"cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams:"
The dirty little secret of calbe & satellite. Nasty nasty nasty.
Personally, I loathe the MP4 streams they give us so often. Watching a dark background posterize into a single shade of bleagh on a static scene is unnerving. Not to mention the lack of detail. HD was supposed to be HIGH-def. Much of it is being compressed into something almost as good as SDTV.
Of course, there are some HD channels that give it up in full def. But chances are, you oughta buy a set with a tuner in it. After all, OTA is 'free'. Kinda as in beer.
Most Thinkpads support something like Full Disk Encryption. Password in the BIOS, and you can't boot without it. The disk is literally unusable without the password.
My gig at I%$&#, they had me write my FDE password down and give it to the nice Systems tech. That way, when I left, they could recover the disk and reissue the machine after the usual shredding and wiping.
Without it, they would have to throw out the drive and buy a new one.
And yes, you need to remember your password. This you write down and leave at home, or with the Keymaster in the office, or your boss.
Look carefully. T-Mobile will sell you a phone at 'retail'. And yes, you will have to ask to have that one unlocked, because they don't inventory unlocked phones. And they'll unlock it immediately, after you jump through the flaming hoop of fire, 'cause you don't have a contract with them for the phone.
Then you can buy a contract with whoever, even T-Mobile.
I really don't quite get the hoohah over this locking thing. In Europe, you buy unlocked phones, and pay quite a bit more. And it's yours. Here, most carriers wanna lock you into some contract, and they subsidize the phone cost to do that. I know that if I want a new Blackberry, I can buy one unlocked for $299 and up, or extend my contract and get one for $199 or something. The value proposition is obvious to me.
T-Mobile unlocked my 7105t without trouble after my contract completed. I even get my contract for about as long as I want, which is nice cause to start a new one will cost me more $ for the same services. I may change to another carrier, but right now nothing in GSM looks that much better.
And I'm disppointed that UMTS is going to be fractured. Never fails, interoperability is always trouble. I'm hopeful that T-Mobile and ATT will resolve this, but it may be as much about data roaming as anything. Imagine the problems if the iPhone 2.0 is UMTS, and people buy them where ATT is not the carrier. Roaming most of the time will open them to surcharges and complaints.
And just in case you weren't listening, the US ain't Europe. Over there, they value choice and freedom, and are willing to pay for it. Are we willing to pay for it also?
Actually,most of what has changed about NetWare over the past 10 years has been new 'features': iFolder in particular comes to mind.
And I recall getting my NetWare 5 server running at home sometime around 1998, or was it 2000? I had my trusty modem autodialing into my own ISP bank. BorderManager as my firewall, happily blocking ads, logging the few (back then) attempts to probe my connection. I ran the NAMP stack (NetWare/Apache/myQL/Perl/PHP) and having fun. I ran Websphere just to see if it would. Tomcat, the Advantage xBase engine, Mercury SMTP alongside GroupWise. At the time, Microsoft didn't have all of that so well done.
Oh yeah, and my personal record on a NetWare server is 1300+ days. My home server ran over 960 days at one stretch. The story of a NetWare server being walled in by accident is attributed to a New York-based Fortune 50 headquarters. Perhaps the only other platform that can easily claim that sort of reliability would be the AS/400 series, which is also reputed to have had at least one server walled in and 'lost'. It was looked for only when the lease expired. I don't doubt it.
None of that really mattered. Microsoft was running NetWare over and backing up to go over it again.
The NetWare Client for Windows was bloated mostly to accomodate the problems of Widows Networking. For one thing, if the Windows AD client did a lookup for something and didn't find it, it would happily look 'everywhere else'. The NetWare client, if not finding it in NDS or Windows, stopped and said 'not found'. The concept of looking everywhere else when it wasn't found within the directory you had struck me as ludicrous. But for Windows, it was SOP. And cost you a minute or two waiting for the inevitable failure. At least in NetWare you got an answer in 2-3 seconds, depending on network performance.
I miss NetWare. But the fight is over. Just don't try and tell me Windows IS any better, even today. It's just more popular.
Right on. Also likely, this is an effort by a church to be 'relevant' to young people.
There ya go. Be 'relevant' by encouraging in your young people the same dissipative activity that leaves them feeling empty inside, and brought them towards your door in the first place.
No, no, NO, I'm not proclaiming Halo 3 'dissipative'. For some of us, young or old, playing shootemup games is very fun, and very cool. For some, a few, though, like many activities, it leaves them hollow.
Churches can do better than emulate our culture. And they should. Plenty of opportunity to play games elsewhere.
At least pick more appropriate games, though I wouldn't want to have to decide on that.
This sounds like an 'emergent church' plan. Not good.
How many branches used VINES (omigod, a pun?), and essentially shipped lan-in-a-container systems to the Middle East around that time? I think they shipped everything but water, assuming that if there were users, there would be water. Latrines too.
This has been done before, and done fairly well. Won't someone please tell the USPTO to knock it off? It isn't funny any more.
Sure, whack up a variant of lIce, and next thing you know there's a bot to nail your bot, and a bot to cover your bot from being nailed by their bot, and swell, we're in another botwar. Wait, we're in that already. Somehow, adding more bots to the fray doesn't appeal to me.
Sometimes, late at night, I think about waking up my IRC client and seeing what's going on out there. Then I realize I gotta do some basic research to see what the security risks are, the clients that are secure enough to not get me pwned, the nets that are just completely off the wall with threats (they all are, darn), and it's just not worth it.
What I need to do is indeed to work with Snort or wireshark, learn to pipe the output through something to identify suspicious activity, and give me a list of questionable things to research. That's all:-0
IIRC, the Dr. Bose we all know and love/hate so well held a series of double-blind (or perhaps just A-B) comparisons of various speaker technologies. Needless to say, his 901s fared very well against some real heavyweights, such as Klipshorns and the best JBL, Advent, Cerwin-Vega, Altec-Lansing, and some others brought to the show. Even today, Bose showrooms play the black felt game, with big black boxes holding tiny little speakers.
He also had some fascinating demos of phono technology. One I saw was to debunk some myths of phono cartridges, tracking, stylus design, and tonearm design. He had a very nice (at the time) Dual turntable with a perfectly good Stanton cartridge on it. doing A-B listening comparisons, he kept changing the stylus pressure. Not by grams, by pennies. After stacking 9 pennies on one arm, listeners could stillot detect a difference between that and one set up by a Stanton tech.
Dr. Bose also made several studies of harmonic distortion, studying the impact on the listening experience of distortion in different frequency spectra. I suspect this research made its way into the work of many amplifier manufacturers, as well as Sony and the ATRAC system, and of course similar work is behind virtually any compression method.
But serious double-blind studies of audio hardware? Very few. It's just to damned important to be left to science.
Just a a question, who would be your cell ISP? Verizon? Is any GSM provider giving up UMTS there, or is it EDGE?
The choices, after you've lost the copper, are now 2/3 of useful. FiOS is cool, but it's probably Cable for your next choice... I don't see any cell choice as being very good - speed is the issue.
Not to mention cost, if you don't get an unlimited plan.
Still, while you're in Kittery, is it the Portsmouth Verizon group that pulled the fiber? Remember when some in Kittery had 603 area codes? It could be NH service you get.
In southern Maine, there are some competitive CLECs. If Verizon were to roll out FiOS and strip the copper, they would not be able to offer the competitive service they can now via DSL.
And they are competitive. One in particular was advertising that it was faster than cable. Time-Warner threatened to sue, basically saying 'no your not!' The CLEC, GWI, said 'bring it on!'.
No suit.
Stripping the copper locks out any of your CLEC competitors. Nice work, if you can make it stick. And more to the point, if it's true and you're bigwigs are denying it, let them walk the plank.
I'm pretty sure that a protracted hearing on subsidies, copper, and deception would make for high drama. it might not change much, but it sure would be fun, for at least a few months.
Gotta love it. First, you complain that electronic voting makes it too easy.
Then you complain it's already too hard, and we need a holiday to give the workers the time (not the energy, interest, or will) to vote.
Which is it? That voting should take some effort, as if that makes it worthwhile in and of itself, or that we should make voting easier, with a holiday and all the time in the world to stroll down and cast a vote, if we feel like it?
Oh, and since when does the effort of casting a vote make it more important? By that measure, perhaps a little barbed wire and concrete pipe to crawl through to get to the polls would make it REALLY IMPORTANT NOW!!!
And I think I can use other s/w to load it. I know I can add/delete in Windows, I haven't bothered to try and sync art and all. I do want to listen to my music, looking at my music isn't so high a priority.
I bought a pair of Phillips SHE9500's, $29.99 at Best Buy. You need to use the right size muffs, and jam them in there pretty tight, but they tend to stay in even while working out. Isolation sufficient for a whiny Southwest 737, and actual bass response you can discern. High end is fine, and the response is crisp enough for me to skip paying more for the phones than I did for the player. For the money, they work for me.
I've had Sony Walkmen since the TPS-L2, the first portable CD player in the bigger-than-a-loaf-of-bread battery case, several so-called shockproof thin CD players, and a couple of minidisc players. Up until the MP3 players, I could live with the bass response, which in the progression above went from marginal to fine to tolerable to great (The Sharp MS702 I went into and changed the bass EQ, not for the faint of heart) to, with MP3s, poor. I rip at 320kb now, since 128 stinks, 192 is passe, and 256 isn't different enough for me to miss the space. The Gigabeat EQ I thought was nonfunctional or superfluous until I tried my DJ phones, and there, there WAS bass in there! The Phillips are good enough for me.
I'm a bass freak, BTW. Listening to old Beatles or Who is fine. Bass305 doesn't quite get delivered with the impact it can have, but hey, these are phones. My Paradigms at home will set off car alarms across the street, despite the concrete floor. That's where the bass belongs. Earbuds that would do that would deafen me. Kids, you have been warned.
I bought a used Toshiba Gigabeat S 60GB, and I love it. The x-control works, having a dedicated manu button (even if it does have the Windows logo on it...) is a blessing, and it's loud enough for an airplane, if you can find earphones that don't s u c k for less than $90. Which I did.
And then I got a chance to try an iPod Touch yesterday. Ok, slick, and a bigger screen. But... I fat-fingered most selections, it was an effort to hit precisely what I wanted. Scrolling was nice, but figuring out the menu button and then hitting it, not nice. Touch was too sloppy for me.
I'm not normal, I know, but I'm not disappointed that I got the Toshiba. And I'll maybe give it to my wife, if the next flavor is substantially cooler. I can live with WMP. Which, BTW, seems to let me sort and search for music just fine. I don't think it's as slick as iTunes, but then I could probably use something else too.
There is more to the PMP world than iPod. Trust me:-)
...dig that old iOpener out of the basement and, wait, I don't have a basement, damn, I sold the iOpener to some kid, maybe I can score a v5 on eBay, ACK! Only 3, and they obviously don't know which rev they have... dammit, I'm gonna have to work on this, l8r, much, !sleep. Must have.
Your analogy with UPS is more accurate than most posters will realize or admit. At least, until now...
I recall when, if I sent packages via UPS Ground, they would arive NO LATER THAN the promised time. Used to be 5-7 days for US shipments, depending on distance. Some would arrive earlier. Rarely would one arrive later. I was happy. In fact, I used Ground for shorter distances since it was invariably virtually overnight.
Not so any more.
If the promise is 7 days, you can be sure UPS will deliver it in 7 days. Not 6. Probably not 8. Many packages aren't 'eligible' for Saturday delivery. That day doesn't count. I never get a package delivered early any more. This has changed over the years. It may be that they've gotten leaner, and so there is no excess capacity to carry a package by a faster means, or no room on another truck. It may be that they've decided that giving faster service for the slower rate is not good business. While I can accept that, I'd be disappointed if UPS would let my package languish in some terminal because they would adhere to their stated SLA, despite having the capacity to do better. But at least I got what I paid for.
Net Neutrality is similar, though a little different. While many ISPs are now making deliberate attempts to block, delay, deny, and frustrate certin types of Net traffic, we haven't been able to call them out successfully on these issues. Some of their excuses include the likely illegal nature of some traffic, the stated 'abuse' of their systems by over-consuming users, and even some very quiet whining about 'others' who 'take unfair advantage' of their system.
When I sent UPS Ground packages short distance in the sure knowledge that they would arrive as quickly as 'priority' packages, I was indeed taking advantage of UPS's exceptional performance, at a lower cost to me. That advantage is pretty much gone, now that UPS 'plays by the rules', and rarely delivers early.
But when my ISP deliberately blocks certain traffic, without previously telling me that they will, I feel differently about it. They seem to want to limit my use in a way they don't want to tell me about.
I'm no longer getting adverts and mailings from my ISP contenders extolling the virtues of video over the Internet. Still, I get the claims of speed, fast data, getting large files quickly, music, etc ( I know, multiplly redundant). Somehow, if my ISP woos me with speed and data, and I use it, their throttling me and complaining about my actually using the service to the max is frustrating. Even cheap.
I'm not surprised Justice doesn't want to get into this. They hope competition will solve the problem.
There is no effective competition in broadband Internet access in America. In perhaps 5% of markets, there is a third alternative, but for most, it's cable, dsl, or nothing.
I watched an ISP in Maine carve out a nice DSL business, doing what Verizon (or was it Nynex? no, wait, New England Telephone? so confusing...) claim it couldn't be done. When they beat cable speeds and advertised it, they got threatened by the cable provider to 'put up or shut up'. Yup, they did, and cable system had to go several steps further and pump up their system to compete on speed. I have no complaints about throttling on *their* system, though the cable guys seem to be doing it.
Net Neutrality will be an issue, and will eventually go to the courts. The Comcast issues alone will cause this. I live in Cox Cable land, and will probably ditch Qwest DSL shortly, so I'll get a taste of the shaping they may be doing. We'll see.
But we will first force Net Neutrality by demanding that ISPs disclose their TOS's and limits. Then we'll have to ask for them to stop modifying traffic, but to either deliver what they promised or change their promises.
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"cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams:"
The dirty little secret of calbe & satellite. Nasty nasty nasty.
Personally, I loathe the MP4 streams they give us so often. Watching a dark background posterize into a single shade of bleagh on a static scene is unnerving. Not to mention the lack of detail. HD was supposed to be HIGH-def. Much of it is being compressed into something almost as good as SDTV.
Of course, there are some HD channels that give it up in full def. But chances are, you oughta buy a set with a tuner in it. After all, OTA is 'free'. Kinda as in beer.
Most Thinkpads support something like Full Disk Encryption. Password in the BIOS, and you can't boot without it. The disk is literally unusable without the password.
My gig at I%$&#, they had me write my FDE password down and give it to the nice Systems tech. That way, when I left, they could recover the disk and reissue the machine after the usual shredding and wiping.
Without it, they would have to throw out the drive and buy a new one.
And yes, you need to remember your password. This you write down and leave at home, or with the Keymaster in the office, or your boss.
Honestly, this is not that hard.
Look carefully. T-Mobile will sell you a phone at 'retail'. And yes, you will have to ask to have that one unlocked, because they don't inventory unlocked phones. And they'll unlock it immediately, after you jump through the flaming hoop of fire, 'cause you don't have a contract with them for the phone.
Then you can buy a contract with whoever, even T-Mobile.
I really don't quite get the hoohah over this locking thing. In Europe, you buy unlocked phones, and pay quite a bit more. And it's yours. Here, most carriers wanna lock you into some contract, and they subsidize the phone cost to do that. I know that if I want a new Blackberry, I can buy one unlocked for $299 and up, or extend my contract and get one for $199 or something. The value proposition is obvious to me.
T-Mobile unlocked my 7105t without trouble after my contract completed. I even get my contract for about as long as I want, which is nice cause to start a new one will cost me more $ for the same services. I may change to another carrier, but right now nothing in GSM looks that much better.
And I'm disppointed that UMTS is going to be fractured. Never fails, interoperability is always trouble. I'm hopeful that T-Mobile and ATT will resolve this, but it may be as much about data roaming as anything. Imagine the problems if the iPhone 2.0 is UMTS, and people buy them where ATT is not the carrier. Roaming most of the time will open them to surcharges and complaints.
And just in case you weren't listening, the US ain't Europe. Over there, they value choice and freedom, and are willing to pay for it. Are we willing to pay for it also?
I've dealt with EFI on Itanium systems. Fast isn't the adjective I would associate with EFI.
In fact, until the damned OS boots, fast doesn't really go with Itanium. After the boot, yeah, sure.
Crap, there's two. I remember that story.
I wouldn't be surprised. UNC and NC were both big NetWare houses until all hope was lost.
Actually,most of what has changed about NetWare over the past 10 years has been new 'features': iFolder in particular comes to mind.
And I recall getting my NetWare 5 server running at home sometime around 1998, or was it 2000? I had my trusty modem autodialing into my own ISP bank. BorderManager as my firewall, happily blocking ads, logging the few (back then) attempts to probe my connection. I ran the NAMP stack (NetWare/Apache/myQL/Perl/PHP) and having fun. I ran Websphere just to see if it would. Tomcat, the Advantage xBase engine, Mercury SMTP alongside GroupWise. At the time, Microsoft didn't have all of that so well done.
Oh yeah, and my personal record on a NetWare server is 1300+ days. My home server ran over 960 days at one stretch. The story of a NetWare server being walled in by accident is attributed to a New York-based Fortune 50 headquarters. Perhaps the only other platform that can easily claim that sort of reliability would be the AS/400 series, which is also reputed to have had at least one server walled in and 'lost'. It was looked for only when the lease expired. I don't doubt it.
None of that really mattered. Microsoft was running NetWare over and backing up to go over it again.
The NetWare Client for Windows was bloated mostly to accomodate the problems of Widows Networking. For one thing, if the Windows AD client did a lookup for something and didn't find it, it would happily look 'everywhere else'. The NetWare client, if not finding it in NDS or Windows, stopped and said 'not found'. The concept of looking everywhere else when it wasn't found within the directory you had struck me as ludicrous. But for Windows, it was SOP. And cost you a minute or two waiting for the inevitable failure. At least in NetWare you got an answer in 2-3 seconds, depending on network performance.
I miss NetWare. But the fight is over. Just don't try and tell me Windows IS any better, even today. It's just more popular.
Right on. Also likely, this is an effort by a church to be 'relevant' to young people.
There ya go. Be 'relevant' by encouraging in your young people the same dissipative activity that leaves them feeling empty inside, and brought them towards your door in the first place.
No, no, NO, I'm not proclaiming Halo 3 'dissipative'. For some of us, young or old, playing shootemup games is very fun, and very cool. For some, a few, though, like many activities, it leaves them hollow.
Churches can do better than emulate our culture. And they should. Plenty of opportunity to play games elsewhere.
At least pick more appropriate games, though I wouldn't want to have to decide on that.
This sounds like an 'emergent church' plan. Not good.
How many branches used VINES (omigod, a pun?), and essentially shipped lan-in-a-container systems to the Middle East around that time? I think they shipped everything but water, assuming that if there were users, there would be water. Latrines too.
This has been done before, and done fairly well. Won't someone please tell the USPTO to knock it off? It isn't funny any more.
...to sell the same obvious domain names over and over and over again. You know the drill:
- Create new TLD.
- Sell domain names to corporations again.
- ???
- Profit!
It's a good thing. For someone else.
My captcha for this post: 'proffer'. Damn, but he's good.
Can I sign up for Vonage and not fear it will be closed down in a week?
Sure, whack up a variant of lIce, and next thing you know there's a bot to nail your bot, and a bot to cover your bot from being nailed by their bot, and swell, we're in another botwar. Wait, we're in that already. Somehow, adding more bots to the fray doesn't appeal to me.
Sometimes, late at night, I think about waking up my IRC client and seeing what's going on out there. Then I realize I gotta do some basic research to see what the security risks are, the clients that are secure enough to not get me pwned, the nets that are just completely off the wall with threats (they all are, darn), and it's just not worth it.
What I need to do is indeed to work with Snort or wireshark, learn to pipe the output through something to identify suspicious activity, and give me a list of questionable things to research. That's all:-0
IIRC, the Dr. Bose we all know and love/hate so well held a series of double-blind (or perhaps just A-B) comparisons of various speaker technologies. Needless to say, his 901s fared very well against some real heavyweights, such as Klipshorns and the best JBL, Advent, Cerwin-Vega, Altec-Lansing, and some others brought to the show. Even today, Bose showrooms play the black felt game, with big black boxes holding tiny little speakers.
He also had some fascinating demos of phono technology. One I saw was to debunk some myths of phono cartridges, tracking, stylus design, and tonearm design. He had a very nice (at the time) Dual turntable with a perfectly good Stanton cartridge on it. doing A-B listening comparisons, he kept changing the stylus pressure. Not by grams, by pennies. After stacking 9 pennies on one arm, listeners could stillot detect a difference between that and one set up by a Stanton tech.
Dr. Bose also made several studies of harmonic distortion, studying the impact on the listening experience of distortion in different frequency spectra. I suspect this research made its way into the work of many amplifier manufacturers, as well as Sony and the ATRAC system, and of course similar work is behind virtually any compression method.
But serious double-blind studies of audio hardware? Very few. It's just to damned important to be left to science.
Just a a question, who would be your cell ISP? Verizon? Is any GSM provider giving up UMTS there, or is it EDGE?
The choices, after you've lost the copper, are now 2/3 of useful. FiOS is cool, but it's probably Cable for your next choice... I don't see any cell choice as being very good - speed is the issue.
Not to mention cost, if you don't get an unlimited plan.
Still, while you're in Kittery, is it the Portsmouth Verizon group that pulled the fiber? Remember when some in Kittery had 603 area codes? It could be NH service you get.
In southern Maine, there are some competitive CLECs. If Verizon were to roll out FiOS and strip the copper, they would not be able to offer the competitive service they can now via DSL.
And they are competitive. One in particular was advertising that it was faster than cable. Time-Warner threatened to sue, basically saying 'no your not!' The CLEC, GWI, said 'bring it on!'.
No suit.
Stripping the copper locks out any of your CLEC competitors. Nice work, if you can make it stick. And more to the point, if it's true and you're bigwigs are denying it, let them walk the plank.
I'm pretty sure that a protracted hearing on subsidies, copper, and deception would make for high drama. it might not change much, but it sure would be fun, for at least a few months.
Then again... my captcha: 'muddied' hehe.
Gotta love it. First, you complain that electronic voting makes it too easy.
Then you complain it's already too hard, and we need a holiday to give the workers the time (not the energy, interest, or will) to vote.
Which is it? That voting should take some effort, as if that makes it worthwhile in and of itself, or that we should make voting easier, with a holiday and all the time in the world to stroll down and cast a vote, if we feel like it?
Oh, and since when does the effort of casting a vote make it more important? By that measure, perhaps a little barbed wire and concrete pipe to crawl through to get to the polls would make it REALLY IMPORTANT NOW!!!
sheesh.
PFS, WMP10/11.
Works for me. What, I should love Apple?
And I think I can use other s/w to load it. I know I can add/delete in Windows, I haven't bothered to try and sync art and all. I do want to listen to my music, looking at my music isn't so high a priority.
I bought a pair of Phillips SHE9500's, $29.99 at Best Buy. You need to use the right size muffs, and jam them in there pretty tight, but they tend to stay in even while working out. Isolation sufficient for a whiny Southwest 737, and actual bass response you can discern. High end is fine, and the response is crisp enough for me to skip paying more for the phones than I did for the player. For the money, they work for me.
I've had Sony Walkmen since the TPS-L2, the first portable CD player in the bigger-than-a-loaf-of-bread battery case, several so-called shockproof thin CD players, and a couple of minidisc players. Up until the MP3 players, I could live with the bass response, which in the progression above went from marginal to fine to tolerable to great (The Sharp MS702 I went into and changed the bass EQ, not for the faint of heart) to, with MP3s, poor. I rip at 320kb now, since 128 stinks, 192 is passe, and 256 isn't different enough for me to miss the space. The Gigabeat EQ I thought was nonfunctional or superfluous until I tried my DJ phones, and there, there WAS bass in there! The Phillips are good enough for me.
I'm a bass freak, BTW. Listening to old Beatles or Who is fine. Bass305 doesn't quite get delivered with the impact it can have, but hey, these are phones. My Paradigms at home will set off car alarms across the street, despite the concrete floor. That's where the bass belongs. Earbuds that would do that would deafen me. Kids, you have been warned.
I bought a used Toshiba Gigabeat S 60GB, and I love it. The x-control works, having a dedicated manu button (even if it does have the Windows logo on it...) is a blessing, and it's loud enough for an airplane, if you can find earphones that don't s u c k for less than $90. Which I did.
:-)
And then I got a chance to try an iPod Touch yesterday. Ok, slick, and a bigger screen. But... I fat-fingered most selections, it was an effort to hit precisely what I wanted. Scrolling was nice, but figuring out the menu button and then hitting it, not nice. Touch was too sloppy for me.
I'm not normal, I know, but I'm not disappointed that I got the Toshiba. And I'll maybe give it to my wife, if the next flavor is substantially cooler. I can live with WMP. Which, BTW, seems to let me sort and search for music just fine. I don't think it's as slick as iTunes, but then I could probably use something else too.
There is more to the PMP world than iPod. Trust me
...dig that old iOpener out of the basement and, wait, I don't have a basement, damn, I sold the iOpener to some kid, maybe I can score a v5 on eBay, ACK! Only 3, and they obviously don't know which rev they have... dammit, I'm gonna have to work on this, l8r, much, !sleep. Must have.
Your analogy with UPS is more accurate than most posters will realize or admit. At least, until now...
I recall when, if I sent packages via UPS Ground, they would arive NO LATER THAN the promised time. Used to be 5-7 days for US shipments, depending on distance. Some would arrive earlier. Rarely would one arrive later. I was happy. In fact, I used Ground for shorter distances since it was invariably virtually overnight.
Not so any more.
If the promise is 7 days, you can be sure UPS will deliver it in 7 days. Not 6. Probably not 8. Many packages aren't 'eligible' for Saturday delivery. That day doesn't count. I never get a package delivered early any more. This has changed over the years. It may be that they've gotten leaner, and so there is no excess capacity to carry a package by a faster means, or no room on another truck. It may be that they've decided that giving faster service for the slower rate is not good business. While I can accept that, I'd be disappointed if UPS would let my package languish in some terminal because they would adhere to their stated SLA, despite having the capacity to do better. But at least I got what I paid for.
Net Neutrality is similar, though a little different. While many ISPs are now making deliberate attempts to block, delay, deny, and frustrate certin types of Net traffic, we haven't been able to call them out successfully on these issues. Some of their excuses include the likely illegal nature of some traffic, the stated 'abuse' of their systems by over-consuming users, and even some very quiet whining about 'others' who 'take unfair advantage' of their system.
When I sent UPS Ground packages short distance in the sure knowledge that they would arrive as quickly as 'priority' packages, I was indeed taking advantage of UPS's exceptional performance, at a lower cost to me. That advantage is pretty much gone, now that UPS 'plays by the rules', and rarely delivers early.
But when my ISP deliberately blocks certain traffic, without previously telling me that they will, I feel differently about it. They seem to want to limit my use in a way they don't want to tell me about.
I'm no longer getting adverts and mailings from my ISP contenders extolling the virtues of video over the Internet. Still, I get the claims of speed, fast data, getting large files quickly, music, etc ( I know, multiplly redundant). Somehow, if my ISP woos me with speed and data, and I use it, their throttling me and complaining about my actually using the service to the max is frustrating. Even cheap.
I'm not surprised Justice doesn't want to get into this. They hope competition will solve the problem.
There is no effective competition in broadband Internet access in America. In perhaps 5% of markets, there is a third alternative, but for most, it's cable, dsl, or nothing.
I watched an ISP in Maine carve out a nice DSL business, doing what Verizon (or was it Nynex? no, wait, New England Telephone? so confusing...) claim it couldn't be done. When they beat cable speeds and advertised it, they got threatened by the cable provider to 'put up or shut up'. Yup, they did, and cable system had to go several steps further and pump up their system to compete on speed. I have no complaints about throttling on *their* system, though the cable guys seem to be doing it.
Net Neutrality will be an issue, and will eventually go to the courts. The Comcast issues alone will cause this. I live in Cox Cable land, and will probably ditch Qwest DSL shortly, so I'll get a taste of the shaping they may be doing. We'll see.
But we will first force Net Neutrality by demanding that ISPs disclose their TOS's and limits. Then we'll have to ask for them to stop modifying traffic, but to either deliver what they promised or change their promises.
Fat chance. We'll have to sue.
Just don't try this without running Incident I & II first. Really.
In Soviet Russia, the Beowolf cluster of auto-joke creators creates clusters of you!!!
i hate you
"They can really punish him by making him run windows ME."
Um, They can really punish him by making him * try* to run windows ME.
Was probably interesting, but;
"... and finally offers advice on when and where to use autonegotiation..."
would undoubtedly be the shortest paragraph in the chapter. A single word would do.