AT&T hit me with an $9 connect fee for a 30 second telephone call in a hotel. When I called their customer service to inquire about the rates they told me the fee was $12.50 - gee didn't I feel lucky. This was at a time when you could buy long distance to anywhere phone cards for $0.15 a minute, I just didn't happen to have one and wanted my wife to phone me back from our $0.09/minute long distance phone.
So, 100x upcharge because of location isn't anything new in AT&T's repertoire.
This pisses me off to no end. As a stockholder, I *really* hate reading that AT&T has gouged another one. Seriously.
BUT, isn't there a clause or statement in the TOS that says streaming video is a no-no?
I'm sorry... as a stockholder aren't you only interested in AT&T gouging as much as possible? It's not like they have any reputation left for anything other than greed.
The wireless provider obviously needs to do something about how much credit they issue people. Nobody is going to pay a $28,000 bill for cell phone usage.
There's a certain segment of people around here that like to play up "personal responsibility". What they often fail to address is the responsibility works both ways. Letting someone rack up a bill on the order of 1000x normal is utterly irresponsible of the provider.
Funny thing is, most wireless plans (except for prepaid) are designed to rack up horrible bills if you go "over the limit", or charge you for a lot of time you don't use if you don't, or simply drive you insane with "in network", "out of network", "peak vs. off-peak", etc. etc. etc.
The technology exists to make reasonably up-to-date user-friendly billing info readily available on the phone's home screen, but does anyone provide this feature? No, they just wait for the cycle you go "over limit" and double your bill, which you don't find out about until 2/3 of the way through the next billing cycle, by which time you have likely repeated the problem. If a big phone bill were a physical harm, the billing system would be considered an attractive nuisance.
AT&T reps I've dealt with all have the attitude of a government agency like the IRS, someone you have no choice but to deal with, not a commercial company with competition. It's amazing that attitude survived the breakup, but apparently it has.
AT&T pulled a rate-switch without notice on me - tripled, I think it was. I changed providers and told them to stick the ($45) bill wherever they like. They sent it to collections, who called me at work once, I don't think I even had to write the cease and desist order to them, they complied with my verbal demand. AT&T called me at home a couple of times and whined, I told them to show me the contract I signed (in 1988 when I got the card) that allowed them to triple my rates without notice. They sent me a notice a couple of years later (like 1998 or so by then) informing me that they can notify of rate changes on their website, all I had to do was pay my last bill to acknowledge acceptance of their terms. Needless to say.....
I had one tiny spot of trouble trying to get a CellularOne cell phone (they were about to be acquired by AT&T), they wanted a $700 deposit - I asked the in-store rep to allow me to talk to the person who came up with that, the person on the other end of the line pointed out my $45 outstanding balance with AT&T, I pointed out the hillarious disproportionality between a disputed $45 bill several years old and a $700 deposit and asked her if CellularOne wanted my business or not... they did, deposit waived.
The $45 dispute was about 6.9 years old when I went to rent a house, it made a good story for the potential landlord - yep, all that time and the only problem I have on my credit is when an asshole corporation tried to throw their weight around, would you honor a bill when the vendor tripled their rates on you without notice? They said they'd do the same thing.
Dunno, there are plenty of support staff in Houston who are fired up to the core for life, and I think that part of that fervor comes from exposure to "the astronaut experience" even if they don't get to go into space themselves.
In the early 1900s "Uncle Sam Wants You" was a big promotional push by the armed forces, competing with all kinds of other industries for recruits and using any and all popular media of the time.
For my purposes, on a 42" 1080p screen viewed from 12' away, 2.5Mbps average (with peaks up to 7Mbps) is what I feel is "adequate". In a side by side with higher data rates you can notice the difference, but without the sharper reference, I'm not missing what's not there. Of course, I'm not enough of an audiophile to have more than 2 speakers (though they are pretty decent 6.5" units driven by an adequate amp), so I'm probably not on the picky end about the video, either. On the other end of the argument, BluRay discs are capable of delivering 72Mbps and more, and there will always be the high-end crowd that demands more fidelity than their eyes, ears and brains could possibly perceive.
Back on the issue of "the pipe" - those 6+Mbps peaks are just enough to oversaturate my 802.11g network - not all the time, but enough to be super-annoying, so I ran a cable. Let's not get into the question of why the file fetcher can't pre-fetch enough data to get past the challenging spots, I've been pissed at Sony engineers since 1991 when I bought their top of the line car CD changer and it only had 1/2 second of pre-buffering. They're still pinching the pre-buffer penny, even now that RAM is what, $10 a GB?
So, then, yes, bandwidth to the home has improved, no doubt, but it's still delivered from the node to the house over those ancient wires that have issues when it rains, etc. We're located 2 miles from our cable office, not sure if there's an intermediate node or not. The cable company could give single homes more bandwidth, but there's still a lot of sharing going on in the co-ax wires, and if every subscriber wanted 50Mbps right now they'd have to do something to improve the infrastructure. I think our service is a nominal 10Mbps now, but reality varies widely, 10 is more the cap, 6 to 8 is the average, and of course there are the occasional virtual outages.
As long as (most) people are happy with the quality from Hulu and Fox TV, they can be serviced by 2-3Mbps pipes. Higher bandwidth to the home (like 50Mbps) will probably remain at a significant premium due to the infrastructure demands - and, thus, it may be cheaper to continue to ship discs via USPS for quite a while.
Besides, people are creatures of habit. They stick with what they know, and if the new thing can't give them 100% of what they're used to for the same or lower cost, they'll be very slow to change.
My house has an nearly unbeatable infestation of small ants
I got rid of a nasty colony of Pharoah ants with the Terro sugar/boric acid liquid bait, drizzled on the outside walls, they came and ate in droves and just vanished within a week.
Or, you could just demolish the structure and burn it, but I bet the ants would actually survive that and just move away.
Actually, this isn't likely to be a serious question a few years from now the way things are going. In the short term streaming media may be lower quality than physical media, but I would be surprised if 5 years from now your average internet connection weren't fast enough to handle streaming high def video.
The last-mile physical wiring hasn't improved much over the last 10 years, and I doubt it will over the next 10. Fiber to the home ain't coming soon.
Cable internet service started living up to its potential a few years back, they had horrible main-office problems before that which (in my experience) made DSL more attractive, at least until the telcos took it over. If you have cable internet service, you might expect to upgrade to 15 or 50Mbps in the next 5 years, depending on the quality of the wires to your home, much less than that if you're stuck with DSL.
I don't see cable modems making the technological leaps and bounds that voice line modems did in the 80's-90's, there's just not the same incentive to improve after they can stream "acceptable" video.
There will always be some people for whom absolute quality trumps all else. The REAL question is, is this group large enough to sustain an ongoing market of manufacturing and selling physical media?
In the dying days of the vinyl record, there was a premium product, something like "Original Master Series" or whatever, they'd charge maybe a 50% markup for marginally better materials that, in my opinion, did deliver a product that was noticeably cleaner sounding and longer lasting. If you played your albums to destruction and then replaced them, they were actually a good value.
Maybe one title in 100 was made available in the premium format, and even when the premium version was available, the regular version outsold it many times over. The press and the critics harp on quality, the bulk of the market buys whatever is convenient, cheap, and not outright horrible (8 tracks?).
Pandora Rocks, rolls, jazzes and classics it up... even if 99% of what comes out is meaningless fluff for 99% of people, there will be killers like Pandora that most everyone can use, and super super niche stuff that's awesome for 1/10,000 iPhone owners and useless to the rest. That's the beauty of a "programmable" device, unlike the Moto815eVerizonLockedPieceOfStuff that I carry - it has some decent basic software, but could be sooooooo much more if it were open for people to get the most out of the platform (such as, the crappy GPS software that Verizon wants to rent to their subscribers...)
The Palm software marketplace was almost identical the the iPhone store - cool shiny new programmable gadget appeals to semi-geek crowd with lots of disposable income. HandFart would have sold very well if the PalmPilot had a decent speaker.
To be isolationist about it: this is a stimulus from US taxpayers for the recovery of the US economy. Open Source knows no borders, stimulus into open source will benefit the whole world, not just the US.
Just because something helps the rest of the world, doesn't mean it doesn't help the US as well. Like developing new CPUs, I guess you would ban that, since it helps other countries as well. What an idiotic way to look at things.
I understand that/.ers have a problem recognizing sarcasm and irony. The views stated above are not mine, just my perception of the majority of my fellow Americans. I happen to agree that it is an idiotic way of looking at things, but until they make me king, I just have one vote out of over a hundred of million.
There's that other 6 months of the year, odd opportunities in trafficking, etc., and there's a certain demographic that will hand a $5 or even $20 out the window at a traffic light. Most light changes he gets nothing, but the light cycles 40 times an hour, and he's had hundreds of thousands of light changes to practice and refine his pitch.
It's not a life I would choose, and besides being a cheap bastard, I reasoned that I wouldn't be doing him any favors by supporting his present lifestyle (and, thus, never donated.)
Problem is, if that center goes off black ops they're going to have to fess up about the dedicated power generation facility that feeds it. Last rumor I heard was that it was shut down because they didn't have enough budget to buy coal for the powerplant.
I'm wanting for a few weekend, to give it a try and just see how much one could collect tax free from handouts.
Hell, if I could make $100K with no record for the tax man...wow...that translates easily to roughly a taxed income of what...$135K or so??
I could look like a bum hours a day for that kinda bread.
I think it takes time to develop your schtick - you need just the right blend of pitiful and likeable, homeless but not repulsive, etc. Since this dude was a junkie, he was unnaturally thin. In later years he had the healthiest looking Yorkshire terrier that he would bring to the corner with him - exposed a little of the truth for me, but I bet it got him extra income from dog lovers...
I reviewed my PlayStation store purchases for the last 16 months just recently, total spend in the range of $100, one title for $40, two or three for $10, and a bunch or little stuff under $10. I have not yet bought a non-download title for the PS3 - in fact, the last retail game I purchased was Warcraft III for the PC.
Maybe I'm not their target market since I don't spend much on games overall... maybe they shouldn't have sold a home media center for less than production cost...
There's a reason why small businesses are more efficient... people doing that crap around here are 100% visible and wouldn't last long on the team.
We clean up our own messes, and help each other out when needed. Now, we do answer to a certain government regulatory agency, and we have spent 90% of the last 6 months running around doing 95% pointless crap for them, so it's not all roses here, but we haven't resorted to pointing at the IT infrastructure as the reason we're not as productive as we'd like to be.
I suspect in your culture, if IT were outsourced to Google, people would find other ways to waste company time and money.
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AT&T hit me with an $9 connect fee for a 30 second telephone call in a hotel. When I called their customer service to inquire about the rates they told me the fee was $12.50 - gee didn't I feel lucky. This was at a time when you could buy long distance to anywhere phone cards for $0.15 a minute, I just didn't happen to have one and wanted my wife to phone me back from our $0.09/minute long distance phone.
So, 100x upcharge because of location isn't anything new in AT&T's repertoire.
This pisses me off to no end. As a stockholder, I *really* hate reading that AT&T has gouged another one. Seriously. BUT, isn't there a clause or statement in the TOS that says streaming video is a no-no?
I'm sorry... as a stockholder aren't you only interested in AT&T gouging as much as possible? It's not like they have any reputation left for anything other than greed.
The wireless provider obviously needs to do something about how much credit they issue people. Nobody is going to pay a $28,000 bill for cell phone usage.
There's a certain segment of people around here that like to play up "personal responsibility". What they often fail to address is the responsibility works both ways. Letting someone rack up a bill on the order of 1000x normal is utterly irresponsible of the provider.
Funny thing is, most wireless plans (except for prepaid) are designed to rack up horrible bills if you go "over the limit", or charge you for a lot of time you don't use if you don't, or simply drive you insane with "in network", "out of network", "peak vs. off-peak", etc. etc. etc.
The technology exists to make reasonably up-to-date user-friendly billing info readily available on the phone's home screen, but does anyone provide this feature? No, they just wait for the cycle you go "over limit" and double your bill, which you don't find out about until 2/3 of the way through the next billing cycle, by which time you have likely repeated the problem. If a big phone bill were a physical harm, the billing system would be considered an attractive nuisance.
AT&T reps I've dealt with all have the attitude of a government agency like the IRS, someone you have no choice but to deal with, not a commercial company with competition. It's amazing that attitude survived the breakup, but apparently it has.
AT&T pulled a rate-switch without notice on me - tripled, I think it was. I changed providers and told them to stick the ($45) bill wherever they like. They sent it to collections, who called me at work once, I don't think I even had to write the cease and desist order to them, they complied with my verbal demand. AT&T called me at home a couple of times and whined, I told them to show me the contract I signed (in 1988 when I got the card) that allowed them to triple my rates without notice. They sent me a notice a couple of years later (like 1998 or so by then) informing me that they can notify of rate changes on their website, all I had to do was pay my last bill to acknowledge acceptance of their terms. Needless to say.....
I had one tiny spot of trouble trying to get a CellularOne cell phone (they were about to be acquired by AT&T), they wanted a $700 deposit - I asked the in-store rep to allow me to talk to the person who came up with that, the person on the other end of the line pointed out my $45 outstanding balance with AT&T, I pointed out the hillarious disproportionality between a disputed $45 bill several years old and a $700 deposit and asked her if CellularOne wanted my business or not... they did, deposit waived.
The $45 dispute was about 6.9 years old when I went to rent a house, it made a good story for the potential landlord - yep, all that time and the only problem I have on my credit is when an asshole corporation tried to throw their weight around, would you honor a bill when the vendor tripled their rates on you without notice? They said they'd do the same thing.
Dunno, there are plenty of support staff in Houston who are fired up to the core for life, and I think that part of that fervor comes from exposure to "the astronaut experience" even if they don't get to go into space themselves.
In the early 1900s "Uncle Sam Wants You" was a big promotional push by the armed forces, competing with all kinds of other industries for recruits and using any and all popular media of the time.
Is this really any different?
For my purposes, on a 42" 1080p screen viewed from 12' away, 2.5Mbps average (with peaks up to 7Mbps) is what I feel is "adequate". In a side by side with higher data rates you can notice the difference, but without the sharper reference, I'm not missing what's not there. Of course, I'm not enough of an audiophile to have more than 2 speakers (though they are pretty decent 6.5" units driven by an adequate amp), so I'm probably not on the picky end about the video, either. On the other end of the argument, BluRay discs are capable of delivering 72Mbps and more, and there will always be the high-end crowd that demands more fidelity than their eyes, ears and brains could possibly perceive.
Back on the issue of "the pipe" - those 6+Mbps peaks are just enough to oversaturate my 802.11g network - not all the time, but enough to be super-annoying, so I ran a cable. Let's not get into the question of why the file fetcher can't pre-fetch enough data to get past the challenging spots, I've been pissed at Sony engineers since 1991 when I bought their top of the line car CD changer and it only had 1/2 second of pre-buffering. They're still pinching the pre-buffer penny, even now that RAM is what, $10 a GB?
So, then, yes, bandwidth to the home has improved, no doubt, but it's still delivered from the node to the house over those ancient wires that have issues when it rains, etc. We're located 2 miles from our cable office, not sure if there's an intermediate node or not. The cable company could give single homes more bandwidth, but there's still a lot of sharing going on in the co-ax wires, and if every subscriber wanted 50Mbps right now they'd have to do something to improve the infrastructure. I think our service is a nominal 10Mbps now, but reality varies widely, 10 is more the cap, 6 to 8 is the average, and of course there are the occasional virtual outages.
As long as (most) people are happy with the quality from Hulu and Fox TV, they can be serviced by 2-3Mbps pipes. Higher bandwidth to the home (like 50Mbps) will probably remain at a significant premium due to the infrastructure demands - and, thus, it may be cheaper to continue to ship discs via USPS for quite a while.
Besides, people are creatures of habit. They stick with what they know, and if the new thing can't give them 100% of what they're used to for the same or lower cost, they'll be very slow to change.
Because they used to be insanely, ridiculously, incredibly damned expensive. Now they are merely damned expensive.
For a few months in 2008, I believe solar was cheaper than oil... still damned expensive, though.
I'm thinking it will turn that 30 year roof into a 40 year roof.
I'm thinking that any gains in roof covering lifetime are more than cancelled by the penetrations of the waterproof membrane by support legs.
My house has an nearly unbeatable infestation of small ants
I got rid of a nasty colony of Pharoah ants with the Terro sugar/boric acid liquid bait, drizzled on the outside walls, they came and ate in droves and just vanished within a week.
Or, you could just demolish the structure and burn it, but I bet the ants would actually survive that and just move away.
Actually, this isn't likely to be a serious question a few years from now the way things are going. In the short term streaming media may be lower quality than physical media, but I would be surprised if 5 years from now your average internet connection weren't fast enough to handle streaming high def video.
The last-mile physical wiring hasn't improved much over the last 10 years, and I doubt it will over the next 10. Fiber to the home ain't coming soon.
Cable internet service started living up to its potential a few years back, they had horrible main-office problems before that which (in my experience) made DSL more attractive, at least until the telcos took it over. If you have cable internet service, you might expect to upgrade to 15 or 50Mbps in the next 5 years, depending on the quality of the wires to your home, much less than that if you're stuck with DSL.
I don't see cable modems making the technological leaps and bounds that voice line modems did in the 80's-90's, there's just not the same incentive to improve after they can stream "acceptable" video.
There will always be some people for whom absolute quality trumps all else. The REAL question is, is this group large enough to sustain an ongoing market of manufacturing and selling physical media?
In the dying days of the vinyl record, there was a premium product, something like "Original Master Series" or whatever, they'd charge maybe a 50% markup for marginally better materials that, in my opinion, did deliver a product that was noticeably cleaner sounding and longer lasting. If you played your albums to destruction and then replaced them, they were actually a good value.
Maybe one title in 100 was made available in the premium format, and even when the premium version was available, the regular version outsold it many times over. The press and the critics harp on quality, the bulk of the market buys whatever is convenient, cheap, and not outright horrible (8 tracks?).
Pandora Rocks, rolls, jazzes and classics it up... even if 99% of what comes out is meaningless fluff for 99% of people, there will be killers like Pandora that most everyone can use, and super super niche stuff that's awesome for 1/10,000 iPhone owners and useless to the rest. That's the beauty of a "programmable" device, unlike the Moto815eVerizonLockedPieceOfStuff that I carry - it has some decent basic software, but could be sooooooo much more if it were open for people to get the most out of the platform (such as, the crappy GPS software that Verizon wants to rent to their subscribers...)
The Palm software marketplace was almost identical the the iPhone store - cool shiny new programmable gadget appeals to semi-geek crowd with lots of disposable income. HandFart would have sold very well if the PalmPilot had a decent speaker.
See also: http://games.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=3295039
To be isolationist about it: this is a stimulus from US taxpayers for the recovery of the US economy. Open Source knows no borders, stimulus into open source will benefit the whole world, not just the US.
Just because something helps the rest of the world, doesn't mean it doesn't help the US as well. Like developing new CPUs, I guess you would ban that, since it helps other countries as well. What an idiotic way to look at things.
I understand that /.ers have a problem recognizing sarcasm and irony. The views stated above are not mine, just my perception of the majority of my fellow Americans. I happen to agree that it is an idiotic way of looking at things, but until they make me king, I just have one vote out of over a hundred of million.
There's that other 6 months of the year, odd opportunities in trafficking, etc., and there's a certain demographic that will hand a $5 or even $20 out the window at a traffic light. Most light changes he gets nothing, but the light cycles 40 times an hour, and he's had hundreds of thousands of light changes to practice and refine his pitch.
It's not a life I would choose, and besides being a cheap bastard, I reasoned that I wouldn't be doing him any favors by supporting his present lifestyle (and, thus, never donated.)
Stick to the fractal art.
Thanks for noticing. It has done pretty well for me lately.
Problem is, if that center goes off black ops they're going to have to fess up about the dedicated power generation facility that feeds it. Last rumor I heard was that it was shut down because they didn't have enough budget to buy coal for the powerplant.
I'm wanting for a few weekend, to give it a try and just see how much one could collect tax free from handouts.
Hell, if I could make $100K with no record for the tax man...wow...that translates easily to roughly a taxed income of what...$135K or so??
I could look like a bum hours a day for that kinda bread.
I think it takes time to develop your schtick - you need just the right blend of pitiful and likeable, homeless but not repulsive, etc. Since this dude was a junkie, he was unnaturally thin. In later years he had the healthiest looking Yorkshire terrier that he would bring to the corner with him - exposed a little of the truth for me, but I bet it got him extra income from dog lovers...
But then, do you divide that 1250 years up amongst the co-conspirators, or do they each get the same sentence?
I'd divide it up, but then, there were only two co-conspirators. Do you think their descendants should pay too?
Chess and poker never get boring.
so, why spend all that money on video games?
I reviewed my PlayStation store purchases for the last 16 months just recently, total spend in the range of $100, one title for $40, two or three for $10, and a bunch or little stuff under $10. I have not yet bought a non-download title for the PS3 - in fact, the last retail game I purchased was Warcraft III for the PC.
Maybe I'm not their target market since I don't spend much on games overall... maybe they shouldn't have sold a home media center for less than production cost...
There's a reason why small businesses are more efficient... people doing that crap around here are 100% visible and wouldn't last long on the team.
We clean up our own messes, and help each other out when needed. Now, we do answer to a certain government regulatory agency, and we have spent 90% of the last 6 months running around doing 95% pointless crap for them, so it's not all roses here, but we haven't resorted to pointing at the IT infrastructure as the reason we're not as productive as we'd like to be.
I suspect in your culture, if IT were outsourced to Google, people would find other ways to waste company time and money.
By the way they are treated on /. I thought RedHat were a bunch of bastards - ergo, no one to save them....