'The Girl in Question'
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They have local monopolies, often. In my neighborhood, our options for internet and cable are:
1) CenturyLink for phone and DSL, with DirecTV as cable (if you can have a satellite) 2) "Wave Broadband" for cable, cable internet, and VoIP phone
Comcast is available in other parts of the city, but there's a city agreement that our neighborhood gets "Wave" (formerly Broadstripe) and the rest get Comcast. I would LOVE to have Comcast back.
yeah, there is functionally no competition in most areas. For example, I would love to have Verizon FIOS, but no cookie as it isn't in this area.
So if I want high speed Internet, it is TW. Verizon is proud of its DSL, but it isn't fast enough for the Internet traffic we need at times.
Why do these companies get away with being so crap? I thought capitalist competition was supposed to mean excellence, right? Do they have local monopolies, or is there some kind of poor-service conspiracy, like price-fixing but for bad customer service?Very much so. IIRC from Communications class in college, a company says "it will cost $x to install the infrastucture to provide cable service to your community. In order to break even on that project, we need xx% of the population to be subscribers. In order to obtain that, we need a monopoly." So, you will find larger cities will segment the city, so the north side get TW and the south side gets Comcast. Then Dish came along, and changed things. So the cable companies went to congress and got a law passed saying that the satellite companies can't provide local over-the-air programming. And there was some crazy law that if a residence had cable within the past (I forget time period) they couldn't get dish, or pay a fee, or some such. I think that has been over turned. But it greatly slowed the development of the dish subscribers. Fiber changes things, as it's data, that can do video. Just like cable is video that can do data. And there was legislation restricting what various companies are allowed to offer, in order to maintain the monopoly.
All that is gross over simplification. And I confess, may be slightly inaccurate, as I am recalling info taught in college 15-20 years ago. But, it gives you an idea of how the bullshit got started.
Took my iPad into the store this weekend, the camera wasn't working. They gave me a new one. Relatively painless, but they don't have screen protectors in the store, so I have to buy a new one. Kinda shitty that I'm out $30. And I will bet that this happens to everyone who has to get an iPad replacement.
Now that I'm pretty much only using Linux at work, I'm finding that I'm digging Gnome 3. It's cool they've done something that's not really like Windows or OS/X.
I have CenturyLink for my phone, and they're fine as long as I don't have any problems... but they are expensive. I'm thinking of switching to Vonage. I'm leery of trusting my phone service to Comcast.
Has anyone here used Graboid. I followed a couple...interesting links (no, not like that. Stop it.) that asked me to install it. Their web page is less than informational.
The web seems to be saying use it, don't use them...their own web site's testimonials are some of the weakest sauce that ever got sauced...I don't even know.
Zenkitty, I used comcast for a voice for a year and had no problems. Their voicemail service is actually pretty good, and will e-mail you when you have a voicemail or notify you through their (admittedly kind of crashtastic) Android app (and, I assume, iOS equivalent). Only dropped it because we weren't really using it very much at all.
ita ! and ND - what filesystem does your Time Machine NAS use on the hard drive? My airport extreme got fried, and I'm replacing it with a much cheaper Asus router that does DD-WRT. I've got it set up, but I have to reformat my connected drive from HFS+ to either FAT32 or ext3 for DD-WRt support and I'm wondering which will be more reliable on Time Machine backup over SMB. If either.
I would think ext3 would be better, being a journaling file system. Ext4 would be better yet if it's supported.
My laptop is making little staticky sounds when I scroll on my scroll pad. That's bad, right?