Doesn't cutting off a customer decrease their revenue by about $50? Besides, I doubt it would cost that much to do throttling as they currently have the capability to do speed bursting for the first x seconds of a download.
Besides, they're not only losing out revenue on just the internet. I've never been cut off from them, but because of their antics, I discontinued both tv and internet service through them, so now they're losing out on $100+ of revenue.
If heavy bandwidth usage is becoming such a problem, I don't understand why they can't just throttle the heavy users once they reach a certain daily or monthly amount of bandwidth. They could also throttle all users during heavy times on longer downloads. There are so many options they could use that don't include putting caps and cutting people off or charging them more once they've hit the cap.
That won't stop the billing though. I canceled my service when I got sick of the stunts and the high bills. Two months later, they tried billing me for two months worth despite the fact that it had been canceled for that time. They straightened it out, but it's still a pain to have to deal with.
You're lucky that you were just paying $55. I got tired of paying $71/month for their digital cable service + another $7 for their anemic hdtv offering. Their expanded basic cable here is $55. On top of it I dropped their internet service and started using my apartment ethernet again (slow but free). I ditched the cable for rabbit ears, supplemented it with the 3/month netflix for $18 and haven't looked back.
The funny thing is I keep getting flyers from them offering me digital cable for $20/6 months. I wonder how much resistance I would get from them if I signed up and immediately scheduled my disconnect for 6 months later.
It could be that the tower serves as a translator for more distant stations. If that's the case, then it may well not transition to digital as translators and low power stations are exempt from the 2009 mandatory switchover. That may also explain the threatening letters from the apparent single owner.
Atheros is definitely one of the better supported cards.
However, I am surprised that no one has mentioned Ralink yet. They are perhaps one of the most friendly wireless chipset manufacturers to the Linux and open source community. They provide documentation without requiring a non-disclosure agreement. They also distribute an open source Linux driver which has been improved greatly by the rt2x00 project. The rt2x00 project is currently rewriting the Ralink drivers for inclusion in the kernel.
The legacy drivers from the rt2x00 do work well (at least the rt2500 that I have does) and are usually easy to install and configure. The binary firmwares for the drivers that require them are also freely redistributable.
That may be the reason for the fact, but it doesn't change it. It's not like there's much of an alternative though. The only sure things in life are death and taxes. It doesn't matter where you live, you're going to subjected to taxes of some sort.
You may be right about public schooling but then again that's a completely different beast, is off-topic and doesn't relate to community broadband at all. Given that, your post was hardly insightful as it didn't provide any insight whatsoever into how government provided community Wi-Fi reduces overall choice. Please give some explanation of that and the other possible negative consequences of it.
Also, you mentioned Fon as a possible solution. While I think Fon is a great idea in theory, it assumes you have broadband access to start with. It also likely violates the terms of service of most broadband providers and opens you up to all sorts of liability issues.
That being said, while I like the idea of community broadband, I am actually opposed to the county wide mesh Wi-Fi that Earthlink is going to roll out here here I live since it is likely to interfere greatly with the performance of my home wireless network.
Yeah, the GPL has certainly had a huge impact on the software market. I definitely recognize that. I just think it's petty that people get really hard core religious about the licenses they use. License selection is just another case of what your goals are and what's the best tool to achieve those goals.
Community internet access is not any different than other government-run services such as parks and recreation or county libraries. Tax payers generally don't have the choice of whether or not to pay taxes for those services either. That's just a fact of life. You did, however, leave out a few more choices in the matter. There's the choice of attending public county board meetings to have your voice heard. You can write your board members to complain. You can run for county board or city council yourself to work to stop the funding for those services you don't want to pay taxes for. Those are options that you have at your disposal. Besides, it's not likely that community broadband services are going to cost the average tax payer significantly more on their annual local tax bill. You probably already spend more each morning at Starbucks for your daily caffeine fix.
The cable and telephone companies would like everyone to believe that community broadband would put them out of business reducing choice for everyone. However, I suspect that it won't have that impact much like how public libraries don't put book stores out of business. Most people who subscribe to their services, such as myself, will continue to do so because the traditional ISPs will be able to provide the added value of high performance connectivity that community broadband won't be able to provide. The real impact of community broadband will be increasing the general availability of broadband by giving dial-up users and non-users a lower cost entry level alternative for broadband internet access.
I'm not quite sure where people get this notion that local government run internet access is anti-competitive. If the people of a locality do not like their choices or those choices are too expensive or limited, it's certainly within their rights to build out their own wi-fi network. If anything, it would put competitive pressure on traditional internet service providers. What's anti-competitive are various state laws that prohibit local governments from rolling out community wi-fi. As far as censorship goes, if you're worried about that then there's nothing stopping you from subscribing to a traditional isp. That's the power of having choice.
Which is exactly why neither license is necessarily better than the other. They're just different licenses better suited for different applications and different purposes.
I have absolutely no problem with copyright holders enforcing their copyrights regardless of who it is. The problem I have is with the methods that the RIAA and MPAA have used in enforcing copyrights. For starters, the RIAA and the MPAA don't even hold the copyrights, their member organizations do. The actual copyright holders are farming out the dirty work to the RIAA and MPAA. Second, they have been using potentially illegal tactics (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations?) to obtain information. Third, they frequently end up suing or bullying people into settling regardless of guilt or innocence. They are effectively attacking regular folks who also happen to be their customers instead of focusing on the large operations that are wholesale distributing their media and profiting from it. For the small time file sharing, a simple cease and desist order would be sufficient to take care of the problem.
This isn't really news. It's just gross speculation. It's more the FSF equivalent to the FUD that MS spreads regularly. I sincerely doubt that either MS or the FSF wants to get into a major legal fight. It's extremely expensive and does neither side much benefit. Microsoft is going to go out of its way to avoid distributing any GPL3 code. Likewise, I don't see Microsoft abusing its patent library to extract cash out of anyone. If history is any indication, they primarily use their patent stash as a defensive mechanism much like all the other big companies like Sun, IBM, etc.
All of this speculation is blown way out of proportion. The true threats patent-wise to both free software and Microsoft alike are the patent trolls that produce nothing and only receive revenue from patent royalties and litigation.
Sounds like the simple solution would be to explain the dollar costs associated with the conversion. This would include licensing, training, design, implementation, and testing costs of switching. You would want to weigh heavily in your presentation about the money the OSS solution would save immediately and in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
After I canceled, I got a bill 2 months later for service during that time as if I had not canceled.
Doesn't cutting off a customer decrease their revenue by about $50? Besides, I doubt it would cost that much to do throttling as they currently have the capability to do speed bursting for the first x seconds of a download. Besides, they're not only losing out revenue on just the internet. I've never been cut off from them, but because of their antics, I discontinued both tv and internet service through them, so now they're losing out on $100+ of revenue.
If heavy bandwidth usage is becoming such a problem, I don't understand why they can't just throttle the heavy users once they reach a certain daily or monthly amount of bandwidth. They could also throttle all users during heavy times on longer downloads. There are so many options they could use that don't include putting caps and cutting people off or charging them more once they've hit the cap.
That won't stop the billing though. I canceled my service when I got sick of the stunts and the high bills. Two months later, they tried billing me for two months worth despite the fact that it had been canceled for that time. They straightened it out, but it's still a pain to have to deal with.
Yup, It's CRAPCASTIC!
You're lucky that you were just paying $55. I got tired of paying $71/month for their digital cable service + another $7 for their anemic hdtv offering. Their expanded basic cable here is $55. On top of it I dropped their internet service and started using my apartment ethernet again (slow but free). I ditched the cable for rabbit ears, supplemented it with the 3/month netflix for $18 and haven't looked back.
The funny thing is I keep getting flyers from them offering me digital cable for $20/6 months. I wonder how much resistance I would get from them if I signed up and immediately scheduled my disconnect for 6 months later.
Regardless of which he chooses, I'm sure they will sign each other's public keys instead of wedding rings.
It could be that the tower serves as a translator for more distant stations. If that's the case, then it may well not transition to digital as translators and low power stations are exempt from the 2009 mandatory switchover. That may also explain the threatening letters from the apparent single owner.
Unfortunately, none of them are on the market yet. From what I've seen, it'll be in February, about the time they mail out the coupons.
In the meantime, I would follow this thread.
They would at least have the cash that they used on the lawyers.
Atheros is definitely one of the better supported cards.
However, I am surprised that no one has mentioned Ralink yet. They are perhaps one of the most friendly wireless chipset manufacturers to the Linux and open source community. They provide documentation without requiring a non-disclosure agreement. They also distribute an open source Linux driver which has been improved greatly by the rt2x00 project. The rt2x00 project is currently rewriting the Ralink drivers for inclusion in the kernel.
The legacy drivers from the rt2x00 do work well (at least the rt2500 that I have does) and are usually easy to install and configure. The binary firmwares for the drivers that require them are also freely redistributable.
That may be the reason for the fact, but it doesn't change it. It's not like there's much of an alternative though. The only sure things in life are death and taxes. It doesn't matter where you live, you're going to subjected to taxes of some sort.
You may be right about public schooling but then again that's a completely different beast, is off-topic and doesn't relate to community broadband at all. Given that, your post was hardly insightful as it didn't provide any insight whatsoever into how government provided community Wi-Fi reduces overall choice. Please give some explanation of that and the other possible negative consequences of it.
Also, you mentioned Fon as a possible solution. While I think Fon is a great idea in theory, it assumes you have broadband access to start with. It also likely violates the terms of service of most broadband providers and opens you up to all sorts of liability issues.
That being said, while I like the idea of community broadband, I am actually opposed to the county wide mesh Wi-Fi that Earthlink is going to roll out here here I live since it is likely to interfere greatly with the performance of my home wireless network.
Yeah, the GPL has certainly had a huge impact on the software market. I definitely recognize that. I just think it's petty that people get really hard core religious about the licenses they use. License selection is just another case of what your goals are and what's the best tool to achieve those goals.
Community internet access is not any different than other government-run services such as parks and recreation or county libraries. Tax payers generally don't have the choice of whether or not to pay taxes for those services either. That's just a fact of life. You did, however, leave out a few more choices in the matter. There's the choice of attending public county board meetings to have your voice heard. You can write your board members to complain. You can run for county board or city council yourself to work to stop the funding for those services you don't want to pay taxes for. Those are options that you have at your disposal. Besides, it's not likely that community broadband services are going to cost the average tax payer significantly more on their annual local tax bill. You probably already spend more each morning at Starbucks for your daily caffeine fix.
The cable and telephone companies would like everyone to believe that community broadband would put them out of business reducing choice for everyone. However, I suspect that it won't have that impact much like how public libraries don't put book stores out of business. Most people who subscribe to their services, such as myself, will continue to do so because the traditional ISPs will be able to provide the added value of high performance connectivity that community broadband won't be able to provide. The real impact of community broadband will be increasing the general availability of broadband by giving dial-up users and non-users a lower cost entry level alternative for broadband internet access.
With the way our governments borrow and spend money these days, it's free until our children or grandchildren get their pay stubs.
I'm not quite sure where people get this notion that local government run internet access is anti-competitive. If the people of a locality do not like their choices or those choices are too expensive or limited, it's certainly within their rights to build out their own wi-fi network. If anything, it would put competitive pressure on traditional internet service providers. What's anti-competitive are various state laws that prohibit local governments from rolling out community wi-fi. As far as censorship goes, if you're worried about that then there's nothing stopping you from subscribing to a traditional isp. That's the power of having choice.
Which is exactly why neither license is necessarily better than the other. They're just different licenses better suited for different applications and different purposes.
I have absolutely no problem with copyright holders enforcing their copyrights regardless of who it is. The problem I have is with the methods that the RIAA and MPAA have used in enforcing copyrights. For starters, the RIAA and the MPAA don't even hold the copyrights, their member organizations do. The actual copyright holders are farming out the dirty work to the RIAA and MPAA. Second, they have been using potentially illegal tactics (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violations?) to obtain information. Third, they frequently end up suing or bullying people into settling regardless of guilt or innocence. They are effectively attacking regular folks who also happen to be their customers instead of focusing on the large operations that are wholesale distributing their media and profiting from it. For the small time file sharing, a simple cease and desist order would be sufficient to take care of the problem.
This isn't really news. It's just gross speculation. It's more the FSF equivalent to the FUD that MS spreads regularly. I sincerely doubt that either MS or the FSF wants to get into a major legal fight. It's extremely expensive and does neither side much benefit. Microsoft is going to go out of its way to avoid distributing any GPL3 code. Likewise, I don't see Microsoft abusing its patent library to extract cash out of anyone. If history is any indication, they primarily use their patent stash as a defensive mechanism much like all the other big companies like Sun, IBM, etc.
All of this speculation is blown way out of proportion. The true threats patent-wise to both free software and Microsoft alike are the patent trolls that produce nothing and only receive revenue from patent royalties and litigation.
They forgot to include in the lawsuit, kicking puppies and kidnapping first born children.
I've got a better idea. I'm going to buy it, print Darl's face and SCO's logo on it, roll it, and then sell it as toilet paper to Slashdot users.
That will certainly leave a lot of satisfied Slashdot users. It'll put a lot of money in my pocket too.
You must be old here.
When SCO files for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy.
Six cents must have doubled their stock value.
Sounds like the simple solution would be to explain the dollar costs associated with the conversion. This would include licensing, training, design, implementation, and testing costs of switching. You would want to weigh heavily in your presentation about the money the OSS solution would save immediately and in the long run.