I think that there should be a Software Industry "Glass Turd" award - for the most over promised, under delivered, and basically mis-applied software product of the year.
Go register a domain name, and start 'awarding' it to companies.
The spooky part is that your post is almost 10 days old and no one has swooped in to register glassturd.com.
Not really, the FBI is subject to the oversight of a freely and fairly elected congress.
Remember that the next time you're watching an episode of Cops and laughing your ass off.
Bwahaha. That guy is such a f*cking idio...OMG I hope he doesn't vote.
Or closer to home, look at your neighbors. They vote too. The a**hole who constantly walks his dog over to my yard so it can take a dump--he votes. And the dude across the street who is ALWAYS in his bathrobe drinking a beer 24/7 votes.
Now I'm not saying communism or socialism is the way--it's just a much faster road to the end.
For example, they may show better judgment when making tech purchases and are often better with green IT initiatives
The company I work for was talking about the green BS as a way to show customers we cared. Whatever. Why shell out thousands of dollars to a bunch of tree-huggung hippies for no reason.
It's funny how they don't see it as throwing away money. They see it as a marketing opportunity. Let's jump on the bandwagon and do what everyone else is doing just because everyone else is doing it.
The only people who know are the programmers at Microsoft who coded this service pack up, they're the ones who could tell us if the conflicting parts of the service pack can just be cut out or not.
Oh yeah--it can totally be cut up and installed piecemail. Just like you can cut IE out of Windows, or get Outlook to not install MSN Messenger...
And that's a great idea, until you end up with a piece of required software that refuses to run without local admin privileges on the computer...
Yeah. These guys make an extremely shitty dental package that falls into that category. Every single last person must be an admin. And the best part is that they back a shitty package with sub-par support. When one of their digital cameras stopped working the other day, one of their tech told me deadpan "Your USB root hub is probably bad. Those things wear out all the time."
The likelihood of achieving anything in a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people in the meeting. So what's the likelihood when the meeting attendees number in the millions?
Give me some credit. I did say get rid of the trolls. That should drop the number a few million...;)
There are many places in the world where fine conversations about technical and technological advancement could take place, but slashdot isnt one of them.
Aside from trolls which could be weeded out from the discussion easily, the geek side of slashdot could (I think) easily come up with a way and agree on the best way to solve this.
This may be oversimplifying it a bit, but I would trust most slashdot users to know how to solve a technical problem.
If a network cable it unplugged, plug it in.
Of course you'll have several threads discussing the best brand of network cable for not coming unplugged with a sub-thread from the guys who still think BNC has something to offer because of the twist-lock connectors. You'll get a thread about the best super-glue to permanently bond the cable into the card for situations where the cable must NEVER come unplugged for security/life support reasons, a few people repeating the same joke about cable length and "is it in yet?", followed lastly by the trolls talking about that one time in the locker room and goatse.
...Oh--and that one guy who always makes a car analogy which makes no sense to me because I'm a netadmin, not a gearhead.
What other way will there be of blocking spam? Legislative won't work because there is no one governing body that controls the entire world and can punish those that do wrong.
Market based...well, it might work, but the solution will probable be some sort of technical device like a barracuda appliance.
Vigilante would work if we just shot all the spammers, but then those people would go to jail for murder. Wait until we can clone, then send your clone in to do the dirty work and hope they don't grab you instead of your clone.
So technical is the only way.
(X) users of email will not put up with it
Fine, they can put up with the spam.
But in my experience, users will put up with a lot of shit if it's required of them. Think BSODs, Windows ME, Windows Vista, etc...
(X) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Kinda like SMTP is required by everyone. If you don't have it, you don't get mail.
I don't care if it's another protocol, or the same protocol with changes. Kinda like IPv6, eventually there will be a cutoff date and everyone needs to get on board or else things just won't work. Get the new email protocol in place, have it work along side SMTP and then once it's developed and tested set a shutoff date for SMTP.
Yeah, it'll be a lot of work, but that's our job. We do the technical shit on the internet. Just like the telco guys--I don't care how my phone call gets from point A to B, just that it does get there.
(X) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
This seems somewhat irrelevant. We're not talking about immediately shutting down SMTP and saying 'fuckit'. A group of intelligent geeks like you'd find on slashdot (for the most part) are completely capable of coming up with a transition plan.
(X) huge existing software investment in smtp
(X) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
(X) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
There's always going to be a huge investment when switching (think IPv4 to IPv6). At some point the flaws or limitations of the system become too big a problem and you must change. Have we reached that point with SMTP and spam? Are we out of quick fixes like SenderID, Domain Keys, DKIM, blacklists, whitelists, spamassassin, greylists, etc...?
As for 'patches' received via email, you're never going to stop idiots and social engineering.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with attacking protocols other than smtp.
(X) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
That part is true. I'm sitting here saying we should come up with something, but not putting forth any ideas.
But I believe if a group like Slashdot held a huge discussion about it, we would come up with something.
The resulting fund would ostensibly 'compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.
MAFIAA Idiot 1: Yeah, we totally need to tax teh intarweb so the songwriters, performers, and publishers get a sweet reoccuring income.
MAFIAA Idiot 2: Oh shit. Don't forget to put us on the list. I know we didn't write the song, pick the performers, or magically give someone talent, but we need in on the money too...uh...because we...uh...thought of the idea. Wait. What the fuck do we do for artists, performers, or music in general again?
Yea, but they're not contracting. They're pulling out and they've agreed to sell their assets, employees, and service area to Fairpoint. To me, the assets and employees are theirs to transfer, the right to service these states is not. Of course the PUC approved it, so now we're screwed. I guess the beef is more with the PUC than with Verizon, but both had a hand in this Fairpoint mess.
Oh--I see what you're saying. Verizon had an exclusive contract to your area and sold (along with assets, and employees) to another company.
The problem isn't that Verizon sold assets, employees, and existing contracts to another company. It's that the city/town/whatever appointed the contract in the first place. Now if the citizens voted for it, tough shit--but if the city just randomly appointed it, that's a grey area. Does the city have a legal right to do that? Did the citizens vote to give the city that right?
To say there aren't monopolies.. I just think it's silly. There is very slight competition, and it's not apples to apples. It's certainly not the way it should be.
Just because there is a lack of competition doesn't mean they are monopolies (in the anti-trust form of the word). There may be no competition simply because they provided better service and beat everyone else out. There may be no competition because no one wants to setup an ISP in the area.
I used to work for an ISP that kicked serious butt. They treated their customer well (Had a bowling party/kegger and invited all 8,000 subscribers) and they knew their stuff. They beat out all three other ISPs in the area, and now it's only them and the local telco.
One competitor started an ISP by buying the largest office space they could find, purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of routers, servers, switches, phone service, etc...they brought on board well-trained staff and paid them very well...all before they had a single customer signed up. They went bankrupt after a year. They sold their customer list of 1,000 customers to us to help pay off their debts. And the worst part was that the customer list was almost entirely our 'bad' customer list. People who lived 30 billion miles from a telco switch whose phone service was so poor you could barely hear them over the crackling on the line--and they would bitch and threaten our support staff because their modem didn't work and it was our fault.
One other competitor was a one-man or two-man operation. He got busted for dealing drugs, and all his POPs revolted and shut off his equipment because he failed to pay bills.
So...are they a monopoly? Yes in the sense that they are pretty much the only option (except for Qwest). And no in the sense that they are not engaged in deceitful business practices to stop the competition.
Also, notice how he doesn't condone criminal activity, yet he is advocating this same behavior for his "cyber command" crap.
It's funny. If they attack a network, host, router, whatever it's ok because they are defending their country.
If you do it, it's not defending your country, it's illegal.
If someone trespasses into my house and I use force to remove them, I'm a criminal.
If a police officer just happened to be there when the trespass occured and they use force to remove the trespasser, they are doing their job.
When did it stop being about individual liberty and individual freedom. Now it seems like you have rights, but only law enforcement, or the government can exercise them for you as they see fit.
What I'm against is Verizon picking Fairpoint with no input from the people that are their potential and current customers.
That sucks. I'm not familiar with the situation, but if Verizon wants to (subcontract?) with a company to provide service to a certain area, I think that's their right.
It's not my business to tell others run their business, and it's especially not the government's place to tell businesses how they must run.
To quote the grate Andrew Wilkow: "Your freedom to be you includes my freedom to be free from you."
This is the kind of bull the corporations feed you. The amount of money you pay DOES NOT equal the quality of service or product. Its not the quality of the product that sets the price, its how much it costs to make (or perform) + some percent over that cost in order to generate profit.
You make that sound so evil. Who do you work for? Would you rather have your company work to try and make a profit or would you rather have your company lose money?
Granted, paying more doesn't always equal a better product. I could go buy a POS Dell for $500 and have non-stop trouble. Instead I went to newegg.com and bought all the parts for $400 and built it myself.
The only reason Comcast charges as much as they do is because they want to increase their profit.
You know--I think you have a great idea. I'm going to start a company, but my goal is going to be to earn as little as possible. That'll attract investors, and employees.
it should be noted that this is NOT a free market, just like how the US is NOT a democracy.
You're right. The government keeps trying to regulate stuff and it is a problem. And you're right about us not being a democracy. We're a republic. It's so we aren't usually governed by knee-jerk reactions of the citizens.
These days, you have to go through hoops of fire in order to start any kind of communications company, not to mention that Comcast will most likely try to acquire you (whether thru merger or gov sanctions).
The hoops of fire are there because of the freakin' FCC who should all be dragged out of their offices and be forced to get 'real' jobs. Comcast acquiring you is simply a business decision. Do you want Comcast to acquire your business or not? If it's a privately held business and you say "no", Comcast can go suck it.
In cases such as these, it is up to the carrier (or at least it should be) to notify you of planned changes to service. If they are going to stop your service for one reason or another, they should notify you.
Comcast did notify me of outages. When I signed up I was told that Comcast has a maintenance window from 0100 to 0300 every morning, but that most of the time they don't use that maintenance window. Smokeping has been running on one of my computers for the last 8 months. I had two outages, both at night during the maintenance window for a total of maybe 20 minutes. Now if I don't pay my bill, they do notify me about stopping my service. It's called a past-due notice. Or are you talking about service interruptions like the maintenance window?
If they are going to start to block some types of transmissions, they should tell you. It sounds to me like you are siding with them just because of what they have said. O, and as an FYI, Comcast didn't limit torrents because of capacity problems with their current customers, they did it so that they could try to free up capacity so that they can sell it to new customers.
It's their network, they can do what they want with it as long as it doesn't violate the agreement I signed. Now even though I despise the FCC, Comcast still has to follow their rules unfortunately and part of that is probably the common carrier agreement (of which I know very little about), so they probably can't just block services--just like Qwest can't suddenly block AT&T calls. Of course Qwest or AT&T can disconnect or block someone who is degrading the network for others--but I would imagine this is very infrequent.
Now I don't know if Comcast is blocking torrents because they want to resell that capacity to other customers--and I doubt you know either. That sounds like an overhyped conspiracy theory. Do you have any sources for that? If they are blocking torrent traffic because they want that capacity to go to new customers, that sucks. But it's their business. (Unless it is affected by the common carrier status)
But back to the point, why don't the people get to vote? Like I said, Verizon is pulling out. We're all against it.
Wow...are you actually telling me that you are pissed that you can't vote and FORCE Verizon to provide service in an area?
What the fuck? This is America, not Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela. You can't vote and force someone to do something like that. If you voted and the government stepped in and said "Verizon, you must provide service out there", do you really think you could force the employees to be helpful when you call--or be as responsive when there's an outage? Who would want to work when they are being FORCED? You can't make someone work unless they are a slave. (That's also the problem with Welfare. When you are being handed a check and you can't be forced to work, you are a drain on the system).
I think one of us misunderstands communism.
To reduce it down to a few sentences, you own nothing. Anything you invent, create, make or do belongs to the 'everyone', and by 'everyone' I mean the government. Working harder doesn't get you anything. Working harder benefits everyone else, including those that do nothing. (Like my neighbor who sits at home all day and drinks beer in his bathrobe while collecting welfare)
In no way does having a business and a product which you sell to make more money and develop new products fit in to the communist way of life.
Now I won't argue that the government gave/gives telcos a huge tax-break for services they never provided--but hey, that's not the free market.
They wouldn't have jack shit if the government hadn't granted them monopolies. Take your trolling elsewhere pinko.
So what exactly did the government give Comcast? I'm not trying to troll here, but this town had NO cable network until Adelphia came in. Then they started providing cable internet. Then Comcast bought them out.
Now initially I'm guessing they (adelphia) made a deal with the city that probably got them a tax break for investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city. But there's nothing wrong with that if the citizens voted for it. I'm sure the citizens would want to sweeten the deal for Adelphia to get them to put in the network in the first place, rather than be stuck with Satellite or dialup.
If on the other hand the city granted Adelphia a monopoly, I would disagree with that. Just like with the telcos.
You speak as if those things are equivalent. They're not.
Cry me a river, hippie.
Comcast in my area is the fastest service, with next to no downtime. Their network is rock solid.
Satellite sucks, has the normal latency issues, costs a metric assload, and it totally inferior.
DSL is about the same price as Comcast, but you only get 5 down instead of 8, and 768 up instead of 1....and the actual numbers are great. I usually get around 15 down and 2 up from Comcast.
So this being a free market, I could switch to Satellite if Comcast pissed me off. But their customer service has always fixed their mistakes by offering me a free or discounted service.
And hey--if you want to start an ISP in my neighborhood, you are free to do so. Lease pole space from the PUD and string cable. Or you can put up antennas and provide WIFI. Hell, we have a provider here that provides fiber service to a huge chunk of the city at (what I think) are decent rates. 10/Mb for $280/mo and 100 Mb for $680. Their prices are apparently even less if you are just networking two offices with no need for internet service.
By your definition, since I could use IP over Carrier Pigeon, the local cable company doesn't have a monopoly.
Quit bitching, if Comcast decided to pull out of your town, there'd be no internet access.
There's no law that says someone MUST provide you with internet access and that it MUST be at a certain service level.
Grow up. The adults in this world have to pay MONEY for SERVICES. And the better the service, the more money.
If you think you can do better than Comcast, write up a business plan, show how you can provide better service than Comcast for an equal or better price...AND make money. Then submit that plan to investors...and then you can sit there and listen to whiny little hippies complain that you are not providing them with fast enough service or that QoSing torrents is wrong. Well..you'd be in the same boat as Comcast. It's their fucking network. They can do what they want with it. And if people like the FCC force them to stop limiting torrents, they will need to expand the capacity of their network....and where will they get the money. I'm guessing they'll either raise their rates or lay off workers.
If you see the problem, you should report it as a bug. Please give the steps we would have to follow to see the problem you describe, and we can write up a bug report. That way, the problem could be fixed.
This is not the process I used, but this will duplicate it.
Step 1 - Go to wikipedia
Step 2 - Perform these actions
Step 3 - After you have 100 or so tabs open, close all but one. Let your computer sit for a day, week, year, whatever.
Memory usage is crap.
But seriously, a good chunk of the problem is probably related to one or more of the extensions I have loaded--and I don't feel like browsing for a few weeks with extensions disabled to try and localize the issue.
If I knew how, I'd write something into the plugin system for Firefox that monitors memory usage by plugin to help try and track it down.
But I don't know C, C++, or whatever the heck Firefox is written in. Unless it's written in Python. In that case, I know it--just not very well.;)
you'll be happy to know several hundred memory leaks have been fixed in Firefox 3,
I am definitely happy about it. I switched to the pre-release version back in January. (Whatever they had in the Ubuntu repos)
Now the same situation uses up about 15% of the memory in my box. Of course a lot of my plugins don't work yet under FF 3...and I'm sure a few of them were partly responsible.
Now it actually frees up memory when you close a tab.
That's the part I always found hilarious. I would regularly have around 100 tabs open with various things I needed to deal with. After an hour or so I would have it down to my last tab. I would look at FF2's memory usage and it would be just over 900 MB on a laptop with 1 GB in it. I could let it sit there all night with that one tab open, and the next morning it would be using 950 MB. It's BS to say it's a 'feature'. There's actually a memory leak in the feature most people are referring to as 'caching'.
After I'd close that last tab, firefox would core dump and I'd free up 90%+ of the memory on my machine.
for christs sake, the wendy's in this podunk town of 11,000 offers free wifi. im not about to consider buying a mobile internet card.
No kidding. I just called Verizon about a corporate cell phone plan for one of my clients. They were quoting $1,000 for 10 lines with 1,000 minutes per phone, and no extra services. Data cards were $55/mo for 2 GB service plus something ungodly like $0.45/MB after you hit the 2 GB cap. And if you wanted text messaging it was just under $20/month/phone...and that only got you 200 text messages. Seriously Verizon, what the fuck? Slashdot mobile bandwidth price article here.
Too bad there isn't a cool open linux-based handset combined with a cheap radio running on a linux-powered box that could be used as a cell 'hotspot'...then you could start deploying them all over the place in a mesh and charge a flat monthly fee for unlimited in-network calls and a small per-minute fee for off-network calls which can be routed through some VoIP provider to POTS numbers...
So I suppose things haven't changed much. If you have the right hardware, you can move where ever you want, as long as they're willing to deal with you. (activation fees, and all that will likely abound)
Maybe things have changed recently. I last tried to sign up with Cingular about 3 years ago, and they flat out would not give me a month-to-month plan for a phone I already had.
My only option was to lock in for two years--even though I already owned the equipment.
The only thing I love about Comcast that the other providers don't have is no stupid 2-year lock-in.
I can get comcast out to my house, sign up for service, use it for a month, and then disconnect. No worries, no fees, no nothing.
It's the same bitch I have will cell carriers. Why the fuck can't I go out and buy my own phone and attach to your network for a month or three of service?
Seriously. If your cell/internet/cable network is soooo awesome, I'll *WANT* to stay with you. I shouldn't have to lock myself in for two years...
then invent their own alternative and leverage everything they have to make it succeed, then (step 3) profit
And 'leverage' apparently means constantly nag users on every single Microsoft web property about wanting to 'enhance' their experience with Silverlight.
STOP FUCKING ASKING ME IF I WANT TO INSTALL SILVERLIGHT DAMNIT!
Someone needs to invent a firefox extension that responds to every single silverlight install question by submitting a form post with a naughty word to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight-sucks-ass/
Slashdot Mirror
I think that there should be a Software Industry "Glass Turd" award - for the most over promised, under delivered, and basically mis-applied software product of the year.
Go register a domain name, and start 'awarding' it to companies.
The spooky part is that your post is almost 10 days old and no one has swooped in to register glassturd.com.
Not really, the FBI is subject to the oversight of a freely and fairly elected congress.
Remember that the next time you're watching an episode of Cops and laughing your ass off.
Bwahaha. That guy is such a f*cking idio...OMG I hope he doesn't vote.
Or closer to home, look at your neighbors. They vote too. The a**hole who constantly walks his dog over to my yard so it can take a dump--he votes. And the dude across the street who is ALWAYS in his bathrobe drinking a beer 24/7 votes.
Now I'm not saying communism or socialism is the way--it's just a much faster road to the end.
For example, they may show better judgment when making tech purchases and are often better with green IT initiatives
The company I work for was talking about the green BS as a way to show customers we cared. Whatever. Why shell out thousands of dollars to a bunch of tree-huggung hippies for no reason.
It's funny how they don't see it as throwing away money. They see it as a marketing opportunity. Let's jump on the bandwagon and do what everyone else is doing just because everyone else is doing it.
Use a large geographically distributed cluster with the ability to pxe boot off each other.
Then a power outage wouldn't be an issue. Power comes up, machine PXE boots off a machine in a neighboring town, state, country, whatever.
I know--not really feasible, but you'd be the king of basement dwellers if you could pull it off...
The only people who know are the programmers at Microsoft who coded this service pack up, they're the ones who could tell us if the conflicting parts of the service pack can just be cut out or not.
Oh yeah--it can totally be cut up and installed piecemail. Just like you can cut IE out of Windows, or get Outlook to not install MSN Messenger...
And that's a great idea, until you end up with a piece of required software that refuses to run without local admin privileges on the computer...
Yeah. These guys make an extremely shitty dental package that falls into that category. Every single last person must be an admin. And the best part is that they back a shitty package with sub-par support. When one of their digital cameras stopped working the other day, one of their tech told me deadpan "Your USB root hub is probably bad. Those things wear out all the time."
What the fuck? Seriously.
The likelihood of achieving anything in a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people in the meeting. So what's the likelihood when the meeting attendees number in the millions?
;)
Give me some credit. I did say get rid of the trolls. That should drop the number a few million...
There are many places in the world where fine conversations about technical and technological advancement could take place, but slashdot isnt one of them.
...Oh--and that one guy who always makes a car analogy which makes no sense to me because I'm a netadmin, not a gearhead.
Aside from trolls which could be weeded out from the discussion easily, the geek side of slashdot could (I think) easily come up with a way and agree on the best way to solve this.
This may be oversimplifying it a bit, but I would trust most slashdot users to know how to solve a technical problem.
If a network cable it unplugged, plug it in.
Of course you'll have several threads discussing the best brand of network cable for not coming unplugged with a sub-thread from the guys who still think BNC has something to offer because of the twist-lock connectors. You'll get a thread about the best super-glue to permanently bond the cable into the card for situations where the cable must NEVER come unplugged for security/life support reasons, a few people repeating the same joke about cable length and "is it in yet?", followed lastly by the trolls talking about that one time in the locker room and goatse.
I hate these forms.
Let's go through it
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
What other way will there be of blocking spam? Legislative won't work because there is no one governing body that controls the entire world and can punish those that do wrong.
Market based...well, it might work, but the solution will probable be some sort of technical device like a barracuda appliance.
Vigilante would work if we just shot all the spammers, but then those people would go to jail for murder. Wait until we can clone, then send your clone in to do the dirty work and hope they don't grab you instead of your clone.
So technical is the only way.
(X) users of email will not put up with it
Fine, they can put up with the spam.
But in my experience, users will put up with a lot of shit if it's required of them. Think BSODs, Windows ME, Windows Vista, etc...
(X) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Kinda like SMTP is required by everyone. If you don't have it, you don't get mail.
I don't care if it's another protocol, or the same protocol with changes. Kinda like IPv6, eventually there will be a cutoff date and everyone needs to get on board or else things just won't work. Get the new email protocol in place, have it work along side SMTP and then once it's developed and tested set a shutoff date for SMTP.
Yeah, it'll be a lot of work, but that's our job. We do the technical shit on the internet. Just like the telco guys--I don't care how my phone call gets from point A to B, just that it does get there.
(X) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
This seems somewhat irrelevant. We're not talking about immediately shutting down SMTP and saying 'fuckit'. A group of intelligent geeks like you'd find on slashdot (for the most part) are completely capable of coming up with a transition plan.
(X) huge existing software investment in smtp
(X) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
(X) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
There's always going to be a huge investment when switching (think IPv4 to IPv6). At some point the flaws or limitations of the system become too big a problem and you must change. Have we reached that point with SMTP and spam? Are we out of quick fixes like SenderID, Domain Keys, DKIM, blacklists, whitelists, spamassassin, greylists, etc...?
As for 'patches' received via email, you're never going to stop idiots and social engineering.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with attacking protocols other than smtp.
(X) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
That part is true. I'm sitting here saying we should come up with something, but not putting forth any ideas.
But I believe if a group like Slashdot held a huge discussion about it, we would come up with something.
The resulting fund would ostensibly 'compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.
MAFIAA Idiot 1: Yeah, we totally need to tax teh intarweb so the songwriters, performers, and publishers get a sweet reoccuring income.
MAFIAA Idiot 2: Oh shit. Don't forget to put us on the list. I know we didn't write the song, pick the performers, or magically give someone talent, but we need in on the money too...uh...because we...uh...thought of the idea. Wait. What the fuck do we do for artists, performers, or music in general again?
Yea, but they're not contracting. They're pulling out and they've agreed to sell their assets, employees, and service area to Fairpoint. To me, the assets and employees are theirs to transfer, the right to service these states is not. Of course the PUC approved it, so now we're screwed. I guess the beef is more with the PUC than with Verizon, but both had a hand in this Fairpoint mess.
Oh--I see what you're saying. Verizon had an exclusive contract to your area and sold (along with assets, and employees) to another company.
The problem isn't that Verizon sold assets, employees, and existing contracts to another company. It's that the city/town/whatever appointed the contract in the first place. Now if the citizens voted for it, tough shit--but if the city just randomly appointed it, that's a grey area. Does the city have a legal right to do that? Did the citizens vote to give the city that right?
To say there aren't monopolies.. I just think it's silly. There is very slight competition, and it's not apples to apples. It's certainly not the way it should be.
Just because there is a lack of competition doesn't mean they are monopolies (in the anti-trust form of the word). There may be no competition simply because they provided better service and beat everyone else out. There may be no competition because no one wants to setup an ISP in the area.
I used to work for an ISP that kicked serious butt. They treated their customer well (Had a bowling party/kegger and invited all 8,000 subscribers) and they knew their stuff. They beat out all three other ISPs in the area, and now it's only them and the local telco.
One competitor started an ISP by buying the largest office space they could find, purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of routers, servers, switches, phone service, etc...they brought on board well-trained staff and paid them very well...all before they had a single customer signed up. They went bankrupt after a year. They sold their customer list of 1,000 customers to us to help pay off their debts. And the worst part was that the customer list was almost entirely our 'bad' customer list. People who lived 30 billion miles from a telco switch whose phone service was so poor you could barely hear them over the crackling on the line--and they would bitch and threaten our support staff because their modem didn't work and it was our fault.
One other competitor was a one-man or two-man operation. He got busted for dealing drugs, and all his POPs revolted and shut off his equipment because he failed to pay bills.
So...are they a monopoly? Yes in the sense that they are pretty much the only option (except for Qwest). And no in the sense that they are not engaged in deceitful business practices to stop the competition.
Also, notice how he doesn't condone criminal activity, yet he is advocating this same behavior for his "cyber command" crap.
It's funny. If they attack a network, host, router, whatever it's ok because they are defending their country.
If you do it, it's not defending your country, it's illegal.
If someone trespasses into my house and I use force to remove them, I'm a criminal.
If a police officer just happened to be there when the trespass occured and they use force to remove the trespasser, they are doing their job.
When did it stop being about individual liberty and individual freedom. Now it seems like you have rights, but only law enforcement, or the government can exercise them for you as they see fit.
What I'm against is Verizon picking Fairpoint with no input from the people that are their potential and current customers.
That sucks. I'm not familiar with the situation, but if Verizon wants to (subcontract?) with a company to provide service to a certain area, I think that's their right.
It's not my business to tell others run their business, and it's especially not the government's place to tell businesses how they must run.
To quote the grate Andrew Wilkow: "Your freedom to be you includes my freedom to be free from you."
This is the kind of bull the corporations feed you. The amount of money you pay DOES NOT equal the quality of service or product. Its not the quality of the product that sets the price, its how much it costs to make (or perform) + some percent over that cost in order to generate profit.
You make that sound so evil. Who do you work for? Would you rather have your company work to try and make a profit or would you rather have your company lose money?
Granted, paying more doesn't always equal a better product. I could go buy a POS Dell for $500 and have non-stop trouble. Instead I went to newegg.com and bought all the parts for $400 and built it myself.
The only reason Comcast charges as much as they do is because they want to increase their profit.
You know--I think you have a great idea. I'm going to start a company, but my goal is going to be to earn as little as possible. That'll attract investors, and employees.
it should be noted that this is NOT a free market, just like how the US is NOT a democracy.
You're right. The government keeps trying to regulate stuff and it is a problem. And you're right about us not being a democracy. We're a republic. It's so we aren't usually governed by knee-jerk reactions of the citizens.
These days, you have to go through hoops of fire in order to start any kind of communications company, not to mention that Comcast will most likely try to acquire you (whether thru merger or gov sanctions).
The hoops of fire are there because of the freakin' FCC who should all be dragged out of their offices and be forced to get 'real' jobs. Comcast acquiring you is simply a business decision. Do you want Comcast to acquire your business or not? If it's a privately held business and you say "no", Comcast can go suck it.
In cases such as these, it is up to the carrier (or at least it should be) to notify you of planned changes to service. If they are going to stop your service for one reason or another, they should notify you.
Comcast did notify me of outages. When I signed up I was told that Comcast has a maintenance window from 0100 to 0300 every morning, but that most of the time they don't use that maintenance window. Smokeping has been running on one of my computers for the last 8 months. I had two outages, both at night during the maintenance window for a total of maybe 20 minutes. Now if I don't pay my bill, they do notify me about stopping my service. It's called a past-due notice. Or are you talking about service interruptions like the maintenance window?
If they are going to start to block some types of transmissions, they should tell you. It sounds to me like you are siding with them just because of what they have said. O, and as an FYI, Comcast didn't limit torrents because of capacity problems with their current customers, they did it so that they could try to free up capacity so that they can sell it to new customers.
It's their network, they can do what they want with it as long as it doesn't violate the agreement I signed. Now even though I despise the FCC, Comcast still has to follow their rules unfortunately and part of that is probably the common carrier agreement (of which I know very little about), so they probably can't just block services--just like Qwest can't suddenly block AT&T calls. Of course Qwest or AT&T can disconnect or block someone who is degrading the network for others--but I would imagine this is very infrequent.
Now I don't know if Comcast is blocking torrents because they want to resell that capacity to other customers--and I doubt you know either. That sounds like an overhyped conspiracy theory. Do you have any sources for that? If they are blocking torrent traffic because they want that capacity to go to new customers, that sucks. But it's their business. (Unless it is affected by the common carrier status)
Someone please mod parent down with flamebait or
But back to the point, why don't the people get to vote? Like I said, Verizon is pulling out. We're all against it.
Wow...are you actually telling me that you are pissed that you can't vote and FORCE Verizon to provide service in an area?
What the fuck? This is America, not Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela. You can't vote and force someone to do something like that. If you voted and the government stepped in and said "Verizon, you must provide service out there", do you really think you could force the employees to be helpful when you call--or be as responsive when there's an outage? Who would want to work when they are being FORCED? You can't make someone work unless they are a slave. (That's also the problem with Welfare. When you are being handed a check and you can't be forced to work, you are a drain on the system).
So I'm the hippie and you're the commie?
I think one of us misunderstands communism.
To reduce it down to a few sentences, you own nothing. Anything you invent, create, make or do belongs to the 'everyone', and by 'everyone' I mean the government. Working harder doesn't get you anything. Working harder benefits everyone else, including those that do nothing. (Like my neighbor who sits at home all day and drinks beer in his bathrobe while collecting welfare)
In no way does having a business and a product which you sell to make more money and develop new products fit in to the communist way of life.
Now I won't argue that the government gave/gives telcos a huge tax-break for services they never provided--but hey, that's not the free market.
They wouldn't have jack shit if the government hadn't granted them monopolies. Take your trolling elsewhere pinko.
So what exactly did the government give Comcast? I'm not trying to troll here, but this town had NO cable network until Adelphia came in. Then they started providing cable internet. Then Comcast bought them out.
Now initially I'm guessing they (adelphia) made a deal with the city that probably got them a tax break for investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city. But there's nothing wrong with that if the citizens voted for it. I'm sure the citizens would want to sweeten the deal for Adelphia to get them to put in the network in the first place, rather than be stuck with Satellite or dialup.
If on the other hand the city granted Adelphia a monopoly, I would disagree with that. Just like with the telcos.
You speak as if those things are equivalent. They're not.
...and the actual numbers are great. I usually get around 15 down and 2 up from Comcast.
...and where will they get the money. I'm guessing they'll either raise their rates or lay off workers.
Cry me a river, hippie.
Comcast in my area is the fastest service, with next to no downtime. Their network is rock solid.
Satellite sucks, has the normal latency issues, costs a metric assload, and it totally inferior.
DSL is about the same price as Comcast, but you only get 5 down instead of 8, and 768 up instead of 1.
So this being a free market, I could switch to Satellite if Comcast pissed me off. But their customer service has always fixed their mistakes by offering me a free or discounted service.
And hey--if you want to start an ISP in my neighborhood, you are free to do so. Lease pole space from the PUD and string cable. Or you can put up antennas and provide WIFI. Hell, we have a provider here that provides fiber service to a huge chunk of the city at (what I think) are decent rates. 10/Mb for $280/mo and 100 Mb for $680. Their prices are apparently even less if you are just networking two offices with no need for internet service.
By your definition, since I could use IP over Carrier Pigeon, the local cable company doesn't have a monopoly.
Quit bitching, if Comcast decided to pull out of your town, there'd be no internet access.
There's no law that says someone MUST provide you with internet access and that it MUST be at a certain service level.
Grow up. The adults in this world have to pay MONEY for SERVICES. And the better the service, the more money.
If you think you can do better than Comcast, write up a business plan, show how you can provide better service than Comcast for an equal or better price...AND make money. Then submit that plan to investors...and then you can sit there and listen to whiny little hippies complain that you are not providing them with fast enough service or that QoSing torrents is wrong. Well..you'd be in the same boat as Comcast. It's their fucking network. They can do what they want with it. And if people like the FCC force them to stop limiting torrents, they will need to expand the capacity of their network.
If you see the problem, you should report it as a bug. Please give the steps we would have to follow to see the problem you describe, and we can write up a bug report. That way, the problem could be fixed.
;)
This is not the process I used, but this will duplicate it. Step 1 - Go to wikipedia
Step 2 - Perform these actions
Step 3 - After you have 100 or so tabs open, close all but one. Let your computer sit for a day, week, year, whatever.
Memory usage is crap.
But seriously, a good chunk of the problem is probably related to one or more of the extensions I have loaded--and I don't feel like browsing for a few weeks with extensions disabled to try and localize the issue.
If I knew how, I'd write something into the plugin system for Firefox that monitors memory usage by plugin to help try and track it down.
But I don't know C, C++, or whatever the heck Firefox is written in. Unless it's written in Python. In that case, I know it--just not very well.
you'll be happy to know several hundred memory leaks have been fixed in Firefox 3,
I am definitely happy about it. I switched to the pre-release version back in January. (Whatever they had in the Ubuntu repos) Now the same situation uses up about 15% of the memory in my box. Of course a lot of my plugins don't work yet under FF 3...and I'm sure a few of them were partly responsible.
Now it actually frees up memory when you close a tab.
That's the part I always found hilarious. I would regularly have around 100 tabs open with various things I needed to deal with. After an hour or so I would have it down to my last tab. I would look at FF2's memory usage and it would be just over 900 MB on a laptop with 1 GB in it. I could let it sit there all night with that one tab open, and the next morning it would be using 950 MB. It's BS to say it's a 'feature'. There's actually a memory leak in the feature most people are referring to as 'caching'.
After I'd close that last tab, firefox would core dump and I'd free up 90%+ of the memory on my machine.
for christs sake, the wendy's in this podunk town of 11,000 offers free wifi. im not about to consider buying a mobile internet card.
No kidding. I just called Verizon about a corporate cell phone plan for one of my clients. They were quoting $1,000 for 10 lines with 1,000 minutes per phone, and no extra services. Data cards were $55/mo for 2 GB service plus something ungodly like $0.45/MB after you hit the 2 GB cap. And if you wanted text messaging it was just under $20/month/phone...and that only got you 200 text messages. Seriously Verizon, what the fuck? Slashdot mobile bandwidth price article here.
Too bad there isn't a cool open linux-based handset combined with a cheap radio running on a linux-powered box that could be used as a cell 'hotspot'...then you could start deploying them all over the place in a mesh and charge a flat monthly fee for unlimited in-network calls and a small per-minute fee for off-network calls which can be routed through some VoIP provider to POTS numbers...
So I suppose things haven't changed much. If you have the right hardware, you can move where ever you want, as long as they're willing to deal with you. (activation fees, and all that will likely abound)
Maybe things have changed recently. I last tried to sign up with Cingular about 3 years ago, and they flat out would not give me a month-to-month plan for a phone I already had.
My only option was to lock in for two years--even though I already owned the equipment.
Who knows--maybe it was a retarded sales droid.
The only thing I love about Comcast that the other providers don't have is no stupid 2-year lock-in.
I can get comcast out to my house, sign up for service, use it for a month, and then disconnect. No worries, no fees, no nothing.
It's the same bitch I have will cell carriers. Why the fuck can't I go out and buy my own phone and attach to your network for a month or three of service?
Seriously. If your cell/internet/cable network is soooo awesome, I'll *WANT* to stay with you. I shouldn't have to lock myself in for two years...
then invent their own alternative and leverage everything they have to make it succeed, then (step 3) profit
And 'leverage' apparently means constantly nag users on every single Microsoft web property about wanting to 'enhance' their experience with Silverlight.
STOP FUCKING ASKING ME IF I WANT TO INSTALL SILVERLIGHT DAMNIT!
Someone needs to invent a firefox extension that responds to every single silverlight install question by submitting a form post with a naughty word to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight-sucks-ass/
I've worked night-shifts; being out of sync is Not Fun.
Yeah, but we're not talking about being out of sync by 12 hours or anything. It's more like 1.