Mods please note: The proper moderation for the above post is nothing at all. Pay special attention to the content (which is obviously not "Informative" to anyone but modders).
If you are to take any action at all, it would be to rate this as Overrated/Offtopic or rate the PARENT post as Funny.
The mistake you made was trying to use BitTorrent to download an oldish file. The way BT works best is when there is a/. effect occurring. When a new ISO of RH9 comes out, there is a bullrush to get it which overwhelms mirrors. BT solves this by having users DL from other users and the mirrors at the same time. Once the majority of users have DL'd the ISO's, they are going to close their BT client. It's been weeks since the RH9 ISO's came out, so most everyone has closed their client. This means you are mostly DL'ing from the seeding servers and not the users. The seeders aren't really built to handle massive bandwidth.
BT is a temporary solution for getting high demand files. It works in an inverse supply-demand curve: the higher the demand, the higher the supply of bandwidth.
If you are saying Disneyland just blows unless you are under 10, I can't argue for or against since I've never been there. I have been to Disney World since I've become an adult, and it was actually pretty fun (well, it was fun since I didn't go with kids but with other adults). Epcot center is pretty cool, if only for good food and to have fun with their "technology" exhibits. They even have dance clubs for adults in the park.
As for picking up on sarcasm, I understood what you were trying to say, but I just felt that the point of your sarcastic statement could be enhanced with cold facts. Disney Land/World is pretty damned expensive, and the Segway is even worse (which is what I showed using data).
Yes, the renting is a few other people cashing in on the hype, but the overall price is set by Segway. Those things are ridiculously expensive for what you get. If they were cheaper to buy, then the renters could charge less. That was my point.
Seriously, this guy doesn't know how to run a good test setup.
First off, he tested all these super specialized memory timings using a stick of RAM that was rated CL2.5 So he was overclocking it and stressing it when he ran a lot of the low latency settings tests. A better setup would've been to get the best darned stick of RAM and THEN test how the timings affect performance.
Next, almost all of the timings he adjusted in the tests affect latency not bandwidth, but he used bandwidth as his ONLY benchmark. If a program is swapping small amounts of data, but VERY quickly and often, latency has more of an effect than bandwidth.
Finally, he doesn't address asynchronous bus speed issues or how well some of his unattainable settings would work (because of my first complaint, his memory was unstable at the aggressive timings).
I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't appear to me that he really understands some of the statistical methods for a good test. This is what I've garnered from reading other slashdot posts, at least.
He concludes that running memory clocked at the memory speed = FSB is better than running mem speed > or < than FSB. He never says that running 400MHz DDR at 333MHz will be slower than DDR333 at 333. If you bother paying extra for that faster RAM, you can run it at 333MHz and it will be just as fast...
The big thing about underclocking the bus speed, though, is that you can now overclock the latencies. You can make that CAS2.5 pc3200 a CAS2 pc2700 and tweak other latency settings, too. It also means that if you decide to upgrade to a 400MHz FSB Athlon, you'll be prepared with memory tested to support that.
This article is stupid because almost all of the tweaks affect latency, but his benchmark is bandwidth. Not much useful information can be gained from it. The Tom's article is much better, but you have to add other knowledge to use it correctly.
are you kidding?
on
Rent a Segway
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Seriously, while a ticket to Disneyland is expensive and you may not enjoy it, think about what this really costs.
$20 for 30 minutes. That's it. A ticket to Disneyland costs about $50 for a 12 hour day (or you can get the 4 day ticket for about $150). Add on the cost of food and souveniers and all that crap kids must have, and you'll be at around $120 for 12 hours. That's only $10/hour, whereas the Segway is $40/hour.
If anyone at Segway Inc. wants an idea why they have a stupid business plan, all they have to do is look at the economics of their machine. I can rent a car for $20/day, but they are charging $20/half hour for something that is supposed to replace cars in the city.
According to this site: Wikipedia, Cruithne is an asteroid that shares Earth's orbit about the Sun, but doesn't actually orbit Earth. This site has more technical information.
Mars has a co-orbital asteroid and Jupiter has 400 captured asteroids, but they aren't considered moons. They are just asteroids, as is this one.
So in my opinion, since this is just an asteroid of small size and it doesn't truly orbit our planet, it shouldn't be called a moon.
That rust case is about the coolest case mod I've ever seen. It is incredibly well done and very creative. It wouldn't work well for a LAN party machine, but it would certainly look great for your hippie/artist/granola friend that lives in a cabin near the mountains.
Yeah, screw bit-torrent... until about halfway through your download about 250,000 other geeks finally notice the new story on/. and start downloading. That's when bit-torrent rocks.k
Yay! Now I don't have to worry about privacy issues with clothes people only bought in the '80's!! Once Z.Cavaricci and I.O.U. hop on the bus, the '90's will be safe.
The pi == 3 law is not an urban legend. It was an actual bill introduced into the Indiana House. The text of the bill is here, a site dedicated to the debunking of rumours.
Also on that site is a bill about public erections being illegal.
Now that I've learned that Grub doesn't need a binary update, I see your point and agree. That LI 0101010101 thing is quite annoying, as is the LI hang.
Yes, there are some config utils for some things. I haven't used that distro for a couple weeks now and haven't configured anything on it for a couple months, so I forget which ones I needed. I do know that the Mouse config wasn't great (never got the scroll to work), the Users/Groups config was hard to find (I think I just used adduser from the cli), Linuxconf wasn't there (I love that tool, whether real linux users think it sucks or not), I never figured out how to do Focus Follows Mouse in Gnome (but I didn't try too hard) when KDE got borked (it got borked after an attempt to reinstall the system with NVidia's stuff and I never got it back working again).
I just remember having a fairly easy time working with RH 8.0 and every Mandrake except 9.0 (9.1 is light years better), but Phoebe was a pain for me.
Maybe the GUI tools you are talking about are in 8.0, but were not yet included in the Phoebe release. Maybe they were and I couldn't find them in all the searching I did in the 4 different menu subsections that all have similar stuff. I'm not sure.
BTW, I hate that there is a seperate menu section for/System Config and/Other Tools/System Config... as well as/System and/Other Tools/System.
As far as getting Grub working, you are right: there are a ton of great resources on the net to show me how to do it easily. The issue is that there is nothing included in the distro (that I found) to help. There is no simple point and click gui config for grub (or for LILO in RH), and the documentation is a bit confusing.
I was speaking from a desktop user's perspective. I have used Linux on the desktop pretty much exclusively for the past 3 years and am not a CS/CompEng/IT trained person. I just learn what I need to learn to get it working. GUI tools make life so much easier. I still prefer CLI for some stuff (all of the video editing I do), but system config that can seriously jack up my system is comforting to have done by a more knowledgable program.
Well, maybe not specific to LILO, but something to make it easy would be nice. Mandrake has about three different gui tools to change the boot config, and I think Linuxconf is one of them.
As I'll write in reply to all of the replies to the parent, the config of GRUB isn't hard, it's getting it implemented. In LILO, you just edit the conf file and run the lilo command. That doesn't work in Grub, and after reading some man stuff I still couldn't figure out how to install the new boot config.
Yes, a simple internet search would've given me the answer I needed, but a tool that is right there for the average desktop user would be better.
I've been using the beta version of this for a month now. Phoebe is the name of the beta if anyone is interested in seeing what might be changed as of the last update.
My impressions as a person who uses this as a desktop at home and is normally a Mandrake kind of user:
It is a very easy to use and install and stable distro. I don't like that they include almost no configuration tools. To make it a good desktop distro I had to download a lot of extra rpms because the cd's with the distro are packed with server/workstation rpms. Also, though not RedHat's fault, NVidia's glx driver doesn't work properly with the new kernel and some weird dis-optimizations to the code have to be done in order for it to work (as of mid Feb; haven't checked lately). This is an issue with all 2.5 and 2.4.20 and above kernels, IIRC.
It is very similar to 8.0 (but they might have changed some things in the last month). The biggest gripe I have is that they use GRUB as the bootloader, but have no configuration utility for it. I'm a LILO person, but I thought I'd install GRUB to see if it was better. The man pages weren't very helpful and RedHat includes nothing to help, either. I went back to LILO, but since RH has no priority for it, there was no graphical options for LILO, just text.
It works for what it is supposed to work for: servers and workstations. As a desktop user that wants to have a simple and easy distro, I switched to Mandrake 9.1 rc1.
I think one critical issue with the timings of patch releases is stated right up there in the post: exploits are already out and about... for 3 days!
I'm not bashing either side because *nix has its security issues, too; but last time I saw an exploit with Linux, there was a patch well before any known exploits. I'm not saying the patches to Linux were made before the bug was made public, just that they were available before the bug was exploited.
If there is some cracker out there that has found this bug, then I'm sure there is a security expert that has also found and reported it. Code Red, IIRC, could've been stopped by a fix available 6 months earlier.
Of course, I'm not in any way a security expert or even amateur, and I'm not a server admin, nor did I RTFA.
I don't know the percentage of wives that were working back in 1970, but I'm sure it's much less than now. That means that the median family income was more based on a single wage earner and not a double income. That family now needs a second car and day care for the children. I would guess that a single wage earner back then had it much better off than now.
Can you get stats that show that the median income in the 70's was based on a certain percentage of double vs single incomes and compare that to today's number? Thanks.
Re:Purdue University Surplus (West Lafayette, IN)
on
Great Surplus Stores?
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· Score: 1
That place is teh r0x0rs.
My friends and I would go down there on a Wednesday afternoon between classes and just dig through all the crap for fun. Sure, you could (and we did) build a 486 from spare parts for $30 or a grocery bag of network cards; but the best was seeing the 10 ft tall robotic arm connected to a computer that had to weigh at least 8000lbs. The giant scanning electron microscope was pretty cool, too. We mostly just bought assloads of Cat5 there, though.
Hey, isn't that what those old:CueCats can now be used for? I know mine is sittin in a bag of old computer parts, and thousands of geeks have them, and there are programs that turn scanned ISBN's into book info (which the company planned on you buying from their affiliates).... this guy should have a section on his Submit Book page where you can scan in an ISBN and then input the data about it... and then others can do a search by the scan of ISBNs.
I agree that we should be going wireless... that makes sense on so many levels.
I can't agree with your analogy about the GT40 (awesome car). The Le Mans organization did not give Ford any money to create the car, didn't block other manufacturers from creating an awesome car. Actually, the government made AT&T the monopoly it became by forcing others to sell out. Not only that, but the Babies still profited massively after the break and recoagulated to only a few entities again.
"...changing the laws on someone when they become too successful is a craven practice..." Isn't that what the FCC would be doing with going to deregulation now? Covad and the guys reselling phone service are profitting, so the Bells lobbied to stop this. The FCC just changed the laws to stop one guy from becoming too successfull. Yes, I know that isn't the truth of the situation, but neither is applying your statement to the Bells and the '96 law or the AT&T breakup.
I'm not sure I understand the point of your statement about corporate morality and how that affects its charging practices. Could you clarify how that affects this discussion?
The FCC created these massive monopolies long ago (long, long before it broke them up and then allowed line sharing). I believe if they hadn't messed with it a long time ago, things would've been fine... but they did, now they have two choices: a) Full regulatory control over all things phone related. b) No control at all over phone lines.
If they go option a) they essentially kill all those highpaying executive jobs at the telcos and create higher taxes and stuff... but the public will get cheaper and better phone/DSL service
if b) they have to allow other people to dig their own lines, take away all special powers they've given the Bells, take away all the weird taxes they've put on phone bills that just give money straight back to the Bells (i.e. those taxes aren't real taxes right now), and really watch the behaviour of the Bells.
I do not agree that things were better when AT&T was ruling back in the day. You are right that there was no innovation, but everything except standard phone service DID cost an arm and a leg. Think about a t1 or ISDN... they were prohibitively costly. ISDN is still so because there are no competitors in its market. DSL tech was available and easy WAY before the 1996 Telecom law, but it wasn't until after it that the Bells deployed it. Of course, that was the Bells after the AT&T breakup... but AT&T was made a monopoly well before that (check the history of telcos before AT&T, it's interesting).
As for would I do anything differently if I were SBC... yes, I would. I'm actually very much a fan of helping the world in the long term instead of helping me in the short term. Of course, this doesn't make as much money so I'll never be in charge of a large corporation. The Bells could work with Covad et. al. to make the DSL footprint larger and advance the tech to drop prices... a win-win. DSL already competes in speed and close in price with the Bells actively depressing the industry and mucking up service calls from Covad...
It's the whole issue of negative campaigning in politics versus positive promoting.
Dude, before you post something, maybe you should have some insight into what you are posting...
First, last week the FCC took away linesharing for broadband (but kept it in place for telephone service). So your argument that they have no incentive to roll out more DSL capacity is crap... In order for a company to lease DSL space NOW is for them to also offer phone service. The point of the post is that the Bells are pissed that the FCC didn't take away linesharing completely. Since they didn't get their way completely, they are going to balk on the promises they made when lobbying for the FCC to take action.
Second, your argument that other people lay their own cable is both not possible and ridiculous. It is ILLEGAL for a company to just lay fibre... The government has granted this monopoly to the phone company (try to dig for a line and see what your local telco says about it). Laying your own cable like the cable companies is ridiculously expensive (note that my father still can't get cable to his house because it's not economically reasonable for the cable co... but he can get phone service fine). It is also not smart... we already have three sets of wires to each living space (phone, cable, electricity), why lay a third or a fourth for competing internet providers?
Third, they aren't losing money to their competition. They leased the line to the CLEC at exactly the same cost as they lease it to their own DSL subsidiary. Not only that, but the CLECs have their own equipment and enormous networks for DSL, they just need access to the last mile.
The more they built before the FCC took away linesharing for broadband, the more money they made (linesharers paid the same cost as the Bells to use the new lines); but they didn't make AS MUCH as they would without competition... Now they have no competition and are still balking at using the government granted power just so they can make even more money than they already do.
the reason why the FCC passed this new arrangement killing off linesharing for broadband is because the Bells whined so heavily about it, saying they'd be able to put out more broadband and would have much more incentive to do so if it weren't for linesharing... They made a big deal about how they'd develop broadband more without linesharing, and they got the arrangement passed.
Now that all this is done, they are saying they essentially lied during the whole lobbying process. They are saying that it's not linesharing holding them back, it's their own spiteful internal decisions.
The FCC was trying to act in the best way for the public and for all corporations involved... it failed miserably in that it killed off all DSL competition (bad for other DSL companies), gave full control to an entity that will do nothing but stifle any development(bad for public), and pissed off the Bells by not going the full measure (bad for the Bells)... but that doesn't change the fact that they were trying to do good, but the Bells had no intention at all of following through with their public statements (corporate ethics is a big issue after the Enron crap).
Slashdot Mirror
Mods please note: The proper moderation for the above post is nothing at all. Pay special attention to the content (which is obviously not "Informative" to anyone but modders).
If you are to take any action at all, it would be to rate this as Overrated/Offtopic or rate the PARENT post as Funny.
"The first round of lawsuits will be prepared during the next eight to 10 weeks."
It looks like they have to wait for all the rebates on CD-RW's they bought for their kids to clear before they can fund the lawyers needed to do this.
The mistake you made was trying to use BitTorrent to download an oldish file. The way BT works best is when there is a /. effect occurring. When a new ISO of RH9 comes out, there is a bullrush to get it which overwhelms mirrors. BT solves this by having users DL from other users and the mirrors at the same time. Once the majority of users have DL'd the ISO's, they are going to close their BT client. It's been weeks since the RH9 ISO's came out, so most everyone has closed their client. This means you are mostly DL'ing from the seeding servers and not the users. The seeders aren't really built to handle massive bandwidth.
BT is a temporary solution for getting high demand files. It works in an inverse supply-demand curve: the higher the demand, the higher the supply of bandwidth.
If you are saying Disneyland just blows unless you are under 10, I can't argue for or against since I've never been there. I have been to Disney World since I've become an adult, and it was actually pretty fun (well, it was fun since I didn't go with kids but with other adults). Epcot center is pretty cool, if only for good food and to have fun with their "technology" exhibits. They even have dance clubs for adults in the park.
As for picking up on sarcasm, I understood what you were trying to say, but I just felt that the point of your sarcastic statement could be enhanced with cold facts. Disney Land/World is pretty damned expensive, and the Segway is even worse (which is what I showed using data).
Yes, the renting is a few other people cashing in on the hype, but the overall price is set by Segway. Those things are ridiculously expensive for what you get. If they were cheaper to buy, then the renters could charge less. That was my point.
Seriously, this guy doesn't know how to run a good test setup.
First off, he tested all these super specialized memory timings using a stick of RAM that was rated CL2.5 So he was overclocking it and stressing it when he ran a lot of the low latency settings tests. A better setup would've been to get the best darned stick of RAM and THEN test how the timings affect performance.
Next, almost all of the timings he adjusted in the tests affect latency not bandwidth, but he used bandwidth as his ONLY benchmark. If a program is swapping small amounts of data, but VERY quickly and often, latency has more of an effect than bandwidth.
Finally, he doesn't address asynchronous bus speed issues or how well some of his unattainable settings would work (because of my first complaint, his memory was unstable at the aggressive timings).
I'm not a statistician, but it doesn't appear to me that he really understands some of the statistical methods for a good test. This is what I've garnered from reading other slashdot posts, at least.
He concludes that running memory clocked at the memory speed = FSB is better than running mem speed > or < than FSB. He never says that running 400MHz DDR at 333MHz will be slower than DDR333 at 333. If you bother paying extra for that faster RAM, you can run it at 333MHz and it will be just as fast...
The big thing about underclocking the bus speed, though, is that you can now overclock the latencies. You can make that CAS2.5 pc3200 a CAS2 pc2700 and tweak other latency settings, too. It also means that if you decide to upgrade to a 400MHz FSB Athlon, you'll be prepared with memory tested to support that.
This article is stupid because almost all of the tweaks affect latency, but his benchmark is bandwidth. Not much useful information can be gained from it. The Tom's article is much better, but you have to add other knowledge to use it correctly.
Seriously, while a ticket to Disneyland is expensive and you may not enjoy it, think about what this really costs.
$20 for 30 minutes. That's it. A ticket to Disneyland costs about $50 for a 12 hour day (or you can get the 4 day ticket for about $150). Add on the cost of food and souveniers and all that crap kids must have, and you'll be at around $120 for 12 hours. That's only $10/hour, whereas the Segway is $40/hour.
If anyone at Segway Inc. wants an idea why they have a stupid business plan, all they have to do is look at the economics of their machine. I can rent a car for $20/day, but they are charging $20/half hour for something that is supposed to replace cars in the city.
According to this site: Wikipedia, Cruithne is an asteroid that shares Earth's orbit about the Sun, but doesn't actually orbit Earth. This site has more technical information.
Mars has a co-orbital asteroid and Jupiter has 400 captured asteroids, but they aren't considered moons. They are just asteroids, as is this one.
So in my opinion, since this is just an asteroid of small size and it doesn't truly orbit our planet, it shouldn't be called a moon.
That rust case is about the coolest case mod I've ever seen. It is incredibly well done and very creative. It wouldn't work well for a LAN party machine, but it would certainly look great for your hippie/artist/granola friend that lives in a cabin near the mountains.
Yeah, screw bit-torrent... until about halfway through your download about 250,000 other geeks finally notice the new story on /. and start downloading. That's when bit-torrent rocks.k
Yay! Now I don't have to worry about privacy issues with clothes people only bought in the '80's!! Once Z.Cavaricci and I.O.U. hop on the bus, the '90's will be safe.
The pi == 3 law is not an urban legend. It was an actual bill introduced into the Indiana House. The text of the bill is here, a site dedicated to the debunking of rumours.
Also on that site is a bill about public erections being illegal.
nice.
Now that I've learned that Grub doesn't need a binary update, I see your point and agree. That LI 0101010101 thing is quite annoying, as is the LI hang.
Yes, there are some config utils for some things. I haven't used that distro for a couple weeks now and haven't configured anything on it for a couple months, so I forget which ones I needed. I do know that the Mouse config wasn't great (never got the scroll to work), the Users/Groups config was hard to find (I think I just used adduser from the cli), Linuxconf wasn't there (I love that tool, whether real linux users think it sucks or not), I never figured out how to do Focus Follows Mouse in Gnome (but I didn't try too hard) when KDE got borked (it got borked after an attempt to reinstall the system with NVidia's stuff and I never got it back working again).
/System Config and /Other Tools/System Config... as well as /System and /Other Tools/System.
I just remember having a fairly easy time working with RH 8.0 and every Mandrake except 9.0 (9.1 is light years better), but Phoebe was a pain for me.
Maybe the GUI tools you are talking about are in 8.0, but were not yet included in the Phoebe release. Maybe they were and I couldn't find them in all the searching I did in the 4 different menu subsections that all have similar stuff. I'm not sure.
BTW, I hate that there is a seperate menu section for
As far as getting Grub working, you are right: there are a ton of great resources on the net to show me how to do it easily. The issue is that there is nothing included in the distro (that I found) to help. There is no simple point and click gui config for grub (or for LILO in RH), and the documentation is a bit confusing.
I was speaking from a desktop user's perspective. I have used Linux on the desktop pretty much exclusively for the past 3 years and am not a CS/CompEng/IT trained person. I just learn what I need to learn to get it working. GUI tools make life so much easier. I still prefer CLI for some stuff (all of the video editing I do), but system config that can seriously jack up my system is comforting to have done by a more knowledgable program.
Well, maybe not specific to LILO, but something to make it easy would be nice. Mandrake has about three different gui tools to change the boot config, and I think Linuxconf is one of them.
As I'll write in reply to all of the replies to the parent, the config of GRUB isn't hard, it's getting it implemented. In LILO, you just edit the conf file and run the lilo command. That doesn't work in Grub, and after reading some man stuff I still couldn't figure out how to install the new boot config.
Yes, a simple internet search would've given me the answer I needed, but a tool that is right there for the average desktop user would be better.
I've been using the beta version of this for a month now. Phoebe is the name of the beta if anyone is interested in seeing what might be changed as of the last update.
My impressions as a person who uses this as a desktop at home and is normally a Mandrake kind of user:
It is a very easy to use and install and stable distro. I don't like that they include almost no configuration tools. To make it a good desktop distro I had to download a lot of extra rpms because the cd's with the distro are packed with server/workstation rpms. Also, though not RedHat's fault, NVidia's glx driver doesn't work properly with the new kernel and some weird dis-optimizations to the code have to be done in order for it to work (as of mid Feb; haven't checked lately). This is an issue with all 2.5 and 2.4.20 and above kernels, IIRC.
It is very similar to 8.0 (but they might have changed some things in the last month). The biggest gripe I have is that they use GRUB as the bootloader, but have no configuration utility for it. I'm a LILO person, but I thought I'd install GRUB to see if it was better. The man pages weren't very helpful and RedHat includes nothing to help, either. I went back to LILO, but since RH has no priority for it, there was no graphical options for LILO, just text.
It works for what it is supposed to work for: servers and workstations. As a desktop user that wants to have a simple and easy distro, I switched to Mandrake 9.1 rc1.
I think one critical issue with the timings of patch releases is stated right up there in the post: exploits are already out and about... for 3 days!
I'm not bashing either side because *nix has its security issues, too; but last time I saw an exploit with Linux, there was a patch well before any known exploits. I'm not saying the patches to Linux were made before the bug was made public, just that they were available before the bug was exploited.
If there is some cracker out there that has found this bug, then I'm sure there is a security expert that has also found and reported it. Code Red, IIRC, could've been stopped by a fix available 6 months earlier.
Of course, I'm not in any way a security expert or even amateur, and I'm not a server admin, nor did I RTFA.
Can you get stats that show that the median income in the 70's was based on a certain percentage of double vs single incomes and compare that to today's number? Thanks.
That place is teh r0x0rs.
My friends and I would go down there on a Wednesday afternoon between classes and just dig through all the crap for fun. Sure, you could (and we did) build a 486 from spare parts for $30 or a grocery bag of network cards; but the best was seeing the 10 ft tall robotic arm connected to a computer that had to weigh at least 8000lbs. The giant scanning electron microscope was pretty cool, too. We mostly just bought assloads of Cat5 there, though.
Hey, isn't that what those old :CueCats can now be used for? I know mine is sittin in a bag of old computer parts, and thousands of geeks have them, and there are programs that turn scanned ISBN's into book info (which the company planned on you buying from their affiliates).... this guy should have a section on his Submit Book page where you can scan in an ISBN and then input the data about it... and then others can do a search by the scan of ISBNs.
I agree that we should be going wireless... that makes sense on so many levels.
I can't agree with your analogy about the GT40 (awesome car). The Le Mans organization did not give Ford any money to create the car, didn't block other manufacturers from creating an awesome car. Actually, the government made AT&T the monopoly it became by forcing others to sell out. Not only that, but the Babies still profited massively after the break and recoagulated to only a few entities again.
"...changing the laws on someone when they become too successful is a craven practice..." Isn't that what the FCC would be doing with going to deregulation now? Covad and the guys reselling phone service are profitting, so the Bells lobbied to stop this. The FCC just changed the laws to stop one guy from becoming too successfull. Yes, I know that isn't the truth of the situation, but neither is applying your statement to the Bells and the '96 law or the AT&T breakup.
I'm not sure I understand the point of your statement about corporate morality and how that affects its charging practices. Could you clarify how that affects this discussion?
My anger is directed at both...
The FCC created these massive monopolies long ago (long, long before it broke them up and then allowed line sharing). I believe if they hadn't messed with it a long time ago, things would've been fine... but they did, now they have two choices:
a) Full regulatory control over all things phone related.
b) No control at all over phone lines.
If they go option a) they essentially kill all those highpaying executive jobs at the telcos and create higher taxes and stuff... but the public will get cheaper and better phone/DSL service
if b) they have to allow other people to dig their own lines, take away all special powers they've given the Bells, take away all the weird taxes they've put on phone bills that just give money straight back to the Bells (i.e. those taxes aren't real taxes right now), and really watch the behaviour of the Bells.
I do not agree that things were better when AT&T was ruling back in the day. You are right that there was no innovation, but everything except standard phone service DID cost an arm and a leg. Think about a t1 or ISDN... they were prohibitively costly. ISDN is still so because there are no competitors in its market. DSL tech was available and easy WAY before the 1996 Telecom law, but it wasn't until after it that the Bells deployed it. Of course, that was the Bells after the AT&T breakup... but AT&T was made a monopoly well before that (check the history of telcos before AT&T, it's interesting).
As for would I do anything differently if I were SBC... yes, I would. I'm actually very much a fan of helping the world in the long term instead of helping me in the short term. Of course, this doesn't make as much money so I'll never be in charge of a large corporation. The Bells could work with Covad et. al. to make the DSL footprint larger and advance the tech to drop prices... a win-win. DSL already competes in speed and close in price with the Bells actively depressing the industry and mucking up service calls from Covad...
It's the whole issue of negative campaigning in politics versus positive promoting.
Dude, before you post something, maybe you should have some insight into what you are posting...
First, last week the FCC took away linesharing for broadband (but kept it in place for telephone service). So your argument that they have no incentive to roll out more DSL capacity is crap... In order for a company to lease DSL space NOW is for them to also offer phone service. The point of the post is that the Bells are pissed that the FCC didn't take away linesharing completely. Since they didn't get their way completely, they are going to balk on the promises they made when lobbying for the FCC to take action.
Second, your argument that other people lay their own cable is both not possible and ridiculous. It is ILLEGAL for a company to just lay fibre... The government has granted this monopoly to the phone company (try to dig for a line and see what your local telco says about it). Laying your own cable like the cable companies is ridiculously expensive (note that my father still can't get cable to his house because it's not economically reasonable for the cable co... but he can get phone service fine). It is also not smart... we already have three sets of wires to each living space (phone, cable, electricity), why lay a third or a fourth for competing internet providers?
Third, they aren't losing money to their competition. They leased the line to the CLEC at exactly the same cost as they lease it to their own DSL subsidiary. Not only that, but the CLECs have their own equipment and enormous networks for DSL, they just need access to the last mile.
The more they built before the FCC took away linesharing for broadband, the more money they made (linesharers paid the same cost as the Bells to use the new lines); but they didn't make AS MUCH as they would without competition... Now they have no competition and are still balking at using the government granted power just so they can make even more money than they already do.
the reason why the FCC passed this new arrangement killing off linesharing for broadband is because the Bells whined so heavily about it, saying they'd be able to put out more broadband and would have much more incentive to do so if it weren't for linesharing... They made a big deal about how they'd develop broadband more without linesharing, and they got the arrangement passed.
Now that all this is done, they are saying they essentially lied during the whole lobbying process. They are saying that it's not linesharing holding them back, it's their own spiteful internal decisions.
The FCC was trying to act in the best way for the public and for all corporations involved... it failed miserably in that it killed off all DSL competition (bad for other DSL companies), gave full control to an entity that will do nothing but stifle any development(bad for public), and pissed off the Bells by not going the full measure (bad for the Bells)... but that doesn't change the fact that they were trying to do good, but the Bells had no intention at all of following through with their public statements (corporate ethics is a big issue after the Enron crap).