My grandpa was the most flexible-minded elder I ever encountered but even he didn't want to change the way he did things once he learned how to do something. He made the transitions from Windows 3.11 to 98se to XP well enough because I minimized the impact by using "classic view" setups and carrying forward as much of his software as possible.

He wasn't afraid to explore new things. Just that, once he learned them, he wanted it to be static and unchanging. Why would you change something that works? One weekend, I came home and he showed me the radio-fax kit he'd bought. Say what??? It was a receiver that plugged into the headphone jack of a shortwave radio on one side and the serial port of the computer on the other side. The software would record and decode faxes of weather maps that were broadcast over shortwave then print them on the DeskJet 500c. But, when this kind of thing became widely available on the internet, he wouldn't switch until either they stopped broadcasting or the software didn't survive an OS upgrade. I forget which. He didn't like using websites to get weather maps as much because they'd make small changes to the websites once or twice a year and he'd have to hunt for what he wanted. As inefficient as the radio-fax thing was, the process didn't change.

And he was doing online banking back in the 90s. No urging or input from me. I didn't think he'd be comfortable with it. But one day he was telling me how I really needed to look into this online banking thing. "It's great!" Heck, I only beat him to it by a few months.

I don't know if it's really just old people who are like that, tho. Way back in the before time, I signed up with a temp agency to get some quick money while I was looking for a permanent job. I did the Word and Excel tests because that was the software I'd used. Then I realized they wouldn't send me to a job where they used WordPerfect or Lotus123 unless I took and passed those tests. It seemed absurd. That would be like "Oh, we can only send you to jobs where you'd be driving a Toyota. You didn't take the Ford test." When I passed every word processor and spreadsheet test they had, the woman looked at me like I was a wizard. "Why didn't you say you knew those programs?" "I don't. I've never used them in my life. But a word processor is a word processor. They all do the same thing and have the same menus." "Wow. I'm not going to have any trouble finding you a job!"

I've worked with people in almost every age group who learned by rote and have no comprehension of what they're doing. I used to say most people 5 years younger than me or older are hopeless with a computer. And that was back in my 30s.

I can't even get my USPS driver to deliver packages to my door for the last few weeks.

"The road's in poor shape." "We've improved the road twice since I bought my house. It's better now than it was when I moved in and it was good enough to deliver packages before we did anything at all." "We switched to LLVs and they don't get around as well as the personal vehicles did." "The only vehicles that have ever delivered mail on my route since I moved here have been LLVs." "I'll look into it."

Seems cheap to me, too. That's like a dollar per person to install it and less than fifty cents per person per year to run it.

something about a $5 wrench?

A wizard did it.

Run it thru a VPN to see if it shows the same degradation. If it doesn't degrade, there's your answer. If it does degrade, it doesn't mean your equipment is bad, it just might mean they throttle all sustained transfers regardless of source or type.

My service is 60 megs and I get 64-65 but they don't specify an uplink speed. I get 4 consistently so I assume that's what I'm supposed to get. Oh, I just checked and they now specify 4 megs up. And no data caps . To me, that's far more important than the speed.

Not very useful. As someone else pointed out, this is an Android device which makes the SD card slot even less useful. If it was Windows, at least I'd have the option of installing apps to the card. But Android doesn't work like that. Even the apps that can be "moved" to the card rarely move all (or even a significant portion) of the app to the card.

Also, there are no 256 gig MicroSD cards. The largest currently available is 128 gigs with 200 gigs announced.

I stand slightly corrected but notice I ranted about android phones, too. The SD slot is worthless for apps in Android. You can't expand the filesystem onto it and "moving" apps to the SD card doesn't actually move the entire app. Move GTA to the SD card and see how much of the 1+ gig of data gets moved. A fraction of a fraction of a percent. I had to delete it from my Galaxy S5 because I needed the space to install the update to 5.0.

If you could expand the filesystem to include the SD card and present it to the OS as a single volume, then the SD card capacity would be relevant.

How on Earth is 16 gigs of internal storage going to be sufficient? My Stream 7 has 32 gigs and it's down to 12.8 gigs free with 5 or 6 apps installed and a recent disk cleanup (including system files). I'm no math whiz but 32-12.8 seems to be something like 19.1 gigs of storage used. The only way you could even hope of making 16 gigs of storage work would be to eliminate the recovery partition but, even then, you'll have no space to install software. Way to go, Dell. You've saved a couple bucks per unit by cutting storage to the bone and, in the process, made your product useless.

When are manufacturers of portable devices going to figure this shit out? Flagship android phones with 16 gigs of storage. Full windows tablets with 16 gigs of storage. Utterly useless. Stop it!

I don't know where you get "falling prices". My cell phone bill is currently 4 times what it was in the late 90s. I paid GTE $30/month back then. Of the Big 4, only AT&T currently has a plan of similar price and features. But it certainly isn't cheaper. Boost Mobile adds data for the same price but then you're on Sprint's network.

One step behind bleeding edge is the sweet spot for me. The last gaming rig I built is approaching 3 years and it's still going strong. The only bleeding edge part was the X79 Extreme 11 motherboard. I built it with one of the 750 gig Seagate hybrids which was later replaced with one of their 2tb hybrids. Works plenty fast for me. When I'm gaming, the next level generally finishes loading before the cut-scene is done so faster load times wouldn't make any difference.

Exept the part where he verified service with two broadband providers before buying the house. Both lied then claimed they'd made an error. Error or lie, he relied on their information to his detriment. There's even a phrase for that in the law. Detrimental reliance.

I just went throught this crap last year when I was shopping for a house. I had a wonderful region picked out but had to scrap it completely because nobody down there could tell me what internet service was available. "That's the first question people aske these days." "So what's available at this location?" "No idea." They seemed to think that satellite and 3 meg DSL were acceptable options. I started doing my own research and quickly learned that most providers lie, lie, lie. Frontier was the worst. Every address but one came back as "25mbit fiber". Even the place that was 10 miles down a dirt road. The only one I trusted was the cable company but their footprint was tiny. If I didn't buy a place in town, I was SOL.

I ended up looking closer to The Big City and only requested viewings of places where the cable company assured me they provided service. And the first thing I looked for was the cable company's box on the side of the house with a fat coax line coming out of the ground. If the place didn't have existing service, I didn't bother going inside. Except for that really creepy house that was more of a dare than a serious look. Who puts the kitchen in the basement???

But getting back to the point, good internet service is as important as a good water supply. Without it, the property is useless for most people. I'd even look at a place without electric service before I'd look at a place with no internet. I could set up a solar/diesel/battery system for power but I can't build my own high speed, low latency internet service.

They forfeit their contract for the area and can't submit a new bid for 10 years.

I can't be the only person who's sick and tired of celebrities pretending they know the first thing about science. Musicians should stick to playing music. Stop trying to save the world! Why does a band even have a "cancer arm"?