Flash is fundamentally user hostile. It's all about controlling the user's experience, not about what the user actually wants.
Until there is an Open Source flash player implementation that can run the vast majority of Flash applications, I don't want it.
Adobe wouldn't be in the platform trouble they were in if that was the case anyway. Right now Adobe has to be the one to create a player for whatever platform. If it were a truly open standard with a good interoperable Open Source implementation, they would no longer have to do that. They could concentrate on making high-quality authoring tools instead.
Or, perhaps just as bad would be information released which, without sufficient context or completeness, caused people to make incorrect conclusions and support the wrong side. You know, classic disinformation. It's easy to imagine many such scenarios.
Well, your other examples were great, but this one is really stupid. Mostly because there is an easy solution to it. Release the full context so people can make up there own minds. The solution to disinformation is not to prevent information from being released, it's releasing good information.
Jailbreaking is not a choice. Just look at the word. Doesn't that sound seedy, underhanded and possibly even illegal? It's certainly not Apple condoned or supported, and I'm guessing that if they could manage to make it illegal or sue everybody who did it, they would.
They are locking people into the Apple approved app store. I don't know how that's not so clear and obvious as to require me to spell it out.
And I don't really think Apple iProduct users are idiots. I think they are blind to the long-term damage they are causing. But a lot of smart people are blind to the long-term damage they cause by various activities. I mostly called them that out of frustration.
I'm sure the vast majority of Apple users are idiots who wouldn't in the least care if the iPhone was able to use a non-Apple app store. But that one change would be enough for me to stop complaining.
As a developer I think my freedom to create systems that are opaque and lock people in should be restricted. Just like I think the government's freedom to pass laws restricting people's ability to say whatever they want should be restricted. It's a freedom I think should be removed because it's a freedom that's used to destroy the freedoms of other people.
By creating a network effect encouraging the existence of iPhone apps and conversely discouraging the existence of apps for platforms that respect my freedom by capturing more of the limited resource of developer time and attention. Now that Android has more market-share than the iPhone does, this effect isn't nearly as strong.
It isn't artificially hard. GM didn't purposely insert things into the engine or chassis to make it melt if you tried to take it apart. They didn't make it so you had to go to a semi-seedy seeming person to get the right tool to open your hood. They didn't encase the engine in a lucite block.
Apple has done the digital equivalent of these things with the iPhone.
Unfortunately, people's interest in those products causes problems with the important things in my life. When I make choices that preserve my freedom, which is very important to me, other people's lack of interest in their own freedom causes my choices to be much more limited than they might otherwise be.
So, I'm sorry, I'm not actually getting angry over nothing. I'm getting angry over something that directly negatively effects me.
If GM went to great pains to restrict how you could modify your Corvette once you bought it by putting in purposeful restrictions beyond the simple restrictions of physics and available manufactured parts, yes, I would say that.
But, when you buy a Corvette, it's capabilities are pretty well spelled out. And if you want to modify those capabilities, the procedure for doing that is within reasonable financial reach, and you don't have to go to GM and get their permission to do it.
So, that case falls either under this sentence "If Apple just sold a phone pre-loaded with apps and you didn't get to change which apps there were, I wouldn't care." (which is a reason I have fewer problems with iTunes than the iPhone or iPad) or this sentence "If they sold the phone and had nothing to do with the app store, or it was easy to use a non-Apple app-store with a stock phone, I wouldn't care.".
If Apple had a bad product that nobody wanted and the apps were trash and nobody wanted THOSE, people wouldn't buy them. People buy iPhones and iPads and iApps because they fulfill some sort of criteria. Apple's control is only on the manufacturing end. They may restrict the specifications of an application (e.g., no porn), but that's hardly control over the consumer.
It is control over the consumer. It's telling them what they are allowed and not allowed to buy for their phone.
Yes, the consumer has control over whether or not to 'buy' the phone in the first place. Though after they do they still don't really own it. After they think they've bought the phone they are then hit with hidden costs, the cost of a lack of certain kinds of choices.
Those hidden costs are a control on the consumers behavior. Apple controls the consumer's behavior post-sale through their app-store policies.
If Apple just sold a phone pre-loaded with apps and you didn't get to change which apps there were, I wouldn't care. If they sold the phone and had nothing to do with the app store, or it was easy to use a non-Apple app-store with a stock phone, I wouldn't care. But the fact Apple's phones are set up so you have to do something that seems shady and dangerous (yet more hidden costs) in order to escape their app-store means they have post-sale control over consumer behavior.
And, unlike a government, they can't even vote to change what the controls are. Yes, if people raise a big enough hue-and-cry Apple might change their policies. But Apple may choose not to, and people who bought an Apple iProduct are locked in by the price they've paid for the device and the investment they've made in learning how it works.
I own an Apple laptop and it runs OS X. OS X has many proprietary parts, but it's at least generally open and doesn't try to control what I can see or install beyond making me type my password.
But I won't own an iProduct. Mostly because even if I buy one I don't really own it. Yes, they are nice looking, have good user interfaces, and are otherwise well-designed. But I require that when I buy something I own it. And that isn't true of those products.
My feelings about corporations and their products are based on principles and not popular opinion.
Control does not have to be absolute to be control. Governments use laws to control the behavior of their people all the time, but nobody thinks "The government made me do it." is generally a credible defense.
Yeah. This whole episode is really dumb. No, it's not really censorship. But it's still ugly and wrong. I hate iProducts. They are all about control of the user for the benefit of Apple. The thing I hate the most about them is that they are so popular and wrongheaded at the same time. I get angry when masses of people let shininess override good sense.
I guess my argument is that with such an incredibly marked lack of transparency in governments the world over, I think the benefits of consequence free leaking outweighs the downside. I would rather trust the editors of wikileaks to decide what should and shouldn't be secret than my own government.
I think secrecy is more harmful to democracy than consequence free leaking is.
Perhaps its true that we've voted for it to be that way over time. But I don't think we can ever get to a place where we don't vote that way without having the leaks. Government control of so much information is really bad for our ability to reliably make decisions about what our government ought to be doing.
You could say some information should be kept secret ( like military strategies , etc... ) , but if they can be leaked , they will be leaked , and the chances are it's going to be leaked not to the general public , but to someone with less then good intentions.
That is also an interesting point. If it's on wikileaks, everybody knows its public knowledge and plans can be changed accordingly.
I still think that wikileaks has a bit of a duty to try to filter out stuff that's obviously going to get someone killed if it's publicly known.
I hope for intelligent responses to this post that actually acknowledge the need for some information to be protected, and for processes to protect that information, of which the government is the steward. Or, for any reasonable alternative other than any and all information should always be able to be indiscriminately leaked without fear of reprisal.
Well, I agree that some information needs to be protected.
In my opinion, most of the governments in the world use their control over information to the great detriment of their citizenry. They do this on purpose, with malice and forethought. I presume that most people who are in charge of making this happen rationalize it with thinking that they're somehow serving the greater good. In point of fact, they aren't. I can't state that emphatically enough. They are not serving any greater good, no matter what kind of excuses they think they have.
Information about the activities of our government that should be secret should basically only be information that would pretty directly result in someone getting killed if it was public knowledge. Strategic plans, detailed specifications for key military equipment, identities of spies, that sort of thing. Also, in some cases, I would also accept that diplomatic negotiations should be kept secret for some relatively short period of time in order to avoid jeopardizing said negotiations.
Too often used is the excuse that information should be kept secret because it would give our enemies ammunition to discredit us. If that's the case, the information discredits us whether or not its secret. All you are doing by keeping it secret is fostering a false sense of self-righteousness in the populace, one that is ultimately incredibly dangerous and inimical to democracy.
So far Wikileaks discretion and judgement in these matters has been impeccable. Sure, you might think the video depicting the helicopter shooting up civilians is biased for any number of reasons. But those reasons should be up for public debate, not hidden behind a decision to make some piece of information secret. Nobody would be able to argue that the army couldn't have known the civilians were unarmed if the video weren't out there to argue about.
I've been testing it on light duty, non-critical filesystems for a little while now. I intend to be an early adopter, but a very cautious one. It's worked fairly well so far.
I use reiserfs for most of my filesystems currently. I've only ever had one problem with it. I had lots of null characters appended to files that were actively being appended to at the time a computer crashed. The stupid jokes and badmouthing whenever it's mentioned really irk me because they don't match my experience and because I think that kind of attitude is part of why it's so poorly supported in RH.
I consider ext[234] to be horribly broken for any number of reasons. Reirserfs is not broken in any of those ways, so I've been looking for the technological successor to resierfs because it's no longer being maintained in any significant way.
As you can see, I have a lot of reasons to go for a risky fs like btrfs. And with its b-tree based structure it has a lot of the features that I think made reiserfs so much better than the ext series and is a more than worthy successor.
I really hate it when people tell me that if I want real storage I should stuff my data in a database. Filesystems exist to organize your data. If they're so bad at it that you need to use a database instead the filesystem is broken and should be fixed.
Eventually you're going to want to migrate those filesystems to btrfs as well, and that has really nice built-in snapshotting capability. But until then (a few years from now) move to LVM. It will save you so much hassle and be much more tested and stable than some hack like ext3cow
As for being disturbed that some customers are being treated as the 'enemy'... this may seem irrational from a customer 'hey I'm the customer, I'm always right and I demand you to treat me like a king!' mentality, but if you look at it from a business perspective it makes a lot more sense. In the real world, some customers are unprofitable. Companies can and do actively disuade or even prohibit doing business with unprofitable customers.
What's the point of retaining unprofitable customers? Making money is a primary motivation for being in business, even if it's not the main one (non-profits are different though). You want profits to be maximised or near-maximised. A certain segment of customers lower your profits and are therefore antithetical to your goals. Your profits would be higher if you got rid of them. The only logical thing to do is cut them loose either by directly refusing their business or by imposing obscene pricing structures on them such that they either become profitable again or leave of their own accord. That's just common business sense and not, in my view, unethical at all.
Well, when you're running a network that isn't a reasonable perspective, even from self-interest perspective. Your 'unprofitable customers' might well be why everybody else wants to be on your network.
Really, the idea of 'unlimited' anything is a joke. Somebody has to pay for it somewhere. There's no free lunch.
Frankly I'm happy they're being more upfront about the fact that there are limits instead of having stupid 'fairness' policies that they can use to arbitrarily terminate your agreement at any point.
The thing that maximizes customer value is having the optimal maximum utilization of your network. The point of capitalism and the free market is that it's supposed to incentivize businesses to approach to a state of maximum customer value as possible. If capitalism and the free market aren't accomplishing that goal, something is broken.
The problem with fairness policies that terminate your agreement is that they still do nothing to achieve the goal. Telecoms should be managing bandwidth usage so that heavy users are deprioritized, but not cut off completely. I think this is the strategy that will most likely result in optimal maximum utilization of your network.
Given that power laws are so incredibly prevalent in distributions for natural phenomena (see Benford's law and Linked: The New Science of Networks) this does not surprise me in the least. In fact, it would surprise me if it weren't the case.
The question remains, is charging on a per-byte basis the right way to handle this? I think this is a natural phenomena that will arise in any network, and that by reducing the bandwidth usage of these small number of people you stand a chance of reducing everybody's bandwidth usage and thereby reducing the network's utility for everybody.
It seems much more sensible to me to prioritize heavy users traffic so that they are at a low priority compared to everybody else. The ideal way to run your network from a cost/benefit standpoint is at the maximum capacity at which your network is efficient (i.e. not at 100% if your network falls down at 100%). I have a guess that deprioritizing heavy users has more of a chance of getting making that happen than trying to use economic incentives for them to reduce their usage.
And on a different note, it really disturbs me that telecom companies are considering a segment of their customer base to be the enemy instead of looking at it as a phenomena to be managed.
I can see leaking select diplomatic cables, but leaking all of them seems horribly irresponsible.
I'm really sad though, because that guy could've been a great source. Our country, and most countries around the world have gotten away with hiding any number of things from the public that they shouldn't be. It would be really nice for those things to be made public.
Governments (ours most definitely included) do horrible ugly things, and I really want more people to be forced to confront that in a way they can't deny.
If your boss (or your mom) asks you to do twice the amount of work, for the same wage (allowance), but you can prioritize so that you can put some tasks off till the weekend in order to do the rush jobs now, would you think that was fair? More work, less downtime, same pay?
Infrastructure doesn't need to spend quality time with it's family. It doesn't go out to movies with friends, there is no value extracted from infrastructure that isn't used. My free time has plenty of value to me.
And yes, a little bit of headroom for burst traffic is a good idea, but I count that headroom as meaning the infrastructure is utilized.
And besides, I already prioritize that work anyway. Work that my friends or girlfriend asks me to do generally are behind in the queue behind work that my job asks me to do, up to a point.
If the traffic is important to you, why should it be LAST? Why can't you pay to have it first, of at least arrive in sequence?
If its not important to you, why not help you make that decision, by making it affect your pocket book?
This makes no sense. Just because something isn't important for me to get at any given point in time doesn't mean I don't want it at all. By this logic, the post office should only ever offer 1st class service because if people didn't want their packages or letters to arrive as quickly as possible then they don't care enough to have them arrive at all.
And, grabbing your comments from other parts of this thread...
Nope. You will never convince the industry or anyone who knows anything about networking that slowing down traffic from heavy users after some magical number has been reached is the way to go.
I had a roommate who used Limewire all the time. He left it up in the background (probably cluelessly) so it was always running. My DSL line was way over-utilized, all the time. I tried to log in remotely and ended up with latencies measured in the thousands of milliseconds.
I rate limited him. He came down and started complaining that his WoW game was laggy. I told him about his Limewire sessions and mysteriously Limewire never really used up all my bandwidth anymore.
If I had had a good way (traffic shaping on Linux is incredibly complex and doesn't work the right way to handle this anyway) of managing priorities I could've limited low-priority traffic to using at most 75% of my bandwidth, and to always be behind in the queue. I could've told him to flick a switch in Limewire (one that should be set by default) and poof, everything would've worked great, and he would've been happy.
Application designers can and will adapt to a world in which applications can assign priorities to traffic. It's their responsibility to provide a good user interface so that users will understand what's happening and be able to make intelligent choices. It's not the network's job to try to manage battery life on cell phones are any of that through network policy, that's the job of the device and application designers.
You are essentially arguing for the Tragedy of the Commons all over again, allowing the sheep to come after the cattle to make sure every blade of grass is eaten, and every packet imagined is sent. Eventually.
The tragedy of the commons is a way over-simplified economic model to be applying here. Additionally, price is not actually the best or most ubiquitous way of handling resource allocation. Cost is. Price and cost are not the same thing. There are many kinds of costs that I don't use money to pay. Perhaps those costs can be reduced to a monetary equivalent if you do a lot of playing around with numbers, but when I pay them, I'm not paying money.
Additionally, people have very little control over exactly how much bandwidth their using. Some website could put in a 3Gb complex Flash banner ad one day without warning and suddenly I'm hit with a giant bill I never expected at had no control over. Forcing me to make a price decision over every byte I download essentially costs me way more than the monetary price of the bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash is fundamentally user hostile. It's all about controlling the user's experience, not about what the user actually wants.
Until there is an Open Source flash player implementation that can run the vast majority of Flash applications, I don't want it.
Adobe wouldn't be in the platform trouble they were in if that was the case anyway. Right now Adobe has to be the one to create a player for whatever platform. If it were a truly open standard with a good interoperable Open Source implementation, they would no longer have to do that. They could concentrate on making high-quality authoring tools instead.
Or, perhaps just as bad would be information released which, without sufficient context or completeness, caused people to make incorrect conclusions and support the wrong side. You know, classic disinformation. It's easy to imagine many such scenarios.
Well, your other examples were great, but this one is really stupid. Mostly because there is an easy solution to it. Release the full context so people can make up there own minds. The solution to disinformation is not to prevent information from being released, it's releasing good information.
Jailbreaking is not a choice. Just look at the word. Doesn't that sound seedy, underhanded and possibly even illegal? It's certainly not Apple condoned or supported, and I'm guessing that if they could manage to make it illegal or sue everybody who did it, they would.
They are locking people into the Apple approved app store. I don't know how that's not so clear and obvious as to require me to spell it out.
And I don't really think Apple iProduct users are idiots. I think they are blind to the long-term damage they are causing. But a lot of smart people are blind to the long-term damage they cause by various activities. I mostly called them that out of frustration.
I'm sure the vast majority of Apple users are idiots who wouldn't in the least care if the iPhone was able to use a non-Apple app store. But that one change would be enough for me to stop complaining.
As a developer I think my freedom to create systems that are opaque and lock people in should be restricted. Just like I think the government's freedom to pass laws restricting people's ability to say whatever they want should be restricted. It's a freedom I think should be removed because it's a freedom that's used to destroy the freedoms of other people.
By creating a network effect encouraging the existence of iPhone apps and conversely discouraging the existence of apps for platforms that respect my freedom by capturing more of the limited resource of developer time and attention. Now that Android has more market-share than the iPhone does, this effect isn't nearly as strong.
It isn't artificially hard. GM didn't purposely insert things into the engine or chassis to make it melt if you tried to take it apart. They didn't make it so you had to go to a semi-seedy seeming person to get the right tool to open your hood. They didn't encase the engine in a lucite block.
Apple has done the digital equivalent of these things with the iPhone.
Unfortunately, people's interest in those products causes problems with the important things in my life. When I make choices that preserve my freedom, which is very important to me, other people's lack of interest in their own freedom causes my choices to be much more limited than they might otherwise be.
So, I'm sorry, I'm not actually getting angry over nothing. I'm getting angry over something that directly negatively effects me.
If GM went to great pains to restrict how you could modify your Corvette once you bought it by putting in purposeful restrictions beyond the simple restrictions of physics and available manufactured parts, yes, I would say that.
But, when you buy a Corvette, it's capabilities are pretty well spelled out. And if you want to modify those capabilities, the procedure for doing that is within reasonable financial reach, and you don't have to go to GM and get their permission to do it.
So, that case falls either under this sentence "If Apple just sold a phone pre-loaded with apps and you didn't get to change which apps there were, I wouldn't care." (which is a reason I have fewer problems with iTunes than the iPhone or iPad) or this sentence "If they sold the phone and had nothing to do with the app store, or it was easy to use a non-Apple app-store with a stock phone, I wouldn't care.".
If Apple had a bad product that nobody wanted and the apps were trash and nobody wanted THOSE, people wouldn't buy them. People buy iPhones and iPads and iApps because they fulfill some sort of criteria. Apple's control is only on the manufacturing end. They may restrict the specifications of an application (e.g., no porn), but that's hardly control over the consumer.
It is control over the consumer. It's telling them what they are allowed and not allowed to buy for their phone.
Yes, the consumer has control over whether or not to 'buy' the phone in the first place. Though after they do they still don't really own it. After they think they've bought the phone they are then hit with hidden costs, the cost of a lack of certain kinds of choices.
Those hidden costs are a control on the consumers behavior. Apple controls the consumer's behavior post-sale through their app-store policies.
If Apple just sold a phone pre-loaded with apps and you didn't get to change which apps there were, I wouldn't care. If they sold the phone and had nothing to do with the app store, or it was easy to use a non-Apple app-store with a stock phone, I wouldn't care. But the fact Apple's phones are set up so you have to do something that seems shady and dangerous (yet more hidden costs) in order to escape their app-store means they have post-sale control over consumer behavior.
And, unlike a government, they can't even vote to change what the controls are. Yes, if people raise a big enough hue-and-cry Apple might change their policies. But Apple may choose not to, and people who bought an Apple iProduct are locked in by the price they've paid for the device and the investment they've made in learning how it works.
Yes, I know. That's really absurd too.
I own an Apple laptop and it runs OS X. OS X has many proprietary parts, but it's at least generally open and doesn't try to control what I can see or install beyond making me type my password.
But I won't own an iProduct. Mostly because even if I buy one I don't really own it. Yes, they are nice looking, have good user interfaces, and are otherwise well-designed. But I require that when I buy something I own it. And that isn't true of those products.
My feelings about corporations and their products are based on principles and not popular opinion.
Control does not have to be absolute to be control. Governments use laws to control the behavior of their people all the time, but nobody thinks "The government made me do it." is generally a credible defense.
Yeah. This whole episode is really dumb. No, it's not really censorship. But it's still ugly and wrong. I hate iProducts. They are all about control of the user for the benefit of Apple. The thing I hate the most about them is that they are so popular and wrongheaded at the same time. I get angry when masses of people let shininess override good sense.
Well, I had a PC that repeatedly crashed from overheating in the late 90s, and I only had the problem I just mentioned. No other data was scrambled.
And in recent years I've never had an issue like that with reiserfs.
Anyway, it's water under the bridge mostly. I'm just clinging to it for another year or two before I think btrfs is ready to be used seriously.
I guess my argument is that with such an incredibly marked lack of transparency in governments the world over, I think the benefits of consequence free leaking outweighs the downside. I would rather trust the editors of wikileaks to decide what should and shouldn't be secret than my own government.
I think secrecy is more harmful to democracy than consequence free leaking is.
Perhaps its true that we've voted for it to be that way over time. But I don't think we can ever get to a place where we don't vote that way without having the leaks. Government control of so much information is really bad for our ability to reliably make decisions about what our government ought to be doing.
You could say some information should be kept secret ( like military strategies , etc ... ) , but if they can be leaked , they will be leaked , and the chances are it's going to be leaked not to the general public , but to someone with less then good intentions.
That is also an interesting point. If it's on wikileaks, everybody knows its public knowledge and plans can be changed accordingly.
I still think that wikileaks has a bit of a duty to try to filter out stuff that's obviously going to get someone killed if it's publicly known.
I hope for intelligent responses to this post that actually acknowledge the need for some information to be protected, and for processes to protect that information, of which the government is the steward. Or, for any reasonable alternative other than any and all information should always be able to be indiscriminately leaked without fear of reprisal.
Well, I agree that some information needs to be protected.
In my opinion, most of the governments in the world use their control over information to the great detriment of their citizenry. They do this on purpose, with malice and forethought. I presume that most people who are in charge of making this happen rationalize it with thinking that they're somehow serving the greater good. In point of fact, they aren't. I can't state that emphatically enough. They are not serving any greater good, no matter what kind of excuses they think they have.
Information about the activities of our government that should be secret should basically only be information that would pretty directly result in someone getting killed if it was public knowledge. Strategic plans, detailed specifications for key military equipment, identities of spies, that sort of thing. Also, in some cases, I would also accept that diplomatic negotiations should be kept secret for some relatively short period of time in order to avoid jeopardizing said negotiations.
Too often used is the excuse that information should be kept secret because it would give our enemies ammunition to discredit us. If that's the case, the information discredits us whether or not its secret. All you are doing by keeping it secret is fostering a false sense of self-righteousness in the populace, one that is ultimately incredibly dangerous and inimical to democracy.
So far Wikileaks discretion and judgement in these matters has been impeccable. Sure, you might think the video depicting the helicopter shooting up civilians is biased for any number of reasons. But those reasons should be up for public debate, not hidden behind a decision to make some piece of information secret. Nobody would be able to argue that the army couldn't have known the civilians were unarmed if the video weren't out there to argue about.
I've been testing it on light duty, non-critical filesystems for a little while now. I intend to be an early adopter, but a very cautious one. It's worked fairly well so far.
I use reiserfs for most of my filesystems currently. I've only ever had one problem with it. I had lots of null characters appended to files that were actively being appended to at the time a computer crashed. The stupid jokes and badmouthing whenever it's mentioned really irk me because they don't match my experience and because I think that kind of attitude is part of why it's so poorly supported in RH.
I consider ext[234] to be horribly broken for any number of reasons. Reirserfs is not broken in any of those ways, so I've been looking for the technological successor to resierfs because it's no longer being maintained in any significant way.
As you can see, I have a lot of reasons to go for a risky fs like btrfs. And with its b-tree based structure it has a lot of the features that I think made reiserfs so much better than the ext series and is a more than worthy successor.
I really hate it when people tell me that if I want real storage I should stuff my data in a database. Filesystems exist to organize your data. If they're so bad at it that you need to use a database instead the filesystem is broken and should be fixed.
In case you hadn't realized this, It is possible to tell people to migrate to LVM without calling them names.
That would be my advice too. Migrate.
Eventually you're going to want to migrate those filesystems to btrfs as well, and that has really nice built-in snapshotting capability. But until then (a few years from now) move to LVM. It will save you so much hassle and be much more tested and stable than some hack like ext3cow
As for being disturbed that some customers are being treated as the 'enemy'... this may seem irrational from a customer 'hey I'm the customer, I'm always right and I demand you to treat me like a king!' mentality, but if you look at it from a business perspective it makes a lot more sense. In the real world, some customers are unprofitable. Companies can and do actively disuade or even prohibit doing business with unprofitable customers.
What's the point of retaining unprofitable customers? Making money is a primary motivation for being in business, even if it's not the main one (non-profits are different though). You want profits to be maximised or near-maximised. A certain segment of customers lower your profits and are therefore antithetical to your goals. Your profits would be higher if you got rid of them. The only logical thing to do is cut them loose either by directly refusing their business or by imposing obscene pricing structures on them such that they either become profitable again or leave of their own accord. That's just common business sense and not, in my view, unethical at all.
Well, when you're running a network that isn't a reasonable perspective, even from self-interest perspective. Your 'unprofitable customers' might well be why everybody else wants to be on your network.
Really, the idea of 'unlimited' anything is a joke. Somebody has to pay for it somewhere. There's no free lunch.
Frankly I'm happy they're being more upfront about the fact that there are limits instead of having stupid 'fairness' policies that they can use to arbitrarily terminate your agreement at any point.
The thing that maximizes customer value is having the optimal maximum utilization of your network. The point of capitalism and the free market is that it's supposed to incentivize businesses to approach to a state of maximum customer value as possible. If capitalism and the free market aren't accomplishing that goal, something is broken.
The problem with fairness policies that terminate your agreement is that they still do nothing to achieve the goal. Telecoms should be managing bandwidth usage so that heavy users are deprioritized, but not cut off completely. I think this is the strategy that will most likely result in optimal maximum utilization of your network.
Given that power laws are so incredibly prevalent in distributions for natural phenomena (see Benford's law and Linked: The New Science of Networks) this does not surprise me in the least. In fact, it would surprise me if it weren't the case.
The question remains, is charging on a per-byte basis the right way to handle this? I think this is a natural phenomena that will arise in any network, and that by reducing the bandwidth usage of these small number of people you stand a chance of reducing everybody's bandwidth usage and thereby reducing the network's utility for everybody.
It seems much more sensible to me to prioritize heavy users traffic so that they are at a low priority compared to everybody else. The ideal way to run your network from a cost/benefit standpoint is at the maximum capacity at which your network is efficient (i.e. not at 100% if your network falls down at 100%). I have a guess that deprioritizing heavy users has more of a chance of getting making that happen than trying to use economic incentives for them to reduce their usage.
And on a different note, it really disturbs me that telecom companies are considering a segment of their customer base to be the enemy instead of looking at it as a phenomena to be managed.
I can see leaking select diplomatic cables, but leaking all of them seems horribly irresponsible.
I'm really sad though, because that guy could've been a great source. Our country, and most countries around the world have gotten away with hiding any number of things from the public that they shouldn't be. It would be really nice for those things to be made public.
Governments (ours most definitely included) do horrible ugly things, and I really want more people to be forced to confront that in a way they can't deny.
If your boss (or your mom) asks you to do twice the amount of work, for the same wage (allowance), but you can prioritize so that you can put some tasks off till the weekend in order to do the rush jobs now, would you think that was fair? More work, less downtime, same pay?
Infrastructure doesn't need to spend quality time with it's family. It doesn't go out to movies with friends, there is no value extracted from infrastructure that isn't used. My free time has plenty of value to me.
And yes, a little bit of headroom for burst traffic is a good idea, but I count that headroom as meaning the infrastructure is utilized.
And besides, I already prioritize that work anyway. Work that my friends or girlfriend asks me to do generally are behind in the queue behind work that my job asks me to do, up to a point.
If the traffic is important to you, why should it be LAST? Why can't you pay to have it first, of at least arrive in sequence?
If its not important to you, why not help you make that decision, by making it affect your pocket book?
This makes no sense. Just because something isn't important for me to get at any given point in time doesn't mean I don't want it at all. By this logic, the post office should only ever offer 1st class service because if people didn't want their packages or letters to arrive as quickly as possible then they don't care enough to have them arrive at all.
And, grabbing your comments from other parts of this thread...
Nope. You will never convince the industry or anyone who knows anything about networking that slowing down traffic from heavy users after some magical number has been reached is the way to go.
I had a roommate who used Limewire all the time. He left it up in the background (probably cluelessly) so it was always running. My DSL line was way over-utilized, all the time. I tried to log in remotely and ended up with latencies measured in the thousands of milliseconds.
I rate limited him. He came down and started complaining that his WoW game was laggy. I told him about his Limewire sessions and mysteriously Limewire never really used up all my bandwidth anymore.
If I had had a good way (traffic shaping on Linux is incredibly complex and doesn't work the right way to handle this anyway) of managing priorities I could've limited low-priority traffic to using at most 75% of my bandwidth, and to always be behind in the queue. I could've told him to flick a switch in Limewire (one that should be set by default) and poof, everything would've worked great, and he would've been happy.
Application designers can and will adapt to a world in which applications can assign priorities to traffic. It's their responsibility to provide a good user interface so that users will understand what's happening and be able to make intelligent choices. It's not the network's job to try to manage battery life on cell phones are any of that through network policy, that's the job of the device and application designers.
You are essentially arguing for the Tragedy of the Commons all over again, allowing the sheep to come after the cattle to make sure every blade of grass is eaten, and every packet imagined is sent. Eventually.
The tragedy of the commons is a way over-simplified economic model to be applying here. Additionally, price is not actually the best or most ubiquitous way of handling resource allocation. Cost is. Price and cost are not the same thing. There are many kinds of costs that I don't use money to pay. Perhaps those costs can be reduced to a monetary equivalent if you do a lot of playing around with numbers, but when I pay them, I'm not paying money.
Additionally, people have very little control over exactly how much bandwidth their using. Some website could put in a 3Gb complex Flash banner ad one day without warning and suddenly I'm hit with a giant bill I never expected at had no control over. Forcing me to make a price decision over every byte I download essentially costs me way more than the monetary price of the bandwidth.
People will pay to have more bandwidth available before being put last in the queue. That's how the new infrastructure will be rolled out.