I wish the self unblocking of ports was an option here. Typical US ISP doesn't educate their helpdesk staff on port blocking and their support staff are asked to lie about it. If you call about blocked ports they typically don't comprehend what you're talking about and will escalate the call to someone who will lie about it.
That's sort of what they're doing. Concentrating on the easy to get stuff, providing reasonable and half assed stuff to the next tier, then occasionally throwing a bone to the next.
Makes the numbers look good.
I'm all for local co-op systems. Can't have the local government involved in the slightest though, it upsets the oligopolist.
You have the most valid answer. The government needs to stay out of business all together, broadband isn't the only thing regulated beyond reason. The greatest thing a large business can hope for is government regulation, it keeps the little guys down.
That doesn't however completely invalidate my point, it just changes the magnitude of each.
I'm constantly confused by things like net neutrality and the recent TV commercial volume thing. I really don't want the government making that happen, but they are things I want to happen.
Deregulating to the point of allowing cowboy competition would be an incredible game changer. Of course then you start having to look at trust and Microsoft of the 1990's style business practices.
The reality is if someone can fuck it up by being an asshole the asshole will appear and seize the oppertunity.
It's the "semi-dense" areas that are really hard to get. In the southern/eastern part of Texas where there's plenty of people all living 1/2 - 2 miles apart. It's the communities of 50 people in West Texas that are 30 miles from the next biggest town which has 400 people. If it were just people in Alaska 30 miles apart I see your point, but it isn't them that makes it really hard. Heck, there's areas considered Houston Metro surrounded by enough undeveloped land to be out of DSL range with dense population surrounding their/their-neighbors property lines.
I am not saying this excuses crappy performance like my 20 Mbit really 3Mbit Fiber. I'm not saying this excuses suburbs that just happen to be of the wrong income level close to a city not having any/many broadband options, it doesn't excuse a lot of stuff.
What is 100% true is that a sparsely populated area doesn't justify the cost of equipment as easily as a densely populated area.
From Wikipedia:
South Korea The country's total area is 38,622.57 square miles (100,032.00 km2) South Korea is noted for its population density, which at 487 per square kilometer is more than 10 times the global average.
Texas has an area of 268,820 square miles (696,200 km2), and a growing population of 24.7 million residents. 79.6[5]/sq mi (30.75/km2) Ranked 26th in the US
What that population density doesn't account for is things like Reeves County where I grew up is 5 people per square mile, where as Harris County is 2,302 people per square mile so that really throws the average density off.
I'm not completely defending the ISP's, but they have a few valid excuses.
To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.
Also, beyond just having crappy maintinance and ethics a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area. Of course that doesn't excuse Verizon for only giving me 3 Mbps when I paid for 20 and got 20 for the first month./yes, I'm being a squeaky wheel.
I'm not saying this new system will be bad, but ask anyone who worked maintenance at the Johnson Space Center building 30 what happened when people sent Cokes through the P-Tube system. You piss off a bunch of techs! (seriously though, I love the idea of a freight tunnel system, it's something I've been designing in my head for a long time - on multiple scales)
The company I was working for that got me started on Macs a couple of years back issued me an iPhone. The phone no longer works properly. The Bluetooth and WiFi broke, last I checked the main radio still worked, so it probably still would work as a phone.
I use it for podcast at the gym.
I've dropped it off the elliptical probably two dozen times or more. Sure I could do podcast on my PSP or nice shiny EVO, but I don't want to drop those off of the elliptical. In other words I still need iTunes.
Did I mention iTunes lock-in is one of the reasons I hate Apple so much?
I'm seriously considering iTunes under WINE just until I finally break this thing to the point of not working for podcast anymore. I dislike WINE, I consider it an excuse to keep people from developing for Linux. Especially when Apple products are already *NIX based and a simple recompile and tool kit swaps would probably let it work on Linux. Or better yet, don't lock their devices down to begin with....
I absolutely love the Apple Zealots on this site who religiously read every comment and if they find something even slightly anti-Apple find a reason to mod it down. Every single critical thing I've ever said against Apple, even when incredibly fair has received this treatment. I could seriously compare some of those people's protection of Apple to a certain religious group protecting other things.
Dude, I was hating Microsoft with a passion in 1998 because I was a Novell/Netscape guy, I saw first hand what their OS "patches" did to Netscape and the Netware client with a farce front of patching the OS.
You could say I'm a hate Microsoft early adopter.
(BTW - I started hating on Windows in 95 when I discovered taking Windows 3.1 out of my batch file and rebooting caused Doom to run great, starting Windows then exiting - no matter what I did memory wise otherwise caused Doom to run crappy.)
Well, next worse thing. I'm using a Mac right now, with Snow Leopard on it.
Really, I think the OS is awesome (except where they intentionally handicapped it) but Apple is pushing lock in so hard and iTunes is beginning to take over everything, in the next revision even in the main OS is going to have iTunes being the main source of software. Given Apples track record of weining its users by introducing something new but staying compatible with the old way, then removing the old way I'm going back to Linux. You heard that right, I went Windows to Linux to Mac/Linux and heading back to just Linux.
You obviously haven't used BitTorrent, at least not years ago when I did. There were lots of results that would turn up claiming to be the exact whatever file name you were looking for. Usually they ended in.exe - my systems are compatible with that file type. Occasionally it would be an HTML file with redirects to the site they were "advertising" for.
Watching AT&T and Microsoft fight is like watching a guido fight a skin-head. It's worth watching and no matter which one loses it's an overall victory for everyone else.
You know, that MySpace bunch over there has tons of server power and bandwidth they're not using for anything anymore. It scares me to think of what would happen if they seized the opportunity to put it to use.
But there is so, so much potential for spammers to kill it before it gets out of the gate good. Spammers so far have killed quite a large number of things that used to be cool on the internet and they're not going to stop until they're reigned in or nobody uses anything electronic anymore because of them.
This is likely to piss off AT&T that they're work on the really horrible U-Verse service with. I would like to assume the XBox 360 would be more reliabe/work better than the U-Verse garbage, but the idea of red-ringing over a TV show does come to mind.
That being said - I think this is a very good and cool idea. It's convergence and the ousting of old tech that needs to go. Modern cable companies are getting too invasive and control/power hungry over what you watch. I'm not saying Microsoft wont be that way, but at least with them you can reap the benefits of paying less, whereas the cable companies just charge more, invade more, and progressively provide less.
After my customary week of hard headed self trouble shooting I found a bug report.
The bug had been posted by others. The general answer was "That chip is no longer supported due to issues with the chip itself and we're no longer going to include nasty hacks to make it work". That was firewire. The sound issue was also reported by someone else, the answer was my audio chip didn't work properly. Well, it worked before, and it works on Kubuntu. I don't doubt the chips are buggy, but at least I got the nasty hacks with Ubuntu. When I first moved over the sound was fixed, but firewire stayed broke. Both work now. I haven't tried Debian in about a year - I tend to keep my laptops for a while. My previous Celeron 450 was used until people were making fun of me for carrying a laptop that still had a visible serial port. It finally fell apart, literally, you could see the mainboard. I'm sure the same will happen to this thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Which our DNA is in you?
On second thought, better not answer that.....
I wish the self unblocking of ports was an option here. Typical US ISP doesn't educate their helpdesk staff on port blocking and their support staff are asked to lie about it. If you call about blocked ports they typically don't comprehend what you're talking about and will escalate the call to someone who will lie about it.
That's sort of what they're doing. Concentrating on the easy to get stuff, providing reasonable and half assed stuff to the next tier, then occasionally throwing a bone to the next.
Makes the numbers look good.
I'm all for local co-op systems. Can't have the local government involved in the slightest though, it upsets the oligopolist.
You have the most valid answer. The government needs to stay out of business all together, broadband isn't the only thing regulated beyond reason. The greatest thing a large business can hope for is government regulation, it keeps the little guys down.
That doesn't however completely invalidate my point, it just changes the magnitude of each.
I'm constantly confused by things like net neutrality and the recent TV commercial volume thing. I really don't want the government making that happen, but they are things I want to happen.
Deregulating to the point of allowing cowboy competition would be an incredible game changer. Of course then you start having to look at trust and Microsoft of the 1990's style business practices.
The reality is if someone can fuck it up by being an asshole the asshole will appear and seize the oppertunity.
It's the "semi-dense" areas that are really hard to get. In the southern/eastern part of Texas where there's plenty of people all living 1/2 - 2 miles apart. It's the communities of 50 people in West Texas that are 30 miles from the next biggest town which has 400 people. If it were just people in Alaska 30 miles apart I see your point, but it isn't them that makes it really hard. Heck, there's areas considered Houston Metro surrounded by enough undeveloped land to be out of DSL range with dense population surrounding their/their-neighbors property lines.
I am not saying this excuses crappy performance like my 20 Mbit really 3Mbit Fiber. I'm not saying this excuses suburbs that just happen to be of the wrong income level close to a city not having any/many broadband options, it doesn't excuse a lot of stuff.
What is 100% true is that a sparsely populated area doesn't justify the cost of equipment as easily as a densely populated area.
From Wikipedia:
South Korea The country's total area is 38,622.57 square miles (100,032.00 km2)
South Korea is noted for its population density, which at 487 per square kilometer is more than 10 times the global average.
Texas has an area of 268,820 square miles (696,200 km2), and a growing population of 24.7 million residents.
79.6[5]/sq mi (30.75/km2)
Ranked 26th in the US
What that population density doesn't account for is things like Reeves County where I grew up is 5 people per square mile, where as Harris County is 2,302 people per square mile so that really throws the average density off.
I'm not completely defending the ISP's, but they have a few valid excuses.
Bet the streaming tenticle porn is great!
To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.
Also, beyond just having crappy maintinance and ethics a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area. Of course that doesn't excuse Verizon for only giving me 3 Mbps when I paid for 20 and got 20 for the first month. /yes, I'm being a squeaky wheel.
I think you're missing the point, especially the point that I sort of just made the point you made without using the same words.
You get an A+ for drama though.
I'm not saying this new system will be bad, but ask anyone who worked maintenance at the Johnson Space Center building 30 what happened when people sent Cokes through the P-Tube system. You piss off a bunch of techs! (seriously though, I love the idea of a freight tunnel system, it's something I've been designing in my head for a long time - on multiple scales)
Dirty little secret.
The company I was working for that got me started on Macs a couple of years back issued me an iPhone. The phone no longer works properly. The Bluetooth and WiFi broke, last I checked the main radio still worked, so it probably still would work as a phone.
I use it for podcast at the gym.
I've dropped it off the elliptical probably two dozen times or more. Sure I could do podcast on my PSP or nice shiny EVO, but I don't want to drop those off of the elliptical. In other words I still need iTunes.
Did I mention iTunes lock-in is one of the reasons I hate Apple so much?
I'm seriously considering iTunes under WINE just until I finally break this thing to the point of not working for podcast anymore. I dislike WINE, I consider it an excuse to keep people from developing for Linux. Especially when Apple products are already *NIX based and a simple recompile and tool kit swaps would probably let it work on Linux. Or better yet, don't lock their devices down to begin with....
I love my EVO.
I absolutely love the Apple Zealots on this site who religiously read every comment and if they find something even slightly anti-Apple find a reason to mod it down. Every single critical thing I've ever said against Apple, even when incredibly fair has received this treatment. I could seriously compare some of those people's protection of Apple to a certain religious group protecting other things.
Dude, I was hating Microsoft with a passion in 1998 because I was a Novell/Netscape guy, I saw first hand what their OS "patches" did to Netscape and the Netware client with a farce front of patching the OS.
You could say I'm a hate Microsoft early adopter.
(BTW - I started hating on Windows in 95 when I discovered taking Windows 3.1 out of my batch file and rebooting caused Doom to run great, starting Windows then exiting - no matter what I did memory wise otherwise caused Doom to run crappy.)
It's a Mac Mini so probably not worth a huge amount, but then again it's got a lot more RAM and HDD than when I bought it. Yes, I did that myself.
Well, next worse thing. I'm using a Mac right now, with Snow Leopard on it.
Really, I think the OS is awesome (except where they intentionally handicapped it) but Apple is pushing lock in so hard and iTunes is beginning to take over everything, in the next revision even in the main OS is going to have iTunes being the main source of software. Given Apples track record of weining its users by introducing something new but staying compatible with the old way, then removing the old way I'm going back to Linux. You heard that right, I went Windows to Linux to Mac/Linux and heading back to just Linux.
Anyone want to donate to my new computer fund?
I already TOLD you how to deal with spammers!
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=552690&cid=23403720
Doh! My systems ARE NOT compatible with that file type.
You obviously haven't used BitTorrent, at least not years ago when I did. There were lots of results that would turn up claiming to be the exact whatever file name you were looking for. Usually they ended in .exe - my systems are compatible with that file type. Occasionally it would be an HTML file with redirects to the site they were "advertising" for.
I don't exactly feel bad for them.
Watching AT&T and Microsoft fight is like watching a guido fight a skin-head. It's worth watching and no matter which one loses it's an overall victory for everyone else.
You know, that MySpace bunch over there has tons of server power and bandwidth they're not using for anything anymore. It scares me to think of what would happen if they seized the opportunity to put it to use.
But there is so, so much potential for spammers to kill it before it gets out of the gate good. Spammers so far have killed quite a large number of things that used to be cool on the internet and they're not going to stop until they're reigned in or nobody uses anything electronic anymore because of them.
This is likely to piss off AT&T that they're work on the really horrible U-Verse service with. I would like to assume the XBox 360 would be more reliabe/work better than the U-Verse garbage, but the idea of red-ringing over a TV show does come to mind.
That being said - I think this is a very good and cool idea. It's convergence and the ousting of old tech that needs to go. Modern cable companies are getting too invasive and control/power hungry over what you watch. I'm not saying Microsoft wont be that way, but at least with them you can reap the benefits of paying less, whereas the cable companies just charge more, invade more, and progressively provide less.
I wish I had mod points for this one.
After my customary week of hard headed self trouble shooting I found a bug report.
The bug had been posted by others. The general answer was "That chip is no longer supported due to issues with the chip itself and we're no longer going to include nasty hacks to make it work". That was firewire. The sound issue was also reported by someone else, the answer was my audio chip didn't work properly. Well, it worked before, and it works on Kubuntu. I don't doubt the chips are buggy, but at least I got the nasty hacks with Ubuntu. When I first moved over the sound was fixed, but firewire stayed broke. Both work now. I haven't tried Debian in about a year - I tend to keep my laptops for a while. My previous Celeron 450 was used until people were making fun of me for carrying a laptop that still had a visible serial port. It finally fell apart, literally, you could see the mainboard. I'm sure the same will happen to this thing.
I quit ATI years ago due to problems with their chips.
Now that they're merged with AMD I may reconsider. (may have little choice)
My results were like yours. That's why I finally switched to stable from testing. Got tired of working on my system instead of using my system.