There was another mode called "Sliced HAM" which was invented by a software hacker. I'm not exactly sure how it worked, but I know it was very CPU intensive, because it was using standard 5-bit mode but with a constantly rotating color palette.
The benefit of Sliced HAM photos was 4096 colors, but without the HAM blur, because each pixel was entirely independent from the others. It created a crystal clear image and was fantastic for looking at porn..... er, SI Swimsuit Issues. Yeah, that's it.;-)
It's a shame Amiga died.
It would have been cool to see it survive to the present day like the Macintosh has survived. It took the Macs and IBM until circa 1995 to achieve what Amiga was doing (near-CD quality sound, thousands of colors, true preemptive multitasking) ten years earlier. A machine truly ahead of its time, but squandered by mismanagement. I suspect if Jack Tramiel has been there, he would have made the Amiga 500 as popular as the Commodore 64 was (via aggressive price reduction to ~$200 per A500 unit & retail sales in place like Sears, Kmart).
>>>"Worked for Cuba. No one has any money, because no one needs any money, because everything is available without it, and everyone is happy"
I just saw a CNN special about Cuba. Disregarding the babbling voiceover and just looking at the images, the Cuban people don't look happy to me. They live in squalor with human excrement filling the streets (read: disease-ridden), drive old cars from the 1940s or 50s, and are basically in sorry sorry shape.
Also:
Regarding capitalists not giving lip service to serving the people? Last I checked, they are ALL talking about "customer service". Just the other day I got a free night at my hotel, just because I told them I'm not happy, and the manager bent over backwards to make sure he didn't lose me as a customer.
Because ultimately, that's who rules in the market:
>>>"If those socialist societies had a proper direct democracy in the Roman style"
Direct Democracy is just a compact way of saying "Tyranny of the Majority to squash the minority (or individual)". It is not a good system to use if you believe in basic human rights. Of course if you don't believe in human rights..... that a simple 50.1% majority vote to take somebody's house (or car or whatever) is an acceptable system, and trampling the individual underfoot to serve the majority is okay..... then go for it.
But for myself, I prefer a Republic of Laws where said laws are designed to protect the individual from tyranny of the state or his neighbors. A republic where each person is a monarch of his own life, and nobody can interfere with his decisions or take his house.
"No man has a right to harm another. And that is all that the government should restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson
>>>"When was the last time you paid the sun for all that electricity? That's where it comes from, and yes, it's free."
(1) Yes but still: The sun is finite, due to cool-off in 5 billion A.D. It's not infinite and neither is the universe (read Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" about the death of the universe & mankind when all the energy runs out).
(2) The sun is free, as is the coal/oil it filled-up with energy circa 500 million years ago, but the manpower to digup the coal/oil and transport it to your home is NOT free. Therefore there is a limitation, and a cost, and a need to charge varying amounts based upon how much each home uses.
>>>"There does not have to be a cost involved in ongoing energy needs, or ongoing material needs."
This is a foolish statement. As I just pointed out, there is manpower required to move the coal/oil to your home, and that means there IS a cost..... even if it's just the cost of food to feed your men (like an old slave plantation).
I just noticed your signature: "Patriotism is akin to racism."
No, not really. Yes sometimes patriotism CAN be twisted into racism (jingoism), but patriotism can also be a rational conclusion of logical thought. Quoting Benjamin Franklin, "Where freedom lives, there is my country." --- A rational form of patriotism based upon the ideal of liberty, not location or race.
Yes and the Telcos/Cablecos have already spent it:
- Improving telephone lines from analog to digital (increasing speeds from 33k to 56k) - Improving telephone lines to handle DSL (new hardware at central locations) - Laying new Cable line to formerly-unserved rurual communities.
The article is mistaken to say that the government gave money, and it was not used. It was used. There have been many, many improvements since 2000.
>>>The cable company pays essentially the same amount no matter how many channels you have.
No they don't. The cable company pays on a "per subscriber" basis, so if a bunch of people decide to drop the FX channel, then the cable company pays less money to FX. The cable company's payout moves up-and-down with the numbers of people subscribing or unsubscribing that channel.
There are some communities where the local politicians have mandated the cable company provide pay-per-channel service. In these communities people pay $1 per channel. Even if that doubled to $2 per channel, that would be ideal for me, as I would only be paying $10 a month + $5 for a "cable maintenance" fee. (Better than the current $60 a month.)
In satellite radio, Sirius/XM have merged and announced a new a la carte service. As I recall, it was $5 a month for 20 channels of your own choosing. They did NOT increase the rate for full subscribers.
A la carte IS a viable business model. So too is internet with 20, 50, 100 gigabyte limits on each tier.
I did it (download 20 gig a month using dialup). I'm a business traveler and from my hotel room I've downloaded the entire first season of Torchwood, the last season of Doctor Who, the recent Monk episodes, and also the latest versions of Spybot/AdAware. I don't know if that adds-up to 20 gig, but it's pretty close by my calculation.
Don't say you "can't" do something when clearly you can.;-)
And to answer your question, I don't know what the speed would be. Probably 4-5 megabit (the U.S. and E.U. average speed)... it depends on how the accountants at Comcast or Verizon or whoever crunch the numbers. A single QAM cable channel can handle ~40 megabit/second, so if each channel is subdivided by 8 internet-connected homes then you'd get 4-5 megabit per home.
I think it's funny when people say internet bandwidth has no limit.
It's not magic; this isn't Harry Potter. Bandwidth DOES have a finite limit, and when it's filled-up you either deal with the slowdown, or you lay more cables/servers (which costs Comcast, Verizon, et cetera money). That's the way the real world works.
Have you read your contract? Mine states that service is not guaranteed, which means they could block my access to Itunes or youtube or any other bandwidth-heavy site whenever they feel like it.
So if it's in your contract, they DID tell you prior to purchase.
Well in my scenario, nobody would be offering "unlimited" except as a high-end, $100 a month option for serious users. The other customers below that tier would be metered.
>>>"Whether their business practices are honest or not (often, they're not, as they don't tell you what they're going to do) is irrelevant. People who think that it's their right to max out a multi-megabit connection for the cost of a couple of lunches need to wake up and join reality."
+1
I only pay $15 for internet, and $5 for my cellphone. The reason my cost is so cheap is because I *don't* max-out my connection. Therefore I get a discount from the corporations because of my lower-than-normal usage.
Well... that works both ways. People who have higher-than-normal usage should be paying a premium to sustain it. Say $100 a month. (IMHO)
My understanding about the government grants? It's already been spent by the Telcos/Cablecos for:
- upgrading phone lines from analog to digital (i.e. from 33k to 56k capability) - upgrading phone lines to handle DSL (new hardware at switching stations) - laying new television/internet cable to reach rural communities
In my own neighborhood, we got Cable TV for the first time in 2002; never had it before. I've seen my connection speed increase from 24k (dirty lines) to 53k during the last few years, and just a few months ago, 3000k (dsl). I think it's false to say the money has not been spent, because clearly it has been spent. All you need to do is look around at all the upgrades (or just review my list).
>>>The problem with these companies is that the infrastructure should be publicly owned
No, no, no. We are not a communist country. The infrastructure of the internet should be *privately* owned. Same way the natural gas lines, or electrical lines, or phone lines, or....... are all privately owned by private companies.
The internet untility should be treated the same as all other utilities are treated. Privately owned. Competitive in nature.
A company that "pockets" the money rather than invest in laying new cable to high-demand customers......is a company that will lose customers to the competitors (Verizon DSL, FiOS, Dish, Netscape). Comcast would be extremely foolish to follow the "don't upgrade; pocket the money" paradigm, but if they do, then you can "vote" with your dollars and go choose somebody else.
I always think it's funny to hear NBC News or Baltimore Sun or some other old media outlet proclaim, "You can't trust the internet, but you can trust us." Yeah right. Reporters have been lying since the day the printing press was invented. They are not any more trustworthy then the new media.
Now that I'm old and cynical, I question everything ("Thanks for your opinion but where's your source to back it up?"). Especially if it comes from internet, TV, radio, or government, in which case I assume everything they say is a lie in order to push some agenda. I've caught the mass media in too many lies to trust them anymore.
Ditto my dorm, but when I came home in Summer 1995 I had to make due with what I had:
- Commodore Amiga 500 - phone jack - 2 k modem
It was slow but it worked, and it allowed me to continue using the Web to look-up television schedules and/or chat with people online. Aside: (Googlegroups still has some of my public messages dating back to 1988! Wow. I guess the web's not as ephemeral as I thought.)
I grew-up in the era of 1980s BBSes, and you didn't need a fast modem because a BBS was just plain ASCII or ANSI. In other words, colorful text. In that era, 0.3 or 1.2 kbit/sec was the norm, and 2.4k was "fast", and anything faster was the domain of the "elites" like BBS owners.
The reason I was still using a 2.4 kbit/s modem in 1994 is because I was a college student and didn't have any money to buy a faster 9.6 or 14.4 model. Plus my parents were not convinced I needed a faster model, so it was obvious I was not going to get any help from them. ["Why do you need a new modem?" "Because it's slow!" "Too bad; I grew up watching tv on a 5 inch screen." "But mom." "I said no." (sigh)]
As soon as I got my engineering job, I bought a new modem and threw away my old model.
Still, it was fun surfing the early Web at 2 kbit speeds. No graphics; just pure text with little tags that said [SCIFI logo] or [PSU image]. It was... unique. Just like my computer at the time: Commodore Amiga 500. I always enjoy doing things in an unusual fashion, because it's part of the challenge of computing. ----- Even today there are people surfing the net using classic 8-bit machines like Commodore 64 or Atari 800, just to see if it can be done.
Look at how "narrow" the page is. All of the graphics were designed to fit inside a 640x480 monitor from the early 1990s. Ya know, somebody ought to start an archive to capture and preserve vintage sites from pre-1999. It could be very educational someday to show future programmers how the Web looked when it was still a toddler.
Slashdot Mirror
There was another mode called "Sliced HAM" which was invented by a software hacker. I'm not exactly sure how it worked, but I know it was very CPU intensive, because it was using standard 5-bit mode but with a constantly rotating color palette.
;-)
The benefit of Sliced HAM photos was 4096 colors, but without the HAM blur, because each pixel was entirely independent from the others. It created a crystal clear image and was fantastic for looking at porn..... er, SI Swimsuit Issues. Yeah, that's it.
It's a shame Amiga died.
It would have been cool to see it survive to the present day like the Macintosh has survived. It took the Macs and IBM until circa 1995 to achieve what Amiga was doing (near-CD quality sound, thousands of colors, true preemptive multitasking) ten years earlier. A machine truly ahead of its time, but squandered by mismanagement. I suspect if Jack Tramiel has been there, he would have made the Amiga 500 as popular as the Commodore 64 was (via aggressive price reduction to ~$200 per A500 unit & retail sales in place like Sears, Kmart).
>>>"Worked for Cuba. No one has any money, because no one needs any money, because everything is available without it, and everyone is happy"
I just saw a CNN special about Cuba. Disregarding the babbling voiceover and just looking at the images, the Cuban people don't look happy to me. They live in squalor with human excrement filling the streets (read: disease-ridden), drive old cars from the 1940s or 50s, and are basically in sorry sorry shape.
Also:
Regarding capitalists not giving lip service to serving the people? Last I checked, they are ALL talking about "customer service". Just the other day I got a free night at my hotel, just because I told them I'm not happy, and the manager bent over backwards to make sure he didn't lose me as a customer.
Because ultimately, that's who rules in the market:
The customer.
>>>"If those socialist societies had a proper direct democracy in the Roman style"
Direct Democracy is just a compact way of saying "Tyranny of the Majority to squash the minority (or individual)". It is not a good system to use if you believe in basic human rights. Of course if you don't believe in human rights..... that a simple 50.1% majority vote to take somebody's house (or car or whatever) is an acceptable system, and trampling the individual underfoot to serve the majority is okay..... then go for it.
But for myself, I prefer a Republic of Laws where said laws are designed to protect the individual from tyranny of the state or his neighbors. A republic where each person is a monarch of his own life, and nobody can interfere with his decisions or take his house.
"No man has a right to harm another. And that is all that the government should restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson
>>>"When was the last time you paid the sun for all that electricity? That's where it comes from, and yes, it's free."
(1) Yes but still: The sun is finite, due to cool-off in 5 billion A.D. It's not infinite and neither is the universe (read Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" about the death of the universe & mankind when all the energy runs out).
(2) The sun is free, as is the coal/oil it filled-up with energy circa 500 million years ago, but the manpower to digup the coal/oil and transport it to your home is NOT free. Therefore there is a limitation, and a cost, and a need to charge varying amounts based upon how much each home uses.
>>>"There does not have to be a cost involved in ongoing energy needs, or ongoing material needs."
This is a foolish statement. As I just pointed out, there is manpower required to move the coal/oil to your home, and that means there IS a cost..... even if it's just the cost of food to feed your men (like an old slave plantation).
There is always a cost.
I just noticed your signature:
"Patriotism is akin to racism."
No, not really. Yes sometimes patriotism CAN be twisted into racism (jingoism), but patriotism can also be a rational conclusion of logical thought. Quoting Benjamin Franklin, "Where freedom lives, there is my country." --- A rational form of patriotism based upon the ideal of liberty, not location or race.
>>>"We've already paid for it"
Yes and the Telcos/Cablecos have already spent it:
- Improving telephone lines from analog to digital (increasing speeds from 33k to 56k)
- Improving telephone lines to handle DSL (new hardware at central locations)
- Laying new Cable line to formerly-unserved rurual communities.
The article is mistaken to say that the government gave money, and it was not used. It was used. There have been many, many improvements since 2000.
>>>The cable company pays essentially the same amount no matter how many channels you have.
No they don't. The cable company pays on a "per subscriber" basis, so if a bunch of people decide to drop the FX channel, then the cable company pays less money to FX. The cable company's payout moves up-and-down with the numbers of people subscribing or unsubscribing that channel.
There are some communities where the local politicians have mandated the cable company provide pay-per-channel service. In these communities people pay $1 per channel. Even if that doubled to $2 per channel, that would be ideal for me, as I would only be paying $10 a month + $5 for a "cable maintenance" fee. (Better than the current $60 a month.)
In satellite radio, Sirius/XM have merged and announced a new a la carte service. As I recall, it was $5 a month for 20 channels of your own choosing. They did NOT increase the rate for full subscribers.
A la carte IS a viable business model.
So too is internet with 20, 50, 100 gigabyte limits on each tier.
I did it (download 20 gig a month using dialup). I'm a business traveler and from my hotel room I've downloaded the entire first season of Torchwood, the last season of Doctor Who, the recent Monk episodes, and also the latest versions of Spybot/AdAware. I don't know if that adds-up to 20 gig, but it's pretty close by my calculation.
;-)
Don't say you "can't" do something when clearly you can.
And to answer your question, I don't know what the speed would be. Probably 4-5 megabit (the U.S. and E.U. average speed)... it depends on how the accountants at Comcast or Verizon or whoever crunch the numbers. A single QAM cable channel can handle ~40 megabit/second, so if each channel is subdivided by 8 internet-connected homes then you'd get 4-5 megabit per home.
I think it's funny when people say internet bandwidth has no limit.
It's not magic; this isn't Harry Potter. Bandwidth DOES have a finite limit, and when it's filled-up you either deal with the slowdown, or you lay more cables/servers (which costs Comcast, Verizon, et cetera money). That's the way the real world works.
Have you read your contract? Mine states that service is not guaranteed, which means they could block my access to Itunes or youtube or any other bandwidth-heavy site whenever they feel like it.
So if it's in your contract, they DID tell you prior to purchase.
The grandparent did. "only about $70/mo." I was actually responding to both posts at the same time. Guess I should have made that clearer.
Well in my scenario, nobody would be offering "unlimited" except as a high-end, $100 a month option for serious users. The other customers below that tier would be metered.
>>>"Whether their business practices are honest or not (often, they're not, as they don't tell you what they're going to do) is irrelevant. People who think that it's their right to max out a multi-megabit connection for the cost of a couple of lunches need to wake up and join reality."
+1
I only pay $15 for internet, and $5 for my cellphone. The reason my cost is so cheap is because I *don't* max-out my connection. Therefore I get a discount from the corporations because of my lower-than-normal usage.
Well... that works both ways. People who have higher-than-normal usage should be paying a premium to sustain it. Say $100 a month. (IMHO)
My understanding about the government grants? It's already been spent by the Telcos/Cablecos for:
- upgrading phone lines from analog to digital (i.e. from 33k to 56k capability)
- upgrading phone lines to handle DSL (new hardware at switching stations)
- laying new television/internet cable to reach rural communities
In my own neighborhood, we got Cable TV for the first time in 2002; never had it before. I've seen my connection speed increase from 24k (dirty lines) to 53k during the last few years, and just a few months ago, 3000k (dsl). I think it's false to say the money has not been spent, because clearly it has been spent. All you need to do is look around at all the upgrades (or just review my list).
>>>The problem with these companies is that the infrastructure should be publicly owned
....... are all privately owned by private companies.
No, no, no. We are not a communist country. The infrastructure of the internet should be *privately* owned. Same way the natural gas lines, or electrical lines, or phone lines, or
The internet untility should be treated the same as all other utilities are treated. Privately owned. Competitive in nature.
A company that "pockets" the money rather than invest in laying new cable to high-demand customers... ...is a company that will lose customers to the competitors (Verizon DSL, FiOS, Dish, Netscape). Comcast would be extremely foolish to follow the "don't upgrade; pocket the money" paradigm, but if they do, then you can "vote" with your dollars and go choose somebody else.
Aren't photons wavicles? (A wave with its ends chopped off, thus displaying the properties of a discrete particle in some cases.)
+1 to the parent.
I always think it's funny to hear NBC News or Baltimore Sun or some other old media outlet proclaim, "You can't trust the internet, but you can trust us." Yeah right. Reporters have been lying since the day the printing press was invented. They are not any more trustworthy then the new media.
I grew-up believing everything.
Now that I'm old and cynical, I question everything ("Thanks for your opinion but where's your source to back it up?"). Especially if it comes from internet, TV, radio, or government, in which case I assume everything they say is a lie in order to push some agenda. I've caught the mass media in too many lies to trust them anymore.
My post is not a "troll".
It's an opinion about the morality (or lack thereof) of journalists/bloggers who lie to their readers. An opinion. Learn to know the difference.
Lynx is a text-only browser?
(shakes the magic wikipedia): "All signs point to yes." Okay.
Ditto my dorm, but when I came home in Summer 1995 I had to make due with what I had:
- Commodore Amiga 500
- phone jack
- 2 k modem
It was slow but it worked, and it allowed me to continue using the Web to look-up television schedules and/or chat with people online. Aside: (Googlegroups still has some of my public messages dating back to 1988! Wow. I guess the web's not as ephemeral as I thought.)
I grew-up in the era of 1980s BBSes, and you didn't need a fast modem because a BBS was just plain ASCII or ANSI. In other words, colorful text. In that era, 0.3 or 1.2 kbit/sec was the norm, and 2.4k was "fast", and anything faster was the domain of the "elites" like BBS owners.
The reason I was still using a 2.4 kbit/s modem in 1994 is because I was a college student and didn't have any money to buy a faster 9.6 or 14.4 model. Plus my parents were not convinced I needed a faster model, so it was obvious I was not going to get any help from them. ["Why do you need a new modem?" "Because it's slow!" "Too bad; I grew up watching tv on a 5 inch screen." "But mom." "I said no." (sigh)]
As soon as I got my engineering job, I bought a new modem and threw away my old model.
Still, it was fun surfing the early Web at 2 kbit speeds. No graphics; just pure text with little tags that said [SCIFI logo] or [PSU image]. It was... unique. Just like my computer at the time: Commodore Amiga 500. I always enjoy doing things in an unusual fashion, because it's part of the challenge of computing. ----- Even today there are people surfing the net using classic 8-bit machines like Commodore 64 or Atari 800, just to see if it can be done.
Neat.
Look at how "narrow" the page is. All of the graphics were designed to fit inside a 640x480 monitor from the early 1990s. Ya know, somebody ought to start an archive to capture and preserve vintage sites from pre-1999. It could be very educational someday to show future programmers how the Web looked when it was still a toddler.