Friend, FreeBSD isn't UNIX. UNIX is a trademark, and FreeBSD can't be called UNIX.
Besides Mac OS X contains a complete FreeBSD 4.4 distribution-- it is, in fact, a superset of FreeBSD-- so OS X is just as much a UNIX operating system as FreeBSD is.
the point was where ever you turn your going to run into a monopoly
Dumbass. My point was that "monopoly" has a very specific meaning. Being the only company in town that offers cable modem service does not mean you have a monopoly on Internet access. As I've explained elsewhere, the word "monopoly" loses its meaning if you make the domain too narrow. Lots of companies make hammers, but only HamCo makes hammers with a rubberized yellow grips with blue spots. Does that mean HamCo has a monopoly on hammers with rubberized yellow grips with blue spots? Of course not. The word "monopoly" doesn't apply in that case.
If you can buy Internet access from six (or whatever) different companies, then there is no monopoly on Internet access. Poof.
That's not an abuse of monopoly power, any more than a McDonalds giving away free french fries with every Happy Meal. It's absolutely okay for a company that sells two products or services to offer customers incentives to buy both of their products or services rather than just one.
Coincidence? Of course not. It's the same reason that a gallon of gas costs about $1.20, plus or minus a dime, at every filling station in town. That's the price that the market will bear.
"Oligopoly" implies that there's collusion going on. That's a pretty strong statement to make, Paul.
What do you think would happen if a guy walked into an all-you-can-eat restaurant and proceeded to take the entire buffet to his table? Don't you think somebody would have a word with that customer? Does it make sense to criticize the restaurant owners for "overselling" the buffet?
In bus-like networks like the coaxial network owned by the cable company, bandwidth is very much a shared and limited resource. The use of that resource has to be managed. If you don't like it, don't sign up for the service.
Bandwidth doesn't work like that, though. A hundred people can surf the web on a T-1 at the same time, and all of them will be happy that their Internet access is so fast.
Besides, the extra money you spend per month goes toward buying you better customer service-- telcos are extremely responsive to their leased line customers, because that's where their bread is buttered-- and no restrictions on use. Expensive? Hardly. I'd call it a bargain at twice the price.
You know, most cell phone providers with whom I'm familiar can change your monthly plan at a moment's notice, and are happy to do so retroactively. I had to go out of town on short notice last year, and while I was gone I found that I was spending about ten times more time on my cell phone than I usually did. I just called AT&T Wireless (my provider at the time) and told them so. They said no problem, and bumped me up to the expensive umpteen-bajillion minute plan retroactively for that month. I think I paid a hundred bucks for my cell phone that month, but it cost me a lot less than by-the-minute would have.
Have you ever heard the expression, "Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose?" Same basic principle here. Unlimited access is well and good up to the point that somebody else's unlimited access starts to infringe on my unlimited access. So, basically, yeah. People who download so much data that it negatively impacts the utility of the system for other users should be limited in some way, or they should pay more, or some such.
No, they're not. Ping times in the 700 msec range make pretty much everything but email painful to use. Even surfing the web is annoying, what with the one- to two-second latency between clicking a link and getting the data for that link.
Games, shell access, VPNs, IRC, these things are all just short of impossible with a satellite Internet connection.
Can't improve it, either. That's a speed-of-light limitation.
It's pretty evident that you don't have the slightest idea what "monopoly" means here. If there's a cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, then there's not exactly a monopoly, is there?
Just as I feel compelled to point out that 555.12.12.12 is an obvious allusion to the traditional fake phone number, 555-1212. (That number gets you directory assistance if you dial it.)
In all of my company's internal documentation, example IP addresses are represented by 212.555.12.12.
essentially I see a time when we have bandwidth meters on our house just like the water and electric meter. It's the only way to be sure that we get what we are paying for.
I think you meant to say, "it's the only way to be sure that we're paying for what we get." Which makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.
And don't completely discount old-school access methods like frame relay, ISDN, and T-1. They're usually pretty expensive compared to the $29-a-month special from the cable company, but if you spread the cost out in a neighborhood co-op you can get much higher quality of service and reliability for a not unbearable price. The T-1 we leased from the telco at our office has never gone out, not even for a second, in almost four years. Can you say the same for your DSL line or your cable modem?
In my city, you can get a T-1 to the Internet for $400 a month, all-inclusive. (This is a service that's provided by one of the local datacenter providers, an outfit called The Planet.) If I had five neighbors who wanted Internet access, it would make a lot of sense for us to buy the T-1 and the necessary equipment to share it between our houses. The up-front costs would be pretty significant, but the recurring costs would be reasonable for the level of service offered.
As long as you are on the internet, and can connect to IPv4 or IPv6, you cannot be stopped. The technology inherently allows you to move around blockages or outage points.
Unless you have a tunnel established, I'd say blocking port n at your cable modem pretty well controls your access to services that run on port n, wouldn't you?
Sure, we could cram everything into port 80-- technologies like SOAP are built around that basic premise already. But that's not exactly the greatest idea ever.
This sort of thing is a pendulum. Consider pop-up ads. Earthlink is running television commercials advertising their pop-up ad blocking software. Somebody at Earthlink thinks they can get subscribers to sign up by offering a hassle-free Internet experience, and they're probably right. If the pendulum swings too far-- cable modem providers arbitrarily limiting service in ways that customers don't like-- then somebody will see a business opportunity to offer unmetered, unshaped service and the pendulum will start to swing the other way again.
I do believe that regulations need to be made, all because if this 1 company is allowed to get away with it, hundreds may follow.
So? Like I said before, this doesn't endanger the health, safety, or welfare of anybody. Yeah, it's a nuisance. But that doesn't mean it should be regulated by the government.
Re:This may be the type of thing we need
on
First Worm with a EULA?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not sure you understand how our government works, or how it's supposed to work. There's no reason at all why this sort of thing ought to be addressed by the government. It doesn't endanger the health, safety, or welfare of the citizenry in any way.
It seems to me that what this company did was completely on the up-and-up. I wouldn't even call it sneaky, really. Lame? Yeah. But not unthinkable, and certainly not illegal.
Re:I don't really get blogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 1
You know, one of the great primary historical resources has always been collections of letters and personal diaries. Think of a blog as a combination of those two things, placed out there in the world for posterity. Two hundred years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to find that blogs and similar personal narratives are considered to be valuable primary sources. Assuming somebody bothers to archive the things, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Friend, FreeBSD isn't UNIX. UNIX is a trademark, and FreeBSD can't be called UNIX.
Besides Mac OS X contains a complete FreeBSD 4.4 distribution-- it is, in fact, a superset of FreeBSD-- so OS X is just as much a UNIX operating system as FreeBSD is.
the point was where ever you turn your going to run into a monopoly
Dumbass. My point was that "monopoly" has a very specific meaning. Being the only company in town that offers cable modem service does not mean you have a monopoly on Internet access. As I've explained elsewhere, the word "monopoly" loses its meaning if you make the domain too narrow. Lots of companies make hammers, but only HamCo makes hammers with a rubberized yellow grips with blue spots. Does that mean HamCo has a monopoly on hammers with rubberized yellow grips with blue spots? Of course not. The word "monopoly" doesn't apply in that case.
If you can buy Internet access from six (or whatever) different companies, then there is no monopoly on Internet access. Poof.
That's not an abuse of monopoly power, any more than a McDonalds giving away free french fries with every Happy Meal. It's absolutely okay for a company that sells two products or services to offer customers incentives to buy both of their products or services rather than just one.
Coincidence? Of course not. It's the same reason that a gallon of gas costs about $1.20, plus or minus a dime, at every filling station in town. That's the price that the market will bear.
"Oligopoly" implies that there's collusion going on. That's a pretty strong statement to make, Paul.
Um... because it's blatantly fictitious? It's obvious from looking at the address that it is not meant to represent any real address. Duh.
What do you think would happen if a guy walked into an all-you-can-eat restaurant and proceeded to take the entire buffet to his table? Don't you think somebody would have a word with that customer? Does it make sense to criticize the restaurant owners for "overselling" the buffet?
In bus-like networks like the coaxial network owned by the cable company, bandwidth is very much a shared and limited resource. The use of that resource has to be managed. If you don't like it, don't sign up for the service.
Bandwidth doesn't work like that, though. A hundred people can surf the web on a T-1 at the same time, and all of them will be happy that their Internet access is so fast.
Besides, the extra money you spend per month goes toward buying you better customer service-- telcos are extremely responsive to their leased line customers, because that's where their bread is buttered-- and no restrictions on use. Expensive? Hardly. I'd call it a bargain at twice the price.
You know, most cell phone providers with whom I'm familiar can change your monthly plan at a moment's notice, and are happy to do so retroactively. I had to go out of town on short notice last year, and while I was gone I found that I was spending about ten times more time on my cell phone than I usually did. I just called AT&T Wireless (my provider at the time) and told them so. They said no problem, and bumped me up to the expensive umpteen-bajillion minute plan retroactively for that month. I think I paid a hundred bucks for my cell phone that month, but it cost me a lot less than by-the-minute would have.
You probably could have done the same thing.
(-1, Offtopic, yeah, yeah)
Have you ever heard the expression, "Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose?" Same basic principle here. Unlimited access is well and good up to the point that somebody else's unlimited access starts to infringe on my unlimited access. So, basically, yeah. People who download so much data that it negatively impacts the utility of the system for other users should be limited in some way, or they should pay more, or some such.
No, they're not. Ping times in the 700 msec range make pretty much everything but email painful to use. Even surfing the web is annoying, what with the one- to two-second latency between clicking a link and getting the data for that link.
Games, shell access, VPNs, IRC, these things are all just short of impossible with a satellite Internet connection.
Can't improve it, either. That's a speed-of-light limitation.
all our new customers have to install a PPPoE client in order to connect
No problem. Your customers will just get themselves an Apple AirPort Base Station, or other PPPoE-savvy gateway device. No muss, no fuss.
It's pretty evident that you don't have the slightest idea what "monopoly" means here. If there's a cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, then there's not exactly a monopoly, is there?
Just as I feel compelled to point out that 555.12.12.12 is an obvious allusion to the traditional fake phone number, 555-1212. (That number gets you directory assistance if you dial it.)
In all of my company's internal documentation, example IP addresses are represented by 212.555.12.12.
essentially I see a time when we have bandwidth meters on our house just like the water and electric meter. It's the only way to be sure that we get what we are paying for.
I think you meant to say, "it's the only way to be sure that we're paying for what we get." Which makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.
And don't completely discount old-school access methods like frame relay, ISDN, and T-1. They're usually pretty expensive compared to the $29-a-month special from the cable company, but if you spread the cost out in a neighborhood co-op you can get much higher quality of service and reliability for a not unbearable price. The T-1 we leased from the telco at our office has never gone out, not even for a second, in almost four years. Can you say the same for your DSL line or your cable modem?
;-)
Your comment annoyed me because it's so very true.
This is the reason that I read Slashdot, y'all. About four times a year, somebody posts something that really makes me think.
In my city, you can get a T-1 to the Internet for $400 a month, all-inclusive. (This is a service that's provided by one of the local datacenter providers, an outfit called The Planet.) If I had five neighbors who wanted Internet access, it would make a lot of sense for us to buy the T-1 and the necessary equipment to share it between our houses. The up-front costs would be pretty significant, but the recurring costs would be reasonable for the level of service offered.
As long as you are on the internet, and can connect to IPv4 or IPv6, you cannot be stopped. The technology inherently allows you to move around blockages or outage points.
Unless you have a tunnel established, I'd say blocking port n at your cable modem pretty well controls your access to services that run on port n, wouldn't you?
Sure, we could cram everything into port 80-- technologies like SOAP are built around that basic premise already. But that's not exactly the greatest idea ever.
This sort of thing is a pendulum. Consider pop-up ads. Earthlink is running television commercials advertising their pop-up ad blocking software. Somebody at Earthlink thinks they can get subscribers to sign up by offering a hassle-free Internet experience, and they're probably right. If the pendulum swings too far-- cable modem providers arbitrarily limiting service in ways that customers don't like-- then somebody will see a business opportunity to offer unmetered, unshaped service and the pendulum will start to swing the other way again.
Yes, someone must develop 802.11 wireless networking immediately! This is a call to arms!
Oh, wait...
I do believe that regulations need to be made, all because if this 1 company is allowed to get away with it, hundreds may follow.
So? Like I said before, this doesn't endanger the health, safety, or welfare of anybody. Yeah, it's a nuisance. But that doesn't mean it should be regulated by the government.
I'm not sure you understand how our government works, or how it's supposed to work. There's no reason at all why this sort of thing ought to be addressed by the government. It doesn't endanger the health, safety, or welfare of the citizenry in any way.
It seems to me that what this company did was completely on the up-and-up. I wouldn't even call it sneaky, really. Lame? Yeah. But not unthinkable, and certainly not illegal.
I would remark "How could the makers of such a thing sleep at night?"
On a big pile of money, probably.
Because, inside of every blogger there's a cute little kitty, just waiting for you to discover it.
Except this one, of course.
You know, one of the great primary historical resources has always been collections of letters and personal diaries. Think of a blog as a combination of those two things, placed out there in the world for posterity. Two hundred years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to find that blogs and similar personal narratives are considered to be valuable primary sources. Assuming somebody bothers to archive the things, of course.