How many times have you heard the rationalization from public school people that they do badly because they have to teach everybody, even the disruptors who don't want to learn?
I think it would be better if the people who wanted to go to school went, and the disruptors, well, didn't.
The largest scale expression of something very close to the Libertariani ideal was Hong Kong and it performed outstandingly under that system, until the return to Chinese control.
So I think there's a reasonable example that libertarianism can work well.
I think it's a good idea for government to handle things that are truly public goods, like roads, because it is just too burdensome to pay every time you drive somewhere.
But I'd love all schools to be private. I think there would be much higher quality education overall if that was the case. Parents who have to pay feel they have some control and "skin in the game", which is not true of today's public schools. Before public schools this was still a very well-educated country, because parents as a general rule are willing to sacrifice for their kids and pay.
I dislike the earbuds so much that the primary use of my iPod is to play music on my home stereo. I found the earbuds to be extraordinarily uncomfortable and unpleasant to use.
I also realized when I used it on the street that it isolated me too much from reality. And as a typical nerd, I'm too isolated to begin with.
So back to the home stereo for this iPod owner!
I seem to remember Bang & Olufsen makes some pretty darn cool looking earbuds. They're probably $5,000 each if I know that company but they might be worth trying.
And there's that cool looking integrated bluetooth earbuds/glasses from Oakley. At $350 (including a Bluetooth transmitter for your iPod), they might be the most expensive set of earbuds on the planet, but it looks like they would get the job done. Here's a pretty appealing review:
That nice Oakley fellow: http://jimjannard.com/life.html is also making a really cool video camera: http://www.red.com/ Can't say he doesn't have an interesting life. He seems kinda like a typical Slashdot reader, but with unlimited cash.
Well, Apple does have the PowerMac line but I suppose in terms of price it's more like a Range Rover than a Tahoe, and you probably wouldn't use your Range Rover to a RV trailer or massive boat.
A car has some inherent predictability. You change your oil ever 3000-odd miles. You don't have to buy additional accessories for it in order for it to work properly. For the first few years, little to no other maintenance is needed.
A Windows computer, on the other hand, requires that you obtain anti-spyware and anti-virus software, and that you make sure they run on a daily basis or at times even more frequently. A new computer almost immediately requires maintenance if it is to keep running at a reasonable speed.
I hire someone to change my oil. I pay something like $20 to do it every few months. Since computer expertise is quite expensive, anyone who's not knowlegeable either has to learn, pay huge amounts of money, impose enormously on friends, or suffer alone with the problems.
I think any car company that sold cars with similar conditions of operation would go out of business or at least be very much on the sidelines. There are some old cars like MGs that have similar repair records to a new computer but they are own exclusively by enthusiasts. No non-enthusiast in his right mind would buy one.
That's one big reason I'm a loyal Mac user. Apple may be the expensive luxury brand but it's saved me thousands of dollars in utter misery dealing with problems like these.
Why would you not want your email address on your business card? It means you can be contacted via email. I'd much rather be contacted via email than called on the phone, and I suspect that's true of many others as well.
I have to say this is a strange article. Most of that conduct seems pretty reasonable and normal. Of course people are going to want to share their pictures with others as they are made. Natural human desire, for sure.
Now, maybe blowing out your ears with an iPod isn't so reasonable. But certainly wanting to listen to music is more or less a human constant, and wanting to listen to your taste in music instead of someone else's is so obvious it hardly bears mentioning.
I was ready to write the exact same thing you were.
Of course things have gotten a bit better over the years.
When I first started on the Internet, the only way to get a secure certificate was to buy a Netscape server ($5,000) and then to buy a Verisign certificate. I don't even remember how much the certificate was at the time, just that it was expensive.
I remember feeling that crypto people, with their curious obsessions about identity and the like, were creating a world way too complex for anyone but other crypto people to manage, and events seem to have borne me out.
D
(PS Anyone else feel the new format seems to have sapped the vitality out of Slashdot? Maybe because it now looks like every other site on the web. It does load faster but I don't know if this change was really that brainy a scheme.)
As I remember, there was considerable shock when it was announced that Apple was moving some technical support operations to India.
I think this might have been in response to that backlash, which at least means Apple listens to its customers.
As you may remember this is even a mini-trend. Dell also moved much of their support operation back from India when customers complained.
I notice others feel sorry for the Indians, and I have some sympathy, but I could never understand those thick accents. So I think Apple's decision was a wise one. I was baffled as to why they would have gone in in the first place. I could have told them there would be customer hostility concerning the move.
I read it, and I have to say your summary was pretty good. I wish they'd had a bit more commentary with their screenshots, but their conclusions seemed a bit over-flattering to Microsoft.
Unless I'm really missing something, it doesn't look too different from XP to me, and I noticed little to no usage of the supposedly famous transparency effects. Perhaps this is just as well; Steve Jobs got rid of a lot of them in the years since MacOS X was created. I think they probably wound up being too distracting.
They have eliminated browser-based updates from Windows Update, so (presumably) attackers won't be able to create simulated updates from their web sites. That always seemed like a huge hole to me and I'm glad it's gone.
And the new kids' games, which they devoted way too many pages to (one page would be too many) looked like they had mascots even more deranged than our pal <a href = 'http://www.ubersoft.net/">Binky the Paperclip</a>.
I didn't see anything making me want to upgrade my moldy old PC from XP, even if it were possible to do so. (The old system doesn't support 128mb graphics RAM or 1gb memory, so I would have to get a brand new one in any event.)
And as for switching my primary computing platform from Apple? Forget it.
Scary? Maybe. Most airlines that I know of have a pretty powerful self-interest in maintaining their planes well. Airplane crashes not only destroy multi million dollar planes, they also ruin reputations to the point where airlines have to change their names in order to survive. From a purely practical point of view, then, skimping on maintenance is a poor idea.
I'm not sure how much credibility I'd put in certifications and tests. Look at how much many of us laugh at the MSCE (the Microsoft credentials for being a Windows technician). If the mechanics are good mechanics, or they are working under the close supervision of other good mechanics, the situation might be just fine.
In any event, it doesn't seem to be a reason to be negative to JetBlue specifically. The use of foreign mechanics is fairly universal, at least according to this quote from the article:
About half of the long-term maintenance on the planes of U.S. carriers is outsourced, and much of that work takes place overseas, where FAA inspections are a sometime thing. Indeed, the point of this story isn't that JetBlue's decisions are in any way exceptional.
I think he's focusing on JetBlue because it's one of the few American airlines that holds any degree of popularity. Surely it doesn't sound like a good reason to use prefer American when they give poor service and (most likely) use very similar maintenance services.
Maybe we should be afraid of flying, period?
But it's still a lot safer per mile than driving. Ask yourself if you check your automobile in any significant way before or after a trip, even a long one, and you might understand why.
There's no reason in the world why the same format couldn't be used for both applications.
Simply have the PDF reader application view documents by screen pages (without showing the blank section with page numbers, etc), and when you print the document, have it print out the PDF format as we see it, with distinct pages, page headings and page numbers. None of that enhances the viewing experience on the screen, so you can leave it out while viewing and insert it when you print.
That format would look considerably better than HTML in many applications since the fonts are embedded.
Wow, those are really long documents. I'd think it would be a royal pain to print them out, but perhaps I'm just used to reading things on the screen (or I have a really good screen, which happens to be the case).
I probably do more casual reading than your customers do. I might want to print out a lengthly instruction manual, but most of the things I just encounter on the web I don't have any interest in printing. For instance, today I read a FAQ on how Adobe is dealing with Apple's transition to Intel. Having to read that kind of document as PDF is just plain dumb.
Do you know of any PDF readers for the Mac (I'm a big Apple fan) that can read a PDF as a continuous stream without page boundaries? (Of course you're probably not an Apple fan but perhaps some of my fellow Apple folks can help).
Wow, those are really long documents. I'd think it would be a royal pain to print them out, but perhaps I'm just used to reading things on the screen (or I have a really good screen, which happens to be the case).
I probably do more casual reading than your customers do. I might want to print out a lengthly instruction manual, but most of the things I just encounter on the web I don't have any interest in printing. For instance, today I read a FAQ on how Adobe is dealing with Apple's transition to Intel. Having to read that kind of document as PDF is just plain dumb.
Do you know of any PDF readers for the Mac (I'm a big Apple fan) that can read a PDF as a continuous stream without page boundaries? (Of course you're probably not an Apple fan but perhaps some of my fellow Apple folks can help).
I don't know if I'd say "scourge" - it's not like they are virii or spyware programs or anything like that. But they are irritating.
What's really annoying is that there is absolutely no point to implement the concept of a "page" on the screen.
There should be a continuous flow like a HTML document. And even what they SAY is a continuous flow option really is not - you still see the spacing between pages.
Because the navigation is based on "pages", which do not map very well to pages on the screen (at least with readable font sizes), it's a royal pain to read the document on the screen.
And how often do you print a PDF, versus how often you view it on the screen?
I do like PDF for fill-in forms and for other things you have to print. But that's less than 1% of the PDF files I've accessed.
However, don't they have a pretty good hierarchical structure in the table of contents some of them have?
Yes, but the ISP is already being paid for this type of traffic. The complaint is against a radical increase in traffic amounts through audio and video services which may require a substantial upgrade in Telco equipment and bandwidth to accomodate.
The idea here is that our average bandwidth use has changed dramatically, and so the original definition of "unlimited bandwidth" may not be sustainable anymore.
My recording of Aja, by Steely Dan, takes exactly 8:00 and is a bit over 9MB. So it's fair to say that audio files take about 1mb/minute. So I'm going to reasonably assume that phone calls are likely to take around 1mb a minute.
If you consider how much many people talk on the phone, this is orders of magnitude more than I, an extremely heavy Internet user by any standard, use. I'm sure the real figures are a bit lower because phone calls are encoded at lower bit rates, but I don't think that changes the essential idea: This is enormous usage compared to the past, and so if unlimited usage meant one thing a few years back, it means something completely different now.
Maybe it's not bad for the money to go from Skype instead of us, since if it goes from Skype, only Skype's users will be paying for it. If we charged more for everyone, including people (like me) who don't use Skype, then that's not fair either.
In other words, there may genuinely be multiple tiers of use evolving, and perhaps that means two-tier charging is fair.
Remember, if Skype or YouTube pay to get better service, we will receive better service, and that may affect us positively. If we get quality audio or video that sounds good and doesn't skip, I think we'll happily pay the extra costs of the two-tier Internet.
What baffles me completely, and what I really want to see addressed here, is how this should have even the tiniest effect on anyone's freedom of speech, including Google[*], Craigslist or our local blog. None of these sites push enough bandwidth through pipes to individual customers to have significant impact on use of bandwidth, and so it's not going to make sense to charge them extra for better QOS; the person on the other end won't notice any difference.
How this would affect anyone's free speech rights baffles me. As long as it's written speech, as on the overwhelming majority of blogs, better QOS is not going to be required.
D
[*] Aside from Google Video, which I think is a tiny share of their business.
I thought originally the point of the tiered Internet was to make sure that when you made phone calls through Skype, which genuinely consume a lot of bandwidth, or when you're downloading video, that extra money was paid to help pay throughout the whole net for the extra bandwidth.
In other words, let's say I send a phone call through Skype's servers. I'm not paying any more to my telco or cableco for them to do this. I'm just paying Skype and Skype is paying their own ISP, not my local ISP, even though my local ISP is carrying all the extra traffic load. This is especially galling for the Telco because this used to be revenue at $ 0.05 a minute and now it's not giving them one thin dime, even though they are providing the bandwidth for it to happen!
This seems like it is in fact inequitable. If my local ISP was a small business it might well have trouble affording the bandwidth being used, and you might have some sympathy for them. But the Evil Telcos have taken away all that business, and so now we have the Evil Telcos suffering, and few feel sorry for an Evil Telco.
Now, what's strange is that the promotional materials for the two-tier Internet say that Google, Microsoft and others should be paying. But at least in terms of the services they are best known for, there should be no need for them to pay. Surely everyone realizes that Google's search, email and Earth, and Microsoft's various web sites, consume "fair" amounts of bandwidth. There is no reason in the world for Google, or your local blog (unless it's high-bandwidth video-based) to have to pay extra for a service we are all paying for equitably. In other words, the "Tier 2" QOS, which I would expect would be similar to what we have now, would be more than ample for their needs.
If there is a two-tier Internet, where video and telephony applications are on the top tier and web sites, email and most other services are on the bottom, it really doesn't seem unfair to me. In fact, it might vastly improve the quality of the top-tier applications to the point where we would be a great deal happier with them than we are now. Surely this is not so bad?
But then why are Google and craigslist afraid of this? Craigslist is about the lowest bandwidth site in the history of mankind and a two-tier model should not have even the slightest impact on their business.
If you would be willing to pay a bit more for an Internet phone call (say $40 a month instead of $30) to get better quality audio and video, then you might actually want the two-tier Internet to work.
Or perhaps Two-Tier doesn't work as I imagine? If you know, please clue me in. It seems like it could be a fair arrangement that would serve everyone well if it's as I've described.
My point was that it's about the content generated by that huge critical mass of customers far more than the technology itself, which I'm sure could be beaten.
But this would make eBay a content company (which, in my opinion, it actually is), and
One source said Microsoft boss Bill Gates came to the conclusion that Yahoo! was more a content company than a tech company. This source said Gates has no interest in owning a content company.
I don't think it would be fair to ask Adobe to open source Photoshop so they can put someone's new file format in.
If you use the BSD license for your format, then Adobe can put it in Photoshop Microsoft can support it in Word, and others can put it in open source formats.
Of course you won't get a dime for it, but if you want wide adaptation, that's what you need to do.
Nice try, but you'd need something more like a surgical scapel to take out the camera without destroying the display and probably the wifi antenna along with it!
* The processors are core duo throughout the entire line, which is great. * The display has what looks like a pretty decent resolution for the size, unlike the older model.
On the whole, it looks like the big issue would be differentiation between the MacBook and MacBook Pro. About all of what's reserved for the MacBook pro is the better-looking aluminum case, the bigger display and marginally faster processors. And non-onboard graphics cards, but since I don't play games that's not enormously important.
On the whole this looks like a very impressive move to Apple. Frankly, it's more than I'd expected. I'd expected a low-end core solo model like the Mac Mini, and they didn't do it.
Okay, I tested this proposition by looking at the Wikipedia entry on Smalltalk.
And you are right in many respects. It seems obvious that Ruby's developer did grab a great deal from Smalltalk, down to the rather odd |... | variable declaration that's used to declare Ruby variables within a block.
However, it would not surprise me at all if there are more people looking at Ruby on Rails right now than there are people who use Smalltalk on a regular basis. Clearly Ruby and Rails have inspired the mainstream in a way Smalltalk hasn't.
I think Ruby's secret is that it expresses these object-oriented ways in a manner that's easier for programmers from other languages to adjust to. Because of this, Ruby doesn't look nearly as alien as Smalltalk, and appears enormously easy to learn, particularly when combined with the overall simplicity of Ruby on Rails.
So what I believe is that Ruby made formerly complex concepts easier to grasp. This means that more people will be coding in a "true" object-oriented way than ever before, and this means that perhaps the promise of Smalltalk can finally be realized, even if some purity is sacrificed in the process.
It's strange that this conversation is about google, since in terms of bandwidth, Google's web site is about as frugal a creation as you'll ever see. The Google web site would still work just fine if it was sent to us at the lowest possible QOS level. In fact, isn't that what QOS is doing, to make sure that voice traffic gets a higher priority so it sounds better?
If you want to deal with the admittedly much higher usage associated with VOIP, why not admit it? It's not an unreasonable argument to say that more bandwidth is being used than customers are presently paying for, especially if the conversations are going peer to peer and so the VOIP provider's bandwidth is not being used.
You won't save much money because 12-packs of Diet Coke are far cheaper than individual cans or bottles.
I don't think anyone in our society is forgiven for being fat - at least not in my experience. So don't feel bad.
Even my temporary girlfriend in the Philippines wanted me to become less fat (which of course also means she didn't want to remain temporary).
So no, don't expect the grass is better on the other side of the fence. You at least benefit by the fact that there is a massive surplus of geek men versus geek women.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times have you heard the rationalization from public school people that they do badly because they have to teach everybody, even the disruptors who don't want to learn?
I think it would be better if the people who wanted to go to school went, and the disruptors, well, didn't.
D
The largest scale expression of something very close to the Libertariani ideal was Hong Kong and it performed outstandingly under that system, until the return to Chinese control.
So I think there's a reasonable example that libertarianism can work well.
I think it's a good idea for government to handle things that are truly public goods, like roads, because it is just too burdensome to pay every time you drive somewhere.
But I'd love all schools to be private. I think there would be much higher quality education overall if that was the case. Parents who have to pay feel they have some control and "skin in the game", which is not true of today's public schools. Before public schools this was still a very well-educated country, because parents as a general rule are willing to sacrifice for their kids and pay.
D
I dislike the earbuds so much that the primary use of my iPod is to play music on my home stereo. I found the earbuds to be extraordinarily uncomfortable and unpleasant to use.
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e y-o-rokr-bluetooth-eyewear/
I also realized when I used it on the street that it isolated me too much from reality. And as a typical nerd, I'm too isolated to begin with.
So back to the home stereo for this iPod owner!
I seem to remember Bang & Olufsen makes some pretty darn cool looking earbuds. They're probably $5,000 each if I know that company but they might be worth trying.
Nope, not so bad. Here's a link:
http://playlistmag.com/products/complete/41-detai
And there's that cool looking integrated bluetooth earbuds/glasses from Oakley. At $350 (including a Bluetooth transmitter for your iPod), they might be the most expensive set of earbuds on the planet, but it looks like they would get the job done. Here's a pretty appealing review:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipod/review/oakl
That nice Oakley fellow:
http://jimjannard.com/life.html
is also making a really cool video camera:
http://www.red.com/
Can't say he doesn't have an interesting life. He seems kinda like a typical Slashdot reader, but with unlimited cash.
D
Well, Apple does have the PowerMac line but I suppose in terms of price it's more like a Range Rover than a Tahoe, and you probably wouldn't use your Range Rover to a RV trailer or massive boat.
A car has some inherent predictability. You change your oil ever 3000-odd miles. You don't have to buy additional accessories for it in order for it to work properly. For the first few years, little to no other maintenance is needed.
A Windows computer, on the other hand, requires that you obtain anti-spyware and anti-virus software, and that you make sure they run on a daily basis or at times even more frequently. A new computer almost immediately requires maintenance if it is to keep running at a reasonable speed.
I hire someone to change my oil. I pay something like $20 to do it every few months. Since computer expertise is quite expensive, anyone who's not knowlegeable either has to learn, pay huge amounts of money, impose enormously on friends, or suffer alone with the problems.
I think any car company that sold cars with similar conditions of operation would go out of business or at least be very much on the sidelines. There are some old cars like MGs that have similar repair records to a new computer but they are own exclusively by enthusiasts. No non-enthusiast in his right mind would buy one.
That's one big reason I'm a loyal Mac user. Apple may be the expensive luxury brand but it's saved me thousands of dollars in utter misery dealing with problems like these.
D
Why would you not want your email address on your business card? It means you can be contacted via email. I'd much rather be contacted via email than called on the phone, and I suspect that's true of many others as well.
I have to say this is a strange article. Most of that conduct seems pretty reasonable and normal. Of course people are going to want to share their pictures with others as they are made. Natural human desire, for sure.
Now, maybe blowing out your ears with an iPod isn't so reasonable. But certainly wanting to listen to music is more or less a human constant, and wanting to listen to your taste in music instead of someone else's is so obvious it hardly bears mentioning.
D
I just wanted to support this statement.
I was ready to write the exact same thing you were.
Of course things have gotten a bit better over the years.
When I first started on the Internet, the only way to get a secure certificate was to buy a Netscape server ($5,000) and then to buy a Verisign certificate. I don't even remember how much the certificate was at the time, just that it was expensive.
I remember feeling that crypto people, with their curious obsessions about identity and the like, were creating a world way too complex for anyone but other crypto people to manage, and events seem to have borne me out.
D
(PS Anyone else feel the new format seems to have sapped the vitality out of Slashdot? Maybe because it now looks like every other site on the web. It does load faster but I don't know if this change was really that brainy a scheme.)
As I remember, there was considerable shock when it was announced that Apple was moving some technical support operations to India.
I think this might have been in response to that backlash, which at least means Apple listens to its customers.
As you may remember this is even a mini-trend. Dell also moved much of their support operation back from India when customers complained.
I notice others feel sorry for the Indians, and I have some sympathy, but I could never understand those thick accents. So I think Apple's decision was a wise one. I was baffled as to why they would have gone in in the first place. I could have told them there would be customer hostility concerning the move.
D
I read it, and I have to say your summary was pretty good. I wish they'd had a bit more commentary with their screenshots, but their conclusions seemed a bit over-flattering to Microsoft.
Unless I'm really missing something, it doesn't look too different from XP to me, and I noticed little to no usage of the supposedly famous transparency effects. Perhaps this is just as well; Steve Jobs got rid of a lot of them in the years since MacOS X was created. I think they probably wound up being too distracting.
They have eliminated browser-based updates from Windows Update, so (presumably) attackers won't be able to create simulated updates from their web sites. That always seemed like a huge hole to me and I'm glad it's gone.
And the new kids' games, which they devoted way too many pages to (one page would be too many) looked like they had mascots even more deranged than our pal <a href = 'http://www.ubersoft.net/">Binky the Paperclip</a>.
I didn't see anything making me want to upgrade my moldy old PC from XP, even if it were possible to do so. (The old system doesn't support 128mb graphics RAM or 1gb memory, so I would have to get a brand new one in any event.)
And as for switching my primary computing platform from Apple? Forget it.
D
I'm not sure how much credibility I'd put in certifications and tests. Look at how much many of us laugh at the MSCE (the Microsoft credentials for being a Windows technician). If the mechanics are good mechanics, or they are working under the close supervision of other good mechanics, the situation might be just fine.
In any event, it doesn't seem to be a reason to be negative to JetBlue specifically. The use of foreign mechanics is fairly universal, at least according to this quote from the article:
I think he's focusing on JetBlue because it's one of the few American airlines that holds any degree of popularity. Surely it doesn't sound like a good reason to use prefer American when they give poor service and (most likely) use very similar maintenance services.
Maybe we should be afraid of flying, period?
But it's still a lot safer per mile than driving. Ask yourself if you check your automobile in any significant way before or after a trip, even a long one, and you might understand why.
D
Well, actually, you miss the point.
There's no reason in the world why the same format couldn't be used for both applications.
Simply have the PDF reader application view documents by screen pages (without showing the blank section with page numbers, etc), and when you print the document, have it print out the PDF format as we see it, with distinct pages, page headings and page numbers. None of that enhances the viewing experience on the screen, so you can leave it out while viewing and insert it when you print.
That format would look considerably better than HTML in many applications since the fonts are embedded.
Does that clarify what I'd like to see?
D
Wow, those are really long documents. I'd think it would be a royal pain to print them out, but perhaps I'm just used to reading things on the screen (or I have a really good screen, which happens to be the case).
I probably do more casual reading than your customers do. I might want to print out a lengthly instruction manual, but most of the things I just encounter on the web I don't have any interest in printing. For instance, today I read a FAQ on how Adobe is dealing with Apple's transition to Intel. Having to read that kind of document as PDF is just plain dumb.
Do you know of any PDF readers for the Mac (I'm a big Apple fan) that can read a PDF as a continuous stream without page boundaries? (Of course you're probably not an Apple fan but perhaps some of my fellow Apple folks can help).
D
Wow, those are really long documents. I'd think it would be a royal pain to print them out, but perhaps I'm just used to reading things on the screen (or I have a really good screen, which happens to be the case).
I probably do more casual reading than your customers do. I might want to print out a lengthly instruction manual, but most of the things I just encounter on the web I don't have any interest in printing. For instance, today I read a FAQ on how Adobe is dealing with Apple's transition to Intel. Having to read that kind of document as PDF is just plain dumb.
Do you know of any PDF readers for the Mac (I'm a big Apple fan) that can read a PDF as a continuous stream without page boundaries? (Of course you're probably not an Apple fan but perhaps some of my fellow Apple folks can help).
I don't know if I'd say "scourge" - it's not like they are virii or spyware programs or anything like that. But they are irritating.
What's really annoying is that there is absolutely no point to implement the concept of a "page" on the screen.
There should be a continuous flow like a HTML document. And even what they SAY is a continuous flow option really is not - you still see the spacing between pages.
Because the navigation is based on "pages", which do not map very well to pages on the screen (at least with readable font sizes), it's a royal pain to read the document on the screen.
And how often do you print a PDF, versus how often you view it on the screen?
I do like PDF for fill-in forms and for other things you have to print. But that's less than 1% of the PDF files I've accessed.
However, don't they have a pretty good hierarchical structure in the table of contents some of them have?
D
Yes, but the ISP is already being paid for this type of traffic. The complaint is against a radical increase in traffic amounts through audio and video services which may require a substantial upgrade in Telco equipment and bandwidth to accomodate.
The idea here is that our average bandwidth use has changed dramatically, and so the original definition of "unlimited bandwidth" may not be sustainable anymore.
My recording of Aja, by Steely Dan, takes exactly 8:00 and is a bit over 9MB. So it's fair to say that audio files take about 1mb/minute. So I'm going to reasonably assume that phone calls are likely to take around 1mb a minute.
If you consider how much many people talk on the phone, this is orders of magnitude more than I, an extremely heavy Internet user by any standard, use. I'm sure the real figures are a bit lower because phone calls are encoded at lower bit rates, but I don't think that changes the essential idea: This is enormous usage compared to the past, and so if unlimited usage meant one thing a few years back, it means something completely different now.
Maybe it's not bad for the money to go from Skype instead of us, since if it goes from Skype, only Skype's users will be paying for it. If we charged more for everyone, including people (like me) who don't use Skype, then that's not fair either.
In other words, there may genuinely be multiple tiers of use evolving, and perhaps that means two-tier charging is fair.
Remember, if Skype or YouTube pay to get better service, we will receive better service, and that may affect us positively. If we get quality audio or video that sounds good and doesn't skip, I think we'll happily pay the extra costs of the two-tier Internet.
What baffles me completely, and what I really want to see addressed here, is how this should have even the tiniest effect on anyone's freedom of speech, including Google[*], Craigslist or our local blog. None of these sites push enough bandwidth through pipes to individual customers to have significant impact on use of bandwidth, and so it's not going to make sense to charge them extra for better QOS; the person on the other end won't notice any difference.
How this would affect anyone's free speech rights baffles me. As long as it's written speech, as on the overwhelming majority of blogs, better QOS is not going to be required.
D
[*] Aside from Google Video, which I think is a tiny share of their business.
Okay, I'm curious about this.
I thought originally the point of the tiered Internet was to make sure that when you made phone calls through Skype, which genuinely consume a lot of bandwidth, or when you're downloading video, that extra money was paid to help pay throughout the whole net for the extra bandwidth.
In other words, let's say I send a phone call through Skype's servers. I'm not paying any more to my telco or cableco for them to do this. I'm just paying Skype and Skype is paying their own ISP, not my local ISP, even though my local ISP is carrying all the extra traffic load. This is especially galling for the Telco because this used to be revenue at $ 0.05 a minute and now it's not giving them one thin dime, even though they are providing the bandwidth for it to happen!
This seems like it is in fact inequitable. If my local ISP was a small business it might well have trouble affording the bandwidth being used, and you might have some sympathy for them. But the Evil Telcos have taken away all that business, and so now we have the Evil Telcos suffering, and few feel sorry for an Evil Telco.
Now, what's strange is that the promotional materials for the two-tier Internet say that Google, Microsoft and others should be paying. But at least in terms of the services they are best known for, there should be no need for them to pay. Surely everyone realizes that Google's search, email and Earth, and Microsoft's various web sites, consume "fair" amounts of bandwidth. There is no reason in the world for Google, or your local blog (unless it's high-bandwidth video-based) to have to pay extra for a service we are all paying for equitably. In other words, the "Tier 2" QOS, which I would expect would be similar to what we have now, would be more than ample for their needs.
If there is a two-tier Internet, where video and telephony applications are on the top tier and web sites, email and most other services are on the bottom, it really doesn't seem unfair to me. In fact, it might vastly improve the quality of the top-tier applications to the point where we would be a great deal happier with them than we are now. Surely this is not so bad?
But then why are Google and craigslist afraid of this? Craigslist is about the lowest bandwidth site in the history of mankind and a two-tier model should not have even the slightest impact on their business.
If you would be willing to pay a bit more for an Internet phone call (say $40 a month instead of $30) to get better quality audio and video, then you might actually want the two-tier Internet to work.
Or perhaps Two-Tier doesn't work as I imagine? If you know, please clue me in. It seems like it could be a fair arrangement that would serve everyone well if it's as I've described.
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My point was that it's about the content generated by that huge critical mass of customers far more than the technology itself, which I'm sure could be beaten.
So I think of it as a content company, of sorts.
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But this would make eBay a content company (which, in my opinion, it actually is), and
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This is just a semantic spat :-).
I should have said "for the reference implementation", as I actually meant, and then I'd be in complete agreement with what you said.
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I don't think it would be fair to ask Adobe to open source Photoshop so they can put someone's new file format in.
If you use the BSD license for your format, then Adobe can put it in Photoshop Microsoft can support it in Word, and others can put it in open source formats.
Of course you won't get a dime for it, but if you want wide adaptation, that's what you need to do.
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Nice try, but you'd need something more like a surgical scapel to take out the camera without destroying the display and probably the wifi antenna along with it!
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Well, they have to do things to cut costs, but ...
* The processors are core duo throughout the entire line, which is great.
* The display has what looks like a pretty decent resolution for the size, unlike the older model.
On the whole, it looks like the big issue would be differentiation between the MacBook and MacBook Pro. About all of what's reserved for the MacBook pro is the better-looking aluminum case, the bigger display and marginally faster processors. And non-onboard graphics cards, but since I don't play games that's not enormously important.
On the whole this looks like a very impressive move to Apple. Frankly, it's more than I'd expected. I'd expected a low-end core solo model like the Mac Mini, and they didn't do it.
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Okay, I tested this proposition by looking at the Wikipedia entry on Smalltalk.
... | variable declaration that's used to declare Ruby variables within a block.
And you are right in many respects. It seems obvious that Ruby's developer did grab a great deal from Smalltalk, down to the rather odd |
However, it would not surprise me at all if there are more people looking at Ruby on Rails right now than there are people who use Smalltalk on a regular basis. Clearly Ruby and Rails have inspired the mainstream in a way Smalltalk hasn't.
I think Ruby's secret is that it expresses these object-oriented ways in a manner that's easier for programmers from other languages to adjust to. Because of this, Ruby doesn't look nearly as alien as Smalltalk, and appears enormously easy to learn, particularly when combined with the overall simplicity of Ruby on Rails.
So what I believe is that Ruby made formerly complex concepts easier to grasp. This means that more people will be coding in a "true" object-oriented way than ever before, and this means that perhaps the promise of Smalltalk can finally be realized, even if some purity is sacrificed in the process.
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It's strange that this conversation is about google, since in terms of bandwidth, Google's web site is about as frugal a creation as you'll ever see. The Google web site would still work just fine if it was sent to us at the lowest possible QOS level. In fact, isn't that what QOS is doing, to make sure that voice traffic gets a higher priority so it sounds better?
If you want to deal with the admittedly much higher usage associated with VOIP, why not admit it? It's not an unreasonable argument to say that more bandwidth is being used than customers are presently paying for, especially if the conversations are going peer to peer and so the VOIP provider's bandwidth is not being used.
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You won't save much money because 12-packs of Diet Coke are far cheaper than individual cans or bottles.
I don't think anyone in our society is forgiven for being fat - at least not in my experience. So don't feel bad.
Even my temporary girlfriend in the Philippines wanted me to become less fat (which of course also means she didn't want to remain temporary).
So no, don't expect the grass is better on the other side of the fence. You at least benefit by the fact that there is a massive surplus of geek men versus geek women.
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