Your comment about the impossibility of Vonage properly reporting the caller ID number is not true. It sounds like you talked to some real moron customer service reps there, unfortunately, but a good friend of mine has Vonage with an ending-in-"00" 212 number that he got from Verizon and ported into the Vonage system (in New York, "business style" numbers that end in 00 are quite hard to come by, so he wanted to take it with him to Vonage). His number shows up correctly with caller ID when he makes outgoing calls to me.
His setup experiences that he described to me were quite frustrating, and involved several hours of annoying support calls with VERY DUMB tech support staff at Vonage. Their problems were mostly a misconfigured "router" (of some sort) that would fail to properly route incoming calls to his ATA-186 box and drop an incoming call out to some strange error message instead of going to voicemail. But still, not quite as atrocious an experience as you described. And once it got working, the service is pretty darned good and useful.
I think Vonage is partially a victim of their own popularity. They don't seem to have the resources or quality of a support organization they would need to handle their volume of customers.
No, I said _a large part_ of the problem is the changing kernel ABI. But that's not the only factor. Another substantial part is that there are more users and thus more developers working on the Windows drivers. You're right, with Open Source drivers the number of man-hours put into updating the drivers wouldn't be limited to the small number of folks NVidia has working on them, and they would probably end up more stable faster, not to mention that the problems with the kernel ABI changing would be pretty much irrelevant as they are with most of the Open Source Linux drivers.
Unfortunately, we all know NVidia can't/won't Open Source their drivers and they claim it's the "can't" due to contracts with other companies that have various pieces of IP in their cards and in the drivers.
Um, no. How about the fact that the Windows driver APIs remain constant within any major release of Windows, whereas Linux driver APIs (or really ABIs here) change slightly even between minor releases of Linux kernels? This is of course intentional - it's supposed to be hard to make closed source drivers. If Linux developers wanted to make it easy, there would be a simple, clear, well documented set of driver development and interface ABIs that only changed with major version releases (2.2, 2.4, 2.6, etc.). Then it wouldn't be necessary to do a partial/stub recompile for every version and have dozens of different packagings of binary and partial-source versions of the NVidia drivers, and they would probably end up much more stable and functional.
So yes, I agree it's quite hard to produce Linux drivers that are stable and functional across a broad range of Linux kernel versions and XFree versions, and I am sure it is in part because there are more users and thus more developers working on the Windows drivers, in large part it's because of the inherent features of the Linux platform. Which of course may be desireable for many people who want to encourage companies to release specs or truly Open Source drivers.
You might want to check out www.allofmp3.com. They have the idea right. And it's legal (in Russia - well, maybe, who really knows). Now if we could do this, even at somewhat higher prices, in the US, it would be nearly perfect. Obviously, they'll never sell entire albums for 75 cents in the US, but at lower prices, and without the nasty DRM, I'm a lot more willing to explore a new album, even if it's something I might only listen to occasionally. Which of course isn't really what the RIAA wants - they want you to buy the small amount of high hype pop hit music and shell out massively inflated prices for it.
I think iTunes comes closest to the ideal - and you can unprotect the music files, either via rip-and-burn or (blatant plug) read my guide using QTFairUse to get sweet sounding, unprotected AAC files from those nasty DRMed iTunes files, and it's not really that hard to convert them to MP3s, and the quality is good enough for me.
If your strategy is built entirely on FUD and keeping the facts secret, revealing something like this list of 65 files publicly is a serious fuckup. I mean, it's pretty much trivial once the "infringing" locations are pointed to in this way to prove that that they are not infringing, to document their lineage in its entirety. Chalk up a loss to SCO on this one, they will come out looking like asses to the analysts on this one.
Mind you, the mainstream press still doesn't know who to believe, since for them it's all greek. But anybody with even an inkling of an ability to read code can check these files out and follow Linus' discussion. And bits of information like this will make serious industry players fall squarely opposed to SCO (though the middle-manager types will still believe what they are spoon-fed by SCO, or rather be unable to analyze the argument sufficiently themselves to come to any conclusions). Bad SCO - very, very dumb.
They might, but these 65 files aren't it. I don't know much, but I know that many of these appear to be simple lists of constants that A) are part of the POSIX standard and B) if they were copied from somewhere, it would be from BSD. As I understand it, the copyright to these parts of the BSD code was already settled in the AT&T/BSDI lawsuit, and as such, are fairly free and clear under the BSD license.
If they can appear under the BSD license, then they can be redistributed with Linux, linked with GPLed works, etc.
If SCO wants to make a case, it's not going to be based on some BSD header files that consist of 50 lines of #define ERRNO -25.
Partner up with an Indian executive who has connections to a body shop in India. You lead their stateside IT interface team. No big company really wants to interface directly with India - you become the architect over here, and your job is to take shitty customer requirements and make them implementable and then ship them off to your project manager in India.
Yes, I have several friends (former employees who I originally hired as software developers) who are now in "Architect" positions that work more or less like this. You'll probably get paid more and your "skills" (okay, not that many required, but at least the perception of your skills and their value on your resume) will only increase in value as more and more shops look to outsourcing.
I know, I know, you're thinking "but I'm good at programming, I should be doing programming work". The problem is unless you are _really_ good at programming, and can effectively specialize in a very high skill niche, your job is waaay too mobile and outsource-prone. If you want to keep programming, give up on the enterprise software gunkware middleware stuff. We all know that kind of API glue-man job is easy by design - remember, Java was designed to make it easy to find programmers to do that crap. It'll always be much harder for companies to outsource business-specific skills or find large outsourcers who have niche market skills.
And more importantly, learn your lesson. Next time some huckster wants to sell you a "security audit", don't buy into it. Use it as justification to do an internal audit, or convince your bosses to bring in consultants of your choosing. Make it a collaborative process with your managers. Prize your relationship with your bosses above all else - don't be an ass kisser, be good, and make them look good. If when they think of you they think of the guy who saved their asses lots of times, they would have to be fools to let you go.
Control is greatly undervalued in business. Often times, control is more important than your bottom line salary. You want to be in control without people knowing that you're in control - don't play politics or backstab people, just be very important to the bottom line and very trusted. If you are unable to make your boss realize that you are important, you should find another job as soon as possible. Also, ALWAYS keep a backup plan in place, enough money in the bank, and have lots of friends in your line of work to help give you an in to other job openings.
It's a cheery little Machiavellian world we live in.:)
First of all, it's not vaporware. Secondly, Soundstudio is a Mac OS X app (I believe, assuming we're thinking of the same Soundstudio here), and there aren't any apps I know of for Windows that will open a _protected_ m4p file and encode the stream to an MP3 directly.
Third, as I mentioned in my QTFairUse guide above, you might find that unprotected AAC audio which you can easily get from QTFairUse is a nice way to listen to your iTunes Music Store songs using WinAmp or non-Apple AAC-capable hardware players, without any quality loss whatsoever. The myths that QTFairUse doesn't work or do anything just aren't true - it is a pain to use in its current form, but it works, and it is useful for some of us. And it's the only way I know of besides stream recording or burn-and-rip to go from M4P to MP3 on a Windows box.
I decided to write a QTFairUse HOWTO guide for going from iTunes DRM-enabled M4P to nice clean AAC (or WAV or MP3...) since everybody out there seems to say it doesn't work. Yes, there may be easier ways to do this on OS X, but if you use iTunes for Windows, you might be interested. Anyway, you can find it here.
I haven't actually tried QTFairUse with the new QuickTime, so it's not impossible that QTFairUse won't successfully patch QuickTime anymore.
Wait a second, as I understand it, iTunes Music Store also sells music from independent, non-RIAA labels, including some which give a substantially larger cut to the artists. I think iTunes has its flaws, but it's hardly fair to blame them for the fact that there is demand for music sold by RIAA-member labels. I agree the "system" of the RIAA sucks and is exploitative, but it's an exploitation the artists willingly buy into in exchange for access to radio station play, promotional dollars and the perks and advances you get with a big name record label.
Blaming Apple for this system is crazy - it's a shitty system, but there's plenty of blame to go around. I'd rather buy music legally from good bands that put effort into making quality albums where I get my moneys worth, whether I buy online or at stores, and focus my effort on defeating the unconstitutional measures the entertainment industry has supported (the DMCA for example) to keep their monopoly and prevent me from using the music that I already legally bought.
Sorry, I abbreviated the conversation a bit. She asked me several more questions than that, like "but you don't get all your songs from iTunes, do you? where do you get them from?" that's what led to the explanation about Kazaa and illegal P2P downloading (which she had heard of from the news, etc., but didn't know all the details of). Also, she specifically asked me why iTunes doesn't sell MP3s when I said essentially what you suggested, and I had to explain that the music industry perceives that without "copy protection" on their files, which you can't do with MP3s, they will lose money.
Just because I abbreviated the conversation in my/. post doesn't mean I don't know how to communicate with normal people. In fact, every job I've ever had involves basically being an explainer and intermediary of technology to non-technology people, both in my own companies and with our customers.
To further put the conversation in context, she originally wanted to know about the different kinds of MP3 players and why they seemed to have such different amounts of space on them (I sent her an MP3 player buying guide on CNET about hard drive vs. MP3/CD vs. solid state, which is what led up to this whole conversation). I think the iTunes service lost her interest because it sounded like lock-in to one specific kind of player - thinking about it like an MBA (which she is), that was probably what drove her away from it. Especially since it wasn't clear that the iPod was right for her needs (to use while working out), and that iPod + purchasing music that effectively only works on iPod would involve a much larger initial outlay of capital to experiment with then a cheapo MP3 player.
My mother asked me about the new iTunes service, and whether she could get songs and put them on an MP3 player to use when working out, instead of her old tape player. She played with iTunes and found all sorts of music she liked on their store. When I had to explain that she would have to get an iPod because you can't download real MP3s, only Apple's own format from iTunes, she asked "Why not?" I explained that the files are protected against "copying" with restrictions that make it difficult to get MP3s from them, so you have to burn the songs to CD, then rip the MP3s. Or you have to find and download songs (illegally) from Kazaa, WinMX, etc.
Whereupon she decided it sounded way too complicated to deal with, and decided she didn't want to bother with it. The fact is the public is bothered by DRM, they just aren't bothered by in a moral or philisophical sense, more in a convenience sense. The thing is that while iTunes wins out right now in convenience, they still aren't anywhere near as convenient as getting plain old unencumbered MP3s, which are the industry standard and supported by all the hardware we've already invested in.
The value of online music purchasing is fast easy downloads and very low search costs (you know you're not going to waste time downloading a bad rip, an RIAA fake, etc.). You waste much less time - paying a buck a song for this service is a good deal, and you get warm fuzzies knowing at least some tiny fraction of the money goes to the artists. These value propositions wouldn't be decreased by using unencumbered MP3s - the people whose time has no value will keep using Kazaa etc. and searching for the good copies among the shit.
My favorite example of this is the DirectX SDK. There's a lot of documentation, which is great, and it's all in one place. The annoying part are the insidious, minor, missing details and caveats that aren't documented, or that turn out to work slightly differently with different DX versions and/or different drivers on different PCs.
Your observation about the _relationships_ and inter-function and state dependencies that are NOT DOCUMENTED at ALL in the DirectX API is right on target - that's the whole problem. They always tell you what one method does, but not that you can't call it until the system is in a particular state, that you get to by calling some other method, or what the side effects are supposed to be when something isn't supported properly.
Well, they changed the decoder back to the older version, which was apparently better. Certainly, I can tell you that my MP3 seem subjectively to sound better with the new WinAmp 5 than they did with WinAmp 3, which managed to make them all sound like shit.
The problem... ISPs want it both ways. They fucking advertise the ability to download music and other multimedia content all the time in their broadband ads. Then they get angry when people do, using up their precious bandwidth (which they promised was "unmetered" and "unlimited"). The legality of the content is irrelevant to this conversation. The fact that much of the content is being distributed without permission from the copyright holder is the fault of the RIAA which refuses to sell music online that people can actually use for reasonable fees - iTunes is great, but if I can't use it with my MP3 player then it's useless, or rather creates more work than it saves.
Without P2P apps, there'd be a heck of a lot less demand for broadband from teenagers and 20-somethings. Maybe the parents in the burbs just want "always-on" so they can check their email without dial up and send pictures to relatives, but let's be real, that's not driving the broadband industry.
You're thinking of a criminal case. This is a civil case. Rather, SCO needs to show that their argument is supported by a preponderance of the evidence. The evidentiary standard in civil court, while high, is substantially lower than criminal court. See the OJ case for an example of why this sometimes means somebody is found innocent of a crime, but still civilly liable for the same action as the crime (in the case of OJ, the deaths of the two people he was previously accused of murdering).
That's not necessarily true. Whether or not a contract is formed depends on more than whether a piece of paper with a signature exists. A contract is an exchange of obligations for compensation, and that's it (where the exact definitions of obligations and compensation are the subject of several weeks or more of the first year of law school). It's not cut and dried that because it's called the "General Public License" it's a license, not a contract. Whether or not a contract is formed by the GPL would probably be open to interpretation, and the GPL might be prosecutable under contract law in certain circumstances.
Could somebody argue, for example, SCO received compensation - the right to redistribute and profit off of Linux source code - in exchange for their obligation to release their own patches and modifications under the GPL. Now if they retroactively claim they didn't intend to release that source under the GPL (sorry, this example is hypothetical, only vaguely based on reality), have they breached a contract, or just refused to agree to a license? Is this clear cut? Am I missing something?
I think their UNIX business will get spun off after the lawsuit business clears up and the company goes bust. The Unixware product will no longer be marketable under the "SCO" name, since the brand will be indelibly tarnished in the IT world as part of a hostile, litigious organization that tried to extort money from companies, big and small, for work that they had no rights to, and for what essentially amounts to a massive pump-n-dump scheme.
I don't know if this is true, unless you are still getting student discount fare Delta/USAir shuttle tickets (are they even still selling these?). Used to be 50 bucks each way when I was in college. These days, it's something more like 80-90 each way on the shuttle flights, normal fare. Versus the train which is something like 60-70 each way. So I'm not sure how you're calculating. Also, when you include airport cab fare vs. train station cabfare on both ends (or take the T in Boston if you're convenient to it), it widens the gap since getting to JFK/La Guardia is definitely more expensive (and time consuming) then getting to Penn Station.
No, SFF is not a geek chic trend. It's the inevitable result of the commoditzation of PC hardware and the integration of the vast majority of components onto the motherboard. You used to need a big PC to get a sound card, ethernet, video card, etc. These days all of this can fit on one board at reasonable cost. There's simply not enough use for most people for all that extra space in the PC, and there clearly is a use for extra desk/floor space.
In fact, my mother saw my Ideq case and insisted I buy one for her since she was so sick of her large PC tower case. The real geeks I know don't see the need for SFF, they want lots of space for extra gadgets.
Agreed 100% on Amtrak. I think the problem is a combination of Amtrak being Amtrak, and the lack of governmental support for Amtrak. The fucking Acela is capable of operating at 125+ MPH, but the state of Connecticut apparently limits its speed legally to 75 MPH. Mind you, this is also Amtrak's fault for not working together with government to sort all this shit out and come up with a technically AND legally sound solution before blowing billions in government subsidized and private capital on stupid projects like this.
Very high population density and relatively small distance between urban centers combined with a willingness to throw away old conventions to make way for progress?
For example, here in the Northeast, the Boston-New York-Washington DC corridor would be a prime target for a Maglev train - the passenger volume is there, the airports are a huge hassle with congestion, weather problems in the winter, and massive traffic issues (driving to Logan in Boston or JFK in New York - ugh). Instead, we have legislation in Connecticut that prevents trains from going faster than 75 miles per hour for "safety reasons", so Amtrak blows a couple billion dollars on the sleek looking "Acela" trains, which go barely faster than the normal old fashion trains running the express routes. You shave about 30-40 minutes off of your travel time Boston to New York, and pay 3 times as much.
So instead they've had to market it as business class travel and sell it based on amenities instead of speed. Pure insanity. What we need is legislation and engineering working together to get a real high-speed train system down this heavy traffic corridor in place as a proof of concept AND proof of economical viability, so the price per mile can come down enough to build similar capability for longer runs.
Maglev or no, there's no technical reason that I'm aware of that high speed trains aren't running this corridor, just a lack of creative problem solving effort and cooperation between government and industry to get the damned thing built.
The other reply is correct - I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the prices I was quoting are purchase prices for residential real estate in New York (not commercial rental prices which are usually quoted in dollars per sq. ft. per year for a lease). In fact I just calculated the per-sq.-ft. purchase prices people are paying in this neighborhood now, where the real estate market is still very strong, and they are substantially more than several hundred a square foot - more like 600-1200 depending on the building. Of course in Manhattan 1000 square feet is a "spacious" 2 bedroom apartment.:)
You should know that we actually do pay about 300-400 dollars a month for a parking spot here in Manhattan (250 if you're willing to trek off the beaten path to get to your car, like I do), more in some areas and buildings, so your estimate for the broom closet isn't too far off.:)
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His setup experiences that he described to me were quite frustrating, and involved several hours of annoying support calls with VERY DUMB tech support staff at Vonage. Their problems were mostly a misconfigured "router" (of some sort) that would fail to properly route incoming calls to his ATA-186 box and drop an incoming call out to some strange error message instead of going to voicemail. But still, not quite as atrocious an experience as you described. And once it got working, the service is pretty darned good and useful.
I think Vonage is partially a victim of their own popularity. They don't seem to have the resources or quality of a support organization they would need to handle their volume of customers.
Unfortunately, we all know NVidia can't/won't Open Source their drivers and they claim it's the "can't" due to contracts with other companies that have various pieces of IP in their cards and in the drivers.
So yes, I agree it's quite hard to produce Linux drivers that are stable and functional across a broad range of Linux kernel versions and XFree versions, and I am sure it is in part because there are more users and thus more developers working on the Windows drivers, in large part it's because of the inherent features of the Linux platform. Which of course may be desireable for many people who want to encourage companies to release specs or truly Open Source drivers.
I think iTunes comes closest to the ideal - and you can unprotect the music files, either via rip-and-burn or (blatant plug) read my guide using QTFairUse to get sweet sounding, unprotected AAC files from those nasty DRMed iTunes files, and it's not really that hard to convert them to MP3s, and the quality is good enough for me.
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I guess the rabbit wasn't big enough.
Mind you, the mainstream press still doesn't know who to believe, since for them it's all greek. But anybody with even an inkling of an ability to read code can check these files out and follow Linus' discussion. And bits of information like this will make serious industry players fall squarely opposed to SCO (though the middle-manager types will still believe what they are spoon-fed by SCO, or rather be unable to analyze the argument sufficiently themselves to come to any conclusions). Bad SCO - very, very dumb.
If they can appear under the BSD license, then they can be redistributed with Linux, linked with GPLed works, etc.
If SCO wants to make a case, it's not going to be based on some BSD header files that consist of 50 lines of #define ERRNO -25.
Yes, I have several friends (former employees who I originally hired as software developers) who are now in "Architect" positions that work more or less like this. You'll probably get paid more and your "skills" (okay, not that many required, but at least the perception of your skills and their value on your resume) will only increase in value as more and more shops look to outsourcing.
I know, I know, you're thinking "but I'm good at programming, I should be doing programming work". The problem is unless you are _really_ good at programming, and can effectively specialize in a very high skill niche, your job is waaay too mobile and outsource-prone. If you want to keep programming, give up on the enterprise software gunkware middleware stuff. We all know that kind of API glue-man job is easy by design - remember, Java was designed to make it easy to find programmers to do that crap. It'll always be much harder for companies to outsource business-specific skills or find large outsourcers who have niche market skills.
Control is greatly undervalued in business. Often times, control is more important than your bottom line salary. You want to be in control without people knowing that you're in control - don't play politics or backstab people, just be very important to the bottom line and very trusted. If you are unable to make your boss realize that you are important, you should find another job as soon as possible. Also, ALWAYS keep a backup plan in place, enough money in the bank, and have lots of friends in your line of work to help give you an in to other job openings.
It's a cheery little Machiavellian world we live in.
Third, as I mentioned in my QTFairUse guide above, you might find that unprotected AAC audio which you can easily get from QTFairUse is a nice way to listen to your iTunes Music Store songs using WinAmp or non-Apple AAC-capable hardware players, without any quality loss whatsoever. The myths that QTFairUse doesn't work or do anything just aren't true - it is a pain to use in its current form, but it works, and it is useful for some of us. And it's the only way I know of besides stream recording or burn-and-rip to go from M4P to MP3 on a Windows box.
I haven't actually tried QTFairUse with the new QuickTime, so it's not impossible that QTFairUse won't successfully patch QuickTime anymore.
Blaming Apple for this system is crazy - it's a shitty system, but there's plenty of blame to go around. I'd rather buy music legally from good bands that put effort into making quality albums where I get my moneys worth, whether I buy online or at stores, and focus my effort on defeating the unconstitutional measures the entertainment industry has supported (the DMCA for example) to keep their monopoly and prevent me from using the music that I already legally bought.
Just because I abbreviated the conversation in my
To further put the conversation in context, she originally wanted to know about the different kinds of MP3 players and why they seemed to have such different amounts of space on them (I sent her an MP3 player buying guide on CNET about hard drive vs. MP3/CD vs. solid state, which is what led up to this whole conversation). I think the iTunes service lost her interest because it sounded like lock-in to one specific kind of player - thinking about it like an MBA (which she is), that was probably what drove her away from it. Especially since it wasn't clear that the iPod was right for her needs (to use while working out), and that iPod + purchasing music that effectively only works on iPod would involve a much larger initial outlay of capital to experiment with then a cheapo MP3 player.
Whereupon she decided it sounded way too complicated to deal with, and decided she didn't want to bother with it. The fact is the public is bothered by DRM, they just aren't bothered by in a moral or philisophical sense, more in a convenience sense. The thing is that while iTunes wins out right now in convenience, they still aren't anywhere near as convenient as getting plain old unencumbered MP3s, which are the industry standard and supported by all the hardware we've already invested in.
The value of online music purchasing is fast easy downloads and very low search costs (you know you're not going to waste time downloading a bad rip, an RIAA fake, etc.). You waste much less time - paying a buck a song for this service is a good deal, and you get warm fuzzies knowing at least some tiny fraction of the money goes to the artists. These value propositions wouldn't be decreased by using unencumbered MP3s - the people whose time has no value will keep using Kazaa etc. and searching for the good copies among the shit.
Your observation about the _relationships_ and inter-function and state dependencies that are NOT DOCUMENTED at ALL in the DirectX API is right on target - that's the whole problem. They always tell you what one method does, but not that you can't call it until the system is in a particular state, that you get to by calling some other method, or what the side effects are supposed to be when something isn't supported properly.
Well, they changed the decoder back to the older version, which was apparently better. Certainly, I can tell you that my MP3 seem subjectively to sound better with the new WinAmp 5 than they did with WinAmp 3, which managed to make them all sound like shit.
Without P2P apps, there'd be a heck of a lot less demand for broadband from teenagers and 20-somethings. Maybe the parents in the burbs just want "always-on" so they can check their email without dial up and send pictures to relatives, but let's be real, that's not driving the broadband industry.
You're thinking of a criminal case. This is a civil case. Rather, SCO needs to show that their argument is supported by a preponderance of the evidence. The evidentiary standard in civil court, while high, is substantially lower than criminal court. See the OJ case for an example of why this sometimes means somebody is found innocent of a crime, but still civilly liable for the same action as the crime (in the case of OJ, the deaths of the two people he was previously accused of murdering).
Could somebody argue, for example, SCO received compensation - the right to redistribute and profit off of Linux source code - in exchange for their obligation to release their own patches and modifications under the GPL. Now if they retroactively claim they didn't intend to release that source under the GPL (sorry, this example is hypothetical, only vaguely based on reality), have they breached a contract, or just refused to agree to a license? Is this clear cut? Am I missing something?
I think their UNIX business will get spun off after the lawsuit business clears up and the company goes bust. The Unixware product will no longer be marketable under the "SCO" name, since the brand will be indelibly tarnished in the IT world as part of a hostile, litigious organization that tried to extort money from companies, big and small, for work that they had no rights to, and for what essentially amounts to a massive pump-n-dump scheme.
I don't know if this is true, unless you are still getting student discount fare Delta/USAir shuttle tickets (are they even still selling these?). Used to be 50 bucks each way when I was in college. These days, it's something more like 80-90 each way on the shuttle flights, normal fare. Versus the train which is something like 60-70 each way. So I'm not sure how you're calculating. Also, when you include airport cab fare vs. train station cabfare on both ends (or take the T in Boston if you're convenient to it), it widens the gap since getting to JFK/La Guardia is definitely more expensive (and time consuming) then getting to Penn Station.
In fact, my mother saw my Ideq case and insisted I buy one for her since she was so sick of her large PC tower case. The real geeks I know don't see the need for SFF, they want lots of space for extra gadgets.
Agreed 100% on Amtrak. I think the problem is a combination of Amtrak being Amtrak, and the lack of governmental support for Amtrak. The fucking Acela is capable of operating at 125+ MPH, but the state of Connecticut apparently limits its speed legally to 75 MPH. Mind you, this is also Amtrak's fault for not working together with government to sort all this shit out and come up with a technically AND legally sound solution before blowing billions in government subsidized and private capital on stupid projects like this.
For example, here in the Northeast, the Boston-New York-Washington DC corridor would be a prime target for a Maglev train - the passenger volume is there, the airports are a huge hassle with congestion, weather problems in the winter, and massive traffic issues (driving to Logan in Boston or JFK in New York - ugh). Instead, we have legislation in Connecticut that prevents trains from going faster than 75 miles per hour for "safety reasons", so Amtrak blows a couple billion dollars on the sleek looking "Acela" trains, which go barely faster than the normal old fashion trains running the express routes. You shave about 30-40 minutes off of your travel time Boston to New York, and pay 3 times as much.
So instead they've had to market it as business class travel and sell it based on amenities instead of speed. Pure insanity. What we need is legislation and engineering working together to get a real high-speed train system down this heavy traffic corridor in place as a proof of concept AND proof of economical viability, so the price per mile can come down enough to build similar capability for longer runs.
Maglev or no, there's no technical reason that I'm aware of that high speed trains aren't running this corridor, just a lack of creative problem solving effort and cooperation between government and industry to get the damned thing built.
You should know that we actually do pay about 300-400 dollars a month for a parking spot here in Manhattan (250 if you're willing to trek off the beaten path to get to your car, like I do), more in some areas and buildings, so your estimate for the broom closet isn't too far off.