My New Fibre Broadband Will Likely Be My Last
Next Friday I'm getting a new fibre-optic broadband line installed at my home, and it's very exciting. Because of where I live I've not been able to take advantage of existing cable services, primarily because my street is block-paved and the cable company took one look at it and said "We're not taking responsibility for putting that all back", so I've had to wait for a new project to be completed where the entire county has had FTTB (fibre to the box) installed.
This is going to give me 40Mbps broadband. I know what you're thinking, it's still nowhere near the 100Mbps some countries and even cable customers here in the UK can get, but for someone who works online, write articles here, spends just about every hour of the day surfing the Internet, watches online videos and does a lot of online gaming it's actually quite fast enough.
Now here in the UK the governments has helpfully held up the auction of the 4G radio spectrum with seemingly endless reams of red tape, but it will inevitably happen in the next couple of years. Finally we'll (apparently) have speeds on a wireless connection that can't be matched by most home and business broadband deals. I say apparently because it entirely depends how many people use the network and for what, and also because we all remember the promises that were made about 3G in 2003.
The big problem with mobile broadband at the moment is that it is still extremely expensive, compared to a landline broadband connection anyway. I pay for a mobile SIM for my laptop at just £5 a month but for this I'm capped at 500Mb, nowhere near enough for everyday home and/or work use.
As the networks wise up to the opportunities ahead of them with 4G however we will no doubt see prices drop to compete directly with current DSL broadband lines, and 4G routers will suddenly be everywhere.
This will be a very exciting time and I'm looking forward to it. To be honest it actually seems quite strange that in this modern day and age, with Internet access being so ubiquitous, that we're all still tied to our homes for general unmetered access on PCs and laptops. Something has to change.
Suffice to say with the advent of 4G it certainly will change and when it does it'll be huge and everywhere. It doesn't matter who you are or where you live, it will be impossible to get away from the immense marketing machine that will accompany it.
I'm looking forward to it as it's going to be very exciting, a great opportunity and I don't really need the landline anyway (nobody ever calls me on it, only businesses, as people know I@m on the mobile). This fibre-broadband connection will very likely then be my last. What about yourselves? Will you switch wholesale to 4G?
Advertisement
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.