Because seven weeks is plenty of time to change people's minds about who they want to vote for. Especially when you run the most inept campaign in political history, and your main opponent massively outperforms (admittedly very low) expectations. Having all that data won't help if it changes before it's used.
The public are afraid. They demand action to stop the terrorists.
Are we really? Mostly, it seems like a whole lot of "Keep Calm and Carry On" (and twitter memes mocking the NYT for suggesting we were "reeling"). I see the politicians claiming that the people are demanding action, and using that as an excuse to push forward whatever draconian measures they want to. If the public are demanding anything in this case, it's probably the replacement of the 20,000 police officers Theresa May presided over the demise of – something that might actually help!
In the real world, people just buy a set of knives from Lidl...
...and then plunge them into Theresa May's back. Oh, wait, no. That's the tories, not the terrorists. My bad. And to be fair, none of them would be caught dead in Lidl.
I'd agree that Turbine have done a pretty good job with converting LOTRO to a hybrid F2P model. You can continue to subscribe and be in the same position as before F2P launched (content and slots unlocked for as long as you subscribe, except for expansions), plus you get a monthly allotment of points to spend in the store. Alternatively you can go a la carte, and buy content and slots as 1-time unlocks (and you can earn points for the store in-game - enough to unlock everything if you're willing to spend enough time grinding). I've not found there to be any instances where paid consumables/services are at all necessary - yes, you can buy buffs and pots to make things a bit easier (but in a PvE setting I don't see a problem with this), and items that will give you quick travel or reduced a grind (but these grinds are ones that existed in the game pre-F2P).
TF2 is a particularly good example - what you get for free is the original paid base game plus several years' worth of updates. You can buy weapons and cosmetics (which can also be got in-game via random drops and crafting) and various other utility items that don't have any (non-cosmetic) effect on gameplay. More importantly, the weapons are all intended to be sidegrades offering alternate play-styles and situational advantages - you can't pay-to-win in any meaningful way.
Here are the missing things that are currently stopping me from defecting from the land of dead-tree books:
1) The reader that's as pleasant and easy to read as book, anywhere I might want to read (like in the bath, or our in the sun on a hot day), and that doesn't leave me twenty times as much out of pocket if it gets lost, stolen or damaged.
2) Cost of acquisition on a par with books. Currently, it's not uncommon for Amazon to be selling a paper book for less than they charge for the kindle version. Factor in the second-hand market, and you can pretty much always pick up a book for significantly less than an ebook.
3) The ability to sell/loan/give away ebooks. And be 100% sure that I'll always be able to read them. The value of books is significantly diminished if I can't lend them to friends and family (and borrow theirs), and if I no longer want them to sell them off or donate them to a charity shop. Or if in ten year's time the vendor went out of business and took their DRM system with them and I can no longer read my ebooks.
4) A way of converting all my paper books into (legal) ebooks. The biggest advantage of ebooks (hundreds of books in your pocket!) is completely if for any given book I wan to read there's a 95% chance that I'm going to have to go and get it off the bookshelf anyway (not that it wouldn't be nice not to be forever running out of bookshelf space)
That last one is, for me, the real killer. Ripping all my CDs into iTunes took a while, but now I have all my music wherever I go and my CDs are in boxes in the attic. I can't do that with books. Sure, I could try and track down pirated ebooks for every paper book I own, but that would take a very long time, and I'm betting there are plenty I wouldn't be able to find. Plus I'd still need to hang onto the originals to make the slightest claim on legality...
I second this recommendation. Whilst it's pretty much overkill for a single firewall, once you start looking after a bunch of them the management centre really shines. You need to invest a bit of work in setting up your components (hosts, networks, non-standard services, groups, etc), but then the drag-and-drop firewall rules and VPN's are a breeze, and templating and shared/inherited rulesets can save a lot of duplicated effort. Centralised logging can be a real time-saver if you've got traffic that's passing through multiple firewalls and need to track exactly which rule on one of them is blocking it...
I don't remember anything about Lost originally having a planned length, but in any case the last three seasons are 16 episodes as opposed to 24, so it's really two seasons' worth of episodes stretched over two years.
Yes, it's probably true that a network running at full capacity costs little more than one which is idle. So what? If its running at capacity, quality of service will rapidly degrade and the ISP will have to upgrade the network - and that's where the cost comes in.
Never mind the fact that a typical UK ISP will be paying usage-related charges both for the connection between the customer and the ISP, and for upstream bandwidth to the internet.
What can they do about this?
1) Nothing. Let contention solve the problem. Service rapidly degrades. All customers complain. 2) OK, so upgrade the network. Have to put up charges to pay for this. All customers complain. 3) OK, so have bandwidth caps. Only charge more to customers who use more. Only heavy users complain. 4) OK, instead of capping, throttle usage beyond a "reasonable" limit. Only heavy users complain. 5) Use a magical new technology to provide more bandwidth at no cost. No-one complains!
Until option 5 comes along, caps/throttling are a fact of life, because it's simple business sense to either either make customers pay for what they use (caps), or failing that chose an option that only pisses off customers who are likely costing you more than they pay (throttling) rather than pissing off everyone.
Not necessarily. That may be true for bandwidth within the ISP's own network, but that's only a small part of the cost equation. Internet transit and more importantly the "last mile" connectivity from the ISP network to the customer are most likely being charged to the ISP based on usage. The latter of those in particular is the largest part of the cost of providing a DSL connection in the UK - and if a customer's usage goes up, so does the cost to an ISP.
If you're paying a fixed monthly rate to an ISP for a service which costs them more the more you use it, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they should but a cap on it so that you can't end up costing them ten times what you're paying (which would be easily possible on an 8 meg connection and the normal rates consumer ISPs charge).
BTW. If the ISP waited until the link was well and truly saturated before upgrading their link, they'd already be haemorrhaging customers due to entirely justified complaints about the crappy level of service...
Except that that isn't really possible for much of the UK internet industry. Unless an ISP is big enough to take their network to every telephone exchange in the country, they're stuck with paying BT (or one of the big ISPs) for their "last-mile" connectivity. Those charges will be based on bandwidth usage, so without bandwidth caps, a customer could easily cost their IPS vastly more in BT fees than they are paying the ISP.
These charges for getting data from the customer to the ISP's network are by far the largest cost of providing a DSL service, dwarfing internet transit costs (by a couple of orders of magnitude) or the cost of maintaining the ISP's network. Until this changes, providing high-speed DSL without a bandwidth cap is simply going to be too financially risky for ISPs to provide. Not, of course, that that excusing them from misleading advertising where the cap is buried in the small print.
On the flip side, the reason UK consumers expect "unlimited" internet is the years of "free" and unlimited dial-up connectivity which proceeded the arrival of broadband. With ISPs being able to take a cut of the call charges, a penny a minute on even local-rate dial-up numbers was more than enough to pay the cost of providing he connection without having to levy any other fees or place restrictions on the service.
The costs would indeed be equal, *if* the customer was sat in a data-centre on the ISP's network (the iPlayer servers will be in data-centres and the BBC is effectively an ISP - they peer at the LINX, for example).
Unfortunately, the ISP then has to get that data from their core network all the way to the end user, and *that* is by far the most expensive part of the deal. iPlayer data could easily be costing ISP's a hundred times what it costs the Beeb...
Internet transit (from the ISP's network to anywhere in the world) is cheap
Peering (from the ISP to other directly attached networks, eg the BBC at the LINX) is all but free
Bandwidth to the end user (from the ISP across the BT DSL network) is hideously expensive
It's the last of those factors which is the killer for small UK ISP's - the BT charges can easily be one or two orders of magnitude higher than the transit costs (which is why a server hosted on the ISP's network can have vastly more bandwidth for the same money). If you were to max out that 1 meg connection 24/7, your ISP would almost certainly be paying BT far more than you're paying them.
It's a shame that somebody managed to [charactername]dies as a tag on the article when I first saw it. Thanks, Slashdot, for being the only site to manage to get a spoiler to me:-(
As long as the reports go to someone who is smart enough to understand those things, the reports can help.
If they go to the wrong person, all that serves to do is annoy someone who has absolutely nothing to do with the spam and can't do anything to fix it. Such emails are usually the most inflammatory, so hackles are already up before you waste time verifying that the original spam was indeed nothing to do with us. Plus, like the boy who cried wolf, every one of these makes you that little bit less inclined to care about the real spam reports that come in. Oh, and forget replying to such messages - I learned long ago that "It's nothing to do with us" is rarely an answer they're interested in hearing, no matter how politely you put it and how detailed your explanation of "this is why and here's who's really responsible" is.
That is indeed how it should work, but it doesn't. I have my Wii set with WiiConnect24 on and standby connection off, and if I try to go into the Forecast or News channels it tells me that WiiConnect24 is turned off. Turning standby connection on and then going back to the Forecast channel (without going into standby first) works just fine. Possibly this is a glitch in the current firmware.
My main irritation with standby connection is that it leaves the video signal active in standby mode, which confuses my automatic video switcher...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who's seen Janet begging for her life in The Good Place already knows this. Even if she's not a robot.
Because seven weeks is plenty of time to change people's minds about who they want to vote for. Especially when you run the most inept campaign in political history, and your main opponent massively outperforms (admittedly very low) expectations. Having all that data won't help if it changes before it's used.
The public are afraid. They demand action to stop the terrorists.
Are we really? Mostly, it seems like a whole lot of "Keep Calm and Carry On" (and twitter memes mocking the NYT for suggesting we were "reeling"). I see the politicians claiming that the people are demanding action, and using that as an excuse to push forward whatever draconian measures they want to. If the public are demanding anything in this case, it's probably the replacement of the 20,000 police officers Theresa May presided over the demise of – something that might actually help!
In the real world, people just buy a set of knives from Lidl...
...and then plunge them into Theresa May's back. Oh, wait, no. That's the tories, not the terrorists. My bad. And to be fair, none of them would be caught dead in Lidl.
I'd agree that Turbine have done a pretty good job with converting LOTRO to a hybrid F2P model. You can continue to subscribe and be in the same position as before F2P launched (content and slots unlocked for as long as you subscribe, except for expansions), plus you get a monthly allotment of points to spend in the store. Alternatively you can go a la carte, and buy content and slots as 1-time unlocks (and you can earn points for the store in-game - enough to unlock everything if you're willing to spend enough time grinding). I've not found there to be any instances where paid consumables/services are at all necessary - yes, you can buy buffs and pots to make things a bit easier (but in a PvE setting I don't see a problem with this), and items that will give you quick travel or reduced a grind (but these grinds are ones that existed in the game pre-F2P).
TF2 is a particularly good example - what you get for free is the original paid base game plus several years' worth of updates. You can buy weapons and cosmetics (which can also be got in-game via random drops and crafting) and various other utility items that don't have any (non-cosmetic) effect on gameplay. More importantly, the weapons are all intended to be sidegrades offering alternate play-styles and situational advantages - you can't pay-to-win in any meaningful way.
Here are the missing things that are currently stopping me from defecting from the land of dead-tree books:
1) The reader that's as pleasant and easy to read as book, anywhere I might want to read (like in the bath, or our in the sun on a hot day), and that doesn't leave me twenty times as much out of pocket if it gets lost, stolen or damaged.
2) Cost of acquisition on a par with books. Currently, it's not uncommon for Amazon to be selling a paper book for less than they charge for the kindle version. Factor in the second-hand market, and you can pretty much always pick up a book for significantly less than an ebook.
3) The ability to sell/loan/give away ebooks. And be 100% sure that I'll always be able to read them. The value of books is significantly diminished if I can't lend them to friends and family (and borrow theirs), and if I no longer want them to sell them off or donate them to a charity shop. Or if in ten year's time the vendor went out of business and took their DRM system with them and I can no longer read my ebooks.
4) A way of converting all my paper books into (legal) ebooks. The biggest advantage of ebooks (hundreds of books in your pocket!) is completely if for any given book I wan to read there's a 95% chance that I'm going to have to go and get it off the bookshelf anyway (not that it wouldn't be nice not to be forever running out of bookshelf space)
That last one is, for me, the real killer. Ripping all my CDs into iTunes took a while, but now I have all my music wherever I go and my CDs are in boxes in the attic. I can't do that with books. Sure, I could try and track down pirated ebooks for every paper book I own, but that would take a very long time, and I'm betting there are plenty I wouldn't be able to find. Plus I'd still need to hang onto the originals to make the slightest claim on legality...
I've been using good old command-Z for that for as long as I can remember. It's just undo. Why would you need another, more complicated shortcut?
So, a new version of this image, then...
I second this recommendation. Whilst it's pretty much overkill for a single firewall, once you start looking after a bunch of them the management centre really shines. You need to invest a bit of work in setting up your components (hosts, networks, non-standard services, groups, etc), but then the drag-and-drop firewall rules and VPN's are a breeze, and templating and shared/inherited rulesets can save a lot of duplicated effort. Centralised logging can be a real time-saver if you've got traffic that's passing through multiple firewalls and need to track exactly which rule on one of them is blocking it...
I don't remember anything about Lost originally having a planned length, but in any case the last three seasons are 16 episodes as opposed to 24, so it's really two seasons' worth of episodes stretched over two years.
The last is a nice idea, but way to open to abuse:
1) Hire someone to spamvertise your competitor's website
2) Wait for the lawsuits against them to roll in
3) ???
4) Profit!
Yes, it's probably true that a network running at full capacity costs little more than one which is idle. So what? If its running at capacity, quality of service will rapidly degrade and the ISP will have to upgrade the network - and that's where the cost comes in.
Never mind the fact that a typical UK ISP will be paying usage-related charges both for the connection between the customer and the ISP, and for upstream bandwidth to the internet.
What can they do about this?
1) Nothing. Let contention solve the problem. Service rapidly degrades. All customers complain.
2) OK, so upgrade the network. Have to put up charges to pay for this. All customers complain.
3) OK, so have bandwidth caps. Only charge more to customers who use more. Only heavy users complain.
4) OK, instead of capping, throttle usage beyond a "reasonable" limit. Only heavy users complain.
5) Use a magical new technology to provide more bandwidth at no cost. No-one complains!
Until option 5 comes along, caps/throttling are a fact of life, because it's simple business sense to either either make customers pay for what they use (caps), or failing that chose an option that only pisses off customers who are likely costing you more than they pay (throttling) rather than pissing off everyone.
Bandwidth that is not used is wasted
Not necessarily. That may be true for bandwidth within the ISP's own network, but that's only a small part of the cost equation. Internet transit and more importantly the "last mile" connectivity from the ISP network to the customer are most likely being charged to the ISP based on usage. The latter of those in particular is the largest part of the cost of providing a DSL connection in the UK - and if a customer's usage goes up, so does the cost to an ISP.
If you're paying a fixed monthly rate to an ISP for a service which costs them more the more you use it, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they should but a cap on it so that you can't end up costing them ten times what you're paying (which would be easily possible on an 8 meg connection and the normal rates consumer ISPs charge).
BTW. If the ISP waited until the link was well and truly saturated before upgrading their link, they'd already be haemorrhaging customers due to entirely justified complaints about the crappy level of service...
Except that that isn't really possible for much of the UK internet industry. Unless an ISP is big enough to take their network to every telephone exchange in the country, they're stuck with paying BT (or one of the big ISPs) for their "last-mile" connectivity. Those charges will be based on bandwidth usage, so without bandwidth caps, a customer could easily cost their IPS vastly more in BT fees than they are paying the ISP.
These charges for getting data from the customer to the ISP's network are by far the largest cost of providing a DSL service, dwarfing internet transit costs (by a couple of orders of magnitude) or the cost of maintaining the ISP's network. Until this changes, providing high-speed DSL without a bandwidth cap is simply going to be too financially risky for ISPs to provide. Not, of course, that that excusing them from misleading advertising where the cap is buried in the small print.
On the flip side, the reason UK consumers expect "unlimited" internet is the years of "free" and unlimited dial-up connectivity which proceeded the arrival of broadband. With ISPs being able to take a cut of the call charges, a penny a minute on even local-rate dial-up numbers was more than enough to pay the cost of providing he connection without having to levy any other fees or place restrictions on the service.
llamallamaduck, surely...
The costs would indeed be equal, *if* the customer was sat in a data-centre on the ISP's network (the iPlayer servers will be in data-centres and the BBC is effectively an ISP - they peer at the LINX, for example).
Unfortunately, the ISP then has to get that data from their core network all the way to the end user, and *that* is by far the most expensive part of the deal. iPlayer data could easily be costing ISP's a hundred times what it costs the Beeb...
It depends what bandwidth you're talking about:
It's the last of those factors which is the killer for small UK ISP's - the BT charges can easily be one or two orders of magnitude higher than the transit costs (which is why a server hosted on the ISP's network can have vastly more bandwidth for the same money). If you were to max out that 1 meg connection 24/7, your ISP would almost certainly be paying BT far more than you're paying them.
That sort of thing is exactly why I'm very glad that Half-Life 2 et al keep the *two* most recent quick-saves...
It's a shame that somebody managed to [charactername]dies as a tag on the article when I first saw it. Thanks, Slashdot, for being the only site to manage to get a spoiler to me :-(
That is indeed how it should work, but it doesn't. I have my Wii set with WiiConnect24 on and standby connection off, and if I try to go into the Forecast or News channels it tells me that WiiConnect24 is turned off. Turning standby connection on and then going back to the Forecast channel (without going into standby first) works just fine. Possibly this is a glitch in the current firmware.
My main irritation with standby connection is that it leaves the video signal active in standby mode, which confuses my automatic video switcher...
With a "LASER", of course!
Windows for Vacuum Cleaners?
My iBook (now two revs old) certainly does manage the claimed battery life (with the brightness down and airport off etc).