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Comment Re:Firefox better get their act together (Score 5, Informative) 152

No this is Google favoring new standards before some browsers are quite ready for it. Firefox supports 60fps if the video is encoded in WebM (VP9) which only happens on Youtube if it has enough views to warrant encoding it in additional formats. Mozilla is still working on Media Source Extensions and MPEG-DASH support which is needed to play back h.264@60fps but afaik it should be in FF36 although it's not ready yet in nightly 36 builds.

Google could have added support in the Flash player but why would they put in the effort for a fairly novel feature when they are trying to replace flash with HTML5? In a few months every browser will support the HTML5 features and nobody will remember this story.

Comment Re:you must not have done well in math class (Score 1) 214

I'm actually a victim of a violent crime and had to have reconstructive surgery on my cheek but way to be completely off the mark. I'm thankful that it was just a punch and not a bullet. I've also been held up at knife-point before by a couple of ~10 year old kids but that was more funny than scary. I'll take my chances against a fist or knife any day over a gun.

Comment Re:distance, please (Score 1) 93

The expenses are around $20k for a typical customer located between 50 and 100m from the node including all equipment and trenching through the premises.

That price is so outrageous that it has to be trenching to 1 single house that has no others around it and hiring a crew for the 1 time job. That's your first problem, trenching is expensive but hanging wires on existing poles isn't. If your municipality doesn't have poles then they should have underground conduits laid for you to just pull the fiber through. If you have neither poles nor conduits then there are micro-trenchers that can carve out ~1cm of road to lay the fiber in that costs much than digging up standard trenches.

Here is a blog post where Dane Jasper says it costs Sonic $500-2500 per home passed to run fiber but he often says under $500 so the $2500 figure is probably on the extreme side for more remote houses.

https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/201...

Comment Re:distance, please (Score 1) 93

By "every few years" I mean every new docsis/dsl version. Even the worst monopolies have been adopting the latest docsis/dsl protocols over the years albeit at a slow pace. The cost of staying on copper is lots of maintenance and minor upgrades in the future, the cost of switching to fiber is an initial investment and then smooth sailing for a long time because it's more reliable and such a significant jump in speed that you won't need to upgrade equipment for decades.

Comment Re:distance, please (Score 2) 93

The cost of going from the neighborhood to the home is ANYTHING BUT minimal. It's arguably one of the largest expenses.

Rough comparison: cable (or fiber) to the neighborhood from the local station: 2500 feet. Cable from the neighborhood hub to each of 50 homes: 5000 feet. And often the latter has to be underground.

Hint: that's the real "last mile".

Only when you look at it from an immediate perspective. Yes it's a big investment but doing incremental copper equipment upgrades every few years is too, the small upgrades just allows them to pass the cost onto the customers over a long period of time. Monopolies don't have any incentive to change but it is well worth it for an independent ISP like Sonic to rollout fiber because they are able to disrupt the incumbents' marketshare with a superior product at equal or lesser prices and recoup the costs in a short time. Dane Jasper is very open about Sonic's business and is constantly criticizing monopolies, he has shared that it costs them around $500 per home passed. They charge $40/mo for gigabit service or a one time $300-400 charge for 5mbps service for 5 years. ie. if you want 5mbps service then you are paying them about what it cost them to roll the fiber to your house, otherwise they recover the cost after about a year of your service.

Comment Re:distance, please (Score 3, Insightful) 93

But the real solution is FTTN: fiber to the street cabinet, rather than the current status quo of fiber to the Central Office. That will have the effect of moving you to well within a few thousand of feet of a fiber converter.

As Dane has said before, if you're going to the neighborhood you might as well go to the home. The cost difference is minimal and by going to the home it will be easier to upgrade the network later by swapping in better optical equipment. Sonic already has a few FTTH rollouts and collaborated with google before google fiber was ever a thing.

Comment Can we stop pretending tech cares about diversity (Score 1) 561

If they really cared about diversity then tech companies wouldn't be asking workers to give up their entire social lives to work egregious hours. Young 20-30 year old men are often willing to go so far as to give up sleep but women and older workers want to be treated like people not machines.

Comment Lots of variety now (Score 1) 427

There is too much variety of hardware now for there to be any defacto model like the wrt54gl was. Back then practically the only differences were RAM and Flash sizes. Now you have choices of 100mbit vs gigabit ports, USB support or not, 802.11n vs 802.11ac, 2.4GHz only or also 5GHz, single radio vs dual radio, 1-8 MIMO stream support (affects throughput), RAM size, Flash size, lots of different SoC's running at various speeds...

You need to prioritize what features you want and then narrow down the wide variety of router models available. Most models are supported by 3rd party firmwares unless they were recently released but most will become supported eventually.

Comment Corporate Contributions to OSS (Score 5, Insightful) 195

I don't understand why there's all these comments saying they should just use FreeBSD. There are many reasons to despise Facebook but their desire to improve the Linux networking stack is admirable. We should be encouraging corporations to contribute to OSS, not telling them to just use that other thing that is better in some ways but not others. Kudos to them for contributing back to the projects they use.

Comment Re:Southwest Boarding Policies (Score 1) 928

How is any seat decent if you know there is a good chance you will be breaking up families and could have a disgruntled parent or a child next to you that will possibly be leaving their seat or yelling across the plane to communicate?

A good boarding system should allow people to stay together toward the back of the plane by reserving far enough in advance, frequent fliers choose seats at the front/middle and anyone booked with you as well, and the rest up for grab. Load the people reserved in back first since they know exactly where they will be and they will clear the front of the aisle(s) quickly which will allow the frequent fliers on and then after they all settle let the rest on.

Comment Re:can be done (Score 1) 200

You pay a monthly fee if the fibre runs past your house. If you want to connect the fibre to your home, you pay a one-time connection charge, followed by a higher monthly fee plus a charge per bit for incoming and outgoing data

Fuck no.

People that are not using the service should not have to pay for it just because someone decided to run a line past their house. That would just encourage the planners to run dark fiber everywhere and collect fees for years before people decide to connect.

There's little reason to charge by the bit or have data caps like most ISP's do. It's not a finite resource like water is. The major cost is last mile, once you have that in place it is a minor cost to upgrade your backbone to support extra usage. The last thing parents need is a huge bill because their kids watched a ton of 1080p youtube videos last month, downloaded a lot of games off steam, or whatever else. The penalty would either be so small that it would be meaningless to have at all or big enough that it would cause massive bills by surprise like cell phone service and smartphone app pricing have done in the past.

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