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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s totally possible! I live in CO and Comcast had a legal monopoly per state law. Nobody else is allowed to compete with their cable service. But you know what isn’t cable? Fiber! A local broadband company just installed fiber in my neighborhood this spring. I signed up for $89/mo gigabit service, no data cap, no installation fees at all. Between when I signed up and when they turned on service, they upgraded my service to 1.2 gigabit, same monthly price, no cap, no commitment, no upsell (their only other service is rural satellite Internet).

    I talked to the technician installing it and he said they aren’t getting any subsidies from anyone. Not the city, state, or fed. It’s simply economically viable to run new gigabit fiber for $89/mo. All it takes is a company that can make the initial infrastructure investment.










  • We called them “luggables”. They’re expensive, but having a server in a box with a monitor was worth it when you could lug it to a customer site and give a live demo of your server stuff. We were doing telephony stuff and you could put a $5000 dialogic pcie card in it and demonstrate call handling live. We can do that with software on a standard issue laptop these days, but the luggable helped seal the deal back in 2005.







  • It’s not even that simple. If you skip ahead during an ad, the YT servers could just keep streaming you the ad content anyway. Their servers can ensure that the next 30s of packet data you receive is an ad no matter what, so the only way you can skip it is to wait it out and close your ears and eyes. Basically the same concept as ads on broadcast TV. Which means we’ll have to do a TiVo for YT… Gross.