The data the article presents really just shows a ton of Netflix traffic breaking the Internet for other users. Shouldn't all that adaptive bitrate stuff make it NOT break other flows? Apparently, not so much. Did Netflix respond by making their video delivery less aggressive, the way Bittorrent did with LEDBAT? No.
What did we learn?
1) Netflix breaks any link it's on. Period. Full stop. The rest of the Internet only gets through when Netflix isn't peered together with it.
2) Therefore ISPs -- ALL ISPs -- bad.
3) Therefore Net Neutrality so Netflix can break the Internet.
Of course, one might be tempted to conclude that big data users should work out their own peering and financial arrangements so that they don't mess up the Internet, but that would make one a corporate shill.
I did a registration system for a pre-school this way thinking having everything land in a spreadsheet would be about their speed. It was kind of awful. You think of
Google as having a bunch of great APIs that let you do all sorts of fantastic things, but stuff that would have been absolutely trivial to do in MS Office 15 or 20 years ago using VBA (minus the web part, which was barely around) were hard to impossible to make happen.
Want that input form to look nice? Want the submitter to be able to preview it or edit what was on it later? Good luck doing that without building a whole different front-end. Google docs lets you use a form to add lines to a spreadsheet, but that's pretty much where the magic ends. I hacked in editing the thing by sending out links that pre-populate fields in a second spreadsheet which Google docs copies over to the first spreadsheet. Yes, it's stupid. No, it's not me. It's Google.
If you're a developer on Google docs and reading this... thanks for making it possible to add a line to a spreadsheet from an ugly form. I am so sorry that they make you do these crappy "20%" effort projects that you're not really proud of and that aren't good enough to help anyone. I know you probably want to put in the time to make a great HTML5 form builder or make it easy to manage an entry using a unique key or validate input in some way, but it's so difficult to focus on those Friday afternoons. So, don't worry about it. Those charities didn't need that technology anyway. Right?
It's such a fantastic case. Netflix is the largest traffic source, and they try to run their business with almost no infrastructure. Their computing and storage is almost all Amazon -- a direct competitor -- and their distribution is through ISPs that also run competing TV services. Some fraction of the disputes with Comcast and Verizon have been over inter-city distribution. The argument from the ISPs is that while the customers have paid for the access portion, the way Netflix or their CDN partners have been using their networks they've essentially been dumping long-haul responsibility on the ISPs. When they're negotiating with Netflix for "paid" access, some of it is about CDN hosting or local interconnect rather than just "now we'll peer at 300G in SF".
Because this is America, Netflix's pleas to have "all traffic treated the same because it's an Internet right" are more about infrastructure cost avoidance than about maintaining YOUR rights. Net Neutrality says the ten millionth copy of a Breaking Bad episode being streamed from California to Texas is just as important as unique data you send on that link, and if that stinks it up so be it. It doesn't get us to the obvious technical solution of a cache-box in-state (if not in-city), but is a convenient hammer to pull out in commercial discussions over CDN hosting. So, as much as you may love the internet and feel there should be some kind of totally impractical rights framework involved to ensure that there is a flag available to wrap around the Internet's abuse, consider spending ten minutes thinking through the motivations of the actors involved. At the end of those ten minutes you may decide that you want Netflix holding that hammer -- the ISP's leverage has been talked about a lot and brinksmanship is apparently part of what makes America great -- but at least you'll do it realizing that all of the companies involved would like you / the Internet as a hostage.
That was the earlier paper. In this paper, they use a more realistic model and numerical simulation. They still get a result that doesn't include an actual singularity.
Your job sounds great. Make some friends on your team and learn what you can from them. Maybe buy a book or RTFM or do a side project. The training will always be offered again somewhere else, and Vegas is a hole.
Use the conference time to fix whatever's going on in your life -- that sounds way more important. Feel free to post here about that!
From the article's conclusion:
In the most likely scenario, Anderman writes, “the price of the 2017 new model will be in the range of $50-80K.”
The 60-kWh version of today's Tesla Model S large luxury sedan starts at $69,900, with an EPA-rated range of 208 miles.
Given that the Model 3 will be a smaller car with one-third less range, using a next-generation battery to be produced in bulk at Tesla's planned gigafactory, that seems rather pessimistic.
The CRTC requires Bell to resell its lines for fixed rates. Bell must offer service that's at least as good as what it provides to its own customers. As the regulated rate is below Bell's own rate of return from an actual Bell customer, Bell has no incentive to provide better service that what it provides to its own customers. If the CRTC allowed for other arrangements, Bell could strike a deal with a wholesaler to offer unlimited service at a higher price. As it stands, it can't.
Nothing here is surprising.
If you own your network enough, you could consider multicasting.
udpcast is one tool for doing this, or you could look into implementing a file carousel.
If you don't have the network support for multicast, then this won't be very helpful.
The hardware hack in the first post is the way to go, but you'll learn something from using Asterisk (this means it's hard to use... incredibly cool, but with great power comes the occasional configuration headache: it does not know what you mean). If you use it, you don't need an external softphone. You can dial or receive calls from the Asterisk console.
If you don't want to do this in hardware and you don't want to buy a digium card (or its equivalent) and discover The Future of Telephony, consider calling in to the queue through a VOIP service from any old softphone. If you're a Windows user, I recommend X-lite, but they're mostly created equal. If you have to forward your home phone to your VOIP service, that's not so hard. Your friends who have recommended this option are not stupid.
I can't recommend a free VOIP service (Free World Dialup is now no longer free), but there are many that are pennies a day.
Minerva is attracting your attention because they like to advertise themselves.
The box is made from some reference design (the ones I'm familiar with are based on a Sigma chip) that a hardware vendor makes light modifications to (there are several candidate companies for your box). The Minerva software is put on top of that, and it's possible - but unlikely - that other software from your ISP or a system integrator acting for them - has been included.
Sigma has opened much of its code, and the uclinux site hosts a Sigma variant (the Sigma chip is a SoC processor / video decoder). You will need an arm cross-compiler. You can then see for yourself how much of the rest of the code on your box has changed. Certainly busybox won't have. The GPL violation, in this case, is mostly that not everyone in the distribution chain is hosting the modified software.
http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/ports/arm/EM8500/
Slashdot Mirror
The data the article presents really just shows a ton of Netflix traffic breaking the Internet for other users. Shouldn't all that adaptive bitrate stuff make it NOT break other flows? Apparently, not so much. Did Netflix respond by making their video delivery less aggressive, the way Bittorrent did with LEDBAT? No.
What did we learn?
1) Netflix breaks any link it's on. Period. Full stop. The rest of the Internet only gets through when Netflix isn't peered together with it.
2) Therefore ISPs -- ALL ISPs -- bad.
3) Therefore Net Neutrality so Netflix can break the Internet.
Of course, one might be tempted to conclude that big data users should work out their own peering and financial arrangements so that they don't mess up the Internet, but that would make one a corporate shill.
Google as having a bunch of great APIs that let you do all sorts of fantastic things, but stuff that would have been absolutely trivial to do in MS Office 15 or 20 years ago using VBA (minus the web part, which was barely around) were hard to impossible to make happen.
Want that input form to look nice? Want the submitter to be able to preview it or edit what was on it later? Good luck doing that without building a whole different front-end. Google docs lets you use a form to add lines to a spreadsheet, but that's pretty much where the magic ends. I hacked in editing the thing by sending out links that pre-populate fields in a second spreadsheet which Google docs copies over to the first spreadsheet. Yes, it's stupid. No, it's not me. It's Google.
If you're a developer on Google docs and reading this... thanks for making it possible to add a line to a spreadsheet from an ugly form. I am so sorry that they make you do these crappy "20%" effort projects that you're not really proud of and that aren't good enough to help anyone. I know you probably want to put in the time to make a great HTML5 form builder or make it easy to manage an entry using a unique key or validate input in some way, but it's so difficult to focus on those Friday afternoons. So, don't worry about it. Those charities didn't need that technology anyway. Right?
It's such a fantastic case. Netflix is the largest traffic source, and they try to run their business with almost no infrastructure. Their computing and storage is almost all Amazon -- a direct competitor -- and their distribution is through ISPs that also run competing TV services. Some fraction of the disputes with Comcast and Verizon have been over inter-city distribution. The argument from the ISPs is that while the customers have paid for the access portion, the way Netflix or their CDN partners have been using their networks they've essentially been dumping long-haul responsibility on the ISPs. When they're negotiating with Netflix for "paid" access, some of it is about CDN hosting or local interconnect rather than just "now we'll peer at 300G in SF". Because this is America, Netflix's pleas to have "all traffic treated the same because it's an Internet right" are more about infrastructure cost avoidance than about maintaining YOUR rights. Net Neutrality says the ten millionth copy of a Breaking Bad episode being streamed from California to Texas is just as important as unique data you send on that link, and if that stinks it up so be it. It doesn't get us to the obvious technical solution of a cache-box in-state (if not in-city), but is a convenient hammer to pull out in commercial discussions over CDN hosting. So, as much as you may love the internet and feel there should be some kind of totally impractical rights framework involved to ensure that there is a flag available to wrap around the Internet's abuse, consider spending ten minutes thinking through the motivations of the actors involved. At the end of those ten minutes you may decide that you want Netflix holding that hammer -- the ISP's leverage has been talked about a lot and brinksmanship is apparently part of what makes America great -- but at least you'll do it realizing that all of the companies involved would like you / the Internet as a hostage.
That was the earlier paper. In this paper, they use a more realistic model and numerical simulation. They still get a result that doesn't include an actual singularity.
Your job sounds great. Make some friends on your team and learn what you can from them. Maybe buy a book or RTFM or do a side project. The training will always be offered again somewhere else, and Vegas is a hole.
Use the conference time to fix whatever's going on in your life -- that sounds way more important. Feel free to post here about that!
Good luck!
From the article's conclusion: In the most likely scenario, Anderman writes, “the price of the 2017 new model will be in the range of $50-80K.” The 60-kWh version of today's Tesla Model S large luxury sedan starts at $69,900, with an EPA-rated range of 208 miles. Given that the Model 3 will be a smaller car with one-third less range, using a next-generation battery to be produced in bulk at Tesla's planned gigafactory, that seems rather pessimistic.
Dutifully bring in a machine for them to install crapware on. Take it home. Clean that stuff off and do whatever you want.
The CRTC requires Bell to resell its lines for fixed rates. Bell must offer service that's at least as good as what it provides to its own customers. As the regulated rate is below Bell's own rate of return from an actual Bell customer, Bell has no incentive to provide better service that what it provides to its own customers. If the CRTC allowed for other arrangements, Bell could strike a deal with a wholesaler to offer unlimited service at a higher price. As it stands, it can't. Nothing here is surprising.
If you own your network enough, you could consider multicasting. udpcast is one tool for doing this, or you could look into implementing a file carousel. If you don't have the network support for multicast, then this won't be very helpful.
The hardware hack in the first post is the way to go, but you'll learn something from using Asterisk (this means it's hard to use... incredibly cool, but with great power comes the occasional configuration headache: it does not know what you mean). If you use it, you don't need an external softphone. You can dial or receive calls from the Asterisk console.
If you don't want to do this in hardware and you don't want to buy a digium card (or its equivalent) and discover The Future of Telephony, consider calling in to the queue through a VOIP service from any old softphone. If you're a Windows user, I recommend X-lite, but they're mostly created equal. If you have to forward your home phone to your VOIP service, that's not so hard. Your friends who have recommended this option are not stupid.
I can't recommend a free VOIP service (Free World Dialup is now no longer free), but there are many that are pennies a day.
Minerva is attracting your attention because they like to advertise themselves. The box is made from some reference design (the ones I'm familiar with are based on a Sigma chip) that a hardware vendor makes light modifications to (there are several candidate companies for your box). The Minerva software is put on top of that, and it's possible - but unlikely - that other software from your ISP or a system integrator acting for them - has been included. Sigma has opened much of its code, and the uclinux site hosts a Sigma variant (the Sigma chip is a SoC processor / video decoder). You will need an arm cross-compiler. You can then see for yourself how much of the rest of the code on your box has changed. Certainly busybox won't have. The GPL violation, in this case, is mostly that not everyone in the distribution chain is hosting the modified software. http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/ports/arm/EM8500/
Though the Nature newsbrief doesn't mention her, the lead author and the main experimentalist was Naomi Ginsberg, a PhD student in Lene Hau's lab. You can read the article abstract on Nature's website: http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nature0549 3
The AFP wire item also gives credit where credit is due:
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1028