Are you sure that is going to be true in a couple of years from now, when more netbooks have been sold with Linux on them, and people go online to watch tv shows?
Oh! 3Com 3C-509, more specifically 3C-509b, happens to be the most compatible network card on the planet (according to me anyway) and just plain works all the time in any operating system!:-)
Okay, I think you got the wrong impression of what I wrote (I don't have any excuse for that, so I'll shamelessly excuse myself by mentioning that English is not my native tongue - Swedish is;). I didn't mean my sentences to come out as sounding like "open source sucks" or something like that. But when I reread what I wrote, I think it might as well have sounded like it, unintentionally. Ironically my post was so easily misunderstood because I kept it short and brought up two points instead of giving a full post with the whole picture.
On the contrary, I love open source and I also founded an OSS game project 5 years ago called Pizza Business. I managed to find two developers who were very ambitious in helping me out with realizing my plan of making a pizza restaurant simulation. For that I am very happy and it was a great, great experience to be part of that! It has gotten a lot of page hits over time and somehow I believe that Google has helped a bit in getting the 20,000+ page hits so far achieved, because I usually show up as the 3rd search result for "Pizza Business".
On occasion, other people "outside" of the project contributed patches to fix things they had trouble with getting to work on their particular system, so I do know for a fact that fame is not a key factor in any way at all. They mostly want the application to compile and run successfully. At the same time, there are also those who have more selfish interests such as getting fame. I don't see anything wrong with it though since their greed helps the community to get the code done, even if it's - yeah, selfish.
Actually I shouldn't have phrased it as "willing to help" but rather: "come in and become an active developer".
Well, yeah. There will be people willing to help if there's either:
1) One determined project leader who wants to see the project progress and result in something good
or
2) Some people who believe they can make a significant amount of internet fame and attention by being the heroes that made something "impossible" into "perfectly working", possibly (but not necessarly) seeing the potential of software companies wanting to hire them afterwards.
I actually know of a 45-something dollar DVD player which can't read certain copy-protected DVD movies. I know this because I know someone who didn't listen to my advice on buying something with higher quality and more features. I suppose that the low price point made it hard to get revenues on the units if they had been properly licensed for decrypting certain copy protection techniques? In any case, it means buying DVD movies is more to it than just looking for your favourite films - it also has to work with playback.
But if those opportunities lead to nothing serious, then it still doesn't matter. What matters though, is for Apple to make sure they fix every vital security flaw they can with current software, implement even smarter security design in the future and continue to be the better choice for those who use their computer for traditional computing, ie. in the creative and journalistic area, internet-related usage (e-mail, web, IM, SFTP) and *NIX (ssh, text editing, programming, etc).
Yeah I agree that it's not important to have extreme performance computers. The functionality is at focus here, not CPU power show-off. As I have understood it, the OLPC is good at doing what it needs to do.
You can shut it off completely with one click from a menu:
Use spotlight, search for trackpad. Choose (System Preferences) "Keyboard and mouse", the first option. The Trackpad section will already be hilighted, so just tick the two checkboxes "Ignore accidental trackpad input" (for those occasions you describe hitting it by mistake..) and "Ignore trackpad when mouse is present". That latter option will disable the trackpad, but I would personally be careful about it since it will be more of a hassle to use the computer if you forget to bring an external mouse at some point, or if it malfunctions...;P What do you think? Were you already aware of that?
You are corrent and you are wrong, at the same time. The answer is not a big "YES!" or big "NO!", unfortunately. It's more complicated than that. I feel that it's possible for me to write a long story about all the experiences I have encountered on fiberoptic installations, for example at where I used to live for 18 years until the year 2005 - how the ISP management and router equipment was a factor and not the neighbourhood network.
But the least tedious answer I can give you, is that you are right about the fact a 100 Mbit connection in Scandinavia will not always give you the full 100 Mbits per second they advertise. It's mostly a way of pissing contest, sort of like the AMD 1.8 Ghz vs Intel 3.4 Ghz speed wars that looked cool in computer magazine ads but tend to surprise regular people in real life when they make a real-world test at home (as if anyone cared who got the fastest CPU among friends, hehe).
However, there's a real difference between 100 Mbit upstream/10 Mbit downstream connections that the ISP Bredbandsbolaget (translation: "The Broadband Company") offers neighbourhood fiber residents, and the 100 Mbit upstream/100 Mbit downstream bandwidth which a much less-known ISP called Riksnet can offer a select group of neighbourhoods. Because of that Bredbandsbolaget has got so relatively many customers in Sweden on LAN/fiber, I happen to know a great deal of friends who connect to internet that way: the speeds happen to vary. 100 Mbit speeds are possible to achieve within the nation-wide ISP network, exactly as you said yourself, while I personally have measured a mere 30 Mbit/s downstream speed to other sources, even within Sweden and not outside country borders. So yes, they fail in giving home residents 100 Mbit speeds outside their own network(s).
However, even though they do, the speeds they offer are promised speeds and not a total 100 Mbit share for all neighbours. It's not dedicated per se, afaik, but very powerful Cisco routers are installed in the neighbourhoods, so that there is room for promised speeds to every household, with promised speeds regardless of how much bandwidth your neighbour uses. Parallel connections to each household. Pretty impressing for a measly 320 SEK per month (45 USD with me setting the currency at 7 SEK per dollar), sometimes set at 289 SEK/month if there is a huge "Donald Trump-like" contract involved.
Riksnet on the other hand is the 2nd fiberoptic ISP I know of, among the top-notchers in Sweden. They have a different model than Bredbandsbolaget. You guys who are reading my post, have you ever heard about Riksnet before? No? Even if you're a Swede? Still "no"? Guess what, they don't pay huge sums of advertising money on promoting themselves nation-wide. They don't have a fancy website either. http://www.riksnet.se/omriksnet.php?page=1 (Unfortunately I was not able to find any English section on their site, but it might help if other multiple Swedish Slashdotters or mods can confirm what I'm pointing to).
Let's compare the two:
* Bredbandsbolaget invest in neighbourhoods who want to have a fiberoptic/LAN hybrid network deployed. Bredbandsbolaget owns all the equipment, the cables and support the maintenance as well as offer telephone support to the customers who live there.
* Riksnet does not invest in neighbourhood infrastructure. Instead, when they talk to interested neighbourhoods about a contract, the neighbourhood needs to shell out money for the infrastructure themselves, if there currently is none deployed already. When this part has been taken care of, which will take a long time to do if there is no deployment with infrastructure already in place. You gotta dig down cables and all that. With infrastructure in place, Riksnet offers to strike a contractual deal with the neighbourhood and say: "this is what we offer to you: 100 Mbit/100 Mbit full duplex speeds with more capacity possible if you're ready for it some day. The price is going to
It's done in Sweden already by the provider ComHem. But since analog cable is part of the rent (they strike deals with the landlords and such), you will continue to have analog reception and pay for it that way, until the day the cable company chooses to turn off the analog part.
www.comhemSLASHDOT.se/portal/comhem/tv_allakanaler (Obviously, just delete slashdot from the domain address. I'm making a lame attempt at spam protecting the link! Even though it's not in English, you have logos and channel names to look at which will make enough sense for you it to be a worthwhile look)
Anyway, say you choose their digital tv offering from this provider, you can opt for what they call the Small package and select from (more than) 130 channels which ones you want, a la carte. Regular content channels are priced around "4 USD/month per channel" while there are also premium sports and movie channels that have higher monthly prices - those that I looked at cost around 13 or 14 USD/month per channel. They also have another digital tv subscription called Medium 8 Favourites. You pay a fixed price of about 22 USD/month and get to choose 8 out of your favourite channels, and you can choose from the same list linked to above in the Small package. Every 30 days you can change to 8 other favourites if you feel like you want to do that. If it's done via login on their website it doesn't cost anything. If you on the other hand call their customer service number, they take 2 dollars in administration fee for the job.
There is also a competing cable company called Tele2Vision which offers an a la carte model as well, but theirs is different. They already give you a fixed price to pay per month and a MUCH smaller channel list to make choices from. In that case also, you have a bare minimum of channels to choose, so even if you have found 5 that you want, you still have to randomly choose other ones on top of that or try choose a couple of ones who are "the least bad".
One more thing... Here in Sweden, individual households cannot unsubscribe from a cable company and then choose another cable company. It's not their decision, it's up to the landlord or condoe neighbourhood responsibles to cancel the contract with the cable company and make a new deal with another company. Are americans free to switch between cable providers at any time if they want to?
Since I'm not an american myself and have never seen how your cable networks are setup and such, I have three questions in order to discuss this matter: 1. Are these cable tv packages that you all talk about, digital or are they for analog cable? 2. What's the main difference between choosing analog over digital cable in the US? 2. When you live in a rental apartment or condoe, as opposed to full house, do you always have to pay to get any basic cable offering at all - are you otherwise left for only receiving free-over-the-air channels?
Here in Sweden, the situation looks as follows: * AFAIK, In 98 % of the times, full-house owners only receive OTA channels over roof antenna. And no, they don't use "rabbit ears". The exception to OTA reception are those who have had a way to get cable installed to their house but even though some people have that, it's a rare situation overall, but I still know one particular case, in a whole urban territory where it's topographically difficult to receive OTA because of mountain terrain, so almost everyone have opted for cable installations there.
* In 97 % of the time, rental apartments and condoes are equipped with analog cable which comes pre-bundled with the rent; there's usually not a way to unsubscribe. (There are exceptions to the rule in selected areas of the country, hence the 97 % number). Even in cases where you can choose to not subscribe, the cable companies are legally obligated to continue broadcast the government public service channels to those opt-out households.
* Digital cable is an option for most people in the country who are on cable, but the last time I checked, there are still some rare findings of places where the landlord or neighbourhoods haven't upgraded to the full offerings from the cable company. Even though digital cable is an option for most, it hasn't catched on much. Approximately 10 % have so far subscribed to digital for one set-top box. The analog offering is still intact. Note: in a few specific areas of the country, there are rental apartments equipped with digital-only setups where analog is not an option any longer.
(Disclaimer: My statistical numbers aren't based on real numbers from the cable companies, but rather rough estimations of my technical knowledge. I base them on how I view the market today and what all my friends and acquaintences including a lot of online forum members have opted for...)
And perhaps also the fact that XBOX360 has got HD DVD only as a separate buying option. Yeah, I'm talking specifically about the effects of console gaming machines in this case, since you mentioned the PS3 I thought it was valid to add.
Unfortunately it's not ported at all. EA just want to sound like they are. It still runs Windows code, as opposed to Universal Binary-based games which run on any fairly recent Mac whether PPC or Intel, 100 % natively. Electronic Arts claim that they chose this solution to be able to deliver Mac games out the door as fast as they deliver Mac games. What does that mean? Well, sounds like to me they rely on DirectX too much instead of using OpenGL which is a lot more portable. DirectX is Windows-only, so.
I personally don't care about computer gaming, rather a console gamer myself. But I do care about the fact that (one of) the biggest companies in the gaming world don't think enough Mac users will appreciate having one of the latest games available. I know a lot of home Mac users do, I see it all the time on online forums among the switchers. They are used to playing games occasionally.
I'm wondering what the difference is between EA and Blizzard when it comes to the Mac games priority. Is it because Blizzard do a lot of MMORPGs that might be easier to code (is it?) while EA make racing games and other mostly single-player games except Battlefield from Digital Illusions? If it matters at all, I don't know.
You do realize who owns all business in communism, right? Hehe. Well, it's not supposed to be taken too literally of course, but for the sake of it: yes, the government controls the economy and creates the job opportunities themselves. Very strict. If people get unemployed, they go make a giant shoe factory and wham - unemployment is not a big issue anymore. Sounds nice in theory, but it's a flawed system.
Anyway...
While the United States still fights with trying to figure out this internet thing called "boader bandage", "brad bond" or broadband, so to speak, the rest of the world makes steady progress in that area. At the same time, US customers who are keen on getting real broadband connections for a decent market price can't always get it because of the corporate monopoly manipulation, as I understand it from the comments here on this topic. I used to believe that the slow adoption of broadband in the US had to do with greed and difficulties for, i.e, startups to get investment money to build or rent fiberoptic infrastructure to compete with existing monopolies or because of expenses in expanding the coverage and buying more equipment, etc, etc. It was just sad to find out today it had nothing to do with unwillingness, but rather with corruption and success in labeling competition as illegal.
I feel for you people "over there" who are frustrated about the situation. It's a shame you have to live with that today. I do understand the short-term scare CEOs of telecom monopolies have, who haven't been exposed to balanced competition and have their business model focused around being expensive. But it doesn't make any sense in the long-term because competition is good for every company. It creates a need to improve, to innovate more and get better at what they do. But in the eyes of monopolies, who just sit still and cash in money and have done that for SEVERAL decades, it seems to work different. Innovation is not interesting, right. Only spend when absolutely necessary. Maximize profits - nothing else matters. Maximize, maximize...
I wish for United States to get real broadband with sane competition ASAP. Here in Europe we regulate a lot on the market to get the monopolies behave more decent. When shouting several times at the telecom dogs fail to work, the European Union have had to bitch slap them;). But hey, it works. Just too bad it has to go that far - shouldn't need to:-/
This is just plain right out SICK! How can this be tolerated? I expect this from Fidel Castro and Mao Tse Tung, but not to be tolerated with american politicians. Are there are politicians who understand the problem and want to do something about it?
It's insane to make good offers of fast internet connections illegal because competitors don't settle for anything less than 800 % profit margins for low-speed Always-On internet (I don't call it broadband).
I have thought about this more than once. Being a Swede myself I know how the broadband market works like here. It works pretty decent, but it depends on where you live and how you set to live (a big full house, an apartment or a condoe). It's not optimally priced nor speedy if you live in the wrong places.
Anyway... we have only 9 million inhabitants in this country, and that's including the little babies and people below adult or even teen ages. I actually don't know how many households we have since that would be a better number to judge by. The population number is low and you would think that the profits aren't that spectacular with only a couple of millions of broadband internet users, and maybe it isn't all that profitable, I don't know. In the US, there is the potential of connecting at the least 130-150 million households to give a very low number, right, knowing that as much as half of the 300 million people in the US are poor (if I got my facts straight). If there was a good plan with politicians knowing what the internet is and how a computer works, plus a motivation to do it, any country should be able to deploy nation-wide broadband. If there are only 5 people living in a village with no neighbours for several hundreds of miles away, those people should still be able to connect somehow. Perhaps by settling with an upcoming launch of WiMAX providing long-distance wireless instead of fiberoptics?
I think that the strategy for a proper broadband expansion in the United States should be organized in a way that made sense to everyone and didn't base itself on short-term greed and monopoly creation but rather on long-term winnings in terms of people being connected everywhere to high-speed internet, making it possible for small towns to grow into big cities because of motivation for tech people to settle there and make businesses, people building houses there, etc. Everyday private consumers always enabled to use state of the art online-based services & technologies as well as small local companies being able to do business online with each other in a more efficient way, including a simplistic thing like connecting one company's different offices to each other + the company headquarter with low-latency. High-quality infrastructure is what creates opportunities and even population growth. Where would people be today if there were no trains or subways to get to work with, for those that need to and are fed up with traffic jams in the morning?
I think this situation will solve itself in the next 50 years, because by then the old people who grew up with no radio and TV will be gone since long. Only people who take internet for granted will be alive, and even as politicians they will want to access high-speed internet everywhere in the country.
(Sorry for my submission being rough - it's half past midnight over here and I can't think straight right now)
That's Telia's filter and sure, they are a dominant player on the market, but there are many others as well. I can access Piratebay.org all I want, no problem. Maybe it should have been mentioned before posting this news to the public, that not all of (us) Swedes are affected by this decision. Funny though: Telia actually have the least interesting internet connection offers to customers who want to do illegal filesharing online. I know they offer 10 Mbit (and possibly 100 Mbit somewhere too?) fiberoptic connections on a couple of places in the country, but it's very uncommon. They are however the most powerful on the ADSL2+ market because of their control of telephone stations that competing companies want to get more lucrative access to.
Seriously, why not? My first impression though was Apple's intension is:
"To make sure the hype and buzz about iPhone continues wildly after the release instead of only before the release". Unnecessary to let the free advertising slow down in pace, right?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that is going to be true in a couple of years from now, when more netbooks have been sold with Linux on them, and people go online to watch tv shows?
Oh! :-)
3Com 3C-509, more specifically 3C-509b, happens to be the most compatible network card on the planet (according to me anyway) and just plain works all the time in any operating system!
Just wanted to add that.
Especially considering that Apple's home address resides on 1 Infinite Loop ... :)
Okay, I think you got the wrong impression of what I wrote (I don't have any excuse for that, so I'll shamelessly excuse myself by mentioning that English is not my native tongue - Swedish is ;). I didn't mean my sentences to come out as sounding like "open source sucks" or something like that. But when I reread what I wrote, I think it might as well have sounded like it, unintentionally. Ironically my post was so easily misunderstood because I kept it short and brought up two points instead of giving a full post with the whole picture.
On the contrary, I love open source and I also founded an OSS game project 5 years ago called Pizza Business. I managed to find two developers who were very ambitious in helping me out with realizing my plan of making a pizza restaurant simulation. For that I am very happy and it was a great, great experience to be part of that!
It has gotten a lot of page hits over time and somehow I believe that Google has helped a bit in getting the 20,000+ page hits so far achieved, because I usually show up as the 3rd search result for "Pizza Business".
On occasion, other people "outside" of the project contributed patches to fix things they had trouble with getting to work on their particular system, so I do know for a fact that fame is not a key factor in any way at all. They mostly want the application to compile and run successfully. At the same time, there are also those who have more selfish interests such as getting fame. I don't see anything wrong with it though since their greed helps the community to get the code done, even if it's - yeah, selfish.
Actually I shouldn't have phrased it as "willing to help" but rather: "come in and become an active developer".
Well, yeah. There will be people willing to help if there's either:
1) One determined project leader who wants to see the project progress and result in something good
or
2) Some people who believe they can make a significant amount of internet fame and attention by being the heroes that made something "impossible" into "perfectly working", possibly (but not necessarly) seeing the potential of software companies wanting to hire them afterwards.
I don't think you NEED to say you're from the Silicon Valley area. Your Slashdot ID number is 18 and that pretty much says it already ;-)
A friend of mine has got 100/100 Mbit fiberoptics in his condoe apartment.
But yeah, it's not in the US and it's not via Verizon.
Good things cost money. Deal with it ;-)
(+3 Funny anyone?)
One of the things I remember from playing the sequel, SimCity 2000, is that the GUI looks like it's been ported from the Mac.
I actually know of a 45-something dollar DVD player which can't read certain copy-protected DVD movies. I know this because I know someone who didn't listen to my advice on buying something with higher quality and more features. I suppose that the low price point made it hard to get revenues on the units if they had been properly licensed for decrypting certain copy protection techniques? In any case, it means buying DVD movies is more to it than just looking for your favourite films - it also has to work with playback.
But if those opportunities lead to nothing serious, then it still doesn't matter.
What matters though, is for Apple to make sure they fix every vital security flaw they can with current software, implement even smarter security design in the future and continue to be the better choice for those who use their computer for traditional computing, ie. in the creative and journalistic area, internet-related usage (e-mail, web, IM, SFTP) and *NIX (ssh, text editing, programming, etc).
Yeah I agree that it's not important to have extreme performance computers. The functionality is at focus here, not CPU power show-off. As I have understood it, the OLPC is good at doing what it needs to do.
What relevance does the German bring? (Just curious) :-)
You can shut it off completely with one click from a menu:
... ;P
Use spotlight, search for trackpad. Choose (System Preferences) "Keyboard and mouse", the first option.
The Trackpad section will already be hilighted, so just tick the two checkboxes "Ignore accidental trackpad input" (for those occasions you describe hitting it by mistake..) and "Ignore trackpad when mouse is present". That latter option will disable the trackpad, but I would personally be careful about it since it will be more of a hassle to use the computer if you forget to bring an external mouse at some point, or if it malfunctions
What do you think? Were you already aware of that?
You forgot one thing on the list: * ... and Duke Nukem 4ever has been released! ;-) Yeah, dream on..
You are corrent and you are wrong, at the same time. The answer is not a big "YES!" or big "NO!", unfortunately. It's more complicated than that.
I feel that it's possible for me to write a long story about all the experiences I have encountered on fiberoptic installations, for example at where I used to live for 18 years until the year 2005 - how the ISP management and router equipment was a factor and not the neighbourhood network.
But the least tedious answer I can give you, is that you are right about the fact a 100 Mbit connection in Scandinavia will not always give you the full 100 Mbits per second they advertise. It's mostly a way of pissing contest, sort of like the AMD 1.8 Ghz vs Intel 3.4 Ghz speed wars that looked cool in computer magazine ads but tend to surprise regular people in real life when they make a real-world test at home (as if anyone cared who got the fastest CPU among friends, hehe).
However, there's a real difference between 100 Mbit upstream/10 Mbit downstream connections that the ISP Bredbandsbolaget (translation: "The Broadband Company") offers neighbourhood fiber residents, and the 100 Mbit upstream/100 Mbit downstream bandwidth which a much less-known ISP called Riksnet can offer a select group of neighbourhoods. Because of that Bredbandsbolaget has got so relatively many customers in Sweden on LAN/fiber, I happen to know a great deal of friends who connect to internet that way: the speeds happen to vary. 100 Mbit speeds are possible to achieve within the nation-wide ISP network, exactly as you said yourself, while I personally have measured a mere 30 Mbit/s downstream speed to other sources, even within Sweden and not outside country borders. So yes, they fail in giving home residents 100 Mbit speeds outside their own network(s).
However, even though they do, the speeds they offer are promised speeds and not a total 100 Mbit share for all neighbours. It's not dedicated per se, afaik, but very powerful Cisco routers are installed in the neighbourhoods, so that there is room for promised speeds to every household, with promised speeds regardless of how much bandwidth your neighbour uses. Parallel connections to each household. Pretty impressing for a measly 320 SEK per month (45 USD with me setting the currency at 7 SEK per dollar), sometimes set at 289 SEK/month if there is a huge "Donald Trump-like" contract involved.
Riksnet on the other hand is the 2nd fiberoptic ISP I know of, among the top-notchers in Sweden. They have a different model than Bredbandsbolaget. You guys who are reading my post, have you ever heard about Riksnet before? No? Even if you're a Swede? Still "no"? Guess what, they don't pay huge sums of advertising money on promoting themselves nation-wide. They don't have a fancy website either.
http://www.riksnet.se/omriksnet.php?page=1
(Unfortunately I was not able to find any English section on their site, but it might help if other multiple Swedish Slashdotters or mods can confirm what I'm pointing to).
Let's compare the two:
* Bredbandsbolaget invest in neighbourhoods who want to have a fiberoptic/LAN hybrid network deployed. Bredbandsbolaget owns all the equipment, the cables and support the maintenance as well as offer telephone support to the customers who live there.
* Riksnet does not invest in neighbourhood infrastructure. Instead, when they talk to interested neighbourhoods about a contract, the neighbourhood needs to shell out money for the infrastructure themselves, if there currently is none deployed already. When this part has been taken care of, which will take a long time to do if there is no deployment with infrastructure already in place. You gotta dig down cables and all that. With infrastructure in place, Riksnet offers to strike a contractual deal with the neighbourhood and say: "this is what we offer to you: 100 Mbit/100 Mbit full duplex speeds with more capacity possible if you're ready for it some day. The price is going to
It's done in Sweden already by the provider ComHem.
r
...
But since analog cable is part of the rent (they strike deals with the landlords and such), you will continue to have analog reception and pay for it that way, until the day the cable company chooses to turn off the analog part.
www.comhemSLASHDOT.se/portal/comhem/tv_allakanale
(Obviously, just delete slashdot from the domain address. I'm making a lame attempt at spam protecting the link! Even though it's not in English, you have logos and channel names to look at which will make enough sense for you it to be a worthwhile look)
Anyway, say you choose their digital tv offering from this provider, you can opt for what they call the Small package and select from (more than) 130 channels which ones you want, a la carte. Regular content channels are priced around "4 USD/month per channel" while there are also premium sports and movie channels that have higher monthly prices - those that I looked at cost around 13 or 14 USD/month per channel. They also have another digital tv subscription called Medium 8 Favourites. You pay a fixed price of about 22 USD/month and get to choose 8 out of your favourite channels, and you can choose from the same list linked to above in the Small package. Every 30 days you can change to 8 other favourites if you feel like you want to do that. If it's done via login on their website it doesn't cost anything. If you on the other hand call their customer service number, they take 2 dollars in administration fee for the job.
There is also a competing cable company called Tele2Vision which offers an a la carte model as well, but theirs is different. They already give you a fixed price to pay per month and a MUCH smaller channel list to make choices from. In that case also, you have a bare minimum of channels to choose, so even if you have found 5 that you want, you still have to randomly choose other ones on top of that or try choose a couple of ones who are "the least bad".
One more thing
Here in Sweden, individual households cannot unsubscribe from a cable company and then choose another cable company. It's not their decision, it's up to the landlord or condoe neighbourhood responsibles to cancel the contract with the cable company and make a new deal with another company. Are americans free to switch between cable providers at any time if they want to?
Since I'm not an american myself and have never seen how your cable networks are setup and such, I have three questions in order to discuss this matter:
...)
1. Are these cable tv packages that you all talk about, digital or are they for analog cable?
2. What's the main difference between choosing analog over digital cable in the US?
2. When you live in a rental apartment or condoe, as opposed to full house, do you always have to pay to get any basic cable offering at all - are you otherwise left for only receiving free-over-the-air channels?
Here in Sweden, the situation looks as follows:
* AFAIK, In 98 % of the times, full-house owners only receive OTA channels over roof antenna. And no, they don't use "rabbit ears". The exception to OTA reception are those who have had a way to get cable installed to their house but even though some people have that, it's a rare situation overall, but I still know one particular case, in a whole urban territory where it's topographically difficult to receive OTA because of mountain terrain, so almost everyone have opted for cable installations there.
* In 97 % of the time, rental apartments and condoes are equipped with analog cable which comes pre-bundled with the rent; there's usually not a way to unsubscribe. (There are exceptions to the rule in selected areas of the country, hence the 97 % number). Even in cases where you can choose to not subscribe, the cable companies are legally obligated to continue broadcast the government public service channels to those opt-out households.
* Digital cable is an option for most people in the country who are on cable, but the last time I checked, there are still some rare findings of places where the landlord or neighbourhoods haven't upgraded to the full offerings from the cable company. Even though digital cable is an option for most, it hasn't catched on much. Approximately 10 % have so far subscribed to digital for one set-top box. The analog offering is still intact. Note: in a few specific areas of the country, there are rental apartments equipped with digital-only setups where analog is not an option any longer.
(Disclaimer: My statistical numbers aren't based on real numbers from the cable companies, but rather rough estimations of my technical knowledge. I base them on how I view the market today and what all my friends and acquaintences including a lot of online forum members have opted for
And perhaps also the fact that XBOX360 has got HD DVD only as a separate buying option. Yeah, I'm talking specifically about the effects of console gaming machines in this case, since you mentioned the PS3 I thought it was valid to add.
Unfortunately it's not ported at all. EA just want to sound like they are.
It still runs Windows code, as opposed to Universal Binary-based games which run on any fairly recent Mac whether PPC or Intel, 100 % natively. Electronic Arts claim that they chose this solution to be able to deliver Mac games out the door as fast as they deliver Mac games. What does that mean? Well, sounds like to me they rely on DirectX too much instead of using OpenGL which is a lot more portable. DirectX is Windows-only, so.
I personally don't care about computer gaming, rather a console gamer myself. But I do care about the fact that (one of) the biggest companies in the gaming world don't think enough Mac users will appreciate having one of the latest games available. I know a lot of home Mac users do, I see it all the time on online forums among the switchers. They are used to playing games occasionally.
I'm wondering what the difference is between EA and Blizzard when it comes to the Mac games priority. Is it because Blizzard do a lot of MMORPGs that might be easier to code (is it?) while EA make racing games and other mostly single-player games except Battlefield from Digital Illusions? If it matters at all, I don't know.
Anyway
While the United States still fights with trying to figure out this internet thing called "boader bandage", "brad bond" or broadband, so to speak, the rest of the world makes steady progress in that area. At the same time, US customers who are keen on getting real broadband connections for a decent market price can't always get it because of the corporate monopoly manipulation, as I understand it from the comments here on this topic. I used to believe that the slow adoption of broadband in the US had to do with greed and difficulties for, i.e, startups to get investment money to build or rent fiberoptic infrastructure to compete with existing monopolies or because of expenses in expanding the coverage and buying more equipment, etc, etc. It was just sad to find out today it had nothing to do with unwillingness, but rather with corruption and success in labeling competition as illegal.
I feel for you people "over there" who are frustrated about the situation. It's a shame you have to live with that today. I do understand the short-term scare CEOs of telecom monopolies have, who haven't been exposed to balanced competition and have their business model focused around being expensive. But it doesn't make any sense in the long-term because competition is good for every company. It creates a need to improve, to innovate more and get better at what they do. But in the eyes of monopolies, who just sit still and cash in money and have done that for SEVERAL decades, it seems to work different. Innovation is not interesting, right. Only spend when absolutely necessary. Maximize profits - nothing else matters. Maximize, maximize
I wish for United States to get real broadband with sane competition ASAP. Here in Europe we regulate a lot on the market to get the monopolies behave more decent. When shouting several times at the telecom dogs fail to work, the European Union have had to bitch slap them
This is just plain right out SICK! How can this be tolerated? I expect this from Fidel Castro and Mao Tse Tung, but not to be tolerated with american politicians. Are there are politicians who understand the problem and want to do something about it?
It's insane to make good offers of fast internet connections illegal because competitors don't settle for anything less than 800 % profit margins for low-speed Always-On internet (I don't call it broadband).
I have thought about this more than once. Being a Swede myself I know how the broadband market works like here. It works pretty decent, but it depends on where you live and how you set to live (a big full house, an apartment or a condoe). It's not optimally priced nor speedy if you live in the wrong places.
... we have only 9 million inhabitants in this country, and that's including the little babies and people below adult or even teen ages. I actually don't know how many households we have since that would be a better number to judge by. The population number is low and you would think that the profits aren't that spectacular with only a couple of millions of broadband internet users, and maybe it isn't all that profitable, I don't know.
Anyway
In the US, there is the potential of connecting at the least 130-150 million households to give a very low number, right, knowing that as much as half of the 300 million people in the US are poor (if I got my facts straight). If there was a good plan with politicians knowing what the internet is and how a computer works, plus a motivation to do it, any country should be able to deploy nation-wide broadband. If there are only 5 people living in a village with no neighbours for several hundreds of miles away, those people should still be able to connect somehow. Perhaps by settling with an upcoming launch of WiMAX providing long-distance wireless instead of fiberoptics?
I think that the strategy for a proper broadband expansion in the United States should be organized in a way that made sense to everyone and didn't base itself on short-term greed and monopoly creation but rather on long-term winnings in terms of people being connected everywhere to high-speed internet, making it possible for small towns to grow into big cities because of motivation for tech people to settle there and make businesses, people building houses there, etc. Everyday private consumers always enabled to use state of the art online-based services & technologies as well as small local companies being able to do business online with each other in a more efficient way, including a simplistic thing like connecting one company's different offices to each other + the company headquarter with low-latency. High-quality infrastructure is what creates opportunities and even population growth. Where would people be today if there were no trains or subways to get to work with, for those that need to and are fed up with traffic jams in the morning?
I think this situation will solve itself in the next 50 years, because by then the old people who grew up with no radio and TV will be gone since long. Only people who take internet for granted will be alive, and even as politicians they will want to access high-speed internet everywhere in the country.
(Sorry for my submission being rough - it's half past midnight over here and I can't think straight right now)
That's Telia's filter and sure, they are a dominant player on the market, but there are many others as well. I can access Piratebay.org all I want, no problem. Maybe it should have been mentioned before posting this news to the public, that not all of (us) Swedes are affected by this decision. Funny though: Telia actually have the least interesting internet connection offers to customers who want to do illegal filesharing online. I know they offer 10 Mbit (and possibly 100 Mbit somewhere too?) fiberoptic connections on a couple of places in the country, but it's very uncommon. They are however the most powerful on the ADSL2+ market because of their control of telephone stations that competing companies want to get more lucrative access to.
Seriously, why not? My first impression though was Apple's intension is:
;)
"To make sure the hype and buzz about iPhone continues wildly after the release instead of only before the release".
Unnecessary to let the free advertising slow down in pace, right?