Please read the entire post before you start the flaming.
I know that when I was in high school (more than 7 years ago) in Santa Cruz, CA, all of the sports programs were funded not by tax payer money but by private donation. People who had been apart of the sports programs, or whos children were in those programs, and decided that they wanted to support them. There was an entire parents organization called the Pirates Club (our mascot was the pirate) whos enitre purpose was to garner funding for the sports program since it got no funding from the school or state. There was another parents organization, the Parents Club, which gathered donations for academics within the school.
Sports do play an important role at schools. I know that soccer made my school experience more enjoyable and allowed me to concentrate more on my school work once I was done playing. It also gives an outlet for people who are looking for something to do after class, which I think is a good thing for a lot of the students who would normally just get themselves into trouble.
That being said, I think that way too much money is being put into, and emphasis placed on, sports in this society. I'm currently getting my Masters degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the publicity that the football team gets angers me to no end. I feel that my experience has been cheapened by the schools affiliation with its football team. The school has three Nobel Laureates, two in physics and one in biology, two women in the physics department who have won McArthur Fellowships in the past 5 years, a world class engineering department with a greater than national average of women in that college and many other great things. Even with all of that, when Coach Barnet (who is the highest paid State employee of Colorado) was put on unpayed leave for 10 weeks (the money he lost over those 10 weeks could pay for 8 4-year full ride, including living expenses, scholarships) the Alumni Association sent a letter to the regents and the president of the university saying that they would withhold donations if Barnet was fired. It sickens me.
This isn't merely a sports verses education issue either. Your standard jock is merely jealous and is trying to exert dominance. There are other aspects of our culture that are trying to produce unthinking non-rational thinkers. If intelligence is revered along with individualism, then the market as we know it will need to modify itself substantially. Another part of our society that is producing a meme that is anti-individual and anti-rational thinking is that of organized religion. If you don't believe me then look at the Evolution verse Creative Design debate, or just start reading this book, The Flight from Science and Reason, which goes into case after case of where religion is attacking science.
I don't think we should just kill all funding of sports. That is extremist and harmful. We need to change the cultural importance of sports and science. Higher emphasis should be placed on intelligence and scientific learning while at the same time people who play sports should not be treated as Gods. Unfortunately, this is a huge change, and one that needs to be done by changing peoples perceptions gradually, attempting to force this change by trying to eliminate funding will not work.
New types of nuclear power plants are still being designed (other than breeder plants). Last I read about it (two years ago) designs for third generation nuclear plants were being pushed. It seemed like quite a bit of time and money was going into their design. These have higher safety and are more effecient. They have been designed but not put into practice due to the irrational fear of radiation. Currently, people are willing to stay on the oil crutch because a vocal minority of ill informed people has convinced them that anything that deals with radiation and radioactie materials is bad. (I appologize if you dislike my cynical attitude, it just gets me angry that we do things like no longer irradiating eggs because people who don't undertand radiation were scared of it)
Breeder plants are an interesting design. They aren't a standard nuclear plant due to their fuel source and waste product. A breeder plant really isn't all that effecient compared to a regular nuclear plant but it can take spent fuel rods from the regular nuclear plant and reuse them. The point of using Breeder plants is to be able to use as much of the fuel as possible and that you have less waste. The problem is that the waste you have is significantly more toxic. Breeders aren't allowed in the USA because their waste product is plutonium, which non-government agencies are not allowed to be in possesion of.
One thing you might want to do to make your papers look nicer is to switch fonts. Times New Roman may be a nice to read, hightly optimized, beautiful font, unfortunately everyone uses it. Since everyone uses it these days, it makes all papers have a look equivalent to someone wearing a cheap suit. I use Dutch 801 for my resume and I have had numerous complements on just my choice of fonts, 90% percent of them saying how professional it looks.
I agree with you 100%. A professor required that we use APS formatting for a paper in one of my upper level physics classes, and he gave us a template for RevTeX 3 APS formatting. After that class I have written everthing in two collumn APS formatting and have never looked back. The number of complements I get from non-scientists for how clean my paper looks, and the impressed looks from my collegues in physics and math is enough to make me never want to look back.
The only thing I haven't used LaTeX for is my resume, but only because I haven't gotten around to making myself a template. Even than I use a old WordPerfect 8 template and save in RTF. People who read it are always impressed with its formatting mainly because it ISN'T from Word.
Unfortunately RevTeX 3 and RevTeX 4 had significant changes to their headers so all of the documents that I had in RevTeX 3 I had to change before I could compile them again. Mind you, it was only 4 lines, but even LaTex isn't immune.
Someone else mentioned using LaTeX for their paper on Lasers, I suggest you follow their example and use LaTeX for writing papers on particle physics. If for no other reason than Feynmann diagrams are fonts.
11 of Logitech's mice are $30 or more. When I bought my new computer about 6 months ago I threw away my MS Intellimouse and plugged in my 5 year old Logitech Mouseman 4. I may have to finally get a new mouse though, about a month ago one of the pads on the bottom lost its stick and fell of, but since I haven't seen any lose of movement I can probably hold off that purchase until something actually breaks.
Everyone I know who has owned a Logitech product has loved it. The first MS mouse I owned was always requiring cleaning and just sucked, I threw it away after 6 months. In fact, at least a quarter of the people I know who own MS mice have had problems with theirs within the first year of ownership. Funny, the University I go to also replaces all of their broken MS mice with old Logitech mice that are more than 5 years old.
Oh, and I think Apple is targetting their market perfectly. The power users will come slowly, but why compete with your ally Linux for them on the desktop when you are in better position to rip away the low end users from MS. I think people are missing the point when they think that Apple will lose market share to Linux, they have two completely different user basis.
I had a friend who did something like this roughly a year ago. The group he was apart, which was essential at the time, of was getting lied to, overworked etc etc...
My friend approached the management and told them that there was talk in the department of a strike. He also told them that they had felt betrayed by the company due to the repetative lies from higher management about raises and appropriate work hours. He calmly informed them that no one wanted to strike but that they felt like they had no other choice since they weren't being heard any other way, and most of the deparement was looking to him to resolve the situation either through talks with management or organizing the strike. His boss and his bosses boss agreed with him and tried to help but were powerless. The higher management sent someone else to appraise the situation, whom my friend warned to tread lightly because most of the department was really upset, she didn't heed his words and was verbally abused for the entire meeting. After their appraisal the higher management's solution was to give my friend a raise but no one else, wait until the next round of scheduled layoffs to fire the entire department and then rehire 3/4 of them back in a months time. They didn't rehire any of the employees that had any leadership skills or repor with the management. The people who did get their jobs back were elated because they couldn't find anything else in the market.
I agree with the opinion of jtheory but I think that you should have someone else do the talking. If you show to them that you are willing to do something about the situation, even in a nice way, you may find yourself without a job.
Okay, so a couple of things. If you buy a laptop, chances are the largest screen you will get will be 15", and the computer will cost ~$2000. That same 15" LCD screen can be bought for anywhere from $260-$400. If you are willing to spend $1000 on an LCD monitor then you can easily get a 19" display. If you buy a laptop for $1000 you will probably only get a 13" display, at best.
TV's are another issue. People aren't willing to spend that kind of money for a small TV. If you are willing to spend $700 you can get a 15" LCD TV. That probably has a lot to deal with supply and demand and the addition of better than laptop speakers combined with them.
Just to make sure we are on the same page, the big displays which cost multiple thousands of dollars are Plasma screens, which is a different technology. Currently LCD's have a limitation of ~22", after which there is a significant degradation to the display (usually).
Although there probably is some price fixing, it isn't as noticable as you seem to think it is.
The one major benefit for using Opera as opposed to Mozilla is Opera has been doing a lot of work on their rendering engine for small devices. The problem with Mozilla (and IE for MS devices) is that they try to render pages as if it were still a full size screen. I suggest you take a look Opera's web page about that technology, it is pretty slick.
I still use Galeon/Mozilla at home but when I get a Zaurus I want a browser that is designed for the 320x240 screen.
Another blow is that after the Challenger explosion NASA actually said that if they lost another one they would not replace it. There will be no more new shuttles.
I haven't tried out KDE 3. I like Evolution and currently there are some conflicts with the Gnome Libraries and the KDE libraries. It is nice to know that KDE 3 has that feature. Thanks for informing me.
Actually, quite a few people use that feature that you positively hate. I find it quite useful, so much so that I went back to Enlightenment specifically for that feature, and why I hate using KDE.
I find that having a larger than normal connected desktop to be useful for many reasons. The biggest is that it helps me out with organization and prevention of clutter on the desktop. I have two workspaces that are 3x2 in size.
I don't understand why they removed that feature. If it confused some people then make it an advanced feature and allow those of us who like it to use it. They shouldn't have just EOLed it.
As for key bindings, I have those too. I use them to move between my multiple workspaces, then the mouse to move within that workspace. It's quite effecient. If you don't believe me, ask the kind people at Apple about their speed tests for keyboard vs mouse.
Re:Uptake slow because telco at capacity on DSL
on
DSL Rising
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· Score: 2
I recommend having them do what my friends and I did, go to AT&T and get cable modems. Those who I know who have gotten DSL through Qwest have inconsistant bit rates and, of course, Qwest's wonderful [sic] customer service. The few cases where there have been exceptions was when they spent the $88 per month to get the 1 Mb lines, then their only problem was the crappy external dsl modems that Qwest sends out (if you request external). They went through four in a year because they kept breaking. Two were DOA.
With their 640 kb lines my friends are getting, on average, only 80-160 kb.
One friend of mine had better luck, but only because he got it when if first arived in Boulder in 1998. He called the Qwest people roughly every day for more than a week and walked their techs on the other end through the bugs in their systems. He got the full bandwidth he paid for.
AT&T is eating Qwest's lunch because Qwest is completely mismanaged.
Although I agree that the upload/download caps are stupid, the DSL in my area (Denver-Boulder) is even worse. DSL: 256kb => $28/month, 640 kb => $34/month, 1 Mb => $88/month; Cable: from 640kb-3Mb download (usually 1.5 Mb), 128 kb (they lie, I have had significantly better speeds than that) upload => $36/month.
As for services. My provider will only shut me down if create a commercial server (I just checked my agreement). I have had an ssh server, web server, ftp server, and pop server online for roughly 3 years now. No calls, no shut down, nothing.
I use a lot of bandwidth. I run X apps from the lab I work in at my home. Constantly transfering data. No extra bills, no calls, no shut downs.
I have a problem, I call and within 3 minutes I have a human (only called once so far). I call Qwest and I wait over an hour on hold (I don't jest this happened to me on several occasions) before I get to talk to someone.
In your area DSL is the way to go. In Denver, you are either a fool or a sadist to use Qwest.
Yea, but if Qwest does decide to compete again both price wise and customer service wise while not adding any more restrictions I will switch over. It is really nice to have fast internet for more than just pr0n, like transfering research data that can be tens if not hundreds of megs in size.
The point I was making is that not everywhere is the difference between cable and dsl so grey. Sometimes it is pretty obvious which is the better solution.
One thing that I have noticed in Colorado, or at least the Denver-Boulder area, is that both the cable and phone lines needed massive upgrading. There are huge areas where neither cable nor DSL are available because of old wiring systems. I have a friend who moved from one apt to another across the street and could get DSL because the lines going into that complex were too old.
What I have noticed is that AT&T seems more on top of replacing the old with the new. Qwest, and USWest before it, had at least a 2 year jump on AT&T and they blew it. They had the attitude of, we have a monopoly on this tech in this area, why rush. AT&T came in and now more areas that have cable availablity than DSL.
My guess is that the DSL providers in the US just don't get it. Qwest sells 640k for just a couple of bucks less per month than AT&T sells cable. If you want a line that is roughly the same download speed as AT&T cable (which is all the average American wants) you need to spend roughly double what you would spend for cable. They refuse to be competative price wise and their tech service sucks.
I guess that really depends on where you live. In the Denver-Boulder area cable connections have an order of magnitude larger download transfer rate for the same price. Although upload rates have been capped, several of my friends who have DSL see their fastest transfer rates when they upload stuff onto my computer. Until Qwest pulls its head out of its butt, or a decent DSL provider comes around, I think that a download rate that varies from 70 kB to 400 kB is significantly better than one that varies from 9kB to 20kB.
To use your metaphor, Cable is like a 5 lane highway where DSL is stuck in a school zone.
Another good one is Johova's Witnesses. If, when you request the information you tell them that you speak *insert obscure language here* then not only do they show up at the door, but with a translater.
This palladium issue sounds vaguely like the PIII id on the chip which was not supposed to be able to be turned off. If I remember correctly Intel took a lot of heat for that stunt and has included the ability to disable it. I haven't heard if the PIV's have it, something tells me they don't.
Palladium requires that BOTH Intel and AMD agree to it, and not back down. Since there is competition within the chip market I think what is going to happen is both will agree to support it (which they have), people will get angry, and first one will crack in order to get higher market share then the other will be forced to do the same. People will get angry too because old stuff won't work, whether it be an old version of Windows or whatever. Some companies require the use of certain versions of an OS and Office suite to insure compatibility. This isn't going to fly.
Intel is also helping out with the porting projects, and certain companies like IBM will get very angry if Linux doesn't work on Intel processors in the future. There are a lot of players out there with rather sizeable amounts of influence, it isn't just Microsoft and the OEM's.
Microsoft is just trying to get people to believe that they care about security. They want the trust of the public back. This will die very quickly and Microsoft will not put up much of a fight.
I live in Boulder, CO and get @HOME. My connection ranges from 1 Mb to 5 Mb. Yes I have seen 5 Mb sustained connections on my Cable modem. It is never a single connection, but when you have several downloads all going 100+ kB a second it adds up real quick. I haven't even done anything illegal. Of course, the highest I have seen on my windows partition is 1 Mb.
I hear all of this complaining but I have never seen any of the problems that everyone seems to talk about. When Excite@Home went under I was down for all of 2 days, then it went back up no problems.
From what I have been able to tell Matrox has never really gone after "serious" gamers like yourself. The are going after power users who game occasionally. I bought a G400 Max because it had dual monitor support (which, by the way, was beautiful until my older monitor gave up the ghost). I would definately go out and buy something like this if I could afford buying two more 17" monitors. The fact that it can compete with other high end gaming cards is an added benefit when I do game but it is not the primary reason for me to buy a card.
One thing that I am curious about is how adding two more monitors effects all of those bench marks. If there is only minor degredation then this card is farther ahead in the game, IMHO, then people are willing to admit.
Under some circumstances, the fines can go even higher.
This is very open ended, IMNAL but one could possibly interpret this as inflation has outdated the cap of $10 million and MS needes a $10 billion fine due to the damage it has done to the entire technology sector.
Slashdot Mirror
Please read the entire post before you start the flaming.
I know that when I was in high school (more than 7 years ago) in Santa Cruz, CA, all of the sports programs were funded not by tax payer money but by private donation. People who had been apart of the sports programs, or whos children were in those programs, and decided that they wanted to support them. There was an entire parents organization called the Pirates Club (our mascot was the pirate) whos enitre purpose was to garner funding for the sports program since it got no funding from the school or state. There was another parents organization, the Parents Club, which gathered donations for academics within the school.
Sports do play an important role at schools. I know that soccer made my school experience more enjoyable and allowed me to concentrate more on my school work once I was done playing. It also gives an outlet for people who are looking for something to do after class, which I think is a good thing for a lot of the students who would normally just get themselves into trouble.
That being said, I think that way too much money is being put into, and emphasis placed on, sports in this society. I'm currently getting my Masters degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the publicity that the football team gets angers me to no end. I feel that my experience has been cheapened by the schools affiliation with its football team. The school has three Nobel Laureates, two in physics and one in biology, two women in the physics department who have won McArthur Fellowships in the past 5 years, a world class engineering department with a greater than national average of women in that college and many other great things. Even with all of that, when Coach Barnet (who is the highest paid State employee of Colorado) was put on unpayed leave for 10 weeks (the money he lost over those 10 weeks could pay for 8 4-year full ride, including living expenses, scholarships) the Alumni Association sent a letter to the regents and the president of the university saying that they would withhold donations if Barnet was fired. It sickens me.
This isn't merely a sports verses education issue either. Your standard jock is merely jealous and is trying to exert dominance. There are other aspects of our culture that are trying to produce unthinking non-rational thinkers. If intelligence is revered along with individualism, then the market as we know it will need to modify itself substantially. Another part of our society that is producing a meme that is anti-individual and anti-rational thinking is that of organized religion. If you don't believe me then look at the Evolution verse Creative Design debate, or just start reading this book, The Flight from Science and Reason, which goes into case after case of where religion is attacking science.
I don't think we should just kill all funding of sports. That is extremist and harmful. We need to change the cultural importance of sports and science. Higher emphasis should be placed on intelligence and scientific learning while at the same time people who play sports should not be treated as Gods. Unfortunately, this is a huge change, and one that needs to be done by changing peoples perceptions gradually, attempting to force this change by trying to eliminate funding will not work.
KFC still uses chicken? I thought they changed their name to KFC due to false advertising clames. :-)
New types of nuclear power plants are still being designed (other than breeder plants). Last I read about it (two years ago) designs for third generation nuclear plants were being pushed. It seemed like quite a bit of time and money was going into their design. These have higher safety and are more effecient. They have been designed but not put into practice due to the irrational fear of radiation. Currently, people are willing to stay on the oil crutch because a vocal minority of ill informed people has convinced them that anything that deals with radiation and radioactie materials is bad. (I appologize if you dislike my cynical attitude, it just gets me angry that we do things like no longer irradiating eggs because people who don't undertand radiation were scared of it)
Breeder plants are an interesting design. They aren't a standard nuclear plant due to their fuel source and waste product. A breeder plant really isn't all that effecient compared to a regular nuclear plant but it can take spent fuel rods from the regular nuclear plant and reuse them. The point of using Breeder plants is to be able to use as much of the fuel as possible and that you have less waste. The problem is that the waste you have is significantly more toxic. Breeders aren't allowed in the USA because their waste product is plutonium, which non-government agencies are not allowed to be in possesion of.
One thing you might want to do to make your papers look nicer is to switch fonts. Times New Roman may be a nice to read, hightly optimized, beautiful font, unfortunately everyone uses it. Since everyone uses it these days, it makes all papers have a look equivalent to someone wearing a cheap suit. I use Dutch 801 for my resume and I have had numerous complements on just my choice of fonts, 90% percent of them saying how professional it looks.
I agree with you 100%. A professor required that we use APS formatting for a paper in one of my upper level physics classes, and he gave us a template for RevTeX 3 APS formatting. After that class I have written everthing in two collumn APS formatting and have never looked back. The number of complements I get from non-scientists for how clean my paper looks, and the impressed looks from my collegues in physics and math is enough to make me never want to look back.
The only thing I haven't used LaTeX for is my resume, but only because I haven't gotten around to making myself a template. Even than I use a old WordPerfect 8 template and save in RTF. People who read it are always impressed with its formatting mainly because it ISN'T from Word.
Unfortunately RevTeX 3 and RevTeX 4 had significant changes to their headers so all of the documents that I had in RevTeX 3 I had to change before I could compile them again. Mind you, it was only 4 lines, but even LaTex isn't immune.
I love LaTeX with RevTeX, but it ain't perfect.
Someone else mentioned using LaTeX for their paper on Lasers, I suggest you follow their example and use LaTeX for writing papers on particle physics. If for no other reason than Feynmann diagrams are fonts.
11 of Logitech's mice are $30 or more. When I bought my new computer about 6 months ago I threw away my MS Intellimouse and plugged in my 5 year old Logitech Mouseman 4. I may have to finally get a new mouse though, about a month ago one of the pads on the bottom lost its stick and fell of, but since I haven't seen any lose of movement I can probably hold off that purchase until something actually breaks.
Everyone I know who has owned a Logitech product has loved it. The first MS mouse I owned was always requiring cleaning and just sucked, I threw it away after 6 months. In fact, at least a quarter of the people I know who own MS mice have had problems with theirs within the first year of ownership. Funny, the University I go to also replaces all of their broken MS mice with old Logitech mice that are more than 5 years old.
Oh, and I think Apple is targetting their market perfectly. The power users will come slowly, but why compete with your ally Linux for them on the desktop when you are in better position to rip away the low end users from MS. I think people are missing the point when they think that Apple will lose market share to Linux, they have two completely different user basis.
I had a friend who did something like this roughly a year ago. The group he was apart, which was essential at the time, of was getting lied to, overworked etc etc...
My friend approached the management and told them that there was talk in the department of a strike. He also told them that they had felt betrayed by the company due to the repetative lies from higher management about raises and appropriate work hours. He calmly informed them that no one wanted to strike but that they felt like they had no other choice since they weren't being heard any other way, and most of the deparement was looking to him to resolve the situation either through talks with management or organizing the strike. His boss and his bosses boss agreed with him and tried to help but were powerless. The higher management sent someone else to appraise the situation, whom my friend warned to tread lightly because most of the department was really upset, she didn't heed his words and was verbally abused for the entire meeting. After their appraisal the higher management's solution was to give my friend a raise but no one else, wait until the next round of scheduled layoffs to fire the entire department and then rehire 3/4 of them back in a months time. They didn't rehire any of the employees that had any leadership skills or repor with the management. The people who did get their jobs back were elated because they couldn't find anything else in the market.
I agree with the opinion of jtheory but I think that you should have someone else do the talking. If you show to them that you are willing to do something about the situation, even in a nice way, you may find yourself without a job.
Okay, so a couple of things. If you buy a laptop, chances are the largest screen you will get will be 15", and the computer will cost ~$2000. That same 15" LCD screen can be bought for anywhere from $260-$400. If you are willing to spend $1000 on an LCD monitor then you can easily get a 19" display. If you buy a laptop for $1000 you will probably only get a 13" display, at best.
TV's are another issue. People aren't willing to spend that kind of money for a small TV. If you are willing to spend $700 you can get a 15" LCD TV. That probably has a lot to deal with supply and demand and the addition of better than laptop speakers combined with them.
Just to make sure we are on the same page, the big displays which cost multiple thousands of dollars are Plasma screens, which is a different technology. Currently LCD's have a limitation of ~22", after which there is a significant degradation to the display (usually).
Although there probably is some price fixing, it isn't as noticable as you seem to think it is.
The one major benefit for using Opera as opposed to Mozilla is Opera has been doing a lot of work on their rendering engine for small devices. The problem with Mozilla (and IE for MS devices) is that they try to render pages as if it were still a full size screen. I suggest you take a look Opera's web page about that technology, it is pretty slick.
I still use Galeon/Mozilla at home but when I get a Zaurus I want a browser that is designed for the 320x240 screen.
Another blow is that after the Challenger explosion NASA actually said that if they lost another one they would not replace it. There will be no more new shuttles.
I haven't tried out KDE 3. I like Evolution and currently there are some conflicts with the Gnome Libraries and the KDE libraries. It is nice to know that KDE 3 has that feature. Thanks for informing me.
Actually, quite a few people use that feature that you positively hate. I find it quite useful, so much so that I went back to Enlightenment specifically for that feature, and why I hate using KDE.
I find that having a larger than normal connected desktop to be useful for many reasons. The biggest is that it helps me out with organization and prevention of clutter on the desktop. I have two workspaces that are 3x2 in size.
I don't understand why they removed that feature. If it confused some people then make it an advanced feature and allow those of us who like it to use it. They shouldn't have just EOLed it.
As for key bindings, I have those too. I use them to move between my multiple workspaces, then the mouse to move within that workspace. It's quite effecient. If you don't believe me, ask the kind people at Apple about their speed tests for keyboard vs mouse.
I recommend having them do what my friends and I did, go to AT&T and get cable modems. Those who I know who have gotten DSL through Qwest have inconsistant bit rates and, of course, Qwest's wonderful [sic] customer service. The few cases where there have been exceptions was when they spent the $88 per month to get the 1 Mb lines, then their only problem was the crappy external dsl modems that Qwest sends out (if you request external). They went through four in a year because they kept breaking. Two were DOA.
With their 640 kb lines my friends are getting, on average, only 80-160 kb.
One friend of mine had better luck, but only because he got it when if first arived in Boulder in 1998. He called the Qwest people roughly every day for more than a week and walked their techs on the other end through the bugs in their systems. He got the full bandwidth he paid for.
AT&T is eating Qwest's lunch because Qwest is completely mismanaged.
It really depends on where you live.
Although I agree that the upload/download caps are stupid, the DSL in my area (Denver-Boulder) is even worse. DSL: 256kb => $28/month, 640 kb => $34/month, 1 Mb => $88/month; Cable: from 640kb-3Mb download (usually 1.5 Mb), 128 kb (they lie, I have had significantly better speeds than that) upload => $36/month.
As for services. My provider will only shut me down if create a commercial server (I just checked my agreement). I have had an ssh server, web server, ftp server, and pop server online for roughly 3 years now. No calls, no shut down, nothing.
I use a lot of bandwidth. I run X apps from the lab I work in at my home. Constantly transfering data. No extra bills, no calls, no shut downs.
I have a problem, I call and within 3 minutes I have a human (only called once so far). I call Qwest and I wait over an hour on hold (I don't jest this happened to me on several occasions) before I get to talk to someone.
In your area DSL is the way to go. In Denver, you are either a fool or a sadist to use Qwest.
Yea, but if Qwest does decide to compete again both price wise and customer service wise while not adding any more restrictions I will switch over. It is really nice to have fast internet for more than just pr0n, like transfering research data that can be tens if not hundreds of megs in size.
The point I was making is that not everywhere is the difference between cable and dsl so grey. Sometimes it is pretty obvious which is the better solution.
One thing that I have noticed in Colorado, or at least the Denver-Boulder area, is that both the cable and phone lines needed massive upgrading. There are huge areas where neither cable nor DSL are available because of old wiring systems. I have a friend who moved from one apt to another across the street and could get DSL because the lines going into that complex were too old.
What I have noticed is that AT&T seems more on top of replacing the old with the new. Qwest, and USWest before it, had at least a 2 year jump on AT&T and they blew it. They had the attitude of, we have a monopoly on this tech in this area, why rush. AT&T came in and now more areas that have cable availablity than DSL.
My guess is that the DSL providers in the US just don't get it. Qwest sells 640k for just a couple of bucks less per month than AT&T sells cable. If you want a line that is roughly the same download speed as AT&T cable (which is all the average American wants) you need to spend roughly double what you would spend for cable. They refuse to be competative price wise and their tech service sucks.
I guess that really depends on where you live. In the Denver-Boulder area cable connections have an order of magnitude larger download transfer rate for the same price. Although upload rates have been capped, several of my friends who have DSL see their fastest transfer rates when they upload stuff onto my computer. Until Qwest pulls its head out of its butt, or a decent DSL provider comes around, I think that a download rate that varies from 70 kB to 400 kB is significantly better than one that varies from 9kB to 20kB.
To use your metaphor, Cable is like a 5 lane highway where DSL is stuck in a school zone.
Of course, this is heavily dependent on the area.
But I think putting their real email address in a state where spammers can retrieve them easily was the wrong gift.
Another good one is Johova's Witnesses. If, when you request the information you tell them that you speak *insert obscure language here* then not only do they show up at the door, but with a translater.
This palladium issue sounds vaguely like the PIII id on the chip which was not supposed to be able to be turned off. If I remember correctly Intel took a lot of heat for that stunt and has included the ability to disable it. I haven't heard if the PIV's have it, something tells me they don't.
Palladium requires that BOTH Intel and AMD agree to it, and not back down. Since there is competition within the chip market I think what is going to happen is both will agree to support it (which they have), people will get angry, and first one will crack in order to get higher market share then the other will be forced to do the same. People will get angry too because old stuff won't work, whether it be an old version of Windows or whatever. Some companies require the use of certain versions of an OS and Office suite to insure compatibility. This isn't going to fly.
Intel is also helping out with the porting projects, and certain companies like IBM will get very angry if Linux doesn't work on Intel processors in the future. There are a lot of players out there with rather sizeable amounts of influence, it isn't just Microsoft and the OEM's.
Microsoft is just trying to get people to believe that they care about security. They want the trust of the public back. This will die very quickly and Microsoft will not put up much of a fight.
I live in Boulder, CO and get @HOME. My connection ranges from 1 Mb to 5 Mb. Yes I have seen 5 Mb sustained connections on my Cable modem. It is never a single connection, but when you have several downloads all going 100+ kB a second it adds up real quick. I haven't even done anything illegal. Of course, the highest I have seen on my windows partition is 1 Mb.
I hear all of this complaining but I have never seen any of the problems that everyone seems to talk about. When Excite@Home went under I was down for all of 2 days, then it went back up no problems.
Maybe I am just lucky.
From what I have been able to tell Matrox has never really gone after "serious" gamers like yourself. The are going after power users who game occasionally. I bought a G400 Max because it had dual monitor support (which, by the way, was beautiful until my older monitor gave up the ghost). I would definately go out and buy something like this if I could afford buying two more 17" monitors. The fact that it can compete with other high end gaming cards is an added benefit when I do game but it is not the primary reason for me to buy a card.
One thing that I am curious about is how adding two more monitors effects all of those bench marks. If there is only minor degredation then this card is farther ahead in the game, IMHO, then people are willing to admit.
You for got this important part.
Under some circumstances, the fines can go even higher.
This is very open ended, IMNAL but one could possibly interpret this as inflation has outdated the cap of $10 million and MS needes a $10 billion fine due to the damage it has done to the entire technology sector.