I'd agree there - the only difference I've noticed is my male bosses have been more backstabbing - they say one thing to your face and something else behind your back, but that applied to one of my female bosses as well, though not to me (she got a female employee fired, but before she was fired that employee referred to my boss as "that bitch"). I've been through a lot of bosses because I get moved around on projects a lot and each are managed by a different boss, but my last three were great - two female and one male, and all were very personable (before that I had two horrible bosses, both of which got shed in layoffs, thankfully).
Some exemptions are mentioned in that blog, but it misses the "single purchase under $25 is exempt" written on the form itself.
I ALWAYS pay my use tax when it is due (which is rarely due to exeptions, but I have paid it twice) and this sounds like double taxation to me, unless they also change their laws on the books.
Well yeah - exactly what I've been saying for years. The only way to win a war is to KILL, so a war on drugs should put all users and dealers to death. Draconian, yes, but that is how you win wars. I personally favor decriminalization and free treatment, but I don't run the country, idiots do.
Well, de-caf coffee is not entirely caffeine free, so if I were a religious zealot averse to caffeine, I'd avoid it. On that note, fruit is not alcohol free (nearly all fruit contains some natural fermentation) and fruit is almost essential for human survival without artificial supplements (for its vitamin C content ya scurvy dogs!), so I guess there is a fine line to be drawn...
Maybe less so these days, but I remember getting user lists and running through passwords like "god, God, admin, letmein, etc. I seem to recall letmein is in the top 5 most popular passwords still today, so the problem isn't entirely gone.
How about the same rights as non-gamers in regard to speech? I would imagine the ESRB would slap an AO on a video game featuring a topless African tribal unless the developer added a bra, even though it is culturally correct and I've seen National Geographic footage of a tribe of such women and it was rated G in the US.
I also had questions about why such a group is needed, though, because there already is a video game voters network, and SOPA/PIPA really didn't have anything to do with gamer's rights IMO, but they did have plenty of censorship, and the main issues I had with SOPA/PIPA were the blocking of legal sites in foreign countries (because of differing copyright laws) and the shoot first, ask questions later wording (shut down site, and the owner can then defend if infringing or not). There were about 9 other issues that I saw (stuff like bypassing is a criminal offense, but changing DNS to a foreign site is not, even though they are essentially identical sometimes), but those are my big 2.
In the 1970s model, you pay $25000 for $2000 worth of hardware upfront (as a depreciating 2-3 year asset), pay for a support contract for that hardware (maybe $2000/year and if it fails it gets replaced for free, otherwise you pay $25000 to replace it), and you get all your software for free. This model works great for businesses, because they can write off a lot of the expenses, but for consumers it is a totally messed up model. Plus the only software the hardware manufacturer will develop is likely whatever drives sales, so if they sell to businesses, that is business software.
Good luck driving that model with consumers - there is a reason why consumers generally pay for consoles sold at a loss and then pay a premium for software/media rather than buying a PC without the subsidies.
I loved WC, but never got to play Eternal Dagger (nobody ever had it in stock). AFAIK, it was the first skill based RPG (you gain skill points as you play instead of levels). Still, the game was Ultima-ish in presentation. Was a relatively serious game, but had a killer rabbit "Easter egg" (quotes because it was easy to find - the big black area on the map).
As far as innovative games, I'd say the platformer Below the Root was missed - while not the first platformer by far, and certainly not popular (due to being sold as eduware) it was an RPG, gave choice of gender and race and it mattered (in 1984, nonetheless), whereas in other RPGs you may be able to choose, but it didn't make any difference (like Ultima 3's Male, Female, or Other). Most of all, it was almost entirely non-violent (and quite fun IMO) - how many RPGs can claim that?
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima... Who is next?
you, preferably.
And if you're going to cite locations, Three Mile Island is a joke -.017 Curies of radiation released (though as I recall it did scale higher on the nuclear events scale because it was a partial meltdown). The Idaho Falls disaster in the 1960s released more (5x I think). Compare that to the 7000 Curies at Chernobyl or the 2400 at Fukushima to get perspective. The Bikini Atoll tests probably dumped more radiation in the air than any of those disasters.
btw, which "God" are you referring to, the Old Testament one that smites everyone, or the New Testament one that forgives you even if you break his very important not to break rules? And if you mean God in the Torah, then you mean the Old Testament God, and if you mean God in the Qur'an, you mean the Old Testament God (really, that God is pretty much from the same place), and if you mean God in, um, other religions then I have no fscking clue. You obviously mean monotheistic, though, because you capitalized God.
If you were GE or Westinghouse and had a duopoly lead in design and implementation of light water and fast breeder reactors because the government paid you billions to research it, you probably would do anything in your power to squash competition and keep your duopoly even though safer, more promising alternatives were available.
How else can you explain how Gen 4 LFTR designs have received _ZERO_ government funding and many based on revisions of current designs have received billions? It is not in the best interest of big energy for another model that they don't have a duopoly on to emerge. That is why they drop terms like "unproven to scale" (don't have a link, but have seen the claim), "proliferation concerns", "slight differences in the waste," (see the video) etc. Um, yeah... Thorium is 99% more efficient than Uranium fuel with continuous reprocessing, pollutes itself making it bad for weapons, and has zero risk of meltdown, so is MUCH safer than Uranium... The worst waste decays in about 300 years (not 10k) and most can be reused. This is all FUD by an industry that doesn't want to invest in a technology for the simple reason that they have working technology that makes them a lot of money already.
If you RTFA, one of the concerns was that the President approved it, bypassing congress by an executive decision. Both Republicans and Democrats have been doing this a lot since Reagan's term in office. If you can't beat congress, Executive Order around it.
So far I haven't seen as many major of issues as I saw reading PIPA, but there are some vague areas. Only at page 2, though:P
I like to be derogatory to my servers and name them things like filth, slime, dirt, shit... brings up some humorous conversations, like "this server is shit!"
Note that the name I see isn't what my users see though (they are VMs with web clients), so no problems with management so far, but I did get a laugh out of an auditor.
Re:Blast from the past
on
Wine 1.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
VirtualBox and VMware emulators are a type called pass-through emulation, which actually only emulates a small amount of functionality of the system (mainly drivers) and the rest is all native, so the performance hit is generally trivial. At most you should see about a 20% hit in CPU here (as long as you aren't memory bound - WINE shouldn't chew up as much memory as a VM, generally). If the GPU is hardware accelerated and properly passed through, there should be almost no hit unless the drivers for that platform are particularly bad.
WINE is a native implementation of the Windows APIs, so if an API isn't implemented, it crashes and burns. Also it actually has the same problem as VMs in regards to devices - they need to be implemented or they won't work and in the case of WINE, very few are. OTOH, WINE can use all graphics memory if used with DX or OpenGL and most VMs share an amount of it (VirtualBox I think is up to 256M now, but my card has 1GB). Likewise emulators usually are assigned some of your CPUs and WINE can use all of them.
When I have VirtualBox properly set up, I get two frames less in Linux running in the emulator than I did in native Windows, so I suspect your VM isn't running with hardware accelerated drivers. With VirtualBox you also need to turn off the native mouse pointer to use OpenGL with hardware acceleration or you spin like crazy (or it will start driving for you in 2D), so if you have the native pointer on and aren't spinning, you aren't in native OpenGL, which requires installing the VirtualBox extensions and the native hardware driver. If your hardware acceleration was properly set up, how much video memory did the OpenGL program consume?
And when they do have MXM slots, those are sometimes tied to manufacturer drivers and customized hardware that will only start if it sees the manufacturer's hardware. Some people have said drivers from laptopvideo2go and such work, but I haven't tried it (my last two laptops both had soldered on discrete graphics).
I was going to say the same - Lord Foul's Bane was by far the best of the series, and The Power that Preserves was OK, but the rest of the series was rather meh. I trudged through book 5 in about 8 months before powering through book 6 just to be done with it. Another series I really liked the beginning of but not really the end of was Stormwarden by Janny Wurtz (that one's probably a bit more rare).
Um, we're a Republic, not a Democracy. Technically a Democratically elected Republic. We actually don't elect the President, we vote for an Electoral College to elect a President, and they don't even need to follow party lines unless the state law says for that particular state says they have to.
I would almost argue a Democratically elected Plutocracy (ruled by the rich), because the system makes the President a 1%er since the Bush era pay increase to $400000 (top 1% starts at ~$350k), and the majority of the elected officials are either rich to begin with or become rich in office through legal bribery.
One small problem with your suggestion - the idea of storing graphics (such as windows) in memory and then compositing them (as the technique is called) was pretty much unheard of - graphics were rendered into a graphics buffer (either front or back, and sometimes a third buffer) and erased and redrawn, an idea reinforced by the graphics buffer being a separate piece of memory and hardware on some systems (as they are often today, but I don't know about the 8010/Star). Hardware graphics did have buffer copy operations, but the number of windows you could create using this technique was limited to the number of buffers you had and the size of them, whereas on the Lisa/Mac the number of buffers you could have was only limited by memory because like the Apple ][, they shared video buffer memory with main memory, and thus copies could be done from any location in memory into the video buffer. Note that this is different than how sprites were rendered in consoles at the time - sprites were given a dedicated slot of memory and you could only have a fixed number of them. If you wanted a different sprite, you had to remove one of the ones you had in sprite memory.
Also, as I recall, the 8010/Star actually did have overlapping windows, but only small tool windows that could be copied to and from a backbuffer and application windows could not overlap. at $50000+, it is entirely possible the 8010/Star had graphics hardware that would make implementing the Apple model for windowing impossible, even though it would render graphics much faster than Apple's hardware could.
Actually, some of the technology was patented, but had expired - the mouse, for instance. Also, due to antitrust litigation, Xerox had limits on what they could patent, so they focused more on products than technologies when applying for patents (for instance, the LaserWriter and Ethernet). Incidentally, they did sue Apple, but the statute of limitations had passed so it was thrown out. Apple also lost its early UI patent lawsuit against Microsoft precisely because they had largely borrowed a bunch of ideas from the Star.
But this meeting was later - by the time Bill and Steve met, Apple was sitting on a pile of new patents Microsoft was infringing on. The situation is not unlike the current Apple vs Android - Apple owns patents like swipe to unlock and Android (and Microsoft for that matter) is infringing. Saying Apple is a patent troll is unfair; defending patents you created is much different than buying a bunch of patents just to sue potential infringees as your sole or a major mean of income. For instance, look at how Unisys handled LZW - they bought Compuserv and thus the patent, then started suing anyone that made programs that created GIF (which uses LZW), and even though they probably wouldn't have won a lawsuit due to statute of limitations, they still made bundles of cash just by threatening to sue.
Wrong. Nearly the entire raster pipeline would be ignored for ray tracing, and you don't really need a lot of shading units for the rest (don't need to multitexture in the background and whatnot). The main use for the GPUs in ray tracing would be collision detection, which could be written into shaders as long as the entire scene was loaded into each GPU's memory, so Wolfenstein is actually a good choice - a large scene would have problems because of memory constraints. Ray tracing works very well with lots of parallel CPUs, but usually is memory constrained (dependent on memory access more than anything else) in that scenario, so splitting it off onto multiple GPUs is a way to remove that constraint, but basically it still works like a lot of parallel CPUs accessing the same scene in memory.
EA wasn't too bad for sleep as long as you could sleep on a couch or beanbag chair, desk chair, etc. (I think they even added beds or cots after I left) and didn't mind spending all other waking moments working. I actually didn't mind the normal schedule (10ish hours a day), it was just crunch time when my girlfriend at the time didn't see me for a month because I was at work 24 hours a day.
Actually, the front of the poll results don't surprise me at all. Doctors and Police Officers get crazy shifts (sometimes 20 hours or more straight). I imagine home health care providers also have crazy shifts. Secretaries kind of surprised me, though.
oh no - pulse definitely wasn't dead in the US, probably not until mid-1990s at the earliest. In fact, it was cheaper to get pulse than tone in the 1980s, and my parents were all for cheap. I didn't have tone until I went off for college and my dorm's phone system required it.
Actually, most connections (like to BBS's) were half duplex, so really 150 baud (about 19-20 characters per second) in each direction. I'd usually go full duplex for downloading, but other than that ran at half.
A friend of mine had an Apple Cat, which was 300 baud generally, but 1200 to other Apple Cats. It was so fast, lol... a different era, definitely.
There were restrictions on commercial internet traffic until 1995, when NSFNET was decommissioned, and there was already a demand for it, mostly from ex-university students like me that had grown used to having Internet (then with a capital I). Also there was a lot of migration from dial up services, especially as some of those services also added Internet connectivity.
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I'd agree there - the only difference I've noticed is my male bosses have been more backstabbing - they say one thing to your face and something else behind your back, but that applied to one of my female bosses as well, though not to me (she got a female employee fired, but before she was fired that employee referred to my boss as "that bitch"). I've been through a lot of bosses because I get moved around on projects a lot and each are managed by a different boss, but my last three were great - two female and one male, and all were very personable (before that I had two horrible bosses, both of which got shed in layoffs, thankfully).
http://blog.ctnews.com/takeonlife/2011/01/22/forget-nickels-the-%E2%80%98use-tax%E2%80%99-could-generate-millions/
Some exemptions are mentioned in that blog, but it misses the "single purchase under $25 is exempt" written on the form itself.
I ALWAYS pay my use tax when it is due (which is rarely due to exeptions, but I have paid it twice) and this sounds like double taxation to me, unless they also change their laws on the books.
Well yeah - exactly what I've been saying for years. The only way to win a war is to KILL, so a war on drugs should put all users and dealers to death. Draconian, yes, but that is how you win wars. I personally favor decriminalization and free treatment, but I don't run the country, idiots do.
Texas wins the number 2 slot in my google search (may be the same source, I didn't rtfa, just looked for Texas):
http://blog.norml.org/2011/05/16/alternet-the-five-worst-states-to-get-busted-with-pot/
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/150935/the_5_worst_states_to_get_busted_with_pot?page=entire
I don't touch the stuff personally, but I know people that do (none in Texas).
Well, de-caf coffee is not entirely caffeine free, so if I were a religious zealot averse to caffeine, I'd avoid it. On that note, fruit is not alcohol free (nearly all fruit contains some natural fermentation) and fruit is almost essential for human survival without artificial supplements (for its vitamin C content ya scurvy dogs!), so I guess there is a fine line to be drawn...
Maybe less so these days, but I remember getting user lists and running through passwords like "god, God, admin, letmein, etc. I seem to recall letmein is in the top 5 most popular passwords still today, so the problem isn't entirely gone.
How about the same rights as non-gamers in regard to speech? I would imagine the ESRB would slap an AO on a video game featuring a topless African tribal unless the developer added a bra, even though it is culturally correct and I've seen National Geographic footage of a tribe of such women and it was rated G in the US.
I also had questions about why such a group is needed, though, because there already is a video game voters network, and SOPA/PIPA really didn't have anything to do with gamer's rights IMO, but they did have plenty of censorship, and the main issues I had with SOPA/PIPA were the blocking of legal sites in foreign countries (because of differing copyright laws) and the shoot first, ask questions later wording (shut down site, and the owner can then defend if infringing or not). There were about 9 other issues that I saw (stuff like bypassing is a criminal offense, but changing DNS to a foreign site is not, even though they are essentially identical sometimes), but those are my big 2.
In the 1970s model, you pay $25000 for $2000 worth of hardware upfront (as a depreciating 2-3 year asset), pay for a support contract for that hardware (maybe $2000/year and if it fails it gets replaced for free, otherwise you pay $25000 to replace it), and you get all your software for free. This model works great for businesses, because they can write off a lot of the expenses, but for consumers it is a totally messed up model. Plus the only software the hardware manufacturer will develop is likely whatever drives sales, so if they sell to businesses, that is business software.
Good luck driving that model with consumers - there is a reason why consumers generally pay for consoles sold at a loss and then pay a premium for software/media rather than buying a PC without the subsidies.
I loved WC, but never got to play Eternal Dagger (nobody ever had it in stock). AFAIK, it was the first skill based RPG (you gain skill points as you play instead of levels). Still, the game was Ultima-ish in presentation. Was a relatively serious game, but had a killer rabbit "Easter egg" (quotes because it was easy to find - the big black area on the map).
As far as innovative games, I'd say the platformer Below the Root was missed - while not the first platformer by far, and certainly not popular (due to being sold as eduware) it was an RPG, gave choice of gender and race and it mattered (in 1984, nonetheless), whereas in other RPGs you may be able to choose, but it didn't make any difference (like Ultima 3's Male, Female, or Other). Most of all, it was almost entirely non-violent (and quite fun IMO) - how many RPGs can claim that?
you, preferably.
And if you're going to cite locations, Three Mile Island is a joke - .017 Curies of radiation released (though as I recall it did scale higher on the nuclear events scale because it was a partial meltdown). The Idaho Falls disaster in the 1960s released more (5x I think). Compare that to the 7000 Curies at Chernobyl or the 2400 at Fukushima to get perspective. The Bikini Atoll tests probably dumped more radiation in the air than any of those disasters.
btw, which "God" are you referring to, the Old Testament one that smites everyone, or the New Testament one that forgives you even if you break his very important not to break rules? And if you mean God in the Torah, then you mean the Old Testament God, and if you mean God in the Qur'an, you mean the Old Testament God (really, that God is pretty much from the same place), and if you mean God in, um, other religions then I have no fscking clue. You obviously mean monotheistic, though, because you capitalized God.
If you were GE or Westinghouse and had a duopoly lead in design and implementation of light water and fast breeder reactors because the government paid you billions to research it, you probably would do anything in your power to squash competition and keep your duopoly even though safer, more promising alternatives were available.
How else can you explain how Gen 4 LFTR designs have received _ZERO_ government funding and many based on revisions of current designs have received billions? It is not in the best interest of big energy for another model that they don't have a duopoly on to emerge. That is why they drop terms like "unproven to scale" (don't have a link, but have seen the claim), "proliferation concerns", "slight differences in the waste," (see the video) etc. Um, yeah... Thorium is 99% more efficient than Uranium fuel with continuous reprocessing, pollutes itself making it bad for weapons, and has zero risk of meltdown, so is MUCH safer than Uranium... The worst waste decays in about 300 years (not 10k) and most can be reused. This is all FUD by an industry that doesn't want to invest in a technology for the simple reason that they have working technology that makes them a lot of money already.
If you RTFA, one of the concerns was that the President approved it, bypassing congress by an executive decision. Both Republicans and Democrats have been doing this a lot since Reagan's term in office. If you can't beat congress, Executive Order around it.
So far I haven't seen as many major of issues as I saw reading PIPA, but there are some vague areas. Only at page 2, though :P
heh - my kind of server
I like to be derogatory to my servers and name them things like filth, slime, dirt, shit... brings up some humorous conversations, like "this server is shit!"
Note that the name I see isn't what my users see though (they are VMs with web clients), so no problems with management so far, but I did get a laugh out of an auditor.
VirtualBox and VMware emulators are a type called pass-through emulation, which actually only emulates a small amount of functionality of the system (mainly drivers) and the rest is all native, so the performance hit is generally trivial. At most you should see about a 20% hit in CPU here (as long as you aren't memory bound - WINE shouldn't chew up as much memory as a VM, generally). If the GPU is hardware accelerated and properly passed through, there should be almost no hit unless the drivers for that platform are particularly bad.
WINE is a native implementation of the Windows APIs, so if an API isn't implemented, it crashes and burns. Also it actually has the same problem as VMs in regards to devices - they need to be implemented or they won't work and in the case of WINE, very few are. OTOH, WINE can use all graphics memory if used with DX or OpenGL and most VMs share an amount of it (VirtualBox I think is up to 256M now, but my card has 1GB). Likewise emulators usually are assigned some of your CPUs and WINE can use all of them.
When I have VirtualBox properly set up, I get two frames less in Linux running in the emulator than I did in native Windows, so I suspect your VM isn't running with hardware accelerated drivers. With VirtualBox you also need to turn off the native mouse pointer to use OpenGL with hardware acceleration or you spin like crazy (or it will start driving for you in 2D), so if you have the native pointer on and aren't spinning, you aren't in native OpenGL, which requires installing the VirtualBox extensions and the native hardware driver. If your hardware acceleration was properly set up, how much video memory did the OpenGL program consume?
And when they do have MXM slots, those are sometimes tied to manufacturer drivers and customized hardware that will only start if it sees the manufacturer's hardware. Some people have said drivers from laptopvideo2go and such work, but I haven't tried it (my last two laptops both had soldered on discrete graphics).
I was going to say the same - Lord Foul's Bane was by far the best of the series, and The Power that Preserves was OK, but the rest of the series was rather meh. I trudged through book 5 in about 8 months before powering through book 6 just to be done with it. Another series I really liked the beginning of but not really the end of was Stormwarden by Janny Wurtz (that one's probably a bit more rare).
Um, we're a Republic, not a Democracy. Technically a Democratically elected Republic. We actually don't elect the President, we vote for an Electoral College to elect a President, and they don't even need to follow party lines unless the state law says for that particular state says they have to.
I would almost argue a Democratically elected Plutocracy (ruled by the rich), because the system makes the President a 1%er since the Bush era pay increase to $400000 (top 1% starts at ~$350k), and the majority of the elected officials are either rich to begin with or become rich in office through legal bribery.
One small problem with your suggestion - the idea of storing graphics (such as windows) in memory and then compositing them (as the technique is called) was pretty much unheard of - graphics were rendered into a graphics buffer (either front or back, and sometimes a third buffer) and erased and redrawn, an idea reinforced by the graphics buffer being a separate piece of memory and hardware on some systems (as they are often today, but I don't know about the 8010/Star). Hardware graphics did have buffer copy operations, but the number of windows you could create using this technique was limited to the number of buffers you had and the size of them, whereas on the Lisa/Mac the number of buffers you could have was only limited by memory because like the Apple ][, they shared video buffer memory with main memory, and thus copies could be done from any location in memory into the video buffer. Note that this is different than how sprites were rendered in consoles at the time - sprites were given a dedicated slot of memory and you could only have a fixed number of them. If you wanted a different sprite, you had to remove one of the ones you had in sprite memory.
Also, as I recall, the 8010/Star actually did have overlapping windows, but only small tool windows that could be copied to and from a backbuffer and application windows could not overlap. at $50000+, it is entirely possible the 8010/Star had graphics hardware that would make implementing the Apple model for windowing impossible, even though it would render graphics much faster than Apple's hardware could.
Actually, some of the technology was patented, but had expired - the mouse, for instance. Also, due to antitrust litigation, Xerox had limits on what they could patent, so they focused more on products than technologies when applying for patents (for instance, the LaserWriter and Ethernet). Incidentally, they did sue Apple, but the statute of limitations had passed so it was thrown out. Apple also lost its early UI patent lawsuit against Microsoft precisely because they had largely borrowed a bunch of ideas from the Star.
But this meeting was later - by the time Bill and Steve met, Apple was sitting on a pile of new patents Microsoft was infringing on. The situation is not unlike the current Apple vs Android - Apple owns patents like swipe to unlock and Android (and Microsoft for that matter) is infringing. Saying Apple is a patent troll is unfair; defending patents you created is much different than buying a bunch of patents just to sue potential infringees as your sole or a major mean of income. For instance, look at how Unisys handled LZW - they bought Compuserv and thus the patent, then started suing anyone that made programs that created GIF (which uses LZW), and even though they probably wouldn't have won a lawsuit due to statute of limitations, they still made bundles of cash just by threatening to sue.
Wrong. Nearly the entire raster pipeline would be ignored for ray tracing, and you don't really need a lot of shading units for the rest (don't need to multitexture in the background and whatnot). The main use for the GPUs in ray tracing would be collision detection, which could be written into shaders as long as the entire scene was loaded into each GPU's memory, so Wolfenstein is actually a good choice - a large scene would have problems because of memory constraints. Ray tracing works very well with lots of parallel CPUs, but usually is memory constrained (dependent on memory access more than anything else) in that scenario, so splitting it off onto multiple GPUs is a way to remove that constraint, but basically it still works like a lot of parallel CPUs accessing the same scene in memory.
remember when Microsoft tried to do that too? They had some success, but not in the US.
EA wasn't too bad for sleep as long as you could sleep on a couch or beanbag chair, desk chair, etc. (I think they even added beds or cots after I left) and didn't mind spending all other waking moments working. I actually didn't mind the normal schedule (10ish hours a day), it was just crunch time when my girlfriend at the time didn't see me for a month because I was at work 24 hours a day.
Actually, the front of the poll results don't surprise me at all. Doctors and Police Officers get crazy shifts (sometimes 20 hours or more straight). I imagine home health care providers also have crazy shifts. Secretaries kind of surprised me, though.
oh no - pulse definitely wasn't dead in the US, probably not until mid-1990s at the earliest. In fact, it was cheaper to get pulse than tone in the 1980s, and my parents were all for cheap. I didn't have tone until I went off for college and my dorm's phone system required it.
Actually, most connections (like to BBS's) were half duplex, so really 150 baud (about 19-20 characters per second) in each direction. I'd usually go full duplex for downloading, but other than that ran at half.
A friend of mine had an Apple Cat, which was 300 baud generally, but 1200 to other Apple Cats. It was so fast, lol... a different era, definitely.
There were restrictions on commercial internet traffic until 1995, when NSFNET was decommissioned, and there was already a demand for it, mostly from ex-university students like me that had grown used to having Internet (then with a capital I). Also there was a lot of migration from dial up services, especially as some of those services also added Internet connectivity.