Apple is not selling the iPad as a PC or even as a computer. It's a device.
Who cares how Apple sells it? It's how the consumer perceives it that counts, and the fact is it's a goddamned portable computer. Period. End of statement. I've been in this business since before there was an Apple Computer, and I remember Steve Jobs referring to the original Macintosh as a "computing appliance." The rest of us considered the thing to be what it really was: a personal computer, the successor to the wildly successful (and completely open) Apple ][ series. Jobs' rhetoric and Apple's policies indicate that he still believes that he can market a restricted "computing appliance" in a world full of personal computers. And he can... but ultimately that's going to limit his success because there are always going to be edge cases (like me) that either want to run software that Apple doesn't deem appropriate, or just don't like being told what to do. It's a balancing act for Apple: if they restrict the platform as much as they would like to, they're going to find themselves in the same boat as the media companies: people will find a way to bypass any restrictions. In Apple's case, they'll probably just buy a competing product. If they open it up... well, I'm having a hard time really seeing the downside for Apple since 99% of users will simply use the default configuration anyway, because most of them are too stupid to use a computer and wouldn't know how to change anything. But Jobs is one arrogant mother and I don't think he's able to grasp that, at least not as fully as Google seems to.
but there are a lot of loose ends which Google appears to have given up on.
Would you care to elaborate on those loose ends? One advantage to Android which hasn't really been talked about in this thread is the fact that it is mostly open source. For example, on my Android device I run Cyanogenmod, one of the many (and in my opinion, the best of the) third-party Android ROMs out there. Your iPhone will never officially be able to run anything but a ROM provided by Apple, whereas Google not only allows these developers to flourish but actively aids them, and the best of their work will often end up back in Google's main repository. Open source at it's finest, when you get right down to it. Matter of fact, Cyanogen (aka Steve Kondik) has tied up a *lot* of those "loose ends" in his ROM, and at this point I can't even imagine running the stock firmware anymore. Hell, he's even got Android 2.x running on the original G1... not only running, but greased lightning in comparison to Google's 1.6 release. Built-in kernel support for USB tethering, with bluetooth support on the way, compressed caching, speech recognition/synthesis, video recording, live wallpaper, tons of goodies that aren't in the OTA releases. You might want to give it a look before you hop into bed with Jobs & Co.
Then they would have a monopoly and then it would be illegal.
That's wrong. Having a monopoly is not, in and of itself, illegal. It just isn't, in spite of what you may think. If you gain a monopoly because people freely choose your products over your competitors (because yours are better, or because you've convinced your customers that yours are better (Yes, Steve, I'm talking about you) there's nothing whatsoever illegal about that. If there were, then any company which achieved a certain measure of success would automatically be deemed illegal and risk being broken up, and that's just not how it works. However if, as Microsoft has done, you leverage your monopoly position to suppress competition, thereby harming the consumer, then you can get in trouble.
Android probably never will go down that route, and as a result, no matter how successful Android phones become in the market, Android apps will never be as successful as iPhone apps.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Apparently the reality-distortion field extends to Slashdot. Android phones are going to leave (are leaving) iPhone sales in the dust. Fragmentation is an issue, but that's no more a problem, when you get right down to it, than that faced by PC developers every day. And there is this thing called the "Android Market" where you can (yes, it's true!) buy applications! Amazing, isn't it, that someone was able to come up with something that's just as functional as an Apple product? More to the point, a developer can sign up for the market for the princely sum of $25, and the SDKs are free (yes, free.) None of Apple and Job's bullshit with non-disclosure agreements, limits on what tools you can use and, for me, the capper of suffering Apple's utterly drain-bamaged and developer-unfriendly approval process. Jobs is an arrogant ass who cannot be trusted who will cheerfully screw over an individual or company that wants to sell software for the iPhone, often for no readily-apparent reason. Frankly, Google has been pretty damned non-Evil when it comes to managing their Market, in how they treat both developers and users... Apple has been decidedly otherwise. As a software developer, I want nothing whatsoever to do with Apple, Steve Jobs or an iAnything.
So, it was okay with Jobs to copy it from Xerox, but not for BG to do the same? Hypocrite is the word, my friend!
I think Apple licensed it from Xerox. But yeah, I share your opinion of Jobs. To paraphrase George Carlin:
Fuck Steve Jobs! Fuck him in the ass with a big rubber dick! Then break it off and beat him with it! I hope Steve dies. I do, I hope he goddamn dies. I hope he gets a hold of some tainted MP3s, and dies lonely and forgotten in the bathroom of some bad building in a poor neighborhood, with his hand in Wozniak's pants.
Limewire was nothing special: just a Gnutella client with extensions. The Gnutella "network" is alive and well, has been for years, and there are many clients out there for it. Limewire just suckered a lot of people into paying for software that was readily available for free. I don't care that Limewire is getting nailed, I just don't like the media companies winning cases like this. It's bad for everybody, including them, if they just had the wit to see it.
And nothing of value was lost. Seriously, who uses an inefficient cruddy program like Limewire when you've got bit torrent?
You don't use a torrent to grab a three or four meg file: swarming protocols work best for sharing large files.
The Gnutella network was, and is, very efficient at sharing small files (you know, the kind that keep media executives up at night.) That said, there are plenty of other ways to share such information, and all the RIAA has done is to (once again) continue the game of whack-a-mole. There are many other Gnutella clients available (personally, I like Phex: multi-platform, open-source, and does what I need. Pick it up on SourceForge) and people will quickly find them. Let the lawyers celebrate their "victory", for whatever it's worth.
I'm all for tinkering, and tinkering with cars used to be a great hobby. But tinkering with proprietary chip sets - with consequences not only your driving experience, but on the safety of others around you - without the proper equipment strikes me as a uniquely bad idea.
And OBD2 port is just a serial port. Actually, there are several different types of OBD2 hardware interfaces, but they all follow the same basic protocol from a software perspective. I understand we have Congress to thank for that much. The proprietary parts are the PIDs that manufacturers add for specific product lines but the basics are pretty consistent. Besides... querying your vehicle's ECU in the precise manner in which it was designed to be queried hardly constitutes tinkering with a proprietary chipset. It's not like we're talking about modifying the ECU's firmware, only polling it for specific data items. That's just not a big deal, and in fact is exactly what OBD2 was designed to do.
I use my Android phone with a bluetooth ELM 327-based interface all the time: the logging and trending features are really helpful. The only potentially negative consequence that I can think of would be watching all the pretty real-time dials on the phone's display rather than paying attention to the road, but that's a different story.
Maybe that's why you are a former mechanic. A good mechanic knows that 90% of the time on a specific car that a misfire on cylinder 3 is that leaking head gasket you have either fixed 50 times or read about in the TSB. Shitty mechanics are shitty mechanics with or without a scanner.
That's all well and dandy except that the scan equipment isn't actually expensive, the OP is simply looking in the wrong places.
Well, I'm not a mechanic but I do like to have some idea what's going on under the hood. I have an Android phone with a bluetooth multiprotocol OBD2 interface, and I use a program (it's in the Market) called "Torque". Works very well, and does more than those handheld scanners you buy at Sears. Even allows you to log OBD info with GPS tagging, and export it. If it finds a trouble code, it will link you to a Web site that lists the possible causes for that code for many different vehicles.
I don't understand the surprise that someone has a working 1986 computer.
No kidding. I don't have my original PC anymore, but I do have an original Apple ][ Standard (Integer ROMs, no less) from 1977, with the FP board and a box full of peripherals. Somewhere I have a 10 meg Cider ][ hard drive, and I think a couple of Apple//e's. I don't know about the Cider, but the computers still work fine, even the floppy drives. I still have an Amiga 1000 too: I had a 500 but I sold it a long time ago. They were neat machines, no doubt about it, but Commodore demonstrated very clearly that they had no idea what they had, how to market it, or what people could or should do with it. So they let it fail and shortly after that Commodore computers disappeared.
I was a game developer when the Amiga was announced (actually, about a year before it was announced) as the company I worked for did the graphics demo that shipped with each machine. It was all very hush-hush (bunch of Sun Sparcstations in a special room with an electronic lock on the door where the "special" programers worked) and none of us knew what was going on until the official word came from Commodore.
It turned out they were working on a couple of prototype Amigas, that didn't even have a power-on/RESET circuit (you had to manually start them after applying power) and were shipped in flat black-painted plywood boxes with holes cut in the side for the connectors. Pretty cool. Wish I had one of those: they'd be worth real money nowadays.
Look I was a game programmer back then, I worked on PC, Apple//, and Commodore 64-series products among others... and you're just wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. I never did anything for the Amiga, and I find it kinda irritating that you believe programmers like me required Amiga experience in order to be good at our jobs. Geez, you Amiga guys sound like Mac fanboys sometimes. You just make shit up. I spent seven years before that failed attempt at a personal computer ever hit the market, hacking high-speed graphics code on a number of different microprocessors, and neither I nor my employers ever felt that I needed to learn to study the Amiga to write graphics an animation code for other systems.
You're giving all the credit to ex-Amiga coders for driving the game market forward and that's just ridiculous. Most of the guys I knew that bought into the Amiga hype went over to the Mac because they didn't want to be dealing with the bare metal. Most of them hadn't a clue what an I/O port was, much less how to screw around with refresh timing or anything else on a VGA card. They let the custom ASICs do all the work. Arcade game development on the IBM compatibles of the era was a lot like it was on the Apple ][... pretty much bare metal and raw assembler all the way through. That's because the CPU had to do everything, except maybe sound if you had an early Soundblaster. No fancy graphics or sound chips, no sirree.
The Amiga had many hardware and other advantages, and the reality is that experience with the Amiga's custom chips didn't count for SQUAT when it came to coding for what passed as video on PCs at the time. Matter of fact, the Amiga's hardware support spoiled the typical Amiga developer and put him at a distinct disadvantage when it came to working on the PC or Apple// lines. That's because many things that were easy on the Amiga took some very sharp, largely ex-Apple ][ programmers to do well on the PC.
That's the real history. You can assign credit any way you like, but those of us who were there will likely go all Guru Meditation on you.
This is the opposite of a waste of public funds.
One of Cisco's biggest customers is the federal government. As such any spending of public money on cracking down on this... Saves the public money.
You didn't read my original post (or the last one, I guess.) I was saying that I think this was reasonable, but their support of the music industry's crackdown is not.
You know, the RIAA has nothing to do with this case. This was trafficking in counterfeit Cisco gear not copyright infringement.
And of course, you present a false dilemma. Or do you really think "actual criminals" got away because resources were used in this case.
I thought so. I just utterly demolished and destroyed your lame, hackneyed comment.
I was only complaining about what I consider to be misuse of public funds on the one hand, and a legitimate use of them on the other. It's not a false dilemma... time and effort the Justice Department expends on supporting anti-filesharing cases is time not spent going after real criminals of any stripe. I'm sure you're aware, if you're a regular Slashdot user, that Obama has shifted Justice's priorities in that regard (several top spots in the Department being filled by ex-music industry attorneys.) Yes, I'm also aware that he supposedly put in place rules to prevent them from using government resources to support their former employers, but those rules don't appear to be working.
I suppose this is a good thing. Honestly though, I'm not entirely sure why this is considered news - the government has long been opposed to knock-offs of most things. It's a nice buff to the security community, but is so hard to detect that the over all effect is likely to negligible.
I'll take a stand and say, "meh."
Still, it's better they target actual criminals than wasting our tax dollars supporting the likes of the RIAA.
You're subscribing to BOTH UVerse TV and Comcast and you think you can live with none? Whatever.
No, I said I'd had Comcast in the past and don't really want to go back to them. I can get basic DSL for about $13.95 a month, and a single phone line (I just want it for receiving the occasional fax, and for emergencies since we use Skype for most long-distance calling) for about $19.95 a month. Tell me how U-Verse can beat that. Granted, U-Verse is faster, but I'm just considering my options.
And no, it's not AT&T... it's SBC. SBC took over AT&T and kept the name, but under the hood it's SBC.
I think I would ditch my subscription if I encountered that.
Well, as I note in another post, I'm definitely considering my options. Other than that, though, the service is really very good, but it's a little on the expensive side.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is not selling the iPad as a PC or even as a computer. It's a device.
Who cares how Apple sells it? It's how the consumer perceives it that counts, and the fact is it's a goddamned portable computer. Period. End of statement. I've been in this business since before there was an Apple Computer, and I remember Steve Jobs referring to the original Macintosh as a "computing appliance." The rest of us considered the thing to be what it really was: a personal computer, the successor to the wildly successful (and completely open) Apple ][ series. Jobs' rhetoric and Apple's policies indicate that he still believes that he can market a restricted "computing appliance" in a world full of personal computers. And he can ... but ultimately that's going to limit his success because there are always going to be edge cases (like me) that either want to run software that Apple doesn't deem appropriate, or just don't like being told what to do. It's a balancing act for Apple: if they restrict the platform as much as they would like to, they're going to find themselves in the same boat as the media companies: people will find a way to bypass any restrictions. In Apple's case, they'll probably just buy a competing product. If they open it up ... well, I'm having a hard time really seeing the downside for Apple since 99% of users will simply use the default configuration anyway, because most of them are too stupid to use a computer and wouldn't know how to change anything. But Jobs is one arrogant mother and I don't think he's able to grasp that, at least not as fully as Google seems to.
but there are a lot of loose ends which Google appears to have given up on.
Would you care to elaborate on those loose ends? One advantage to Android which hasn't really been talked about in this thread is the fact that it is mostly open source. For example, on my Android device I run Cyanogenmod, one of the many (and in my opinion, the best of the) third-party Android ROMs out there. Your iPhone will never officially be able to run anything but a ROM provided by Apple, whereas Google not only allows these developers to flourish but actively aids them, and the best of their work will often end up back in Google's main repository. Open source at it's finest, when you get right down to it. Matter of fact, Cyanogen (aka Steve Kondik) has tied up a *lot* of those "loose ends" in his ROM, and at this point I can't even imagine running the stock firmware anymore. Hell, he's even got Android 2.x running on the original G1 ... not only running, but greased lightning in comparison to Google's 1.6 release. Built-in kernel support for USB tethering, with bluetooth support on the way, compressed caching, speech recognition/synthesis, video recording, live wallpaper, tons of goodies that aren't in the OTA releases. You might want to give it a look before you hop into bed with Jobs & Co.
Then they would have a monopoly and then it would be illegal.
That's wrong. Having a monopoly is not, in and of itself, illegal. It just isn't, in spite of what you may think. If you gain a monopoly because people freely choose your products over your competitors (because yours are better, or because you've convinced your customers that yours are better (Yes, Steve, I'm talking about you) there's nothing whatsoever illegal about that. If there were, then any company which achieved a certain measure of success would automatically be deemed illegal and risk being broken up, and that's just not how it works. However if, as Microsoft has done, you leverage your monopoly position to suppress competition, thereby harming the consumer, then you can get in trouble.
Being dick is being dick no matter whether it's illegal or not.
"Don't be Evil". Failing that, don't be a dick. Jobs is a loser on both counts, so far as I'm concerned.
Android probably never will go down that route, and as a result, no matter how successful Android phones become in the market, Android apps will never be as successful as iPhone apps.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Apparently the reality-distortion field extends to Slashdot. Android phones are going to leave (are leaving) iPhone sales in the dust. Fragmentation is an issue, but that's no more a problem, when you get right down to it, than that faced by PC developers every day. And there is this thing called the "Android Market" where you can (yes, it's true!) buy applications! Amazing, isn't it, that someone was able to come up with something that's just as functional as an Apple product? More to the point, a developer can sign up for the market for the princely sum of $25, and the SDKs are free (yes, free.) None of Apple and Job's bullshit with non-disclosure agreements, limits on what tools you can use and, for me, the capper of suffering Apple's utterly drain-bamaged and developer-unfriendly approval process. Jobs is an arrogant ass who cannot be trusted who will cheerfully screw over an individual or company that wants to sell software for the iPhone, often for no readily-apparent reason. Frankly, Google has been pretty damned non-Evil when it comes to managing their Market, in how they treat both developers and users ... Apple has been decidedly otherwise. As a software developer, I want nothing whatsoever to do with Apple, Steve Jobs or an iAnything.
So, it was okay with Jobs to copy it from Xerox, but not for BG to do the same? Hypocrite is the word, my friend!
I think Apple licensed it from Xerox. But yeah, I share your opinion of Jobs. To paraphrase George Carlin:
Fuck Steve Jobs! Fuck him in the ass with a big rubber dick! Then break it off and beat him with it! I hope Steve dies. I do, I hope he goddamn dies. I hope he gets a hold of some tainted MP3s, and dies lonely and forgotten in the bathroom of some bad building in a poor neighborhood, with his hand in Wozniak's pants.
...in 3, 2, 1
Limewire was nothing special: just a Gnutella client with extensions. The Gnutella "network" is alive and well, has been for years, and there are many clients out there for it. Limewire just suckered a lot of people into paying for software that was readily available for free. I don't care that Limewire is getting nailed, I just don't like the media companies winning cases like this. It's bad for everybody, including them, if they just had the wit to see it.
And nothing of value was lost. Seriously, who uses an inefficient cruddy program like Limewire when you've got bit torrent?
You don't use a torrent to grab a three or four meg file: swarming protocols work best for sharing large files.
The Gnutella network was, and is, very efficient at sharing small files (you know, the kind that keep media executives up at night.) That said, there are plenty of other ways to share such information, and all the RIAA has done is to (once again) continue the game of whack-a-mole. There are many other Gnutella clients available (personally, I like Phex: multi-platform, open-source, and does what I need. Pick it up on SourceForge) and people will quickly find them. Let the lawyers celebrate their "victory", for whatever it's worth.
I'm all for tinkering, and tinkering with cars used to be a great hobby. But tinkering with proprietary chip sets - with consequences not only your driving experience, but on the safety of others around you - without the proper equipment strikes me as a uniquely bad idea.
And OBD2 port is just a serial port. Actually, there are several different types of OBD2 hardware interfaces, but they all follow the same basic protocol from a software perspective. I understand we have Congress to thank for that much. The proprietary parts are the PIDs that manufacturers add for specific product lines but the basics are pretty consistent. Besides ... querying your vehicle's ECU in the precise manner in which it was designed to be queried hardly constitutes tinkering with a proprietary chipset. It's not like we're talking about modifying the ECU's firmware, only polling it for specific data items. That's just not a big deal, and in fact is exactly what OBD2 was designed to do.
I use my Android phone with a bluetooth ELM 327-based interface all the time: the logging and trending features are really helpful. The only potentially negative consequence that I can think of would be watching all the pretty real-time dials on the phone's display rather than paying attention to the road, but that's a different story.
Maybe that's why you are a former mechanic. A good mechanic knows that 90% of the time on a specific car that a misfire on cylinder 3 is that leaking head gasket you have either fixed 50 times or read about in the TSB. Shitty mechanics are shitty mechanics with or without a scanner.
Did you actually read the GP's post?
That's all well and dandy except that the scan equipment isn't actually expensive, the OP is simply looking in the wrong places.
Well, I'm not a mechanic but I do like to have some idea what's going on under the hood. I have an Android phone with a bluetooth multiprotocol OBD2 interface, and I use a program (it's in the Market) called "Torque". Works very well, and does more than those handheld scanners you buy at Sears. Even allows you to log OBD info with GPS tagging, and export it. If it finds a trouble code, it will link you to a Web site that lists the possible causes for that code for many different vehicles.
It only cost two bucks.
I don't understand the surprise that someone has a working 1986 computer.
No kidding. I don't have my original PC anymore, but I do have an original Apple ][ Standard (Integer ROMs, no less) from 1977, with the FP board and a box full of peripherals. Somewhere I have a 10 meg Cider ][ hard drive, and I think a couple of Apple //e's. I don't know about the Cider, but the computers still work fine, even the floppy drives. I still have an Amiga 1000 too: I had a 500 but I sold it a long time ago. They were neat machines, no doubt about it, but Commodore demonstrated very clearly that they had no idea what they had, how to market it, or what people could or should do with it. So they let it fail and shortly after that Commodore computers disappeared.
I was a game developer when the Amiga was announced (actually, about a year before it was announced) as the company I worked for did the graphics demo that shipped with each machine. It was all very hush-hush (bunch of Sun Sparcstations in a special room with an electronic lock on the door where the "special" programers worked) and none of us knew what was going on until the official word came from Commodore.
It turned out they were working on a couple of prototype Amigas, that didn't even have a power-on/RESET circuit (you had to manually start them after applying power) and were shipped in flat black-painted plywood boxes with holes cut in the side for the connectors. Pretty cool. Wish I had one of those: they'd be worth real money nowadays.
if you are eating a certain food just to show how different you are, doesn't that make you a moron?
Wait a minute ... are were talking Sushi or iPods here?
Former Amiga programmers realized
Look I was a game programmer back then, I worked on PC, Apple //, and Commodore 64-series products among others ... and you're just wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. I never did anything for the Amiga, and I find it kinda irritating that you believe programmers like me required Amiga experience in order to be good at our jobs. Geez, you Amiga guys sound like Mac fanboys sometimes. You just make shit up. I spent seven years before that failed attempt at a personal computer ever hit the market, hacking high-speed graphics code on a number of different microprocessors, and neither I nor my employers ever felt that I needed to learn to study the Amiga to write graphics an animation code for other systems.
... pretty much bare metal and raw assembler all the way through. That's because the CPU had to do everything, except maybe sound if you had an early Soundblaster. No fancy graphics or sound chips, no sirree.
// lines. That's because many things that were easy on the Amiga took some very sharp, largely ex-Apple ][ programmers to do well on the PC.
You're giving all the credit to ex-Amiga coders for driving the game market forward and that's just ridiculous. Most of the guys I knew that bought into the Amiga hype went over to the Mac because they didn't want to be dealing with the bare metal. Most of them hadn't a clue what an I/O port was, much less how to screw around with refresh timing or anything else on a VGA card. They let the custom ASICs do all the work. Arcade game development on the IBM compatibles of the era was a lot like it was on the Apple ][
The Amiga had many hardware and other advantages, and the reality is that experience with the Amiga's custom chips didn't count for SQUAT when it came to coding for what passed as video on PCs at the time. Matter of fact, the Amiga's hardware support spoiled the typical Amiga developer and put him at a distinct disadvantage when it came to working on the PC or Apple
That's the real history. You can assign credit any way you like, but those of us who were there will likely go all Guru Meditation on you.
It's amazing, you don't look a day ove....
Oww, my eye!
Which no doubt spawned the usual "Do not look into laser beam with remaining eye" warning.
I had some aches and pains and a little lump on Rightie, so I was sent off right away to have a scrotal ultrasound.
Your testicles have names? How cute!
Yes. The other one is called Todd.
Don't let Microsoft point ultrasonic emitters at your nuts.
Blue Ball of Death?
Well, if it's a true BSOD it would be the Bloated Scrotum of Death.
Because having your cousin die somewhere in someplace for other reasons is ok?
How did you read that into what he said? Who modded you up?
Irreverent just pointed out that this is not some distant problem but one that can affect people you know.
This is the opposite of a waste of public funds. One of Cisco's biggest customers is the federal government. As such any spending of public money on cracking down on this... Saves the public money.
You didn't read my original post (or the last one, I guess.) I was saying that I think this was reasonable, but their support of the music industry's crackdown is not.
You know, the RIAA has nothing to do with this case. This was trafficking in counterfeit Cisco gear not copyright infringement.
And of course, you present a false dilemma. Or do you really think "actual criminals" got away because resources were used in this case.
I thought so. I just utterly demolished and destroyed your lame, hackneyed comment.
I was only complaining about what I consider to be misuse of public funds on the one hand, and a legitimate use of them on the other. It's not a false dilemma ... time and effort the Justice Department expends on supporting anti-filesharing cases is time not spent going after real criminals of any stripe. I'm sure you're aware, if you're a regular Slashdot user, that Obama has shifted Justice's priorities in that regard (several top spots in the Department being filled by ex-music industry attorneys.) Yes, I'm also aware that he supposedly put in place rules to prevent them from using government resources to support their former employers, but those rules don't appear to be working.
I suppose this is a good thing. Honestly though, I'm not entirely sure why this is considered news - the government has long been opposed to knock-offs of most things. It's a nice buff to the security community, but is so hard to detect that the over all effect is likely to negligible. I'll take a stand and say, "meh."
Still, it's better they target actual criminals than wasting our tax dollars supporting the likes of the RIAA.
The patents are actually held by the licensors, and MPEG-LA only handles litigation.
So, in other words, they're the RIAA of the video compression world.
Hell, burn it to the ground rather than let them get their pound of flesh. They must be starved into finding real jobs.
I agree, and if those lawyers were working in that plant while you burned it to the ground, well ... let's just say it's a win-win situation.
You're subscribing to BOTH UVerse TV and Comcast and you think you can live with none? Whatever.
No, I said I'd had Comcast in the past and don't really want to go back to them. I can get basic DSL for about $13.95 a month, and a single phone line (I just want it for receiving the occasional fax, and for emergencies since we use Skype for most long-distance calling) for about $19.95 a month. Tell me how U-Verse can beat that. Granted, U-Verse is faster, but I'm just considering my options.
... it's SBC. SBC took over AT&T and kept the name, but under the hood it's SBC.
And no, it's not AT&T
I think I would ditch my subscription if I encountered that.
Well, as I note in another post, I'm definitely considering my options. Other than that, though, the service is really very good, but it's a little on the expensive side.