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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.'"
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.
"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.
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?
This will never fly because of simple mathmatics: 95% of the internet users pay too much for their connection anyway and use maybe 5% of their fair share or allotment.
If your plan would come into place those people would see their monthly bills drop like a rock.
Guess who won't be allowing any of that? Not to mention that anyone who's in the top 5% range of usage will drastically flee to cheaper operators or even adjust their download behavior.
All that metered access would accomplish is a gigantic drop in revenue for ISPs.
Respect in this case comes from the Internet Innovation Alliance who fund it. Of course, AT&T funds the IIA
Make of that what you will. I know that the first thing I think is "shill", followed closely by "astroturf".
Watch for this study to be cited in some bills regarding tiered service agreements any day now.
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?
No, of course it wouldn't - not unless your web browser is poorly written and stuck in an I/O blocking state, consuming all available CPU cycles. But that doesn't happen these days, and hasn't for a decade+. Never mind the bravado in which the article states these things is, and always has been, nonsense.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What sort of limited resource (other than bandwidth) are you consuming when you use the Internet vs Electricity? With Electricity, you are consuming power generation at the power plants, a non-unlimited source. With the Internet, the only thing limited are the resources to get you what you want, not the actual data you are concerned about. Does Google run out of bits to send you? Does your trading software say 'Oops, no more bits today'? No, it doesn't. Instead of comparing Internet Bandwidth to power generation, perhaps you would liken it better to roads (yay car analogies!). Even metered (tolls), it still exceeds it's maximum capacity (traffic jams). The only resolution is to build out the infrastructure (bigger road) to handle more traffic at once.
streaming video.
porn
You're just being redundant.
Don't you love it when people who don't understand irony think you actually mean what you say.
Actually, no, I don't.
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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
Computers slow down when you turn them off, or lower their clock rate. They don't slow down when you use them; you just put those cycles to (local) use.
What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?
Windows XP, filesystem browsing ("Computer Explorer") remote CIFS/SMB shares. Jitter, share, complete application freezeout*. Not hypothetical; I live it every day at a job where most of the documents I work on are hosted 1,000 miles away. (MS Word is a complete pig about temp files over the same remote link, too; that's another example of "jitter and freeze".)
*Yes. The kernel doesn't freeze. But it seems that large portions of the I/O complex does. Applications using the network mount definitely freeze. The desktop shell definitely does freeze. Since the "Start" button is tied to that same desktop shell, that means you can't start any other applications either. However, applications already running and not doing filesystem I/O are not frozen, I suppose. That means that I should keep Minesweeper running in the background to have something to do when most of the useful parts of the system are wedged solid.
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It's quite simple really, I'll explain:
A computer is a machine that has to fill with data in order to work, just like a lightbulb has to fill with electricity in order to work. Back in the old days, you purchased your data on little disks, and inserted them into the slot in order to fill your computer with data. Now, with the internet, you connect your computer to the data tube, which fills your computer with data from the cloud, just like taking your car to the gas station. The problem is, with pirates and pedophiles and enemies of the Comcast's Rightful Profit start consuming large amounts of data, the data pressure of cyberspace falls. When cyberspace's data pressure is lower than your computer's data pressure, data starts to flow out of your computer through the data tube, rather than flowing in. As your computer's data pressure falls, it starts to slow down and crash.
See?