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Comment Re:I may not be reading this right, but... (Score 1) 479

No, the $75 is the maximum overage charge you can get per month at any tier. At the lowest tier (the new lowest one - $15.95/mo for 758Kbps and 1GB cap) you can hit that $75 faster because it's $2/GB overage fee.

However, they've structured their tiers so that the less you pay the slower your connection is and the lower your cap as well.

Comment And that's the problem - they don't understand (Score 5, Informative) 479

I'm one of the fortunate few to be in Rochester, NY and fall under the tyranny of Time Warner Cable. I've talked to their customer service reps. I've read their statements. And yesterday I had the opportunity to hear some of their low-level execs try and defend the plan at a town hall meeting with our congressional representative (who's on our side BTW).

They simply don't acknowledge that access (bandwidth) is not at issue here, limiting the use of that bandwidth in terms of some arbitrary amount of data is the issue.

If you look at their 2008 SEC filings (linked by their corporate site timewarnercable.com then you'd see their costs went down about 12% from 2007 and their revenues and new customers both rose about 10% over 2007. Clearly usage is not really an issue.

The issue they're not admitting to (except in their SEC filing) is Internet video like Hulu and Netflix is their primary threat and the way to mediate this threat is to make it more expensive to watch videos on the Internet than to pay Time Warner for cable and Video on Demand services.

The Internet

Submission + - Is consumption-based billing infringement?

StringBlade writes: "Recently in my area Time Warner Cable is trying to impose data caps on our rather isolated city — that is, there are no other high-speed broadband cable or fiber providers available. The move has caused a lot of anger and it caused me to think about billing for use instead of access. If Time Warner (or Comcast or AT&T) bills me for the data I consume in addition to, or instead of simply billing me for my access connection speed, is that not effectively billing me for the data itself? Since no one owns everything on the Internet nor do cable providers have a license to distribute everything on the Internet, aren't they infringing the copyright of the content owners by collecting money for content that isn't theirs? Doesn't that imply that data caps are quite simply illegal altogether?"

Comment Re:In a word, 'yes' (Score 1) 223

Correct. I meant to suggest that by forking the project Sun would be doing a disservice to themselves and to the community, but the community would likely continue on their own version and Sun would have simply wasted their time and money.

I did not mean that the community deserves more than they're getting right now, merely that they are "owed" what they have and to try to deny that would be biting the hand that feeds.

Comment Re:In a word, 'yes' (Score 3, Insightful) 223

I referred to MySQL as Sun/MySQL because the company by the same name as the project is now owned by Sun. As such, I'm really accusing Sun of failing the community.

It's näive to think that Sun would have purchased MySQL if it weren't for its community base of users and developers and indeed, MySQL would not have been much of anything without said same user and developer base. So to suggest that "the community" is owed nothing for their efforts (developing, testing, debugging, suggesting improvements, etc) is also näive.

MySQL is as popular as it is because of its environment as well as its code base. If you take away either component it will fail, and Sun doesn't seem to get that by taking away the community participation it's killing the project/product it just bought.

Comment In a word, 'yes' (Score 4, Interesting) 223

Sun/MySQL can and should be blamed if they are failing the community that made MySQL so popular and strong.

Sun has a bad reputation for having very closed open source projects such as OpenOffice. The project is managed much more like a proprietary venture than an open source project and community input is minimized or ignored altogether.

I can't feel sorry for Sun when they drop buku bucks on MySQL and then complain that others are taking their revenue away from them doing what the OSS community does best - improve the software on their own.

Comment Re:640k (Score 1) 596

I've got about 500 DVDs that I'm ripping to HDD without compression (but only ripping the title track and main audio track at the highest quality - DD 5.1 or DTS) and I'm using OpenFiler as a centralized NAS. Presently I've got a RAID 5 array of 250GB drives (about 500GB usable space) and a RAID 1 array of 1TB drives backed up on a 500GB drive and a 1TB drive respectively (stored externally in a somewhat climate-controlled area).

I estimate that I will need another 3-4 TB of storage just for my movies, not to mention my music and photo collection.

I imagine in the next 10 years media centers (such as the PS 3, WMC, and MythTV) will become much more prominent and storage demands will increase dramatically. All this is without considering the impact of HD.

So I can easily see 1PB being necessary within 10 years if not more.

Books

New Book Cuts Through Violent Video Game Myths 213

Terry Bosky suggests a recent interview from Game Couch with one of the authors of an upcoming book which fights the "myths and hysteria" surrounding violent video games. Dr. Cheryl K. Olson explains how many of the studies linking aggression with video games were flawed or misguided, and she discusses some of her own findings. Quoting: "Until now, the most-publicized studies came from a small group of experimental psychologists, studying college students playing nonviolent or violent games for 15 minutes. It's debatable whether those studies are relevant to real children, playing self-selected games for their own reasons (not for cash or extra credit!), in social settings, over many years. But media reports and political rhetoric often ignore that distinction. Also, the most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence. Their studies were designed under the assumption that violent video games are harmful, which dictated the questions they asked and how they framed their results. Media violence is just a small part of what we do, so we could look at the issue with fresh eyes and no agenda."
Software

Submission + - Virtualization in Linux: A Review of Four Software (techthrob.com)

Nemilar writes: "This week Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced a partnership with Parallels, maker of the Virtualization products Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac. This makes four different virtualization programs that run on Linux, three of which are available via the Ubuntu repositories. This article compares four virtualization products available for Linux: the free, open source x86 emulator Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the commercial Parallels Workstation."
Linux Business

Submission + - What are your Linux Deal-Breakers?

soundman writes: I've been a dedicated Ubuntu and Fedora user for the past 3 years. Recently, I've setup a surround sound system but found that even after hours of configuring ALSA, I still couldn't get it to work properly. Rebooting into Windows, it took under a minute to set it up with the vendor supplied GUI tool that came with my motherboard drivers. What are your Linux deal-breakers?
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA's attack on NewYorkCountryLawyer fails (p2pnet.net)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "p2pnet.net reports that the RIAA has egg on its face. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation requested permission to file an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Boston University students challenging the RIAA's ex parte discovery order, the RIAA lawyers attacked the blog "Recording Industry vs. The People" for its criticism of the RIAA as seeking to "abuse the American judicial system, distort copyright law, and frighten ordinary working people and their children" and then falsely claimed that the blog's author is an EFF attorney, this despite the fact that they know that the blog's author (known on Slashdot as NewYorkCountryLawyer) is a partner in a New York law firm and is not an EFF attorney. Judge Gertner apparently wasn't impressed, and granted the EFF's motion, rejecting the RIAA's objections, since she felt amici curiae might "shed light" on the "copyright law" and "computer technology" issues before her."
Cellphones

Submission + - SPAM: A 3G Linux phone for sub $US100

WirePosted writes: "NXP Semiconductors and Purple Labs have introduced a reference design for 3G Linux phone offering video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing and video streaming that they say will cost operators less than $US100."
Link to Original Source
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA's war against college students in a nutshell (p2pnet.net)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "p2pnet.net has put together a fascinating retrospective on the RIAA's war against college students, commenced February 28, 2007, describing the campaign as one to "force 'consumers' to buy what they're told to buy — corporate 'content,' as the Big 4 call their formulaic outpourings." In a scathing indictment not only of the major record labels but of those schools, administrators, and educators who have yet to take a stand against it, Jon Newton reviews a number of landmark moments in the 11-month old "reign of terror", including the announcement of the bizarre "early settlement" sale, the sudden withdrawal of a case in which a 17 year old Texas high school student had been subpoenaed while in class during school hours to attend a deposition the very next day during his taking of a standardized test, the call by Harvard law professors for the university to fight back when and if attacked, and the differing reactions by other schools."
Hardware Hacking

Hacking Asus EEE 150

An anonymous reader writes "Torsten Lyngaas has published a set of instructions with photographs on his personal wiki that describe the steps he took to install $450 worth of extra hardware, including a GPS receiver, an FM transmitter, Bluetooth, extra USB ports, 802.11n, and an extra 4GB flash storage drive."
Music

U2's Manager Calls For Mandatory Disconnects For Music Downloaders 658

sleeplesseye writes "In a speech at the Midem music industry convention in Cannes, Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of the band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce mandatory French-style service disconnections to end music downloading, and has urged governments to force ISPs to adopt such policies. McGuinness criticized Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' pay-what-you-want business model, saying that 'the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire'. He also accused ISPs, telcos, device makers, and numerous specifically named companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Oracle, and Facebook of building 'multi billion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it', and of being 'makers of burglary kits' who have made 'a thieves' charter' to steal money from the music industry. The full text of his speech has been posted on U2's website."

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