I haven't logged in or posted a comment in years... What Mossberg and the vast majority of people bitching about cable tv don't understand is the content providers (the channels) are the ones that require bundling and the "linear style" video services. The Viacom and Disney owned channels are perfect examples. For those of you that don't have kids - why are you required to have Nickelodeon and Disney? Do you really thing the cable provider cares what channels subscribed to? For a long time competition was driven by the number of channels that were available to watch. Now, as those channels continue to charge the cable companies more and more every damn year, the market is pushing back a cost of service is more important. But large conglomerates (including Comcast and Time Warner / AT&T / DirecTV) hold the keys to access to a huge portion of the content that people want to watch. It will still be a long time before those entities change, if at all.

As someone that has designed, engineered, constructed, and operated FTTH deployments I am not surprised by this development at all. Just from reading the press releases and the associated documents it was clear that Google was not employing people with the necessary experience to pull it off. The time-frames that were in those releases were not fiscally feasible.

This particular issue is almost laughable in its incompetence. The only companies that are putting fiber optics in the power space of aerial power lines are power companies for a reason. It is prohibitively expensive labor wise and it is extremely difficult to get a power company to allow ANYONE that is not employed by them to work in this space. The liability issues alone are enough to cause this idea to be a non-starter.

It really isn't hard to do this properly, but the first step is to get yourself a copy of the NESC and actually read it.

I agree with your observations whole heartily and it feels like a giant fuck you to me and I would assume to a lot of people that have been praising and endorsing Firefox for years.

Oh well; on to something else.

I had 4 plugins out of 14 that were not compatible with ff5 and have 3 others that have not been updated to be compatible with 4 yet; must be my fault that I installed the wrong plugins right?

Your example is LAN to LAN and is typically significantly better than LAN to WAN on consumer routers and it's bullshit anyway as that would equate to 400Mbps for your transfer rate to the NFS and would only be capable with GigE to GigE over a wireline switch that eliminates the Layer3 capabilities of the consumer router. You completely missed the point and failed to grasp what is involved with LAN to WAN throughput on a consumer router...

There's a link to SmallNetBuilder's router charts in a reply to my parent post that shows there are consumer routers that can do it. But, that missed my point because I didn't state it clearly enough. Most people, including a significant number of people that consider themselves competent in this area, do not know that the current typical consumer router can only get about 30Mbps throughput. These routers also do not include the throughput in their specs on the boxes or on the site selling the device. As I stated in another reply; the new Linksys E1500 does NOT have 105 Mbps throughput in the lab on the wired LAN interface to the WAN interface. For comparison sakes; the Cisco ASA 5505 has a max firewall throughput of 150Mbps which is where I would start looking for comparable devices if I'm routing for a 105Mbps Internet connection.

You can't rely on any single factor for router throughput... that is significanly impacted by chipset, RAM, and the processor inside the device and the quality of the code running on it. Maybe this will bring about a change and we'll see WallyWorld carrying only routers that can handle this but that is a long way off.

And for the consumer OS... XP home could only do approx 25Mbps for layer3 throughput; I don't know what Vista Home Premium or Windows 7 Home Premium can do but I doubt it's 105 Mbps.

I'm assuming that you then have a lab similar to smallnetbuilder and have tested these in a real world scenario? When I talk consumer grade I mean sub $100 price range for these routers. Not upper consumer devices that have started coming out. I also mean consumer WalMart special computers... Or do you have some extensive experience with routing in these conditions with average Joe Sixpack?

Look at smallnetbuilder's router throughput tests... do those come any where close to real world conditions for the average person? And those are the best case scenario numbers for devices... show me the specs for those devices that show the throughput out of the box. Does a test of a computer running IxChariot on a LAN port to a computer running IxChariot on the WAN port really simulate the consumer with their virus riddled Windows 7 starter edition connected to a wireless router that has no clue on what other devices in their house is interfering with the signal and the effect that this interference has on their throughput.

In case you're wondering the new Linksys E1500 is sub 100Mbps for LAN to WAN throughput in these tests... So I say again where is the dearth of consumer grade routers that can handle this? Are there devices that can route this speed... yes and I didn't say there weren't.

But you clearly are a consumer product god so this will just be another "silliest comment on slashdot"

All this talk of the data cap... what consumer grade router is even capable of utilizing that speed? How about any consumer OS? This is a marketing stunt and nothing more... or is there a slew of GigE WAN port consumer routers that can actually handle the routing at these speeds that I'm not aware of?

That's just robber baron justification and is not a statement of "fact"... Companies exist to provide a product or service with the *goal* of making as much as possible on that product or service. The pursuit of additional revenue does not justify unethical or unscrupulous behavior to reach that goal.

um, Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal. News Corp is not just Fox and Fox News.

Here's the list of Newspaper and Informational holdings of News Corp from their own website: http://www.newscorp.com/operations/newspapers.html

"As the sour economy and the Web start putting more pressure on the cable companies, they may be forced to consider breaking up the big bundles of channels they now insist that consumers buy and instead offer individual channels or smaller groups of channels on an à la carte basis."

Until the people that write these articles get the facts straight and discover that it's the content providers like ESPN/Disney, Scripps, Discovery, MTV Networks, Fox, NBC, and others that REQUIRE the carriage of so many channels in basic and DO NOT ALLOW a la carte channel purchasing the sooner there will be an actual change.

If you're going advocate for genetic engineering to impose social beliefs then use the proper term of eugenics or at least inform us how "anti-dysgenics" is any less immoral than state enforced eugenics.