yo

yo

yup!

@devwild OK, that just didn't work. mods, feel free to delete this.

see below for my reply :)

@devwild oops, wrong reply, this was supposed to go in my above thread.

damn these fancy new fan-dangled websites :)

Unfortunately link saturation isn't just dependent on bandwidth. Even with decent QOS management, if you get enough people on a relatively high latency (compared to ground networks - it was better than I expected, but it's still no better than your cell phone's 3G service, which is not meant for sharing), low bandwidth connection, you start having problems with increased latency, timeouts, dropped packets, etc. It doesn't matter if there's bandwidth left over if you can't open a socket to engadet to download the page at all. (sometimes this happens *because* of the QOS management)

This is the kind of thing I've seen increasingly on free internet services in recent years, including the free wifi at, as I mentioned, several hotels, and at our local airport. Thanks to netbooks, ipod touches, etc, more and more people are traveling with wifi enabled devices, and thanks to services like facebook, they want to use them constantly.

For the airlines and hotels it makes more sense to charge a fee to keep usage at a reasonable level and bring in a small amount of dedicated funds for the service (as well as for measuring usage trends). Personally, I'd rather pay the fee and actually be able to use the service when I want to.

That said, I also don't think the fees should be over $10 for a 4-8hour flight, or $10 per day for a hotel. It's enough to restrict use to those who need it, while still being affordable for those of us who are flying coach for a reason. And any hotel that charges $10 or more for internet when they are still only connected by a single T1 should be scolded profoundly. :)

And airports that want to charge you $10 to use the net during your 2 hour layover... ugh, give me a break.

@digitallysick That however, I agree with. The lack of complimentary food is a crime against humanity (literally, stop starvin' us folks).

wifi on flights absolutely should cost money... because if they don't, everyone gets on, and the connection gets swamped. It's like free wifi in hotels- it sounds great, but then you get there and the performance is so horrible that it's totally unusable, because everyone in the building is trying to use it for torrents or whatever. (this has happened to me a lot lately, and as a result I've switched to being a strong proponent of just paying :))

I tried this on an american flight last month, and I was actually shocked at how usable and how low latency it was. I would actually consider using it more often, because I think the price is fair considering the proportional cost of the service and the technology involved. Certainly more practical for business travelers than casual use. Being able to clock a little more work makes it more than worth it if you need it.

It absolutely does not have the bandwidth however to sustain the use of the entire cabin, and if it was free, you *might* be able to download one email the whole flight.

I just finished the first one with a friend recently, and when all was said and done, we were breathing a sigh of relief that we wouldn't feel the need to play the game again. There's a fair amount of decent gameplay, particularly in coop, but the horrible story (*minor spoiler* the whole thing is contrived, but then you tack on not one bad ending, but two, making the whole thing pointless?), inconsistent cover mechanic, contrived scripted sequences (the truck obviously, but others too), and moronic AI (especially your "friendlies", who decide to walk over and stand at that corner you're shooting around, or run out in front of a mounted gun when you just told them to guard a doorway), really turned the majority of the game into more of a chore than a fun experience.

Unless the second is a massive improvement, right now, just seeing the game title alone makes my stomach hurt.