Ahh, the advantages of sorting newest postings to the top. You'd think more moderators would get the hint by now that the best (and worst for that matter) postings don't always appear early.
Yep. Stardock has a utility in beta called WindowFX that, among other things, allows you to set transparency levels on any application. You have to be a member of their Object Desktop Network to get the latest beta, but they did have a public preview back in February that I believe is still downloadable. It was slow, but usable, on a P3-500 with 256MB. I'm guessing they have it optimized better by now, but I'm not sure.
I haven't signed up for the full network yet, but will probably do so soon. I've been trying out their WindowBlinds utility (also part of the network) and have been pretty impressed.
I agree that people usually work better (at least at coding) when dressed comfortably.
However, maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anywhere in the article that it mentioned that they wore suits. It said "moderately dressy... neat but nothing flashy, certainly nothing grungy". Still sounds like it could fit the "comfortable" range to me.
Of the photographs I could make out, one group of people was wearing jackets, but the other group didn't even have ties. Probably what separates management from the grunts would be my guess.
I'm not aware of a dedicated keyboard site, but alt.comp.periphs.keyboard might be a good place to start. I found it at deja.com, but your ISP may carry it as well on your local newsserver. I believe deja.com will also let you set up your own discussion on a topic.
There was also a great discussion of keyboards and keyboard features in the recent Slashdot poll "Most Important Part of a Keyboard", but most of the past polls are missing all of the comments. Does anyone know if this is a normal thing? I seem to remember past polls keeping the comments at one point in time.
It can't *possibly* do you *ANY* harm at all, and so it doesn't matter.
I guess I just have trouble believing this. Non-personal, statistical information can still be harmful to you, and thus you should have the option of not participating in the "survey". For instance, what if you have a video card that is currently supported, but id finds out that it's the least common card used and subsequently drop support for it.
Other people here have posted that this is good because it benefits the majority of users that don't have that card (as well as id, of course). But the information *was* harmful to you and was taken from you without your permission. Yes, you'd be better of telling id you have that video card anyway so that they know that there are users out there, but the fact remains that the forced survey of all users gives id the exact statistics they need to make a decision not to support you anymore.
Another possibility from the data being gathered is that id might one day track how quickly users of different OS's (or even videocards) upgrade after a patch has been released. Good for them, good for the majority of users in the category that now get the upgrades faster, but maybe bad for you since you now have to wait longer than you would have otherwise for your upgrade (even though you always upgraded as quickly as possible before).
Heck, even those in the *majority* can be harmed when the marketing department at Activision comes into play and decides pricing for future versions or bundling arrangements with video card makers (e.g. people with card X are likely to buy our product anyway, so we're not going to bundle there).
Make no mistake, statistical information can be harmful to consumers, especially those in the minority of any category. Regardless of how simple the information is, or benign the intended use, I still want to be asked first. Because I, as a rule, will almost always say no. Taking information about my computer from me without my consent or knowledge is wrong.
Speaking of today's significance with primes, here's another interesting tidbit...
If my math is correct, and we take the fact presented in several other posts here that 1 is not mathematically prime, then this is also the last date to not have any prime digits until 4000-01-01.
Every day for the rest of this month will have a 2 or 3 in it. Every day in December will have the 2 from the month, and throughout the third and fourth milleniums, the years will all have 2's and 3's.
Agreed on just about everything, but I thought I mention to you that my RC2000's arrow keys are assigned to different devices and I don't have the Mark II. While the user's guide does say that they can only be assigned to one device, it is apparently wrong.
- Page 13 of the manual says that some buttons cannot be taught function-dependent operations: "POWER ON/OFF", "VOL", "CURSOR", "MUTE", "OSD", "GUIDE".
This is not true- I have been able to assign different codes to "CURSOR" and "OSD" that are dependent on whether I am in TV or VCR mode. The other buttons listed do appear to be global, however.
Of course, something that it also mentions is that there were actually two different versions of the original RC2000 -- the "green or no dot" and the updated "blue dot" models. It has been thought that the only difference between the two is the amount of memory, but maybe the cursor key functions are another difference.
Well, I guess you could always buy a Qualcomm pdQ and add the OmniRemote software that others have been talking about here. Since the pdQ is a cell phone with a complete Palm OS 3.0 and IR, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Since it can read e-mail and web pages wirelessly, I think you might just have your tricorder-killer;-)
On the downside, I ended up returning my pdQ. For the $800 cost of the pdQ I can get...
a Palm Vx with 8 megs of RAM (the pdQ only had 2)
another cell phone (actually I already had one, so this was just additional cost savings to me)
the data cables for the cell phone
The result is smaller (a normal cell phone+Palm V combo is smaller than the pdQ alone), has better battery life by a huge factor, and overall is much more convenient than the pdQ.
I too am always looking for the ultimate in couch-potato toys, but this just wasn't it for me. As much as I was looking forward to convergence, now that it's here I find that the alternative is better after all.
I was actually a little worried about how easy it would be to surf with an LCD remote as well. This almost scared me away from the Pronto/RC-5000 (I already had an RC-2000, but ran out of memory). Fortunately, the 7 physical buttons on the RC-5000 work perfectly for surfing, and the ability to jump to an entirely different "page" of commands means that I can even "chain" keys to expand that number even more. For example, I have one of the physical buttons in my "Surf" mode set up to take me into VCR mode. At that point the physical buttons now control the most commonly used features of the VCR. The customizability of the Pronto/RC-5000 is an absolute joy for this and many other reasons.
If someone were really, really tied to physical buttons, the best high-end is probably the Marantz RC-2000 Mark II. Between $200 and $250, it has 32 soft-keys for each device (in addition to all the "standard" buttons). The soft-keys are labeled on the LCD, but are actual physical buttons placed next to the user-defined label.
While I ran out of memory on my RC-2000, that was the first generation (well, first point-release of the first generation from what I understand). I believe that the Mark II's make considerably better usage of memory.
Is there any CDMA support in Europe, or is GSM/TDMA too locked in there?
I'm just hoping that one day I'll be able to carry one phone worldwide. For now, while I like the CDMA technology, I seem to be stuck when I travel from the US to Europe.
Actually, I picked up a pdQ today, and I can tell you that it does exactly what I think you are asking. One of the first things I tried was plugging in my standard ISP that uses a PPP dial-in, and it worked perfectly for web browsing (of course, Slashdot was the first site I tried;-). Haven't tried e-mail yet since my account on that ISP is typically where I let all spam go, but it supports straight POP3/SMTP so I don't expect it to be a problem. One thing that did seem to be missing however was an option to leave the mail on the server after retrieval, although it could be that I just haven't found it yet.
The network options look reasonably complete -- PPP, SLIP, and CSLIP are supported. You can set up multiple accounts. By default it plugs in eight common names such as Compuserve, Earthlink, AT&T Worldnet, etc. It also supports scripting of the login for those more difficult ISP's. I'm not certain about PAP or CHAP yet, but I do have an account which uses PAP, so I'll find out. It looks like it does since some of the default services are set to PPP without a login script.
Fixed vs. dynamic IP's are supported, as well as querying or setting of DNS servers (primary and secondary). And the browser supports proxies if you call into your corporate net.
All in all, I was amazed that they packed this much flexibility into the network options.
On a side note, I think that some of the confusion about this particular device comes from the sales reps at Sprint, as well as the recent advertising spree. As you can tell from the review linked above, it's likely that pretty much any Slashdot reader will end up teaching the sales staff a few things about the device. When I went in, I expected that the pdQ needed the "Wireless Web" service that Sprint has been advertising heavily recently here in the States. The sales rep also felt that I needed to upgrade to a plan which would offer me 200 wireless web "updates" a month for about $20 more than the typical service plan (plus $.10 for each update over 200). As I looked at the demo phone they had (and the manual they let me read through), I realized that this device wasn't offering the "clipping" services that the other "wireless web" phones used. For those other devices, you pay for each update or e-mail from Yahoo, etc. Since the Qualcomm lets you connect to your existing ISP, you just use the connection minutes against your plan.
When I left the store with the phone, I still wasn't completely certain about this, but I was confident enough that I decided to hold off on the "wireless web" service. Sure enough, it works fine without it (better than fine, really, since it's much more flexible that the "clipping" services).
I've spent enough time talking about the networking options, so I won't go into a full review of what I've seen so far. In short, a lot to like (it supports my favorite one/two touch-dialing for 99 numbers - Yay!), some not to like (size , single-band, and battery life are the big ones).
Okay, from other postings it seems like I'm wrong about this -- Nowadays, almost all content is automatically copyrighted. From reading some other sites, it is still recommended to provide the copyright notice since it gives you a better case if you do decide to take it to the courts.
Reading the SCSL license, commercial use is restricted and requires a special Commercial Use License agreement, with a "fill-in-the-blank" for royalty-per-unit payments.
"Commercial use" is defined two ways in the glossary of the license. First, internal deployments of more than 500 units are commercial use, so only small to medium sized businesses will qualify for the "Internal Deployment Use" license. Not that I see many large corps switching to StarOffice anytime soon, but it's worth noting.
Second, commercial use is defined as use for "direct or indirect commercial or strategic gain or advantage." Based on that, I don't believe hardware manufacturers could pre-install StarOffice without making payments to Sun.
Can't get back to the Bablefish translation to see if the original article promoted this misconception, but the $59/month is for the data service only.
The cable service itself is actually about $10/month more than normal cable service for this area. The "complete" plan, with every channel they offer, is $77/month+$5 for each additional television on which you want digital. Cablevision in the same area offers about the same channel selection + digital music for $72/month (unlimited TV's). I believe the cable modem for Cablevision is $40/month. So when you total it out, I'm about $30 over what I'd pay with Cablevision (I have two TV's). That being said, I don't mind paying if it's quality service. So far I have been very impressed with the quality of the digital cable service. The clarity is far beyond the signal I was getting with Cablevision. Others in my subdivision that switched from Mediaone to BellSouth mention the same difference.
My understanding from one of the BellSouth installers is that MindSpring is also going to act as an ISP for this service. The MindSpring page says that they'll offer ADSL at the end of the summer, so I'm guessing that might be when they come online with the PON as well.
I'm in Gwinnett, Lawrenceville specifically. I do recall the BellSouth Entertainment installer telling me that the only other area he knew of where they had purchased the cable franchise was in Woodstock. He didn't know anything about the expansion plans besides that.
From what the rep who changed my appointment to July 1 told me, that's when they are turning on the network service. So that's why we are getting the cable service earlier.
The BellSouth press release says that they have completed fiber to 200,000 homes in the Atlanta and Miami areas, so it's certainly going to be bigger than just 400 real soon. Although 200,000 is still a small fraction of the total homes in those two cities combined.
I'm a little skeptical that they won't have some serious problems early in the trial, but BellSouth seems to typically work out new technologies over the course of about six months.
What's amazing to me is that, from the posts, it seems like at least three of us are Slashdot readers. I mean, I know we're bandwidth hungry, but those still seem like long odds to have at least three among the 400.
Out of curiosity, did they put a "BellSouth Broadband" box in your yard? I have one, and they just put them in a friend's subdivision as well here in Gwinnett, so I'm wondering if this is one of the indicators that your house might be eligible for service.
Ditto for me on the Win9x plan, although most of the BellSouth installers that I've worked with recently have been very reasonable and informative. I think I'm going to at least ask about Linux when the installer comes.
Everything I'm reading here leads me to believe that this is the service that BellSouth is installing for me July 1. If so, that might just make up for the fact that they canceled my appointment for last Friday because "they hadn't turned on the service yet" (after a three week wait already).
The equation -- I just moved into a new home where BellSouth Entertainment is my cable provider, giving me ~120 channels digital (excellent quality picture, if you're wondering), ~70 analog channels on the TV's not connected to a digital converter, and ~30 music channels.
I ordered the "FastAccess" option for $59/month (FastAccess is the "consumer friendly" term BellSouth uses for all of its ADSL and related services). I assumed this was going to be a cable modem, but recent events have made me question this.
The FastAccess installation date was supposed to be last Friday, but on Thursday, as I was counting down the hours, BellSouth called me and told me that the service wasn't turned on for the area yet. They still had some work to do on the technical side of the "fiber system" before it would be ready. The system would be turned on for the area on July 1, and they could install it on that day.
Needless to say I was pretty upset. Pushing off the installation another month after my anticipation had built to the level that it had was infuriating. However, in the midst of my complaining about the fact that they waited until the day before to tell me, I did hear the rep say that this service was over the phone line, not the cable line. In fact, it seemed she didn't even realize this order was placed with the cable division of their company.
Both of the BellSouth installers that worked on my ISDN told me that I have fiber all the way from the CO to my curb, so while I couldn't get ADSL, there was another option coming.
Could I be one of those lucky few? I think it might just be so. Of course for the short term this doesn't seem much better than a DSL or cable modem solution since it will be locked down to 1.5 Mb/s speeds, but at least the speed won't degrade based on distance from the CO. And the possibility of them opening it up to 100 Mb/s in the future boggles my mind.
Anyone want an update when and if this actually happens? What's the best place for this info if you do want it? Here as a response to this article? Should I submit a review of it as a story? Another site?
>> "Your own belief in free speech apparently does not extend to allowing Richard Stallman to say what he thinks."
Ahh, yes. The infuriatingly maddening "recursive disagreement".
Follow closely here -- RMS must not believe in free speech since he disagrees with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
But the poster must not believe in free speech because he disagrees with RMS who is exercising his free speech right to disagree with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
And you must not believe in free speech because you disagree with him while he is excercising his free speech right to disagree with RMS who is exercising his free speech right to disagree with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
And guess what? I must not believe in free speech either because I'm sitting here disagreeing with you while you are exercising your free speech right to disagree with him while he is excercising his free speech right to disagree with RMS who is exercising his free speech right to disagree with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
Wow -- Dizzy yet?
It kind of reminds me of the "I know you are, but what am I?" arguments children have. There's just no winning.
Or was it that I remember the crew of the Enterprise destroying some computer with this kind of logic .
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience -- If it's an AC, it's meant to be a troll; If they're logged in, it's meant to be funny.
Ahh, the advantages of sorting newest postings to the top. You'd think more moderators would get the hint by now that the best (and worst for that matter) postings don't always appear early.
Yep. Stardock has a utility in beta called WindowFX that, among other things, allows you to set transparency levels on any application. You have to be a member of their Object Desktop Network to get the latest beta, but they did have a public preview back in February that I believe is still downloadable. It was slow, but usable, on a P3-500 with 256MB. I'm guessing they have it optimized better by now, but I'm not sure.
I haven't signed up for the full network yet, but will probably do so soon. I've been trying out their WindowBlinds utility (also part of the network) and have been pretty impressed.
I agree that people usually work better (at least at coding) when dressed comfortably.
... neat but nothing flashy, certainly nothing grungy". Still sounds like it could fit the "comfortable" range to me.
However, maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anywhere in the article that it mentioned that they wore suits. It said "moderately dressy
Of the photographs I could make out, one group of people was wearing jackets, but the other group didn't even have ties. Probably what separates management from the grunts would be my guess.
I'm not aware of a dedicated keyboard site, but alt.comp.periphs.keyboard might be a good place to start. I found it at deja.com, but your ISP may carry it as well on your local newsserver. I believe deja.com will also let you set up your own discussion on a topic.
There was also a great discussion of keyboards and keyboard features in the recent Slashdot poll "Most Important Part of a Keyboard", but most of the past polls are missing all of the comments. Does anyone know if this is a normal thing? I seem to remember past polls keeping the comments at one point in time.
It can't *possibly* do you *ANY* harm at all, and so it doesn't matter.
I guess I just have trouble believing this. Non-personal, statistical information can still be harmful to you, and thus you should have the option of not participating in the "survey". For instance, what if you have a video card that is currently supported, but id finds out that it's the least common card used and subsequently drop support for it.
Other people here have posted that this is good because it benefits the majority of users that don't have that card (as well as id, of course). But the information *was* harmful to you and was taken from you without your permission. Yes, you'd be better of telling id you have that video card anyway so that they know that there are users out there, but the fact remains that the forced survey of all users gives id the exact statistics they need to make a decision not to support you anymore.
Another possibility from the data being gathered is that id might one day track how quickly users of different OS's (or even videocards) upgrade after a patch has been released. Good for them, good for the majority of users in the category that now get the upgrades faster, but maybe bad for you since you now have to wait longer than you would have otherwise for your upgrade (even though you always upgraded as quickly as possible before).
Heck, even those in the *majority* can be harmed when the marketing department at Activision comes into play and decides pricing for future versions or bundling arrangements with video card makers (e.g. people with card X are likely to buy our product anyway, so we're not going to bundle there).
Make no mistake, statistical information can be harmful to consumers, especially those in the minority of any category. Regardless of how simple the information is, or benign the intended use, I still want to be asked first. Because I, as a rule, will almost always say no. Taking information about my computer from me without my consent or knowledge is wrong.
Speaking of today's significance with primes, here's another interesting tidbit ...
If my math is correct, and we take the fact presented in several other posts here that 1 is not mathematically prime, then this is also the last date to not have any prime digits until 4000-01-01.
Every day for the rest of this month will have a 2 or 3 in it. Every day in December will have the 2 from the month, and throughout the third and fourth milleniums, the years will all have 2's and 3's.
Right?
Something I found on the "RC2000 tips" site:
Of course, something that it also mentions is that there were actually two different versions of the original RC2000 -- the "green or no dot" and the updated "blue dot" models. It has been thought that the only difference between the two is the amount of memory, but maybe the cursor key functions are another difference.
- Doug
On the downside, I ended up returning my pdQ. For the $800 cost of the pdQ I can get
- a Palm Vx with 8 megs of RAM (the pdQ only had 2)
- another cell phone (actually I already had one, so this was just additional cost savings to me)
- the data cables for the cell phone
The result is smaller (a normal cell phone+Palm V combo is smaller than the pdQ alone), has better battery life by a huge factor, and overall is much more convenient than the pdQ.I too am always looking for the ultimate in couch-potato toys, but this just wasn't it for me. As much as I was looking forward to convergence, now that it's here I find that the alternative is better after all.
- Doug
I was actually a little worried about how easy it would be to surf with an LCD remote as well. This almost scared me away from the Pronto/RC-5000 (I already had an RC-2000, but ran out of memory). Fortunately, the 7 physical buttons on the RC-5000 work perfectly for surfing, and the ability to jump to an entirely different "page" of commands means that I can even "chain" keys to expand that number even more. For example, I have one of the physical buttons in my "Surf" mode set up to take me into VCR mode. At that point the physical buttons now control the most commonly used features of the VCR. The customizability of the Pronto/RC-5000 is an absolute joy for this and many other reasons.
If someone were really, really tied to physical buttons, the best high-end is probably the Marantz RC-2000 Mark II. Between $200 and $250, it has 32 soft-keys for each device (in addition to all the "standard" buttons). The soft-keys are labeled on the LCD, but are actual physical buttons placed next to the user-defined label.
While I ran out of memory on my RC-2000, that was the first generation (well, first point-release of the first generation from what I understand). I believe that the Mark II's make considerably better usage of memory.
- Doug
Is there any CDMA support in Europe, or is GSM/TDMA too locked in there?
I'm just hoping that one day I'll be able to carry one phone worldwide. For now, while I like the CDMA technology, I seem to be stuck when I travel from the US to Europe.
- doug
Actually, I picked up a pdQ today, and I can tell you that it does exactly what I think you are asking. One of the first things I tried was plugging in my standard ISP that uses a PPP dial-in, and it worked perfectly for web browsing (of course, Slashdot was the first site I tried ;-). Haven't tried e-mail yet since my account on that ISP is typically where I let all spam go, but it supports straight POP3/SMTP so I don't expect it to be a problem. One thing that did seem to be missing however was an option to leave the mail on the server after retrieval, although it could be that I just haven't found it yet.
The network options look reasonably complete -- PPP, SLIP, and CSLIP are supported. You can set up multiple accounts. By default it plugs in eight common names such as Compuserve, Earthlink, AT&T Worldnet, etc. It also supports scripting of the login for those more difficult ISP's. I'm not certain about PAP or CHAP yet, but I do have an account which uses PAP, so I'll find out. It looks like it does since some of the default services are set to PPP without a login script.
Fixed vs. dynamic IP's are supported, as well as querying or setting of DNS servers (primary and secondary). And the browser supports proxies if you call into your corporate net.
All in all, I was amazed that they packed this much flexibility into the network options.
On a side note, I think that some of the confusion about this particular device comes from the sales reps at Sprint, as well as the recent advertising spree. As you can tell from the review linked above, it's likely that pretty much any Slashdot reader will end up teaching the sales staff a few things about the device. When I went in, I expected that the pdQ needed the "Wireless Web" service that Sprint has been advertising heavily recently here in the States. The sales rep also felt that I needed to upgrade to a plan which would offer me 200 wireless web "updates" a month for about $20 more than the typical service plan (plus $.10 for each update over 200). As I looked at the demo phone they had (and the manual they let me read through), I realized that this device wasn't offering the "clipping" services that the other "wireless web" phones used. For those other devices, you pay for each update or e-mail from Yahoo, etc. Since the Qualcomm lets you connect to your existing ISP, you just use the connection minutes against your plan.
When I left the store with the phone, I still wasn't completely certain about this, but I was confident enough that I decided to hold off on the "wireless web" service. Sure enough, it works fine without it (better than fine, really, since it's much more flexible that the "clipping" services).
I've spent enough time talking about the networking options, so I won't go into a full review of what I've seen so far. In short, a lot to like (it supports my favorite one/two touch-dialing for 99 numbers - Yay!), some not to like (size , single-band, and battery life are the big ones).
- Doug
Okay, from other postings it seems like I'm wrong about this -- Nowadays, almost all content is automatically copyrighted. From reading some other sites, it is still recommended to provide the copyright notice since it gives you a better case if you do decide to take it to the courts.
Reading the SCSL license, commercial use is restricted and requires a special Commercial Use License agreement, with a "fill-in-the-blank" for royalty-per-unit payments.
"Commercial use" is defined two ways in the glossary of the license. First, internal deployments of more than 500 units are commercial use, so only small to medium sized businesses will qualify for the "Internal Deployment Use" license. Not that I see many large corps switching to StarOffice anytime soon, but it's worth noting.
Second, commercial use is defined as use for "direct or indirect commercial or strategic gain or advantage." Based on that, I don't believe hardware manufacturers could pre-install StarOffice without making payments to Sun.
No brochure for me, but they didn't have to tear up my yard since they installed the cable while the subdivision was being developed.
Can't get back to the Bablefish translation to see if the original article promoted this misconception, but the $59/month is for the data service only.
The cable service itself is actually about $10/month more than normal cable service for this area. The "complete" plan, with every channel they offer, is $77/month+$5 for each additional television on which you want digital. Cablevision in the same area offers about the same channel selection + digital music for $72/month (unlimited TV's). I believe the cable modem for Cablevision is $40/month. So when you total it out, I'm about $30 over what I'd pay with Cablevision (I have two TV's). That being said, I don't mind paying if it's quality service. So far I have been very impressed with the quality of the digital cable service. The clarity is far beyond the signal I was getting with Cablevision. Others in my subdivision that switched from Mediaone to BellSouth mention the same difference.
My understanding from one of the BellSouth installers is that MindSpring is also going to act as an ISP for this service. The MindSpring page says that they'll offer ADSL at the end of the summer, so I'm guessing that might be when they come online with the PON as well.
I'm in Gwinnett, Lawrenceville specifically. I do recall the BellSouth Entertainment installer telling me that the only other area he knew of where they had purchased the cable franchise was in Woodstock. He didn't know anything about the expansion plans besides that.
From what the rep who changed my appointment to July 1 told me, that's when they are turning on the network service. So that's why we are getting the cable service earlier.
The BellSouth press release says that they have completed fiber to 200,000 homes in the Atlanta and Miami areas, so it's certainly going to be bigger than just 400 real soon. Although 200,000 is still a small fraction of the total homes in those two cities combined.
I'm a little skeptical that they won't have some serious problems early in the trial, but BellSouth seems to typically work out new technologies over the course of about six months.
What's amazing to me is that, from the posts, it seems like at least three of us are Slashdot readers. I mean, I know we're bandwidth hungry, but those still seem like long odds to have at least three among the 400.
Out of curiosity, did they put a "BellSouth Broadband" box in your yard? I have one, and they just put them in a friend's subdivision as well here in Gwinnett, so I'm wondering if this is one of the indicators that your house might be eligible for service.
Ditto for me on the Win9x plan, although most of the BellSouth installers that I've worked with recently have been very reasonable and informative. I think I'm going to at least ask about Linux when the installer comes.
Everything I'm reading here leads me to believe that this is the service that BellSouth is installing for me July 1. If so, that might just make up for the fact that they canceled my appointment for last Friday because "they hadn't turned on the service yet" (after a three week wait already).
The equation -- I just moved into a new home where BellSouth Entertainment is my cable provider, giving me ~120 channels digital (excellent quality picture, if you're wondering), ~70 analog channels on the TV's not connected to a digital converter, and ~30 music channels.
I ordered the "FastAccess" option for $59/month (FastAccess is the "consumer friendly" term BellSouth uses for all of its ADSL and related services). I assumed this was going to be a cable modem, but recent events have made me question this.
The FastAccess installation date was supposed to be last Friday, but on Thursday, as I was counting down the hours, BellSouth called me and told me that the service wasn't turned on for the area yet. They still had some work to do on the technical side of the "fiber system" before it would be ready. The system would be turned on for the area on July 1, and they could install it on that day.
Needless to say I was pretty upset. Pushing off the installation another month after my anticipation had built to the level that it had was infuriating. However, in the midst of my complaining about the fact that they waited until the day before to tell me, I did hear the rep say that this service was over the phone line, not the cable line. In fact, it seemed she didn't even realize this order was placed with the cable division of their company.
Both of the BellSouth installers that worked on my ISDN told me that I have fiber all the way from the CO to my curb, so while I couldn't get ADSL, there was another option coming.
Could I be one of those lucky few? I think it might just be so. Of course for the short term this doesn't seem much better than a DSL or cable modem solution since it will be locked down to 1.5 Mb/s speeds, but at least the speed won't degrade based on distance from the CO. And the possibility of them opening it up to 100 Mb/s in the future boggles my mind.
Anyone want an update when and if this actually happens? What's the best place for this info if you do want it? Here as a response to this article? Should I submit a review of it as a story? Another site?
>> "Your own belief in free speech apparently does not extend to allowing Richard Stallman to say what he thinks."
Ahh, yes. The infuriatingly maddening "recursive disagreement".
Follow closely here -- RMS must not believe in free speech since he disagrees with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
But the poster must not believe in free speech because he disagrees with RMS who is exercising his free speech right to disagree with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
And you must not believe in free speech because you disagree with him while he is excercising his free speech right to disagree with RMS who is exercising his free speech right to disagree with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
And guess what? I must not believe in free speech either because I'm sitting here disagreeing with you while you are exercising your free speech right to disagree with him while he is excercising his free speech right to disagree with RMS who is exercising his free speech right to disagree with others who are exercising their free speech right to call it just "Linux".
Wow -- Dizzy yet?
It kind of reminds me of the "I know you are, but what am I?" arguments children have. There's just no winning.
Or was it that I remember the crew of the Enterprise destroying some computer with this kind of logic .
Hey -- Shouldn't you refer to it as GNU/Hurd? ;-)