Plain and simple, they thought they could make up in volume, or something. They needed to charge a lot more (I think they were getting $14 per subscriber, or something idiotically small like that).
$40 a month for the kind of bandwidth most of us use on our cable modem is insanely low, and I don't how much more I can afford to pay for it, but it's been a nice ride.
Comcast @home in Indy. I've never used my @home email, so I don't even know *how* to get to it, unless it's the same as the one at excite.com. Oh well, I never cared about it, so I guess I don't care if it goes away.
I was asleep, so I don't know if anything actually switched off, but I didn't have to unplug my cable modem this morning or restart my computer.
Then again, @home told me that to setup properly, my workgroup name had to be @home. I changed it to another name for my home network and the connection still works. Maybe they don't even know I'm out here.;)
Of course, I only seem to be clocking in at ~900 kbps
Every one of us @home customers go through a local cable company... that's how @home works. And I've yet to see a city where you get to "choose" your cable company (that means, they're a monopoly in your area). In my city, we get to "choose" Insight,Comcast, or Time Warner. Guess how? By moving.
I recently got email working through my own domain name, which means I can read it over the web, or pop it to another account (it currently goes into my work/school email.) I've never used my @home email, but I needed to do something to get away from hotmail, and I'm really glad I didn't switch over to my excite address.;)
My internet connection has been up about 18 months now. The only time it's ever been off was when I moved the computer downstairs. Speeds are blazing, at least to me, but I'm not sure if i'm getting better than I can with a $50 dsl line.
The only good reason I can think slashdotters hate people with @home is that they can't get high-speed internet themselves, so they want to bitch about it. It's like when they complain because a company doesn't make a port of a game for all 27 Linux users.
"If you want to get MP3s, you'd probably just download them somewhere else."
So, that's how all mp3s come about? You just download them from somewhere else? Funny, but I copy my CDs so that I can load them on mp3 CDs, which just happen to let me take hours and hours of music on a single disc. It's good to know that I've been stupid this, and I'll stop buying CDs.
I mean, I figure if I'm going to be labelled a criminal, I might as well be one.
I've yet to say anyone make any substatial proof that dollar-for-dollar, DSL is better than Cable. Perhaps if someone could point me to a decent comparison (not done by cable or telephone companies) I might be inclined to fork over the money for DSL.
This according to their own press release. They've released nothing in recent days. But I seem to remember that AT&T bought up most everything Excite had, so continued service *shouldn't* be a problem.
"Excite@Home has informed us that they stopped provisioning for new customers today. This development does not affect operations for our existing high-speed Internet customers. Comcast is working closely with the management of Excite@Home and other interested parties to find a prompt solution that will allow the continued seamless deployment of high-speed Internet services to new customers. In the meantime, Comcast has taken steps to continue rolling out modems while we work to reach a resolution.
?Given that Excite@Home provides high speed Internet services to more than 3.6 million customers at many of the world?s largest MSOs including Comcast, Cox and AT&T Broadband, we are confident that the bankruptcy process will allow for a practical solution to quickly be found."
In the city... too many lights. As we drove out of the city, the fog got thicker. and thicker. and thicker. You could literally stand 20 yards from your friends and not see them. However, fog generally allows you to see straigh up, so I did see a few (24), including 3 or 4 doozies (meaning, they were really bright.) It was actually a pretty cool experience, because it was fun *and* spooky.
On a side note, any train running near you in a fog sounds like it's coming *right for you*
Star Trek will probably be the last TNG movie. I don't think they've decided which direction to go after this, though I think if Berman gets the boot and Stewart or Spiner come on as Producer, we're more likely to see DS9 over Voyager.
From what i've seen so far, this one appears to have a decent script, and ST movies are usually good if they can get a decent screenplay. (Oh, and if God isn't a character)
That's the only way to explain how horrible it is. "Someday I will be the most powerful Jedi ever." Did someone get *paid* to write that line? I sure hope not. And oh, big shocker, he blames Obi Wan.
Granted, I've only seen a few seconds of his performance, but the "human" (highly suspect) that's playing Anakin looks like he's doing a high school play. They're called actor's, George. Look into hiring them.
And they exist for most artists. It is NOT a money-making scheme from the record company. These are usually independantly run and "officially sanctioned"... usually by friends or family of the band. Granted, in most you don't get a free copy of the recent release, but you do get extra stuff.
If you wanna make money on this scheme, then you'd have to rip off people, like Dave Matthews Band does. Their fan club is $50 per year.
Advanced access to tickets is a staple of fan clubs and usually the major reason people join.
Re:Ssomeone has to say it....
on
Virtual Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, the paper idea is a pretty good one. That way, you'd have something to reference too visually if you "got off track".
I wonder how the unit is centered, ie, if I move both of my hands 1 inch from the other, am I going to be typing on different keys, are is the "center" based around each hand. This would be useful for people who like to actually type farther apart than the normal keyboard allows.
My problem with this isn't the concept, it's the fact that it's a 1-way street. It only gives a benefit to people who are offended by nudity/language violence.
I personally want to see digital radio and broadcast TV have the same kind of automatical filters. Thus, a radio station could broadcast a song *uncut* and then allow each individual receiver (and listener) to choose what to cut off. This wouldn't even require the broadcaster to send two whole songs, they could send a song that's encoded in places that the radio station or record company chooses.
Granted, this is pretty unfeasible with broadcast radio, at least while it's still just sent over radio waves. However, this has other application. This could be used on CDs so that Walmart and K-mart wouldn't need to edit music (and I woulnd't try to firebomb them as much).
The best place I see this happening is with TV, as it moves to high-definition and digital, this becomes infinitely easier. With this, you could broadcast the movie uncut, with markers as to where changes are "normally" made to make it PG-13, PG, etc. This way, adults could make full choices on what they see, and the tv stations don't need to worry about offending people. It would be the job of censors (as it is now) to decide which parts of the shows are inappropriate for certain ratings and assigning the appropriate encoding.
This is already in effect in some computer games. Parents can set a rating lower than the game's rating, and a lot of the gore is removed, and violent or sexual cut scenes are automatically edited or removed.
Most universities require graduate-level researchers to sign agreements that the University (and not the student OR the advisor) owns any patents that a researcher might need to take out. From what I've seen, universities are pretty divided on whether they make these patents public, keep them, or return them to the student. The basic premise of doing this is that the University puts up most of the financial resources needed for research. How fair is it for a someone to spend millions of dollars of a schoo's research money and then shut the university out of the financial rewards of that invention?
I seem to remember a case a few years ago where a student, wanting to benefit from his discover, had destroyed his university work, quit school, and then a year later finished his research. The school sued and won, on the charge that the student had committed the equivalent of industrial sabatoge.
The real problem is that advisors tend to steal *credit* for inventions, thus getting patent rights back from the university. This ruling just means that students don't automatically give their rights up de-facto to their advisor/department.
This article does not seem to suggest *where* they got this FAA Information. Secondly, the FAA never makes the call this fast. The most they might say is "it appears to have been engine trouble" and that would be information they got from the pilots through tower contact. And, even if it *is* engine problems, it doesn't rule out sabatoge, or explosives.
I experienced a similar feeling when I was a CS major. Gladly, it happened in semester 1, not semester 7.
CS as an academic subject has to be more mind numbing than Business, Math, and Art Appreciation combined. To add to your woes, apart from a select few CS departments, a CS education is woefully out of date before it's even half over. The only useful stuff you learn is in the first semester or 2... the rest is just implementation, which can just as easily be learned from RTFM.
The other catch is that most high-end CS jobs require
1. A degree
2. Experience.
CS degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on without any kind of experience to back it up. This is more true now than it was 5 years ago... Now companies are finding out the formal education in a specific field does not equate to actually have the skills needed to do well in the job.
People too often think of CS as an engineering field. If you're on the hardware side of it, then yes, it can be as exacting as an EE or ME. However, for most of us, the CS career will involve teaching non-technical people how to use their technology, and in some form or another programming stuff. The first can't be learned in a classroom, and there's no point in wasting money on the second.
This has often been by beef against "Certifications," especially the Microsoft kind. They teach you (for a premium) how to use a specific kind of software/system, but when that system goes out of date, you have to learn it all over again. Better to learn the fundamentals of CS and then go out and teach yourself anything else.
So do what I did! (well, it might be too late for you in particular, but for anyone a little earlier in their CS career.) Quit CS... switch to a major you enjoy. I picked English, and will probably go for a PoliSci or Philosophy degree next (I'm only two semesters from graduation.) Get a job on your campus doing something with computers... Consulting (you know, computer lab babysitting) is a great first step in, but of course, if you have experience, go for something better. One way or another, get a degree (companies like degrees, they 'prove' that you can get stuff accomplished, and are reasonably smart), get some experience, and DONT PANIC. CS is in such a state that their's no reason to go into hysterics (or utter apathy) over it... This isn't nursing or engineering... there *are* other ways into the field. And they're all more fun than your 15th programming class!
Of course, your other option is push the computer off the table and move to Montana and start writing manifestos to the New York Times. But, you saw what happened with the *last* one.
I'm not what you call the world's largest Star Wars fan, but I enjoyed the movies, despite the fact that scientifically, they were less informed than Star Trek: TOS. But I'd have to say that Ep 1 was probably the worst sci-fi movie (okay, okay, ST 5 is the worst, but you can barely call that sci-fi.)
How is then that anybody is actually looking forward to EP 2? The only redeeming quality is that the title is SO bad that the movie has to be good, right? Granted, I will see both EP 2 and EP 3, simply because it's pretty much required, but I can't imagine why someone is actually *excited* bout this movie.
On another note, to reply to another thread, yes, Lord Of the Rings will be the best fantasy movie ever. This alone doesn't mean the movie won't be crap. It just means it'll be the best crap out there. And I will see all three, despite the fact that I'll be cringing every time they stray from the Book. Because it's required.
Several of the sites in my school were hard coded to only do netscape 4.x, so that netscape 6 (or mozilla, which returns netscape 5) don't work. Then again, most of them give you a link to try anyway and it usually works (one that doesn't uses a little ie-specific client to download and install software, so it will probably never work in Netscape.
I've seen this all over the place. The problem is really any site that thinks you need to have IE and assumes you're too stupid to figure out how to work it otherwise.
So intel's plan to bolster their flagging market share is to introduce an entirely new platform that's not backwards compatible? I'm not exactly hardware-techno-geeky, but it seems to me this means none of your software is going to run (It would be like running a mac program on windows.) It seems to me there's got to be a way to have an intermediate step somewhere down the line that support both architectures. But then again, I could be an idiot on this point.
Either way, AMD is the smart one. extending x86 means they have 64-bit entries in the consumer market much faster, while Intel spends all of their time actually developing a new ISA. The real question will be if Intel decides to grant rights to the new ISA like they did for x86.
AMD knows, either way, that they have to wait for intel. They don't have enough of the market to be bold enough to introduce a new architecture.
Granted, they could pull the product, but the underlying issues are different. Microsoft isn't being accused of copyright infringement. They're being accused of antitrust violations. Microsoft's real danger (now that breakup has been cast aside) is continuous lawsuits from competitors. But the problem is, this isn't a copyright issue. It's a lot harder to sue Microsoft simply because they make a product that "sells" better.
Slashdot Mirror
Plain and simple, they thought they could make up in volume, or something. They needed to charge a lot more (I think they were getting $14 per subscriber, or something idiotically small like that).
$40 a month for the kind of bandwidth most of us use on our cable modem is insanely low, and I don't how much more I can afford to pay for it, but it's been a nice ride.
Comcast @home in Indy. I've never used my @home email, so I don't even know *how* to get to it, unless it's the same as the one at excite.com. Oh well, I never cared about it, so I guess I don't care if it goes away.
;)
I was asleep, so I don't know if anything actually switched off, but I didn't have to unplug my cable modem this morning or restart my computer.
Then again, @home told me that to setup properly, my workgroup name had to be @home. I changed it to another name for my home network and the connection still works. Maybe they don't even know I'm out here.
Of course, I only seem to be clocking in at ~900 kbps
They'll just move. They always do. And it's not fucking fair to those of us that don't spam.
Every one of us @home customers go through a local cable company... that's how @home works. And I've yet to see a city where you get to "choose" your cable company (that means, they're a monopoly in your area). In my city, we get to "choose" Insight,Comcast, or Time Warner. Guess how? By moving.
I recently got email working through my own domain name, which means I can read it over the web, or pop it to another account (it currently goes into my work/school email.) I've never used my @home email, but I needed to do something to get away from hotmail, and I'm really glad I didn't switch over to my excite address. ;)
They will just switch to another provider. That's like saying if you put AOL out of business, there won't be any morons left on the net.
My internet connection has been up about 18 months now. The only time it's ever been off was when I moved the computer downstairs. Speeds are blazing, at least to me, but I'm not sure if i'm getting better than I can with a $50 dsl line.
The only good reason I can think slashdotters hate people with @home is that they can't get high-speed internet themselves, so they want to bitch about it. It's like when they complain because a company doesn't make a port of a game for all 27 Linux users.
"If you want to get MP3s, you'd probably just download them somewhere else."
So, that's how all mp3s come about? You just download them from somewhere else? Funny, but I copy my CDs so that I can load them on mp3 CDs, which just happen to let me take hours and hours of music on a single disc. It's good to know that I've been stupid this, and I'll stop buying CDs.
I mean, I figure if I'm going to be labelled a criminal, I might as well be one.
I've yet to say anyone make any substatial proof that dollar-for-dollar, DSL is better than Cable. Perhaps if someone could point me to a decent comparison (not done by cable or telephone companies) I might be inclined to fork over the money for DSL.
Which gives the FBI the right to spy on people without a court order.
This according to their own press release. They've released nothing in recent days. But I seem to remember that AT&T bought up most everything Excite had, so continued service *shouldn't* be a problem.
"Excite@Home has informed us that they stopped provisioning for new customers today. This development does not affect operations for our existing high-speed Internet customers. Comcast is working closely with the management of Excite@Home and other interested parties to find a prompt solution that will allow the continued seamless deployment of high-speed Internet services to new customers. In the meantime, Comcast has taken steps to continue rolling out modems while we work to reach a resolution.
?Given that Excite@Home provides high speed Internet services to more than 3.6 million customers at many of the world?s largest MSOs including Comcast, Cox and AT&T Broadband, we are confident that the bankruptcy process will allow for a practical solution to quickly be found."
In the city... too many lights. As we drove out of the city, the fog got thicker. and thicker. and thicker. You could literally stand 20 yards from your friends and not see them. However, fog generally allows you to see straigh up, so I did see a few (24), including 3 or 4 doozies (meaning, they were really bright.) It was actually a pretty cool experience, because it was fun *and* spooky.
On a side note, any train running near you in a fog sounds like it's coming *right for you*
Star Trek will probably be the last TNG movie. I don't think they've decided which direction to go after this, though I think if Berman gets the boot and Stewart or Spiner come on as Producer, we're more likely to see DS9 over Voyager.
From what i've seen so far, this one appears to have a decent script, and ST movies are usually good if they can get a decent screenplay. (Oh, and if God isn't a character)
That's the only way to explain how horrible it is. "Someday I will be the most powerful Jedi ever." Did someone get *paid* to write that line? I sure hope not. And oh, big shocker, he blames Obi Wan.
Granted, I've only seen a few seconds of his performance, but the "human" (highly suspect) that's playing Anakin looks like he's doing a high school play. They're called actor's, George. Look into hiring them.
And they exist for most artists. It is NOT a money-making scheme from the record company. These are usually independantly run and "officially sanctioned"... usually by friends or family of the band. Granted, in most you don't get a free copy of the recent release, but you do get extra stuff.
If you wanna make money on this scheme, then you'd have to rip off people, like Dave Matthews Band does. Their fan club is $50 per year.
Advanced access to tickets is a staple of fan clubs and usually the major reason people join.
Actually, the paper idea is a pretty good one. That way, you'd have something to reference too visually if you "got off track".
I wonder how the unit is centered, ie, if I move both of my hands 1 inch from the other, am I going to be typing on different keys, are is the "center" based around each hand. This would be useful for people who like to actually type farther apart than the normal keyboard allows.
My problem with this isn't the concept, it's the fact that it's a 1-way street. It only gives a benefit to people who are offended by nudity/language violence.
I personally want to see digital radio and broadcast TV have the same kind of automatical filters. Thus, a radio station could broadcast a song *uncut* and then allow each individual receiver (and listener) to choose what to cut off. This wouldn't even require the broadcaster to send two whole songs, they could send a song that's encoded in places that the radio station or record company chooses.
Granted, this is pretty unfeasible with broadcast radio, at least while it's still just sent over radio waves. However, this has other application. This could be used on CDs so that Walmart and K-mart wouldn't need to edit music (and I woulnd't try to firebomb them as much).
The best place I see this happening is with TV, as it moves to high-definition and digital, this becomes infinitely easier. With this, you could broadcast the movie uncut, with markers as to where changes are "normally" made to make it PG-13, PG, etc. This way, adults could make full choices on what they see, and the tv stations don't need to worry about offending people. It would be the job of censors (as it is now) to decide which parts of the shows are inappropriate for certain ratings and assigning the appropriate encoding.
This is already in effect in some computer games. Parents can set a rating lower than the game's rating, and a lot of the gore is removed, and violent or sexual cut scenes are automatically edited or removed.
Granted, this is pretty unfeasable
Most universities require graduate-level researchers to sign agreements that the University (and not the student OR the advisor) owns any patents that a researcher might need to take out. From what I've seen, universities are pretty divided on whether they make these patents public, keep them, or return them to the student. The basic premise of doing this is that the University puts up most of the financial resources needed for research. How fair is it for a someone to spend millions of dollars of a schoo's research money and then shut the university out of the financial rewards of that invention?
I seem to remember a case a few years ago where a student, wanting to benefit from his discover, had destroyed his university work, quit school, and then a year later finished his research. The school sued and won, on the charge that the student had committed the equivalent of industrial sabatoge.
The real problem is that advisors tend to steal *credit* for inventions, thus getting patent rights back from the university. This ruling just means that students don't automatically give their rights up de-facto to their advisor/department.
This article does not seem to suggest *where* they got this FAA Information. Secondly, the FAA never makes the call this fast. The most they might say is "it appears to have been engine trouble" and that would be information they got from the pilots through tower contact. And, even if it *is* engine problems, it doesn't rule out sabatoge, or explosives.
I experienced a similar feeling when I was a CS major. Gladly, it happened in semester 1, not semester 7.
CS as an academic subject has to be more mind numbing than Business, Math, and Art Appreciation combined. To add to your woes, apart from a select few CS departments, a CS education is woefully out of date before it's even half over. The only useful stuff you learn is in the first semester or 2... the rest is just implementation, which can just as easily be learned from RTFM.
The other catch is that most high-end CS jobs require
1. A degree
2. Experience.
CS degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on without any kind of experience to back it up. This is more true now than it was 5 years ago... Now companies are finding out the formal education in a specific field does not equate to actually have the skills needed to do well in the job.
People too often think of CS as an engineering field. If you're on the hardware side of it, then yes, it can be as exacting as an EE or ME. However, for most of us, the CS career will involve teaching non-technical people how to use their technology, and in some form or another programming stuff. The first can't be learned in a classroom, and there's no point in wasting money on the second.
This has often been by beef against "Certifications," especially the Microsoft kind. They teach you (for a premium) how to use a specific kind of software/system, but when that system goes out of date, you have to learn it all over again. Better to learn the fundamentals of CS and then go out and teach yourself anything else.
So do what I did! (well, it might be too late for you in particular, but for anyone a little earlier in their CS career.) Quit CS... switch to a major you enjoy. I picked English, and will probably go for a PoliSci or Philosophy degree next (I'm only two semesters from graduation.) Get a job on your campus doing something with computers... Consulting (you know, computer lab babysitting) is a great first step in, but of course, if you have experience, go for something better. One way or another, get a degree (companies like degrees, they 'prove' that you can get stuff accomplished, and are reasonably smart), get some experience, and DONT PANIC. CS is in such a state that their's no reason to go into hysterics (or utter apathy) over it... This isn't nursing or engineering... there *are* other ways into the field. And they're all more fun than your 15th programming class!
Of course, your other option is push the computer off the table and move to Montana and start writing manifestos to the New York Times. But, you saw what happened with the *last* one.
I'm not what you call the world's largest Star Wars fan, but I enjoyed the movies, despite the fact that scientifically, they were less informed than Star Trek: TOS. But I'd have to say that Ep 1 was probably the worst sci-fi movie (okay, okay, ST 5 is the worst, but you can barely call that sci-fi.)
How is then that anybody is actually looking forward to EP 2? The only redeeming quality is that the title is SO bad that the movie has to be good, right? Granted, I will see both EP 2 and EP 3, simply because it's pretty much required, but I can't imagine why someone is actually *excited* bout this movie.
On another note, to reply to another thread, yes, Lord Of the Rings will be the best fantasy movie ever. This alone doesn't mean the movie won't be crap. It just means it'll be the best crap out there. And I will see all three, despite the fact that I'll be cringing every time they stray from the Book. Because it's required.
Several of the sites in my school were hard coded to only do netscape 4.x, so that netscape 6 (or mozilla, which returns netscape 5) don't work. Then again, most of them give you a link to try anyway and it usually works (one that doesn't uses a little ie-specific client to download and install software, so it will probably never work in Netscape.
I've seen this all over the place. The problem is really any site that thinks you need to have IE and assumes you're too stupid to figure out how to work it otherwise.
So intel's plan to bolster their flagging market share is to introduce an entirely new platform that's not backwards compatible? I'm not exactly hardware-techno-geeky, but it seems to me this means none of your software is going to run (It would be like running a mac program on windows.) It seems to me there's got to be a way to have an intermediate step somewhere down the line that support both architectures. But then again, I could be an idiot on this point.
Either way, AMD is the smart one. extending x86 means they have 64-bit entries in the consumer market much faster, while Intel spends all of their time actually developing a new ISA. The real question will be if Intel decides to grant rights to the new ISA like they did for x86.
AMD knows, either way, that they have to wait for intel. They don't have enough of the market to be bold enough to introduce a new architecture.
Granted, they could pull the product, but the underlying issues are different. Microsoft isn't being accused of copyright infringement. They're being accused of antitrust violations. Microsoft's real danger (now that breakup has been cast aside) is continuous lawsuits from competitors. But the problem is, this isn't a copyright issue. It's a lot harder to sue Microsoft simply because they make a product that "sells" better.
So, you mean we can finally deport the CC? Where can we send them? Maybe the vatican will take them in.
Let's deport Operation Rescue back to Mars.