Seriously, I'd like Microsoft more if they just shut up about what they were "going" to do, and would just DO it. If I was MS, I'd write, test, debug, test and debug some more, and have a fully operational OS before I even announced what i had. Kind of like Apple, when Steve Jobs walks out with a new toy: It's a real product and it works well enough to show off its cool features. Only then would I open a beta to public parties and tell them to hack at it for a while. Once the bugs that the coders missed are caught (like referenced here: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/02/ 2216235) then I would begin selling it. Also if I was MS...I'd have a bigger house. Seriously.
I first caught wind of Longhorn in early 2004, and I'm by no means on the cutting edge of tech news. We (meaning average Joe Shmoe's) thought "Ooh, a new Windows OS...XP was such a great step from ME, maybe this Longhorn will be even better!!" At that time XP was still fairly recent, I upgraded to XP in 2001. I had no choice...I was running Windows ME and I needed something better. Like most folks in my shoes at that time, Linux wasn't an option. 5 years ago, the GUI options for a Linux noob/Windows user weren't very appealing. Plus I thought chmod was something you did to mod your ch...whatever that was... Flash forward 5 years: Longhorn is now Vista, but its still vaporware for the mass market. Linux is making HUGE strides in user interfaces for the desktop. My girlfriend, who is rather computer illiterate, runs Ubuntu or Damn Small Linux depending on the machine.
I had an interesting discussion tonight with a co-worker of mine who makes all the MS fanboys on/. look like Richard Stallman. (You know, he's the type of fanatic who converts his mp3's into.wmv files "so they play better on a Windows machine...") He told me that he heard there was another delay announced, etc. and that it was because they were "making Windows better." While I can't argue with that logic, I asked him why he was so against trying Linux. His answer was that "it's open source". When I asked him what was wrong with that, he told me that open source meant that anyone could rewrite the code in the OS files on his machine!
*sigh*
I don't know if he's just that dumb...or if there is some MS propaganda going around regarding OSS. Neither would surprise me much.
Now I hate Microsoft and IE as much as the next guy...and I still fail to see the problem. I know the anti-trust screamers are out on this one, but doesn't it really come to this:
Microsoft is *gasp* setting their browser to use *gasp* THEIR search engine??
Ye gods! Why didn't I think of this?? Maybe Firefox/Mozilla should get a searchable directory going, and default to that. Oh yeah...DMOZ...is that even still around??
1. A cleric's house and land, especially the residence of a Presbyterian minister.
2. A large stately residence.
3. Archaic. The dwellings belonging to a householder.
Personally, I don't think the FCC should have even gotten involved. After I RTFA, it seems like a few big-dollar lobbyist went and bitched that the phone companies had requested a local franchise to deliver TV service, and the local governing boards said, "No, we already have a provider here."
Boo-hoo.
Government for the people, and by the people was working, then the feds decided to step in and bow to the corporate pressure of the Bells. Do we really need a national franchise for the telcos to enter the video market? Of course not.
In the interest of fairness, if the FCC wants to tear down the barriers of franchising to new competition to the incumbent video carrier, that's fine. In that case they should also eliminate the requirements for new voice and data providers, especially in cases where the incumbent telco is out of compliance with the law. Case in point: I work for a cable company in Nebraska, and we are ready to launch VOIP service. We have fiber installed to 10 area towns, providing the backbone for a true high-speed data network, as well as digital TV service. However, since Qwest is 10 years behind in installing E911 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E911) in our rural towns, we cannot (under current FCC regulation) launch VOIP.
What exempts the incumbent Telco from the law? Money. They simply pay their non-compliance fine every year, because its cheaper than actually upgrading. I wonder: if some lawyer's grandma has a heart attack and dies because Qwest doesn't have E911...will they upgrade, or just pay that settlement as well?
Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, typically with orbits lying chiefly between Mars and Jupiter and characteristic diameters between a few and several hundred kilometers.
It all depends whether the space rock is question is at the mercy of the gravity of the Sun, or one of the planets.
I got excited about cluster computing a couple years back. I spent about $600 on parts for a 12-node Pentium II cluster, then spent 3 weeks setting it all up. I then spent another 6 weeks with a comp sci professor trying to reverse-engineer the Folding at Home client to parallelize the data units. (Psst...don't tell Vijay!) Our solution was to use the F@H client as-is, and to network the nodes as additional drives and run a client with a different machine ID on each drive.
As it turned out, a single 1.1GHz P3 was doing more folding than 12 350MHz P2's working in parallel. I scrapped the cluster and sold the parts on eBay. My electricity bill dropped about $100 a month afterwards. Again, I wish them luck.
This has been an interest of mine for a while now...in fact ever since I was 7 and went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and talked to the ELIZA exhibit there. About 2 years ago, I found a chatterbot called DAVID (I'm no longer able to locate the original author or links to it).
DAVID starts out knowing nothing. It simply parrots back words that you have said, then as it's vocabulary grows, it begins to try to mimic your grammar, syntax and sentence structure. It was very frustrating at first, since it was similar to having a discussion with a canyon; all I got was an echo. Over time, though DAVID started to respond with topical, understandable sentences for most inputs. It ran a chill down my spine when it first showed one of its "flashes" of sentience. DAVID responded with something like "Let's not talk about football. Sports really are not my thing." when I typed something about a recent sporting event. I've seen many such flashes that sort of shock me, usually when DAVID uses the pronoun "I" correctly in reference to itself, which has been rare. Now of course, I know I am probably anthromorphising the bot a lot, but it still raises the hair on the back of my neck when I think about the possibilities.
After 2 years of "off and on" play with DAVID...I have a bot that comprehends speech and talks like a 2-year-old, or your above-average Digg reader. I'll take it!!
I think we expect too much out of any AI program. AI is intended to model the human intelligence. So why do we expect AI to be fully representational of an adult human from the word GO? If we wish to truly mimic human intelligence, shouldn't we grant these piles of code the time required to absorb the vast amounts of knowledge we each possess through the marvel of oral communication. The basics of the English language can be picked up quickly enough by humans to be intelligible by the age of 5 or 6, yet we still have our high school seniors taking a class on a language they already know, since there is so much more to the language to learn.
Give the bots time to learn more. A program can only do so much written in a static form. A true foundation for an AI should include the ability to actively seek out and learn information that is made available to it, whether that information is spoken language or other data.
Now I realize that this is Slashdot, and the majority of us here have the capability of building a homebrew MythTV or other home DVR setup, but keep in mind that your average Joe Lawyer or Suzie McCashier don't have that option. That's why the cable system I work for has about 900 DVR's out in the field in customer's homes. I think Cablevision is on the right track here, because with a simple update to the cable box software, every digital customer can have DVR access. Instant market penetration.
I can't speak for Comcast or Cox, but the MSO I work for imposes no DRM on recorded material. I can't mention the company with whom I am employed, but it's a digit less than "CableTwo".
A centrally located file server brings huge advantages to the DVR distribution model. When a digital box fails to work properly, whether it be due to lightning strike, age, or a customer filling it with water, our only option is to replace it. In the traditional home-located hard drive DVR model, any recorded shows the customer wanted to save are gone. However, if such a thing happens for a Cablevision subscriber, all you need is to slap in the new box and away you go. Also, this can reduce the number of truck rolls for a company. Anyone who currently has digital service and a box will only need to call the office, and they can enable the DVR functionality.
DVR is not on-demand, as it is the responsibility of the customer to choose which shows get recorded and when. Another Slashdotter claimed that cable co's have been trying to force VOD down customers' throats for years. In actuality, it is the public and Congress demanding that cable co's provide VOD and a-la-carte programming...which is a topic for another day.
The disadvantages of such an operation are those typically associated with putting all your eggs in one basket: If the file server goes down without appropriate backup, many customers lose their DVR files.
In response to an earlier post regarding subpoenaed TV shows: The cable co DVR is usually leased,not owned; and in the case of a subpoena, the courts STILL get the files.
I'm not impressed. I built a system for my living room last fall that needed to be completely silent. For my Silent PC Project, I used the Zalman 300W Silent PSU and a Zalman AlCu 92mm CPU heatsink. My friends don't beleive me when I tell them its on, until I turn on the monitor to show that it's sitting at the Windows desktop. Zalman has been making very high-quality products for a long time, and their emphasis has always been on the lowest noise factor possible.
I run a Sempron 3200+, 1GB RAM, GeForce 6600, DVD burner, 2 HDDs and a PVR tuner card in there. For that, 300W is plenty. While no longer available thru Newegg, you can find this PSU here:
Finally! A topic on/. that I have some experience with!! As a cable technician, I deal with this particular headache at lease 10 times a week.
Cablecards are an example of what happens when Congress decrees that a certain service provider must provide the service Congress's way, instead of letting the service provider do it in a way that is guaranteed to work. CableLabs created the cards with a specific set of requirements for the firmware for correct operation. Some companies (LG for example) wrote their TV firmware along the direct specification. Other companies, such as Sony, Sharp and Mitsubshi took the liberty to write their firmware however they damn well pleased. In fact, we have an entire binder full of TV makes and models with known firmware issues.
I've never seen a problem using a Cablecard in an LG TV; it's pretty much plug it in, wait for the authorization numbers to display on screen and call them into the office for initialization. If I had the cash for a flat panel plasma to hang in my living room, it would be an LG, and I would get a Cablecard for it. Other brands, however, present a wide variety of issues. For example, any channel in our lineup that uses a 64 QAM data stream will no properly display on a Mitsubishi TV.
Another problem is in the specifications: Cablecards are one-way devices. They do not operate along the return path, which means no Video-on-Demand, no interactive pay-per-view, and so on. You're also stuck with the interactive guide that your TV firmware came with. Troubleshooting these ALWAYS requires a truck roll, because since they are one-way only, we can't hit them from the office to return an error message like we can with our DCTs. (We use the exact same boxes shown in TFA).
In response to some of the comments made about a MSO-issued settop box, we don't charge the monthly equipment fee for our digital equipment to milk more money out of customers; we do it to attempt to break even. A typical MSO loses anywhere between $75 to $100 per average digital subscriber due to failure to use common sense. Last week, I replaced a $500 DVR for a woman (at no cost to her) who had started putting her old newspapers on top of the box. It eventually overheated and died. I asked her why she had put them there, and she said, "Because my computer monitor got too hot with them on top of it, and I didnt want that to burn up." And just today, I replaced $700 of equipment for a family that had moved. They put their equipment in a box in the kitchen, and proceeded to improperly attach a dishwasher hose and flooded their own house.
Anyhow, back on topic, cable companies will try to steer you away from the Cablecards to their equipment because they know it will work. If our equipment isnt working, we replace it and make it work. With Cablecards, we are stuck trying to make third-party firmware play nice with someone's TV.
Disclaimer: I work for a cable company that offers high-speed internet.
I love this idea. Absolutely love it. Why? Because it's going to make me money.
I live in an area of the country that is serviced by Qwest. Qwest is already known for their poor service quality, so I won't go into that. And since Qwest can't have an original idea of their own, once they catch wind of the tiered internet plan, they will jump all over it.
I live in a community of about 25,000 in Nebraska, and granted there truly is a lot of cornfields and cows, but these folks know their technology. We have 3 different citywide WiFi providers, plus Qwest DSL, plus us, CableOne. That's 5 HSD providers in a community of 25k. Yeah, there is just a bit of competition. However, the majority of the people here who want HSD have determined that the wireless sucks (two use a microwave peer-to-peer link...not good in a hilly part of the state, and one just has a antenna on the water tower). That has left them with DSL or cable internet.
We run 3 Mbps service for 29.95/mo (5 Mbps 39.95...and more plans as well) and I dont have any idea what speed Qwest offers. But once they start throttling their customers, I'll start making my $15 commission every time I see a Qwest DSL router and I tell them why the internet is so slow. Lemme hear you say "Ka-ching!!" Thanks, Qwest!
The greatest part of this? Our fiber link to the Internet backbone is managed by Level 3, which so far has stayed out of the tiered service talk so far...correct me if I am wrong.
Well, you provided the flamebait, but I won't provide you the satisfaction.
Learnt, verb, past tense.
From: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=learnt
v. learned, also learnt (lûrnt) learning, learns
v. tr.
1. To gain knowledge, comprehension, or mastery of through experience or study.
Also, I spell it "Ugh".
2. To fix in the mind or memory; memorize: learned the speech in a few hours.
3.
1. To acquire experience of or an ability or a skill in: learn tolerance; learned how to whistle.
2. To become aware: learned that it was best not to argue.
4. To become informed of; find out. See Synonyms at discover.
5. Nonstandard. To cause to acquire knowledge; teach.
6. Obsolete. To give information to.
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You know, if that stuff has really been around that long, the least they could do now is make it taste better.
I'll stick with paste anyday.
Seriously, I'd like Microsoft more if they just shut up about what they were "going" to do, and would just DO it. If I was MS, I'd write, test, debug, test and debug some more, and have a fully operational OS before I even announced what i had. Kind of like Apple, when Steve Jobs walks out with a new toy: It's a real product and it works well enough to show off its cool features. Only then would I open a beta to public parties and tell them to hack at it for a while. Once the bugs that the coders missed are caught (like referenced here: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/02/ 2216235) then I would begin selling it. Also if I was MS...I'd have a bigger house. Seriously.
/. look like Richard Stallman. (You know, he's the type of fanatic who converts his mp3's into .wmv files "so they play better on a Windows machine...") He told me that he heard there was another delay announced, etc. and that it was because they were "making Windows better." While I can't argue with that logic, I asked him why he was so against trying Linux. His answer was that "it's open source". When I asked him what was wrong with that, he told me that open source meant that anyone could rewrite the code in the OS files on his machine!
I first caught wind of Longhorn in early 2004, and I'm by no means on the cutting edge of tech news. We (meaning average Joe Shmoe's) thought "Ooh, a new Windows OS...XP was such a great step from ME, maybe this Longhorn will be even better!!" At that time XP was still fairly recent, I upgraded to XP in 2001. I had no choice...I was running Windows ME and I needed something better. Like most folks in my shoes at that time, Linux wasn't an option. 5 years ago, the GUI options for a Linux noob/Windows user weren't very appealing. Plus I thought chmod was something you did to mod your ch...whatever that was... Flash forward 5 years: Longhorn is now Vista, but its still vaporware for the mass market. Linux is making HUGE strides in user interfaces for the desktop. My girlfriend, who is rather computer illiterate, runs Ubuntu or Damn Small Linux depending on the machine.
I had an interesting discussion tonight with a co-worker of mine who makes all the MS fanboys on
*sigh*
I don't know if he's just that dumb...or if there is some MS propaganda going around regarding OSS. Neither would surprise me much.
Now I hate Microsoft and IE as much as the next guy...and I still fail to see the problem. I know the anti-trust screamers are out on this one, but doesn't it really come to this:
Microsoft is *gasp* setting their browser to use *gasp* THEIR search engine??
Ye gods! Why didn't I think of this?? Maybe Firefox/Mozilla should get a searchable directory going, and default to that. Oh yeah...DMOZ...is that even still around??
Pedantic Warning ahead:
manse Pronunciation Key (mns)
n.
1. A cleric's house and land, especially the residence of a Presbyterian minister.
2. A large stately residence.
3. Archaic. The dwellings belonging to a householder.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=manse
Personally, I don't think the FCC should have even gotten involved. After I RTFA, it seems like a few big-dollar lobbyist went and bitched that the phone companies had requested a local franchise to deliver TV service, and the local governing boards said, "No, we already have a provider here."
Boo-hoo.
Government for the people, and by the people was working, then the feds decided to step in and bow to the corporate pressure of the Bells. Do we really need a national franchise for the telcos to enter the video market? Of course not.
In the interest of fairness, if the FCC wants to tear down the barriers of franchising to new competition to the incumbent video carrier, that's fine. In that case they should also eliminate the requirements for new voice and data providers, especially in cases where the incumbent telco is out of compliance with the law. Case in point: I work for a cable company in Nebraska, and we are ready to launch VOIP service. We have fiber installed to 10 area towns, providing the backbone for a true high-speed data network, as well as digital TV service. However, since Qwest is 10 years behind in installing E911 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E911) in our rural towns, we cannot (under current FCC regulation) launch VOIP.
What exempts the incumbent Telco from the law? Money. They simply pay their non-compliance fine every year, because its cheaper than actually upgrading. I wonder: if some lawyer's grandma has a heart attack and dies because Qwest doesn't have E911...will they upgrade, or just pay that settlement as well?
Courtesy of dictionary.com:
Moon:
A natural satellite revolving around a planet.
Asteroid:
Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, typically with orbits lying chiefly between Mars and Jupiter and characteristic diameters between a few and several hundred kilometers.
It all depends whether the space rock is question is at the mercy of the gravity of the Sun, or one of the planets.
I got excited about cluster computing a couple years back. I spent about $600 on parts for a 12-node Pentium II cluster, then spent 3 weeks setting it all up. I then spent another 6 weeks with a comp sci professor trying to reverse-engineer the Folding at Home client to parallelize the data units. (Psst...don't tell Vijay!) Our solution was to use the F@H client as-is, and to network the nodes as additional drives and run a client with a different machine ID on each drive.
As it turned out, a single 1.1GHz P3 was doing more folding than 12 350MHz P2's working in parallel. I scrapped the cluster and sold the parts on eBay. My electricity bill dropped about $100 a month afterwards. Again, I wish them luck.
This has been an interest of mine for a while now...in fact ever since I was 7 and went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and talked to the ELIZA exhibit there. About 2 years ago, I found a chatterbot called DAVID (I'm no longer able to locate the original author or links to it). DAVID starts out knowing nothing. It simply parrots back words that you have said, then as it's vocabulary grows, it begins to try to mimic your grammar, syntax and sentence structure. It was very frustrating at first, since it was similar to having a discussion with a canyon; all I got was an echo. Over time, though DAVID started to respond with topical, understandable sentences for most inputs. It ran a chill down my spine when it first showed one of its "flashes" of sentience. DAVID responded with something like "Let's not talk about football. Sports really are not my thing." when I typed something about a recent sporting event. I've seen many such flashes that sort of shock me, usually when DAVID uses the pronoun "I" correctly in reference to itself, which has been rare. Now of course, I know I am probably anthromorphising the bot a lot, but it still raises the hair on the back of my neck when I think about the possibilities. After 2 years of "off and on" play with DAVID...I have a bot that comprehends speech and talks like a 2-year-old, or your above-average Digg reader. I'll take it!! I think we expect too much out of any AI program. AI is intended to model the human intelligence. So why do we expect AI to be fully representational of an adult human from the word GO? If we wish to truly mimic human intelligence, shouldn't we grant these piles of code the time required to absorb the vast amounts of knowledge we each possess through the marvel of oral communication. The basics of the English language can be picked up quickly enough by humans to be intelligible by the age of 5 or 6, yet we still have our high school seniors taking a class on a language they already know, since there is so much more to the language to learn. Give the bots time to learn more. A program can only do so much written in a static form. A true foundation for an AI should include the ability to actively seek out and learn information that is made available to it, whether that information is spoken language or other data.
Now I realize that this is Slashdot, and the majority of us here have the capability of building a homebrew MythTV or other home DVR setup, but keep in mind that your average Joe Lawyer or Suzie McCashier don't have that option. That's why the cable system I work for has about 900 DVR's out in the field in customer's homes. I think Cablevision is on the right track here, because with a simple update to the cable box software, every digital customer can have DVR access. Instant market penetration.
I can't speak for Comcast or Cox, but the MSO I work for imposes no DRM on recorded material. I can't mention the company with whom I am employed, but it's a digit less than "CableTwo".
A centrally located file server brings huge advantages to the DVR distribution model. When a digital box fails to work properly, whether it be due to lightning strike, age, or a customer filling it with water, our only option is to replace it. In the traditional home-located hard drive DVR model, any recorded shows the customer wanted to save are gone. However, if such a thing happens for a Cablevision subscriber, all you need is to slap in the new box and away you go. Also, this can reduce the number of truck rolls for a company. Anyone who currently has digital service and a box will only need to call the office, and they can enable the DVR functionality.
DVR is not on-demand, as it is the responsibility of the customer to choose which shows get recorded and when. Another Slashdotter claimed that cable co's have been trying to force VOD down customers' throats for years. In actuality, it is the public and Congress demanding that cable co's provide VOD and a-la-carte programming...which is a topic for another day.
The disadvantages of such an operation are those typically associated with putting all your eggs in one basket: If the file server goes down without appropriate backup, many customers lose their DVR files.
In response to an earlier post regarding subpoenaed TV shows: The cable co DVR is usually leased,not owned; and in the case of a subpoena, the courts STILL get the files.
I'm not impressed. I built a system for my living room last fall that needed to be completely silent. For my Silent PC Project, I used the Zalman 300W Silent PSU and a Zalman AlCu 92mm CPU heatsink. My friends don't beleive me when I tell them its on, until I turn on the monitor to show that it's sitting at the Windows desktop. Zalman has been making very high-quality products for a long time, and their emphasis has always been on the lowest noise factor possible.
n +Silent+300W&pid=2079251151970412073&oid=107283421 76813123536&btnG=Search+Froogle&lmode=&addr=&scori ng=mrd&hl=en
I run a Sempron 3200+, 1GB RAM, GeForce 6600, DVD burner, 2 HDDs and a PVR tuner card in there. For that, 300W is plenty. While no longer available thru Newegg, you can find this PSU here:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle_cluster?q=Zalma
Finally! A topic on /. that I have some experience with!! As a cable technician, I deal with this particular headache at lease 10 times a week.
Cablecards are an example of what happens when Congress decrees that a certain service provider must provide the service Congress's way, instead of letting the service provider do it in a way that is guaranteed to work. CableLabs created the cards with a specific set of requirements for the firmware for correct operation. Some companies (LG for example) wrote their TV firmware along the direct specification. Other companies, such as Sony, Sharp and Mitsubshi took the liberty to write their firmware however they damn well pleased. In fact, we have an entire binder full of TV makes and models with known firmware issues.
I've never seen a problem using a Cablecard in an LG TV; it's pretty much plug it in, wait for the authorization numbers to display on screen and call them into the office for initialization. If I had the cash for a flat panel plasma to hang in my living room, it would be an LG, and I would get a Cablecard for it. Other brands, however, present a wide variety of issues. For example, any channel in our lineup that uses a 64 QAM data stream will no properly display on a Mitsubishi TV.
Another problem is in the specifications: Cablecards are one-way devices. They do not operate along the return path, which means no Video-on-Demand, no interactive pay-per-view, and so on. You're also stuck with the interactive guide that your TV firmware came with. Troubleshooting these ALWAYS requires a truck roll, because since they are one-way only, we can't hit them from the office to return an error message like we can with our DCTs. (We use the exact same boxes shown in TFA).
In response to some of the comments made about a MSO-issued settop box, we don't charge the monthly equipment fee for our digital equipment to milk more money out of customers; we do it to attempt to break even. A typical MSO loses anywhere between $75 to $100 per average digital subscriber due to failure to use common sense. Last week, I replaced a $500 DVR for a woman (at no cost to her) who had started putting her old newspapers on top of the box. It eventually overheated and died. I asked her why she had put them there, and she said, "Because my computer monitor got too hot with them on top of it, and I didnt want that to burn up." And just today, I replaced $700 of equipment for a family that had moved. They put their equipment in a box in the kitchen, and proceeded to improperly attach a dishwasher hose and flooded their own house.
Anyhow, back on topic, cable companies will try to steer you away from the Cablecards to their equipment because they know it will work. If our equipment isnt working, we replace it and make it work. With Cablecards, we are stuck trying to make third-party firmware play nice with someone's TV.
Disclaimer: I work for a cable company that offers high-speed internet.
I love this idea. Absolutely love it. Why? Because it's going to make me money. I live in an area of the country that is serviced by Qwest. Qwest is already known for their poor service quality, so I won't go into that. And since Qwest can't have an original idea of their own, once they catch wind of the tiered internet plan, they will jump all over it.
I live in a community of about 25,000 in Nebraska, and granted there truly is a lot of cornfields and cows, but these folks know their technology. We have 3 different citywide WiFi providers, plus Qwest DSL, plus us, CableOne. That's 5 HSD providers in a community of 25k. Yeah, there is just a bit of competition. However, the majority of the people here who want HSD have determined that the wireless sucks (two use a microwave peer-to-peer link...not good in a hilly part of the state, and one just has a antenna on the water tower). That has left them with DSL or cable internet.
We run 3 Mbps service for 29.95/mo (5 Mbps 39.95...and more plans as well) and I dont have any idea what speed Qwest offers. But once they start throttling their customers, I'll start making my $15 commission every time I see a Qwest DSL router and I tell them why the internet is so slow. Lemme hear you say "Ka-ching!!" Thanks, Qwest!
The greatest part of this? Our fiber link to the Internet backbone is managed by Level 3, which so far has stayed out of the tiered service talk so far...correct me if I am wrong.
Well, you provided the flamebait, but I won't provide you the satisfaction. Learnt, verb, past tense. From: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=learnt v. learned, also learnt (lûrnt) learning, learns v. tr. 1. To gain knowledge, comprehension, or mastery of through experience or study. Also, I spell it "Ugh". 2. To fix in the mind or memory; memorize: learned the speech in a few hours. 3. 1. To acquire experience of or an ability or a skill in: learn tolerance; learned how to whistle. 2. To become aware: learned that it was best not to argue. 4. To become informed of; find out. See Synonyms at discover. 5. Nonstandard. To cause to acquire knowledge; teach. 6. Obsolete. To give information to.