I'm sure I've ranted once or twice here about the lack of Internet competition provided by Comcast and Qwest, my local cable and phone companies... the problem being, short of one or the other improving their service and/or lowering their prices (none too likely, in either case), I couldn't see any "viable" third option coming to play. That changes today, with Google deciding to run a test project on entering the fray with true fiber-to-the-home Internet connectivity (link).
In brief, Google wants to run 1 Gbit connections to homes in its test area (at least 50 times faster than the fastest cable Comcast provides these days), and let you choose from a variety of Internet providers to get your service through their hardware... you know, kind of like in the old days of dialup, where there was active competition for your Internet dollar, and smaller providers were able to survive and, in some cases, thrive. The downside, of course, will be what Google's going to charge for that line to your house, I'm sure... but it's still a test program, so I can dream. Heck, while I'm dreaming, come over this way to run your test... I won't mind, honest... :)
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Subscription TV via Internet - so... close...
Yep, Roku just added another channel to their box, for Skitter.tv. Unfortunately, it's not just "subscribe with us, and get content via Internet on the cheap"... rather, they partner with local Internet providers to stream content, including local broadcast stations, that their users would otherwise have to get via cable or dish. Being on a cable company's Internet service, that means that I won't be seeing this particular feature any time soon... but, patience is a virtue, and all that. One way or another, a la carte programming will make its way online... eventually... I hope... please? :)
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The latest fly in my ointment - "alarm registration"
This is a small issue, but one that illustrates a basic flaw with most governments I've seen... the basic disconnect between "for the good of the community" they were set up to serve, and "for the good of the government" that they evolve towards.
Until this year, my city has had a simple, straightforward system for dealing with alarm systems, specifically for dealing with false alarms... the first one in a given year's free (accidents will happen), after which escalating fees and other requirements kick in to fix your brokenness. The end result of this setup (according to the numbers quoted in the notice I received): slightly over 1000 false alarm responses by the police, at an estimated cost of slightly under $45,000 over the course of 2008. If my math doesn't fail me, that's a per-alarm cost of $4.50... so, let's be generous (inflation and all that), and call it $5 per false alarm.
Now, being the rational sort that I am, if I considered this to be a problem (which, honestly, I don't... responding to potential property crimes in progress is part of the job of the police), I would look at either increasing the fines for false alarms (or, if that revenue stream wasn't reliable enough, a small fee on all alarm owners), and use that money to hire on more police help (with the numbers we're talking here, that's maybe only half or a third of a full hire... but I don't think most alarm owners would get too bent out of shape about hiring on added police capacity to ensure their alarm was responded to in a timely manner). Oh, but wait, that would involve administrative overhead to collect those piddling little funds, and might be portrayed as "raising your taxes", so we can't do that, can we?
Instead, the city has decided to bring in an outside company to do the administrative work, charging every residential alarm customer $25 a year ($15/year if no false alarms in the past year), and even more for business alarms... or, to put it another way, everybody who dares to own an alarm system gets to pay 3-5 times more (or even more for a business) than it cost, on average, for any false alarm they responded to in 2008... which, in and of itself, is a nuisance. However, they then take that money, and... wait for it... use it to make sure that your contact information is correct. That's it. The theory being that, if we can call you when your alarm goes off, you might tell us no, it's OK, I tripped the alarm myself, no worries, no need for the police to get involved.
But now, hang about a moment... if you have an alarm company, they're supposed to do that already. I mean, that's part of the purpose of having a monitoring company for an alarm... alarm goes off, they call to make sure it's not a problem and, failing that, call the police. So, the end result of this new system is, rather than improving public safety by hiring on additional police, the city is extorting funds from their citizens to fund a private company that duplicates what the alarm monitoring company is supposed to do for itself, on the off chance they're not... all so no elected official "looks bad" for raising taxes.
Now, for the part that really chaps my hide... I'm a homeowner, I have an old alarm system still mostly doing what it's supposed to do, but I don't have a monitoring company (haven't for years, and it's disconnected from the phone line entirely), just the audible alarm. It's been tripped a couple of times (usually when I'm out-of-town and have somebody drop by to feed the cats), and I haven't seen or heard from any police officers in that time, so the "false alarm mitigation" argument doesn't really fly for me... but, unless I uninstall the system or disable the klaxon, I'm still liable for the fee. Worst of all... I'm actually going to pay the fee, rather than muck with the system, because I'm reasonably certain I get more than $15/$25 off my homeowner's insurance over the course of a year for having a local alarm system. Well, at least they'll have my phone number right, when they need to call me about that alarm they happened to drive by and hear going off, I guess... :/
Until this year, my city has had a simple, straightforward system for dealing with alarm systems, specifically for dealing with false alarms... the first one in a given year's free (accidents will happen), after which escalating fees and other requirements kick in to fix your brokenness. The end result of this setup (according to the numbers quoted in the notice I received): slightly over 1000 false alarm responses by the police, at an estimated cost of slightly under $45,000 over the course of 2008. If my math doesn't fail me, that's a per-alarm cost of $4.50... so, let's be generous (inflation and all that), and call it $5 per false alarm.
Now, being the rational sort that I am, if I considered this to be a problem (which, honestly, I don't... responding to potential property crimes in progress is part of the job of the police), I would look at either increasing the fines for false alarms (or, if that revenue stream wasn't reliable enough, a small fee on all alarm owners), and use that money to hire on more police help (with the numbers we're talking here, that's maybe only half or a third of a full hire... but I don't think most alarm owners would get too bent out of shape about hiring on added police capacity to ensure their alarm was responded to in a timely manner). Oh, but wait, that would involve administrative overhead to collect those piddling little funds, and might be portrayed as "raising your taxes", so we can't do that, can we?
Instead, the city has decided to bring in an outside company to do the administrative work, charging every residential alarm customer $25 a year ($15/year if no false alarms in the past year), and even more for business alarms... or, to put it another way, everybody who dares to own an alarm system gets to pay 3-5 times more (or even more for a business) than it cost, on average, for any false alarm they responded to in 2008... which, in and of itself, is a nuisance. However, they then take that money, and... wait for it... use it to make sure that your contact information is correct. That's it. The theory being that, if we can call you when your alarm goes off, you might tell us no, it's OK, I tripped the alarm myself, no worries, no need for the police to get involved.
But now, hang about a moment... if you have an alarm company, they're supposed to do that already. I mean, that's part of the purpose of having a monitoring company for an alarm... alarm goes off, they call to make sure it's not a problem and, failing that, call the police. So, the end result of this new system is, rather than improving public safety by hiring on additional police, the city is extorting funds from their citizens to fund a private company that duplicates what the alarm monitoring company is supposed to do for itself, on the off chance they're not... all so no elected official "looks bad" for raising taxes.
Now, for the part that really chaps my hide... I'm a homeowner, I have an old alarm system still mostly doing what it's supposed to do, but I don't have a monitoring company (haven't for years, and it's disconnected from the phone line entirely), just the audible alarm. It's been tripped a couple of times (usually when I'm out-of-town and have somebody drop by to feed the cats), and I haven't seen or heard from any police officers in that time, so the "false alarm mitigation" argument doesn't really fly for me... but, unless I uninstall the system or disable the klaxon, I'm still liable for the fee. Worst of all... I'm actually going to pay the fee, rather than muck with the system, because I'm reasonably certain I get more than $15/$25 off my homeowner's insurance over the course of a year for having a local alarm system. Well, at least they'll have my phone number right, when they need to call me about that alarm they happened to drive by and hear going off, I guess... :/
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Ultima? Nooooooo!
Let me give you a brief explanation behind this post's tile first... for practically as long as I can remember, I've always liked computer and video games, but they were always brief distractions, to be played for a while, set aside, maybe come back to later to be played from the beginning. Then, in the mid-80's, a friend of mine who actually owned a computer (now that's aging me, innit?) showed me Ultima III. We played that game for hours on end, the same game, and had a blast... to this day, we can still crack each other up with a properly-delivered "Oh no! Orcs!" line.
That experience molded me more than I would often care to admit... first, showing me that a computer-based role-playing game was feasible, and that games, in general, could be worth spending more than a single play session on... to put it bluntly, I was hooked. When I got my first computer, fresh out of boot camp, one of the first titles I bought for it was that self-same Ultima III. Then, Ultima IV came out, and introduced me to the concepts of games with deeper interaction with their characters (you actually had something resembling conversations with characters in IV, instead of the canned replies in III) and an ethical component in games (I had to restart my game after cheating a blind shopkeeper too often/thoroughly, because games, up to that point, didn't enforce any penalties for such actions). And so on through Ultima V, VI, and VII, each expanding the story of Ultima's world, improving the technology used to tell the story, and so forth.
Of course, nothing good lasts forever... I don't recall whether Electronic Arts had gobbled up Origin Systems by that time, or completed their mutation from art-house publisher to soulless corporate monolith, but Ultima VIII was a severe disappointment, mixing platform-game mechanics with Ultima's RPG roots, and placing it in a separate world entirely (I was overseas at the time, and got the game from a local shop in the Arab lands for something like $5, and still felt overcharged). But it takes more than one game to break a franchise... so Ultima IX put the nails in the coffin. IX could have been passable, but they attempted to make it a 3d game, and never really got the glitches worked out of their engine... I kept the box for that game on my shelf for a long, long time, as a reminder to let reviewers and others take the plunge on brand new games first. Finally, the main creator behind the Ultima games, Richard Gariott, left EA for another company, but wasn't able to take his games with him... there have been a few other "side-games", and abortive attempts to create something new, but Ultima has been effectively "done" as a brand since the end of the '90s, with only Ultima Online still kicking around... and that as more of a footnote of the evolution of MMORPGs than anything else.
Apparently, EA just can't leave Ultima to rest in peace, though. They've snagged the name for a free, web-based strategy game they're ginning up, trying to cash in on the casual/free-to-play craze of the day by melding it with a mostly-forgotten franchise from the ancient past (well, ancient in Internet terms, at any rate). Here's a link to their closed-beta game... I'd like to believe that they're going to do something interesting or worthwhile with the franchise, but I'm getting the vibe that they just needed a name to toss on their medieval-styled game, and, hey, we own this one. As my brother would put it, they're probably raping my childhood... but then, I expect no less from EA.
That experience molded me more than I would often care to admit... first, showing me that a computer-based role-playing game was feasible, and that games, in general, could be worth spending more than a single play session on... to put it bluntly, I was hooked. When I got my first computer, fresh out of boot camp, one of the first titles I bought for it was that self-same Ultima III. Then, Ultima IV came out, and introduced me to the concepts of games with deeper interaction with their characters (you actually had something resembling conversations with characters in IV, instead of the canned replies in III) and an ethical component in games (I had to restart my game after cheating a blind shopkeeper too often/thoroughly, because games, up to that point, didn't enforce any penalties for such actions). And so on through Ultima V, VI, and VII, each expanding the story of Ultima's world, improving the technology used to tell the story, and so forth.
Of course, nothing good lasts forever... I don't recall whether Electronic Arts had gobbled up Origin Systems by that time, or completed their mutation from art-house publisher to soulless corporate monolith, but Ultima VIII was a severe disappointment, mixing platform-game mechanics with Ultima's RPG roots, and placing it in a separate world entirely (I was overseas at the time, and got the game from a local shop in the Arab lands for something like $5, and still felt overcharged). But it takes more than one game to break a franchise... so Ultima IX put the nails in the coffin. IX could have been passable, but they attempted to make it a 3d game, and never really got the glitches worked out of their engine... I kept the box for that game on my shelf for a long, long time, as a reminder to let reviewers and others take the plunge on brand new games first. Finally, the main creator behind the Ultima games, Richard Gariott, left EA for another company, but wasn't able to take his games with him... there have been a few other "side-games", and abortive attempts to create something new, but Ultima has been effectively "done" as a brand since the end of the '90s, with only Ultima Online still kicking around... and that as more of a footnote of the evolution of MMORPGs than anything else.
Apparently, EA just can't leave Ultima to rest in peace, though. They've snagged the name for a free, web-based strategy game they're ginning up, trying to cash in on the casual/free-to-play craze of the day by melding it with a mostly-forgotten franchise from the ancient past (well, ancient in Internet terms, at any rate). Here's a link to their closed-beta game... I'd like to believe that they're going to do something interesting or worthwhile with the franchise, but I'm getting the vibe that they just needed a name to toss on their medieval-styled game, and, hey, we own this one. As my brother would put it, they're probably raping my childhood... but then, I expect no less from EA.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
A good day to be an independent
So, the news is ringing out across the land... Ted Kennedy's senate seat has been claimed by a Republican. News greeted with shock and finger-pointing by Democrats, glee and visions of resurgence by Republicans... and simple contentment by yours truly. Giving either party full, no-holds-barred control of both sides of Congress and the White House is a rather bad turn of events... and, if my experience was typical, not quite what I expected out of the last election.
Mind you, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, I suppose... the filibuster-proof majority the Democrats hoped to use relied on the support of some independent senators, including the mixed blessing of the mercenary Joe Lieberman. As such, they didn't get to run as roughshod over the other side of the aisle as they might otherwise have... but now, hopefully, there will be less kowtowing to Mr. Lieberman's specific corporate interests (like, oh, say, the medical insurance industry), now that they'll have to bring at least a Republican or two on board.
Of course, I don't think either the Democrats or the Republicans realize what a gift this really is for the Democrats, either. Rather than get their rude awakening in the mid-term elections, the Democrats got it now, with plenty of time to restore their image (and demonize the Republicans as do-nothing obstructionists, of course) before the big show... it could easily be the difference between keeping control of Congress and losing it, come the next election. Time will tell... but, short of a whole slew of Independents getting elected (which I don't expect to see in my lifetime), it's about the best I can hope for, what with the current crop of Republicans.
Mind you, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, I suppose... the filibuster-proof majority the Democrats hoped to use relied on the support of some independent senators, including the mixed blessing of the mercenary Joe Lieberman. As such, they didn't get to run as roughshod over the other side of the aisle as they might otherwise have... but now, hopefully, there will be less kowtowing to Mr. Lieberman's specific corporate interests (like, oh, say, the medical insurance industry), now that they'll have to bring at least a Republican or two on board.
Of course, I don't think either the Democrats or the Republicans realize what a gift this really is for the Democrats, either. Rather than get their rude awakening in the mid-term elections, the Democrats got it now, with plenty of time to restore their image (and demonize the Republicans as do-nothing obstructionists, of course) before the big show... it could easily be the difference between keeping control of Congress and losing it, come the next election. Time will tell... but, short of a whole slew of Independents getting elected (which I don't expect to see in my lifetime), it's about the best I can hope for, what with the current crop of Republicans.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Good on ya, Comcast!
It's not often I say good things about Comcast, but they appear to have rethought a decision I disagreed with. Ever since Internet providers started talking about capping and/or metering traffic, my basic stance has been that, sure, that's your right, but you'd best make those traffic measurements available to me to view, contest, what have you... which Comcast saw no need for, but compensated by making their cap quite high (as they would put it, 99% of users never approach their 250GB cap).
Now, at least in my area, Comcast is running a pilot program to let end-users that care to look view their data usage (link). Mind you, you still have to dig a bit to find it, if you don't know where to look already, but it's a big step forward... I can only hope it "sticks", and everybody gets to use it.
Best of all, I compared their numbers to what my router tells me I've used... right now, Comcast lists me at 11GB for the month, while the router says 14GB. I don't know whether the difference is due to a lag in data collection, or if there's some data they are discounting, accidentally or on purpose... but, at the very least, they're not saying I'm using more than I'm seeing, so that's a definite plus.
Now, at least in my area, Comcast is running a pilot program to let end-users that care to look view their data usage (link). Mind you, you still have to dig a bit to find it, if you don't know where to look already, but it's a big step forward... I can only hope it "sticks", and everybody gets to use it.
Best of all, I compared their numbers to what my router tells me I've used... right now, Comcast lists me at 11GB for the month, while the router says 14GB. I don't know whether the difference is due to a lag in data collection, or if there's some data they are discounting, accidentally or on purpose... but, at the very least, they're not saying I'm using more than I'm seeing, so that's a definite plus.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Lost trumps Obama?
Boy, I'm not sure exactly what this says about society today, but I'm pretty sure it's not good. I know there are some people who are obsessed with Lost, and some portion of those were fretting that the President would schedule his State of the Union address to conflict with the start of the new season of that show. Apparently, they don't need to worry... a White House spokesman said so.
Mind you, I'm aware of how much of a mummer's play the State of the Union address is these days... but still, when the government has to go out of their way to reassure people that their favorite escape won't be inconvenienced by a once-a-year report on where we are, as a nation... I can't help but cringe.
Mind you, I'm aware of how much of a mummer's play the State of the Union address is these days... but still, when the government has to go out of their way to reassure people that their favorite escape won't be inconvenienced by a once-a-year report on where we are, as a nation... I can't help but cringe.
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