My first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio. I liked the idea but never did anything with it. I gave it to a friend and ordered an Archos Jukebox 6000, which I really liked (mainly because of the capacity and sound quality). I loved the fact that it simply mounted as a hard drive and didn't require an app of any kind of the host computer. It was a simple, handly, and very reliable device. It went to Iraq with me in 2003. It was special. It could take me to a different place. I remember finding a quite place up forward next to some guns on the ship, where I'd get away from the noise and ships company (Sailors). I'd sunbathe there and for some reason nobody bothered me there. Finding any quiet or privacy on a warship is very difficult! Then later, after we were helicoptered to "the beach" (the nasty little port of Umm Qasr) the Archos came along and provided a little escape when I could take a break and not have to focus on what was going on around me. The unit took a lot of abuse, held my entire music library at the time. I even had a folder full of SOMA-FM music thanks for longtime friend Rusty Hodge at the station. It always seemed weird and kind of decadent to be able to lie down someplace and be taken away from all of the stuff going on, to the sound of your music that relaxes you, or gets you going. Later, when I got home, I used it in the rental car as I drove up the west coast, Visiting places and places that I hadn't seen since I was a kid. Just composing this message is taking me back, yet again.I also brought along a Sangean ATS-909 portable AM/FM/Shortwave radio, and that was great too. It allowed me to listen to British Forces Broadcasting Service, VOA and even Kuwaiti FM stations.
They'd love us to be back in the bad old days, where the cost of entry was high and they completely controlled distribution because ONLY they could make the little plastic disks.
They used to have a cool deal going on: radio stations promote records for free (or some. Ahem. "Consideration"), the music would sell, and the system would feed itself. Now, the radio stations won't take any risks (since they're all owned by a few companies who overpaid for them and have huge payments to make). The record companies will sue anything that moves and wants money from the radio stations who might have promoted their Lady Gaga like garbage for free, and then they whine every time that somebody tries to give the public something close to what it wants. I wish that they'd hurry up an go out of business so that somebody with half a clue can get things going again. I mean, how do you blow this?
We're seeing more G.722 in VOIP phone sets these days. This gives you 7 khz bandwidth which is respectable for voice. It's also a royalty free codec that's simple to implement. It's supported (mostly) in Asterisk and is commonly used by the corporate conference systems and radio stations. There are better codecs, but the royalties preclude their inclusion into the things that most people buy.
Cell phones, as far as audio go, as a disease! I used to be the Chief Engineer at a major talk radio station and... dealing with cell phones was just awful.I refuse to participate on a conference call or any critical phone call using a cell phone. How people can use those things as their primary home phones mystifies me.
I live in a very rural area in the Southern California high desert not far from Nevada (Look! There goes Art Bell!) and used to have a C Band dish. After I first moved here (1990 or so) you could tune a few transponders in with a video receiver that had Frequency Division Multiplex (FDM) on them. This is just a fancy way of saying "many little SSB carriers". Connecting a radio that receives short wave to the sat receiver allowed you to listen to phone calls from Alaska and Hawaii. You'd change channels by simply tuning the radio between channels. You'd only hear one side of the conversation but it was kind of interesting at the time. I 'm pretty sure that's all gone now that those places actually have been connected via fiber. (Look! UFO's!) TV was just going scrambled but there were a few things "still in the clear". I suspect that that's still the case. There's also FTA "Free to Air" digital TV or DVB. Consider setting up a couple of long wire antennas, one "North -South" another "East - West". The absence of noise allows you to receive some interesting things on SW.
I guess the term "Anchor Tenant" has multiple meanings in this case.
I wonder why they're doing it in San Francisco, with it's incredibly restrictive business rules and ridiculously expensive and unreliable electricity?
I guess that TV broadcasters didn't give the government enough money.
I have a better idea! How about if a good sized chunk of that spectrum was made license free, like 2.4 and 5.8 ghz?
Why should we give up "public airwaves" to the Verizons of the world to sell back to us by the kilobyte at high prices with data caps, etc.
Look what's been done with the crumbs that the FCC has allowed us already!
In 2003, I was on a small team using a similar WHOI system called REMUS to take surveys of ports and waterways, looking for mines. We had been training with the system, mainly in Southern California and when Iraq started up, they decided that they wanted to try the new technology there. We did, and it was successful. http://www.joetalbot.net/pages/030401-N-3783H-075A.htm
In the course of our training, we managed to get the things stuck, beached and lost several times despite a system that would take it to the surface when it's little PC-104 mind was blown. Remember, there are things down there (plants, critters, caves, rocks, ships and junk) that are unknown to us before these things are launched (that's often why we launch them, you know? To take surveys?). These things navigate underwater using a small network of buoy "transponders" the respond to pings from the unit. The slight response delay (caused by the water and very predictable) tells the unit how far it is from the buoy, who's locations are known to the units (windows) programming software.
These things are pretty cool and useful, but they're also kind of primitive. We used to attach a "pinger" to the units so that when they got stuck, we could recover them with divers. A pinger is a small capsule that contains a device that periodically emits a 20-70 khz "ping" that is easily picked up by a hand held, very directional receiver carried by a diver. http://www.benthos.com/undersea-pingers-locators-product-overview.asp Given what the system is worth, I would imagine that it has a pinger for location as well.
The Navy did the "biggest IT contract ever let" and it was pretty much an expensive bloated disaster. See http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3813651
I'm beginning to think that "too big to fail" means "too big" and that failure is inevitable.
This smells like another attempt to get politicians or eco-opportunists into "the climate business".Remember, they almost pulled it off.
It was really disappointing and scary to me that there are some out there who wold pull any kind of stunt and use any tactic to support using allegedly "settled science" to achieve very questionable political goals.
Once again, don't get your science from Politicians, celebrities or lawyers. Examine why you believe what you do. Honest skepticism is healthy.
To those who call skeptics "deniers" (like holocaust deniers), please keep your religion to yourself.True scientists are skeptical, as they should be.
Never had a call drop? Never been someplace where there is "no network"? Never had a conversation that you simply couldn't understand because of the "stacked" aggressive compression? C'mon!
Thanks to the wireless companies, people have lower standards now, in terms of audio quality, reliability and availability.
I used to work for Jabra years ago, before they had any market share and weren't really sure what direction to take. I was brought on to improve audio quality for various products. One was the small "all in ear" headset. It had terrible audio due to the lack of "proximity effect", there was really no way to "fix" this problem. I used to piss everybody off by calling it "an ear mounted speakerphone" in meetings. People would never accept the poor quality on land line phones (the headset market at that time). Poof! Along comes wireless and the lack of quality is expected by the consumer. Result: sell product and then company!
People who have only a cell phone are nuts, and deaf!
Everything here is political. To get anybody to do their job, you must shame them publicly or provide them an opportunity to look good in the press.
Most lawyers are too techno-phobic to understand even a simple case like this one, and it's bad laws that make this kind of thing possible.
What happens is that people google the "calling number" and get links to "whocalledus" or similar, but they also get the listing of the poor victim, though usually it's a recently disconnected number. I'm not sure whether the number is disconnected before the creeps "use" it or if it was already disconnected. The behavior described suggests that they just pick a number out of the sky that shows up in google with an address that looks legit.
I have call logs (CDR's) that go back for months that show the pattern that they use. That's how I know it. Oh, that and the MF'rs call on my cell phone all the time, over and over.
Why do we have to have telemarketing AT ALL? Who does it help? This won't stop until that whole business is shut down. They've proven that they have no respect for individuals or the law.
I'm a little concerned about how the people here have determined that it's Digitcom in LA, though it might well be.
I wondered when this was going to happen! I take care of a PBX with about 600 numbers on it and we get calls from these same creeps daily. When you try to find out who they are they just hang up on you. I have three active complaints with the FCC on these people. Usually, they spoof the number of some poor individual who is always listed in the phone book, always with the address, usually in some backwater town and the number is recently disconnected. I suspect that the listing is to help avoid blacklists or filtering (it works with us). The company is a service bureau that produces "leads" for several products including the car warranty fraudsters, an alarm company, a directTV dealer and a credit card company. They ignore the do not call list. The warranty people are the most persistent and the sleaziest, as they try to trick people into believing that they have an existing business relationship with them. This has been going on for months and will take a serious effort to get these guys busted, are slashdotters up to the task?
Somebody will have to become an actual "lead" for them and collect some information that the FTC and FCC can use to find them. Getting the media on board will ensure the attention of the government agencies, who each will want to take the credit for stopping this once they "see the cameras". The story here is perfect for her local TV station's investigative team "Local woman gets thousands of calls from angry public because of fraudulent telemarketing company!". People hate fraud and telemarketers. These lead generation companies do the dirty work and keep "reputable" firms hands clean of wrongdoing by providing another layer of anonymity and making it almost hopeless to attempt to pursue the bad guys, but somebody has to get the customers money and to do that requires piercing that vail. The next phase of this will be when these kinds of losers start calling via VOIP from overseas. The key is to identify these people and more importantly, their customers! Please help!
MicroCenter is one of my two favorite local brick and mortar places. The service is very good and deals can be had. It's not the noisy, chaotic sleezefest that is Fry's. While Fry's has deals (loss leaders), you must beware of "repacked returns", often missing parts. I bought a router the other day and found it reflashed with a broken version of WRT! Somebody flashed it then returned it! Service at Fry's is generally awful unless you speak another language. Fry's is not a favorite, but sometimes can't be avoided.
We also have Central Computers, a very well run operation that is open every day (I always seem to be building/repairing PC's on Sunday for some reason.) I've been buying some online from Newegg and buy.com, both with good results.
Besides the fact that this system is dying a rapid death, the quality is so poor that you wouldn't want to record it, let alone listen to it.
Would you download a mp3 music file with a bitrate of less than 128k?
If you make an analog recording that is uncompressed, then at least you won't be further degrading the signal. "Stacked Compression" is a very bad deal sonically.
Do you REALLY think that it's worse now? They don't even have to run jumpers anymore! They just type in what they want or "scoop up" entire trunk groups at a time. Remember what I said "If it can be done, it will be done" and I'd bet money that it *IS* being done. Wake up!
He was! Are you sure that it wasn't intersil 8038's?
I'm familiar with that design. What area did you live in at that time? We may know a lot of the same people.:)
If it CAN be done, it WILL be done. Back then "being paranoid" was standard for Phreaks and considered a good thing. Honestly, I think that things are FAR WORSE now, then under Nixon. If they want to get your for something, they will. We've had enough examples of "the law be damned" over the past dozen years or so that it should be clear to all. The things that you have to fear are getting caught up in the "justice system" at all. You'll be facing incompetent, sometimes evil, always political and usually aggressive investigators, lawyers and judges. Anybody who's ever done work with or for an attorney knows that they are the most technophobic people you'll ever meet, and while this can work in your favor, most often it doesn't. This won't get fixed because they don't recognize a problem. Be very afraid!
Nokia is one of the first companies I've seen that's created an entire retail strategy based on unlocked phones available without contract. I bought an "N95" a while back for a high price but unlocked. It was worth the money to me to get what I want, the way that I wanted it. The phone is far more capable than the iPhone.
I think that Nokia is stuck living in a (screwed up) world that the carriers built. While there have been some token sign of "openness" lately, those guys like the world as it is (sim locks, windows drm, contracts, lock-ins). Most consumers in the wireless market aren't very sophisticated and think that this carrier dominated eco-system is the only way. That needs to change, and "good luck with that".
Depending on where you are in the city, Wiline Networks provides great service at a low cost and is &*%&*%@& fast! We get 40 mbps down and 10 mbps up. We pay $500 and get 8 statics. We are in the Embarcadero area.
My Comcast internet has been out for a month anyway, and last time I tried to get it fixed I almost hurt someone because they pissed me off so badly.
I have a tough time believing that this is the most effective way to get a government regulator "off your back", even a corrupt, incompetent one like the FCC.
I just showed them how the 'free market' works. They didn't even try to save the account. I've been paying $190 a month for 1 DVR and internet, and it goes up every month it seems. Now to get rid of the TV.
I already have DSL from Speakeasy (Covad). It's not as fast, but it's never gone down and they're pretty responsive and well run.
The FCC needs to be taken apart. They are worse than useless!
Microcenter is my favorite "Big Box" store. The people who work there speak english. The stores are well stocked and merchandised, and the prices are fair.
I meant to mention them in an earlier posting about "rebate hell" and Belkin cable ripoffs.
I avoid the place, mainly due to their annoying marketing practices! They're completely rebate happy! On Saturdays, I'll often look at the ads in the Mercury News where there are circulars from Fry's (weasels), Best Buy (mass market junk), Circus City and sometimes "Chump USA".
Best Buy seems to be trying to shed the rebate nonsense, the others less so. But I simply won't play the games that CompUSA comes up with to avoid being ripped off. What the ^%$#@ is "instant savings" anyway? How about just publishing the price, without a bunch of nonsense!
I had to buy an IEC power cord the other day because I stupidly forgot one when I went to another city to install new gear. Chump wanted $9 for it because they're a Belkin house. I ran out of time and held my nose and vowed to never again do business with them, but they did get their nine bucks. Hope it was worth it, guys! When a store starts carrying belkin, they drop all the competing cables and suddenly you can't avoid getting ripped off anymore. Those kinds of practices make me avoid the place like the plague, and I control a lot of spending.
Here's how I see it: Screw the customer. Go out of business. Eventually, bad business loses. It just takes too long.
This development is for AUV's/UUV's and have nothing to do with submarines. We used UUV's in Iraq to clear the waterways (there ARE waterways!) of mines. This means less need for trained dolphins and related dolphin headaches and expenses. See http://www.joetalbot.net/index_10.htm
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My first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio. I liked the idea but never did anything with it. I gave it to a friend and ordered an Archos Jukebox 6000, which I really liked (mainly because of the capacity and sound quality). I loved the fact that it simply mounted as a hard drive and didn't require an app of any kind of the host computer. It was a simple, handly, and very reliable device. It went to Iraq with me in 2003. It was special. It could take me to a different place. I remember finding a quite place up forward next to some guns on the ship, where I'd get away from the noise and ships company (Sailors). I'd sunbathe there and for some reason nobody bothered me there. Finding any quiet or privacy on a warship is very difficult! Then later, after we were helicoptered to "the beach" (the nasty little port of Umm Qasr) the Archos came along and provided a little escape when I could take a break and not have to focus on what was going on around me. The unit took a lot of abuse, held my entire music library at the time. I even had a folder full of SOMA-FM music thanks for longtime friend Rusty Hodge at the station. It always seemed weird and kind of decadent to be able to lie down someplace and be taken away from all of the stuff going on, to the sound of your music that relaxes you, or gets you going. Later, when I got home, I used it in the rental car as I drove up the west coast, Visiting places and places that I hadn't seen since I was a kid. Just composing this message is taking me back, yet again.I also brought along a Sangean ATS-909 portable AM/FM/Shortwave radio, and that was great too. It allowed me to listen to British Forces Broadcasting Service, VOA and even Kuwaiti FM stations.
They'd love us to be back in the bad old days, where the cost of entry was high and they completely controlled distribution because ONLY they could make the little plastic disks. They used to have a cool deal going on: radio stations promote records for free (or some. Ahem. "Consideration"), the music would sell, and the system would feed itself. Now, the radio stations won't take any risks (since they're all owned by a few companies who overpaid for them and have huge payments to make). The record companies will sue anything that moves and wants money from the radio stations who might have promoted their Lady Gaga like garbage for free, and then they whine every time that somebody tries to give the public something close to what it wants. I wish that they'd hurry up an go out of business so that somebody with half a clue can get things going again. I mean, how do you blow this?
We're seeing more G.722 in VOIP phone sets these days. This gives you 7 khz bandwidth which is respectable for voice. It's also a royalty free codec that's simple to implement. It's supported (mostly) in Asterisk and is commonly used by the corporate conference systems and radio stations. There are better codecs, but the royalties preclude their inclusion into the things that most people buy. Cell phones, as far as audio go, as a disease! I used to be the Chief Engineer at a major talk radio station and... dealing with cell phones was just awful.I refuse to participate on a conference call or any critical phone call using a cell phone. How people can use those things as their primary home phones mystifies me.
I live in a very rural area in the Southern California high desert not far from Nevada (Look! There goes Art Bell!) and used to have a C Band dish. After I first moved here (1990 or so) you could tune a few transponders in with a video receiver that had Frequency Division Multiplex (FDM) on them. This is just a fancy way of saying "many little SSB carriers". Connecting a radio that receives short wave to the sat receiver allowed you to listen to phone calls from Alaska and Hawaii. You'd change channels by simply tuning the radio between channels. You'd only hear one side of the conversation but it was kind of interesting at the time. I 'm pretty sure that's all gone now that those places actually have been connected via fiber. (Look! UFO's!) TV was just going scrambled but there were a few things "still in the clear". I suspect that that's still the case. There's also FTA "Free to Air" digital TV or DVB. Consider setting up a couple of long wire antennas, one "North -South" another "East - West". The absence of noise allows you to receive some interesting things on SW.
I guess the term "Anchor Tenant" has multiple meanings in this case. I wonder why they're doing it in San Francisco, with it's incredibly restrictive business rules and ridiculously expensive and unreliable electricity?
I guess that TV broadcasters didn't give the government enough money. I have a better idea! How about if a good sized chunk of that spectrum was made license free, like 2.4 and 5.8 ghz? Why should we give up "public airwaves" to the Verizons of the world to sell back to us by the kilobyte at high prices with data caps, etc. Look what's been done with the crumbs that the FCC has allowed us already!
In 2003, I was on a small team using a similar WHOI system called REMUS to take surveys of ports and waterways, looking for mines. We had been training with the system, mainly in Southern California and when Iraq started up, they decided that they wanted to try the new technology there. We did, and it was successful. http://www.joetalbot.net/pages/030401-N-3783H-075A.htm In the course of our training, we managed to get the things stuck, beached and lost several times despite a system that would take it to the surface when it's little PC-104 mind was blown. Remember, there are things down there (plants, critters, caves, rocks, ships and junk) that are unknown to us before these things are launched (that's often why we launch them, you know? To take surveys?). These things navigate underwater using a small network of buoy "transponders" the respond to pings from the unit. The slight response delay (caused by the water and very predictable) tells the unit how far it is from the buoy, who's locations are known to the units (windows) programming software. These things are pretty cool and useful, but they're also kind of primitive. We used to attach a "pinger" to the units so that when they got stuck, we could recover them with divers. A pinger is a small capsule that contains a device that periodically emits a 20-70 khz "ping" that is easily picked up by a hand held, very directional receiver carried by a diver. http://www.benthos.com/undersea-pingers-locators-product-overview.asp Given what the system is worth, I would imagine that it has a pinger for location as well.
The Navy did the "biggest IT contract ever let" and it was pretty much an expensive bloated disaster. See http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3813651 I'm beginning to think that "too big to fail" means "too big" and that failure is inevitable.
This smells like another attempt to get politicians or eco-opportunists into "the climate business".Remember, they almost pulled it off. It was really disappointing and scary to me that there are some out there who wold pull any kind of stunt and use any tactic to support using allegedly "settled science" to achieve very questionable political goals. Once again, don't get your science from Politicians, celebrities or lawyers. Examine why you believe what you do. Honest skepticism is healthy. To those who call skeptics "deniers" (like holocaust deniers), please keep your religion to yourself.True scientists are skeptical, as they should be.
Never had a call drop? Never been someplace where there is "no network"? Never had a conversation that you simply couldn't understand because of the "stacked" aggressive compression? C'mon! Thanks to the wireless companies, people have lower standards now, in terms of audio quality, reliability and availability. I used to work for Jabra years ago, before they had any market share and weren't really sure what direction to take. I was brought on to improve audio quality for various products. One was the small "all in ear" headset. It had terrible audio due to the lack of "proximity effect", there was really no way to "fix" this problem. I used to piss everybody off by calling it "an ear mounted speakerphone" in meetings. People would never accept the poor quality on land line phones (the headset market at that time). Poof! Along comes wireless and the lack of quality is expected by the consumer. Result: sell product and then company! People who have only a cell phone are nuts, and deaf!
Everything here is political. To get anybody to do their job, you must shame them publicly or provide them an opportunity to look good in the press. Most lawyers are too techno-phobic to understand even a simple case like this one, and it's bad laws that make this kind of thing possible.
What happens is that people google the "calling number" and get links to "whocalledus" or similar, but they also get the listing of the poor victim, though usually it's a recently disconnected number. I'm not sure whether the number is disconnected before the creeps "use" it or if it was already disconnected. The behavior described suggests that they just pick a number out of the sky that shows up in google with an address that looks legit. I have call logs (CDR's) that go back for months that show the pattern that they use. That's how I know it. Oh, that and the MF'rs call on my cell phone all the time, over and over. Why do we have to have telemarketing AT ALL? Who does it help? This won't stop until that whole business is shut down. They've proven that they have no respect for individuals or the law. I'm a little concerned about how the people here have determined that it's Digitcom in LA, though it might well be.
I wondered when this was going to happen! I take care of a PBX with about 600 numbers on it and we get calls from these same creeps daily. When you try to find out who they are they just hang up on you. I have three active complaints with the FCC on these people. Usually, they spoof the number of some poor individual who is always listed in the phone book, always with the address, usually in some backwater town and the number is recently disconnected. I suspect that the listing is to help avoid blacklists or filtering (it works with us). The company is a service bureau that produces "leads" for several products including the car warranty fraudsters, an alarm company, a directTV dealer and a credit card company. They ignore the do not call list. The warranty people are the most persistent and the sleaziest, as they try to trick people into believing that they have an existing business relationship with them. This has been going on for months and will take a serious effort to get these guys busted, are slashdotters up to the task? Somebody will have to become an actual "lead" for them and collect some information that the FTC and FCC can use to find them. Getting the media on board will ensure the attention of the government agencies, who each will want to take the credit for stopping this once they "see the cameras". The story here is perfect for her local TV station's investigative team "Local woman gets thousands of calls from angry public because of fraudulent telemarketing company!". People hate fraud and telemarketers. These lead generation companies do the dirty work and keep "reputable" firms hands clean of wrongdoing by providing another layer of anonymity and making it almost hopeless to attempt to pursue the bad guys, but somebody has to get the customers money and to do that requires piercing that vail. The next phase of this will be when these kinds of losers start calling via VOIP from overseas. The key is to identify these people and more importantly, their customers! Please help!
MicroCenter is one of my two favorite local brick and mortar places. The service is very good and deals can be had. It's not the noisy, chaotic sleezefest that is Fry's. While Fry's has deals (loss leaders), you must beware of "repacked returns", often missing parts. I bought a router the other day and found it reflashed with a broken version of WRT! Somebody flashed it then returned it! Service at Fry's is generally awful unless you speak another language. Fry's is not a favorite, but sometimes can't be avoided. We also have Central Computers, a very well run operation that is open every day (I always seem to be building/repairing PC's on Sunday for some reason.) I've been buying some online from Newegg and buy.com, both with good results.
Besides the fact that this system is dying a rapid death, the quality is so poor that you wouldn't want to record it, let alone listen to it. Would you download a mp3 music file with a bitrate of less than 128k? If you make an analog recording that is uncompressed, then at least you won't be further degrading the signal. "Stacked Compression" is a very bad deal sonically.
Do you REALLY think that it's worse now? They don't even have to run jumpers anymore! They just type in what they want or "scoop up" entire trunk groups at a time. Remember what I said "If it can be done, it will be done" and I'd bet money that it *IS* being done. Wake up!
He was! Are you sure that it wasn't intersil 8038's? I'm familiar with that design. What area did you live in at that time? We may know a lot of the same people. :)
If it CAN be done, it WILL be done. Back then "being paranoid" was standard for Phreaks and considered a good thing. Honestly, I think that things are FAR WORSE now, then under Nixon. If they want to get your for something, they will. We've had enough examples of "the law be damned" over the past dozen years or so that it should be clear to all. The things that you have to fear are getting caught up in the "justice system" at all. You'll be facing incompetent, sometimes evil, always political and usually aggressive investigators, lawyers and judges. Anybody who's ever done work with or for an attorney knows that they are the most technophobic people you'll ever meet, and while this can work in your favor, most often it doesn't. This won't get fixed because they don't recognize a problem. Be very afraid!
We use these and the Hawking Broadband Booster (~$60). These devices can make a DSL or cable modem usable and pretty consistent. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Nokia is one of the first companies I've seen that's created an entire retail strategy based on unlocked phones available without contract. I bought an "N95" a while back for a high price but unlocked. It was worth the money to me to get what I want, the way that I wanted it. The phone is far more capable than the iPhone. I think that Nokia is stuck living in a (screwed up) world that the carriers built. While there have been some token sign of "openness" lately, those guys like the world as it is (sim locks, windows drm, contracts, lock-ins). Most consumers in the wireless market aren't very sophisticated and think that this carrier dominated eco-system is the only way. That needs to change, and "good luck with that".
Depending on where you are in the city, Wiline Networks provides great service at a low cost and is &*%&*%@& fast! We get 40 mbps down and 10 mbps up. We pay $500 and get 8 statics. We are in the Embarcadero area.
My Comcast internet has been out for a month anyway, and last time I tried to get it fixed I almost hurt someone because they pissed me off so badly. I have a tough time believing that this is the most effective way to get a government regulator "off your back", even a corrupt, incompetent one like the FCC. I just showed them how the 'free market' works. They didn't even try to save the account. I've been paying $190 a month for 1 DVR and internet, and it goes up every month it seems. Now to get rid of the TV. I already have DSL from Speakeasy (Covad). It's not as fast, but it's never gone down and they're pretty responsive and well run. The FCC needs to be taken apart. They are worse than useless!
Microcenter is my favorite "Big Box" store. The people who work there speak english. The stores are well stocked and merchandised, and the prices are fair. I meant to mention them in an earlier posting about "rebate hell" and Belkin cable ripoffs.
I avoid the place, mainly due to their annoying marketing practices! They're completely rebate happy! On Saturdays, I'll often look at the ads in the Mercury News where there are circulars from Fry's (weasels), Best Buy (mass market junk), Circus City and sometimes "Chump USA". Best Buy seems to be trying to shed the rebate nonsense, the others less so. But I simply won't play the games that CompUSA comes up with to avoid being ripped off. What the ^%$#@ is "instant savings" anyway? How about just publishing the price, without a bunch of nonsense! I had to buy an IEC power cord the other day because I stupidly forgot one when I went to another city to install new gear. Chump wanted $9 for it because they're a Belkin house. I ran out of time and held my nose and vowed to never again do business with them, but they did get their nine bucks. Hope it was worth it, guys! When a store starts carrying belkin, they drop all the competing cables and suddenly you can't avoid getting ripped off anymore. Those kinds of practices make me avoid the place like the plague, and I control a lot of spending. Here's how I see it: Screw the customer. Go out of business. Eventually, bad business loses. It just takes too long.
This development is for AUV's/UUV's and have nothing to do with submarines.
We used UUV's in Iraq to clear the waterways (there ARE waterways!) of mines. This means less need for trained dolphins and related dolphin headaches and expenses. See http://www.joetalbot.net/index_10.htm