On the other hand, I've simply stopped buying anything at release in favor of letting someone ELSE determine whether I'll need a crack to run it successfully. If that's the case, I won't buy it. I'm sick of dealing with companies at any level that feel the need to go crazy with copy protection, whether it's genuinely a flawed attempt at anti-piracy, an attempt to kill second-hand sales, or they're just a bunch of douche bags.
Games are supposed to be fun. Cracking stuff, to me, isn't fun, nor is fighting with games in order to get them to play. So companies that employ technologies that take away fun from my gaming experience no longer get my
Same here. I've switched to Ubuntu for my new computer rather than deal with Vista's DRM crap. Windows games without DRM generally works with WINE. I've only had to crack Warcraft III so far to get it to work (and yes I bought it). For new games I simply won't pay for them. Most are coming out with DRM from what I've seen.
We're looking at purchasing a Wii later this year. I figure I won't have to deal with trying to crack those games just to get them to work properly. At least I haven't heard of any issues there.
The only thing Comcast are trying to do with that policy is implement a masquerade behind which they can throttle a range of customers who refuse to pay extra for premium services. Network analysis which find the most intensive data traffic users (likely already has) and they will specifically be targeted, pay extra or have all your traffic shut down to a trickle every fifteen minutes for what, 2 minutes to start with and, then they will continually up that until, the customer leaves or pays the premium bandwidth fee, pays extra for the actual bandwidth, that Comcast B$ marketing claims to be selling.
We upgraded to a business account and Concast still terminated our internet for a year.
What's funny is they want our business now that we're with their competition.
Think my kids were interested in going back to Concast after that experience?
I say this will go to court once, and something comical will happen like a subpoena for a log of every packet across the network to that user, and the sum total of the bandwidth used.
I've been running vnstat on my firewall for months and have a pretty good idea of what my bandwidth usage is. For us 100 Gigs is more than plenty of bandwidth (our current ISP's limit per account).
I wish I had this tool in place years ago. But then it wouldn't matter since Concast terminated the top 1000 users monthly. I could be using 2 or 3 gigs a month and if we're in the top 1000 users we would still be terminated.
Terminating a customer account without giving the customer followup tools so they can watch their usage... just seems malicious.
So, organize, and pressure Comcast into providing access to this information...
Never attribute to Malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence:-)
Actually I believe our campaign to force Concast to come clean with several items including bandwidth restrictions has been very successful. A little over a year after my family was terminated we finally see results of our work. Hundreds upon hundreds of people filed complaints to the FCC and FTC over the last year.
Personally I'm hoping we can finally receive what the NII promised in 1994. Fiber to the home with 45 meg up / down. You and I are already paying for it and have been since 1994.
It has the net effect of decreasing the effective sustained bandwidth. I don't have Comcast, and I think the cumulative limits are fair, but this strikes me as unfair. What if I don't come close to the monthly limits, but I'm streaming/DLing something that will take longer than 15min? If congestion isn't an issue, why not let someone DL at the capabilities of their connection?
to make it even more interesting, since Concast doesn't tell us how much we're using (it's up to us they say), what if our metering tools show we're in compliance and Concast says we're using too much?
Which do they go with?
You guessed it. You are screwed and terminated for a year. It doesn't matter that you only used 30 or 50 gigs a month, you are gone.
And there is no escalation process either. You can't complain or contest it.
I can choose Comcast (6Mbs) or Qwest (who the fuck knows, slower then comcast). If my town signed up for Utopia I could get good speed but Farmington has decided to not join in. It's been this way since I got high speed back in like 1999. All this lovely stuff for like 55 bucks a month. No new vendors, no break in price, nothing but high prices and poor customer service.
I live in Utah also.
In the State Capital, our Representatives and Senators considered Qwest sufficient competition to Concast. This was during the Utopia meetings last year.
I spoke with several of these guys and corrected them. Competition is providing similar or better services. Not 1/5 the service guys!!
That's what you get with DSL in most places here. 1/5th the speed.
Hopefully Utopia will take off. It needs to and it needs to succeed. Otherwise we're stuck with Concast and slow DSL from Qwest.
Oh yeah. There is also Qwest's Fiber to the node HOWEVER where can you get it? I've spoken with people over at Qwest and haven't heard where the blazing 20 Megs pipes are. I saw them running fiber down three corridors in my area but will I qualify?
I guess we're playing more wait and see.
And yes, the government is afraid of doing anything to slow down innovation with the Internet. At least that's their take on it. Sad. I thought it already was moving slow. At least compared to nearly every developed country.
If consumers dislike a particular ISPs plan, they can voice their opinions and vote with their wallets. Yes, I understand this comment is probably going to generate dozens of "but I can't get another ISP!" replies, and I preemptively dispute the validity of most of them. I'm living on a Naval installation, and I could drop my current cable provider for a number of DSL providers. Would I have the the same download speeds? Probably not, but the option is still there.
So you are claiming DSL is just as good as Concast's speeds?
Wow. and I thought DSL was 1/5th the speed of Concast.'
People will learn to get around blocks with proxies, true, but how long before ISP's start blocking major proxy sites too? If my workplace can use Websense [wikipedia.org] to block virtually any proxy list (and it's REALLY good at it too, BTW), there is nothing to stop my ISP from doing it too. And, like most people, I only have a couple of choices of broadband ISP's in my area (AT&T and Time Warner), so it's not like I could just take my business elsewhere.
It's not a 250 GB/month download cap. It's a total data transfer cap, uploads and downloads together. Makes a big difference if you're running a P2P client like Bittorrent and you like to do your part by uploading what you download. Effectively cuts the cap in half./I.
Not really in half since their upspeed is severely restricted. So if a download is 6 / 8 / or 12 megs down, you are at best getting 384 or 512 up. I've heard you can get up to 1 meg up.
So now, if they call me again (and they have already done so once) I can verify their reports of my usage. I may not be able to convince the person on the phone, and they may still decide to cut my service, but at least I'll know I was right and have a record to use against them.
Exactly. The Concast rep will not believe you and will cut you off regardless.
At least that was my experience. I told them there is no way possible for us to use that much bandwidth in a month. But of course they stood by their statement that we used it too much.
I wish I was monitoring it at the time. It would have been nice to know but that's the past and personally I would never go back to a company that provided terrible customer service.
Their invisible caps were just part of the problem and is easy to fix. Their extremely poor customer service will be far more difficult for them to resolve.
I run DD-WRT through the router connected directly to the modem. I know exactly how much I'm using.
Undestood. My point however was when we signed up with Concast the advertisement said "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". I still have the contract which says that and the advertisement when they came to our area.
We never thought we needed to monitor our bandwidth consumption.
We are now. Our cap is 100 Gigs which has worked out very well for us. I'm running Ubuntu server for my firewall and am running vnstat to give me an idea of how much we're using.
It also has a nice predictive section where it gives an idea how much it 'thinks' we'll use for the month.
We have yet to break our record of 73 gigs. And that was just when I downloaded the Ubuntu x86 repository (Yeah I know but I needed it::grinz::)
I don't know how it works where you live, but in my city I pay more if I use more water. In fact, I pay much more per gallon the more I use. If you want Comcast to adopt water billing, it will be $50 for the first 250 GB, then $75 for the next 150, then $125 for the next 100.
As long as I can verify that's what my usage really is I don't have a problem with that.
Very good comments however the thing you should be concerned about is will Concast treat you fairly when there is a problem with your usage?
The company 'claims' they will allow you to download 250 Gigs a month. That's great! That's a hell of a lot of data to consume in a month. The question I ask is how can YOU the customer validate what your usage is?
Concast said my family used over 300 gigs a month but when I asked to validate that number they denied my request. Even said they couldn't tell me what the unlimited limit was. What a great company.
Their Internet and cable TV service was mostly ok over the four years my family had them. But asking customers to simply trust them?
How can I possibly make it through a month at 250 G? I, um, have a condition, yeah, that's it, that requires I download unlimited amounts of data from the internet. This is cause an undue hardship. As if comcast has the RIGHT to take this from me. If my connection weren't actually my neighbors, I'd SUE THEIR ASSES pronto!
So what shall I do Slashdot? How can I get my umlimited back? Get a bigger Wifi antenna? I heard about that but what about bandwidth?
what's really amusing is you are told to just trust Concast. You don't have a way to validate what they are saying is correct but that's ok. Just trust us:D
I FTP things in and out of my apartment all the damned time, including backup image files and the like, let alone dealing with torrents or streaming video. I'm sure I transfer more than 10GB a day.
Disgusting as it is, I don't have any other high speed alternative.
you would be a prime target so I'd be careful...
Oh in case anyone wonders, we had upgraded to a business account also. So it's interesting to see what they will do in cases such as yours.
The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis.... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
And how does a customer verify that Concast is right? I mean consider what happened to several people in my neighborhood. The company calls and doesn't give a way for anyone to validate that it's not B.S.
What's to stop Concast from adding a zero at the end?
Yeah, why would they want to do that???
Is there anything in their conduct that people would simply trust them at their word?
It took 20 years to run the Air India 182 trial. Things like investigations take a long time. If the explanation came out the day after the fall, you would be claiming that it's proof of a conspiracy, since no one gets a complicated explanation together that fast unless they knew about it in the past. As for the owner of the building, his pull comment was pulling the effort to stop the fire, not setting off any demolition.
I think his larger point is that if you have the resources to kill a few thousand Americans in a very public way and have the magical ability to keep everyone from feeling a pang of guilt and spilling the goods in an operation that would take hundreds of people, what the hell were they doing during Iraq. Planting a few weapons on Saddam would have been trivial compared to to the absurd conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11.
Next thing you'll say is our government didn't know about Perl Harbor before we were attacked...
Why do people continue to insist that PC gaming, which is only done by a small percentage of computer users, is so important to Linux. It would be a simple matter to capture 90% of the PC market without ever having a single 3d driver, let alone anything more than the casual games Linux already has.
Hell, before Aero was announced, most systems had almost no graphics (and thus gaming) ability anyway.
Because it IS important. I'm switching 100% over to Linux now. No more multiboot however I still don't have native Counterstrike Source OR Team Fortress 2 available for Linux.
So I've been testing WINE with Ubuntu 8.04 and loving it. I can still play my games written for Windows.
I've also spent a great deal of time finding those games native to Linux that my family can play. We have several computers all running Linux now. We've been looking at free and commercially available games.
This was a long process over the last few months but it was worth it. Now we have some awesome games both free and commercial that run. Best part, it runs on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder which society has better long term prospects for its people, economy, and Government?
So are you saying rather than complaining about the US and stating we're moving to Canada we should say "That's it! I'm moving to India!"?
Doesn't have the same ring to it
On the other hand, I've simply stopped buying anything at release in favor of letting someone ELSE determine whether I'll need a crack to run it successfully. If that's the case, I won't buy it. I'm sick of dealing with companies at any level that feel the need to go crazy with copy protection, whether it's genuinely a flawed attempt at anti-piracy, an attempt to kill second-hand sales, or they're just a bunch of douche bags.
Games are supposed to be fun. Cracking stuff, to me, isn't fun, nor is fighting with games in order to get them to play. So companies that employ technologies that take away fun from my gaming experience no longer get my
Same here. I've switched to Ubuntu for my new computer rather than deal with Vista's DRM crap. Windows games without DRM generally works with WINE. I've only had to crack Warcraft III so far to get it to work (and yes I bought it). For new games I simply won't pay for them. Most are coming out with DRM from what I've seen.
We're looking at purchasing a Wii later this year. I figure I won't have to deal with trying to crack those games just to get them to work properly. At least I haven't heard of any issues there.
Guess we'll see.
The only thing Comcast are trying to do with that policy is implement a masquerade behind which they can throttle a range of customers who refuse to pay extra for premium services. Network analysis which find the most intensive data traffic users (likely already has) and they will specifically be targeted, pay extra or have all your traffic shut down to a trickle every fifteen minutes for what, 2 minutes to start with and, then they will continually up that until, the customer leaves or pays the premium bandwidth fee, pays extra for the actual bandwidth, that Comcast B$ marketing claims to be selling.
We upgraded to a business account and Concast still terminated our internet for a year.
What's funny is they want our business now that we're with their competition.
Think my kids were interested in going back to Concast after that experience?
Hell No!
--
I say this will go to court once, and something comical will happen like a subpoena for a log of every packet across the network to that user, and the sum total of the bandwidth used.
I've been running vnstat on my firewall for months and have a pretty good idea of what my bandwidth usage is. For us 100 Gigs is more than plenty of bandwidth (our current ISP's limit per account).
I wish I had this tool in place years ago. But then it wouldn't matter since Concast terminated the top 1000 users monthly. I could be using 2 or 3 gigs a month and if we're in the top 1000 users we would still be terminated.
What a screwed up company.
Terminating a customer account without giving the customer followup tools so they can watch their usage... just seems malicious.
So, organize, and pressure Comcast into providing access to this information...
Never attribute to Malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence :-)
Actually I believe our campaign to force Concast to come clean with several items including bandwidth restrictions has been very successful. A little over a year after my family was terminated we finally see results of our work. Hundreds upon hundreds of people filed complaints to the FCC and FTC over the last year.
Personally I'm hoping we can finally receive what the NII promised in 1994. Fiber to the home with 45 meg up / down. You and I are already paying for it and have been since 1994.
It has the net effect of decreasing the effective sustained bandwidth. I don't have Comcast, and I think the cumulative limits are fair, but this strikes me as unfair. What if I don't come close to the monthly limits, but I'm streaming/DLing something that will take longer than 15min? If congestion isn't an issue, why not let someone DL at the capabilities of their connection?
to make it even more interesting, since Concast doesn't tell us how much we're using (it's up to us they say), what if our metering tools show we're in compliance and Concast says we're using too much?
Which do they go with?
You guessed it. You are screwed and terminated for a year. It doesn't matter that you only used 30 or 50 gigs a month, you are gone.
And there is no escalation process either. You can't complain or contest it.
Sounds Concastic doesn't it
For a moment I thought it said "Comcast discontinues Customer Service".
Had to re-read that again :-)
I live in Utah.
I can choose Comcast (6Mbs) or Qwest (who the fuck knows, slower then comcast). If my town signed up for Utopia I could get good speed but Farmington has decided to not join in. It's been this way since I got high speed back in like 1999. All this lovely stuff for like 55 bucks a month. No new vendors, no break in price, nothing but high prices and poor customer service.
I live in Utah also.
In the State Capital, our Representatives and Senators considered Qwest sufficient competition to Concast. This was during the Utopia meetings last year.
I spoke with several of these guys and corrected them. Competition is providing similar or better services. Not 1/5 the service guys!!
That's what you get with DSL in most places here. 1/5th the speed.
Hopefully Utopia will take off. It needs to and it needs to succeed. Otherwise we're stuck with Concast and slow DSL from Qwest.
Oh yeah. There is also Qwest's Fiber to the node HOWEVER where can you get it? I've spoken with people over at Qwest and haven't heard where the blazing 20 Megs pipes are. I saw them running fiber down three corridors in my area but will I qualify?
I guess we're playing more wait and see.
And yes, the government is afraid of doing anything to slow down innovation with the Internet. At least that's their take on it. Sad. I thought it already was moving slow. At least compared to nearly every developed country.
Over $200 billion has been given in taxes to the telcos to build out our 45 meg up / down fiber to the home network and now they want more?
This article gives some good info on what happened. Where's the accountability? NII was Bill Clinton and Al Gores deal for America.
Epic Fail if we don't demand they build the damn thing now.
If consumers dislike a particular ISPs plan, they can voice their opinions and vote with their wallets. Yes, I understand this comment is probably going to generate dozens of "but I can't get another ISP!" replies, and I preemptively dispute the validity of most of them. I'm living on a Naval installation, and I could drop my current cable provider for a number of DSL providers. Would I have the the same download speeds? Probably not, but the option is still there.
So you are claiming DSL is just as good as Concast's speeds?
Wow. and I thought DSL was 1/5th the speed of Concast.'
thanks for clearing that up ;-)
People will learn to get around blocks with proxies, true, but how long before ISP's start blocking major proxy sites too? If my workplace can use Websense [wikipedia.org] to block virtually any proxy list (and it's REALLY good at it too, BTW), there is nothing to stop my ISP from doing it too. And, like most people, I only have a couple of choices of broadband ISP's in my area (AT&T and Time Warner), so it's not like I could just take my business elsewhere.
Well.... there is always Comcast .... right? ;-)
It's not a 250 GB/month download cap. It's a total data transfer cap, uploads and downloads together. Makes a big difference if you're running a P2P client like Bittorrent and you like to do your part by uploading what you download. Effectively cuts the cap in half./I.
Not really in half since their upspeed is severely restricted. So if a download is 6 / 8 / or 12 megs down, you are at best getting 384 or 512 up. I've heard you can get up to 1 meg up.
So now, if they call me again (and they have already done so once) I can verify their reports of my usage. I may not be able to convince the person on the phone, and they may still decide to cut my service, but at least I'll know I was right and have a record to use against them.
Exactly. The Concast rep will not believe you and will cut you off regardless.
At least that was my experience. I told them there is no way possible for us to use that much bandwidth in a month. But of course they stood by their statement that we used it too much.
I wish I was monitoring it at the time. It would have been nice to know but that's the past and personally I would never go back to a company that provided terrible customer service.
Their invisible caps were just part of the problem and is easy to fix. Their extremely poor customer service will be far more difficult for them to resolve.
I run DD-WRT through the router connected directly to the modem. I know exactly how much I'm using.
Undestood. My point however was when we signed up with Concast the advertisement said "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". I still have the contract which says that and the advertisement when they came to our area.
We never thought we needed to monitor our bandwidth consumption.
We are now. Our cap is 100 Gigs which has worked out very well for us. I'm running Ubuntu server for my firewall and am running vnstat to give me an idea of how much we're using.
It also has a nice predictive section where it gives an idea how much it 'thinks' we'll use for the month.
We have yet to break our record of 73 gigs. And that was just when I downloaded the Ubuntu x86 repository (Yeah I know but I needed it ::grinz::)
I don't know how it works where you live, but in my city I pay more if I use more water. In fact, I pay much more per gallon the more I use. If you want Comcast to adopt water billing, it will be $50 for the first 250 GB, then $75 for the next 150, then $125 for the next 100.
As long as I can verify that's what my usage really is I don't have a problem with that.
I believe the concern isn't the cap as 250 gigs is a LOT of data (how many terabytes a year is that??? WOW!).
No the concern is how do you validate they are correct? That you really are using that much bandwidth?
Very good comments however the thing you should be concerned about is will Concast treat you fairly when there is a problem with your usage?
The company 'claims' they will allow you to download 250 Gigs a month. That's great! That's a hell of a lot of data to consume in a month. The question I ask is how can YOU the customer validate what your usage is?
Concast said my family used over 300 gigs a month but when I asked to validate that number they denied my request. Even said they couldn't tell me what the unlimited limit was. What a great company.
Their Internet and cable TV service was mostly ok over the four years my family had them. But asking customers to simply trust them?
Sorry, most of us aren't that gullible.
How can I possibly make it through a month at 250 G? I, um, have a condition, yeah, that's it, that requires I download unlimited amounts of data from the internet. This is cause an undue hardship. As if comcast has the RIGHT to take this from me. If my connection weren't actually my neighbors, I'd SUE THEIR ASSES pronto!
So what shall I do Slashdot? How can I get my umlimited back? Get a bigger Wifi antenna? I heard about that but what about bandwidth?
what's really amusing is you are told to just trust Concast. You don't have a way to validate what they are saying is correct but that's ok. Just trust us :D
Well, pay me $1000 or your mother in law will receive this immortality drug...
I'm just waiting for them to email spam the Mafia. I can see it now...
Vinny: Hey Guido, it's that Nigerian dude once again. And now he's threatening to kill you
Guido: Put a hit on him Vinny. $50k dead
I FTP things in and out of my apartment all the damned time, including backup image files and the like, let alone dealing with torrents or streaming video. I'm sure I transfer more than 10GB a day.
Disgusting as it is, I don't have any other high speed alternative.
you would be a prime target so I'd be careful...
Oh in case anyone wonders, we had upgraded to a business account also. So it's interesting to see what they will do in cases such as yours.
The cable provider insisted that 250 GB is "an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. ... As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage,' Comcast said Thursday. 'If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use,' according to the AUP."
And how does a customer verify that Concast is right? I mean consider what happened to several people in my neighborhood. The company calls and doesn't give a way for anyone to validate that it's not B.S.
What's to stop Concast from adding a zero at the end?
Yeah, why would they want to do that???
Is there anything in their conduct that people would simply trust them at their word?
It took 20 years to run the Air India 182 trial. Things like investigations take a long time. If the explanation came out the day after the fall, you would be claiming that it's proof of a conspiracy, since no one gets a complicated explanation together that fast unless they knew about it in the past. As for the owner of the building, his pull comment was pulling the effort to stop the fire, not setting off any demolition.
So he recanted his comment to stop the fire?
HUH?
I think his larger point is that if you have the resources to kill a few thousand Americans in a very public way and have the magical ability to keep everyone from feeling a pang of guilt and spilling the goods in an operation that would take hundreds of people, what the hell were they doing during Iraq. Planting a few weapons on Saddam would have been trivial compared to to the absurd conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11.
Next thing you'll say is our government didn't know about Perl Harbor before we were attacked...
And yes, that one did come out decades later.
That's just one of many theories. Some say it was done with Pop Rocks and Soda. I happen to believe it was done with Mentos and Diet Coke.
I find your lack of faith in pop rocks disturbing ;-)
Why do people continue to insist that PC gaming, which is only done by a small percentage of computer users, is so important to Linux. It would be a simple matter to capture 90% of the PC market without ever having a single 3d driver, let alone anything more than the casual games Linux already has.
Hell, before Aero was announced, most systems had almost no graphics (and thus gaming) ability anyway.
Because it IS important. I'm switching 100% over to Linux now. No more multiboot however I still don't have native Counterstrike Source OR Team Fortress 2 available for Linux.
So I've been testing WINE with Ubuntu 8.04 and loving it. I can still play my games written for Windows.
I've also spent a great deal of time finding those games native to Linux that my family can play. We have several computers all running Linux now. We've been looking at free and commercially available games.
This was a long process over the last few months but it was worth it. Now we have some awesome games both free and commercial that run. Best part, it runs on Linux.