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Joined:
August 2006
Posts: 3145
Location: Marlton, NJ | I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I drove my daughter to crew practice this morning - it's 5:30 to 7:30 - too far to drive home, so I brought my laptop to watch a movie, or rip some CDs. Lo and behold, there's free internet access here... I'm sitting in my car in front of a boatyard accessing the internet... sheesh!
I also brought the Papoose, but my hands are too cold. |
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Joined:
March 2002
Posts: 14842
Location: NJ | It's cool, ain't it??
I know there's a goodly part of Philly that's WiFi . . .
The town I live in (Summit, NJ) is researching going citywide WiFi within the next year. |
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Joined:
February 2002
Posts: 1817
Location: Minden, Nebraska | According to Tom Friendman in 'The World is Flat', the USA has the least WiFi access of developed nations. Perhaps it's because we're the largest. |
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Joined:
March 2002
Posts: 14842
Location: NJ | . . . and the cable/telecommunications/ISP corporations have politicians in their pockets . . . |
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Joined:
May 2003
Posts: 4389
Location: Capital District, NY, USA Minor Outlying Islands | Plus, the corporations don't have an interest in low cost wi-fi because they haven't figured out how to make enough money off it. Sure they can make a profit, but it's not fat like the phone company.
Another reason why are wi-fi deprived is that we are the first country in a lot of things, our infrastructure hasn't been destroyed by wars like europes or japan's. So they are relatively new. And when you go to asia, like in singapore, pretty much all infrastructre is post 1960. In a way, even though we are young nation, in terms of being part of the developed world we are amongst the oldest. |
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Joined:
November 2003
Posts: 11039
Location: Earth·SolarSystem·LocalInterstellarCloud·Local Bub | Originally posted by cliff:
. . . and the cable/telecommunications/ISP corporations have politicians in their pockets . . . Cell phone service is another example. Nearly every other nation on Earth has better service more coverage AND cheaper.
I applaud Philly's efforts to make the city Free Wireless- against wishes of ISPs. |
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Joined:
March 2002
Posts: 14842
Location: NJ | It's amazing how we get sucked into this crap - especially cable.
When Jeanette lost her job the week before Christmas (nice of them, huh??) of '05, we decided to "scale back" on some of the monthly expenditures, so we seriously pared-down the cable subscription. At the time, the current season of the "Sopranos" (and some of the other HBO series I watched) was over, so we just cut it back to the BARE minimum, and scaled-back the bill drastically. Just have the basic local channels for News/Weather, four PBS channels, and I'm happy.
This past weekend, we went out and replaced our POS television with a sizeable, flatscreen HDTV. While he's writing it up, the salesman couldn't help repeatedly stressing that we needed to contact our cable company for HighDef service. He seemeed extremely bewildered that I was just sticking with my "basic" cable coverage. I told him that we were buying it as a "monitor" to watch movies on DVD, and that watching "sh!t" in HiDef is STILL "sh!t" - the HiDef simply makes that fact "clearer". |
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Joined:
October 2005
Posts: 5332
Location: Bluffton, SC | Amen. Let's face it - the only reason you can't buy stations "ala carte" is because three-quarters of them would die within a week. |
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Joined:
March 2007
Posts: 665
Location: Tychy, Poland | wi-fi sux. it's good when it comes to giving people free internet, but you probably wouldn't like to be connected by wi-fi at home.
i had a "pleasure" to be a network administrator in a DKsoft - one of internet providers in Tychy. We had about 1,400 users and it was a real CRAP. the only part of our network which wasn't producing problems all the time was our backbone, built on Tsunami (5ghz range wireless). But everything else was on 2.4 ghz. One access point was serving about 20 users, and even if they had acceptable download speed (up to 40 kb/s) their uploads, if AP was more than 100m from their antenna, were low (3-10kb/s max). Another problem was latency - normal ping response from one end to the other end of our network was around 15ms.
And - of course. Health. Everyone says that it's safe, but every time, after 10 minutes of work on the roof of one building where we had our main hub (8x 2.4 ghz + 4x 5 ghz + 1x23 ghz) i had to vommit and i had a gigantic headache. My co-worker had the same symptoms. |
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Joined:
October 2006
Posts: 5576
Location: big island | it's a conspiracy, i tell ya' ;) |
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Joined:
September 2006
Posts: 10777
Location: Keepin' It Weird in Portland, OR | True Joke from Readers Digest "Life in these United States"....
So Joe, did you see the Sapranos last night?
I don't have Cable anymore.
Why? They cut you off?
Naw, I had them disconnect me. There still ain't nothing on TV, but I'm saving $59 a month! |
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OT - The Modern World
