ Any long distance you do by ship or train. Pick up your oversized baggage directly from the ship, and fly it to its final destination.
+ If I can add my own: the weather can change a lot in 8 hours. Flying into a storm with a 50 ton windmill hanging from your butt is bad news.
I think that the idea is for these to be able to haul large or awkwardly-shaped cargo to remotely-placed sites where transportation by ship/train isn't an option.
For instance, large portions of buildings can be completed in a workshop, and then flown and dropped into to their final sites.
In other cases, remote locations (like the oil fields of the Alaskan north slope) can be extremely problematic for transporting large equipment or goods using traditional methods. Although the range problem will still need to be overcome, transporting a fully-assembled piece of equipment by air would certainly be preferable to shipping it in pieces, and assembling on-site.
This project doesn't seem to seek to supplant traditional transportation methods, but rather seeks to allow the transport of cargo that simply can't be carried using current methods.
It shouldn't be that hard to wire up a simple resistive 15W load to one of these cheap power supplies.
Connect a multimeter/oscilloscope, and take a look at what sort of signal it's putting out.
To take it a step further, connect the input of the cheapo power supply to a benchtop supply capable of putting out a "clean" 120VAC signal, and start fucking around with it. How high/low can you go before the supply's output is degraded? Remember that even a "good" mains supply can vary by up to ±10%.
I'd rather do things scientifically than recommend that all router users purchase a UPS that will likely cost more than the router itself. I've found router power supplies to be unusually subpar. However, there's an extremely fine line between the amount of voltage required to make the router unstable, and the amount required to fry the thing. I really doubt that slight fluctuations in the input voltage are causing the routers to become unstable because of this, or that a UPS could solve the problem. A better suggestion would simply be to replace the DC power supply with a more robust one.
This may be just anecdotal evidence, but the Airport Express series has a reputation for being flaky, and typically dropping flat-out dead after about a year.
I don't want to absolutely bad-mouth the product, because I've also got an Airport Extreme base station that has never needed rebooting in the few years that I've had it, and because I've also got an AE Express that's worked fine for me the entire time I've had it. However, the Airport Express seems to be based around *much* different hardware than its bigger, more expensive cousins, which are put in the same league as high-end gear from Cisco and the like, rather than the $50 boxes from Linksys that most of us have in our homes.
Jesus..... anything is better than RCN. Maybe it was just my area, but their TV and Internet offerings were both miserably pathetic, their support terrible, and the prices high.
As a point of evidence, we finally got two-way cable installed and supported in our town around 2006-7.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs that the cable companies are bad enough to make the phone company, of all things, look good.
And yeah. FiOS is fantastic. The cable companies will be out of business in a few years, and although I don't look forward to a Verizon monopoly, for now the service is phenominal, and the FTTP infrastructure is just about as future-proof as you can possibly ask for.
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Not to turn this into a flamewar, but the G4s of that vintage Benchmarked significantly faster than their Pentium counterparts at the same clockspeed, and could address up to 2GB of RAM, which was a ridiculous amount in 1999.
I still use it because it's perfectly adequate for what I need it for. Although Apple succumbed to a great deal of bloat in 10.5, OS X runs remarkably well on older hardware.
I'm running 10.3 on that machine, because there's not much I do on it that would benefit from a new version (and mainly because I'm too lazy to upgrade).
Unlike Windows, and like Linux an OS X installation doesn't get "stale" after a while, and continues to run perfectly adequately. Although I don't use the machine to encode video, it's perfectly capable for day-to-day tasks.
In fact, I had a big video editing project a year or two back that required the use of several machines at once. Remarkably, Final Cut Pro has absurdly modest system requirements. Although encoding and rendering complex effects was predictably slow as a dog, the main interface remained as fast, snappy, and useful as it was on the top-of-the-line G5s I was using.
If you're not doing super-CPU-intensive tasks, old macs tend to do reasonably well.
Failing all that, they make fantastic Linux boxes if you can live without Flash. Add UbuntuPPC and XFce, and you've got yourself an even faster, and still quite capable machine.
A surprising number of "Classic" Macs are still out there and still being used, although even I consider that a bit extreme.
Again, no no no no. That's simply not true.
Apple Hardware is typically comparable to hardware from other vendors at the same price point. There sure as heck isn't a $1,000 markup.
Whether or not it's necessary for Apple to use Xeon processors and server-grade components in the Mac Pro is an entirely different debate. However, you're paying for more than just OS X.
In my own unqualified and unscientific opinion, I've found Apple hardware (back in the PPC days) to generally outlive its PC counterparts by a good margin. It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but I think that most other users claims back me up. I have a 450 Mhz G4 tower that's still running nearly unmodified, and still generally useful, nearly 10 years after its original purchase.
Russia has (or at least had) a good heavy-lift system in the form of the Energia rocket.
One of the primary advantages of Russia's shuttle system was that the Energia boosters didn't necessarily need to lift a shuttle. They could lift all sorts of other cargo.
Its makers claim that they can still build one if there is the interest for it.
Enough to print the contents of the Library of Congress on.
Bullshit. The processors alone would cost $1430 from NewEgg.
A Dell Precision T5400 configured as close as I could get to the $2800 Mac Pro (Two quad-core Xeon 2.8ghz/2gb RAM/320gb HDD) priced out to $4315.
Although it is indeed frustrating that Apple doesn't offer a "normal" desktop box, their machines seem to be a good value for the money, provided that you fit the profile of one of their offerings.
How heavy was the laptop?
For most laptop users, this is a huge factor.
The eeePC has pretty terrible specs, but makes up for it by being extremely portable. I doubt I'd take my laptop nearly as many places as I do if it were larger than it is (I use a 12" Powerbook. Before that, I used a Dell Latitude LS, which fit the bill just as well, but was also equally expensive).
A PC below the Macbook's price-range will very likely weigh twice as much.
This is only sort-of true. They won't service machines that have 3rd-party RAM installed, but don't mind if you remove the RAM, and then give it to them. They don't want to waste time diagnosing problems caused by 3rd-party components, which seems perfectly reasonable.
In my case from a few years ago, the tech removed the RAM for me, and returned it in a static bag separately.
Their current lineup is fairly competitively priced.
Go ahead and spec out a similar machine from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. When comparing apples to apples (heh), they might not necessarily be the best deal around, but are certainly competitive, and definitely not a ripoff.
Grab a Flickr account, and upload the photos there.
Having scans of that book preserved somewhere for posterity would be pretty freakin' awesome too. I sincerely doubt Woz would mind...
This is your chance to be a geek hero. Share the wealth!
Also the fact that it's apparently one of the only halfway-decent Blu-Ray players out there.
I was shocked when I first read this, but it's apparently true. How the heck did Blu-Ray "win" when the only decent player is a freakin' PS3?
Uhm. No.
Military/aerospace-grade components are built to an absurdly high standard, and have to be tolerant of extreme physical forces and high levels of electromagnetic radiation.
Take a look at what gets put onto satellites (including ones not built by governments). You'll see a lot of radiation-hardened Pentiums and 486s.
A year or two ago, an amateur satellite got sent up using off-the-shelf components, and many (including those who built it) were astonished when the chips lasted a whole month before finally succumbing.
The military is one area where the government actually wants to succeed, as opposed to the many other agencies that were intentionally set up for failure during the Reagan years.
Yes. Daikatana did indeed suck without the expansion pack.
Actually, come to think of it.......
(But seriously, Nintendo were one of RAMBUS's first customers, with the N64 being the first widespread application of their RDRAM technology. If you'll also remember back a few years, RDRAM was hella expensive, not very good, and the company engaged in some shady dealings with Intel to force it on consumers. After that failed, they (literally) sued every other memory company in existence. This all probably has a great deal to do with the N64's limited amount of built-in memory)
He says in this article that GNOME was chosen for how easy to use it is. He's saying that the widget set doesn't dictate that
In my experience, that doesn't necessarily seem to be true.
The UI Paradigms used in various applications seem to be very much a function of their underlying toolkits.
Windows apps have traditionally been heavily toolbar-driven, and allow for extensive keyboard navigation. Contextual menus are also used quite often (although less so these days). Many of the UI paradigms left-over from the pre-multitasking days are still around, as many apps (eg. Photoshop) still use nestled windows, and users are encouraged to "maximize" whichever application they are using.
MacOS (X) apps have never made use of nestled windows, and there is much encouragement for applications to seamlessly interact via drag & drop, and such. Contextual menus are present, but not extensively used (no right mouse button!). Cocoa applications are easily distinguishable from Carbon apps, and applications that make use of neither stick out like a sore thumb.
Perhaps due to its perceived "weaknesses," GTK applications tend to take a minimalistic approach. In my own opinion, this has resulted in a more user-friendly environment, where apps do exactly what they need to, and nothing more. Once you learn to work within its bounds, Xfce is also a fantastic environment, simultaneously being "modern" and extremely "minimalistic" if that's the sort of thing you want.
KDE and QT both feel like they borrow many of their UI paradigms from Pre-XP windows. The underpinnings are solid (and also C++), but the apps tend to suffer from feature bloat, making them daunting to new users, and visually unappealing. (Too many toolbars, and not enough pixel artists results lots of identical blue blobs at the top of the screen!) KDE4 seems to be a step in the right direction, though I do think that the KDE folks still need to rethink their strategy.
One of Java's primary historical weaknesses has been the lack of a coherent toolkit or consistent set of UI paradigms. One commonly-heard joke is that Java's portability enables it to be equally ugly and slow on all platforms. Fortunately, SWT fixes much of this, and provides perhaps the only successful cross-platform UI library to date, though not all Java apps implement it......
The EXIT_SUCCESS macro was placed in <stdlib.h> after lobbying from the largest Piraha software companies.
Not to be confused with the GREAT_SUCCESS macro, present largely due to the influence of Kazakhstan's state media.
* Encyclopaedia Britannica
Hmm.... I never realized it was quite so prestigious to own a copy of Britannica...
In fact, this list seems to indicate that it's even more important than the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which DeBakey received in 1969, but isn't on the list.
I dunno. Those sort of things immediately jump to mind as "whatcouldpossiblygowrong"
It sounds a whole lot like those experiments that the Navy did to attempt to increase the efficiency of sub crews by "fine-tuning" their sleep patterns. It worked great for about two weeks, and afterward, the crews went raving mad (but thankfully recovered eventually).
Pushing the limits of human endurance for non-lifesaving purposes seems like awfully risky business to me. It's no surprise that DARPA stayed well away from it for so long.
As correct as you may be, it seems that the 10th is only invoked whenever the ruling party doesn't like something.
Although the idea of states' rights is very much open to debate, the wording of the law should be amended to reflect the status quo that's been present ever since the end of the Civil War (remember folks, the constitution is not scripture, and was explicitly designed to be updated as needed).
For one thing, the 10th was drafted long before the sparsely-populated western states were annexed. Many of these states simply don't have the population to support all these agencies, and it would be fairly inefficient to duplicate the efforts of an agency such as the EPA or FDA 50 times over.
As long as the federal agencies are focusing on the issues that affect the majority of the states, I honestly see no problem. States certainly should be able to run their own agencies to tackle their own problems (that's the point after all), though it does make a lot of sense to have a federally-run agency to focus on the big-picture issues.
The reason why Skype and the official NX Client are still around, and in widespread use is simply because they are already free-as-in-beer, and don't have any serious deficiencies. In both cases, they're perfectly adequate for 99.99% of their users.
If either of those things changes, development on a FOSS client will pick up.
NX is a really good example of this, because it's an open protocol, and there are virtually no practical issues impeding development of a good open-source client.
People care about results, not ideology. If the non-free NX client is already good enough, why bother reproducing what's already there?
At risk of self-deprecation, I find Feynmann's lectures to be far too brief to gain a sufficient understanding of the subject, and that the lectures would almost immediately dive off into a fairly advanced treatment of the material, and provided few if any examples.
If you're looking for an introduction to the subject, I can't say that I give them the same sort of recommendations as others are giving here. They're certainly not horrible, but they also take a very different approach to the material than most texts do, especially at the undergraduate level.
If you want a comprehensive "survey" of Physics, I'd more highly recommend the Landau/Lifshitz series of texts (although these too are somewhat different from what you'd find being taught in a classroom in the UK or US).
Failing that, there are a few widely-used undergraduate texts that are hard to go wrong with (Griffiths, Kittel, Shankar, etc....), especially given that most of your colleagues will have learned from them as well.
Also consider that I've never heard of Feynman being taught at a UK university, and that it's not particularly popular in the US, apart from at Caltech (which is where he wrote them).
Although I can give a wholehearted recommendation for the Griffiths and Kittel books (and have heard good things about the Shankar QM book), I had some *serious* qualms about Thornton/Marion's Classical Dynamics book.
Attempting to work my way through their reasoning, proofs, and explanations was an exercise in frustration and futility. Some important sections were barely described at all, while other trivial topics were covered to death. The texts by Goldstein and Landau/Lifshitz are both vastly better, especially for somebody coming from a Maths background. Your local library should have a copy of both, as they've been around for quite some time.
It seems like far too many politicians are actively attempting to destroy the economy in order to make this happen.
How about attempting to fix things, rather than forcing us to start from scratch? Can't we simply admit that Reganomics is simply digging us into a deeper and deeper hole?
+ Any long distance you do by ship or train. Pick up your oversized baggage directly from the ship, and fly it to its final destination.
+ If I can add my own: the weather can change a lot in 8 hours. Flying into a storm with a 50 ton windmill hanging from your butt is bad news.
I think that the idea is for these to be able to haul large or awkwardly-shaped cargo to remotely-placed sites where transportation by ship/train isn't an option.
For instance, large portions of buildings can be completed in a workshop, and then flown and dropped into to their final sites.
In other cases, remote locations (like the oil fields of the Alaskan north slope) can be extremely problematic for transporting large equipment or goods using traditional methods. Although the range problem will still need to be overcome, transporting a fully-assembled piece of equipment by air would certainly be preferable to shipping it in pieces, and assembling on-site.
This project doesn't seem to seek to supplant traditional transportation methods, but rather seeks to allow the transport of cargo that simply can't be carried using current methods.
Here's an idea:
It shouldn't be that hard to wire up a simple resistive 15W load to one of these cheap power supplies.
Connect a multimeter/oscilloscope, and take a look at what sort of signal it's putting out.
To take it a step further, connect the input of the cheapo power supply to a benchtop supply capable of putting out a "clean" 120VAC signal, and start fucking around with it. How high/low can you go before the supply's output is degraded? Remember that even a "good" mains supply can vary by up to ±10%.
I'd rather do things scientifically than recommend that all router users purchase a UPS that will likely cost more than the router itself. I've found router power supplies to be unusually subpar. However, there's an extremely fine line between the amount of voltage required to make the router unstable, and the amount required to fry the thing. I really doubt that slight fluctuations in the input voltage are causing the routers to become unstable because of this, or that a UPS could solve the problem. A better suggestion would simply be to replace the DC power supply with a more robust one.
This may be just anecdotal evidence, but the Airport Express series has a reputation for being flaky, and typically dropping flat-out dead after about a year.
I don't want to absolutely bad-mouth the product, because I've also got an Airport Extreme base station that has never needed rebooting in the few years that I've had it, and because I've also got an AE Express that's worked fine for me the entire time I've had it. However, the Airport Express seems to be based around *much* different hardware than its bigger, more expensive cousins, which are put in the same league as high-end gear from Cisco and the like, rather than the $50 boxes from Linksys that most of us have in our homes.
Jesus..... anything is better than RCN. Maybe it was just my area, but their TV and Internet offerings were both miserably pathetic, their support terrible, and the prices high.
As a point of evidence, we finally got two-way cable installed and supported in our town around 2006-7.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs that the cable companies are bad enough to make the phone company, of all things, look good.
And yeah. FiOS is fantastic. The cable companies will be out of business in a few years, and although I don't look forward to a Verizon monopoly, for now the service is phenominal, and the FTTP infrastructure is just about as future-proof as you can possibly ask for.