Perhaps setting up the broadband service as a true non-profit organization
I think there's certainly an opportunity for this model. In fact, if you look at the rural electric cooperative as a model (where my company has received financial support), there's a lot about the model that works well along these not-for-profit lines. RECs also have a strong cultural dynamic - understanding that sustaining, supporting and growing rural communities is a central focus.
Monies would be allocated from taxes
I'd suggest staying as far away from this source; not only is it theft in my book, but it immediately taints the organization through the political influence. At a minimum, it establishes a young organization with a dangerous addiction - to unlimited, unaccountable cash via corporate welfare.
Look at the RUS/farm bill broadband grants and low interest loans. Everything sounded great until the rules got written. Guess what? If you're a tired old incumbent local phone monopoly, you easily qualify for money. If you're an up and comer, they've got enough rules to keep you out. Rules always reward those who've been contributing to the election process for years, of course. (I don't mean to sound bitter about this - it's what one should expect from the process).
Competition would result for the services, but not for the bandwidth.
I'd love to hear of an example where this worked out well. I've mostly encountered political and technical/architectual issues.
What I was getting at is building a much higher then needed capacity, allows you to keep that infrastructure in place for a much longer time.
This is very hard to justify, and increasingly so post dot-com bust. It's a nice thought, but when you can't afford to build a network on the level of scale being proposed, it's nearly absurd to propose making it 10 times bigger just so it lasts longer - the company or government building it won't be around to see it!
In this sense, the comparison other posters have used to building highways may help. It's not often you'll find 10-lane expressways when 2 lanes does the job. Of course, when you're spending someone elses money, I'll bet you'll opt for the 10 lanes.
How often do you think the tax payers in Utah want to vote on a Millage to update aging infrastructure?
I'll guarantee they'll get to keep shelling out, even if they build the 10-lane model today. Fiber technologies, transmission & switching developments, IPv6 evolution, etc. will all keep them going back and re-engineering. Build for what your customer can afford, not what you think you can build by stealing the funds from other taxpayers.
Not only that, but it comes out to be $28/month averaged over 40% of potential users.
Congratulations. You've spread a single cost element (fiber construction, at optimum projected budget cost) over a completely unrealistic marketshare projection (40%).
Assuming you were the most fortunate manager in the US and got 40% marketshare on day one, while keeping your fiber transmission cost on budget, you've got to add up the rest of your costs:
- fiber transmission: $28/mo (per your budget) - local fiber loop: $45/mo (from looking at Utopia's data) - Internet transport: $16/mo (3Mbps/1Mbps profile) - customer support: $4.50/mo. - billing: $3.50/mo. (includes credit card payment costs) - sales: $3/mo (cost of acquiring you, over projected lifetime of account)
MONTHLY COSTS: $100
Add to that a minimum 15% rate of return - necessary because you wouldn't give me your investment money for this venture unless I could do better than traditional investments, given the high risk we're taking here. This yields:
MONTHLY RATE: $115 (before taxes - estimate another 10% for your final bill)
Do you see a problem here (hint: look at household demographic data, or better yet, talk to normal people around you - they don't have an extra $135 a month lying around for Internet alone!). Don't forget, we've assumed 40% marketshare out of the gate, as well as pretended that we'll have no budget overruns. Oh, and we haven't allocated any funds for backoffice - e.g. the company that runs this all. We've also given the customer a free install with zero costs (impossible) and have made ZERO expensive service calls using $60K service vans and $120K boom trucks to your house over the contract term. Not a single dollar lost to bad debt (deadbeats who don't pay their bills, steal equipment, etc.) - all 40% marketshare will be perfect customers.
they charge about $50-60/month for the same service that the fiber network could provide for half the price!
What's the line about something being too good to be true?
the cable/phone companies have become a little too content with their respective monopolies.
And replace it with another monopoly? To get your 40%, you're going to have to prohibit other competitors from entering your market.
Please... there are real people that work at these companies, real people that invest money expecting 15% or greater for their risk, real costs of doing business, etc. Any post-high school graduate should have enough of a personal financial experience to understand these basics - and those that don't usually learn after their first personal bankrupcy filing.
It's important to be realistic about the consequences of projects like this. Having a terribly conceived project like Utopia in your market only scares realistic providers out of your market - the last thing we want is a fool for a competitor who can perpetually tax their way to oblivion while they fail.
For Utah, this project will put them 10 years behind neighboring states. As if Novell's failure didn't leave enough of a void.
Utopia would spend about $1,100 a home to run the fiber network by each house in the 18 cities involved, and an additional $1,400 for each home
$2500 per subscriber to build the last mile. This is a very interesting number, as it's identical to the number used by cable television entities in the mid to late 90s in estimating the cost to upgrade their networks to support digital service / high-speed Internet/etc. Folks like Mediacom, Charter, Cox, Time Warner and other operations (many very heavily entrenched in debt).
Except several years later, they determined the actual cost was more than double this $2500 prediction.
And that didn't include transmission out of the market - most of these deployments were in major metros that had access tandems, permitting local-loop transport to interexchange carriers for long-haul Internet capacity.
These are completely terrible numbers for Utopia. It just isn't possible to make a positive return absent $250 or more a month out of a subscriber. Then again, maybe they'll do a Worldcom deal, go bankrupt, shrug off the debts, and allow management to flip it around while sticking the original investors with the cost.
You know, I've never once in my career ever had a business customer say this. Why is that? Perhaps they understand that someone has to pay for this capacity? Tell me, when was the last time you bought a Freightliner semi-truck and trailer just for the rare chance you might need more capacity than the family minivan? Seriously, this is like your unemployed cousin ordering the most expensive bottle of wine at dinner when he knows he's not paying the bill.
Let me share some first-hand experience with a FO overbuild project in a community in our region:
91% telephone, cable TV and high-speed Internet marketshare requirement to break even. That's nine out of ten households and businesses switching from the RBOC that underserves the market, and a national cable operator that also offers high-speed service. (I promise you'll never see 91% in a competitive market. Some people will never switch - they like their old phone number, used to work for Bell, don't like change/new things, etc.)
Average wholesale monthly bill for a residential subscriber of $90. (Cable, phone, Internet elements paid by the retailer leasing the FO loop facility for each subscriber). This actually leaves the reseller with less room than typical, so it probably will result in high-speed Internet service above $60-$70/monthly, or slower service.
40% grant support for overbuild - free money for nearly half the infrastructure. (This is a sort of underwear gnomes requirement - "step 2. someone pays down half of our cost.")
Interconnection by no less than three transport companies at the proposed FO loop rate of $18/mo. for high-speed IP transport (3Mbps down/512Kbps up proposed). This profile would be required initially of interconnecting retailers to "ensure fast service for the community." Bandwidth caps, interestingly, were not welcome. This unwillingness to permit resellers to control costs, along with the high wholesale rates and a market that just won't buy high-speed service when it's $80 or more a month, killed the project. No providers would sign on - there was no way to avoid a financial sinkhole.
Interestingly, these numbers were apparently modeled after other FO implementations. What does this mean? Add to it the cost of content (high-speed egress to the Internet, phone transmission lines to the access tandem, cable programming) and you've got a subscriber that's going to get whacked with costs. Transmission alone, especially when it is carrying high-capacity service from a rural community to a major metro where tier one networks can be reached (e.g. Sprint/AT&T/Level3 IP) alone is costly - T1 loops often start at $500. Regional fiber IRUs typically hit $80K or more for a ten-year lease on a 30-45 mile span. There just isn't a no-cost way to carry your sustained 3 Mbps MP3 downloads down from the Internet. If you're financially well-backed, you can build your own regional fiber in at a starting price of about $17K/mile (not including right-of-ways, which will get more costly and difficult the closer you get to your metro.)
So back to my original question: how much are you willing to pay for high-speed Internet? If $60/month for your 3 Mbps/1 Mbps cable Internet is too slow, will you pay more? Are you aware that you probably aren't paying the real costs of your service yet at these rates and this is part of the reason (along with the disappearance of DSL resellers who forced a below-cost retail rate) your rates continue to go up?
If your provider pays $150+ per Mbps or more on a DS3 basis, adds local/regional transmission, switching, sales and support to the cost, how are you supposed to have this for less?
I'm still waiting for a consumer like this previous poster who is ready to give me a blank check for his unlimited demand...
Municipalities across the country are either going to do the retail or the wholesale
Many have been, and in spite of the track record and sufficient demonstration of their inability to operate as a professionally run telecom entity, many still aspire to do things more interesting than running their local water plant.
What is important for any consumer (and citizen, in the case of a municipal considering getting into commercial enterprises with your tax dollars) is to understand the dynamic of motivation in any operation.
In Utah, the complaint is being made that too many commercial entities are ignoring the demand for broadband. Being one who provides this to a third of a fly-over country state, I can tell you that the claims of interest in broadband (even at 60% comperable city cable modem prices) is far less than the claims. I've had communities present us with petitions with over 200 signatures, only to discover that less than 20% of that number were actually prepared to pay for the service when it was finally provided. (It wasn't price or competition - but rather a large majority of parties signing it to pad the numbers in the hope they could bring something good to their community - without they themselves actually having to purchase it!)
And we're motivated by the consequence of failure being of significant disinterest (forget about making great profits at this point - broadband in rural America is being operated exceptionally well if you're breaking even) . Contrast that with a municipal. They are used to 8:30 to 4 work hours, not twelve-hour days, expect to sneak out early Friday and never work weekends. They're typically overstaffed with undercompetent people and solve problems by throwing more bodies at the problem, or (god forbid), hiring and believing consultants.
Their motivation? It's typically prestige and recognition. Failure isn't a possibility, as they will quickly transfer moneys from their monopoly operations (water, sewer, etc.) either legally or illegally (watch out for those creative loans from the monopoly that get "forgiven" and wiped off the books a few years later, or the illegal transfer "loaning" of assets, including employees, vehicles, equipment and office space that is billed to the regulated monopoly but actually put to use within the broadband operation).
The result: you end up paying the highest water, sewer, electric, etc. rates in the state. One municipal in our region, who decided to offer broadband (in spite of three - yes, three - other broadband offerings) has an electric and water rate over 40% higher than anything remotely close in the region. That and creative accountants.
Worse yet, the municipals simply do not understand the telecom business. They're used to product life cycles of 5 to 10 years and don't understand capitalizing something that'll be obsolete in 12 months. They don't understand that core business means you need to have expertise on the subject - they'll hire consultants to an extent that ensures their project will never be profitable. This leads to unfortunate purchasing decisions - e.g. buying proprietary equipment from a company that goes bankrupt and leaves the municipality with an investment in junk (this happens more than you'd think - in fact, one of the proprietary near-line of sight vendors in our business that has the most success with municipals is a breath away from chapter 11 or 7, but they nail the municipal process by building their confidence up in the sales process about how easy this broadband stuff is - "heck, this stuff sells itself and is nearly self-installable!").
Now you're really in trouble, as a consumer of the water/gas/electric from the municipal. Consider for a moment - what would you do if you disagreed with paying 50% or more for your utilities to subsidize a pathetic broadband operation? Have you evern looked at how you can get rid of your municipal management? They're very hard to remove - most are unaccountable to the political process and report only to a w
i just see this as one use when closed source would be better. same goes for mission critical military, intelligence, and government applications.
Please read Bruce Schneier's Secret's & Lies to understand why this is the antithesis of how things really work.
Schneier provides a good high-level view on security issues and helps explain why security within complex systems requires as many perspectives as possible. He also provides numerous examples of "perfect" closed-source security systems (e.g. DeCSS DVD encryption, broken by a seven-line program), "uncrackable algorithms" broken by trivial attacks and other illustrations.
I'm working with nine identical machines with identical configurations and one or two of them might lock up once a week for no apperent reason. I'm much more supicious(?) of the hardware now.
I'll preface that my system usage may not be a fair comparison. My Linux and freeBSD systems provide qmail, dns, radius, mrtg, httpd, webmail, snmp management, etc. for tens to thousands of users, many under constant heavy loads.
My Linux desktops are used for network engineering, management, as well as the obligatory desktop stuff (web, mail, etc.).
They don't crash. Uptimes in hundreds of days is normal.
I can't exit Outlook on XP more than 50% of the time without a crash. XP has now decided to start forgetting its wireless cards (dual boot separate drive to Redhat9 has no issues on same hardware). For a 4-month old Dell with clean XP and NOTHING fancy on third party software (intentionally kept clean as "office machine" while my dual-boot does all the network stuff), this is absurd.
I've never, ever had a Windows OS that ran cleanly after more than 6 months. I have thousands of customers with Win98 that suffer absolute DLL hell. Yes, blame third party software a bit, but who was the architect of this disaster?
Again, tools are tools and I'll be the first to acknowledge that my tools I need for some things only work right on Windows (Project, Visio, Powerpoint, etc.). I've tried open source equiv's and they're no match.
But for reliability, *please* don't argue Microsoft can even be considered as marginal contender.
According to a Mercury News story , the camera is nearly unhackable through its proprietary interface (aha! those wily hackers will never figure this one out!).
"Hackers will have a hard time making Dakota Digital cameras reusable at home. The cameras have a special plug, so you can't use any standard computer cable for connecting to a personal computer. Also, you can't erase more than one picture and the images are stored in a raw format that won't be recognized by photo-editing software."
Really... how many times does it take for stupid marketers to learn security by obscurity doesn't work?
Free software such as Linux is better because it's free
John Milton wrote an essay about this freedom (in a broader sense) called Areopagetica. It's one of those things journalism majors usually have to wade through their senior year in mass communication history.
In his time, one in Britain could not print without prior authorization from the crown. The King's official reason for this prohibition was to "protect libel from being spread." Milton argued that it took the public grappling of truth against falsehood to determine what really was true. Without this public airing, you simply could not know whether the facts you had were true or not.
The closed source vs. open source issue, especially from the perspective of code security and reliability, is inherently linked to this issue argued nearly 400 years ago by Milton. There simply is no way Microsoft can expose its proprietary code to the inspections open source benefits from. The result is horribly broken, insecure and crash-prone Microsoft code vs. a base of increasingly stable open source.
And the future gets worse for Microsoft. Complexity is the instigator of this dynamic; as software complexity grows, the ability of closed source to hang on evaporates.
for a Microsoft customer, Windows software is better
That's just not true. I'm a Microsoft customer, and granted, some of their products are a reasonable choice. But such a blanket statement is just absurd and diminishes Microsoft's credibility.
Microsoft says: 'We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better.'
Incorrect and absolutely false. At the past three companies I've worked with, I've met with regional Microsoft reps and discussed this very topic in "what will it take to switch everything to Microsoft" pitches. Microsoft would typically go application by application across the enterprise to lock up the business.
Imagine my disdain when they proposed switching our international carrier's DNS servers to NT DNS (from BIND, along with our mediation software, etc.). Wonder if anyone can help Microsoft understand what a root nameserver is...
Amazing, that open source could be superior.
PR handlers will advise that you're only making the situation worse when the market has consolidated in an attitude to which you're opposed. Better to recognize the landscape has changed and reformulate your strategy. Of course, failure is always a choice too.
new versions will be the preferred path, rather than backporting security fixes
This really is a shame, as it appears Redhat has confessed that it simply does not understand its market.
I'm a smaller shareholder of Redhat stock - owning enough stock that the losses I took (from a purchase at $22/share) could have paid for a lifetime of Redhat commercial licenses (and yes, I've even suggested this - even a free lifetime maintenance subscription as an apology for the loss - not even an email reply from a marketing weasel). Naturally, I'd welcome any move by Redhat to recover their stock value. This move, unfortunately, encourages me to dump and finally take my losses, as I've definitely lost hope in Redhat management.
An earlier poster pointed out that he'll simply stop running Redhat at home, load up Debian or some other distribution, and when the boss asks him to buy an enterprise license for a work project, he'll naturally go with what he is familiar with. Any halfway competent marketer understands this strategy - it's the "sneak past the decision maker by getting to his recommender geek" play. If you're not IBM/Microsoft/etc., and especially if you're the underdog, this is your game. (Redhat, are you listening?)
Microsoft occasionally admits (though it is increasingly rare) that it too has benefitted from the pirated use of its software by home users. How many SQL admins cut their teeth on bootleg versions (I can name a few in my circles), and have since even converted new employers to SQL from older non-Microsoft dbms's? I can name a large satellite distribution company that did just this, and much credit goes to the db admins for advocating MSSQL from their bootleg experience. A better example is Microsoft's educational discounted software and packages nearly given out at classes and shows.
Then there's the Netscape vs. IE illustration; Netscape got a real attitude when its stock soared into the stratosphere and immediately forgot about all of us ISPs out there who evangelized their product. They started demanding license fees for copies of Navigator included with our installation kits. Along came IEAK...
Granted, Navigator vs. IE is an application battle, not an operating system, but I don't believe Redhat is ready to play as a stand-alone OS (and not as a support model). Those that pay for support will and do. Those that won't will just move to another distribution; e.g. Redhat's move gains no new customers and loses many others.
And come on, expecting users to settle for crippleware when alternatives exist is a waste of time. I'll say it first... Fedora is DOA. Redhat, if you're going to abandon your userbase, don't bother wasting time with an unmaintained crippleware release.
So it doesn't look good for Redhat. If there isn't a change in direction, I guess it's probably just as good a time to dump my stock, cept I've told you all now too:-(
Never thought/. would be a stock rant site... *sigh*
expend a significant amount of money to defend themselves against these bogus charges
Unfortunately this appears to be what happens when you combine a society fixated with junk science with a political class ruled by trial attorneys.
The State of Missouri had an issue a bit more than a year ago with a state legislator that was trying to get all communication towers banned. The reason? "It might harm children." A few folks did some research on the legislator pushing the bill and guess who one of his largest financial supporters was? Incumbant local telephone companies (the competition to wireless providers). Save the children unfortunately has become code for political and legal system payola.
Unfortunately this poster touches on the reality of the current US legal nightmare: many defendents cannot afford the fight for what is right due to the complete lack of financial accountability of irresponsible plantiff attorneys and their clients. I'm predicting the school will back out and turn off their wireless devices. Their students will lack the access to information that other students might have. Unless other parents get vocal and oppose this luddite activity, they'll further the progress of their children towards a future job at Burger King.
Per the allegation that the school has been ignoring evidence that electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi networks poses health risks, I'd invite the luddite parents and their attorneys to have a radiofrequency engineer show them what the airwaves in the classroom (or better, at home) look like. 802.11b/a/g is background noise compared to many of the narrowband signals out there. Better shut off the FM, AM and TV broadcasters immediately. Throw away that cellphone (you don't hold that anywhere *near* your head, do you?) Better start packing candles in the kids lunch bag... those fluorescent lights are little RF monsters ("to quote: while the intentional radiation of fluorescent light tubes lies in the visible light range, such tubes also generate very low levels of microwave and RF white noise (Mumford, 1949)... microwaves? That's not a classroom lit by fluorescents, it's a Easy Bake Oven from Hell!). Lock up the school TV sets - what do you think that gunnplexer is firing at your eyeballs? Get weather, aviation and police radar shut off immediately (sure hope that speeder doesn't crash into the school bus). And god forbid you have one of those Air Force E-4B 747's fly over your home as they do mine... one of those bastards wipes out my TV amplifier every time it flies over my farm! Heck, we haven't even thought about RF experiments like HAARP that can probably melt a human in milliseconds!
Of course, the final step for the trial attorneys and their luddite clients will be banning the ultimate producer of raw RF. Once that's done, we can all rest assured that no RF deathrays will harm us.
Well I just left Comcast... $50/month wasn't justifiable
You might just be on to something. Anyone see the WSJ article last week about digital cable having horrible churn rates? Apparently 300 stations (15 different HBO channels alone, starting the same movie 15 minutes apart!) isn't enough to justify the extra $15 or so.
We experienced the Cox digital TV story when it first came out. We immediately signed up - sounded great (I hate to confess, but the music stations sounded pretty cool, like the Techno station. We live in a large market with not a single techno station - but hey, a half-dozen country FM stations!)
By the time you had the digital TV converter box, high-speed Internet, telephone service, and the digital package (off the promo price), our bill was $220/month! Interestingly, if you do research on cable provider revenue requirements, $225 is sort of a milestone for them to get out of you each month. So we dropped the digital and went back to basic. Just never watched all those channels.
So per the $50/month cable Internet, isn't it interesting that they're tossing in 3Mbps while jacking up these rates. Sounds just like the digital TV game: we'll throw a ton of stations/bandwidth you can't use at you and charge you more.
And why not? With an overall cap, 3 Mbps really doesn't make much of a difference in http, smtp, etc. over 1 Mbps. Yes, the occasional FTP download will be speedy, but you're capped from grabbing Redhat ISOs and other large downloads frequently.
In all, it's not much of a bargin. Prediction: watch the churn grow while DSL and other rate-shaped services steal the service (with a lower tiered price).
Maybe once PC's become as easy to use as a TV will that work. Maybe.
Maybe not. Had a customer support meeting today to review what our broadband operation is dealing with. The top ten?
- I lost my password (pppoe logins). Need reset - I can't type my password right - My Internet doesn't work (something unplugged, someone goofed up IP settings, etc) - Virus/Trojan/Worm infections - Pop-Up annoyances and requests to tell the Internet to stop sending them to the user - Home network disasters - Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. application help (yes, apparently your broadband provider is supposed to provide this help for free. Why do they call? "Who else would I call? I don't know anyone else who knows Word!")
Broadband without support? Good luck. We specify what support is and isn't provided, and we still get "SEP" (somebody elses problem) issues more than any issue related to a customer's broadband service.
Bandwidth has gotten a hell of a lot cheaper, dirt cheap. In fact, pumping photons around the Internet has never been cheaper.
Says who? Sprint, UUNET, etc. have all jacked prices. Typical is 10% across the board each year in the past - on top of "old" pricing. Deals for highly discounted wholesale bandwidth are no where as competitive as the peak of dot-com - why? There simply isn't the competition anymore (and not enough people giving it away to make up for a little bit of cost).
DSL is kicking cable's butt, and this is what cable had to do to be competitive.
Actually, cable's doing this but for a different reason. Cable operators have generally failed to implement layer two over layer two/three protocols that allow them to rate shape customers effectively. Yes, they do have controls but overall they're pretty raw compared to mechanisms like PPPoE that is more common in DSL land.
The solution for the cable provides is to solve this by overengineering and using brute force. That's why you'll see 3 Mbps/1 Mbps type profiles, but at 9pm, it takes 25 minutes to download a 5 MByte file or dslreports shows you're running 108kbps down, 72kbps up.
Likewise, you'll find lots of the cable operators in smaller markets abusing their aggregate to the extreme. Yes, it's 3Mbps local, but a single T1 for all to share leaving town.
Just don't forget, bandwidth is no different than crude oil - it's very supply/demand driven, and right now, those who've survived to be here today in telecom just won't sell cheap anymore.
But if anyone is an unsigned band: don't sign with an RIAA-connected label
Absolutely, and if you have any talent, it'll probably be wasted at a major RIAA label as well.
There's been a lot of coverage the past few years about the real problems of these labels, including the absurd advances to dated artists like Michael Jackson (who never make back the advance money and end up costing other less prominant artists their chance), promotional efforts being spent on the tired old artists at the expense of up-and-coming ones ("Hey folks. That new Madonna album's out. Let's put lips on that pig!"), termination of thousands of smaller and newer artist contracts, fewer releases, etc.
Compare that with a label like Metropolis Records which has amassed a base of artists like Funker Vogt, KMFDM, VNV Nation, Juno Reactor, Apoptygma Bezerk, Frontline Assembly, Project Pitchfork, De/Vision, etc. - much of the EBM and techno-industrial sounds come from this label.
How do they play with the Internet community? They support royalty-free shoutcasting (which is how I found them and ended up spending a few $$$ on their artists!).
Support these labels by buying direct whenever you can, and let them know each time you buy that the reason you're sending them business is because of their support for great artists and the promotion of a music marketplace free of RIAA manipulation and anticompetitive behavior.
Dell already made their move - they're not going to do anything per indemnification of customers (coming straight from Michael Dell himself).
It's a shame, as I like (and buy Dell - writing this from an Inspiron 8200 in fact). Looks like the next batch of servers ordered will be saying HP on them...
Compare this to the US where if you live in a small town you are pretty screwed.
Not true. My home town (population 997) has excellent broadband. $35/month. I'm obviously biased, as my company covers one-third of the state providing broadband to communities as small as 400. And guess what? Nobody fleeced a taxpayer to make this happen. Not one cent of gubmint money made this happen.
We tried various broadband wireless connections but they were highly unreliable.
Interesting. In our part of the state, DSL has that reputation. It comes in 128 kbps (advertised, though at 6 pm, the fractional T1 that the incumbant LEC uses for Internet egress is filled up with P2P and other stuff, so you get about 40-50 kbps... dialup, over that $70/month DSL).
Bottom line is that no technology works well when it's operated by incompetent providers, or folks who just don't plain care anymore. Drive past your service provider's office at 4:30 pm. If there are no cars (all gone golfing), don't count on them working hard to give you good service.
Why? Because they can and it makes them feel important.
Don't mean to be redundant, but there's a very good (not good good, but "explains things" good) reason they do: they're paid to do so.
Minnesota imposed VoIP regulations to protect the incumbant carriers. ILECs are aggressive at lobbying and throw a lot of money around during election time. (After all, they've got to spend some of that money the fleeced you on your business line somewhere).
Florida's proposal is bizarre. Granted, the ILEC tax model is old, though they're still finding creative ways to pump back money to the old boy network like re-inventing the rural telephone fund to tax broadband service and give the money back to ILECs in exchange for their promise to think about rural customers occasionally. (In an odd twist, our company which provides service to half a state in fly-over-country, would be taxed in order to give the money to ILECs who don't offer broadband! Go figure...). But this Florida one even has me puzzled. It's as loopy as use tax (sales tax for sales that a state does not have legal jurisdiction for, and then creates a tax on using products, but exempts you if you paid in-state sales tax, meaning the only people that pay use tax are interstate purchases which didn't pay sales tax. How's that for simple?)
Since nobody wants to cut budgets in state gubmints, it makes you wonder what's next. Don't be surprised if we see:
- a simple "per-foot" tax on cable. We'll have to have 14-page exemption forms for farmers who have long rural distances to run between the barn and the house, of course.
- a MIPS tax, socking it to the rich suckers who can afford that top-of-the-line processor (sort of a PC SUV tax)
- CPU cycle credits: download and run GUBMINT.EXE in the background, allowing the state's tax computers to load share when your PC is idle, and get a $25 annual rebate on your LAN tax. (Of courses, the state will hire consultants from Intuit to write spyware that measures your LAN length and other taxable details and reports back thru the exe program).
Come on, public servants. Certainly you can find more creative ways to part us from our hard-earned money while you play solitare all day at the DMV!
Should be an interesting case - presumably the sell order was placed long ago to trigger on the price, so there's an avoidance of insider issues / prior knowledge. However, the bump the stock got on the announcement of the lawsuit was pretty predictable.
It'll be interesting to see how the SEC fields this one - if they want round two of pump & dump, it'll happen if they call this one fair.
Huh? The government has nothing to do with the licensing of IP.
Huh? Copyrights, trademarks and patents are all IP. The government assigns exclusive license to the registrants through the respective processes, and also provides courses for remedy should these exclusive licenses be violated. (And come on now, you think any government would allow any property to not be managed and controlled by itself? Who's smoking crack here?)
The rest of your post is similarly confused. (perhaps to one who doesn't have to deal with the confusing world of intellectual property law!) Copyright vests in the author without any registration requirement. The government can not and will not reassign the copyright to code to people who register and to people who hold patents.
That wasn't what was said in the post. Apparently I've offended a few GPL fans who are ignoring political process and litigation dynamics.
Let's see if I can make this more clear: Do not be surprised if the remedy SCO seeks after it completely muddies the water is to seek the declaration that GPL contributed to the theft of their intellectual property.
Don't forget Microsoft's meme about GPL being viral. Don't count on other anti-open source parties staying out of the game. Reading through SCO's claims, there's a second level to this all and yet much of the open source community is naively pretending the matter will be settled on the a basis of reason.
So instead of marking posts you disagree with as "troll" and "smoking crack," sit back and watch Mr. Boies change the rules just as the open source community thinks it is winning the battle.
SCO knows about so-called 'infringing' code in there, yet they continue to distribute it, meaning they have effectively GPLed whatever code is in there...
As perverse as it may be to one who follows the GPL to see that the "company currently known as SCO" has continued to use Linux in its various practices, it appears we're missing the primary issue: SCO believes it ownes Linux (and the IBM suit is somewhat of a red herring which SCO believes will destroy GPL in a court test, resulting in SCO's ownership of all that is Unix, Linux included). Remember, the more litigation and the more chaos from various IBM, Redhat, etc. lawsuits, the more evidence that supports SCO's claims that GPL simply doesn't work and traditional government assignment of property rights must be applied by the courts. Consider this sequence:
1. CalderaSCO has used GPL, IBM's used it, Red Hat, Linus, GNU and others have all used it. Ownership has become increasingly vague and traditional technology licensing means as constructed by the government have been circumvented.
2. GPL has caused an amazing mess where copyrights, patents and trademarks have been thrown in and this GPL not only hasn't prevented that contamination, but it arrogantly claims to supercede governmental authority to determine the assignment and licensing of ownership. Don't forget, Microsoft has warned us that GPL was a virus.
3. Things that supercede the government tend to irritate the government and will be thrown out. We all know about Microsoft's penalty for superceding authority; GPL's crimes are worse.
4. All the GPL code is stripped of its ownership and must revert back to claimants who have registration as issued by governmental authority. Chunks of GPL code are arbitrarily assigned by the USPTO based upon previous registrations (e.g. by patent holders, etc.). Imagine one big sourcecode clearinghouse created to distribute and maintain code rights, as well as serving as a central authority for code registration (sort of a software Star Chamber). For the paranoid, toss in the anti-strong encryption nuts and RIAA/ABA/film/anti-software piracy lobby who'd quickly throw support behind a government entity that required all code be licensed and inspected. Proposed anti-terrorism provisions could serve as a springboard for this move and see considerable industry and governmental support. Licensing is required for programmers (after all, this would stop people from writing computer viruses, trojans and other rogue code, right?)
5. SCO presents Unix copyright claims and ends up with some to most of the GPL base.
Certainly it's a stretch, but it seems to be a pragmatic one for an otherwise worthless entity with a Unix copyright claim. Furthermore, the timing of the move is well situated to capture current lobby momentum.
From that respect, it makes sense that SCO has distributed Linux and continues to claim that its very foundation was based on Linux solutions, as stated on its company profile page.
five different phones around and used them to compare?
We've gone through about as many here in our corner of the central US and have been equally disappointed (Verizon has the best network? Maybe everywhere else in the US, but not in the central states!).
- SprintPCS: Wonderful when you don't leave the metros. Useless outside. Dual-band for roaming gets you buy at a nasty price. Good customer service in our experience.
- Verizon: Has a real problem with sensing its digital network when it's too weak to use, and refusing to try analog. Verizon was rock solid for us until a software update a year ago January where they apparently attempted to shift to "try a digital signal at any cost." This isn't an issue in the metro areas, but when you're constantly on the outskirts, it makes the phone worthless. They have what appears to be some real cell transition issues in our metro as well and can't seem to fix them. Customer service is rather poor as well.
- Alltel: Actually had the best signal coverage and reliability. Unfortunately, they have some unusual billing practices. After billing the wrong service plan for the company cellphones, they were to credit the overcharges that were paid. Instead, they BILLED the credits. They continued to bill credits for three more rounds (i.e. they owe $2300, so they would label the bill with a credit memo, and then charge us an extra $2300 rather than giving it back, putting us a net $4600 off!). After six months of billing hell, we found an accounting person who figured it out and was going to fix it. They laid her off before she could get it done. What a disaster of a company.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps setting up the broadband service as a true non-profit organization
I think there's certainly an opportunity for this model. In fact, if you look at the rural electric cooperative as a model (where my company has received financial support), there's a lot about the model that works well along these not-for-profit lines. RECs also have a strong cultural dynamic - understanding that sustaining, supporting and growing rural communities is a central focus.
Monies would be allocated from taxes
I'd suggest staying as far away from this source; not only is it theft in my book, but it immediately taints the organization through the political influence. At a minimum, it establishes a young organization with a dangerous addiction - to unlimited, unaccountable cash via corporate welfare.
Look at the RUS/farm bill broadband grants and low interest loans. Everything sounded great until the rules got written. Guess what? If you're a tired old incumbent local phone monopoly, you easily qualify for money. If you're an up and comer, they've got enough rules to keep you out. Rules always reward those who've been contributing to the election process for years, of course. (I don't mean to sound bitter about this - it's what one should expect from the process).
Competition would result for the services, but not for the bandwidth.
I'd love to hear of an example where this worked out well. I've mostly encountered political and technical/architectual issues.
*scoove*
It doesn't cost substantially more to bury high-capacity fiber than low-capacity fiber.
You're exactly right - burial costs are probably indifferent. But is that the primary cost of the network? No.
Look at OC-622 gear vs. OC-12. Distances vary significantly. This means many more repeaters. Then there's the termination and switching cost. Etc.
Lots of other factors and costs...
What I was getting at is building a much higher then needed capacity, allows you to keep that infrastructure in place for a much longer time.
This is very hard to justify, and increasingly so post dot-com bust. It's a nice thought, but when you can't afford to build a network on the level of scale being proposed, it's nearly absurd to propose making it 10 times bigger just so it lasts longer - the company or government building it won't be around to see it!
In this sense, the comparison other posters have used to building highways may help. It's not often you'll find 10-lane expressways when 2 lanes does the job. Of course, when you're spending someone elses money, I'll bet you'll opt for the 10 lanes.
How often do you think the tax payers in Utah want to vote on a Millage to update aging infrastructure?
I'll guarantee they'll get to keep shelling out, even if they build the 10-lane model today. Fiber technologies, transmission & switching developments, IPv6 evolution, etc. will all keep them going back and re-engineering. Build for what your customer can afford, not what you think you can build by stealing the funds from other taxpayers.
*scoove*
Utah: America's New Taxland
Not only that, but it comes out to be $28/month averaged over 40% of potential users.
Congratulations. You've spread a single cost element (fiber construction, at optimum projected budget cost) over a completely unrealistic marketshare projection (40%).
Assuming you were the most fortunate manager in the US and got 40% marketshare on day one, while keeping your fiber transmission cost on budget, you've got to add up the rest of your costs:
- fiber transmission: $28/mo (per your budget)
- local fiber loop: $45/mo (from looking at Utopia's data)
- Internet transport: $16/mo (3Mbps/1Mbps profile)
- customer support: $4.50/mo.
- billing: $3.50/mo. (includes credit card payment costs)
- sales: $3/mo (cost of acquiring you, over projected lifetime of account)
MONTHLY COSTS: $100
Add to that a minimum 15% rate of return - necessary because you wouldn't give me your investment money for this venture unless I could do better than traditional investments, given the high risk we're taking here. This yields:
MONTHLY RATE: $115 (before taxes - estimate another 10% for your final bill)
Do you see a problem here (hint: look at household demographic data, or better yet, talk to normal people around you - they don't have an extra $135 a month lying around for Internet alone!). Don't forget, we've assumed 40% marketshare out of the gate, as well as pretended that we'll have no budget overruns. Oh, and we haven't allocated any funds for backoffice - e.g. the company that runs this all. We've also given the customer a free install with zero costs (impossible) and have made ZERO expensive service calls using $60K service vans and $120K boom trucks to your house over the contract term. Not a single dollar lost to bad debt (deadbeats who don't pay their bills, steal equipment, etc.) - all 40% marketshare will be perfect customers.
they charge about $50-60/month for the same service that the fiber network could provide for half the price!
What's the line about something being too good to be true?
the cable/phone companies have become a little too content with their respective monopolies.
And replace it with another monopoly? To get your 40%, you're going to have to prohibit other competitors from entering your market.
Please... there are real people that work at these companies, real people that invest money expecting 15% or greater for their risk, real costs of doing business, etc. Any post-high school graduate should have enough of a personal financial experience to understand these basics - and those that don't usually learn after their first personal bankrupcy filing.
It's important to be realistic about the consequences of projects like this. Having a terribly conceived project like Utopia in your market only scares realistic providers out of your market - the last thing we want is a fool for a competitor who can perpetually tax their way to oblivion while they fail.
For Utah, this project will put them 10 years behind neighboring states. As if Novell's failure didn't leave enough of a void.
*scoove*
Utopia would spend about $1,100 a home to run the fiber network by each house in the 18 cities involved, and an additional $1,400 for each home
$2500 per subscriber to build the last mile. This is a very interesting number, as it's identical to the number used by cable television entities in the mid to late 90s in estimating the cost to upgrade their networks to support digital service / high-speed Internet/etc. Folks like Mediacom, Charter, Cox, Time Warner and other operations (many very heavily entrenched in debt).
Except several years later, they determined the actual cost was more than double this $2500 prediction.
And that didn't include transmission out of the market - most of these deployments were in major metros that had access tandems, permitting local-loop transport to interexchange carriers for long-haul Internet capacity.
These are completely terrible numbers for Utopia. It just isn't possible to make a positive return absent $250 or more a month out of a subscriber. Then again, maybe they'll do a Worldcom deal, go bankrupt, shrug off the debts, and allow management to flip it around while sticking the original investors with the cost.
*scoove*
You know, I've never once in my career ever had a business customer say this. Why is that? Perhaps they understand that someone has to pay for this capacity? Tell me, when was the last time you bought a Freightliner semi-truck and trailer just for the rare chance you might need more capacity than the family minivan? Seriously, this is like your unemployed cousin ordering the most expensive bottle of wine at dinner when he knows he's not paying the bill.
Let me share some first-hand experience with a FO overbuild project in a community in our region:
Interestingly, these numbers were apparently modeled after other FO implementations. What does this mean? Add to it the cost of content (high-speed egress to the Internet, phone transmission lines to the access tandem, cable programming) and you've got a subscriber that's going to get whacked with costs. Transmission alone, especially when it is carrying high-capacity service from a rural community to a major metro where tier one networks can be reached (e.g. Sprint/AT&T/Level3 IP) alone is costly - T1 loops often start at $500. Regional fiber IRUs typically hit $80K or more for a ten-year lease on a 30-45 mile span. There just isn't a no-cost way to carry your sustained 3 Mbps MP3 downloads down from the Internet. If you're financially well-backed, you can build your own regional fiber in at a starting price of about $17K/mile (not including right-of-ways, which will get more costly and difficult the closer you get to your metro.)
So back to my original question: how much are you willing to pay for high-speed Internet? If $60/month for your 3 Mbps/1 Mbps cable Internet is too slow, will you pay more? Are you aware that you probably aren't paying the real costs of your service yet at these rates and this is part of the reason (along with the disappearance of DSL resellers who forced a below-cost retail rate) your rates continue to go up?
If your provider pays $150+ per Mbps or more on a DS3 basis, adds local/regional transmission, switching, sales and support to the cost, how are you supposed to have this for less?
I'm still waiting for a consumer like this previous poster who is ready to give me a blank check for his unlimited demand...
*scoove*
Municipalities across the country are either going to do the retail or the wholesale
Many have been, and in spite of the track record and sufficient demonstration of their inability to operate as a professionally run telecom entity, many still aspire to do things more interesting than running their local water plant.
What is important for any consumer (and citizen, in the case of a municipal considering getting into commercial enterprises with your tax dollars) is to understand the dynamic of motivation in any operation.
In Utah, the complaint is being made that too many commercial entities are ignoring the demand for broadband. Being one who provides this to a third of a fly-over country state, I can tell you that the claims of interest in broadband (even at 60% comperable city cable modem prices) is far less than the claims. I've had communities present us with petitions with over 200 signatures, only to discover that less than 20% of that number were actually prepared to pay for the service when it was finally provided. (It wasn't price or competition - but rather a large majority of parties signing it to pad the numbers in the hope they could bring something good to their community - without they themselves actually having to purchase it!)
And we're motivated by the consequence of failure being of significant disinterest (forget about making great profits at this point - broadband in rural America is being operated exceptionally well if you're breaking even) . Contrast that with a municipal. They are used to 8:30 to 4 work hours, not twelve-hour days, expect to sneak out early Friday and never work weekends. They're typically overstaffed with undercompetent people and solve problems by throwing more bodies at the problem, or (god forbid), hiring and believing consultants.
Their motivation? It's typically prestige and recognition. Failure isn't a possibility, as they will quickly transfer moneys from their monopoly operations (water, sewer, etc.) either legally or illegally (watch out for those creative loans from the monopoly that get "forgiven" and wiped off the books a few years later, or the illegal transfer "loaning" of assets, including employees, vehicles, equipment and office space that is billed to the regulated monopoly but actually put to use within the broadband operation).
The result: you end up paying the highest water, sewer, electric, etc. rates in the state. One municipal in our region, who decided to offer broadband (in spite of three - yes, three - other broadband offerings) has an electric and water rate over 40% higher than anything remotely close in the region. That and creative accountants.
Worse yet, the municipals simply do not understand the telecom business. They're used to product life cycles of 5 to 10 years and don't understand capitalizing something that'll be obsolete in 12 months. They don't understand that core business means you need to have expertise on the subject - they'll hire consultants to an extent that ensures their project will never be profitable. This leads to unfortunate purchasing decisions - e.g. buying proprietary equipment from a company that goes bankrupt and leaves the municipality with an investment in junk (this happens more than you'd think - in fact, one of the proprietary near-line of sight vendors in our business that has the most success with municipals is a breath away from chapter 11 or 7, but they nail the municipal process by building their confidence up in the sales process about how easy this broadband stuff is - "heck, this stuff sells itself and is nearly self-installable!").
Now you're really in trouble, as a consumer of the water/gas/electric from the municipal. Consider for a moment - what would you do if you disagreed with paying 50% or more for your utilities to subsidize a pathetic broadband operation? Have you evern looked at how you can get rid of your municipal management? They're very hard to remove - most are unaccountable to the political process and report only to a w
i just see this as one use when closed source would be better. same goes for mission critical military, intelligence, and government applications.
Please read Bruce Schneier's Secret's & Lies to understand why this is the antithesis of how things really work.
Schneier provides a good high-level view on security issues and helps explain why security within complex systems requires as many perspectives as possible. He also provides numerous examples of "perfect" closed-source security systems (e.g. DeCSS DVD encryption, broken by a seven-line program), "uncrackable algorithms" broken by trivial attacks and other illustrations.
*scoove*
I'm working with nine identical machines with identical configurations and one or two of them might lock up once a week for no apperent reason. I'm much more supicious(?) of the hardware now.
I'll preface that my system usage may not be a fair comparison. My Linux and freeBSD systems provide qmail, dns, radius, mrtg, httpd, webmail, snmp management, etc. for tens to thousands of users, many under constant heavy loads.
My Linux desktops are used for network engineering, management, as well as the obligatory desktop stuff (web, mail, etc.).
They don't crash. Uptimes in hundreds of days is normal.
I can't exit Outlook on XP more than 50% of the time without a crash. XP has now decided to start forgetting its wireless cards (dual boot separate drive to Redhat9 has no issues on same hardware). For a 4-month old Dell with clean XP and NOTHING fancy on third party software (intentionally kept clean as "office machine" while my dual-boot does all the network stuff), this is absurd.
I've never, ever had a Windows OS that ran cleanly after more than 6 months. I have thousands of customers with Win98 that suffer absolute DLL hell. Yes, blame third party software a bit, but who was the architect of this disaster?
Again, tools are tools and I'll be the first to acknowledge that my tools I need for some things only work right on Windows (Project, Visio, Powerpoint, etc.). I've tried open source equiv's and they're no match.
But for reliability, *please* don't argue Microsoft can even be considered as marginal contender.
*scoove*
According to a Mercury News story , the camera is nearly unhackable through its proprietary interface (aha! those wily hackers will never figure this one out!).
"Hackers will have a hard time making Dakota Digital cameras reusable at home. The cameras have a special plug, so you can't use any standard computer cable for connecting to a personal computer. Also, you can't erase more than one picture and the images are stored in a raw format that won't be recognized by photo-editing software."
Really... how many times does it take for stupid marketers to learn security by obscurity doesn't work?
*scoove*
Free software such as Linux is better because it's free
John Milton wrote an essay about this freedom (in a broader sense) called Areopagetica. It's one of those things journalism majors usually have to wade through their senior year in mass communication history.
In his time, one in Britain could not print without prior authorization from the crown. The King's official reason for this prohibition was to "protect libel from being spread." Milton argued that it took the public grappling of truth against falsehood to determine what really was true. Without this public airing, you simply could not know whether the facts you had were true or not.
The closed source vs. open source issue, especially from the perspective of code security and reliability, is inherently linked to this issue argued nearly 400 years ago by Milton. There simply is no way Microsoft can expose its proprietary code to the inspections open source benefits from. The result is horribly broken, insecure and crash-prone Microsoft code vs. a base of increasingly stable open source.
And the future gets worse for Microsoft. Complexity is the instigator of this dynamic; as software complexity grows, the ability of closed source to hang on evaporates.
*scoove*
for a Microsoft customer, Windows software is better
That's just not true. I'm a Microsoft customer, and granted, some of their products are a reasonable choice. But such a blanket statement is just absurd and diminishes Microsoft's credibility.
Microsoft says:
'We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better.'
Incorrect and absolutely false. At the past three companies I've worked with, I've met with regional Microsoft reps and discussed this very topic in "what will it take to switch everything to Microsoft" pitches. Microsoft would typically go application by application across the enterprise to lock up the business.
Imagine my disdain when they proposed switching our international carrier's DNS servers to NT DNS (from BIND, along with our mediation software, etc.). Wonder if anyone can help Microsoft understand what a root nameserver is...
Amazing, that open source could be superior.
PR handlers will advise that you're only making the situation worse when the market has consolidated in an attitude to which you're opposed. Better to recognize the landscape has changed and reformulate your strategy. Of course, failure is always a choice too.
*scoove*
new versions will be the preferred path, rather than backporting security fixes
/. would be a stock rant site... *sigh*
This really is a shame, as it appears Redhat has confessed that it simply does not understand its market.
I'm a smaller shareholder of Redhat stock - owning enough stock that the losses I took (from a purchase at $22/share) could have paid for a lifetime of Redhat commercial licenses (and yes, I've even suggested this - even a free lifetime maintenance subscription as an apology for the loss - not even an email reply from a marketing weasel). Naturally, I'd welcome any move by Redhat to recover their stock value. This move, unfortunately, encourages me to dump and finally take my losses, as I've definitely lost hope in Redhat management.
An earlier poster pointed out that he'll simply stop running Redhat at home, load up Debian or some other distribution, and when the boss asks him to buy an enterprise license for a work project, he'll naturally go with what he is familiar with. Any halfway competent marketer understands this strategy - it's the "sneak past the decision maker by getting to his recommender geek" play. If you're not IBM/Microsoft/etc., and especially if you're the underdog, this is your game. (Redhat, are you listening?)
Microsoft occasionally admits (though it is increasingly rare) that it too has benefitted from the pirated use of its software by home users. How many SQL admins cut their teeth on bootleg versions (I can name a few in my circles), and have since even converted new employers to SQL from older non-Microsoft dbms's? I can name a large satellite distribution company that did just this, and much credit goes to the db admins for advocating MSSQL from their bootleg experience. A better example is Microsoft's educational discounted software and packages nearly given out at classes and shows.
Then there's the Netscape vs. IE illustration; Netscape got a real attitude when its stock soared into the stratosphere and immediately forgot about all of us ISPs out there who evangelized their product. They started demanding license fees for copies of Navigator included with our installation kits. Along came IEAK...
Granted, Navigator vs. IE is an application battle, not an operating system, but I don't believe Redhat is ready to play as a stand-alone OS (and not as a support model). Those that pay for support will and do. Those that won't will just move to another distribution; e.g. Redhat's move gains no new customers and loses many others.
And come on, expecting users to settle for crippleware when alternatives exist is a waste of time. I'll say it first... Fedora is DOA. Redhat, if you're going to abandon your userbase, don't bother wasting time with an unmaintained crippleware release.
So it doesn't look good for Redhat. If there isn't a change in direction, I guess it's probably just as good a time to dump my stock, cept I've told you all now too:-(
Never thought
*scoove*
expend a significant amount of money to defend themselves against these bogus charges
Unfortunately this appears to be what happens when you combine a society fixated with junk science with a political class ruled by trial attorneys.
The State of Missouri had an issue a bit more than a year ago with a state legislator that was trying to get all communication towers banned. The reason? "It might harm children." A few folks did some research on the legislator pushing the bill and guess who one of his largest financial supporters was? Incumbant local telephone companies (the competition to wireless providers). Save the children unfortunately has become code for political and legal system payola.
Unfortunately this poster touches on the reality of the current US legal nightmare: many defendents cannot afford the fight for what is right due to the complete lack of financial accountability of irresponsible plantiff attorneys and their clients. I'm predicting the school will back out and turn off their wireless devices. Their students will lack the access to information that other students might have. Unless other parents get vocal and oppose this luddite activity, they'll further the progress of their children towards a future job at Burger King.
Per the allegation that the school has been ignoring evidence that electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi networks poses health risks, I'd invite the luddite parents and their attorneys to have a radiofrequency engineer show them what the airwaves in the classroom (or better, at home) look like. 802.11b/a/g is background noise compared to many of the narrowband signals out there. Better shut off the FM, AM and TV broadcasters immediately. Throw away that cellphone (you don't hold that anywhere *near* your head, do you?) Better start packing candles in the kids lunch bag... those fluorescent lights are little RF monsters ("to quote: while the intentional radiation of fluorescent light tubes lies in the visible light range, such tubes also generate very low levels of microwave and RF white noise (Mumford, 1949)... microwaves? That's not a classroom lit by fluorescents, it's a Easy Bake Oven from Hell!). Lock up the school TV sets - what do you think that gunnplexer is firing at your eyeballs? Get weather, aviation and police radar shut off immediately (sure hope that speeder doesn't crash into the school bus). And god forbid you have one of those Air Force E-4B 747's fly over your home as they do mine... one of those bastards wipes out my TV amplifier every time it flies over my farm! Heck, we haven't even thought about RF experiments like HAARP that can probably melt a human in milliseconds!
Of course, the final step for the trial attorneys and their luddite clients will be banning the ultimate producer of raw RF. Once that's done, we can all rest assured that no RF deathrays will harm us.
*scoove*
Well I just left Comcast... $50/month wasn't justifiable
You might just be on to something. Anyone see the WSJ article last week about digital cable having horrible churn rates? Apparently 300 stations (15 different HBO channels alone, starting the same movie 15 minutes apart!) isn't enough to justify the extra $15 or so.
We experienced the Cox digital TV story when it first came out. We immediately signed up - sounded great (I hate to confess, but the music stations sounded pretty cool, like the Techno station. We live in a large market with not a single techno station - but hey, a half-dozen country FM stations!)
By the time you had the digital TV converter box, high-speed Internet, telephone service, and the digital package (off the promo price), our bill was $220/month! Interestingly, if you do research on cable provider revenue requirements, $225 is sort of a milestone for them to get out of you each month. So we dropped the digital and went back to basic. Just never watched all those channels.
So per the $50/month cable Internet, isn't it interesting that they're tossing in 3Mbps while jacking up these rates. Sounds just like the digital TV game: we'll throw a ton of stations/bandwidth you can't use at you and charge you more.
And why not? With an overall cap, 3 Mbps really doesn't make much of a difference in http, smtp, etc. over 1 Mbps. Yes, the occasional FTP download will be speedy, but you're capped from grabbing Redhat ISOs and other large downloads frequently.
In all, it's not much of a bargin. Prediction: watch the churn grow while DSL and other rate-shaped services steal the service (with a lower tiered price).
*scoove*
Maybe once PC's become as easy to use as a TV will that work. Maybe.
Maybe not. Had a customer support meeting today to review what our broadband operation is dealing with. The top ten?
- I lost my password (pppoe logins). Need reset
- I can't type my password right
- My Internet doesn't work (something unplugged, someone goofed up IP settings, etc)
- Virus/Trojan/Worm infections
- Pop-Up annoyances and requests to tell the Internet to stop sending them to the user
- Home network disasters
- Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. application help (yes, apparently your broadband provider is supposed to provide this help for free. Why do they call? "Who else would I call? I don't know anyone else who knows Word!")
Broadband without support? Good luck. We specify what support is and isn't provided, and we still get "SEP" (somebody elses problem) issues more than any issue related to a customer's broadband service.
*scoove*
Bandwidth has gotten a hell of a lot cheaper, dirt cheap. In fact, pumping photons around the Internet has never been cheaper.
Says who? Sprint, UUNET, etc. have all jacked prices. Typical is 10% across the board each year in the past - on top of "old" pricing. Deals for highly discounted wholesale bandwidth are no where as competitive as the peak of dot-com - why? There simply isn't the competition anymore (and not enough people giving it away to make up for a little bit of cost).
DSL is kicking cable's butt, and this is what cable had to do to be competitive.
Actually, cable's doing this but for a different reason. Cable operators have generally failed to implement layer two over layer two/three protocols that allow them to rate shape customers effectively. Yes, they do have controls but overall they're pretty raw compared to mechanisms like PPPoE that is more common in DSL land.
The solution for the cable provides is to solve this by overengineering and using brute force. That's why you'll see 3 Mbps/1 Mbps type profiles, but at 9pm, it takes 25 minutes to download a 5 MByte file or dslreports shows you're running 108kbps down, 72kbps up.
Likewise, you'll find lots of the cable operators in smaller markets abusing their aggregate to the extreme. Yes, it's 3Mbps local, but a single T1 for all to share leaving town.
Just don't forget, bandwidth is no different than crude oil - it's very supply/demand driven, and right now, those who've survived to be here today in telecom just won't sell cheap anymore.
*scoove*
But if anyone is an unsigned band: don't sign with an RIAA-connected label
Absolutely, and if you have any talent, it'll probably be wasted at a major RIAA label as well.
There's been a lot of coverage the past few years about the real problems of these labels, including the absurd advances to dated artists like Michael Jackson (who never make back the advance money and end up costing other less prominant artists their chance), promotional efforts being spent on the tired old artists at the expense of up-and-coming ones ("Hey folks. That new Madonna album's out. Let's put lips on that pig!"), termination of thousands of smaller and newer artist contracts, fewer releases, etc.
Compare that with a label like Metropolis Records which has amassed a base of artists like Funker Vogt, KMFDM, VNV Nation, Juno Reactor, Apoptygma Bezerk, Frontline Assembly, Project Pitchfork, De/Vision, etc. - much of the EBM and techno-industrial sounds come from this label.
How do they play with the Internet community? They support royalty-free shoutcasting (which is how I found them and ended up spending a few $$$ on their artists!).
Support these labels by buying direct whenever you can, and let them know each time you buy that the reason you're sending them business is because of their support for great artists and the promotion of a music marketplace free of RIAA manipulation and anticompetitive behavior.
*scoove*
Guess what Dell will be doing next.
Dell already made their move - they're not going to do anything per indemnification of customers (coming straight from Michael Dell himself).
It's a shame, as I like (and buy Dell - writing this from an Inspiron 8200 in fact). Looks like the next batch of servers ordered will be saying HP on them...
*scoove*
Compare this to the US where if you live in a small town you are pretty screwed.
Not true. My home town (population 997) has excellent broadband. $35/month. I'm obviously biased, as my company covers one-third of the state providing broadband to communities as small as 400. And guess what? Nobody fleeced a taxpayer to make this happen. Not one cent of gubmint money made this happen.
We tried various broadband wireless connections but they were highly unreliable.
Interesting. In our part of the state, DSL has that reputation. It comes in 128 kbps (advertised, though at 6 pm, the fractional T1 that the incumbant LEC uses for Internet egress is filled up with P2P and other stuff, so you get about 40-50 kbps... dialup, over that $70/month DSL).
Bottom line is that no technology works well when it's operated by incompetent providers, or folks who just don't plain care anymore. Drive past your service provider's office at 4:30 pm. If there are no cars (all gone golfing), don't count on them working hard to give you good service.
*scoove*
Why? Because they can and it makes them feel important.
Don't mean to be redundant, but there's a very good (not good good, but "explains things" good) reason they do: they're paid to do so.
Minnesota imposed VoIP regulations to protect the incumbant carriers. ILECs are aggressive at lobbying and throw a lot of money around during election time. (After all, they've got to spend some of that money the fleeced you on your business line somewhere).
Florida's proposal is bizarre. Granted, the ILEC tax model is old, though they're still finding creative ways to pump back money to the old boy network like re-inventing the rural telephone fund to tax broadband service and give the money back to ILECs in exchange for their promise to think about rural customers occasionally. (In an odd twist, our company which provides service to half a state in fly-over-country, would be taxed in order to give the money to ILECs who don't offer broadband! Go figure...). But this Florida one even has me puzzled. It's as loopy as use tax (sales tax for sales that a state does not have legal jurisdiction for, and then creates a tax on using products, but exempts you if you paid in-state sales tax, meaning the only people that pay use tax are interstate purchases which didn't pay sales tax. How's that for simple?)
Since nobody wants to cut budgets in state gubmints, it makes you wonder what's next. Don't be surprised if we see:
- a simple "per-foot" tax on cable. We'll have to have 14-page exemption forms for farmers who have long rural distances to run between the barn and the house, of course.
- a MIPS tax, socking it to the rich suckers who can afford that top-of-the-line processor (sort of a PC SUV tax)
- CPU cycle credits: download and run GUBMINT.EXE in the background, allowing the state's tax computers to load share when your PC is idle, and get a $25 annual rebate on your LAN tax. (Of courses, the state will hire consultants from Intuit to write spyware that measures your LAN length and other taxable details and reports back thru the exe program).
Come on, public servants. Certainly you can find more creative ways to part us from our hard-earned money while you play solitare all day at the DMV!
*scoove*
Should be an interesting case - presumably the sell order was placed long ago to trigger on the price, so there's an avoidance of insider issues / prior knowledge. However, the bump the stock got on the announcement of the lawsuit was pretty predictable.
It'll be interesting to see how the SEC fields this one - if they want round two of pump & dump, it'll happen if they call this one fair.
*scoove*
You miss the point.
Huh? The government has nothing to do with the licensing of IP.
Huh? Copyrights, trademarks and patents are all IP. The government assigns exclusive license to the registrants through the respective processes, and also provides courses for remedy should these exclusive licenses be violated. (And come on now, you think any government would allow any property to not be managed and controlled by itself? Who's smoking crack here?)
The rest of your post is similarly confused. (perhaps to one who doesn't have to deal with the confusing world of intellectual property law!) Copyright vests in the author without any registration requirement. The government can not and will not reassign the copyright to code to people who register and to people who hold patents.
That wasn't what was said in the post. Apparently I've offended a few GPL fans who are ignoring political process and litigation dynamics.
Let's see if I can make this more clear: Do not be surprised if the remedy SCO seeks after it completely muddies the water is to seek the declaration that GPL contributed to the theft of their intellectual property.
Don't forget Microsoft's meme about GPL being viral. Don't count on other anti-open source parties staying out of the game. Reading through SCO's claims, there's a second level to this all and yet much of the open source community is naively pretending the matter will be settled on the a basis of reason.
So instead of marking posts you disagree with as "troll" and "smoking crack," sit back and watch Mr. Boies change the rules just as the open source community thinks it is winning the battle.
*scoove*
I think we're missing a bigger issue here:
SCO knows about so-called 'infringing' code in there, yet they continue to distribute it, meaning they have effectively GPLed whatever code is in there...
As perverse as it may be to one who follows the GPL to see that the "company currently known as SCO" has continued to use Linux in its various practices, it appears we're missing the primary issue: SCO believes it ownes Linux (and the IBM suit is somewhat of a red herring which SCO believes will destroy GPL in a court test, resulting in SCO's ownership of all that is Unix, Linux included). Remember, the more litigation and the more chaos from various IBM, Redhat, etc. lawsuits, the more evidence that supports SCO's claims that GPL simply doesn't work and traditional government assignment of property rights must be applied by the courts. Consider this sequence:
1. CalderaSCO has used GPL, IBM's used it, Red Hat, Linus, GNU and others have all used it. Ownership has become increasingly vague and traditional technology licensing means as constructed by the government have been circumvented.
2. GPL has caused an amazing mess where copyrights, patents and trademarks have been thrown in and this GPL not only hasn't prevented that contamination, but it arrogantly claims to supercede governmental authority to determine the assignment and licensing of ownership. Don't forget, Microsoft has warned us that GPL was a virus.
3. Things that supercede the government tend to irritate the government and will be thrown out. We all know about Microsoft's penalty for superceding authority; GPL's crimes are worse.
4. All the GPL code is stripped of its ownership and must revert back to claimants who have registration as issued by governmental authority. Chunks of GPL code are arbitrarily assigned by the USPTO based upon previous registrations (e.g. by patent holders, etc.). Imagine one big sourcecode clearinghouse created to distribute and maintain code rights, as well as serving as a central authority for code registration (sort of a software Star Chamber). For the paranoid, toss in the anti-strong encryption nuts and RIAA/ABA/film/anti-software piracy lobby who'd quickly throw support behind a government entity that required all code be licensed and inspected. Proposed anti-terrorism provisions could serve as a springboard for this move and see considerable industry and governmental support. Licensing is required for programmers (after all, this would stop people from writing computer viruses, trojans and other rogue code, right?)
5. SCO presents Unix copyright claims and ends up with some to most of the GPL base.
Certainly it's a stretch, but it seems to be a pragmatic one for an otherwise worthless entity with a Unix copyright claim. Furthermore, the timing of the move is well situated to capture current lobby momentum.
From that respect, it makes sense that SCO has distributed Linux and continues to claim that its very foundation was based on Linux solutions, as stated on its company profile page.
*scoove*
five different phones around and used them to compare?
We've gone through about as many here in our corner of the central US and have been equally disappointed (Verizon has the best network? Maybe everywhere else in the US, but not in the central states!).
- SprintPCS: Wonderful when you don't leave the metros. Useless outside. Dual-band for roaming gets you buy at a nasty price. Good customer service in our experience.
- Verizon: Has a real problem with sensing its digital network when it's too weak to use, and refusing to try analog. Verizon was rock solid for us until a software update a year ago January where they apparently attempted to shift to "try a digital signal at any cost." This isn't an issue in the metro areas, but when you're constantly on the outskirts, it makes the phone worthless. They have what appears to be some real cell transition issues in our metro as well and can't seem to fix them. Customer service is rather poor as well.
- Alltel: Actually had the best signal coverage and reliability. Unfortunately, they have some unusual billing practices. After billing the wrong service plan for the company cellphones, they were to credit the overcharges that were paid. Instead, they BILLED the credits. They continued to bill credits for three more rounds (i.e. they owe $2300, so they would label the bill with a credit memo, and then charge us an extra $2300 rather than giving it back, putting us a net $4600 off!). After six months of billing hell, we found an accounting person who figured it out and was going to fix it. They laid her off before she could get it done. What a disaster of a company.
*scoove*