Reminds me of the scene in "The Fly"
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... where Jeff Goldblum sends the steak through the transporter. He has Geena Davis take a taste of the "molecularly re-engineered" steak vs the "real" steak. She has an immediate negative reaction and her complaint is that is tastes like something that is trying to be a steak (not her exact words, but the gist of the whole scene). This is how I imagine this meat being.
This is also similar to some of those vegetarian "meats" available. One hamburger product I tried reminded me a lot of that scene. It tasted more like a burger than any other veggie burger I tried, but was perhaps a bit too close without being perfect. The end result was that it was more "disturbing" to eat because though it sorta tasted like meat, it had a weird "there is something not right here" kind of taste to it.
Of course they'll realize (too late of course) that given the right combinations of other foods/chemicals that the meat will continue to grow while in the gut. This will at first be disturbing as burger gluttons everywhere start exploding, but then people will realize that you only have to eat one burger, and given a good protein shake, you can "replenish" it any time you want:)
All this talk about the back button is interesting, but it seems to ignore one of the biggest failings with todays web browsers, and that is the whole page based metaphor. Now it works great for content that lends itself to it, but it sucks for the ever increasing sites that use the browser as an application front end vs a simple content reader. For anyone whose done any application creation in html/http you know what type of nightmare exists trying to keep track of user sessions and making your app "back button" proof.
What browsers need is a more robust control mechanism that allows the site to control exactly what happens when the navigation buttons are pressed. Moving around in an ecommerce site is a lot different than a message board. Now I'm not saying make it a free-for-all, but people do expect certain "logical" behaviours and many are smart enough to deal with minor shifts in absolute behaviour depending on context. This combined with other improved navigational aids (e.g. like the article, better history, etc) would make EVERYONES life easier.
As a matter of principle and desire for truth, I have no trouble saying hell.
Right, but that is missing the point. The bigger issue that one is faced with is that if your life in the matrix were not that bad, then could you truely face the "real world".
And of course, the bigger overarching question is, when you are in the "real world", how do you know that you are in the "real world"? How do you know it's not the matrix being smart and saying, "hey, if these fools want to live in a post apocalyptic hell, I'll give'em one to live in, making them happy". So the ultimate irony would be that you would be giving up a relatively "nice" existence, for one that pretty much sucks, but in "reality" is no better than what you originally had?!?
Actually that does bring up an interesting point. Say they somehow manage to 'defeat' the matrix. Now the diplomatic thing to do would be to give each individual a choice (just as was done with Neo and the rest). People would be "brought out" to see the real world first hand, and then we would be allowed to choose. This of course assumes that by 'defeating' the matrix, it is not destroyed, but rather its programming is now controlled by humans.
After that, Morpheus and company can start a company called "Recall Enterprises" and offer people vacations to the most exotic places (i.e. no non hell on earth location) without leaving the comfy confines of........
Well if your the govt, then the implications are huge. If they had a way of effieciently "keyword" scanning spoken conversations (esp. phone), this would help intelligence gathering tremendously. If this company can make their stuff work as advertised, they have huge upside potential with the likes of the NSA, DOD, CIA, etc.
Well assuming that your primary reason for communicating with the thing is to transfer data to/from it, ftp would be the minimum protocol required (i.e. you'd want ftp anyway even if you did have telnet/rsh/ssh). It would be simple on the sat side to have it respond to commands that were say in a specific file (text file at that). So they could upload '/commands' and the sat would then execute whatever was there. Another way would be to use the normal authentication to do some command processing. If communications were over a secure channel (as one would assume it would be), then you could have various username/password combos be meaningful. I.E. you could login as EngineControl and anything you upload would then be assumed to be for the engine controller (I have a dye sub printer that works sorta like this).
So out of all the "standard" protocols out there, ftp would be the most flexible while still being very light weight.
How is running out of money "selling out", except in the strictist sense of the word? They did/do have some cool stuff (we use some of their hardware development kits here at work), but if they are not selling enough to stay afloat, then you do what you have to do to keep some semblence of the company going. What would you have them do, just go belly up?
It's a Development Kit. It's not intended for mass-market use. You're supposed to use the board to help you create real stuff.
Right but it's a development kit that is designed with that form factor in mind. I don't see any other support on their site for taking what you've designed and being able to apply it to other form factors. After all, it reads like a software development kit, not a hardware one since there are no hardware hooks. Is there a replaceable flash or anything of the sort, nope. They want you to cram the thing into a case, not a beige case, but some sort of case and build a product around this board, so my complaints are far from pointless. What makes this board any different from the other MicroATX boards out there other than the fact that it has their processor?
I stand by my contention that this board does not go far enough. It is NOT a "cpu platform development" board, it is a "system development" board to wrap the board in. Unless you saw something on their site that I didn't, if so, please point me to it, because like I said, I'd love to do some custom systems with it if they offer something other than a glorified microatx board.
I'm glad you mentioned that because I forgot to add them to my list:
- remove the 3 pci slots
For the formfactor and applications that I mentioned, a pci slot is worthless (actually, maybe one horizontal might work). I want this thing to be small, throwing in a big ole nvidia card with massive heat sink and fan isn't going to help the applications that I have in mind. That's why I said to give it expandability by sodimm based modules. small enough for you to upgrade and still keep the thing a minimum size. Better yet, allow some of the code morphing magic to do things like the audio, so I can "upgrade" without adding anything other than software (I'm dreaming now:)
It's now, what, 4 years later and they still only have x86. Shame on you guys for lying to me like that!
I don't think they lied, it all has to do with reality. The reality is that the cpus have not sold in the quantities that they would have liked. In order to spend money on resources to come up with these other "personalities" you have to get the money from somewhere. I can't imagine that it would be cheap to develop such a thing and make it performant enough to justify the expense. Like the original poster of the article said, their hurting and it sure doesn't make any sense to pour money into supporting other chips that don't have nearly the market as the intel chips anyway. plus one of their claims to fame, low heat dissapation, isn't as big of a deal with the PPC since the chips run at lower clock rates and use less power in general anyway. Do cut them some slack, nice idea, just no money in it, sounds familiar.
Why not? Because an open source, "secure" system that prevents end user illegal copying is impossible
I never said that the solution had to be completely opensource. I just said that the opensource community could pitch in and lend their technical expertise. This being a perfect example of OS not being the ultimate solution for every problem.
Plus I also said "well as much as possible" because I know it's pretty much next to impossible given any technical solution to make it perfect. I again stated that the point was that the MPAA/RIAA wasn't going to just throw their hands up and say, "gosh I guess it's impossible". So given that reality, why don't we try to help come up with a solution that wouldn't be as bad in our eyes vs just sitting around waiting for the next move by the mpaa/riaa to piss us off.
What would really be cool is if they had a kit that allowed one to right their own "code morphing" code on top of their vliw core. I'm sure someone is/has work/ed/ing on a jvm for it. But imagine a linux kernel on core. I know that stuff like this has been tried before and failed miserably, but hey, that's what stuff like OS is about, just doing and making it work, and saying "now isn't that cool".
Or you could even come up with your own custom extensions to the x86 IS, implement game logic, whatever.
I can see the attraction for a kit like this. For those of us who might want to put together some type of home theatre pc or car pc something _like_ this would be nice. With the low power/heat requirements, it would lend itself nicely to such uses. IF it were a lot smaller. It's just too big. Plus they are just competing with all the other microatx mb's out there. This is the feature set that I think would actually be attractive:
- make it much smaller, all small as feasable, don't worry about making it a "standard" size
- chuck the floppy/parallel, keep one serial for programming
- add 2 firewire ports for camcorders/ipods
- sell a 12v converter for car/boat apps
- allow the sound/video to be upgradable somehow (logic on sodimm?) to allow upgrading.
- of course, drop the price.
If they had done these things, then I would be most interested since I have several projects that are begging for a formfactor smaller than microatx, but yet doesn't force me to use crap audio/video.
Hell if you're going to go for a niche, then GO FOR THE NICHE, don't come out with a "me too" product that has very little to distinguish itself from the competition.
It wouldn't be counter productive, but just like anything else, one has to determine what they are trying to achieve and choose the best way to get there.
As far as I can tell (and this applies to me personally) the biggest gripe that people have about MPAA/RIAA is that they want to squelch a persons right to fair use. I don't think anyone begrudges their attempts to keep actually pirating at bay, it's only when these attempts prevent the legitimate owners from doing things that the copyright laws appear to allow is when hackles get raised. Please feel free to add anything else (like artists rights, but I don't really have an opinion on this personally as it is more contract law imho).
OK, so we want to make sure our fair use rights are kept intact. How is the best way to go about doing this? I see two possible approaches. One approach that falls into the category of "why can't we all just get along", is this./. is composed of many technical, knowledgeable people (well one or two and then everyone else;), why don't we as the open source community do the unthinkable, and come up with a os technology to help the MPAA/RIAA attain their goal of making their content harder to illegally copy, but yet still allows fair use use. We regularly bash their attempts at doing this because they would rather err on the side of making the thing totally uncopyable, so why not pitch in and help to try to achieve a mutally agreeable (well as much as possible) solution.
The second approach (and probably more realistic) is to say, "hey, no matter what technology we throw at it, people will copy it". Fine, this is a valid point. But lets be realists here and accept that the MP/RIAA will not take this for an answer. So again, I think having us as a community help them come up with a solution to their needs that is mutually beneficial. Suggest alternatives, create/push these alternatives. Put youself into their shoes, say "I need to protect my IP from those who would illegally gain/attain it" and say, how would I solve this issue?
I guess both my suggestions fall into the category of, lets solve the problems instead of fighting wars. Not that I have anything against fighting wars, it's just that, like in "War Games", there can't be a winner. Sure we could "boycott", but would that REALLY do any good? We're just to small a segment to make any real impact with our wallets, but we could potentially make more impact with our heads.
I know this will get mod'ed off topic, but what the hell, I have karma to burn
That statement reminds me of a joke (apologies to our foreign friends if you don't get it)
A guy was at the hospital getting ready to get a vasectomy. He was in a sour mood knowing the fate that was about to befall him. After removing his clothes and donning his hospital gown, he was lead by a nurse down the halls of the hospital to go to see the doctor how was to perform the procedure. On the way down the hall, he happened to glance into a room. In that room he saw several attractive nurses giving BJ's to the male patients. "Holy Cow, what's going on in there" he asked. The nurse calmly replied that those men were also getting vasectomies, and that as a pre-surgery procedure, they want to make sure that the mans plumbing was clear of any semen. Now his demeanour picked right up and his pace quickened down the hallway. He then happened to glance another room, and in this room there were several men in gowns holding Playboys while jacking off. "What is going on in there?" he asked puzzled. The nurse replied, "Oh, the same thing, but they belong to an HMO."
now we get to side with the pR0n industry. I guess lame ass patents transcend most of the normal things that the average/.'er dislikes (M$, Sony, et al).
When is the USPTO going to realize that there is a significant problem with patents and how they are applied to technology and do a major overhaul of the entire system. Is there a group that is working on getting this pushed through?
emotionally engrossing, visually stunning, socially influential expressions that capture and inform the spirit of the times.
Hey man, it's just a stinkin game. Just like, hey man, it's just a stinkin movie. Not to say that you can't create art or entertainment that has some social significance, but that's not the point of the content. Media servers two primary purposes, to inform or to entertain. Any broader social relevance is few and far between.
Also, why the focus on "adult content"? As a medium to entertain, shouldn't that be the primary goal of the game, to entertain? If he enjoys creating games that happen to be very good and very successful, why would he need to change? Are people having significantly fewer kids so the kid market is not significant anymore? I would think that it is the complete opposite (well not that people are having more kids necessarily), but as adults view consoles and games as commonplace as the tv, more and more kids will be playing more and more games (though not necessarily on consoles), making that market more important.
I for one am glad that he's telling the "establishment" to bugger off. Funny how in a industry that claims to value independance and differentation, that people are trying to make one of it's most creative members conform.
Too good a service and too good a price, hence the money-losing company that had to be shut down.
Does make you wonder exactly what the economics of it was. Their price was decent, comparable to cable and their service was reliable (at least for me). So was this a case of simply not having enough customers, customers hogging bandwidth (I wouldn't believe this one, if so why didn't they just put bandwidth caps and offer tiered service?), to much profit going to the telcos for the lines, etc?
Nothing, it was just a DSL service that happened to be offered by DirecTV (they acquired it from some other company not that long ago). Cool thing (at least for me) was that it actually was what they advertised. I signed up online, got my dsl modem after being informed that my dsl line was up (and within the time period they specified) and I plugged it in and ran with it. Hadn't had a peep or problem with it since. A shame.
Slashdot Mirror
... where Jeff Goldblum sends the steak through the transporter. He has Geena Davis take a taste of the "molecularly re-engineered" steak vs the "real" steak. She has an immediate negative reaction and her complaint is that is tastes like something that is trying to be a steak (not her exact words, but the gist of the whole scene). This is how I imagine this meat being.
:)
This is also similar to some of those vegetarian "meats" available. One hamburger product I tried reminded me a lot of that scene. It tasted more like a burger than any other veggie burger I tried, but was perhaps a bit too close without being perfect. The end result was that it was more "disturbing" to eat because though it sorta tasted like meat, it had a weird "there is something not right here" kind of taste to it.
Of course they'll realize (too late of course) that given the right combinations of other foods/chemicals that the meat will continue to grow while in the gut. This will at first be disturbing as burger gluttons everywhere start exploding, but then people will realize that you only have to eat one burger, and given a good protein shake, you can "replenish" it any time you want
Cool, thanks.
at many on-line parts houses
Don't just throw something like that out, state a few. A simple to program lcd like that is exactly what I'm looking for. TIA.
All this talk about the back button is interesting, but it seems to ignore one of the biggest failings with todays web browsers, and that is the whole page based metaphor. Now it works great for content that lends itself to it, but it sucks for the ever increasing sites that use the browser as an application front end vs a simple content reader. For anyone whose done any application creation in html/http you know what type of nightmare exists trying to keep track of user sessions and making your app "back button" proof.
What browsers need is a more robust control mechanism that allows the site to control exactly what happens when the navigation buttons are pressed. Moving around in an ecommerce site is a lot different than a message board. Now I'm not saying make it a free-for-all, but people do expect certain "logical" behaviours and many are smart enough to deal with minor shifts in absolute behaviour depending on context. This combined with other improved navigational aids (e.g. like the article, better history, etc) would make EVERYONES life easier.
As a matter of principle and desire for truth, I have no trouble saying hell.
Right, but that is missing the point. The bigger issue that one is faced with is that if your life in the matrix were not that bad, then could you truely face the "real world".
And of course, the bigger overarching question is, when you are in the "real world", how do you know that you are in the "real world"? How do you know it's not the matrix being smart and saying, "hey, if these fools want to live in a post apocalyptic hell, I'll give'em one to live in, making them happy". So the ultimate irony would be that you would be giving up a relatively "nice" existence, for one that pretty much sucks, but in "reality" is no better than what you originally had?!?
Actually that does bring up an interesting point. Say they somehow manage to 'defeat' the matrix. Now the diplomatic thing to do would be to give each individual a choice (just as was done with Neo and the rest). People would be "brought out" to see the real world first hand, and then we would be allowed to choose. This of course assumes that by 'defeating' the matrix, it is not destroyed, but rather its programming is now controlled by humans.
........
After that, Morpheus and company can start a company called "Recall Enterprises" and offer people vacations to the most exotic places (i.e. no non hell on earth location) without leaving the comfy confines of
Well if your the govt, then the implications are huge. If they had a way of effieciently "keyword" scanning spoken conversations (esp. phone), this would help intelligence gathering tremendously. If this company can make their stuff work as advertised, they have huge upside potential with the likes of the NSA, DOD, CIA, etc.
Well assuming that your primary reason for communicating with the thing is to transfer data to/from it, ftp would be the minimum protocol required (i.e. you'd want ftp anyway even if you did have telnet/rsh/ssh). It would be simple on the sat side to have it respond to commands that were say in a specific file (text file at that). So they could upload '/commands' and the sat would then execute whatever was there. Another way would be to use the normal authentication to do some command processing. If communications were over a secure channel (as one would assume it would be), then you could have various username/password combos be meaningful. I.E. you could login as EngineControl and anything you upload would then be assumed to be for the engine controller (I have a dye sub printer that works sorta like this).
So out of all the "standard" protocols out there, ftp would be the most flexible while still being very light weight.
Does this mean that someone is working on a cart based Linux distro? Can't wait to do tar backups on my cassette!
Sony, Matsushita Back Linux For Consumer Goods!
The popular tech news site slashdot.org repo rted that the consumer tech giants will cooperatively work on a version of Linux for consumer products!
It just boggles the mind that they sold out
How is running out of money "selling out", except in the strictist sense of the word? They did/do have some cool stuff (we use some of their hardware development kits here at work), but if they are not selling enough to stay afloat, then you do what you have to do to keep some semblence of the company going. What would you have them do, just go belly up?
It's a Development Kit. It's not intended for mass-market use. You're supposed to use the board to help you create real stuff.
Right but it's a development kit that is designed with that form factor in mind. I don't see any other support on their site for taking what you've designed and being able to apply it to other form factors. After all, it reads like a software development kit, not a hardware one since there are no hardware hooks. Is there a replaceable flash or anything of the sort, nope. They want you to cram the thing into a case, not a beige case, but some sort of case and build a product around this board, so my complaints are far from pointless. What makes this board any different from the other MicroATX boards out there other than the fact that it has their processor?
I stand by my contention that this board does not go far enough. It is NOT a "cpu platform development" board, it is a "system development" board to wrap the board in. Unless you saw something on their site that I didn't, if so, please point me to it, because like I said, I'd love to do some custom systems with it if they offer something other than a glorified microatx board.
you do realise that it has 3 pci slots
:)
I'm glad you mentioned that because I forgot to add them to my list:
- remove the 3 pci slots
For the formfactor and applications that I mentioned, a pci slot is worthless (actually, maybe one horizontal might work). I want this thing to be small, throwing in a big ole nvidia card with massive heat sink and fan isn't going to help the applications that I have in mind. That's why I said to give it expandability by sodimm based modules. small enough for you to upgrade and still keep the thing a minimum size. Better yet, allow some of the code morphing magic to do things like the audio, so I can "upgrade" without adding anything other than software (I'm dreaming now
It's now, what, 4 years later and they still only have x86. Shame on you guys for lying to me like that!
I don't think they lied, it all has to do with reality. The reality is that the cpus have not sold in the quantities that they would have liked. In order to spend money on resources to come up with these other "personalities" you have to get the money from somewhere. I can't imagine that it would be cheap to develop such a thing and make it performant enough to justify the expense. Like the original poster of the article said, their hurting and it sure doesn't make any sense to pour money into supporting other chips that don't have nearly the market as the intel chips anyway. plus one of their claims to fame, low heat dissapation, isn't as big of a deal with the PPC since the chips run at lower clock rates and use less power in general anyway. Do cut them some slack, nice idea, just no money in it, sounds familiar.
Why not? Because an open source, "secure" system that prevents end user illegal copying is impossible
I never said that the solution had to be completely opensource. I just said that the opensource community could pitch in and lend their technical expertise. This being a perfect example of OS not being the ultimate solution for every problem.
Plus I also said "well as much as possible" because I know it's pretty much next to impossible given any technical solution to make it perfect. I again stated that the point was that the MPAA/RIAA wasn't going to just throw their hands up and say, "gosh I guess it's impossible". So given that reality, why don't we try to help come up with a solution that wouldn't be as bad in our eyes vs just sitting around waiting for the next move by the mpaa/riaa to piss us off.
Must have been typed on an original Pentium with the floating point rounding error.
What would really be cool is if they had a kit that allowed one to right their own "code morphing" code on top of their vliw core. I'm sure someone is/has work/ed/ing on a jvm for it. But imagine a linux kernel on core. I know that stuff like this has been tried before and failed miserably, but hey, that's what stuff like OS is about, just doing and making it work, and saying "now isn't that cool".
Or you could even come up with your own custom extensions to the x86 IS, implement game logic, whatever.
I can see the attraction for a kit like this. For those of us who might want to put together some type of home theatre pc or car pc something _like_ this would be nice. With the low power/heat requirements, it would lend itself nicely to such uses. IF it were a lot smaller. It's just too big. Plus they are just competing with all the other microatx mb's out there. This is the feature set that I think would actually be attractive:
- make it much smaller, all small as feasable, don't worry about making it a "standard" size
- chuck the floppy/parallel, keep one serial for programming
- add 2 firewire ports for camcorders/ipods
- sell a 12v converter for car/boat apps
- allow the sound/video to be upgradable somehow (logic on sodimm?) to allow upgrading.
- of course, drop the price.
If they had done these things, then I would be most interested since I have several projects that are begging for a formfactor smaller than microatx, but yet doesn't force me to use crap audio/video.
Hell if you're going to go for a niche, then GO FOR THE NICHE, don't come out with a "me too" product that has very little to distinguish itself from the competition.
It wouldn't be counter productive, but just like anything else, one has to determine what they are trying to achieve and choose the best way to get there.
/. is composed of many technical, knowledgeable people (well one or two and then everyone else ;), why don't we as the open source community do the unthinkable, and come up with a os technology to help the MPAA/RIAA attain their goal of making their content harder to illegally copy, but yet still allows fair use use. We regularly bash their attempts at doing this because they would rather err on the side of making the thing totally uncopyable, so why not pitch in and help to try to achieve a mutally agreeable (well as much as possible) solution.
As far as I can tell (and this applies to me personally) the biggest gripe that people have about MPAA/RIAA is that they want to squelch a persons right to fair use. I don't think anyone begrudges their attempts to keep actually pirating at bay, it's only when these attempts prevent the legitimate owners from doing things that the copyright laws appear to allow is when hackles get raised. Please feel free to add anything else (like artists rights, but I don't really have an opinion on this personally as it is more contract law imho).
OK, so we want to make sure our fair use rights are kept intact. How is the best way to go about doing this? I see two possible approaches. One approach that falls into the category of "why can't we all just get along", is this.
The second approach (and probably more realistic) is to say, "hey, no matter what technology we throw at it, people will copy it". Fine, this is a valid point. But lets be realists here and accept that the MP/RIAA will not take this for an answer. So again, I think having us as a community help them come up with a solution to their needs that is mutually beneficial. Suggest alternatives, create/push these alternatives. Put youself into their shoes, say "I need to protect my IP from those who would illegally gain/attain it" and say, how would I solve this issue?
I guess both my suggestions fall into the category of, lets solve the problems instead of fighting wars. Not that I have anything against fighting wars, it's just that, like in "War Games", there can't be a winner. Sure we could "boycott", but would that REALLY do any good? We're just to small a segment to make any real impact with our wallets, but we could potentially make more impact with our heads.
clean the tubes
I know this will get mod'ed off topic, but what the hell, I have karma to burn
That statement reminds me of a joke (apologies to our foreign friends if you don't get it)
A guy was at the hospital getting ready to get a vasectomy. He was in a sour mood knowing the fate that was about to befall him. After removing his clothes and donning his hospital gown, he was lead by a nurse down the halls of the hospital to go to see the doctor how was to perform the procedure. On the way down the hall, he happened to glance into a room. In that room he saw several attractive nurses giving BJ's to the male patients. "Holy Cow, what's going on in there" he asked. The nurse calmly replied that those men were also getting vasectomies, and that as a pre-surgery procedure, they want to make sure that the mans plumbing was clear of any semen. Now his demeanour picked right up and his pace quickened down the hallway. He then happened to glance another room, and in this room there were several men in gowns holding Playboys while jacking off. "What is going on in there?" he asked puzzled. The nurse replied, "Oh, the same thing, but they belong to an HMO."
now we get to side with the pR0n industry. I guess lame ass patents transcend most of the normal things that the average /.'er dislikes (M$, Sony, et al).
When is the USPTO going to realize that there is a significant problem with patents and how they are applied to technology and do a major overhaul of the entire system. Is there a group that is working on getting this pushed through?
industry. They take themselves way too seriously.
emotionally engrossing, visually stunning, socially influential expressions that capture and inform the spirit of the times.
Hey man, it's just a stinkin game. Just like, hey man, it's just a stinkin movie. Not to say that you can't create art or entertainment that has some social significance, but that's not the point of the content. Media servers two primary purposes, to inform or to entertain. Any broader social relevance is few and far between.
Also, why the focus on "adult content"? As a medium to entertain, shouldn't that be the primary goal of the game, to entertain? If he enjoys creating games that happen to be very good and very successful, why would he need to change? Are people having significantly fewer kids so the kid market is not significant anymore? I would think that it is the complete opposite (well not that people are having more kids necessarily), but as adults view consoles and games as commonplace as the tv, more and more kids will be playing more and more games (though not necessarily on consoles), making that market more important.
I for one am glad that he's telling the "establishment" to bugger off. Funny how in a industry that claims to value independance and differentation, that people are trying to make one of it's most creative members conform.
Too good a service and too good a price, hence the money-losing company that had to be shut down.
Does make you wonder exactly what the economics of it was. Their price was decent, comparable to cable and their service was reliable (at least for me). So was this a case of simply not having enough customers, customers hogging bandwidth (I wouldn't believe this one, if so why didn't they just put bandwidth caps and offer tiered service?), to much profit going to the telcos for the lines, etc?
Nothing, it was just a DSL service that happened to be offered by DirecTV (they acquired it from some other company not that long ago). Cool thing (at least for me) was that it actually was what they advertised. I signed up online, got my dsl modem after being informed that my dsl line was up (and within the time period they specified) and I plugged it in and ran with it. Hadn't had a peep or problem with it since. A shame.
Sorry, but DirecTVDSL had nothing to do with satellite broadboand, just dsl. They had a good service at a good price (never had a problem with mine).