Slashback: Bandwidth, Animation, Gruvin'

Slashback this evening brings you news and updates on several previous stories, including (not limited to) @home service, Linuxgruven, and some followups to Slashdot book reviews.

More news you can use on the @home front. Anubis333 writes: "After a while talking with customer support, I have learned that Comcast@Home (Soon to be ATT Broadband) has instituted a network-wide cap on user upload to 15KB! (Thats not much more than dialup) Also, they have now capped Usenet news access. What am I paying 50 dollars a month for again? More info on usenet here.

Upon even longer hold times, I found out that when Comcast switches over to ATT the cap will be set to 128KB and the usenet caps will be lifted, also they will support more groups. The full change over will be complete by the end of Feb. Any users in the Savannah Ga. Area, they will start here Jan. 15 and end in early feb. Call support for exact local dates if interested."

Yessir, about oh, yea big by a few more inches ... Dave contributed a link showing a side-by-side comparison of the current Apple laptop line, including the new bigger iBook. Shame about the resolution, though ...

By their fruits ye shall know them. zsazsa writes: "According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon has sued James Hibbits and Michael Webbs, the two founders of Linuxgruven for deceptive business practices. He alleges that interviewers were actually salespeople paid to enroll job applicants in training programs costing up to $3,150."

Would the FSF call Sun "GNU-minded"? maitas writes: "It seems that Sun has removed Solaris for Intel from its free download list. It's really sad to see a company that promotes its 'GNU minded' culture to go back on the few good things it had made. They even removed the Solaris source code from their site! Sad, sad, sad."

That them thar' book larnin' Stardance points to an interview at Salon with Steve Grand, in which the "designer of the artificial life program 'Creatures', talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be 'alive.'" You may remember Grand's book Creation: Life & How to Make It, reviewed on these pages. Speaking of reviews, several readers have contributed links to the New York Times' review of Lawrence Lessig's new book.

"shame about the resolution though..."

[Wakko Warner]

Er, precisely what sucks about the resolution, for those of us not ``in the know''?

- A.P.

Re:"shame about the resolution though..."

[whee]

The resolution of the 14" iBook is 1024*768 -- the same as the resolution of the 12.1". You're paying more for a bigger laptop with no other real advantage besides not having to squint as much.

Caps

[CaptainSuperBoy]

The upload cap sucks, but I have to say - 3GB per 3 days of USENET is not unreasonable. If you subscribe to a PAY USENET service, there's still a cap on downloads for a set time period. People leech warez and porn off USENET all day, and your ISP (or other provider) can't support that without imposing some sort of limitation. A typical pay service is $10/month and lets you download say, 8GB a month such as newshosting.com.

Wah...

[xonker]

Okay, the upload cap is something to bitch about, but whining about a 3GB download cap for news over a 3 day period? Puh-leez.

If you're downloading more than 3GB of pr0n over three days, you have some serious issues...

I'm quite happy to see that the Linuxgruven bastards are being sued, though. They screwed over a good friend of mine, and I hope they get nailed to the wall for it. Took 'em long enough, though...

Dialup Woes

[Renraku]

I'm on dial-up. You people complain about 128k being all evil and bad, and thats just your upload cap! Think about us who get the run around from every broadband provider we go to, being capped at like 40k.

You're getting what you're paying for

[Anonymous Coward]

Just exactly how much bandwidth you you think $50 is worth? Ever priced a T1 even from a shitty provider (Broadwing) they're over $700/mo with local loop things are even more expensive is you live in a remote area. Besides for $50 you are getting nearly a DS3 (I've seen peaks of 500k/sec on my cable modem) worth of download speed, especially from those local @Home usenet servers. Quit your bitching and thank god you have broadband at all.

Re:Caps

[ImaLamer]

Not unreasonable?

Why should anyone pay for USENET service when it's included with the service? Simply don't offer it, offer text only services and advertise that, or sell USENET extra. But for god sakes drop the price of the overall service. For $50 a month, they should guarantee great server retention. $50 is too much for cable, considering other providers offer no-cap, for $10 less.

But cable providers are special. If they were smart they would have the news server local relative to the customers. There is no reason ATT or even AOL and the rest can't set up a local news server. They have the lines.

If the server is local, they don't share the server between cities - cutting down the load. They also save $ on bandwidth considering the server is only a few hops away, those hops being within the same building.

And when it comes to warez or porn... whose business is it what they are doing? What if I want to take a daily backup of alt.religion.scientology? or even alt.religion.* ? Maybe I'm a linux enthusiast and want to archive comp.os.linux.* ? Or even alt.linux.sucks.?

Maybe they want to download them all [mentioned above]. It shouldn't matter.

It would be like saying... "you get this open, fast, connection. We will provide a news server somewhere within our own net. But you can download more on IRC, Napster, the web and FTP sites... you're welcome"

Re:15KB... why

[mattdm]

They're doing it to keep you from running servers from your home. If you want to do that, they want you to pay them a lot more.