Your experience is what I experienced at a telco with Windows Servers, OS/2 Servers, Lotus Notes Servers, Linux Servers, Unix Servers and mainframes. The Linux and Unix servers only came down when we brought them down. Amazing how much you can do with those to OS NIXs that do NOT require bringing down the servers. OS/2 had the next best uptime; than Lotus Notes and finally Windows.

Tell me about it, I would have loved to have more administrators working with me, not to mention make more money. The salary BS is very much another lie. As if a company is going to pay your more these days with so many System Administrators out of work thanks to off shoring, yea right! We are living the free market dream...as if lobbyists do not prevent markets from functioning based on supply and demand as a truly FREE market.

I have heard of Unix/Linux System Admins making north of $120K per year, those guys/gals are worth every penny too. The one I personally knew, was managing north of 300 servers and still had time to test software and do even more. Why, simple, he was a true "expert" and no paper tiger. He configured the systems to save him time, do things faster and was simply more effective not only for himself, but the company as well.

An expert knows the answer off the top of their head, period. If they pause to think about it, they are considering one of the 10 - 20 options for that specific command and want to give you the correct option. Either that or they are considering one of many ways to accomplish the task and want to suggest the one that would be most effective given the constraints involved, usually self imposed constraints of the hardware/software used at that site. Anything less than this definition, in my opinion, is NOT an Expert. This is also why an "Advanced" professional, by my definition, is a much stronger job candidate than 98% of the so called "Experts" out in the industry. In most jobs with most companies you simply do not have the time required to become an "expert" in any given one area and if you did, not only would your type A, non techie manager be ragging on your performance, but you would not be "qualified", per Human Resources, for that next position at the same or another company simply because that next job would require you to be a so called "expert" in 5 other programming languages, scripting languages, SQL database derivatives, software application packages, network protocols, etc, etc, etc,...

And remember you have to have had actual work experience on those 10 topics in the last 3 years also to qualify....what a farce.

Very, very true. As a manager at another company, I was responsible for a pretty significant budget that included everything IT. At any given time, usually due to hardware problems, 10 - 14% of our desktops were down. Because we were NOT restricted by licensing issues, we had extra computers configured and ready to go. When a worker's PC died for any reason, we plug and played a new system at their desk. Since all their resources were assigned, via scripts, when they logged in, there was not an issue with software, access, anything. The restrictive licensing in most businesses today related to proprietary software would preclude me having that capability today. What a mistake.

I have talked to Linux Systems Administrators that were responsible for administering well over 13,000 users in multiple geographic locations. They told me straight up that Active Directory would be a major headache for them. Fortunately their companies were not just Microsoft centric in their IT purchases.

The computers are only there to do tasks.

Absolutely, PCs are tools, nothing more. I would add to that, a very simple truth... if you do not control 100% the computers on your network, in your business, that you are responsible for; then you a few incidents from being reprimanded and/or terminated for something that is not your fault and/or is out of your control.

Nothing like getting blamed for inabilities and ineptness because one proprietary party's hardware and/or software does not perform as advertised. Its real fun explaining to the Vice President of another Business Unit that the problem is specifically due to that proprietary vendor. You of course are prepared with actual test cases and proof that, that is where the fault lies if you are worth your salt. Even worse when the proprietary vendor knows they can NOT fix the problem and starts blaming you the IT support person for the problem. (Can you say GPF, General Protection Fault; Different Office Word data formats, oh the list, oh the humanity) And support from that vendor, yea right. A total waste of time in every case based on my well over 5 years of experience with one major telco who actually paid for the support for all its hardware and especially its software. It was less than fun to use it(their support help desk), and every time I tried, not one time did they provide a solution that actually worked. You were much better off if you kept your own internal database of past problems and their solutions. Also it helps to know how to search on the web; where open source always will reign supreme. Closed source is highly over-rated and rarely worth the money you are spending.

Most companies do not admit to all the costs associated with the proprietary software or they would not use it, without palms getting greased. This is in reality what happened overseas, that and being dependent on any one or more components that are designed by default to vendor lock you in...can you say Outlook.

Of course back in the day we did not auto-roll-out anything that was not thoroughly tested first to be compatible with all the applications, hardware, network, printers, servers, software that our business used and needed. We were much too professional for that. Only novice newbies ever made that mistake. And a good IT Manager would not let them make that mistake as they knew it would put their job in jeopardy. Today auto roll=out with no ability to pre-test is standard business practice...foolish and short sighted. I guess your down-time is really not as expensive as you declare, at least your down time is allot less than ours was, that is for sure.

I bet many of those Windows ONLY shops do what we did, get in before 7:30a to bring up the Windows Servers, that way, officially, no outage ever occurred. Yea we cooked the books to show better uptime, you had too with Windows and Lotus Notes. But never with OS/2, Linux and Unix those are just the facts.

A funny aside unrelated to software and Microsoft...

I was the only System Admin on my team that our company's help desk was 100% sure would call in after the 24 hour support pager was called after hours or on the weekend. At least that is what they told me...I told them to let my Manager know if someone did not answer. One time, my Manager called me into his office and was in the process of calling me on the carpet for ignoring his urgent page to my SkyTel "24 hour Emergency Duty" pager, ignoring my assertion that I never received a page. He insisted that the SkyTel System never failed and that the pagers always went through. Obviously I did not have an answer for him that he wanted to hear. Fortunately for me, his page came in, 20 minutes after the fact, while I was standing in front of him, in his office. After I asked him if this was the page he was referring to, he just said get out of my office.

Technology never fails, yea right! When it does I want to have a backup hardware and software, ready to go and if licensing restricts me from doing so, well that is unacceptable by any definition. Its not like the backup is sitting their running when it is not in use. Also a very good reason not to allow another vendor to turn off any piece of your IT infrastructure because they "feel" that copy is "unauthorized" based on serial numbers, licensing or swapping out hardware components. Are they on crack? Well they can be if they want, but that does not mean you have to follow them down the alley and join them...become a crack head too! Nope you have options if you plan, don't let them take your options away from you!

Can you say ZaReason and System 76. Linux PC Vendors that avoid proprietary hardware/bios/software crapware...these PCs will even run Windows 7, so you have the best of all the worlds. If you love Microsoft, pay them their tax and use it, however when Microsoft stops supporting that operating system, you KNOW the hardware will run a variety of other Linux operating systems.

Quality hardware at a fantastic price, who does not love that?

My non tech friends have been installing ubuntu and loving it. The

OpenOffice.org replaces MS Office fantastically. gMail long ago surpassed anything that Outlook could do and if you are worried about email being outside your company, there are great Linux solutions, you just have to stay away from Outlook as it was designed to vendor lock-in companies to Microsoft in the first place. Duh moment there.

It is no wonder that Microsoft continues to attack and lock in people/companies with data formats, Outlook, .NET, etc... They even changed the document formats from one version of MS Office Word to the next, talk about ironic. I for one want to know that my data that I store today in the format that I use will be available to me in the future, no matter whose software I use. The fact that Microsoft, on a whim, changes data formats from one release to the next creates an abnormally high future business risk to any company. If you honestly mitigate your business risk, you MUST move away from vendors that artificially create and/or inflate RISK just to vendor lock-in and force automatic updates. Anything else is less than honest.

Does the vendor support "open" formats with their software applications? Meaning I can put my data in AND get it out without converting it to do so. If not, next....

To coin a phrase, "that is not entirely accurate". It is well documented (2009 Study) that "Private Browsing" does not actually protect you, (blog post) that the Flash cookies + Javascript code simply store the Flash cookies in a location that is not monitored and/or controlled.

Linux using Symlinks to redirect the Flash stuff to a (/tmp) directory that gets automatically erased every time you reboot your PC is a great option. See (Banish flash cookies forever under linux. Since Mac OS X is based on BSD Linux, you should be able to do the same thing with that operating system. With Windows, you could always count on DOS to allow you to erase junk also, however with Windows 7 I honestly have no idea if it is even possible. As many of the articles pointed out, vendors will tell you that you are safe and browsing privately, but the reality is often something else. At best they only do a partial job with Flash. At worst they do nothing. Adobe blames the browsers API, which is interesting. I am not buying that at all. As for browsers, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome do not allow you to control Flash junk 100%, allowing for only a false sense of security. Since Google has partnered with Adobe, this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. See the comparison link below to see how those browsers stacked up based on Privacy.

With Firefox + NoScript + Linux you can at least control the Flash stuff after a reboot of your PC. However between reboots, Flash can track your activity on the web. Since there are over a 100 web browsers to choose from, surely a few of them will allow you to successfully control your Privacy and not just pay lip service to it.

Don't settle for security by obscurity or as this blog post (with examples) showed privacy settings that do not work 100%. A quote from that post, "Still, the private browsing features in Chrome and Firefox are a complete false sense of privacy and security". Why settle....

Another options might be MPlayer or gnash, the point is you do NOT have to use Flash if you do not want too. HTML5 should be another positive development to diminish Flash.

I was annoyed that Google Chrome would let me only block the website cookie, not all the related tracking cookies from 3rd parties that are not named the same as the website. Even if you are not concerned about your privacy, you have to hate your Internet browsing experience slowing to a crawl because a website you are spending a second at wants to set 20 to 30 Flash cookies on your PC. This quote from the comments of the Linux article to banish flash cookies mentioned above, sums it up nicely...

See how some Browsers stacked up (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer with respects to privacy, most do not block iFrame cookies, by default or as designed.

Stay safe my friend....

Can you honestly expect PDF w/ scripts, JavaScript, Java to be any better? I mean if the vendor is going to mislead you about one issue, why are you trusting them on another? It really is crazy to expect a different outcome with such a well known, well tracked and recorded history on the subject.

LMAO, I have heard better reasons to NOT comment code than this.

This explains why most Object oriented code loads such large and unneeded libraries.

Do I need this? Don't know, better load it so nothing breaks...thanks for nothing.

~ from the link in your post....

I almost could not stop laughing...so that is what they were doing in Redmond when they ignored previous Web browser standards, instead implementing proprietary features that only worked in IE and not in other browser, especially not in Firefox. What hogwash.

Or perhaps that is what they were targeting when the refused to implement either H.264 or X.264 into Silverlight in order to push their own proprietary standard? And it is not forgivable that they implemented H.264 compliance into Silverlight over two years later when the market refused to go down yet another proprietary format blind alley that only supports and promotes Microsoft products over any and every one else...often breaking those other company products in the process.

That explains Embrace, Extend and Extinguish, silly me for not realizing.

Irony is when their own proprietary format does not work with the next version of their application that only supports yet another proprietary format...

And they wonder why their stock price is not growing...duh moment here. In reality, given their massive loss in market share, that is expected to continue into the future, they are doing GREAT, at holding their own stock price. Just goes to show you that the people making money on wall street, that do not produce anything, are not very bright either.

Microsoft cast stones way before almost anyone else in the proprietary format and browser wars...they really do live in a glass house and not acknowledging their deceptions does not revise history enough for the average person to understand how they have abused their monopoly position.

Thankfully they are becoming less and less a force for many reasons, browsers being mitigated to only a small one...finally.

Not only has it NOT been a problem for years...device drivers in Linux...there are literally more device drivers for linux than ANY operating system in the history of computers.

The problems with proprietary hardware are easy to avoid...don't purchase proprietary hardware, ever.

Two great sources for PC hardware that will run anything are ZaReason and System 76. Avoid any company that is stupid enough to pay a Microsoft Tax (can you say LinPro as they use hardware that is rigged to only work with Microsoft Windows and break under Linux.) as they are using hardware that will not work readily with all Linux distros.

You can even install Windows on them if you want, but all the hardware is configured knowing from day 1 that it will run under Linux. If the hardware will not run under Linux, it is not used...problem solved.

To add an additional layer of security, learn about hardware, and for any company that ships hardware that will not work with Linux and refuse to immediately fix it or provide information so others can fix it...do not buy any hardware or software from them for a minimum of 7 years since the last "Linux-Show-Stopper" event. If we all did that, no company would dare release BS hardware that does not work with Linux on day 1, as they would lose your business for 7 years, with the clock getting restarted at each new occurrence.

Thus their words NO LONGER MATTER, only their actions! If after 7 years of good behavior, once again add them to your list of bonafide companies to do business with. For definition of bonafide, see O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)

Your enemy is a multinational cartel, which means they have NO alliance to this or any other country or their beliefs, would have NO problem perverting laws and removing rights in trade for higher profits, and finally has billions of dollars to use against you with everything from SLAPP style lawsuits to outright bribery of elected officials.

Mod him up.

If Americans truly understood the enemy, no Republican candidate would EVER get elected. The majority of Democratic candidates would not be elected either. No Libertarian candidate would stand a chance as they are way too pro corporate. Citizen's United vs FEC was the plan-goal, 12 - 20 years in the making. Its way past time for wake up calls for people who are easily distracted by Religion; think giving up "rights" make them safer or who think a magic bullet killed Kennedy and that our own government would not act to our disadvantage in the name of multi-national corporate interests, calling it American interests. If you are not awake now, you will be starving within 10 years when your local grocery store shelves start running bare and you can not afford food, much less gasoline. Predictions have that starting by the end of this year (2010 or next year 2011)...so you have time to start learning how to grow crops now...better get started.

The past great wars (WW I and WW II) were fought to prevent this type of abuse and keep Americans free, how is it working for you? All wars since them have been stupid, short sighted and for the wrong reasons, like big Oil in Iraq. The Birchers were thrown out of the Republican party at one time, now those people are running the Republican party. (Like we need an example like the Religious cult leader in Gainesville Florida who was threatening to burn the Koran for us to realize our founders truly understood why we needed separation of Church and state.)

Many counties have banned very large, big box, multi-national corporations from getting permits to own land and/or run businesses in their county. I know Walmart buys land just across the county line. We need to find a county, surrounded by counties with the same ban...giving us a 240 mile buffer (4 hour drive @ 60 mph one way) so small business can finally create decent paying jobs for Americans. And Americans can afford to provide for their families. This would also benefit churches...a Win - Win - Win - Win. We are not talking about only a few counties here, but literally hundreds of counties across the country. I saw the list on a Youtube video about Walmart abuses...it was 20, 30 or 40 minutes long and well worth the time to watch. That list would be a good place to start your search for a new home.

In one city, in Colorado I think...name escapes me, all the local banks and financial institutions have created their own currency, which can be converted to US Dollars whenever. With 10% - 20% discounts given to people to use the local currency instead of dollars, that community is better insulated from the multi-nationally owned Federal Reserve System (Read "Secrets of the Federal Reserve System" if you can find one to learn how it is privately owned by 6/7 families around the world...it was an edification to say the least). Its time to realize that FDIC insurance is not worth the paper it is written on and free up local banks to support their community.

Now add a law, first preventing local politicians from taking money from any company (large or small) to campaign and run for office and perhaps you will get some decent people who really want to work for the community in which they live. I suggest a poison-pill provision such that if they accept corporate financing or violate their oath of office, the police come in and remove them from office in order to "protect and serve" the community. A substitute with the same "political" leanings can run the office while they defend themselves in court...after all, innocent until proven guilty, right? And if they are innocent the accuser will never be allowed to accuse anyone else and if in office, removed as such a false claim clearly makes them unfit for office, now or in the future. Since neighborhood restrictions hold up in court, make anyone buying property in the area agree to the "poison pill" provision or be prevented from purchasing property and building homes. They can always live somewhere else if they want to be ripped off by corporations and politicians, I think most of us would like to see this abuse stopped, I know I felt this way when I was a registered Republican, that was before I woke up and saw the many abuses.... This would also serve to avoid long drawn out court cases wasting precious tax money. Let a panel of local citizens drawn by random (same time as jury duty would work) decide based on the evidence the outcome...call it arbitration by peers. Of course we would have to take a hard look at our state legislature, state laws and work to have laws passed to prevent the state from pilfering our successful, free, fair local economic increase and FairTax system in order to pay for other communities (like Bell, Ca) where the local population has allowed abusers to hold office. Then you might have a decent place to live.

Finally, and most importantly, the #1 decision when you purchase your next home should be Fiber access (FTTH, Fiber To The Home) to the Internet via a connection that is not throttled with a company that lives, eats and breaths net neutrality. Considering that 38 states, supposedly, have anti-tel-co-Internet laws on the books, good luck with this. Currently the only way to get 100Mb/100Mb Fiber Internet at FIOS (50Mb/5Mb) prices is Wilson N.C (Greenlight) and 23+ communities in Utah (Utopia). Perhaps Google's Go Big for a Gig will give us 5 more 100Mb/100Mb or higher places to live and have families. Anything slower than 100Mbps UPSTREAM bandwidth would NOT qualify as BROADBAND. That is a sustained, 100Mbps Upstream, not just 1 sec spikes after throttling and restricting the bandwidth....only fiber can do this.

After all we need access to slashdot at least.

P.S. Lying to get elected would also remove them from office and prevent them from ever running for public office ever again. And if the ballet initiative is worded so that a 5th grader can not understand it, it does not get on the ballet to screw up anything. Half truths and mis-statements are as good as lies...or should I see equally damning.

It's their new open source data format, totally compatible with all operating systems and all applications. You can't read it until you pay your Microsoft tax.

You nailed it, the individual and the individual's opinion, perspective, is the real gold always has been, always will be. The fact that corporations will NEVER be able to totally control individuals is their problem.

Of course the "standard" web tools are limited for selfish, proprietary and wasted attempts at controlling the individual thus they fail, continue to fail, will always fail.

.Net, Flash, excessive html markup, overblown cascading style sheets, huge libraries (which try to do everything rather then a few things well and bog down a user's system in the process), any video resolution less then 1080p and less then 30 frames per second, and so many more examples.

Already some people wrongly believe that everything that needs to be coded, has been, thus to have anyone write new code is useless...yea right...keep thinking that...your wrong.

The problem is that all the current websites do a crappy job of helping you to find "good" versus "excellent" versus "bad" comments, posts, opnions.

It does not help that 100% of Cable companies throttle our access to the Internet, can not wait to have Fiber...

You are missing the point of the article, the articles are not proposing that Amazon et al. pay one more cent of tax on their income just collect and remit to the proper taxing authorities taxes that are legally owed by the purchaser of the goods. Would it increase the cost of doing business for e-commerce firms, yes but so what? The cost of doing business is part of any business plan. Amazon and its ilk are utilizing a legal loophole to get an unfair advantage over local merchants.

The handwriting is on the wall, there are too many states hurting for revenue. The current environment isn't fair, isn't sustainable, isn't long for this world.

Only if RIM finally goes out of business and companies are forced to support at least MS Active Sync (because it works on almost every smart phone) or preferably some open standard. Note to people who love their Blackberries, their best model is garbage compared to any of the current iPhones, Pres, Android phones or even (shudder) Windows Mobile Phones. Demand your companies stop buying these pieces of trash with no useful functionality and horrendous user interfaces.

Those entities where they do it are done on a country level, which is fairly simple.

I won't claim that Amazon can't get it done, because they're smart people with incredible infrastructure and metric crap-tons of money that they could throw at the problem if they so desired. I can tell you that I live in Cook County, Illinois where Amazon would be forced to collect not only the Illinois state sales tax, but also a Cook County sales tax. I can tell you that since they sell cigarettes, that county sales tax is different for that product versus others. I can tell you that while I myself do not live in Chicago, if I did and I ordered from Amazon they would also then be obligated to collect yet another sales tax. And that, you guessed it, Chicago also levies "sin taxes" on certain products including cigarettes, soft drinks and--don't ask me why--bottled water. And I can tell you that the tax rates are scheduled to change in July 2010.

That is, of course, one potential set of jurisdictions for one potential customer. Now multiply that ridiculous level of legal complexity for every possible combination of city, county and state that are applicable and you're quickly arriving at a system of rather ridiculous proportion. Better that we not bother, in my mind.

Before anybody says "but we're only talking about state taxes!" I'll head it off by saying two things: First, that if we're going to make them collect state taxes you can bet the next debate is going to be about other levels of government as counties* and cities all complain about how their budgets are struggling too. And second, that it only helps marginally. In my example, about half of those county and city taxes are actually collected and administered by the state of Illinois, essentially making them state taxes that are only applicable in certain areas.

I understand the plight of the brick-and-mortars who not only have to compete on price but also on a lack of sales tax. I also understand the struggles of many cities and states with their budgets for the past decade or so now. But this is a ridiculously complicated system, far different from the "ZOMG X% VAT" that Amazon deals with in other countries. Setup would be bad enough, much less maintaining compliance with all such systems.

Impossible? No. Unwieldy? Definitely. Worthwhile? Not in my mind.

* I think Cook County may be the only county in the country that is legally permitted to levy its own sales tax, but I'm not sure.

Exactly.

I received a nook and I gave one and one of the drawbacks is the price of the ebooks. Except for crap like Twitlight which is a few dollars - most of the books I'm interested in are $9.99.

It does support the EPUB and PDF and has no apparent DRM so it has it's advantages. I don't consider it a dud either. I don't read as fast as I used to and flipping a real page is just about the same time as the reader takes to show the next one (i think it's in the 1/2 second to second range) It does need a "zoom" as some of the PDFs I loaded don't show the diagrams with a larger font size. I think I need to look into converting the PDFs into a ebook format to see if that works.

The one I gave went to a huge hardcover reader so that should reduce his costs.

I'm still working on a couple of books I bought before I take a look at one of the Baen freebies that I loaded on it.

TL;DR - I like the nook - the prices of the books suck.

I too noticed this slight when I read the article referenced in the post above and left a comment there as well. The Nokia N770 came out in 2005; in 2006, the Nokia N800 was released. I think the N810 was released in 2008. These devices had GPS modules, extra cost + monthly service, so that would technically classify them as mobile devices. They just were NOT cellular.

I agree with you, WiFi + VoIP was the killer app for the decade. The next decade will be Fiber and virtual reality, at least that is my guess. 3G and cellular simply will not have the bandwidth of Fiber. And while the telcos have been able to take our money and lobby to suppress Fiber deployment for well over two decades; they simply can not keep this up if for no other reason then it is hurting the GNP of the United States and costing Americans jobs.

I would suggest to you that without job creation we are going to be in the recession/depression longer.

Smart communities will put in City wide WiFi connected to Fiber backbones. Perhaps we will see a technology that I first read about in 2000, it was a communication spectrum with a wave length so long that it could deeply penetrate buildings and other normal blockages of signals. It also could travel farther distances. A small company in Canada had invented the technology. The router like device basically could break apart a communication (as TCP/IP packets are done now via the Internet) and put pieces on different parts of the spectrum. The spectrum's bandwidth was virtually unlimited and made existing FCC licenses for Wireless spectrum obsolete. In fact that was one of the biggest stumbling blocks to acceptance, adoption and deployment; the fees received on FCC licenses. They would all be worthless as soon as the technology was released and rolled out. The packets could be encrypted and sent on different parts of the spectrum which would make eavesdropping on communication practically impossible. That was expected to be a concern to the various security agencies that want to know what everyone is saying, with or without a court order.

The Nokia N770 was out in 2005 and the Nokia N800 was out in 2006. They were/are great Linux computer / hand helds / VoIP smart phones / GPS + so much more. The Nokia N800 is still the standard by which I measure all other devices. No point in taking a step backwards technologically. And I do not give a rats about cellular. Weened myself many years back from that hole in the ethers to dump money in.

Read liked your posts and that was a bad car analogy, but all this is off topic...more on topic per your quote:

That's not entirely accurate...

We, you, your parents, their parents, all of us have give American telcos more than $200 Billion in tax money (out right cash + additional taxes and additional fees; all of which was approved by our elected leaders) since 1990; for their promise to Americans to provide Fiber To The Home FTTH; over the last mile, not just to our neighborhood, but to our house/apartment.

Not only is it economical and feasible, but instead of honoring their promises, they lobby our elected officials at the rate of $1.8 Million per week to not give us fiber, to not give us net neutrality, to not give us high speed broadband.

I pay over $50 per month for 16,000 Kbps down and 2,000 Kbps up stream bandwidth. They do not even give me that. I see it and sometimes during the Speed Test, but as soon as the Speed Test finishes, my cable (100% of Cable users experience this) broadband is throttled back to lower than the FCC definition of broadband. The FCC definition is 768Kbps, however I do not see above 400Kbps down or above 120 Kbps up stream bandwidth.

The US is not slightly behind the rest of the world, we are way behind the rest of the industrialized world. Thanks to putting in Fiber infrastructure (and density is relative as it costs more then anyone admits to dig up infrastructure in a large city where in rural areas they can lay miles of fiber in short periods of time) In 2007, we were 13th in the world.

In 2000, Japan had 100Mbps / 100Mbps bi-directional synchronous fiber broadband service for less than $55 per month. In 2006, thanks to Fiber, all the Japanese had to do was switch out the customer's modem and they could give them 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps bandwidth for less than $53 per month. Yes competition drove the price down. Their market is working, the US market has not worked for well over two decades.

Why? simple, follow the money. The telcos want you to believe bandwidth is scarce. The bandwidth scarcity myth is well a myth. (Proof is in their statements to stock analysts, especially in the light of current economic realities) A lie to keep their failed tiered pricing strategy. Their goal to drive all customers up to $150 per month. However it is back firing on them and for the very reasons that I mentioned above. Once you realize you are throttled and they are not delivering you a fraction of the bandwidth you are paying for; you will quickly discover that a DSL line providing you 1,500Kbps down and 384Kbps up stream is well over 3X faster than Cable Modem Internet access. And DSL service costs you between $20 - $30 per month. In fact for the price of one Cable Internet access you could have 2 DSL providers (redundancy and increased bandwidth). And remember 1 DSL line is 3X faster than a single throttled coaxial cable access. Ignore what they say you will get as they will never give you or me 12Mbps down or 2Mbps up. Just will never happen.

I do not mean to get on your case, I like your posts, but whenever I see another American acting as a Shill for the industry while getting screwed in the process, well some learning is in order.

Consider this: In 2006, a Telco executive said in the future the average household will consume at least 300GB of bandwidth per month. I would suggest to you that by 2010, you will need much more than 300 GB per household, just auto updating for most people will approach that limit in 2010. In spite of knowing this, in 2008, what was the monthly bandwidth CAP suggested by the Cable companies before consumer frustration forced them to increase it? Do you remember? Allow me, they attempted to implement a 50GB bandwidth CAP, if you went over the 50GB CAP you would be required to pay more per month! They KNEW you would go over a 50GB cap, if not now, sometime in the NEAR future. In fact I believe they know we will go over 300GB as well.

They throttle or limit you for one reason. They see it as critical to maintain their Cable TV/Movie business. What they failed to see is customers like me getting so pissed off that we would actually sell our Cable ready TVs (if they tried to force either a cable box or DVD/DVR box on me I would have said no and told them to take a long walk off a short pier!), Switch to Skype ($5 per month) VoIP phone service and ONLY need Internet Access.

Many Americans simply will never ever need their discounted "joke" combined combo service of TV - Internet - Telephone. I do not care if they can provide me with one inflated bill...just not interested.

Here it is 2009, and they are ONLY a TCP/IP packet provider, nothing more! (There worse fear realized)

And I am not alone, there are over 20 Million Skype users, you honestly think any of us are willing to pay more than $5 - $8 per month for phone service, ever? NOPE. If they did the unthinkable, buy Skype and kill it, I would simply provision my own Linux server running Asterisk VoIP and start my own VoIP company. I would actually make money, woot woot!

And if I ever purchase another 42" to 52" LG LCD/LED TV, It will be with intent to hook it up to the Internet ONLY, Cable will never be a desire or option to me, like the cellular companies, their customer-no-service mentality has soured me on their company and their service. It has been long in coming.

And today, they throttle you 24 X 7 X 365 whether its when others are at work or early in the morning when everyone is asleep. If you use the DD-WRT open source software on a supported device, you will see like I do, that you are throttled to less than 300Kbps down and less than 30Kbps up stream. Its happening as I type this to you and its after 3am on a work night. Sure there are too many other users up and on the pipe, surfing the Internet, NOT, sorry just not buying it! So much for the argument that they only throttle when your trunk is heavily used...total BS and an OUTRIGHT LIE!

There are no valid reasons for Americans not having Fiber to our homes, over the last mile today, 2009, only tired, old, lame excuses. Its simply unacceptable. There are certainly no reasons not to have net neutrality nor to have bandwidth artificially throttled when it is NOT necessary, but they do it.

Please stop spreading FUD. It makes me sad when I see a smart person, I have read over a dozen of your posts, the intelligence is obvious, they are well written, like you being made a shill by the telco, cable industry just because you are unaware of the many facts of the situation. Because if you knew, there is no way you would have said what you did, based on your past posts, you are too smart for that!. So I am providing this to help you and others, it is not a personal attack, not at all!

As for Fiber, I have bought and sold over 4 houses over the years, I will NOT purchase another house if it does not have a fiber link going to it with at least three or more potential service providers. I admit that having three or more service providers is a wish item to keep prices lower. (Utopia in Utah has this...) At this point just to have Fiber would be a huge improvement and worth the over $50 per month that I am paying now. My guess is that once I get use to DSL speeds for less than $30 per month, I will not be interested in paying much more for even Fiber as DSL will meet my content streaming needs!

The reality is Cable service does not meet my needs for streaming content right now and without fiber, they will not have hopes of meeting my needs in the future! It's probably why they literally lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers every year (over 200,000 4th quarter 2008) ...this trend will continue because of their customer-no-service business practices.

They are just pissing off too many people and acting like Americans simply do not matter!