On Monday Ken Starks published an article on Internet access in his neck of the woods, which is outside the Austin city limits. That got me wondering how much most of you spend each month to have the ability to read articles on FOSS Force, watch the latest episodes of your favorite TV shows and check in with your friends on your favorite social network.
Here at FOSS Force we pay $35 monthly for a 4Mbs DSL connection with our local telephone company. Believe it or not, that serves us just fine. I suspect this is because we’re only about the third subscriber from the nearest switching station and we’re probably getting much higher speeds than advertised. All I know is that we can watch multiple movies and videos on multiple machines just fine, with no jerks or freezes. We certainly have more than enough speed for our normal work around here, which mainly consists of writing articles and posting them to the web, reading and sending email and spending way too much time avoiding work by playing on Facebook.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
It appears that the police in Tallahassee, Florida have been busy tracking folks by their cell phones without bothering to show up before a judge and ask for a warrant. Why would they violate the constitutional rights of their citizens this way? Evidently because they were using technology on loan and had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Our computers were only a portion of the casualty list. The storm also took out two televisions, my entire AC unit and a microwave. The thunder was so close and so powerful it broke out our front bay window and the window glass in two of my trucks. Even top-of-the-line Belkin surge protectors couldn’t stave off these strikes.