AT&T owns Comcast. Around here Comcast has been screwing up so bad the city is threatening to fine them. The news one night was
"10,000 cable customers without service tonight, and this time it's not Comcast's fault"
Seems some disgruntled customer took a machete to their cable hacking up over 100 feet of it.
The local phone company Embarq, used to be Sprint, dosn't seem to have the same disconnect policy Comcast has. However in some areas their network get so congested that ping times go over 2 seconds.
No broadband ISP has the bandwidth needed to deliver the advertised speed to every user on their networks simultaneously, not even the mighty Comcast (AT&T). The Internet backbone couldn't handle it either. I own a very old ISP here in FL and have been buying unlimited bandwidth for many years now and the cost of this type of connection is 20 times higher than most broadband connections.
The cheapest bandwidth in this area still costs around $100 per meg (OC-3, 155Mbps). Users on Comcast get 6 megs for half this. Broadband ISPs deliver the product most users want, intermittent very high download speed without sustained bandwidth use.
All ISP and even phone companies are based on what is called over subscription. ISPs buy bandwidth based on actual demand not theoretical maximum demand. Phone companies have infrastructure to support around 1 in 20 people making a phone call at the same time.
What is needed is for the ISP to be more forthcoming in there product descriptions. We sell a wireless broadband connection for around $38 per month and advertise 2meg download speeds. We are also up front that excessive p2p usage may result in throttling and or account suspension. This is explained before service is installed not just buried in the terms on service. Comcast terminates accounts without any warning and even deny there is any bandwidth cap on users accounts. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
You want something without at least the central idea being scientifically unsound. Star Wars is right out. Unfortunately so is Star Trek with so many scientifically unsound concepts such as warp drive and time travel.
Some films to consider:
2001 A Space oddessy - Much accurate here including the fact people will not explode when exposed to a vacuum. The depiction of space travel is reasonably sound.
Jurassic Park - Sound science about DNA. We may never be able to get good enough dino DNA to do this but if we could it may be possible. The park systems were completely non-sense however. You would never use active high voltage fences to contain such dangerous critters. (power failures will happen) And even a raptor couldn't bite through 1/2 inch steel cable.
Blade runner (Do androids dream of electric sheep) - Clone improved humans to do our fighting and perform such other undesirable/dangerous work. Lots of good science and discussion foder for what it means to be human.
I-robot / AI - More good what if with regard to Artificial intelligence.
20,000 Leagues under the sea. Good look back and science fiction become science fact.
Fantastic Voyage - Shrinking things like this complete nonsense but good anatomy lesson.
Time Machine - Shows accurate plausible future human evolution. Here two separated human populations change to adapt to their environment. This shows clearly the driving force behind evolution, environmental pressure. Darwin called it natural selection. (I hate shows/books that imply that we have an evolutionary predestined path. In one episode of Star Trek TNG we see some crew members have there evolution accelerated depicting what humans will evolve into. Evolution cannot be separated from the environment.)
This is guy is fairly intelligent,.....He is not nuts......AH He's full of shit!
His remarks show an obvious bias against Linux and open source. Some people just can't accept that something done without profit motive can be any good. Seems to be anti American, what free enterprise (business) isn't producing the best stuff! Why would anyone produce anything of value and just give it away. Can't be any good. Last I looked Linux adoption was growing not shrinking. Even Sun the great Unix comapny seems to moving in the direction of open source. But of course none of this is is happening!
MetroPCS....$45 a month, unlimited calls long distance included. Only serves a few areas though. West and east coast of Florida and few other major cities.
I agree that requiring the patent holder to produce or license the patent before suing for damages would have problems.
It would be simple for a troll to license the patent to a sister company just to fulfill the requirement. It would also prevent anyone from getting anything from his patent if could not afford to build it.
Perhaps the patent could be ruled invalid if someone, patent holder or licensee doesn't produce within 4 years of granting a patent.
Public peer revue of patents is almost a must with so much specialized knowledge these days.
Here is an idea. Lets take out a patent on patenting prior art and suing for infringment. This is allowed as a business method patent. Then when companies do what this company is doing, we sue them for patent infringment.
This exact circuit was used in the Apple II in 1977. Copied by IBM in the IBM PC in 1981. May have been used prior to this. This circuit is so common they had to know that this was used many years ago. If I were a defendant in this case I would counter sue claiming they knowingly patented something that was in common use without disclosing the prior art just so they could intimidate companies. This a fraud on the patent office!
Powertel 2000. Turn on, Turn off, Reboot, etc. Do this all remotely via touch tone phone. Used an 8748 Intel Single chip controller. Software was developed on an Intel MDS model 230. This beast has a whopping 64K of ram and uses 8 inch floppies holding 500k each. Both still work. I still use the Powertel when I need to reboot our mail server.
S-100 bus had +7 and +15 volt unregulated power buses, mostly because getting the linear ps's to generate the high current regulated voltage needed for an entire system was expensive and difficult. Most Cards had 7805's and 7812's to regulate the power need for that board. The advent of switching ps's in the late 70's changed all that.
It makes me nuts when a company like PC World can't get this stuff right. The IBM XT did NOT use an 8086 CPU. IT was an 8088 just like the PC. The only differnec in the two machines was a larger power supply (130 Watts) to accomodate a hard drive and 3 more slots (8 total). This was done by placing the slots closer togther as the machines were indentical in size. Funny thing this machine set the slot spacing for all the machines that came after it. Even the most modern machines still have the same spacing.
Remember that although gas may have 120MJ/gallon most of this energy is waisted as heat. Most gasoline engines produce so much excess heat they need hefty water cooling/radiator systems to get rid of it. The electric system is much more effcient. Regerative braking makes electric even more effcient in city driving.
I have a small WISP in Ft. Myers FL. (SW FL) I'll pay a bounty for $20 per month transit. Our main Wireless distribution point is 1 mile from our main office. The cheapest I can find transport is $695.00 per month for a 10 Meg Fiber connection. I'd pay $500 to someone who could find a transit provider that would sell a point to point 10meg connection for $200 per month.
Of coarse that's not the total cost of bandwidth. I first have to purchase bandwidth to the Internet. The cheapest I have found in this area, (local population around 500,000, not exactly the middle of nowhere), is around $4500 for a full DS-3.
If I could buy bandwidth for $20 per meg and get transit for $20 per meg I would let all the Bit Torrent users use all they want. Just not the case. $200 per meg for unrestricted use seems about right.
I have had openwrt rc4 running on a Motorola WR850G for over a week now. Runs great in client mode. Reverse SMA antenna connector, same Flash and Ram as wrt V4 hardware, price under $50.
It used to be that repairing computers involved electronics knowledge. You would need to troubleshoot down to the chip level and replace the bad component. Motherboards back a couple decades cost upwards of $500 to $1000 depending. A well equiped bench would have Multimeter, Oscope, Logic probe, Chip tester, eprom programmer (bios upgrades),
Nowadays the motherboards (and most other pc components) use ASICs (aplication Specific Integrated Circuits). Even if you could troubleshoot down the that level replaceing them is very difficult (surface mount ICs mostly) and getting the parts just as tough. With motherboards costing only $80 to $200 it's not worth it. The one repair we still do is replacement of bad caps. These are a VERY common failure and are easy to spot (bulged tops). To unsolder these you will need a soldering station (irons don't get hot enough and aren't temp controlled) and a desoldering vacum station. The ground and PS PCB plains are so large they draw away mass amounts of heat when trieing desolder them. We generally have to use both the iron and the desoldering tool at the same time (one on the back of the baord, one on the front) in order to clean the cap lead holes. The caps? We get plenty of those from old/bad motherboards.
Power supplies are another thing we sometimes repair. The thing that most often fails is the fan. Like to MB's the caps can fail here to, however these are much easer to desolder.
A post diag card is helpfull to some degree but the best thing to have is lots of spare parts to swap. Old eqipment (486 and earler) is valuable for caps and fans. Allways salvage these parts before trashing.
I find most tech work these days involves not hardware repair but software repair. Most of our time is spent getting rid of spyware and viruses and fixing OS screwups (frequently reinstalling windows). The key here is to be able to work on several machines at once because you spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen (virus/spyware scans, os installs). Have at least three hookups for machines so you can work on three at once.
If you really want some test gear (machine that goes ping) for wow factor consider a used Oscope from ebay (~$100-$200). Analog is good enough here. I personally like HP test equipment here. You should be able to get a 100MHz or better scope for very little money. If nothing else they look impressive. A freind of my father used to have a sign in his office that read "If you can't dazzle them with brilance, baffle them with bullshit".
It may be that your company is selling them below cost to get the customer as a subscriber. Ecomm Wireless shows a price of $595.00 for a 5.8GHz SM. If this is going to compete with cable and DSL they need to provide a less than $50 month service with at least 1.5Meg bandwidth. Sprint (our local ILEC) is dropping the price of their DSL product because they can't compete on performance (5 Megs download speed) with the cable company. 1.5Meg DSL now costs only $34.95. Both the the phone company and the cable company here will do a zero cost install and even give a low introductory rate for several months to get customers. Then of course theres the installation on the equipment both indoors and out.
Don't get me wrong I think wireless is great way to get broadband to places that conventional technology can't reach. However all the WISPs in my area focus on businesses at $100 per month or more. CLEC have the same problem, costs are so high they can't sell to residential customers.
Their Canopy components would need to get a lot cheaper for this to be affordable for residential broadband. Subscribers modules retail for over $500 now. Typical broadband cable modem or DSL modem costs around $100.
I get "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later."
Seems they need to get a "Real Host"
Our company, CyberStreet gets asked why they (customers)should pay $20 per month for hosting when others are selling it for as little as $5 per month.
Tranfer Limits?, but I didn't tranfer very much!?
I love it when the cheapy hosting companies help me sell our product.
This happened to my domain (cyberstreet.com) back in 1999. Someone forged my return address and sent an Email to Netsol requesting the DNS change. It took several days and lots of time on the phone to netsol to fix this.
Aparently all the theif had to do was send one email. Netsol ASSUMED (ASS out of U and ME) that I had requested this and did it without any attempt to verify this with me.
I am alarmed to hear what happened to panix because I had thought this security issue was fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems strangely familiar. Oh yea I read it on nytimes.com TWO DAYS AGO! Come on slashdot find some news thats NEW!
AT&T owns Comcast. Around here Comcast has been screwing up so bad the city is threatening to fine them. The news one night was
"10,000 cable customers without service tonight, and this time it's not Comcast's fault"
Seems some disgruntled customer took a machete to their cable hacking up over 100 feet of it.
The local phone company Embarq, used to be Sprint, dosn't seem to have the same disconnect policy Comcast has. However in some areas their network get so congested that ping times go over 2 seconds.
No broadband ISP has the bandwidth needed to deliver the advertised speed to every user on their networks simultaneously, not even the mighty Comcast (AT&T). The Internet backbone couldn't handle it either. I own a very old ISP here in FL and have been buying unlimited bandwidth for many years now and the cost of this type of connection is 20 times higher than most broadband connections.
The cheapest bandwidth in this area still costs around $100 per meg (OC-3, 155Mbps). Users on Comcast get 6 megs for half this. Broadband ISPs deliver the product most users want, intermittent very high download speed without sustained bandwidth use.
All ISP and even phone companies are based on what is called over subscription. ISPs buy bandwidth based on actual demand not theoretical maximum demand. Phone companies have infrastructure to support around 1 in 20 people making a phone call at the same time.
What is needed is for the ISP to be more forthcoming in there product descriptions. We sell a wireless broadband connection for around $38 per month and advertise 2meg download speeds. We are also up front that excessive p2p usage may result in throttling and or account suspension. This is explained before service is installed not just buried in the terms on service. Comcast terminates accounts without any warning and even deny there is any bandwidth cap on users accounts. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
You want something without at least the central idea being scientifically unsound. Star Wars is right out. Unfortunately so is Star Trek with so many scientifically unsound concepts such as warp drive and time travel.
Some films to consider:
2001 A Space oddessy - Much accurate here including the fact people will not explode when exposed to a vacuum. The depiction of space travel is reasonably sound.
Jurassic Park - Sound science about DNA. We may never be able to get good enough dino DNA to do this but if we could it may be possible. The park systems were completely non-sense however. You would never use active high voltage fences to contain such dangerous critters. (power failures will happen) And even a raptor couldn't bite through 1/2 inch steel cable.
Blade runner (Do androids dream of electric sheep) - Clone improved humans to do our fighting and perform such other undesirable/dangerous work. Lots of good science and discussion foder for what it means to be human.
I-robot / AI - More good what if with regard to Artificial intelligence.
20,000 Leagues under the sea. Good look back and science fiction become science fact.
Fantastic Voyage - Shrinking things like this complete nonsense but good anatomy lesson.
Time Machine - Shows accurate plausible future human evolution. Here two separated human populations change to adapt to their environment. This shows clearly the driving force behind evolution, environmental pressure. Darwin called it natural selection. (I hate shows/books that imply that we have an evolutionary predestined path. In one episode of Star Trek TNG we see some crew members have there evolution accelerated depicting what humans will evolve into. Evolution cannot be separated from the environment.)
This is guy is fairly intelligent,.....He is not nuts......AH He's full of shit!
His remarks show an obvious bias against Linux and open source. Some people just can't accept that something done without profit motive can be any good. Seems to be anti American, what free enterprise (business) isn't producing the best stuff! Why would anyone produce anything of value and just give it away. Can't be any good. Last I looked Linux adoption was growing not shrinking. Even Sun the great Unix comapny seems to moving in the direction of open source. But of course none of this is is happening!
MetroPCS....$45 a month, unlimited calls long distance included. Only serves a few areas though. West and east coast of Florida and few other major cities.
I agree that requiring the patent holder to produce or license the patent before suing for damages would have problems.
It would be simple for a troll to license the patent to a sister company just to fulfill the requirement.
It would also prevent anyone from getting anything from his patent if could not afford to build it.
Perhaps the patent could be ruled invalid if someone, patent holder or licensee doesn't produce within 4 years of granting a patent.
Public peer revue of patents is almost a must with so much specialized knowledge these days.
Here is an idea. Lets take out a patent on patenting prior art and suing for infringment. This is allowed as a business method patent. Then when companies do what this company is doing, we sue them for patent infringment.
This exact circuit was used in the Apple II in 1977. Copied by IBM in the IBM PC in 1981. May have been used prior to this. This circuit is so common they had to know that this was used many years ago. If I were a defendant in this case I would counter sue claiming they knowingly patented something that was in common use without disclosing the prior art just so they could intimidate companies. This a fraud on the patent office!
Powertel 2000. Turn on, Turn off, Reboot, etc. Do this all remotely via touch tone phone. Used an 8748 Intel Single chip controller. Software was developed on an Intel MDS model 230. This beast has a whopping 64K of ram and uses 8 inch floppies holding 500k each. Both still work. I still use the Powertel when I need to reboot our mail server.
Ever play the Bomb squad? [BS]Viper here. Try Team fortress mod for wolenstien Enemy terratory.
S-100 bus had +7 and +15 volt unregulated power buses, mostly because getting the linear ps's to generate the high current regulated voltage needed for an entire system was expensive and difficult. Most Cards had 7805's and 7812's to regulate the power need for that board. The advent of switching ps's in the late 70's changed all that.
They blocked our email server. I just route to another server. This stratagy won't protect users from spam, it's too easy to route around.
It makes me nuts when a company like PC World can't get this stuff right. The IBM XT did NOT use an 8086 CPU. IT was an 8088 just like the PC. The only differnec in the two machines was a larger power supply (130 Watts) to accomodate a hard drive and 3 more slots (8 total). This was done by placing the slots closer togther as the machines were indentical in size. Funny thing this machine set the slot spacing for all the machines that came after it. Even the most modern machines still have the same spacing.
Bandwidth quota reached and it's still the most recent story on slashdot. Get a real hosting company!
Remember that although gas may have 120MJ/gallon most of this energy is waisted as heat. Most gasoline engines produce so much excess heat they need hefty water cooling/radiator systems to get rid of it. The electric system is much more effcient. Regerative braking makes electric even more effcient in city driving.
I have a small WISP in Ft. Myers FL. (SW FL) I'll pay a bounty for $20 per month transit. Our main Wireless distribution point is 1 mile from our main office. The cheapest I can find transport is $695.00 per month for a 10 Meg Fiber connection. I'd pay $500 to someone who could find a transit provider that would sell a point to point 10meg connection for $200 per month.
Of coarse that's not the total cost of bandwidth. I first have to purchase bandwidth to the Internet. The cheapest I have found in this area, (local population around 500,000, not exactly the middle of nowhere), is around $4500 for a full DS-3.
If I could buy bandwidth for $20 per meg and get transit for $20 per meg I would let all the Bit Torrent users use all they want. Just not the case. $200 per meg for unrestricted use seems about right.
I have had openwrt rc4 running on a Motorola WR850G for over a week now. Runs great in client mode. Reverse SMA antenna connector, same Flash and Ram as wrt V4 hardware, price under $50.
Dlink has had WIFI equiped video cameras with built in FTP to send stills to an Internet server for over a year now.
It used to be that repairing computers involved electronics knowledge. You would need to troubleshoot down to the chip level and replace the bad component. Motherboards back a couple decades cost upwards of $500 to $1000 depending. A well equiped bench would have Multimeter, Oscope, Logic probe, Chip tester, eprom programmer (bios upgrades),
Nowadays the motherboards (and most other pc components) use ASICs (aplication Specific Integrated Circuits). Even if you could troubleshoot down the that level replaceing them is very difficult (surface mount ICs mostly) and getting the parts just as tough. With motherboards costing only $80 to $200 it's not worth it. The one repair we still do is replacement of bad caps. These are a VERY common failure and are easy to spot (bulged tops). To unsolder these you will need a soldering station (irons don't get hot enough and aren't temp controlled) and a desoldering vacum station. The ground and PS PCB plains are so large they draw away mass amounts of heat when trieing desolder them. We generally have to use both the iron and the desoldering tool at the same time (one on the back of the baord, one on the front) in order to clean the cap lead holes. The caps? We get plenty of those from old/bad motherboards.
Power supplies are another thing we sometimes repair. The thing that most often fails is the fan. Like to MB's the caps can fail here to, however these are much easer to desolder.
A post diag card is helpfull to some degree but the best thing to have is lots of spare parts to swap. Old eqipment (486 and earler) is valuable for caps and fans. Allways salvage these parts before trashing.
I find most tech work these days involves not hardware repair but software repair. Most of our time is spent getting rid of spyware and viruses and fixing OS screwups (frequently reinstalling windows). The key here is to be able to work on several machines at once because you spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen (virus/spyware scans, os installs). Have at least three hookups for machines so you can work on three at once.
If you really want some test gear (machine that goes ping) for wow factor consider a used Oscope from ebay (~$100-$200). Analog is good enough here. I personally like HP test equipment here. You should be able to get a 100MHz or better scope for very little money. If nothing else they look impressive. A freind of my father used to have a sign in his office that read "If you can't dazzle them with brilance, baffle them with bullshit".
It may be that your company is selling them below cost to get the customer as a subscriber. Ecomm Wireless shows a price of $595.00 for a 5.8GHz SM. If this is going to compete with cable and DSL they need to provide a less than $50 month service with at least 1.5Meg bandwidth. Sprint (our local ILEC) is dropping the price of their DSL product because they can't compete on performance (5 Megs download speed) with the cable company. 1.5Meg DSL now costs only $34.95. Both the the phone company and the cable company here will do a zero cost install and even give a low introductory rate for several months to get customers. Then of course theres the installation on the equipment both indoors and out.
Don't get me wrong I think wireless is great way to get broadband to places that conventional technology can't reach. However all the WISPs in my area focus on businesses at $100 per month or more. CLEC have the same problem, costs are so high they can't sell to residential customers.
Their Canopy components would need to get a lot cheaper for this to be affordable for residential broadband. Subscribers modules retail for over $500 now. Typical broadband cable modem or DSL modem costs around $100.
I have a /24 publicly routed. Got in a merger with a company that got it from ARIN in early 1995.
I get "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later." Seems they need to get a "Real Host" Our company, CyberStreet gets asked why they (customers)should pay $20 per month for hosting when others are selling it for as little as $5 per month. Tranfer Limits?, but I didn't tranfer very much!? I love it when the cheapy hosting companies help me sell our product.
This happened to my domain (cyberstreet.com) back in 1999. Someone forged my return address and sent an Email to Netsol requesting the DNS change. It took several days and lots of time on the phone to netsol to fix this.
Aparently all the theif had to do was send one email. Netsol ASSUMED (ASS out of U and ME) that I had requested this and did it without any attempt to verify this with me.
I am alarmed to hear what happened to panix because I had thought this security issue was fixed.