Slashdot Mirror
Think-Tank Warns of Internet "Brownouts" Starting Next Year
JacobSteelsmith writes "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research, reports the Web has reached a critical point. For many reasons, Internet usage continues to rise (imagine that), and bandwidth usage is increasing due to traffic heavy sites such as YouTube. The article goes on to describe the perils Internet users will face including 'brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace,' and constant network 'traffic jams,' similar to 'how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games.' ... 'Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India. ... While the net itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts — a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.'"
Home computers slow down when kids come home from school and start playing video games? Poppycock. Home computers slow down when adults get home from work, come home, and start watching streaming video.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
that's not realistic at all. It's true we're going to see massive slowdowns in bandwidth, but those are caused by too many users drawing too much data through the 'tubes'.
Not to mention, this could all be solved if the greedy ISPs and network owners spent some of their damned earnings on upgrading the networks.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I didn't see this.
I didn't see this.
There just is no good reason not to start moving everything over to cloud computing and SaS.
Nuff said
Smivs on the intertubes!
I remember this from an earlier slashdot of the same group saying the same thing. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/20/0024248&from=rss
If only someone (cough **telcoms** cough) had been given time and money to expand bandwidth we wouldn't have this problem. Too bad they only had 15 years to try to solve the problem. Guess the internet just grow too fast for 'em.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
For the past 12 hours today, rapidshare.com has not been accessible to me on a random basis.
It pings all the time, but the HTTP protocol is not available.
So?
Iam unable to download my today's quota of HD movies and stuff.
Damn you internet.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
We would see massive power brownouts if electricity was being billed as an unlimited service too. The fact the internet service is still this way is silly. Meter it and move on.
Bob, is that you? ... I hope that Nemertes Research owns a blender
...waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts â" a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
Will all computers do this? I think not. They are either referring to servers or the network as a whole.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I mean, if the internet were to slow down to almost a standstill... then my computer would completely freeze, just like it does when I unplug my ethernet connection.
"This would be followed by brownouts a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed."
I have Comcast; how will I be able to tell when this starts to happen, compared to what I see today?
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
brownouts that will freeze their computers
In my experience, when the internet is slow or a server is having problems, the webpage takes longer to load. It doesn't affect anything outside the browser, and my other programs remain "unfrozen."
Aaargh, it's infuriating that a thinktank that has the false authority to make proclaimations like this conflates network performance and computer performance. It's like Intel's "MMX makes the internet faster" crap, but in reverse. A slow network does not suddenly make your favourite offline photo editing app slow down.
(I will of course withdraw these objections if it transpires that the think-tank have come back from the near future where everything's done on The Cloud.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Everyone's computer is going to jitter or freeze because the net will be over capacity? Are the rest of you still using Windows 95 or other OS's that don't multithread properly?
Otherwise, the idea that your whole computer will freeze due to a network issue is kind of laughable...
So far, carriers have added capacity often enough to stay ahead of the curve. I don't see why that would change now.
I'm sure if we just set up some sort of beowulf cluster among our desktops and set up a cloud on top of it it would solve all of our problems.
Windows 7 is already going there - the actual plan is to use the XP VM to host the internet locally - like freenet, but umm... controlled by Microsoft instead of the evil... umm... people. Yeah.
It seems most of these fluffy fear pieces are mere convenient flak for those that want some government excuse for broadband rollouts. These rollouts may or may not be warranted, but fear mongering is not convincing, especially when they tout increasing use of you tube or BBC iplayer as bringing down the global backbones. As you tube and BBC gain users, the response will be more and more local CDNs. There is no reason anyone's global backbones need be involved to stream you tube from India to USA.
Meh... this just smacks of astroturfing for "tiered service agreements" that the ISP's have been trying to push for a decade!
Besides, aren't random freezes and jittering just part of Windows "charm"? :)
> "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research.."
What does that mean, respected? By whom? Some IETF plenary council? Paris Hilton?
Is "respected" meant to imply the report is accurate? Why don't we judge reports on their own merits - soundness of methodology, reproducibility - rather than alleged reputations of the report's issuer?
This is the obligatory annual "INTERNET BROWNOUT OH GOD NO" article.
nooooooooo, we're running out of internet? i still have 2 more seasons of "I Love Lucy" to download!
Nemertes' research pops up often in discussions of net neutrality. See the Save The Internet blog for another perspective on their data.
When they make such technically brain dead statements as, "Internet brownouts will make computers freeze!" do they really expect anyone to take them seriously?
'brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace,'
If a problem with the internet connection actually freezes someone's computer, whoever had a hand in creating the operating system is a complete idiot.
On the front page is this one - must have taken a team of highly skilled research scientists to come up with it:
"Flu Fears Likely to Fuel Rise of Telepresence".
No shit Sherlock.
If they say the interweb demand is going to exceed capacity, I say we either add more pipes or make the ones we got bigger...or maybe we need to ream 'em out - are they gotten clogged up with fat and pr0n and bad music videos and stuff?
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Subject says it all but since it is so funny, insightful and shows how amazing a human being I am in 5 little words (and because the lameness filter forces me to showing that slashdot coders are silly and not worthy of kissing my furry butt, I will repeat here).
Think-tank, where thinking tanks.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Thank God! I'm glad someone knows what's going on in this confusing world of ours!
As far as what the OP says, aside from the wild fear mongering and hilariously dumb power distribution "analogies", I do tend to experience connectivity problems during peak hours (Sunday nights specifically). That is, I lose connectivity: upstream and downstream simply cease for periods of time (5s+), and I'm unable to connect to anything (including DNS) on the outside. It's infuriating.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I know it might sound totally crazy but can't we just you know ... build more of these tubes and then connect them to the other series of tubes so the interweb tube system doesn't fill up so fast.
This would be followed by brownouts -- a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
I consider it bad enough that I have to explain, every time I helps someone clean up their machine, that MSN loading slowly does not mean they have a slow computer.
And now we have so-called experts warning us that network lag will cause slow computers?
What next, a warning about how Windows 7 requires 16 GB of storage, causing a wave of panic among those who don't understand the difference between RAM and HDD space?
ive been using an alternative-internet technology based on corn and soybean oil for years now...with the only side effect being that my slashdot posts sometimes smell like french-fries or donuts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If this is the flavor of stupid being put out by respect think tanks I would hate to see what the less respected tanks are churning out.
Frozen computer?
Hah! I'm using a socket 478 Pentium 4, biaatch!
There is no hope of freezing this computer if the power is on, no matter what is happening with the internet.
I use it to heat my house, you insensitive clods!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Internet brownouts, eh? High-traffic issues and network congestion? Gee, if there were only a technology available out there that would decentralize the demand and give us the capability of sharing very large files...Hrm. Anybody know where I could fin[post censored by RIAA/MPAA. Copyright 2009 RIAA/MPAA. All Rights Removed.]
News flash... ISPs and Telcos know how to increase their bandwidth, too... it's not just the last mile that's getting faster and allowing people to do more and more frivolous things with their Internet connections.
Sheesh.
...again. Film at eleven.
"A respected American think-tank"
Respected by who ??
This would be followed by brownouts -- a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
So what you're saying then, is the future looks exactly like the Comcast service I have today.
Glad to know I'm inoculated against disappointment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Congratulations! This is the last page.
Thank you for surfing the web, so much that you finally came to the very last page. There are no more links to visit nor anymore pages to view."
Take a look at why Slashdot's pages load so slowly. There are several layers of "document.write(some javascript that loads something else)" just to load ads. The browser can't do the loads concurrently; they all take place sequentially. Each "document.write" has to finish before the code in it can be run. Also, some of the CSS is being read from "s.fsdn.com", which is a rather slow server at times.
It can get worse. Try Rushmore Drive, the slowest-loading search engine home page known. This is a spinoff of Ask. There's enough ad-related crap on that page that it takes 10-15 seconds to load. And this is without any personalization or content-related overhead. It's all inept ad serving.
Those are both sites maintained by supposedly competent professionals. Sites where some third-tier web programmer just cut and pasted code from other sites can be much worse.
We can probably deal with increases in Internet traffic just by improving ad-blocking.
A lot of that bandwidth is just from analytics gathering, mentioned here a few articles back: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/30/1216248
\\//_ Live long and prosper.
They forgot to add "My name is Time-Warner Cable, and I approve this message" at the end.
I'm getting serious deja vu here folks... seems to me we already got through a wave of this "the internet is going to burst" stuff years ago. Guess what? The internet is still going, much to the misery of some of the telecom companies that would have loved to have an internet state-of-emergency declared so they could come "rescue us" with filtering, heavy traffic shaping, and metered usage. Instead, they're trying to introduce these things behind closed doors or, when they can't like in the case of metered usage, through public tests which are being met with a lot of negative backlash.
This isn't really a technology limitation. This has nothing to do with dead websites clogging the net (LOL) and it isn't going to freeze anyone's computer.. at least not until every bit of our apps are in the cloud. This is the telecomms refusing to use money they were given for what it was for and balking at using their own profits do to it now. With little competition in most cases, these companies would like nothing better than to convince the general populace that the internet is as good as it can ever get now and that prices will need to be hiked and metered usage added to ration what we have.
And no, I don't think metered service is a good solution. I don't have any faith in these companies not to sorely abuse it. We've seen already how the ones that also manage cell service act... I don't trust them not to put a insanely inflated number on the cost of bandwidth per mb or gig (see cell text message for an example of an insanely overpriced service).
Really? Are we sure? This has nothing to do with IPv4 running out of addresses and IPv6 not being implemented in time? I wonder if they just numbed down the 'technical jargon' to be featured in more mainstream news... Bandwidth issues are not as bad as the issues with IPv4...if ISP's finally stop overselling their networks this would cease to be a problem. As an added bonus, more ISP companies would be demanded by the public thus creating more jobs and more competition in the market, as well as increasing the infrastructure of the network. Besides, the real problem in bandwidth issues is spam and botnets, not kids playing games or people watching hulu...
uhhh ... what the HELL does more traffic and less capacity have to do with your computer jittering and freezing!?
Your computer will run fine. You may be paying for metered internet, have every bit you access stored for review by a governmental droid, but your computer will run fine until the inevitable bloatware and toolbars slow it down.
This hand is the internet
This hand is your computer
*smack* that's for associating the performance of one with the other.
On a more serious note, this is why I wonder about the wisdom of offloading everything to the cloud. Mainframes and shared processing anyone? Local clients must continue to be able to function in a disconnected state.
be0wulfe
If the net slows down this much, who will want their business-critical software to sometimes run?
The summary was so bad that I actually read the article, expecting that I could then come here and post the usual flame about mangled, misleading, or otherwise just bad summaries.
That was a HUGE mistake. The article really is bad enough that no improvement in the summary would have been possible.
The author of that article confuses "computer" and "network streaming". The confusion seems to be quite deep, perhaps to the point that the author thinks of computers as mere display screens for this magical "internet" thing that does all the work.
Imagine that you read an article about a traffic jam, but rather than saying that the flow of traffic at the moment didn't seem to be very fast, it instead suggested that the cars would "jitter and freeze". That's how I felt when I read that article.
See that "Preview" button?
Why the hell would my computer slow down or freeze because of network congestion? My throughput my go down, but that has nothing to do with the performance of my machine, it just means webpages will load more slowly. Time to panic! Seriously though, we can all blame the telcoms for not investing their huge tax breaks in new infrastructure electing to instead go on boat rides and the like.
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 : brownout \brown"out\ n. 2. a partial reduction in the amount of electric power available to customers in a region, such as by reduction of voltage or selective cutoff of certain customers;
"The companies" have already been testing selective cutoff of internet access, and some are even making appearances of "backing off". This "study" is simply telling the truth. "The companies" are going to increase their practices of selective cutoff. This is just propaganda to get the general public to believe it's not "the companies" doing it deliberately.
It sounds like Titanic 2020 http://www.censa.org/censaorgfiles/Publications/Titanic2020_bookmarks_Jan-21-2000.pdf is coming a little early. They were predicting Titanic 2020 back when we work fixing Y2K problems in the 1990's.
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?
That kind of comment generated a "WTF?" reaction from me. As did "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research"... I never heard of Nemertes Research, and if this is the quality of their work, they ain't getting no respect from me!
Who is this mysterious Nemertes Research Group? They are part of the Internet Innovation Alliance, and you'll never guess who's footing the bill. I'll give you a hint, it starts with A*&*. No that's too easy, let's call them *T&T.
As has become the defacto standard way of doing business, let's pay some 'researchers' to publish the results that favor our intentions. "Remember, statistics don't lie, just the fuckers that use them."
I've been observing these "brownouts" on a small scale for at least several years now, during the act of something as bandwidth-friendly as sending a plain-text e-mail. The catch is that these brownouts have occurred at rather suspicious times of day: when people are changing daily activities en masse, changing gears, if you will.
Have you ever tried to call into a radio station during a contest or promotion, and encountered that lovely "all circuits busy" signal, because the lines at that instant were jammed with hundreds of other people trying to do the same thing? Have you ever been trapped in a sea of unmoving cars during so-called "rush hour"? (Never mind that these days rush hour is a three hour window.)
Rush hours happen on the Internet already, and have been happening for some time.
South Park already discussed this issue extensively.
From TFA:
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource.
Really? The internet was limitless in 1989 and now its slowing down? Which internet were they using?
That's pretty much a complete rewrite of history if I've ever seen one. The internet was really slow in those days. My whole university of 40,000 students had a 64kbit connection to the internet as late as 1993 or so. Anybody remember the www being called the world-wide-wait? I think the first couple of years I was more limited by the backbones the by the last mile. And that was on dialup!
Then at some point in the late 90s, probably during the dot com boom, they finally got the backbones to where they could keep up. And by and large, I think they do that pretty well even with the much increased traffic today. Did these guys just make up some facts to support their fearmongering theory? Like 'home computers' slowing down when kids start playing games?
I don't get it
There's 20,000+ miles of dark fiber in America owned by a couple of shells or consortiums. All this was laid out during the late 90's dot com boom and the bandwidth per fiber was tripled with DWDM. Most of the holding companies acquired the infrastructure for pennies on the dollar as deployed fiber costs fell with dwdm.
On top of that the telcos laid out an extra set of conduits with all fiber to snake future fiber through..all the backbone they need to double of triple their bandwidth is already available..
The ISP's are really reluctant to invest money in leasing more fiber and upgrading their switches, god forbid they accidentally invest money in something actually beneficial for their customers. they prefer to spend money lobbying and threatening out the competition.. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86081/big-us-isps-roll-out-push-polling-to-stop-cheap-internet/
Let's create some more FUD on 'brownouts' and roll out the bandwidth caps... On a related note TWC will be repackaging a recent Southpark episode as a documentary on excess internet usage and broadcasting it for free on all channels tonight..
think tank? these comments sound so retarded. i think my grandmother could have come up with better analogies without even knowing what the internet is.
In other news...
...this is the year of Linux on the desktop.
...Apple is dead.
...Moore's law has reached its end.
...the latest copy protection scheme will work this time.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What is this thing called 'Javascript' you people speak of?
Oh, right. The little unchecked box in my preferences.
Never mind me while I go back to loading pages in a blink.
Have gnu, will travel.
Modern codecs are pretty CPU-intense. As long as you keep the data flowing, the CPU stays busy and generates a lot of heat. If the pipe stalls, what happens is that the CPU idles. Now, the article is probably written for an audience where most people overclock with some rather extreme cooling solutions. When these peoples' CPUs idle, the water-cooling can actually ice up.
When the coolant freezes, the tubes burst. (Senator Stevens warned us about this, but people didn't understand, and some even ridiculed him.) Then when more packets come in and the CPU resumes working and heats up, the coolant thaws and leaks out of the broken tubes. Coolant gets all over the motherboard, and the computer crashes.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The Internet is at the mercy of current events. When something of global interest happens, the Internet slows to a crawl internationally. The death of Princess Diana or Jerry Garcia, the tsunamis in Indonesia and other events slowed responses to the point that the mainstream media commented on that topic as much as they did the underlying event.
No one mentions spam? I know that most servers are running 94-95% spam and the vast majority of that is in the 200kb range these days. AOL has reported billions of spams per year. I don't have any metrics, but with the increasing spam rates across the board, I would think that dwarfs all other online traffic combined.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
This think tank's claims are pure garbage. You all need to read this article from arstechnica about how the peak and average load on the internet backbone has actually dropped over the last couple of years. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/exaflood-not-happening.ars
You can bet they'll start complaining all this bad stuff happened because they weren't allowed to traffic shape, implement tiered pricing and charge at both ends of the pipe.
Then they'll do what the coal power industry is doing, just drag their feet until the government gives them money to solve the problem or solves it for them, then step in to reap the profits.
After all, some of those high flying execs might have to scrimp by with a few million less if they made infrastructure investments.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You can read more about Nemertes here, including profiles of their management and employees (including two research analysts):
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/nemertes-research
End anonymous moderation and posting on
I remember when the web started to take off, everyone said that would kill the internet. How could we possibly have enough bandwidth to cope with web pages and even (shock horror) images!
Obviously the answer is to trim down people's internet usage, afterall, browsing porn and utube are contributing to global warming.
-Al Gore approves this message.
I have never heard of this "Internet" company before, but I am 100% certain they are infringing on a Microsoft patent.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Most urban broadband users in the USA have 2 choices for ISP, cable and DSL/Fiber. Close on their heels is white space spectrum, 4G wireless, etc. They will begin to compete on availability and quality of service. If there are brownouts on one then they will lose the customers that flock to their competitor. The invisible hands of the free market have got this one covered. You can go back to your streaming video now and stop worrying.
A respected American think-tank...
Not after publishing this article.
Its nothing more than a scam run by the ISPs that want to use a metered charge. This is just the beginning of a series of articles that will be intended to make you think paying by the megabyte is doing you a favor when in reality it is just another way for ISPs to increase their profits.
Friends Of Dvorak.
I think the Internet has been doomed since even ARPANET.
This is my sig.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7103426.stm
US analyst firm Nemertes Research predicted a drastic slowdown as the network struggles to cope with the amount of data being carried on it. (2007)
Oh noes! It's the exaflood! Where have we heard this before? If there were a shortage of bandwidth, the price would be going up. It's not. It's going down. I am really tired of these Malthusian predictions. Technological innovation will take care of most of this problem (e.g. DWDM, DOCSIS 3.0, etc). I wonder who funded this study? Is it someone looking for a subsidy to build out infrastructure or is it cable companies anxious to jack up prices?
Given the content of the actual article, the past tense is really appropriate now.
Nermetes Research is nothing more than an ISP funded thinktank. So the results they've come up with took no study. So let's follow the cash trail Nermetes Research http://internetinnovation.org/community/members http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/suckered-by-astroturf_b_73483.html
Or, we could just start using IP multicast for all audio and video streaming. We're talking 15 year old technology here... why isn't anybody using it?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Since they are coming out of standby/hibernate/poweroff...wouldn't the computers technically be speeding up?
Also the day the internet crashing causes my pc to stop working is the day I switch to an abacus, damn things always work, but takes forever to render crysis on one.
They use document.write so that the page can't show up until the ad image is finished loading.
OG.
First off the Think Tank is well respected... by who exactly? I am pretty neck deep in the industry and I've never heard of them. If you are going to tell us "they are well respected" then a journalist would provide us with who holds them in high regard.
Second: A think tank, in this sense, is usually funded. In full disclousure when talking about "THINK TANKS" it is usually customary to indicate the sponsors of said think tank.
Third: More statistical mumbo jumbo. 60% growth each years is irrelivant without the baseline numbers to go with it. I can have a 60% growth rate no problem but 60% of what? 60% of the base population? 60% increase in the new traffic? (In short if it went up last year by 100 people and this year went up 160 or were there 100 people to begin with and we added 60 more...)
I could go on but I am tired, cranky, and due for a nap...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Oh. So .. things are reaching the same point that they were at [in many places] in, say, 1991 .. when places like where I am had internet [telnet, really] access through our local university's one 9600bps pipe..
Really, is anyone surprised about this? Considering the huge amount of intended-for-infrastructure money that providers have utterly squandered over the past 20 years? I doubt it would really happen at the scale they seem to describe here, but.. yeah.
Strange, loads just fine for me :) (Adblock plus does have uses)
My Babylon
WTF is wrong with these people? How do these astroturfers live with themselves? Is there nothing more important than the size of your paycheck or your corporate rank?
Everyone's surely seen through this and it goes without saying, but yes, this is pure anti-nn astroturf, and it's being shoveled out now because of TWC's recent actions.
http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/The-Exaflood-Myth-Just-Wont-Die-102202
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12673221
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2007/11/20/suckered-by-astroturf/
Dirtbags. "Research", my ass.
...sounds like it'll be pretty much the same, then.
Check who is paying their bills. They are only trying to do what has been done for a long time convince people that there needs to be more government money thrown at ISPs. We have seen these same stories going back years and years. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/04/63264 The report assumes no new investment in increasing capacity. Whatever. Dumb Masses.
Ludicrous! Internet brown outs will have ZERO impact on your computer's speed. Losing your internet connection does not "freeze" your pc.
AND they completely ignored the fact that most ISPs are now limiting b/w and placing monthly caps, on top of the capped speeds to begin with.
AND they failed to mention the 1 aspect that WILL cause problems for the internet, we're OUT OF IPS!!! We need to switch over to ipv6 asap.
This article is bull honky writted by someone with little to no knowledge of computer technology.
>,' similar to 'how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games.'
This quote immediately destroyed all credibility for the authors of whatever this is.
Gaming usually creates very little traffic. It's the torrent and other p2p users downloading/uploading movies, music and software, usually illicit copies, as well as people downloading huge legal content files (Netflix, Amazon, direct2drive et. al)
Gaming doesn't saturate your ISP's connections, full throttle downloadin' does.
Even with a VOIP client (such as teamspeak or ventrilo) running you are looking at less traffic than would saturate a 56k modem, for most gaming, at least when it's not patch day. On patch day, yea but it's still not 24x7 downloadin' and patch day only happens once in a while.
-Viz
Sounds like that wolf crying again...
Seriously, I've been hearing that long distance bandwidth is plentiful, it's just the last mile that is the limiting factor.
There's someone backing up your claims that if your metered internet usage isn't implemented, the world will end. HORRAAAAYYY!!!
Now get back to spinning metered access in a way that consumers will "understand", and that will protect your on-demand video from the eeevil intertubes.
phenomena, he must not be on Comcast. Just had a 5 minute freeze about 20 minutes ago...
Do you have ESP?
What is this thing called 'Javascript' you people speak of?
Oh, right. The little unchecked box in my preferences.
Never mind me while I go back to loading pages in a blink.
Every time a new browser claims to be X times faster than existing browsers, I wonder why people want to get their pages loads in 0/X instead of 0 seconds. If you block ads, there are very, very few sites on the internet that have a noticeable rendering time.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
You joke but(and this is true) on my dodgy slow GPRS connection, from here in deepest Africa, slashdot sometimes decides to ignore the ends of my comm
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
it will only freeze if you are using rdp or vnc or some other thing like that !
What a bunch of baboons. At the bottom of http://www.nemertes.com/who_we_are/who_we_are
"Jonathan Block :w!q"
Jonathan Block is our resident Jack-of-all-Trades here at Nemertes. In addition to his duties as Head IT Administrator, Jonathan is also our Webmaster, Sound Editor, Staff Photographer, Head Chef, and IT Project Manager.
He's a horrible photographer and 'webmaster'--but at least he uses vi. "Head Chef?"
We're all gonna die from Swine Flu anyway.......
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Oh my God! Oh My God! OH MY GOD! Its going to be worse than Y2K!!!!!!!! MAN BEAR PIG!!! MAN BEAR PIG!!!
So we won't be able to watch porn?
Perish the thought!
Steve in Ft. Laud., too lazy to log in
http://www.nemertes.com/studies/internet_interrupted_why_architectural_limitations_will_fracture_net
Not nearly as bad as the Sunday Times article...
The most poorly written article ever.
I don't own a single computer that will "jitter" or "freeze" if my internet connection is down. Who on earth does?
Individual applications may be effected, however it will not "freeze" the computer. I hate idiots that write about things they don't understand.
And, who are these people that are using their home pc's as mainframes? How do the kids getting home from school and playing games making the home computer slow? Who is noticing? unless they are somehow using that pc as a terminal server no one. Is it making the rest of the computers in the house internet access slower? That is a completely different thing than making the computer slow.
or have you forgotten how fast the net used to be before browsers were configured to verify websites as not being evil, and checking every little link and ad with some cybercop someplace.
it's like working dialup again.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
remove all the damn ads and Im sure we'll be just fine
Ok,
I work for the biggest backbone provider on the planet that . There is just too much dark fiber for this to be true. In addition to the dark fiber all of the conduit that the fiber is laid in has room to easily deploy more fiber simply by snaking it through as most smart providers use over sized conduits.
The question here is MONEY not technology. The last mile ISP's are trying to soak more money out of consumers and are using scare tactics like this to justify their price jacking. This is more about what kind of Ferrari or corporate jet the CEO has rather than a technical issue.
This article, or at least the summary appears to be written by a non-technical person. The speed of your internet or lack thereof has no relation to your computer freezing or slowing down. Firefox will run just fine regardless of how slow or fast the internet(s) are working.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
...about ten years ago. Of course, they were calling it "the gigalapse" back then.
I remember the great IRC splits that would happen due to kiddies and their mIRC scripts fighting it out on EffNet.
Ah, those were the days.
JOHBOT ME!
WTF? Over?
Every single year someone claims this, and it has never happens. The fact is that, no matter what the ISPs want you to believe, there is more than enough bandwidth to go around.
That spams refresh. And everything will be okay. Providers make too much money keeping us online. Market forces will take care of things.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
HOSTS files provide security benefits, & speed!
(Via blocking KNOWN bad adbanners &/or websites, from a CENTRAL source, not just individual browsers &/or webbased programs (email mainly, this is an attack vector too if HTML mail & scripting is allowed))
I populated it with my own lists for HOSTS files since 1997 (30.000 entries long, mostly for adbanner blocking @ first 1997-2001), then later for security 2002 onwards...
I extended it further (to 654,000 unique entries currently & yes, I have to stop the Windows DNS client for that, it's 14mb for Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003, & up to 19mb (using 0.0.0.0) OR 26mb (using 127.0.0.1) for Windows VISTA/Server 2008/Windows7) per sources like:
1.) StopBadWare.org
2.) SRI
3.) Dancho Danchev's ZDNet Blog
4.) SpyBot "Search & Destroy" Immunize lists
5.) , + other reputable known HOSTS files shown @ wikipedia.com, here ->
All nearly DAILY updated here.
(& kept free of repeat entries via a program I wrote to do that, as well as alphabetize the entries, plus change them to a "faster up off disk into memory" internal schema for blocking out bad sites & adbanners, by going from the larger, slower 127.0.0.1 default loopback adapter IP, to either 0.0.0.0 (for VISTA/Server2k8/Windows 7, a mistake on MS' part I mentioned to they here -> http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/09/recognizing-improvements-in-windows-7-handwriting.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage which they started on 12/09/2008), OR the fastest & most efficient 0 blocking IP address))
HOSTS files are a good layer for this, then you can also "layer on" IE Restricted Zones, Opera filter.ini/urlfilter.ini, & FireFox addons like NoScript + its internal to browser restricted sites lists ontop of them, for the utmost in security protection AND speed (I do other things like use custom cascading style sheets & PAC file filtering as well, but those are another subject)...
APK
P.S.=> Layered security, AND, more speed... usually security things (like AntiVirus' programs for example) add another layer of processing complexity and slow you down... NOT HOSTS Files! apk
This is likely the fourth or fifth time in the last 15 years that I have heard that the internet is about to collapse under its own weight. BTW how much dark fiber is out there right now?
Yeah, clearly the solution to the sequential loads is to offer us threads in the browser. Threads would make things so much simpler for the Web 3.x monkeys. And like JavaScript memory allocation, we need a thread garbage collection so threads are created and destroyed "auto-magically". Imagine how much more the browser could do, and how much more content could be delivered in a mutli-threaded browser environment. Why aren't advertising folks and PHBs clamoring for this?
Bwah-ha-ha.
We need to get more hard drive space for the interwebz - wait no that doesn't make sense. I think its a plot for M$ to make it look like the internet is crashing their systems.
It's about time spam and illegal P2P was brought to an end. I reckon there'd be a 25% drop in traffic just by killing illegal P2P traffic.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
An online OS and desktop may freeze when bandwidth shuts down, not a local system. With the move to put applications online to prevent piracy this is what can be expected... no control over your machine. Bad move, bad article, I have to believe MOST computer users have more of a clue than to believe this BS.
Only AOL users and webTV folks will fall for this.
If only we had a way to make technology gooder so it wouldnt suffer from being slow. maybe every 16 to 18 months?
Will it be a rolling brownout? :)
No offense intended, but there's been a bit of revisionism with regard to "free market" - as it used to be referred to as "free enterprise" - which has been destroyed by big business - formerly known as a monopoly.
easy solution: outlaw windows! without botnets reading some IRC channel, sending gazillions of spam-mail per day, brute-forcing server-logins, attacking other PCs and seeding child pornography, I guess we'd free up around 10-20% of the current bandwidth usage...
also this stupid discussion has been nonsense in every f*cking generation of the web - why should it be different this time?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
n/t
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
For making Slashdot fall for this astroturf AGAIN, both JacobSteelsmith and timothy need to be booted off the damned site.
In other news some other think tank says that orange farmers may be forced to stop growing apples, leading to the end of oranges due to not enough funding. "Cirusium Ex Examina", an independant body has released a paper showing just how this might happen in 4 months time. Asked how the think tank can stay afloat by just "thinking things and then saying what those things are" a spokesman said "We're heavily funded by The Orange Industry".
Think tanks stink no matter whether you agree with them or not.
(This opinion is not final but is strongly held opposing debate would be more than welcomed but I don't see another option).
"Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts â" a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.'"
Seriously, was this interview given to grade-school kids? "...jitter and freeze..." WTF is this guy talking about?
It's seems to me that if someone is going to be giving and interview regarding the Internet, they should probably know something about it first. Just a thought.
This is a load of BS. They were writing this up for next years April 1st web jokes and accidentally hit send prematurely.
The key sentence in this whole thing: "Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity."
Of course you have to wade down to the very last sentence before you find the motivation of this little bit of astroturf, which is "we need to punish the big users of the 'net because if we don't, your computer will crash."
Translation: "give us tiered pricing or die."
It's just FUD designed to push an agenda.
Um my outside connection slowing my computer down? Um. ya, sure.
It might piss me off, might kill my browsing for the day, but slowing my computer down is just a bad marketing ploy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But then again, im on comcast.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Who ever wrote the article should get canned. Same with everyone up the administrative chain that let it go out.
If what they said was true, and computers had more problems and errors when there was less network capacity available, the no computers could work at all unless they were connected to the net.
Proof otherwise is trivial and can be obtained by anyone reading this.
One can assume most generously that the author can't tell a computer from the net. Any other assumption makes them look worse. Still, the best is bad enough that they've sunk any reputation they had.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Where's Brad Templeton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Templeton when you need him?!
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Install a geared data supercharger - you can use data pressure sensors to automatically change the gearing on the supercharger to suit the conditions. I'd install a data bypass valve for safety to prevent a dangerous data overpressure condition which could blow your RAM gasket and bend your CPU rods.
This setup will heat up the incoming data though, so make sure you have active cooling on your NIC. Finally you might want to richen up the electricity mixture to prevent data corruption.
For a slight overhead, that should allow the computer to suck in more data as needed and operate in lower data pressures.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Our politicians believe the way to avoid brownouts is to require all traffic to fight for bandwidth at the same time. No protocol or user can be inhibited in their God-given right to use the Internet with as much bandwidth as they want, when they want. This is called net neutrality. I predict growth in private networks like Akamai as public nets are inundated. Then again, the next dip in the recession may knock a few tens of millions of the 'Net, avoiding the brownouts for a while longer.
On top of that, you seem to be extremely oblivious about the default values for connection limits on p2p applications like eMule, or most bittorrent clients.
I just did a default install of eMule, the latest version from their website.
Here's my connection window. I changed no options, selecting the closest speed to my ISP's connection (1.5/768):
http://i44.tinypic.com/mjveds.jpg
I did have 49b installed (but unused), and it was at something along the lines of 400/800 or 600/800 before doing an uninstall and reinstall.
Unless I'm confused, that says 800 connections max. The only other thing connection related I can find is under Extended, which has a "Max. New Connections / 5 secs.: 20".
So I'm not crazy. The default limit for an average DSL user is 800 connections at the same time.
Unlike these cloud computing dipshits, my computer has its own CPU.
It only slows down when I'm multitasking.
Occasionally my Internet will slow down, but the computer itself is not slowed down by network traffic.
Not at all.
You pay the ISPs so they can constantly upgrade their network. That is their business, if they don't do this, you have 2 choices:
1. Change to an ISP which _does_ upgrade it's network. (This may not always be possible)
2. Build your own network by peering with your neighbours over WLAN or simmilar technologies. After all there's little need for your neighbours to torrent the same as you do, a central server could easily get rid of much internet bandwidth. Plus it's harder to detect by outside organisations.
Bahahahahahaahahahaahahahahahahahaahaaaaaa!
Thank you ever so much! I really needed this pick-me-up!
Hey remember that e-mail that floated around saying that websites could take your picture through your keyboard/screen?
Ahh. Bliss.
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
I think we all should know the procedure with utility pricing by now:
1. Prime the consumers.
2. Create scarcity: stage blackouts and shortages.
3. Start jacking up prices year after year...
Telephone companies hire 'think tank' to talk up bandwidth scarcity. Telephone companies ask for price rises.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Oh no! It's the Exaflood! Hide in your basements or be consumed by the wave of streaming video!
This is nothing but political propaganda put forth by the "we need to censor and control the internet" lobby.
I thought that brownouts only happened on Patch Day Tuesday for WoW.
Sig? No thanks. I don't smoke.
I agree that eventually we will get to a utility billing system. We are starting to see that now with many of the ISPs. I would like to know the assumptions around the think tanks projects.
Yeaahhhhhh...
This is why I severely dislike the current technique used by the majority of people to explain technical things to lay people.
It's the same goofy shit that made masses of people think of computer cases as hard drives and actual hard drives as memory. Or worse, they think the case is the CPU.
- Alex
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When I'm waiting for my video to buffer (in the rare case it's being slow) I usually go take a dump. It's called multi-tasking....sheesh... But seriously though, my computer is going to freeze because the internet is too congested? double u tee eff.... Computers slow down when kids come home and play games? El oh el... Either these guys have no real idea how computers and the internet works, or they are the champions of wording shit wrong.
So southpark was right?