4Gbps sounds really impressive and all until you realize that, currently, fiber has a theoretical maximum of 14.4Tbps per strand. Holy speed, Batman. You could share it with a thousand of your closest neighbors and still smoke cable. That there's some future-proofing. The costs are also highly variable depending on if you can do more or less aerial runs. The real cost of fiber lies in trenching, not equipment, and some cities have been smart enough to install fiber while trenching for other projects. (The city of American Fork, UT, as an example, is thinking about installing an upgraded network while they have open trenches for a new irrigation system.) As for speed... well, Provo rolled out service to 100,000 residents in about 2 years. UTOPIA passed about 100,000 residents themselves in a similar time-frame despite lawsuits from Qwest to halt the project.
Also consider that even though Comcast has been willing to demo a unit doing 150Mbps, there's a strong possibility that we aren't going to see those kinds of speeds at home anytime soon. We'll probably also continue to be stuck with asynchronous connections, something fiber networks eschew. Indeed, copper is only part of the problem: incumbents who are unwilling to deliver next-generation services make up more of it. That more than technical ability is going to kill copper.
As much as the cablecos would like to make us all go "oooh" and "aaah" over this technology, it's still incredibly unimpressive. We won't see rollouts of this technology for at least a year and most projections show just 40% of cable subscribers will have access to DOCSIS 3.0 by 2012. It's really not all that impressive considering that projects like UTOPIA and FIOS are currently delivering better speeds than cable and can ramp up to 100Mbps+ without much in the way of equipment upgrades. UTOPIA can even do 1Gbps+ with a minimum of new equipment.
This is just another way for incumbent providers to squeeze more blood from the turnip that is their aging copper-based plant. The stock market will reward them now, but the market as a whole will be punishing them in 5-10 years.
I really enjoy MMORPGs, but pricing is a big issue to me. Paying $15/mo when I barely have time to log 5 hours a month feels like I'm being taken for a ride. For someone who's dropping 10 hours or more a week, $15/mo is a steal in terms of cost per hour. For someone like me, however, it makes more sense to buy a block of hours (like a calling card of sorts) or pay a lower monthly cost for a restricted-use account.
This is one of the main reasons I quit WoW. Contrary to what more than a few other posters have said, there are plenty of missions that are either difficult or impossible to complete by yourself AND require an investment of 2 or more hours at a time. Sure, you can make it to level 60 without doing them, but you're missing out on a lot of the content. When I figure that I can't play a large chunk of the game without spending at least 10-20 hours a month on it, I feel like I'm being ripped off.
EVE gets some of it right by letting you train skills while logged out. Even if I'm not playing all of the time, I still feel like I'm getting some benefit from the game without giving up my Saturdays. Of all of the MMORPGs I'm aware of, this is the one I'd be most likely to start playing just for that reason. (I still wouldn't mind a drop in cost, however.)
Where an MMORPG can succeed is by capturing players like me. Make a game that can be played for 30-60 minutes at a time at a lower cost without sacrificing or foregoing content because of time constraints and you'll grab a significant number of price- and time-sensitive clients.
Looks like I'm the only one going to largely agree... to a point. Most of the cheap printers that HP makes are absolutely drek. Almost everything they produce that costs less than $100 breaks down in no time flat and they usually consume more ink in cleaning cycles than in actual printing. When I worked as an on-site tech, I can't tell you how many times I worked with an HP printer that was busted beyond all repair. About the only think worse were the low-end Lexmarks.
You know what always lasted? Okidata and Brother laser printers. Those things could chew through over 250K pages and still keep on trucking on the original drum. (Yes, I know: that's bad practice, kind of like the Saturn I once saw that was running decently at 100K miles after only 6 oil changes during its life.) The HP of yesteryear threw their hardware quality into the ditch about 7-8 years ago and only recently started making half-decent products again.
Take it from someone who had to fix a wide variety of printers: HP earned their bad wrap.
In the face of a patent infringement lawsuit from Sprint, they might just sell themselves to the company instead. The anticipated timing of such an announcement? April 24, when the hearing on the stay is set to occur. The slide in stock price definitely makes Vonage an attractive target for acquisition just for the customer base and Sprint has deep pockets to duke this thing out with.
... at least for those of us living here in Utah. They've caught a bit of flak from members of the Bloghive in these parts, especially with the hackjobresponses they've got going on. Of course, these are the same guys who tried to get a special E911 tax on VoIP and almost passed statewide franchise agreements, so you've got to know they're not entirely with it.
There's a lot of recoverable material in radioactive "waste" produced by power plants, but the expense of getting it back has, historically, been much more expensive than buying or producing new fissle material. Maybe with the increasing prices, we'll see more reprocessing, solving our waste issue and giving us a new supply. It's kind of like the high price of oil pushing new alternative energies.
And this press release is NOT going to keep me from looking at transferring my phone service Real Soon Now(TM) to another provider. As much as I like Vonage, I'm not going to ride this roller coaster of not knowing if or when my phone service will go off thanks to a company I've never done business with.
Amen to that. Far too many businesses promote someone to management because 1) they're been there for a long time and 2) they're good at their technical job functions. They don't, however, have a lick of personnel or project management skills. It also usually ends up taking someone from a job they do well and putting them in a job they do poorly, a double whammy. I'm at least smart enough to know that I shouldn't be given anything beyond a team lead position.
A company I used to work for would always order Dell systems because we got good pricing and decent service. Of course, the systems that came in would be wiped clean with a fresh image of Windows 2000 Pro with our volume license. Effectively we ended up double-paying for Windows to get what we needed.
It seems that neither AMD nor Intel has done a terribly good job at telling us what exactly LIVE! or Viiv are all about. I mean, most of us know it has something to do with being a HTPC and that there should be some kind of home theater goodies on-board, but what exactly are they? I'm seriously having flashbacks to the MPC spec of 15 years ago that so many PC manufacturers and software publishers passed around without explaining what the heck it meant.
Making up new branding like this is pretty much worthless to consumers. For all their flash the marketing guys can't really tell us what these symbols mean but doggonnit you can buy a bunch of items with the same pretty logo and know they'll probably work together.
Maybe you've heard of UTOPIA or iProvo? Both of them are large muni fiber projects in Utah that act as wholesalers. UTOPIA already serves six cities and iProvo just finished its build-out last year. Combined, they provide service to somewhere in the range of 300K+ users.
When you go to register the car, they can read the odometer and assess mileage based on the difference in reading between registrations. Doesn't sound very difficult at all to do it that way.
Then again, I suppose you don't get to prop up Silicon Valley with something that simplistic.
Good point. They barely maintained ballot status in Nevada. I would wonder, however, if the $100K spent on verifying the votes would be better spent on just gathering the needed signatures if/when the time comes.
My feel is that they don't care too much what the results are. They just want to see if they can find out if all the rumors of vote fraud in the state have any merit. I think it's just a PR stunt, something the Libertarians have always been good at.
I got wind of this watching Channel 8, and I'm not too surprised. It's never a matter of who cheated to win an election, but rather who cheated best. I'm wondering if 3rd-party registrations were also targetted: my party, the IAP, has grown 52% from Jan to Aug, and we nibble away at the Republican's ultra-conservative base.
That's what I don't get about the Democrats. They've spent all of their time knocking Nader off the ballot when they could be backing Peroutka in tight states to destroy Bush's conservative base. In the meantime, they're busy earning plenty of disrespect from those in the know for their technicallity-chasing.:-/
Well, actually... you reminded me of a gadget I had read about a while ago. It was a combination oven and refrigerator. Now, before you go "WTF", let me explain. Let's say you prepare a roast that needs to marinade, and you'd like to have it ready to go by the time you get home from work. Well, you leave it in the oven with the fridge function on, and then you remotely tell it to start cooking so that it's done when you get home.
Yeah, it's total gadgety, but there *is* sometimes applicability.
I doubt the lawsuit would hold too much water, but it's good press coverage. The Libertarians certainly seem to know how to do that much. I personally agree with their points, but the courts often seem to be stacked in the favor of the ruling party (parties?).
Take a look at Maine's system and then contact your state legislators. The votes are assigned to the winner of each congressional district with the overall winner of the state's popular vote pickup up the last two. For instance, a candidate wins CD-1 and CD-2, but loses CD-3. He gets 55% of the total vote. He grabs 4 electoral votes, the "loser" gets 1. The "winner-take-all" system gets thunked, the states get to keep their power, and it doesn't (literally) take an act of Congress to get it passed.
Well, I felt compelled to give them $20 and skip going out to eat this weekend, and give them the endorsement of the Independent American Party of Clark County, Nevada. I'm glad they exist.
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4Gbps sounds really impressive and all until you realize that, currently, fiber has a theoretical maximum of 14.4Tbps per strand. Holy speed, Batman. You could share it with a thousand of your closest neighbors and still smoke cable. That there's some future-proofing. The costs are also highly variable depending on if you can do more or less aerial runs. The real cost of fiber lies in trenching, not equipment, and some cities have been smart enough to install fiber while trenching for other projects. (The city of American Fork, UT, as an example, is thinking about installing an upgraded network while they have open trenches for a new irrigation system.) As for speed... well, Provo rolled out service to 100,000 residents in about 2 years. UTOPIA passed about 100,000 residents themselves in a similar time-frame despite lawsuits from Qwest to halt the project. Also consider that even though Comcast has been willing to demo a unit doing 150Mbps, there's a strong possibility that we aren't going to see those kinds of speeds at home anytime soon. We'll probably also continue to be stuck with asynchronous connections, something fiber networks eschew. Indeed, copper is only part of the problem: incumbents who are unwilling to deliver next-generation services make up more of it. That more than technical ability is going to kill copper.
As much as the cablecos would like to make us all go "oooh" and "aaah" over this technology, it's still incredibly unimpressive. We won't see rollouts of this technology for at least a year and most projections show just 40% of cable subscribers will have access to DOCSIS 3.0 by 2012. It's really not all that impressive considering that projects like UTOPIA and FIOS are currently delivering better speeds than cable and can ramp up to 100Mbps+ without much in the way of equipment upgrades. UTOPIA can even do 1Gbps+ with a minimum of new equipment. This is just another way for incumbent providers to squeeze more blood from the turnip that is their aging copper-based plant. The stock market will reward them now, but the market as a whole will be punishing them in 5-10 years.
I really enjoy MMORPGs, but pricing is a big issue to me. Paying $15/mo when I barely have time to log 5 hours a month feels like I'm being taken for a ride. For someone who's dropping 10 hours or more a week, $15/mo is a steal in terms of cost per hour. For someone like me, however, it makes more sense to buy a block of hours (like a calling card of sorts) or pay a lower monthly cost for a restricted-use account. This is one of the main reasons I quit WoW. Contrary to what more than a few other posters have said, there are plenty of missions that are either difficult or impossible to complete by yourself AND require an investment of 2 or more hours at a time. Sure, you can make it to level 60 without doing them, but you're missing out on a lot of the content. When I figure that I can't play a large chunk of the game without spending at least 10-20 hours a month on it, I feel like I'm being ripped off. EVE gets some of it right by letting you train skills while logged out. Even if I'm not playing all of the time, I still feel like I'm getting some benefit from the game without giving up my Saturdays. Of all of the MMORPGs I'm aware of, this is the one I'd be most likely to start playing just for that reason. (I still wouldn't mind a drop in cost, however.) Where an MMORPG can succeed is by capturing players like me. Make a game that can be played for 30-60 minutes at a time at a lower cost without sacrificing or foregoing content because of time constraints and you'll grab a significant number of price- and time-sensitive clients.
I had an HL-1240 where I never had to do that. Go figure.
Looks like I'm the only one going to largely agree... to a point. Most of the cheap printers that HP makes are absolutely drek. Almost everything they produce that costs less than $100 breaks down in no time flat and they usually consume more ink in cleaning cycles than in actual printing. When I worked as an on-site tech, I can't tell you how many times I worked with an HP printer that was busted beyond all repair. About the only think worse were the low-end Lexmarks. You know what always lasted? Okidata and Brother laser printers. Those things could chew through over 250K pages and still keep on trucking on the original drum. (Yes, I know: that's bad practice, kind of like the Saturn I once saw that was running decently at 100K miles after only 6 oil changes during its life.) The HP of yesteryear threw their hardware quality into the ditch about 7-8 years ago and only recently started making half-decent products again. Take it from someone who had to fix a wide variety of printers: HP earned their bad wrap.
In the face of a patent infringement lawsuit from Sprint, they might just sell themselves to the company instead. The anticipated timing of such an announcement? April 24, when the hearing on the stay is set to occur. The slide in stock price definitely makes Vonage an attractive target for acquisition just for the customer base and Sprint has deep pockets to duke this thing out with.
... at least for those of us living here in Utah. They've caught a bit of flak from members of the Bloghive in these parts, especially with the hackjob responses they've got going on. Of course, these are the same guys who tried to get a special E911 tax on VoIP and almost passed statewide franchise agreements, so you've got to know they're not entirely with it.
There's a lot of recoverable material in radioactive "waste" produced by power plants, but the expense of getting it back has, historically, been much more expensive than buying or producing new fissle material. Maybe with the increasing prices, we'll see more reprocessing, solving our waste issue and giving us a new supply. It's kind of like the high price of oil pushing new alternative energies.
Oh, my options are *much* worse. I'd have to look at service from Qwest. *shudder*
And this press release is NOT going to keep me from looking at transferring my phone service Real Soon Now(TM) to another provider. As much as I like Vonage, I'm not going to ride this roller coaster of not knowing if or when my phone service will go off thanks to a company I've never done business with.
Amen to that. Far too many businesses promote someone to management because 1) they're been there for a long time and 2) they're good at their technical job functions. They don't, however, have a lick of personnel or project management skills. It also usually ends up taking someone from a job they do well and putting them in a job they do poorly, a double whammy. I'm at least smart enough to know that I shouldn't be given anything beyond a team lead position.
I happen to be working with Live Nation on implementing my company's software for them. Thank goodness it has nothing to do with this little tidbit.
A company I used to work for would always order Dell systems because we got good pricing and decent service. Of course, the systems that came in would be wiped clean with a fresh image of Windows 2000 Pro with our volume license. Effectively we ended up double-paying for Windows to get what we needed.
It seems that neither AMD nor Intel has done a terribly good job at telling us what exactly LIVE! or Viiv are all about. I mean, most of us know it has something to do with being a HTPC and that there should be some kind of home theater goodies on-board, but what exactly are they? I'm seriously having flashbacks to the MPC spec of 15 years ago that so many PC manufacturers and software publishers passed around without explaining what the heck it meant. Making up new branding like this is pretty much worthless to consumers. For all their flash the marketing guys can't really tell us what these symbols mean but doggonnit you can buy a bunch of items with the same pretty logo and know they'll probably work together.
Maybe you've heard of UTOPIA or iProvo? Both of them are large muni fiber projects in Utah that act as wholesalers. UTOPIA already serves six cities and iProvo just finished its build-out last year. Combined, they provide service to somewhere in the range of 300K+ users.
When you go to register the car, they can read the odometer and assess mileage based on the difference in reading between registrations. Doesn't sound very difficult at all to do it that way.
Then again, I suppose you don't get to prop up Silicon Valley with something that simplistic.
Good point. They barely maintained ballot status in Nevada. I would wonder, however, if the $100K spent on verifying the votes would be better spent on just gathering the needed signatures if/when the time comes.
My feel is that they don't care too much what the results are. They just want to see if they can find out if all the rumors of vote fraud in the state have any merit. I think it's just a PR stunt, something the Libertarians have always been good at.
You can bet I'll sue for lack of due process if I get slapped onto a no-fly list without a trial.
I got wind of this watching Channel 8, and I'm not too surprised. It's never a matter of who cheated to win an election, but rather who cheated best. I'm wondering if 3rd-party registrations were also targetted: my party, the IAP, has grown 52% from Jan to Aug, and we nibble away at the Republican's ultra-conservative base.
That's what I don't get about the Democrats. They've spent all of their time knocking Nader off the ballot when they could be backing Peroutka in tight states to destroy Bush's conservative base. In the meantime, they're busy earning plenty of disrespect from those in the know for their technicallity-chasing. :-/
Well, actually... you reminded me of a gadget I had read about a while ago. It was a combination oven and refrigerator. Now, before you go "WTF", let me explain. Let's say you prepare a roast that needs to marinade, and you'd like to have it ready to go by the time you get home from work. Well, you leave it in the oven with the fridge function on, and then you remotely tell it to start cooking so that it's done when you get home.
Yeah, it's total gadgety, but there *is* sometimes applicability.
I doubt the lawsuit would hold too much water, but it's good press coverage. The Libertarians certainly seem to know how to do that much. I personally agree with their points, but the courts often seem to be stacked in the favor of the ruling party (parties?).
Take a look at Maine's system and then contact your state legislators. The votes are assigned to the winner of each congressional district with the overall winner of the state's popular vote pickup up the last two. For instance, a candidate wins CD-1 and CD-2, but loses CD-3. He gets 55% of the total vote. He grabs 4 electoral votes, the "loser" gets 1. The "winner-take-all" system gets thunked, the states get to keep their power, and it doesn't (literally) take an act of Congress to get it passed.
Well, I felt compelled to give them $20 and skip going out to eat this weekend, and give them the endorsement of the Independent American Party of Clark County, Nevada. I'm glad they exist.