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Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
nicholasjay writes "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent."
im with you.
Scare stories like this are used as a marketing chess move by the anti net neutrality lot of lobbyists.
Yes and of course, they are simple minded merchants. Chess is played by merchants and accountants; while philosophers and warriors play Go.
It is unfortunate that the people in power are also merchants and accountants. They will be more apt to respect the chess moves; while those of us who see the larger game in Go-- looking at the whole of the board, seeing how this move doesn't just change this area for the next few moves but alters future positions until the very end of the game dozens of moves later-- will see these chess moves as short-sighted self-serving drivel, and see the larger game taking better shape only if more care and consideration is taken before playing any move.
Of course, the merchants in power will play out with their fellow chess players, haggling over their simple goal of capturing or defending the king with no regard to how many pieces are lost on the board in the process by either side. Even if the businesses don't capture their king, they'll likely spread disaster before submitting to a checkmate; and both sides will think nothing of the destruction wrought, because one side won and the other lost.
Who cares about lost pawns when you won?
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Thankfully, I can think of nothing else that will get the average American more in a tiff than their chosen source of entertainment suddenly not working.
Don't mention gay marriage or legalizing pot. I may be slightly off topic here, but only /.ers and the like will know who to blame, and why to be mad. And that's not the average American. We're lucky if we make up 5%.
If only we could become the archetypal American, Joe the IT guy, as opposed to Joe the plumber.
--"insert clever quote here"
In Go, often the few moves in the endgame can swing 5 or 10 points and turn an obvious loss into an obvious win.
Chess is a horrible analogy for the real world. If I wanted to make this a pure Go analogy, I would have to go into a really deep discussion about two players trying foolishly for specific goals such as capturing a set of corner stones, which wouldn't make sense to most people any more than my already horrible analogy.
In chess, people resign when they can't win. In Go, loss of an area of play can be walked away from, and possibly recovered from later due to a changed state of the board. My analogy sucks mainly because I have to somehow argue that losing pawns somehow matters when you manage to checkmate the king; in Chess it really doesn't, but in such an analogy it would be ridiculous to say that pawns lost along the way are meaningless when you ultimately win. Stupid laws go on the books, even if they're not the laws you WANT.
It's hard. But the funny thing is that the analogy to playing Go as you would play Chess-- directing your energy to concrete goals, which in the game of Go is harmful-- is actually highly relevant to people who are only concerned with their tiny little sphere of influence and their single-minded goals in the middle of such volatile and far-reaching issues.
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