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Myths about Internet growth
An anonymous reader writes "An article in The Economist outlines WorldCom's role in starting the myth that Internet traffic doubles every 100 days. This helped inflate the telecoms bubble."
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Damn, humanity wil \. the Internet.
Defated the internet bubble, then popped themselves.
WorldCom's role in starting the myth
:-)
Maybe spam companies will finally realize that spamming isn't as effective as they thought. If there's not as many new users as they thought, then perhaps they'll realize most of their bloody e-mails are just being deleted
As people were jumping onto that new-fangled internet thing, I'm sure the bandwidth usage did double every 100 days (maybe less).. But that wouldn't be a fixed value, the increase would have slowed over time, as the market became saturated.
my pr0n collection doubles every 100 days.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It should be 'annoying X10 pop unders double every 100 days'
If that were true, maybe EDUSlash.com's membership would double every day
~ now you know
Worldcom creates the bubble that says net growth doubles every hundred days. Then everyone says "oh crap, we better double our bandwidth every hunder days". All those other companies dont use as much, and *poof* they die.
Why did it take so long for this to catch up with worldcom? Oh, maybe its their shady accounting...
Are people being stupid, or simply letting themselves get caught up in the excitement?
I think we can safely file THAT particular statistic away with the MPAA's and RIAA's claim that piracy has cost billions and billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Of course, I could see the BSA, RIAA, and MPAA getting together and claiming that the piracy of billions of dollars of software is the CAUSE of traffic doubling every 100 days!
You just knew somebody had to say it. =^_^=
-Dennis
This sig no verb.
Former AT&T employee blames Worldcom for causing network capacity to grow geometrically; Broadband users blame AT&T for causing it to shrink geometrically (see AT&T's failure to acquire @home, leaving millions without internet access for weeks).
The problem with this article, as well as the original Worldcom estimate, is that they assume linear growth. In reality, the demand for Internet bandwidth grows and shrinks with the economy in general. We're in a slump right now, so growth has slowed down. In the next boom, more people will want to download rich content such as video, which will in turn increase the demand for bandwidth.
Like the stock market, the bandwidth market has its up times and its down times. When you invest in the stock market, you invest for the long-term trend which historically has been up. In the same way, the need for bandwidth will continue to grow over the long term as we continue to find new and cool things to do with it.
the member numbers would increase everyday......
I find it really strange how otherwise serious and well-educated people very often go along with these "X doubles every Y days" stories. Everybody who is familiar with even basic math should know that this kind of growth can only last for for a very short time, otherwise we would all be impersonating Elvis by now.
Now Worldcom probably tweaked the facts but if some people really believe in this kind of exponential growth then I hardly have any compassion for them, and blaming Worldcom or someone else for your own stupidity is just silly.
When men used to be men
I think, that internet traffic is still growing exponentially, maybe not doubling every 100 days, but if Moore's law would be applicable to the internet we have still a 100fold traffic in 10 years.
Felix
/dev/earth not found. Reboot?
Why we are all still paying so much for broadband style end user bandwidth......????
With so much spare capacity available as of right now one would think that someone would realise the value of offering it cheaply to the masses.
Why do I need a seperate box for cable tv and internet, why do I need a radio and a news paper?
Why can't it all come through the one pipe in a chep and interactive form?
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
-- Bartlett, as quoted in my 1st year physics textbook
How many other "marketing-oriented" "facts" are being touted today as justification for business, hiring, tactical, or hiring strategies? Or to be cruder, how many other business lies are out there mucking things up?
There's a re-evaluation of business tactics and laws going on. Maybe its time to re-evaluate supposed technological "truths" as well.
And maybe we techies can use this as yet another example of the hype over reality in technology, since WorldCom is in the use. Next time someone non-technical tosses out something obviously ridiculous, bring THIS up and ask them where they got their idea.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
internet pr0n/mp3 xfers double every 100 days, not traffic in general.
four-oh-four
For the sake of argument I'll say that there were 1,000 people on the internet in 1995.
It's been 100 days since then 25 times over.
So now there are now exactly 33,554,432,000 people online and we all speak english.
According to this, there was about 1 gbps of internet traffic in 1995.
If this doubled every 100 days, there would be 50,000 terabits per second of internet traffic today. There's actually less than one terabit/sec of traffic.
By 2010, we could expect more bits per second of internet traffic than there are atoms in the universe.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
This should have meant high bandwidth and low prices, but as suppliers like Worldcom had to borrow heavily for their infrastructure costs, they were stuck with high prices. Something similar happened with Deutsche Telekom in Germany. They built a fibre network through the former DDR but borrowed heavily to finance it. The things is that nobody was going to pay for that capacity at a premium price. Telekom didn't mess around with their predictions in the way that Worldcom did, but they also came unstuck.
The problem comes down to the revenue models and the telecom analysts in the banks. If I have a bank of 64K connections and I upgrade them to 1024K, I can't simply charge 16 times the price. A few customers can afford this (think banks), but many others can not.
Capacity including dark fibre definitely was doubling every 100 days but usage wasn't and certainly not revenue.
See my journal, I write things there
I would believe Moore's law could apply to doubling of internet usage, but that is every 18 months or so. They seem to state that it's growing exponentially by doubling every 100 days. Wouldn't every ten months be something like 10 to the power of 2 in traffic?
~S
Bill Gate's nett worth
Microsoft's profits
Windows bugs
IIS security holes
The number of digits in the latest I.E. version number
The megabytage of Windows Media Player
The number of countries George Bush wants to bomb
The length of Richard Stallman's beard
The number of trolls on Slashdot
WorldCom lying? I am shocked! Shocked!
This issue (a dubious statistic repeated infinitely in press) results from the fact that facts are not checked thoroughly before publication. This sort of stuff happened with the stats the women's movement used, environmentalists, conservative groups, etc. The number of women dying from eating disorders was a classic error that was endlessly cycled and never questioned until the misconception was permanently rooted in the public consciousness.
Every interest group pushing an agenda (yes, even profit-seeking corporations seeking to sell more bandwith) seems to come up with some dubious statistic like this. The media gobble up press releases, disguised oftentimes as "studies" which are bought and paid for by the interest group, and they spit them out on in the newspapers and other media outlets, sometimes virtually unchanged.
I am not surprised by the Economist's story -- I am surprised that it took so long for it to make it into print. I wonder how many times the Economist itself published that same "fact" before discovering that the emporer had no clothes.
Lots of petrified grits
Usage tends to grow by leaps and bounds every time someone comes up with a new file sharing protocol.
Maybe that statement was from the good ol' days of Napster.
...they'll be telling us that these claims about penis growth that I keep getting in my mailbox are all a myth too...
This perversion of Moore's Law was a fault (in part by the telecom industry for believing the hype that the rest of the money grubbing industries where touting. Movies over the Net. Everyone telecommuting. Attend college classes from home. More retail content than you can choke on. Plus a bevy of other "wouldn't it be cool" party line hype that drove the bubble. Me? I blame it on the GUI and Mouse. If it wasn't for those things, the Net would still be a usefull place (tool, etc).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear to be bright. Until you hear them speak.
We've all heard talk of over-built data networks and "dark fiber". What interests me is how this apparent over-capacity does not seem to match up the price of bandwidth and the apparent bandwidth management of consumer-level heavy users.
Is there a mismatch? Do we actually have a demand that's being held in check by an inappropriate pricing schedule (perhapse even businesses with a lack of vision)? Or does potential capacity fail to overcome the cost of "lighting up" and maintaining these over-built networks?
WorldCom isn't the first telecom to go bankrupt. This trend in this industry is just accelerating. Blame it on the classic business cycle: overbuilding, in this case excess capacity, traditionally overflowing inventories, usually are the downfall of boom times. This is especially true in the telecom industry. Sure, there's capacity, but instead of lowering prices to encourage consumption, the telecoms have to meet the bottom line. Unfortunately for some this is causing an industry shake-out.
Quintus malus puer est.
Same reason people believed eating carbohydrates would help them lose weight. They wanted to believe. They wanted to believe eating chocolate eclairs was good for them, and they wanted to believe that "nice man" wouldn't lie to them. And they wanted to believe the future was "so bright" they had "to wear shades." That's the one thing Clinton was able to impart to the country that Shrub doesn't seem to be able to. Optimism.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Yeah. What was that Moore guy thinking in 1965
when he forecasted chip density doubling every
18 months. That obviously couldn't last more
than a couple of years, could it?
Some predictions seem to work better than others.
As much as I vohmently hate the phrase "Caveat Emptor", when it comes to "So and so for life" offers, its just common sense to understand that absolutely nobody on this planet can garauntee anything service for life.
.. crap, didn't anybody learn anything from e-World (Apple, included?)
So move on
"Old man yells at systemd"
how come they're the rich ones?
It's all a misunderstanding. What they meant to say was internet USERS double in size every ten days. I know I do.
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
Nope, it doesn't double every 100 days, but the number of my posts to /. do.
Now if only the size of my Beowulf cluster would double every 100 days...
Hey, wait a sec... if the internet WERE doubling every 100 days, then wouldn't that mean that they would have to make double the servers every 100 days?....
Tibbon
tibbon.com
The next thing you know, they'll be telling us computers double in speed every 18 months!
er.
Rival telecoms companies believed the myth and cited UUNET's figures, even if their own traffic figures disagreed.
I find it disturbing that these rival telecom companies aren't making their own decisions. "Tech: Sir, we are only using 3% of our bandwidth and 45% of the nations traffic traverse our networks. CEO: Damnit, can't you hear? We need more bandwidth!! MOORRRREEE!!!!"
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
Meanwhile, MCI/Worldcom/UUNET was dubbed "Whipping Boy of the Hour" by 17 leading pseudo-news organizations around the world.
Why is it that we pretend that such over-zealous predictions are unique?
Worldcom is in trouble so attacking them is easy: they have bigger fish to fry. If you go after Sprint this way, those bastards might sue you!
funny sig link!
How can we get a Worldcom (Enron, Global Crossing ...) executive to mod a PS/2, so they will throw his ass in jail, where it belongs?
Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending
1976? If these trends continue...ayyy
Next week's spam.
of course it doubles - 100 days is about the time the M$ worms need to propigate...
there really isn't a way around that you know -- i hate the phrase "viscious cycle" but it's very necessary to use it here.
there are some basic facts we have to deal with when doing this
1) laying 1 fibre vs. laying 32 fibres costs about the same
2) you need to lay tons of fibres regardless (because the US is sparced out compared to, say, Tokyo / Seoul)
3) you need capacity *today*. not 32-fibre worth of capacity, maybe 1 or 2 fibre worth.
4) you probabbly need the 32-fibre worth of capacity in the future -- okay -- not the *near* future, but you know for a fact it will be utilized later
so basically, you need to invest in this infrastructure regardless -- because let's face it, you need them damn fibre runs even for today's economy. the choice boils down to
1) you spend 85 billion for 2 fibres today, and another 80 3 years later when you need to double the capacity
2) you spend 100 billion for 32 fibres today, and be home free for 12 years or so.
okay -- simplified math, bs statistics. but pretty much the same point.
if you were the CEO / CTO, what's gonna be your plan? i know i will bank on the 100 billion.
so they took a bet and ran out of $$ before it turned profitable. but it's was a lost gamble -- not a bad decision.
i like to point out that the interstate highway system is pretty much the same except the US got enough cash to cover it while it slowly became... profitable (on a entire economy scale)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I think the Economist strectched the facts a bit here...
For one Odlyzko's article first appeared in 1998. People in the network community were refering to it back in 2000.
Also they are trying to pin the blame on Worldcom (kick them while they are down). If the AT&T executives failed to listen to their foremost expert why is that Worldcom's problem? The data Odlyzko quotes from MAE and other NAPs is publicly available. It was very easy for anybody to check and see if data was doubling or not...
As soon as the company files for ch. 11, we start blamming them for everything!
dmarien
Why does the stupid program insist I have to write something here? +3.5 (Fractal)
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Of course the statistic was bogus. 47.2% of all statistics are made up.
Internet traffic grows by a factor of 100 every two days. Now get out there and buy those stocks! Buy Buy Buy!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Maybe they were saying stuff like this to get government aid for laying fiber optic lines? Fiber can hold a buttload of bandwidth... Maybe they were too cheap (too busy with accounting bullcrap?) to lay lots of it on their own dime?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
I just recalled stories on Slashdot - and elsewhere - calling for a halt to the Worldcom merger due to is potential to be a monopoly.
I quote from Wired: 10:45 a.m. Jan. 6, 1998 PST
"By eliminating each other as a major competitor and by creating one dominant Internet backbone provider, the merged entity would have the market power to exercise unilateral or concerted action to control the price of and potentially restrict access to the Internet."
Since most everyone on Slashdot is afraid of Monopolies - realize - that without government to enforce the monopoly the fears of control of price didn't actually materialize. In part this is due to the ability of new players to enter the market (unless entering isn't profitable) and the competition from the development of alternative technologies. Monopolies only become dangerous when barriers to entry are erected by law.
I guess Worldcom belied its own hype "doubling in 100 days" - and now they're dying!
Free Me! (http://www.freeme.org/)
Does /. post it's traffic anywhere? Just curious, seems relevant...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
What's the world record for holding your breath?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
If you could do that in the market, you'd be rich. I agree, all doctors aren;t egotists. Problem is, their power is such that a few of them have monumental consequences for their patients. Tom Brokaw can't kill you in the normal course of events. Politicians can , but it usually takes a while. CEOs can just lose you your job, which could kill you in the long run. But an egotistical doctor who doesn't know how to listen to his patients is a walking time bomb.
As for Guam, in the "absolute" sense, it's a speck of dust in the cosmos.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
If capacity has grown 500x in the last 5 years, and if demand has only quadrupled (4x), then webhosting should be dirt cheap, right???
After all, all of this overbuilding was for backbones and not the last mile, right?
So why are webhosting companies still charging $20 for 20 GB/month transfer rate, which is a little more monthly transfer rate than that of a 56K modem?
Does anybody have an real insight into the problem, and how I might go about exploiting it?
After all, How can we help the telecom industry if they can't give us discounts to access these overbuilt networks?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
from Jakob Nielsen
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9509.html
(Thank you Samuel Clemens.) Well, fortunately, it seems as though a lot of people who use those doctored statistics often wind up hoist on their own petard. Looks like WorldCom's getting there, as was Child Find in an article in the Denver Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporters Griego and Kilzer.
There are some spectacularly bad examples in the posting above... I'm not sure anyone ever said there were a million homeless people. However, the widely-criticised (as to methodology) US census survey cited almost half a million, which you can add for yourself here. Also, as to the "statistics" quoted by the poster on sexual orientation, I know that as early as 1972 the University of Guelph's Veterinary and Agricultural Colleges were using the 10% figure in training films (one of which, my friend, a student in another department at the time, narrated) on animal breeding, and in Animal Days, the British naturalist Desmond Morris mentions something similar based on his work with ten-spined sticklebacks (1958). Similar figures seem to hold through all animal species.
The problem seems to be that too many of the general public fall for that same old Ad Verecundiam Fallacy. I think it's a lack of critical thinking skills.
And in this day and age, if a CEO doesn't qualify as an "improper authority"... --smirk--
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Interesting. This situation is going to be very good news for some people and very bad for others. The good news is for bandwidth customers, since whoever buys up Worldcom's assets won't have to repay their debt, and will be able to charge low prices for bandwidth. The bad news is that the investors who financed this infrastructure can say bye-bye to their money.
...when suits make decisions and don't believe what their own highly trained, highly experienced, and usually certified staff tell them. Believe me, I'm experiencing this first hand.
The RIAA and MPAA. Their clampdown is the reason for the diminishment of growth in network traffic.
Man, I hope they don't find that 20 meg HardCard! And the second 720K floppy drive, oh man I'm screwed!
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Blame these nuts!
Was it illegal for WorldCom to lie about the percentage of traffic that hit their network? Obviously it is in a grey area, and being that WorldCom had a minor monopoly it was easy for them to do. Business is a dog eat dog world. It's interesting to see how creative businesses will get when they want to throw off their compeditors. It makes you stop and wonder if WorldCom gave out correct information how much money would have been saved by their compeditors, and who would not have gone bankrupt.
Sadly, I work for WorldCom still and when I was hired about 1.5 years ago I do remember them in their "come work for us because we're cool" speech they mentioned that they backbone capacity was doubled every year. Probably some PR person heard it wrong and assumed what would sell more stock.
Pepsi does taste better in small doses because it's so much sweeter. If you had these people polish off a 2 liter bottle of each, I don't think the results would be quite as skewed.
Oh, and for christ's sake back up your claims with actual studies.
Why is "Post Anonymously" so goddamned close to "Submit"?
One of the very fist things people learn in Numerical Analysis classes is the principle
Do NOT Extrapolate
Unlike interpolation (which is guessing the value of a function f(x) where x is in (x0,x1) and f(x0), f(x1) is known), extrapolation (which is forecasting the value f(x) where x is in (x1,+Inf) ) is doomed to almost always yield incorrect results.
In plain English, even if traffic had beed growing by 100% every month so far, this would not necessarily mean that the same trend would carry on from now on.
I wish somebody put DO NOT EXTRAPOLATE under every manager's, stockholder's, futurist's pillow. Less money would be lost, less nonsense would be said.
So, if Telecom companies and stockholders believed Worldcom's lies (or honest nonsense), I guess they had it coming...
The ISP's thought they could recover the losses on delivering bandwidth with the upcoming content buisiness. What they failed to see whas that no one would be buying content until the bandwidth was enough to support content like video and such at an acceptable quality. 512 kbit/s isnt near enough for semi quality video (no glitches and acceptable resolution). Bandwidth demand wont rise much until there is content that demands it and vice versa. If i do the things i do today i really dont need more bandwidth. I surf and d/l and chat. If i dont take pirating movies into the account there are few occasions where i really would benifit from having more bandwidth. A faster ping might help me when i run around fragging in fraggelonia but all the bandwidth in the world wont matter a bit. If movie companies start renting out movies on the net and does it broadly it would create a big demand for bandwidth but it has to happen at the same time and not one a while after the other. Worldcom and other ISP's have been waiting on the content companies and vice versa.
HTTP/1.1 400
traffic at (T=0) = B
:)
delta time(years) = DT
traffic at DT = B*2^(DT*365.24/100)
hmmm... lets say there was 1 KB of traffic per hour in 1990 (ridiculously low...) B=1, DT=12.
2^(43.8) = 1.53e13 KB = 15.3 petabytes of traffic per hour today. Somehow I doubt it...
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
"The claim assumed unimpeachable status when it appeared in a report published by America's Department of Commerce in April 1998."
This begs the question....How many other reports have they published but done zero research for?
A company can claim anything, and they usually do. People frequently are skeptical of corporate claims, until the government "affirms" it. Phin Fin (or however it is spelled) was "approved" by the FDA. Perhaps the FDA should have removed their collective head from their ass before approving it, and likewise, maybe the DoC should actually so some research before making great claims that people believe.
I'm not sure how it happened, but the goverment gained a reputation such that anything that comes from DC must be the gospel.
A modern day witchhunt.
What does this have to do with media, guaco? A child knows not to believe everything in the newspapers. This is misinformation from sources with legal and fiduciary responsibility to act forthrightly. This is financial analysts spouting press releases as research, accountants fudging figures, corporate execs talking up the sleeves of their $3,000 suits in their annual reports.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. --Thomas Jefferson.
illegitimii non ingravare
At that rate (doubling every 100 days) it only takes 8.9 years to go from 1 to 6.32 billion. How many people are there on earth? Oh yeah, 6.32 billion.
Hmmm.... something smells fishy.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I find it mildly ironic that /. believes things that are printed by the mainstream media.
With profound apologies to whomsoever this sig originally belonged.
Then why aren't "neighborhood" CO-OP/ISP's more popular? It would seem that providing a single 10Mbps link to a point on (say) a city block for residential (or even multi-use) service would be viable.
But, all we have is "connection sharing," where one customer gives away their connectivity, without being able to add any value or economies of scale for others.
Don't get me wrong; I know the per-customer cost is high (it'll take PacBell 2-3 months on my DSL service to cover the support calls and startup kit!), but why don't we see anyone filling the gap on bundled/value-added services in that last 100m?
makes the '80s "Decade of Greed" look like a kindergarten class. Bill "I never had sex" Clinton and Al "I invented the Internet" Gore really lead the charge too.
Lies. Lies. Lies.
Next time I hear about "greedy Republicans" I'm going to hit someone.
BC
Was it illegal for WorldCom to lie about the percentage of traffic that hit their network? Obviously it is in a grey area, and being that WorldCom had a minor monopoly it was easy for them to do. Business is a dog eat dog world. It's interesting to see how creative businesses will get when they want to throw off their compeditors. It makes you stop and wonder if WorldCom gave out correct information how much money would have been saved by their compeditors, and who would not have gone bankrupt.
WorldCom would hook up new customers with connections capable of handling, say, up to 1.5 Mbit/s of data, knowing that for most of the time the lines would only carry a fraction of this amount. WorldCom would then use the 1.5 Mbit/s figures, not the actual traffic figures, when citing Internet traffic growth statistics.
So they were like a water company talking about how much water you COULD use if you left your faucets open and sprinklers on 24/7, rather than how much you actually ran. (And if everybody else did, too. And if the city left all the fire hydrants open...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
He was a humongous mathematician. How'd he get to be an authority on internet growth? If Bud Selig can be Commissioner of Baseball, I guess that's ok, too, but Andy ought to have better things to do.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet... Err, umm, except slashdot articles.
LightReading had a very well-researched article about this earlier in the week.
And according to the article Worldcom was talking factor-of-10 per year, when in fact that was the right number for 1995 and 1996, but after that it was about factor-of-two per year. Still respectable, but nowhere NEAR Worldcom's numbers.
So with a factor-of-5 per year shortfall (and assuming bandwidth and customer base are proportional) when the bubble finally burst in early 2000 the dotcommers had one potential customer for each 125 they were expecting.
Having less than one percent of the market you thought you had can make the difference between a fantastic business plan and wastpaper.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Internet traffic doubles every 100 days? I never heard that myth. They must have a bad marketing department.
Trying to get rich for doing nothin'. It's everywhere. Most people want a shot at doing that. So we're all suckers _and_ hucksters.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
That would work, if everyone on your block was savvy, but how are you going to explain outages to your former friendly neighbors? It's a lot of responsibility and a lot of tension between people you have to live with.
Something like a homeowner's association could probably pull it off, but if an individual takes ownership of it solely, they are basically running a business then, and that's a lot to take on.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
A lone researcher cites vague research to blame WorldCom for dotcom bandwidth burst. Slashdot kids blindly believe the lone researcher with dodgy data and embark on rants about blindly believing what authorities say, using the WorldCom case as evidence.
Yup, just another day on Slashdot.
All ideas should be treated as lies until they turn a sustainable profit. Not very practical, but probably accurate.
Here's some examples of lies in the Computing industry (the only people who make money are the salesmen):
Software Process
ADA
Smalltalk
Object Oriented Programming
C++
Design Patterns
Modeling Tools
Java
Counter examples are the contributions of Knuth and Brooks, for instance.
In fact no abstraction makes a company profit (except the sellers of the abstraction.) Companies typically make money by implementing specifics. Abstractions *always* get in the way.
I don't think there are a million homeless people. Why? Because home is an state of mind. If a person makes a home for themselves on Lower Wacker Drive then they are certainly not homeless. This is just another liberal distortion. Liberals are so condscending that they would probably call all those who chose to make a home on the street homeless. (Yes, I did steal this from George Carlin.)
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Cactus?
actually Moore originally predicted a 12 month doubling and then extended it to 18 month, and then (recently) extended it to 24 months.
--sam
--sam
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
The big change in internet traffic, I would guess, is multimedia. It is probably now dominated by people downloading music and such on fast connections with other applications becoming small time. People may very well viewing twice as much html every 100 days but bandwidth shall from now on be music and movies. It shall soon be mostly just movies. The speed they roll out the DSL lines should have a huge effect.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
If you had gotten to the party earlier, you would have seen that the article about the guy getting busted for modding the Playstation originally said "Chip a PS/2, Go to Jail".
One of the counts against the thieves at Adelphia is that they infalted cable TV subscription numbers. Sounds like UUNet did the same thing. Make room in the cell for Bernie and John.
There are a small number of top-notch journalists, who really do objective well-rounded reporting. Unfortunately, it really is a small number of journalists.
You know, I almost hate to admit it, but I probably get 90% of my news from the Daily Show. It may be funny, and delivered by comics, but for the most part they really are good reporters. There's generally not much spin on the stories, and Jon Stewart usually does a good job of exposing the crap that most media outlets pass off as "news."
Of course, half of the episodes are always dedicated to morons who think they've seen bigfoot and the celebrity guest, but that 5 minutes of real reporting is pretty good.
It's sort of sad that Comedy Central has one of the best news shows on TV...
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Back when sugar was the sweetener I recall some pepsi sponsored taste tests, and I was one of the few people who prefered Coke. Of course now I usually drink the off brands unless I mix, in which case Coke seems to mix better.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
pad're but she got your balls in a box. Docs really and truely do suckx egoeggs yesterday today & tomorrow allday&night.
So what is the *real* growth rate of international internet traffic e.g. this year? Is there *any* somewhat reliable source at all? Does maybe the ITU track such things? I finally want the *real* numbers!
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions/links.
CK
Though his mind is not for rent
Don't put him down as arrogant
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Why does the news media seem so reluctant to use the word "fraud"? Is is fraud, isn't it? fraud (frôd) n. A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
But then in 2001 - those people decide sitting in front of their computer looking at yahoo, amazon or slashdot is just too boring (because modem dial up is just too slow) - so they decide to visit bookstore, hang out at the mall, or get a tan at the beach rather than sitting in a dark room all day.
Why is it that people buy into BS when it comes out of the president or some CEO?
It's the natural trust some people have for authority. In the US, most people seem to have a greater degree of distrust in the government (in Europe and the UK it seems the balance goes more the other way -- my English friends are regularly shocked that I not only fail to be surprised by, but often expect, the US government acting in a shady, unethical manner.)
Another example of this is when people getting violently screwed by their Very Big Company employer assume that everything happening to them is legal, because "every company does it that way". A big, big example of this is salaried employees not getting paid overtime -- the onus is on the employer to prove you're exempt, and if they don't or can't, they are required to pay overtime. Even many HR folk seem to honestly be unaware of this rule of the game, and millions of salaried grunts are the losers.
-- Old Man Kensey
BTW, Tbps can also stand for tablespoon, an English/Conventional unit of measure equal to about 16 mL
Actually, according to Cadbury, a British standard tablespoon holds 17.7ml while the American tablespoon has a 14.2 ml capacity.
I think I need to do more research; my sample size has remained static for a long time :-/
I wonder how US students will mod this :-)
Twice as much pr0n, twice the quality, twice as fast.
And every 100 days the single girl photos turn into girl-on-girl action.
After three years you get panoramic video of orgies in DVD quality.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
They cap cable modems for good reasons. If you are speaking of a speed cap, it's so their pipe doesn't get hammered. Few people are going to give you a full OC-12 (which is probably what runs to your local node) to use as much as you want. The cable companies pay for bandwidth. It costs them money for ever mb that goes through the pipe to another network. If they have to expand so that every joe on the block can get a full 10mb (your cable modem has a 10mb connector on the back, so that's your 'max'), it would cost them a ton of money, perhaps in 1999 a company would have tried to take a loss and try something crazy like that, but not today.
Some Cable companies put limit caps (10gb or so) on users to allow them to all have good speeds, and make sure that no one is running Warez servers out of their house. They have abuse coordinators that get calls from Adobe, MSFT, etc. all the time, saying that they found software available to all on someone's system. Then the abuse coordinator, normally just asks them to stop for first time offenders ( I think, it's not my job). Most people don't use more than 15gb/month on normal access. I used to use alot more, then I was hosting LAN parties all the time, and was actually downloading mp3s. I personally can't stand the way that mp3s sound over my speakers (which are very, very good), so I only like to listen to CDs or SACDs if I can get them. With 11 computers hooked up, I probably only use about 4-7 gb/month of traffic. Yes, sometimes I have used much more, but never more than 15gb/month. If you use a proxy server such as Squid or others, then you can cache some pages, and speed up a few things, and use a little less bandwidth. If you are seriously using more than 20gb/month of bandwidth, i AM pretty impressed. I mean you could be running a mirror of something out of your house, which would be cool, but you really should get a larger pipe to try something like that. Our cable company offers 4mb/2mb lines just for things like that with static IPs. I have seen some that offer over a 40mb direct fibre line to your door.
Hey don't complain that they 'owe' you or something, let's just be thankful that we have broadband, I remember a few years ago the highest that most of us ever saw was an ISDN at work, and perhaps a T-1 at school (that was normally overworked).
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Around this time DT became public, or less privatised is better to say. There was a huge public offering in Germany and almost everybody invested in it. These huge debts and the burst have sent the stock price plummeting with no sign of recovering soon. Lot's of people lost big money on this deal.
But the cultural differences still shine through: Worldcom lies about demand, DT tries to find other sources of revenue.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Radar, not instrumentation lighting. Not that I should really be wasting time answering an AC, but urban legends should be strangled at birth.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Moore's "law" is not such, it is an informed guesstimate.
Also bear in mind that when density begins from a very low number exponential increase can be sustained for longer.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The other two aren't.
So your point is?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.