The fact is, no speed is guaranteed; period. If Comcast is giving you 1/100th of the speed; according to the contract nothing is guaranteed and "network conditions" are so vague it will get them out of anything.
Exactly. And the speedtest servers *may* have enough priority to give a good result. This would not be the first time an ISP was prioritizing speedtest connections to make themselves look good.
It's not about how much bandwidth DOCSIS supports; but how many channels on the cable they devote to it. They would be lucky if they were getting 150mbps of bandwidth per node out.
Cable is a total waste of bandwidth. You're already cramming 4 or 5 HD channels in a 6MHZ QAM channel; every On-Demand stream eats up QAM...the more they crap they add, the smaller the pipe becomes.
If more people realized that; they'd stop buying Comcast's BS.
No one bothers to read fine print. If they read the fine print on the contract, or website, or even pausing on a commercial; the fine print mentions this. Anyone who has any understanding of how cable internet works and how the cable system has been built; would immedately understand why getting 150mbps all the time like it's your own dedicated bandwidth is *NEVER* going to happen.
I have FiOS; even my download speeds aren't guaranteed; though Verizon, if you go through the proper channels, will make attempts to keep your speeds running that way. Then again, that's a fiber network. Less crowding per fiber, more bandwidth per fiber.
Cable's problem...is the cable itself. You can't run a "21st century network" using an over 100 year old transmission line; at least not for last mile.
Will do no good. "Speeds are not guaranteed" and pushing 150mbps, down DOCSIS, with an entire neighborhood using the same DOCSIS frequencies...you're NOT going to get the 150mbps you pay for. Not to mention speedtests download so little data it's not an accurate picture.
You should use some simple RF science to figure out why you'll never get those speeds on a reliable basis. Last I looked; they weren't even giving more than 200mbps total on each node
Maybe that's changed; but the real problem is you're on a over-sold network that's shared with who knows how many people. Good luck.
why didn't any of these agencies say "So... we're going to pay you a huge pile of money... once... for this font."
Because spending large piles of money is exactly what Republican's don't want to do; plus, being pro-business, it was in their interests to let some third-party company profit from this mandate. I also don't think it was a required mandate or a standard; if a jurisdiction didn't want to pay for Clearview, they could probably still use Highway Gothic. Clearview was just the other approved font.
You're missing the point. You need the serial chip to communicate with the Arduino; and if you're doing it on Windows...you need the driver to do it. It doesn't matter what the device runs, but the host OS that has to communicate with the device through the chip.
I bought a $2 USB-to-serial converter; apparently has CH340 chip on it. All I use it for is so my ham radio software can trigger the RTS or DTS lines to key the transmit line on my rig for digital modes. Works perfect for that; granted I had to do some surgery to fix the horrible noise issues; it's been just fine.
Mine also doesn't contain a branded chip and is apparently just a piece of silicon under a blob on the board. I don't know who originally came up with the CH340, but it has apparently been cloned by everyone and is starting to grab hold in the market; with a lot of Arduino boards ditching FTDI and going with CH340 for the same reason.
There mere fact is; it's not legal for a company to disable counterfeit devices without authorization. Doing so is basically the same thing as vandalism.
Whether you think they're in the right or not; current interpretation of laws do not. They did not do enough to secure their products to ensure counterfeits wouldn't hit the market; which you do by getting such devices blocked at the customs level.
Typical corporate shill BS from another Anyonymous Coward.
Perhaps people would take you seriously if you attached a name to your post; but, you didn't...so you're just some anonymous coward trying to troll people.
Verizon will gladly rent you a router for $9.95/month (or something); or they will allow you to buy one of theirs. Don't want one of theirs? Then you're welcome to buy any off-the-shelf router for your internet. If you signed up years ago; Verizon outright gave you the router.
AFAIK, it's the same with the biz class as home class.
I think the larger point you should be yelling about isn't the fact you have to pay for Comcast's hardware; but like that Comcast is your only option for services. They're getting away with crap like that because they're a monopoly; and they've likely paid off your state/local legislators to ensure their monopoly will stand nice and legal.
Yes, cable card mandate ended last year; Congress struck it down. Most cable companies immediately stopped offering or even supporting cablecard. Friend of mine on Comcast said they gave him no warning and just shut it off; telling him he'd have to get a box from them.
Of course, most of the time the cable companies broke the system so horribly. Comcast here did not bring out any new hardware from 2007 till recently; that was because they were not allowed to ingrate the security in with the box and had to use cableCard.
If you want to back the cable company on this, go ahead; but you are backing an industry that is 100% anti-consumer and 100% profit-profit.
Except that Comcast is so large content providers can't not afford to come to agreements. If your channel gets taken off of 50% of homes in the US; it will be a disaster for the network. That means the advertising value just plummeted.
One of the biggest fears from content providers over all these mergers is it would allow one or two companies to dominate and would remove any bargining power they have. Comcast doesn't want to pay for it? You're going to have to lower your fee because without Comcast, you will effectively be out of business.
Advertisers will not cough up money if your channel loses that many subscribers.
Fine. Maybe when your cable company is charging you $400/month for the same crap and the networks have shut off OTA for being non-profitable...will you be still calling it socialist.
Your hatred of Obama makes you blind to the fact no corporation is your friend; none of them care about you. All they see you as is a source of income; and a cable company would gladly take your money without giving you service if they could figure out a way to legally do it.
I don't want to live in a world where I'm under the total control of a heartless corporation. It's bad enough I only have two choices for TV/Internet/Phone as well as most other things in this country. Where the fuck is the competitiveness? I thought open free markets were supposed to embrace competition; not merge and get rid of it.
You're just a source of money to them. Take a look at any water utility that shuts people off for non-payment. IF you can legally shut off what could be considered a basic requirement to live; then there's a problem.
IF you think that's the way it should be; then you're a horrible person...and your title of Anonymous Coward says everything it needs to say about you.
The reason people bother with cable is the fact the selection of channels you get OTA is absolute garbage. The networks don't show anything worth showing anymore; and the "extra" channels are usually the same crappy reruns or foreign language programming.
There's also the fact a large majority of the people do not have the luck you have with digital TV. I live 25 miles from DC; if you assume that I get all the OTA DC channels and a good chunk of Baltimore stations you are horribly mistaken. I can get 1 broadcast out of DC and another from a tower five miles away. This leaves me with CBS and about 12 channels that are all foreign language. Sure, I get great signal reports on all of them; but the digital streams are completely useless after they've bounced around 5000 times. If an ATSC signal bounces even once, the decoder cannot handle it. I am not about to invest the thousands of dollars in installing a TV tower (which will probably meet local opposition ayway) or the equipment to put an antenna on the top of it with a rotator (coax is not cheap, and RG-6 is not suitable for UHF); especially considering the garbage I could get OTA.
It's great you don't need cable; it's also ironic you talk about streaming services as if they're all free. CBS charges, all the other content providers want verification of TV subscription before they'll let you view. The grass might be green where you are; but for myself, and a lot of people; if we didn't have cable, we'd be completely out of the loop.
That's all fine till three of them draw guns and shoot on you first.
The idea that a gun will protect you 100% of the time is a myth put out by gun manufacturers and their butt-buddy, the NRA. They want you to think the gun will protect you in every case; when that's not true. Most of the time, people don't have a chance to do anything but pull a gun because the criminal is armed and has zero remorse about randomly opening fire. Meanwhile, after they put 15 rounds in to you just reaching for your gun; they've stolen your gun and committed more crimes with it.
I can't tell you the number of people I've spoken to who had CC permits that did them no good because they either got shot themselves or were ambushed with no way of preparing.
Just remember the person who submitted the story had the decency to put his name on it. You, on the other hand; are about like every other conservative...the name "Anonymous Coward" fits you perfectly. Your narrow-minded opinions mean squat if you don't have the decency to own up to them.
Perhaps you forget the actual idea behind free speech.
The idea that you can say whatever you want, and that no one can stop you; is not the idea behind free speech. Free Speech merely means the government cannot imprison or bring up criminal charges for speech they do not like.
Twitter is not a government organization, it is allowed to place whatever terms and conditions they want on the service. They own it; the users do not. It is perfectly acceptable from a constitutional standpoint for Twitter to say "we do not like your hate-speech and are removing you from the service", it would be legal for any company to say "I do not like what you wrote on Twitter/Facebook/Other Social Media; they disagree with our ethics and you are being terminated."
Another example is if you were shouting hate-speech in a public place. As long as you on public property, that is fine. However, the minute you step on to privately owned property; the owners are able to enforce any restrictions they want. Want to scream bigoted statements in front of my house? Make sure you're doing it on the sidewalk or street; if you're in my yard; I'll have you removed.
I find it ironic that people that scream the most about constitutional freedoms; are doing so in the most twisted way possible. If Trump is violating the usual TOS of Twitter; than he needs to be removed. He can't be charged with a crime for doing so; but Twitter would not be violating the constitution.
What makes you say 1mbps is fast enough? Do you even go on the internet? So many pages are riddled with advertisements they'll take forever to load. So many pages anymore aren't posting stories; they're posting video.
Maybe if you got out of 1997 and stopped using RealPlayer; you'd realize you can't do anything under a megabit anymore. I realized that in 2005 when I was stuck on sub-megabit internet. Web-pages were a tedious ordeal.
You speak as an idiot; or someone who wants to see internet speeds fall so people will be forced to going back to paying outrageous prices for cable TV.
Who do you work for? Judging by the fact you're too cowardly to post under a name, I can only assume you're some corporate shill. You should have disclosed that; it might have gotten you at least a little respect.
This is one of the few cases where I don't support the activities of any party involved; the hackers for what they did, the website for providing/promoting such blatant infidelity, nor the people who use the site.
However, in this case, the people I support the least are the people who took their marriage vows so lightly they're using a website to cheat. It's absolutely disgusting. You get what you deserve. What to avoid the collateral damage; don't cheat. But, since you're past that point; you might as well fess up to it; and make sure you tell your family you're only coming clean about it due to a threat of blackmail. It'll make them see your character for what it really is.
Quite frankly, screw everyone all around in this ordeal. It's disgusting we're still talking about this.
Oh..and also the thing that kicked it all off: http://www.reuters.com/article...
I don't think anyone is saying they can't waste their money; it's just we have regulations on station ownership. CRI is "bending" the rules by having majority stakes in the companies that own and lease these stations; and it's just natural they'd use it to spread their propaganda.
The Chinese are essentially broadcasting all their propaganda on a 50kW AM station located just outside of DC; that doesn't disclose they're Chinese; and that no one has done anything about.
I don't think most people knew what a matrix was, not till the quad era. The earliest reference I can find to it is from 1931, which talked about using hybrid transformers to matrix audio. Most people encountered it in the 60s/70s in the form of FM MPX, also called FM Stereo. The mid/sum channel is used to modulate the main FM carrier; while the difference/side is contained in a dual-sideband carrier supressed amplitude modulated subcarrier at 38khz in.
Of course, mid/side matrix is also used in the bulk of audio formats. It's slightly more efficient to encode one channel of everything and one channel of just the difference vs both independently and having all sorts of redundancy. Unlike the quad matrix systems that came out in the 70s; mid/side is actually a truly lossless matrix since you're only asking for two channels from two channels. They called this "joint-stereo" in the mp3 days; except joint-stereo could also include some intensity stereo frames which weren't very good.
I personally first discovered this method; by accident, as a child. It was later that someone online told me about the hafler circuit for surround sound. The commercialized version of this was Dynaco's "Dynaquad", which included a "quadaptor" which provided this wiring scheme with an attenuator.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is, no speed is guaranteed; period. If Comcast is giving you 1/100th of the speed; according to the contract nothing is guaranteed and "network conditions" are so vague it will get them out of anything.
Exactly. And the speedtest servers *may* have enough priority to give a good result. This would not be the first time an ISP was prioritizing speedtest connections to make themselves look good.
It's not about how much bandwidth DOCSIS supports; but how many channels on the cable they devote to it. They would be lucky if they were getting 150mbps of bandwidth per node out.
Cable is a total waste of bandwidth. You're already cramming 4 or 5 HD channels in a 6MHZ QAM channel; every On-Demand stream eats up QAM...the more they crap they add, the smaller the pipe becomes.
If more people realized that; they'd stop buying Comcast's BS.
No one bothers to read fine print. If they read the fine print on the contract, or website, or even pausing on a commercial; the fine print mentions this. Anyone who has any understanding of how cable internet works and how the cable system has been built; would immedately understand why getting 150mbps all the time like it's your own dedicated bandwidth is *NEVER* going to happen.
I have FiOS; even my download speeds aren't guaranteed; though Verizon, if you go through the proper channels, will make attempts to keep your speeds running that way. Then again, that's a fiber network. Less crowding per fiber, more bandwidth per fiber.
Cable's problem...is the cable itself. You can't run a "21st century network" using an over 100 year old transmission line; at least not for last mile.
Will do no good. "Speeds are not guaranteed" and pushing 150mbps, down DOCSIS, with an entire neighborhood using the same DOCSIS frequencies...you're NOT going to get the 150mbps you pay for. Not to mention speedtests download so little data it's not an accurate picture.
You should use some simple RF science to figure out why you'll never get those speeds on a reliable basis. Last I looked; they weren't even giving more than 200mbps total on each node
Maybe that's changed; but the real problem is you're on a over-sold network that's shared with who knows how many people. Good luck.
why didn't any of these agencies say "So ... we're going to pay you a huge pile of money ... once ... for this font."
Because spending large piles of money is exactly what Republican's don't want to do; plus, being pro-business, it was in their interests to let some third-party company profit from this mandate. I also don't think it was a required mandate or a standard; if a jurisdiction didn't want to pay for Clearview, they could probably still use Highway Gothic. Clearview was just the other approved font.
You're missing the point. You need the serial chip to communicate with the Arduino; and if you're doing it on Windows...you need the driver to do it. It doesn't matter what the device runs, but the host OS that has to communicate with the device through the chip.
I bought a $2 USB-to-serial converter; apparently has CH340 chip on it. All I use it for is so my ham radio software can trigger the RTS or DTS lines to key the transmit line on my rig for digital modes. Works perfect for that; granted I had to do some surgery to fix the horrible noise issues; it's been just fine.
Mine also doesn't contain a branded chip and is apparently just a piece of silicon under a blob on the board. I don't know who originally came up with the CH340, but it has apparently been cloned by everyone and is starting to grab hold in the market; with a lot of Arduino boards ditching FTDI and going with CH340 for the same reason.
There mere fact is; it's not legal for a company to disable counterfeit devices without authorization. Doing so is basically the same thing as vandalism.
Whether you think they're in the right or not; current interpretation of laws do not. They did not do enough to secure their products to ensure counterfeits wouldn't hit the market; which you do by getting such devices blocked at the customs level.
Typical corporate shill BS from another Anyonymous Coward.
Perhaps people would take you seriously if you attached a name to your post; but, you didn't...so you're just some anonymous coward trying to troll people.
I've got FiOS.
Verizon will gladly rent you a router for $9.95/month (or something); or they will allow you to buy one of theirs. Don't want one of theirs? Then you're welcome to buy any off-the-shelf router for your internet. If you signed up years ago; Verizon outright gave you the router.
AFAIK, it's the same with the biz class as home class.
I think the larger point you should be yelling about isn't the fact you have to pay for Comcast's hardware; but like that Comcast is your only option for services. They're getting away with crap like that because they're a monopoly; and they've likely paid off your state/local legislators to ensure their monopoly will stand nice and legal.
Yes, cable card mandate ended last year; Congress struck it down. Most cable companies immediately stopped offering or even supporting cablecard. Friend of mine on Comcast said they gave him no warning and just shut it off; telling him he'd have to get a box from them.
Of course, most of the time the cable companies broke the system so horribly. Comcast here did not bring out any new hardware from 2007 till recently; that was because they were not allowed to ingrate the security in with the box and had to use cableCard.
If you want to back the cable company on this, go ahead; but you are backing an industry that is 100% anti-consumer and 100% profit-profit.
Except that Comcast is so large content providers can't not afford to come to agreements. If your channel gets taken off of 50% of homes in the US; it will be a disaster for the network. That means the advertising value just plummeted.
One of the biggest fears from content providers over all these mergers is it would allow one or two companies to dominate and would remove any bargining power they have. Comcast doesn't want to pay for it? You're going to have to lower your fee because without Comcast, you will effectively be out of business.
Advertisers will not cough up money if your channel loses that many subscribers.
Fine. Maybe when your cable company is charging you $400/month for the same crap and the networks have shut off OTA for being non-profitable...will you be still calling it socialist.
Your hatred of Obama makes you blind to the fact no corporation is your friend; none of them care about you. All they see you as is a source of income; and a cable company would gladly take your money without giving you service if they could figure out a way to legally do it.
I don't want to live in a world where I'm under the total control of a heartless corporation. It's bad enough I only have two choices for TV/Internet/Phone as well as most other things in this country. Where the fuck is the competitiveness? I thought open free markets were supposed to embrace competition; not merge and get rid of it.
You're just a source of money to them. Take a look at any water utility that shuts people off for non-payment. IF you can legally shut off what could be considered a basic requirement to live; then there's a problem.
IF you think that's the way it should be; then you're a horrible person...and your title of Anonymous Coward says everything it needs to say about you.
CableCARD. But most cable companies do such a piss-poor job of supporting it, that the technology fails to work.
The reason people bother with cable is the fact the selection of channels you get OTA is absolute garbage. The networks don't show anything worth showing anymore; and the "extra" channels are usually the same crappy reruns or foreign language programming.
There's also the fact a large majority of the people do not have the luck you have with digital TV. I live 25 miles from DC; if you assume that I get all the OTA DC channels and a good chunk of Baltimore stations you are horribly mistaken. I can get 1 broadcast out of DC and another from a tower five miles away. This leaves me with CBS and about 12 channels that are all foreign language. Sure, I get great signal reports on all of them; but the digital streams are completely useless after they've bounced around 5000 times. If an ATSC signal bounces even once, the decoder cannot handle it. I am not about to invest the thousands of dollars in installing a TV tower (which will probably meet local opposition ayway) or the equipment to put an antenna on the top of it with a rotator (coax is not cheap, and RG-6 is not suitable for UHF); especially considering the garbage I could get OTA.
It's great you don't need cable; it's also ironic you talk about streaming services as if they're all free. CBS charges, all the other content providers want verification of TV subscription before they'll let you view. The grass might be green where you are; but for myself, and a lot of people; if we didn't have cable, we'd be completely out of the loop.
That's all fine till three of them draw guns and shoot on you first.
The idea that a gun will protect you 100% of the time is a myth put out by gun manufacturers and their butt-buddy, the NRA. They want you to think the gun will protect you in every case; when that's not true. Most of the time, people don't have a chance to do anything but pull a gun because the criminal is armed and has zero remorse about randomly opening fire. Meanwhile, after they put 15 rounds in to you just reaching for your gun; they've stolen your gun and committed more crimes with it.
I can't tell you the number of people I've spoken to who had CC permits that did them no good because they either got shot themselves or were ambushed with no way of preparing.
Just remember the person who submitted the story had the decency to put his name on it. You, on the other hand; are about like every other conservative...the name "Anonymous Coward" fits you perfectly. Your narrow-minded opinions mean squat if you don't have the decency to own up to them.
Perhaps you forget the actual idea behind free speech.
The idea that you can say whatever you want, and that no one can stop you; is not the idea behind free speech. Free Speech merely means the government cannot imprison or bring up criminal charges for speech they do not like.
Twitter is not a government organization, it is allowed to place whatever terms and conditions they want on the service. They own it; the users do not. It is perfectly acceptable from a constitutional standpoint for Twitter to say "we do not like your hate-speech and are removing you from the service", it would be legal for any company to say "I do not like what you wrote on Twitter/Facebook/Other Social Media; they disagree with our ethics and you are being terminated."
Another example is if you were shouting hate-speech in a public place. As long as you on public property, that is fine. However, the minute you step on to privately owned property; the owners are able to enforce any restrictions they want. Want to scream bigoted statements in front of my house? Make sure you're doing it on the sidewalk or street; if you're in my yard; I'll have you removed.
I find it ironic that people that scream the most about constitutional freedoms; are doing so in the most twisted way possible. If Trump is violating the usual TOS of Twitter; than he needs to be removed. He can't be charged with a crime for doing so; but Twitter would not be violating the constitution.
What makes you say 1mbps is fast enough? Do you even go on the internet? So many pages are riddled with advertisements they'll take forever to load. So many pages anymore aren't posting stories; they're posting video.
Maybe if you got out of 1997 and stopped using RealPlayer; you'd realize you can't do anything under a megabit anymore. I realized that in 2005 when I was stuck on sub-megabit internet. Web-pages were a tedious ordeal.
You speak as an idiot; or someone who wants to see internet speeds fall so people will be forced to going back to paying outrageous prices for cable TV.
Who do you work for? Judging by the fact you're too cowardly to post under a name, I can only assume you're some corporate shill. You should have disclosed that; it might have gotten you at least a little respect.
This is what you get.
This is one of the few cases where I don't support the activities of any party involved; the hackers for what they did, the website for providing/promoting such blatant infidelity, nor the people who use the site.
However, in this case, the people I support the least are the people who took their marriage vows so lightly they're using a website to cheat. It's absolutely disgusting. You get what you deserve. What to avoid the collateral damage; don't cheat. But, since you're past that point; you might as well fess up to it; and make sure you tell your family you're only coming clean about it due to a threat of blackmail. It'll make them see your character for what it really is.
Quite frankly, screw everyone all around in this ordeal. It's disgusting we're still talking about this.
Oh..and also the thing that kicked it all off: http://www.reuters.com/article... I don't think anyone is saying they can't waste their money; it's just we have regulations on station ownership. CRI is "bending" the rules by having majority stakes in the companies that own and lease these stations; and it's just natural they'd use it to spread their propaganda.
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
The Chinese are essentially broadcasting all their propaganda on a 50kW AM station located just outside of DC; that doesn't disclose they're Chinese; and that no one has done anything about.
I don't think most people knew what a matrix was, not till the quad era. The earliest reference I can find to it is from 1931, which talked about using hybrid transformers to matrix audio. Most people encountered it in the 60s/70s in the form of FM MPX, also called FM Stereo. The mid/sum channel is used to modulate the main FM carrier; while the difference/side is contained in a dual-sideband carrier supressed amplitude modulated subcarrier at 38khz in. Of course, mid/side matrix is also used in the bulk of audio formats. It's slightly more efficient to encode one channel of everything and one channel of just the difference vs both independently and having all sorts of redundancy. Unlike the quad matrix systems that came out in the 70s; mid/side is actually a truly lossless matrix since you're only asking for two channels from two channels. They called this "joint-stereo" in the mp3 days; except joint-stereo could also include some intensity stereo frames which weren't very good. I personally first discovered this method; by accident, as a child. It was later that someone online told me about the hafler circuit for surround sound. The commercialized version of this was Dynaco's "Dynaquad", which included a "quadaptor" which provided this wiring scheme with an attenuator.
Yup. Difference matrix. Been around for years.