I don't know what you mean by "major city," but I look in Milwaukee every six months or so. There simply aren't any "independent ISPs" here with remotely comparable speeds or prices.
Hi! I'm one of the four (that I know of) independent ISPs that serve Milwaukee and the surrounding areas with a combination of WISP, Fiber, and Copper technologies. We all suck at advertising and rely on referrals.
In the Milwaukee market we all focus on business users (and generally ones that need symmetric or high-upload service and would be looking at a fiber build) or MDU applications because... For the past several years we've seen a consumer preference for absolute lowest cost over quality or available bandwidth. At the extreme end we still have users on wholesaled ILEC DSL on provisioned for 768k download that just don't care enough to upgrade or switch because they like the sub $20 price. It's ILEC controlled so I can't just upgrade them out of the goodness of my heart either.
The participants list for our little Internet Exchange is somewhat workable as a directory of area independent ISPs although some of us are datacenter operators or as far away as Racine or Madison: http://www.mkeix.net/
This is my experience as well, just across the pond from you (West Michigan).
Home users demand the world for $19.99 a month and no contract. Therefore, they get terrible Comcast / TWC / ATT (essentially, they get what they asked for).
There are a lot of people trying to run the "independent ISP" gauntlet, all over the US. (And I'm biased, as I am one of them). But those consumer prices usually only work if you offer bad/slow service, have a complete monopoly, or have government subsidy.
Since most Independents don't have or won't do most of those, they have to focus on business, as those are (usually) the only people who care enough to put actual money into service.
I haven't been in the access game for a long time, but I honestly don't know how you could sell to even smart "prosumers" these days.
I would love to get a ~50mbps line to my home, from a reliable local ISP with clue. I'd pay around $150/mo for such service, and I'm not one of those guys that runs stuff maxed out 24x7.
There just are no options where I live for that amount of bandwidth other than Comcast. So instead I have my primary comcast line ($120/mo) which is 150/20, and a backup DSL line from USWest/Qwest/Centurylink/whatever they are calling themselves today. I believe that one is 20/2, but it sucks so bad (seriously no 1500 MTU still? sigh.) I rarely use it even for failover anymore. LTE is faster.
There are a two main reasons that I see, technical and business.
Generally speaking, multipoint access technologies (including cell & fixed wireless/wimax, DOCSIS, and multi-user fiber such as GPON) have a fixed amount of spectrum/timeslots to allocate for transfers. Transfer timeslots are allocated primarily for downlink (I use 75% down) because the vast majority of user traffic is download so it just makes sense to allocate that way.
On the business side it is one way to segment your customer base between business/pro users and residential users because residential users don't care and businesses are less price-sensitive. When they need more upload they are often willing to pay for dedicated symmetric connections such as TDM circuits or ethernet over fiber (the industry term is "Active Ethernet"). In theory these circuits cost more to provide because the last mile isn't shared with other users.
The use of Doom3 in the Kickstarter (I remember feeling like Carmack had given his seal of approval), definitely provides Zenimax with ammo, and I agree, it could be ugly.
Like so many other (game) programmers, Carmack is a hero of mine, and the bias runs deep. In reading the complaint, though, I was starting to feel for Zenimax, but when the "$500 worth of optics" phrase started appearing, they lost me. The kit, as described in the thread where Carmack and Palmer first interacted in public, was to be a display, display-controller, and some sort of ski-goggle based contraption you could put together. And, iirc, $300 was the price discussed.
But I think the really key point, missing from this complaint, is that, before Carmack (and Abrash at Valve) improved on the Rift, it had stirred up interest because of the concept of using simple, _cheap_, optics, that would allow the display to be closer to the eyes (wide FOV), and pre-correcting for the resulting distortion in software.
Carmack and Abrash provided some secret sauce that I'm sure will be vital to the sense of presence that will drive broad appeal, but the breakthrough was saying "so what if the optics massively distort the image; we'll fix it in software". From what I've read, I'm pretty sure that wasn't Palmer's idea to begin with either, but he was the first one to run with it.
I owned a BeBox and used it as my desktop for several years, til it stopped posting. The use of its relational-database-like filesystem, for email and organizing my music, was such a joy.
I once wrote a _MacOS_ shareware review site for a friend, as a single, small perl script that looked through a tree in the filesystem of a BeOS box (on mac-clone hardware), and spit out html. The descriptions and reviews were just metadata columns I added to the relevant mime-types.
I worked in a hospital, and saw similar things, but I think the moral of the story is that huge organizations operate internally more like a feudal oligarchy. They crystallize, regardless of the external market.
This one certainly was. Another story of my friends was sitting in on a meeting, where one of the old-school specialists of nearly 30 years experience made a snide remark about 'newcomers not understanding how things are done'. The target of the remark responded 'I've been here 17 years...'.
The point remains the same, though - letting physicians choose whatever they want is not a magic bullet given by 'the free market', and can make things worse in practise. And it's not like 'the free market' has shown us that comms protocols are followed with any particular veracity in the software world, for things that have no regulation on them. Do we have an open video codec yet that runs on all browsers, for example?
It definitely _looks_ spammy. I think what's absent from this discussion, though, is that these are bands with a 'taper' culture, and the app is only useful for these, niche bands.
If an Umphrey's McGee fan (I've seen them ~10 times; a close friend has seen them >170x) were interested in an app to play music on their phone, and could only search using vague terms, like "free music", the results will be mainstream and commercially motivated; not a good match for their actual desire, of listening to that one show they went to, back in '05.
I agree with you in the short term, and disagree in the ideal/long-term.
I think we can replace this pachinko machine of representative democracy, not with some one or two dimensional direct-democracy, but with the kind of thing that cypherpunks have been thinking about for decades.
But in the short-term, the current zeitgeist, which I _rejoice_ in, as an ex-mormon 'queer' person (so queer I can't categorize myself), I am stricken by the thought that Mozilla may be suffocated by people I would like to hold hands with.
Chunkhost has the same specs at the $9 price point as DO, though they claim 2 cpus (obviously could be apples and oranges). It's Xen, like DO and EC2, and they use ECC ram.
They also have this "hardware upgrade" thing that might make it cheaper at the higher price points, depending on how long you use it, and when each provider eventually upgrades its offerings.
I use them for my personal mail+whatever server, and have been quite happy, for about a year.
I don't want to judge you, not knowing how big a yard you have, but as a downtown apartment dweller, dogs barking provide all the annoyance of car alarms, the same inaction, and a smoldering hatred for people who keep dogs in these conditions.
I'd hazard a guess that while it may be as annoying to you, and receive the same inaction from you, that to each owner a dog's bark has a different meaning. Partly because they get to know the animal ("oh, he never does X or he usually does Y so I can judge this better") and partly because they have context (all you hear is barking, but they hear that along with... knowing the dog hasn't had his walk yet. Or knowing he was asleep so something strange must have woken him up. Or knowing... etc.)
Depends on the kind. For the most part, if one keeps barking in the night, you can assume something's wrong. If it does it anyway, you already know that and can ignore it, and call the council if it keeps doing it.
