I’ll be sure to buy myself something nice for Christmas.

Upstream is usually still your ISP’s network for a while longer. The splitter box goes into some other equipment owned by your ISP.

Well it isn’t shared before the upstream server, that’s what FTTH is.

FTTH just means that there’s fiber going into your house.

Most residential fiber internet connections use a technology called PON (GPON for gigabit or XGS-PON for 10Gbps). My understanding is that the fiber from your house goes into a splitter box in the street, which takes fiber connections from many customers (usually either 32 or 64 customers) and multiplexes them into a single fiber by either using different wavelengths of light or by time multiplexing. Upstream from this, bandwidth is shared.

The bandwidth is still shared… It’d be prohibitively expensive to have dedicated bandwidth just for your connection, and most customers don’t need anywhere near that. Unlimited, dedicated 1Gbps is around 320TB of data per month.

A business-grade connection has fewer people sharing it, but it’s still shared. The only fully-dedicated connections are enterprise-grade connections (like in a data center), and even then it’s an upgrade that costs quite a bit. :)

You’re right - upstream connections are usually fiber. In fact there’s a name for this type of network: HFC (hybrid fiber + coax)

The 2Gbps symmetric though Comcast is still cable. In theory, DOCSIS 4.0 supports up to 10Gbps down and 6Gbps up over cable, although real-world speeds are always lower than theoretical speeds.

You share bandwidth with your neighbours regardless of whether it’s coax or fiber. A common contention ratio for residential connections is between 40:1 and 50:1, meaning the bandwidth is shared between 40 and 50 people (i.e. 1Gbps of upstream bandwidth per 40-50 people with a 1Gbps connection). This is usually fine as it’s very unlikely that every customer will be using the full bandwidth at the same time. Residential usage is usually very spiky with only brief periods of high speed usage.

Breville is such a good brand. Not very well known in the USA since they’re an Australian brand. Kinda expensive, but very high quality.

Comcast is still using Coax instead of Fiber Optic and desperately trying to convince people that somehow, someway coax can be just as good.

Comcast are starting to offer 2Gbps symmetric (same speed up and down) via DOCSIS 4.0 in some areas.

There’s quite a few KDE apps that work on Windows. I think they’re trying to position KDE as a provider of high-quality cross-platform open-source apps, rather than being limited to just Linux.

Why are they adding this to Notepad rather than Word?

How can you have 0.25 of an item when the song only has whole numbers?

Prices will go up before black friday

It’s before Black Friday now :P

Amazon show a “lowest price in 30 days” badge if the price is the lowest in the past 30 days, so companies that sell their products on Amazon will sometimes raise the price 30 days before Black Friday.

Some companies will make units specifically for black friday. Usually cheaper, less features, and sometimes less reliable.

This has always been the case. Same with outlets - some items at outlet stores are specifically made to be sold at the outlet.

Things like this take a while to finalize, so you’re good for now. Just wait until Black Friday to buy anything, since it’s so soon and lots of computer stuff goes on sale.

What can I do to help, as a cis man?

Unfortunately I can’t vote in the US since I’m not a citizen.

They get around $500 million per year from Google, so $1 billion is just two years worth of that. 86% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from that Google deal.

There’s no winning. Some people use the regular version and complain about the updates, while others use the ESR release and complain that sites that use cutting-edge features don’t work properly.

The solution to updates is to use Linux, since then it’ll update through your distro’s package manager along with your other software.

They’re likely preparing for their funding from Google to be cut. Having a lot of money in the bank doesn’t matter if your income is lower than expenses, since you’ll run out of money eventually.

I wouldn’t mind paying money for a good browser. I paid for Opera back in the day, and browsers are significantly more complex (and cost several orders of magnitude more to develop) now compared to back then.

w3m

There’s also a new browser based on Firefox/Gecko called Zen. There’s way too many browsers based on Webkit or Blink.