I don't believe the Centillium MTA-1 is configurable at all from the customers perspective. You can make noises at AT&T and what they do is quietly change things to throttle their own bandwidth up and down. They do not divulge any specifics. It's even worse if you set the line to use a fax/modem. That reserves 128k on its own. Which is what? 8x what the corresponding analog bandwidth is?
I used to be the geeks geek studying the lowest level material just to get a grasp of the latest and greatest in hardware and software of all kinds. But it's not interesting anymore:
Most of the gear is commodity gear Most of the interesting details are hidden for the sake of competitive advantage
Point in fact, PC magazine in the early '80's ran an extensively technical article about the mathematics of compression when a team from Georgia Tech announced a breakthrough in the technology. You would never see an article like that today. It would be "Wow this is great, buy these boxes they're SUPER COOL!!!!!!!!eleventy!"
In the security mags, the whole field is reduced to 'articles' by the CIO's of big advertisers and/or government agencies writing about their experiences with widget X Y and Z, followed by half the magazine filled with 'product reviews' which are paid placements in the first place.
So who cares? The field isn't interesting anymore. Why don't they publish a magazine called
Outsourcing and Outplacement Technology Journal; adventures in jobs that suck that you don't have anymore anyhow.
I have AT&T CallVantage, their VoIP offering, against my will. My employer installs and pays for it.
It is SHIT.
The voice quality is average at best. The reliability is horrendous. At any time and for any reason the entire service drops out - nothing no dialtone, nothing. Inbound calls route straight to voicemail about 50% of the time.
AT&T's tech 'support' is very simple - they tell you the only thing to do is to install he TA in front of the router behind the cable modem. But the Centillium MTA-1 is a locked down box and it's configured as a NAT device so it fucks up my Homelan every time someone looks for a DHCP refresh. So I have to put it behind the router instead and because of that tech 'support' won't 'support' it. It also consumes a great deal of bandwidth - about 128k. That's a LOT for quality that isn't crystal fucking clear. That's the same as two ISDN channels and for that much bandwidth I should be able to hear you sleeping on the other end.
Phone companies will kill VoIP just like they have killed everything else. They'll crush all comers and then do what they do best. Fuck up the service and rape the customers.
What's $68,000 to the RIAA? They blow $68,000 on human blood beverages in the conference room, every day. The gold slave collars they give the midgets who wash their balls cost more than that.
Bought a ticket recently? Seen the massive other fees they tack on now? Do you understand what's happening? The musician gets paid a fraction of the 'ticket price'. NOT the extra fees. So when you pay $24 for a ticket and $17 in fees the act only gets a slice of the $24 and the venue pockets the $17 + whatever their skim of the $24 is.
So record companies are eventually going to:
Kill radio Kill internet broadcast Kill sharing Force everyone to live venues;
Which are already screwing them harder than the record companies and live acts are screwing their audiences. And the acts and the record companies are just going to make less money until all the scumbags are broke. Except for maybe 2 dozen acts that make hundreds of millions of dollars for them.
Music will in fact become a lot more like movies than you imagine. There will be a tiny handful of 'blockbusters' each year all pretty much shit and music will die as an entertainment let alone an art form.
And I for one couldn't be happier. May the RIAA executives drown in the blood of their own children.
I use 2002 at work and 2003 on all my home/school machines. I can't for the life of me imagine a scenario where Office has or should be changed dramatically enough requiring an upgrade to 2007. I'm assuming that a few years out there will still be a student version of Office for about $100 where you get to install it on any 3 machines simultaneously. If not, and I doubt it, given the big presence Office has in college bookstores, which is the only reason now to specifically replace a machine or buy a new one, I'll just put on whatever Open Office is current and point it to store in Office 2002/3 formats. If the latest formats are an absolute requirement because of some dumbass teacher then I assume the school will provide a discounted version to support it. Just because Redmond thinks they can force you to upgrade, there aren't too many circumstances where they can.
For comparison's sake, the online price of that unit from Walmart is $299. A 2/3rd's discount off a Wal*Mart price is probably half the cost of making one.
A) Don't provide either the cables nor even the function or capability for connecting your phone to a USB port and have it be recognizable to the PC.
B) Price their own network backup services so absurdly high I have never in my life heard of anyone using it.
C) Have such awful data network speeds and reliability that you're going to spend all day screwing with it. Imagine your phone's non EVDO non 3G browser's performance. Yeah it's THAT bad.
D) Provide phones that have spotty Bluetooth features but the only phones that actually support the BT Profiles for data transfer are the highest end phones with MP3 players or PDA. My Samsung A640 phone form Sprint supports BT vCard profiles ONLY and it's only PUSH to the phone not the other way.
I'd say it's good bet that any encryption today will be broken in less than a decade. Turings's law says that if it takes 10 years to solve a problem today but in 5 years it will only take 3 years then you're better off waiting 5 years and saving 2.
Thank you I found the PS2 experience of missing stuff to be infuriating. One controller - missing cables, RF inverter, etc. And - a NIC was another $100. Except for the one controller part good to see Sony wised up.
I'm on my first replacement XBox 360 which is someone else's broken unit that Xbox repaired and sent to me to replace my broken unit. Did you hear that the failure rate is so bad and customer service is so horrible that Xbox decided to punt - refund everyone's repair bill and triple the warranty? They better send me my $140 pronto.
I have to tell you that if I bought a PS3 for the discounted $500 plus I guess all the gear like controllers, wireless NIC and such that you need to get a FUNCTIONING unit, and it broke, I swear to God it would end in a hostage situation.
Sony needs to keep that in mind when they pump up sales - they need to have a model that's reliable enough in the field so that they don't end up LOSING money in the end, trying to support it.
I want a phone that my carrier will accept. I don't know how the rest of the world views it but just because a company makes a phone doesn't actually mean my carrier is forced to integrate it into their network. Oh you can wave all the public policy documents from the FCC in their face you want. Doesn't mean shit. My carrier, Sprint has a hard enough time supporting the phones they sell. The conversation about bringing them an unlocked phone to activate it would something like:
Me: "I have this phone I want to add to my plan" Sprint: "Did the store activate it?" Me: "No it's my phone I didn't get it from a Sprint store" Sprint: "Sir we don't do that" Me: "blah blah blah blah - - ~~~ you're supposed to blah blah" Sprint: "Sir let me check can you hold?" Me: "Yeah sure" -15 minutes later Sprint: "Sir? We can do that, the activation fee is $375" Me: "Huh?" Sprint: "Sir yes if it's not a phone we sell then that's the activation fee" Me: "Never mind, thanks anyway" Sprint: "Thank you for calling Sprint"
I suppose you're right & I shouldn't complain. The problem(s) is:
I'm a permanent work from home'r so working on a network that assumes 10x higher bandwidth TO me instead of from me is problematic. Sending business sized presentations objects around is pretty damn slow. The asymmetric nature of it, is killing me.
I have VoIP - from AT&T Callvantage. I'm not sure if the problems are bandwidth related but the service is ludicrously unreliable. My employer is spending $25/month to get me a service I leave on the side unused 90% of the time in lieu of my own cell phone.
But let's not ignore that the US is a decade behind the rest of the world in terms of broadband. And there's no end in sight.
I'm still waiting for the very small form factor - uATX, picoATX and smaller FF's to come way down in price. The premiums they get for a small machine are obscene. And the units that don't need a fan like Via C3s are so absurdly underpowered you have to wonder why they don't embed the whole system in a network appliance.
If you try to buy or upgrade a new phone over the phone = 3 calls Calls to track phone package in shipment = 2 calls Post sale check on the rebates that didn't get processed = 2 calls Calls to straighten out the PCS services Sprint screwed up during the upgrade = 2 calls Calls to straighten out the next billing cycle = 1 call
Now I have 5 phones on my bill and have upgraded all of them = 50 calls per annual cycle plus 1 call per month to clear up 'accidental' over billing = 12 calls
So that's 52 calls give or take a year just to do their jobs for them. plus 1-3 calls per month per phone to do what Sprint asks when you get disconnected: call them up for a rebate = 60 - 120 calls per year
for a total of 112 - 172 calls per year to Sprint.
I can't think of a single phone ever that didn't charge you for a replacement battery. But most people replace their phone before the battery dies anyway.
It's pretty obvious that the NEXT turn of the crank from Redmond's meatgrinder will not produce a usable desktop OS. It's as if we've hit some fundamental law for desktop OS's in terms of size, complexity and hardware. Whatever is post-Vista may very well be a server OS and desktops will be left behind as Redmond tries to figure out how to extract the typical $109-179 per seat retail price out of its installed base. This is probably going to be a great opportunity for any non Redmond OS out there. If the non Redmond world can't compete on compatibility and features and fear then they can compete on sheer ability to be installed and run even at near parity pricing.
It's insane that my provider can happily support my P2P traffic, get paid for it then turn around and rat me out all the while being immune from those very same lawsuits. If people want to see changes in the P2P laws then you will have to make the carriers bleed.
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I don't believe the Centillium MTA-1 is configurable at all from the customers perspective. You can make noises at AT&T and what they do is quietly change things to throttle their own bandwidth up and down. They do not divulge any specifics. It's even worse if you set the line to use a fax/modem. That reserves 128k on its own. Which is what? 8x what the corresponding analog bandwidth is?
Yes I had heard that as a solution, thank you.
I used to be the geeks geek studying the lowest level material just to get a grasp of the latest and greatest in hardware and software of all kinds. But it's not interesting anymore:
Most of the gear is commodity gear
Most of the interesting details are hidden for the sake of competitive advantage
Point in fact, PC magazine in the early '80's ran an extensively technical article about the mathematics of compression when a team from Georgia Tech announced a breakthrough in the technology. You would never see an article like that today. It would be "Wow this is great, buy these boxes they're SUPER COOL!!!!!!!!eleventy!"
In the security mags, the whole field is reduced to 'articles' by the CIO's of big advertisers and/or government agencies writing about their experiences with widget X Y and Z, followed by half the magazine filled with 'product reviews' which are paid placements in the first place.
So who cares? The field isn't interesting anymore. Why don't they publish a magazine called
Outsourcing and Outplacement Technology Journal; adventures in jobs that suck that you don't have anymore anyhow.
I have AT&T CallVantage, their VoIP offering, against my will. My employer installs and pays for it.
It is SHIT.
The voice quality is average at best. The reliability is horrendous. At any time and for any reason the entire service drops out - nothing no dialtone, nothing. Inbound calls route straight to voicemail about 50% of the time.
AT&T's tech 'support' is very simple - they tell you the only thing to do is to install he TA in front of the router behind the cable modem. But the Centillium MTA-1 is a locked down box and it's configured as a NAT device so it fucks up my Homelan every time someone looks for a DHCP refresh. So I have to put it behind the router instead and because of that tech 'support' won't 'support' it. It also consumes a great deal of bandwidth - about 128k. That's a LOT for quality that isn't crystal fucking clear. That's the same as two ISDN channels and for that much bandwidth I should be able to hear you sleeping on the other end.
Phone companies will kill VoIP just like they have killed everything else. They'll crush all comers and then do what they do best. Fuck up the service and rape the customers.
What's $68,000 to the RIAA? They blow $68,000 on human blood beverages in the conference room, every day. The gold slave collars they give the midgets who wash their balls cost more than that.
Bought a ticket recently? Seen the massive other fees they tack on now? Do you understand what's happening? The musician gets paid a fraction of the 'ticket price'. NOT the extra fees. So when you pay $24 for a ticket and $17 in fees the act only gets a slice of the $24 and the venue pockets the $17 + whatever their skim of the $24 is.
So record companies are eventually going to:
Kill radio
Kill internet broadcast
Kill sharing
Force everyone to live venues;
Which are already screwing them harder than the record companies and live acts are screwing their audiences. And the acts and the record companies are just going to make less money until all the scumbags are broke. Except for maybe 2 dozen acts that make hundreds of millions of dollars for them.
Music will in fact become a lot more like movies than you imagine. There will be a tiny handful of 'blockbusters' each year all pretty much shit and music will die as an entertainment let alone an art form.
And I for one couldn't be happier. May the RIAA executives drown in the blood of their own children.
I use 2002 at work and 2003 on all my home/school machines. I can't for the life of me imagine a scenario where Office has or should be changed dramatically enough requiring an upgrade to 2007. I'm assuming that a few years out there will still be a student version of Office for about $100 where you get to install it on any 3 machines simultaneously. If not, and I doubt it, given the big presence Office has in college bookstores, which is the only reason now to specifically replace a machine or buy a new one, I'll just put on whatever Open Office is current and point it to store in Office 2002/3 formats. If the latest formats are an absolute requirement because of some dumbass teacher then I assume the school will provide a discounted version to support it. Just because Redmond thinks they can force you to upgrade, there aren't too many circumstances where they can.
For comparison's sake, the online price of that unit from Walmart is $299. A 2/3rd's discount off a Wal*Mart price is probably half the cost of making one.
Seriously, they just heaped features on this thing for bragging rights. What are you going to do - turn this into a one box data center?
Because phone companies
A) Don't provide either the cables nor even the function or capability for connecting your phone to a USB port and have it be recognizable to the PC.
B) Price their own network backup services so absurdly high I have never in my life heard of anyone using it.
C) Have such awful data network speeds and reliability that you're going to spend all day screwing with it. Imagine your phone's non EVDO non 3G browser's performance. Yeah it's THAT bad.
D) Provide phones that have spotty Bluetooth features but the only phones that actually support the BT Profiles for data transfer are the highest end phones with MP3 players or PDA. My Samsung A640 phone form Sprint supports BT vCard profiles ONLY and it's only PUSH to the phone not the other way.
I'd say it's good bet that any encryption today will be broken in less than a decade. Turings's law says that if it takes 10 years to solve a problem today but in 5 years it will only take 3 years then you're better off waiting 5 years and saving 2.
Thank you I found the PS2 experience of missing stuff to be infuriating. One controller - missing cables, RF inverter, etc. And - a NIC was another $100. Except for the one controller part good to see Sony wised up.
You're almost right but you left the 6-10 split.
I'm on my first replacement XBox 360 which is someone else's broken unit that Xbox repaired and sent to me to replace my broken unit. Did you hear that the failure rate is so bad and customer service is so horrible that Xbox decided to punt - refund everyone's repair bill and triple the warranty? They better send me my $140 pronto.
I have to tell you that if I bought a PS3 for the discounted $500 plus I guess all the gear like controllers, wireless NIC and such that you need to get a FUNCTIONING unit, and it broke, I swear to God it would end in a hostage situation.
Sony needs to keep that in mind when they pump up sales - they need to have a model that's reliable enough in the field so that they don't end up LOSING money in the end, trying to support it.
I want a phone that my carrier will accept. I don't know how the rest of the world views it but just because a company makes a phone doesn't actually mean my carrier is forced to integrate it into their network. Oh you can wave all the public policy documents from the FCC in their face you want. Doesn't mean shit. My carrier, Sprint has a hard enough time supporting the phones they sell. The conversation about bringing them an unlocked phone to activate it would something like:
Me: "I have this phone I want to add to my plan"
Sprint: "Did the store activate it?"
Me: "No it's my phone I didn't get it from a Sprint store"
Sprint: "Sir we don't do that"
Me: "blah blah blah blah - - ~~~ you're supposed to blah blah"
Sprint: "Sir let me check can you hold?"
Me: "Yeah sure"
-15 minutes later
Sprint: "Sir? We can do that, the activation fee is $375"
Me: "Huh?"
Sprint: "Sir yes if it's not a phone we sell then that's the activation fee"
Me: "Never mind, thanks anyway"
Sprint: "Thank you for calling Sprint"
I suppose you're right & I shouldn't complain. The problem(s) is:
I'm a permanent work from home'r so working on a network that assumes 10x higher bandwidth TO me instead of from me is problematic. Sending business sized presentations objects around is pretty damn slow. The asymmetric nature of it, is killing me.
I have VoIP - from AT&T Callvantage. I'm not sure if the problems are bandwidth related but the service is ludicrously unreliable. My employer is spending $25/month to get me a service I leave on the side unused 90% of the time in lieu of my own cell phone.
But let's not ignore that the US is a decade behind the rest of the world in terms of broadband. And there's no end in sight.
What with their rock solid 3.7MB down and 374KB up - Anything more would be Goddamn communism.
What is the rough equivalence in performance of a 1.2Ghz C3 or C7 compared to an Intel. My slowest desktop is a Pentium III 1.2Ghz machine.
I'm still waiting for the very small form factor - uATX, picoATX and smaller FF's to come way down in price. The premiums they get for a small machine are obscene. And the units that don't need a fan like Via C3s are so absurdly underpowered you have to wonder why they don't embed the whole system in a network appliance.
Just sayin.
If you try to buy or upgrade a new phone over the phone = 3 calls
Calls to track phone package in shipment = 2 calls
Post sale check on the rebates that didn't get processed = 2 calls
Calls to straighten out the PCS services Sprint screwed up during the upgrade = 2 calls
Calls to straighten out the next billing cycle = 1 call
Now I have 5 phones on my bill and have upgraded all of them = 50 calls per annual cycle
plus
1 call per month to clear up 'accidental' over billing = 12 calls
So that's 52 calls give or take a year just to do their jobs for them.
plus
1-3 calls per month per phone to do what Sprint asks when you get disconnected: call them up for a rebate = 60 - 120 calls per year
for a total of 112 - 172 calls per year to Sprint.
I can't think of a single phone ever that didn't charge you for a replacement battery. But most people replace their phone before the battery dies anyway.
Didn't know that. Thought the whole company was marketing.
It's pretty obvious that the NEXT turn of the crank from Redmond's meatgrinder will not produce a usable desktop OS. It's as if we've hit some fundamental law for desktop OS's in terms of size, complexity and hardware. Whatever is post-Vista may very well be a server OS and desktops will be left behind as Redmond tries to figure out how to extract the typical $109-179 per seat retail price out of its installed base. This is probably going to be a great opportunity for any non Redmond OS out there. If the non Redmond world can't compete on compatibility and features and fear then they can compete on sheer ability to be installed and run even at near parity pricing.
It's insane that my provider can happily support my P2P traffic, get paid for it then turn around and rat me out all the while being immune from those very same lawsuits. If people want to see changes in the P2P laws then you will have to make the carriers bleed.