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Why the Olympics Didn't Melt the Internet
perlow tips his blog entry over at ZDNet on why the Internet didn't melt when millions of users streamed 480i video for a week. The short answer is Limelight Networks of Tempe, Arizona. "[W]hy the Internet didn't 'melt' is quite simple — [Limelight is] completely 'off the cloud.' In other words, unlike Akamai and similar content caching providers, their system isn't deployed over the public Internet... Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide... so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP's main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP's internal network. In most cases, you're never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video."
Canada (the CBC) ranks them the same way as the US.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Ummm...I run XP and had no problems at all.
Maybe nobody was watching:
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld has a great rundown of the numbers behind this weekend's Olympic coverage. The highest day of coverage was on August 10th and it saw about 3.42 million video streams with 66.7 million page views and an average time spent on the site of 15 minutes. Pretty good numbers but as the BTL piece notes, that's only about 2% of a typical YouTube day. So it didn't exactly take the world by storm.
reference
In this case, there is a distributed bunch of servers, so when a user requests a file, it's not even reaching the internet backbone, it's reaching a dedicated video server which is local to the ISP. Net neutrality has nothing to do with this, this is just agreements between companies to make highly demanded video available to users without costing the ISPs as much bandwidth.
I work for an ISP in Australia, we and a number of other local ISPs have local Akamai clusters. I haven't RTFA, mainly because if the summary isn't right, then the article probably isn't right either. It is mutually beneficial for content providers and ISPs to host content locally. For the content provider, they have more content distribution points, which is a selling point to use with their customers. For the ISP, it shifts typically fairly large amounts and "types" of traffic off of their Internet transit links, saving them money.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Because our esteemed broadcaster, Channel 7, decided that it wouldn't stream anything of note at all online live.... at all.
Rather than, oh, I don't know, streaming what was being shown on tv onto the web (with ads and all, hence just the damn same revenue possibility, only with more viewers), they decided to occasionally stream some match that no-one was actually interested in at all, while they showed the 'good stuff' on tv. Which sucked, because in Australia most of the good stuff is happening while we're at work.
Except, well, channel seven's coverage has been ABYSMAL.
They:
* Spend half their time showing recaps and highlights of stuff that's already happened instead of showing things that are ACTUALLY ON RIGHT NOW
* Spend a sizeable chunk of their time broadcasting Australian Rules Football matches instead of the Olympics! For god sakes! I'm sure the footy fans can live without a bloody live football match during the Olympics... show the games when the Olympics are not happening RIGHT NOW!
* Spend a huge amount of time advertising all the shows we don't want to watch on their channel that will be on after the olympics, including one horrendously insulting one where they show some Olympic gold moment, then a bit from one of their shows, then an olympic moment, then one of their shows, all the while with soaring music and a voice over being overly earnest. Trying to suggest that they are reaching for gold, and doing their personal best and trying to compare themselves to Olympic athelets when showing Australia's next Top Model is, frankly disgusting.
* Then when they do show anything live, they seem to like showing heats and almost entire matches of deciding games of hockey or the like rather than showing finals of things that are happening RIGHT NOW.
Urgh, the coverage of the games in Australia this year has been downright pathetic, and I hope Channel 7 gets a downturn rather than an upturn in their ratings to punish them for treating them with the utter contempt they have.
Answer: has nothing to do with it. Let me demonstrate why by switching a couple words around:
Let me get this straight. World of Warcraft content is getting special treatment due to commercial deals between Blizzard, Blizzard's Hosting Networks, and a bunch of subscribers?
Do you see how both your question and my altered question have absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality?
The official rank is always sorted by the amount of gold medals, i guess because they want USA to be on top they go for the alternate "Rank by total medals". Still, you can check the real rank and the rank by total on the official website.
The Olympics, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
The website said that it was Vista only, on the main page when I checked, even if the stream worked fine on every platform, a lot of people would have seen that and not bothered going any further
The commercial deals are just to co-locate content. You too can co-locate content with your ISP as part of a commercial deal. How can this bode anything for net neutrality anyway?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Not sure how big you have to be, but if you are of sufficient size, Akamai will approach you. They did to the university where I work. Their deal was simple: They cover all the costs, you put their computers in your datacentre. Basically the provide a number of cache engine computers and a switch to connect them to. You then mess with your routing so that traffic prefers those over their central site.
It's win-win. It costs you nothing other than some staff time, reduces your bandwidth usage (we knocked off an average of like 5mbps) and increases the speeds your users see. They of course also get the benefit of reduced bandwidth usage.
I'm sure they don't do it for every tiny ISP out there, but you you are of reasonable size (may be if you have your own ASN), expect Akamai to take notice and come offering cache engines.
Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?
I imagine it's to put the US first. Personally I think it's a ridiculous way of ordering things. It encourages playing safe for bronzes, which is boring and contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.
Then again we've got to remember that no official table exists and it's not in the Olympic spirit. Personally, I think an official one should be made just to settle things once and for all. It's all well and good saying people shouldn't rank the countries, but they do and it affects both tactics and funding.
An (America-centric) article on the subject can be found here.
Silverlight 2 (required for NBCOlympics.com) doesn't run on most Macs in the field. It only supports the newer intel-based Macs, which eliminates the 3 Macintoshes I have at home (including my PowerMac G5 with 4 x 2.5GHz cores, 8GB RAM, and 30" Cinema HD display). It also doesn't run on either of the Windows 2000 machines I have at home.
I think that it does. In Europe, funding in many countries has been ruthlessly cut for sports that don't look likely to yield golds. This leads to situations where gynastic teams (for example) will try incredibly high-scoring routines in the last round to nab a gold (and some more funding for the next four years) only to fail and lose the bronze that they could have secured.
If you know your funding just depends on getting a medal, you'll probably consolidate your third place, rather than going all out for a tiny chance of gold.
sure, when you add the ?sort=gold it matches the other sites, however if you just go to http://stats.cbc.ca/olympics_medals.asp it sorts by total medal count by default, which is what NBC is doing.
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There's a reasonably official one at the official site: http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/INF/GL/95A/GL0000000.shtml
It has an extra column, rank by total medals, for those searching for some redemption because of sheer numbers of participants. Aussies don't mind the American sorting though, as it puts us fourth :)
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Funny, but the real reason it didn't melt is because they refuse to stream video across international boundaries so most of the world cannot access it...
I'm from Australia, currently living in Norway, and I definitely wanted to watch the Aussies and also be able to watch with English commentary, rather than Norwegian. So I bypassed those regional restrictions to stream video from both NBC and Yahoo7. It can be done with either a VPN or SSH tunnelling to a server in the USA (for NBC) or Australia (for Yahoo7).
If you have a server available to do it, SSH tunnelling is as simple as:
ssh -D 8080 -fN username@example.com
Then set your browser to use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS 5 host.
Otherwise, eurosport apparently has streaming available in Europe, but it costs a few dollars; and, if it works in your country, I'm told youtube.com/beijing2008 has some videos, but I'm not sure which countries that's available in (It doesn't seem to be available in either Australia, Norway or the USA)
Finally, as a last resort, you can try downloading events recorded from TV through either usenet, bittorrent or other P2P networks.
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But, if you run linux with vmware/Windows XP, the streaming works fine. Just make sure you have enough RAM and you'll be ok. I've accessed the site from my work PC running Suse Linux 10.2, 2 GB RAM, nvidia graphics (512 mb) with vmware/XP running in a second monitor. I get the occasional hiccup, but I think that's mostly due to lack of RAM -- mostly, it runs fine.
You sound confused, but you're an AC, so I guess that's a given.
Iceweasel is Firefox for Debian users. It really is that simple.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Not to shit all over your rant, but the site is clearly satire. They list China as "Communist China" for fuck's sake! What, does something have to be Maddox level before your spoof sensors start going off?
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