Because DoS attacks never harm innocent bystanders like the ISP, *THEIR* ISP, or other customers of either of them.
We have enough problems with DoS attacks launched by miscreants. So, yeah, maybe some of these ISPs don't take reports seriously, but I do know that not all "copyright enforcement" type actions are well researched...
This one time we got a DMCA takedown notice from a software vendor in Australia for a site run by a department of a local university, for running an unlicensed copy of their software. The DMCA takedown notice was sent to my company because they "couldn't find the contact information" *FOR A UNIVERSITY*. I found it by clicking on the "contact" link on the page they made the takedown request for.
Turns out that the university *DID* have a license for the software, BTW.
I know it's annoying when your stuff gets stolen, but don't go attacking people.
Now, admittedly this was in high school, but back in the '80s Apple was *IT* as far as computers went. The art lab had a Mac, the math/programming lab had 8 Apple IIs with CPM, the computer lab had a dozen more Apple IIs, the physics teacher had an Apple II, and the administrative offices had a few of them (with hard drives, woo!).
The drafting class had *ONE* PC with AutoCAD or something, that the teacher wouldn't let anyone even touch. I asked to play with it, but the closest I got to it was he once asked me how to delete this file. "DEL whatever.ext". "But file names can only have 8 characters!"
Your price comparison is off base in a few ways...
First of all, you concentrate on the $4/GB, but ignoring the $50/month cap. If you go just a little over, you may pay as little as $4. Doesn't seem like highway robbery to me. If you go a LOT over, you don't have to pay more than $86. No threats of being cut off like with Comcast... You get to have unlimited Internet for $86. Again, doesn't seem like highway robbery to me.
You talk about how much wholesale Internet costs, but this just isn't wholesale so the comparison is not realistic. You mention $25/Mbps, which is a reasonable per Mbps price *IF* you are buying 100mbps, with a 3 year contract. That's ninety thousand dollars. Still makes $86/month not look like highway robbery. If you want wholesale prices, get a DS3 into your house.
If you are just buying a megabit at a facility, it's probably going to be closer to $200/mbps. A megabit is around 325GB in a month, if used steadily. Most people don't use the Internet that way though -- they use it 4 to 6 hours a day. So that makes 80GB for say $160/month. Or $4/GB...
These are all prices you are likely to see in a data center for bandwidth, ignoring cross-connect fees. I can say that with some authority, I've gotten quotes from half a dozen data centers over the last month and I buy Internet services for my company and make recommendations for several clients.
Can you get it more cheaply? Yes. But I don't think it's fair to call this highway robbery.
Cheaper would be Cogent at $10/Mbps, month-to-month, again for 100mbps. And you can drop that to maybe $6/mbps with a 3 year commit (verbal quote from Cogent last week). Or, if you're in CA, Hurricane Electric has a great deal on a cabinet plus power plus 100Mbps for $600/month for 3 years. But that's capped at 100Mbps, where the others are burstable above 100Mbps. But, these are real wholesale prices, and particularly in the Cogent case you'd probably need to be multi-homing with another provider, which will double or more your costs.
In short, I don't think it's unreasonable to pay $50/month in overage when the alternative requires a $2,500/month commitment.:-)
Remember, they cap their overage charges at $50. So, the max you can pay with this is around $86/month (the "Lite" plan is $36/month). That's around $83USD.
For comparison, the Extreme Plus plan is about what I'm paying in the US for Comcast, at $70/month. That offers 125GB of transfer per month, or half the Comcast cap. Of course, it also offers 25mbps download and 1mbps upload, which is better than the 16mbps and 876kbps I get.
But what happens if I go over my 250GB cap? Comcast seems to be saying they'll provide you a warning if you do it once, and will shut you off if you do it regularly. I'd rather pay $4/GB if I go over, up to a cap of $50, than just be cut off. It doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me... Sure, I pay less per GB at my hosting facility, but I'm sure if I was giving Comcast thousands of dollars per month they'd move on that $4/GB as well.:-)
You need to provide some citations. Because I'm pretty sure that satellite Internet has Rogers hands-down when it comes to geographical coverage. That's one of the ways we've gotten Internet coverage at the family cabin up near Flin Flon. There's also province-wide dial-up from the telcos, not that that's a real alternative. My wife also says that all the cell phone towers have WiFi on them, but I've never heard the full story on that. And the population (as opposed to geographical) coverage certainly has access to DSL. When we were up in Fort McMurray visiting family for Canadian Thanksgiving we had both cable and DSL service in the house (my nephew is a big gamer and buys his own dedicated cable connection).
So, I'm pretty sure that most people are a long ways from having to entirely give up on the Internet if they drop Rogers.
The closest I've come to being hit by a car was in a parking-lot where some dude in a Prius was driving on the "wrong" side of the lane. I was walking into the lot on the left hand side, and then started to cross over, looked over my shoulder and a Prius was doing around 3x my speed a few paces behind me, and passed within a few feet of me. I'd been lifting my foot to step out before I noticed him, I couldn't hear it at all.
Sure, this guy shouldn't have been coming up from behind me to pass going so much faster than me. particularly driving on the left hand side of the lane, but it wouldn't have been a problem in almost any other car. At least someone on a bicycle probably would have said "On your right", because they KNOW that pedestrians probably can't hear them. But, more importantly, if a pedestrian steps out in front of a bicycle, the bicyclist is probably going to be hurt as badly or worse than the pedestrian, so they have a vested interest in you knowing they're there. Not so much with a car.
Can these things run some fans, or have some speakers installed to make some kind of noise so we can hear them? People are *USED* to hearing cars approaching. It's a simple fix. I'm sure one day cars will use their cameras and/or radar (like the adaptive cruise control radar) to detect pedestrians and make their presence known via audible or other signals. Until then, run a fan or speaker or something. Play La Cuccaracha for all I care.:-)
I don't know about the cost/benefit for most people, but we're all running SSDs for our laptops now, and it's definitely worth it.
Once I realized that I could fit on a 64GB SSD comfortably if I didn't keep my ENTIRE photo collection on my laptop, it was a pretty easy decision to make to try them.
And after some testing, I've decided that it's enough worth it for us that we're all using them. In most cases it isn't a bit noticeable difference. But for some things it really does make a difference, and not having to wait for them is a big gain. The things that are a lot faster are: booting (rarely, but you're entirely "down" while doing it), opening big apps like OpenOffice, re-opening firefox or thunderbird when they flake out, and doing big find/grep jobs. Searching through e-mail and the like? Great.
For a long time, CPU increases were way outpacing the disc performance gains. We how have CPUs that are faster than most of my staff can really take advantage of on our laptops. But disc performance, even at 7200 RPM, was often the bottleneck.
So, we've traded volume for performance, and been very happy with it.
I was recently wanting to do something similar. I decided on using the open source Digikam software (which may not be an option for you under Windows), because it has powerful photo management functionality, but also because it stores tags and more all as XMP data directly within my JPEG file.
There is work being done to do face recognition to tag people in photos, one of the things that is taking most of the time for me.
My application was a custom photo-blog, with some neat tag-based features (like "show me the pictures taken at this person's house that have this oher person it them").
So, I tag them in digikam, do cropping and comments, and then save the image. I then wrote some Python programs to check this data for consistency, and to load the data into a database for the web server. The web server also has the ability to edit tags and comments, so I then have code to, once reviewed, write these changes out to the XMP meta-data.
But, the photos themselves are the authoritative source for this information. If I lost the database, no problem. The photos are the authoritative source for all that information.
Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the tools in the upload chain is to get rid of albums and instead encode it in the file with a tag called something like "Blog/Group/$UUID_STRING". It also saves off the "album thumbnail" in a similar way ("Blog/Group/IsAlbumThumbnail").
It's worked extremely well.
I use the command-line "exiv2" program to export and import the XMP data as XML, then I process it (the parts mentioned above) as XML.
A lot of the replies bring up problems of going completely with this solution (how do you get it started if you need things spinning first, how do you tow a car with one of these). Admittedly not an optimal solution, but a very effective one could be to still have a clutch in the mix for some of these situations. Considering that the clutch would only be used fairly rarely, and could be engaged while the rest of the system is in neutral (meaning it's fairly low engagement load), it could be much smaller and have a much longer life than the typical clutch arrangement.
Clutches don't have to have a short life. The clutch in one of my cars that I've owned since 20 miles now has just under 200K miles on it. I've been expecting to have to replace it for a decade. But, the way I drive it seems to pamper the clutch.
Check out top fuel dragsters. They make around 8K horsepower out of an 8 liter engine, but the top fuel and funny car rules limitations on many things. So, yeah, doesn't seem that far off to get 10K horsepower out of a 7L engine. In these cars, nearly a thousand horsepower is going into running the supercharger. But, they use around 15 gallons of fuel for a single quarter mile run.:-)
One idea that I've had but haven't had an opportunity to try is doing this in LVM. "pvmove" lets you move a physical extent from one device to another, so if you can track which extents are hot you can move them to the SSD. But pvmove works by mirroring the extent from one device to another, so it would seem that you could keep it on the spinning disc and mirror it for reads. But if it is write heavy you probably need it to stay on the SSD primary.
Of course, what we really want is more than just one level, we want hierarchical storage: Tape for bulk storage of infrequently needed stuff, maybe optical. 5400RPM big drives, 15K for faster IO on that, MLC for faster, and SLC for fastest. That's totally what we need, right?:-)
I could totally see 4GB of SLC, 32GB of MLC, and then a 500GB hard drive in my laptop.
I don't agree with your statement that "high bandwidth users" don't want to pay proportionally more. The thing is that most ISPs just simply won't offer other plans, or they do in insane ways. For example, with Comcast they have added a 250GB "cap" over which you risk getting cut off. They don't have a plan for paying $100/month for 500GB. They have 2 plans: 5Mbps/.7Mbps 250GB for $40, or 8Mbps/.7Mbps 250GB for $60. They have no other plans. We have a wireless ISP that offers a 5Mbps/2Mbps service for $100/month which I signed up for, then found there's a neighbors tree in the way.
The low usage users that are interested in paying for less can easily be handled by having a traffic limited service that is 20% cheaper, whether offered by the same ISP that is servicing the heavy users, or by a competitor that wants to take these lower use users.
You don't have to try to alienate the high usage users in order to increase profits. Just make your service plans plans reasonable...
You're co-mingling the two options. If option 1 is selected by google, then there is no blocking and no need to switch ISPs. If option 2 is selected, then there are alternatives: the ISPs that aren't asking google for the money (since google isn't paying it, why would other ISPs demand the non-existent money and cut off access to google?).
"If they started to selectively block certain ISPs then they would be facing a *huge* antitrust lawsuit."
It really depends on the terms... If the telcoms were to make an ultimatum like "we're going to start billing you on May 1 for traffic you send", then google could stop passing traffic to them. This kind of reminds me of the situation that lead to me installing the only global filter rule I've ever done in the 12 years I've been running an (admittedly small) ISP. I forget the exact details, but this guy mailed saying that he considered traffic coming from our network to be "computer trespass" or similar wording. What choice do I have other than to block traffic going to his IPs? ISTR that the exact situation was that he had subscribed to a mailing list that one of our customers runs, and a spam message got through to the mailing list, and this was the action he decided to take instead of using the "unsubscribe" Mailman URL.
But, I think the person who said "option 3: Google does nothing and lets the telecoms do the blocking" has it exactly right.
It's not like these telecoms customers are paying them for access to the Internet, so they need to get their revenue from somewhere. Oh, wait...
This is not cable TV, you can't "unbundle premium channels", stop clinging to your ancient business models and come up with a good one.
What I don't think they've fully thought out is the end-game. Possible options:
1) Google pays them. Google then starts getting invoices from every ISP around, from the little mom-and-pops to the tier-1s demanding a cut of the pie.
2) Google cuts them off so that the above doesn't happen. These ISPs customers start screaming "Why am I paying you for access to the Internet, when you aren't providing it?" and they start switching to other providers that aren't pulling this.
Come on, telcoms! You're already charging users for access to the Internet, and the businesses they visit for access to the Internet. How many more times do you need to get paid?
They seem to think they're in a position of power because they control the "eyeballs", but those eyeballs will go to another provider if you don't provide access to the services they want.
Sure, out East in the fat markets, where Verizon is offering fiber to the home, I'm sure the high-speed Internet picture looks great.
Here in Colorado, we don't have Verizon FTTH. We have QWest, who only this year started putting DSLAMs out in neighborhoods instead of just the central offices. They didn't put DSLAMs out in the neighborhoods because doing so would have allowed the CLECs to put them out there, and eat away at areas where QWest didn't want to spend the money to put them. Contrast this to Saskattoon, Saskatchewan Canada, which is very similar to where I live, as far as town size, ruralness, etc... Back in 2000 when I was there, they had deployed remote DSLAMs and had coverage of over 90% of the city.
So, I'm fairly confident that Verizon has a more rosy picture of what the US high-speed network connectivity to the home looks like.
Don't forget, the phone companies got an extra fee added to our phone bills to delivery fiber to the home by 2000. They raised 2 billion dollars from that (or was it 20?), and as far as I can tell they largely pocketed it.
I'm ok with a 250GB cap on my 8Mbps cable line. I'm ok paying double if I need to use 500GB. What I'm not ok with is the gouging. I calculated out one of the wireless providers overage charges, though I can't remember which one right now. I think it was T-mobile. The first 5GB was $60/month. The second 5GB was $1,000. So, I'm quite happy with Cricket, who says "If you go over 5GB/month, we reserve the right to throttle you." Much more sane than "If you go over, we'll do our best to bankrupt you.";-/
I think the mythbusters did a very nice job of demonstrating that you shouldn't conduct a job interview or take the SAT while driving on an obstacle course. What I wish they would have done is to have also run the course with someone in the car asking a similar barrage of questions while they were driving the obstacle course. There's a huge difference between using a cell phone and being asked complex questions, and using the phone to say "hey, I'm going to be 10 minutes late."
I'd rather someone made a simple call saying they'd be a few minutes late, than that they were speeding, trying to make up time, for example of a possible unintended consequence.
I disagree. If it requires 100% of your attention to drive down an empty, straight, rural interstate in the middle of the day, then I can guarantee that you are a severe hazard in the rain or snow or heavy traffic. Various driving environments demand varying degrees of effort, attention, and skill.
I don't know what the current numbers are, but as of a couple of years ago the story was that the leading cause of distracted driver accidents was messing with the climate control and radio. So, yeah, let's go for saving lives and make it so you can't change the radio station, volume, or adjust the temperature. There will probably have to be congressional hearings on whether defogging of the windows is worth the risk involved in enabling it. I guess for safety's sake we should just make defogging be on all the time, just in case.
I personally think that the real problem is people not giving the driving the attention it requires. Whether it's your child (my wife was once rear-ended by a woman in a SUV because she was watching her child in the back seat -- did I mention we drive an impossible-to-miss yellow car), having a beverage, or adjusting the climate control... You need to pay attention to the weapon you are steering.
See the graphs in the article, but the majority of users were indeed running 5.2GHz and 802.11n.
I tell by getting candidate APs and testing them. The Netgear I used had issues when running WPA, but as the event was running wide open, and my testing had no issues, I was happy.
The gear I really wanted was 3Com's equivalent, for 33% more, but my vendor said they didn't expect to get the first shipment until the week before the conference. Not enough time to test. And I'm glad I didn't even think about it -- at the event I checked my vendor and they still didn't have them in.:-)
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I'm sure the hybrid tanks and APCs probably won't run into the stuck accelerator thing.
Probably.
Sean
Because DoS attacks never harm innocent bystanders like the ISP, *THEIR* ISP, or other customers of either of them.
We have enough problems with DoS attacks launched by miscreants. So, yeah, maybe some of these ISPs don't take reports seriously, but I do know that not all "copyright enforcement" type actions are well researched...
This one time we got a DMCA takedown notice from a software vendor in Australia for a site run by a department of a local university, for running an unlicensed copy of their software. The DMCA takedown notice was sent to my company because they "couldn't find the contact information" *FOR A UNIVERSITY*. I found it by clicking on the "contact" link on the page they made the takedown request for.
Turns out that the university *DID* have a license for the software, BTW.
I know it's annoying when your stuff gets stolen, but don't go attacking people.
Now, admittedly this was in high school, but back in the '80s Apple was *IT* as far as computers went. The art lab had a Mac, the math/programming lab had 8 Apple IIs with CPM, the computer lab had a dozen more Apple IIs, the physics teacher had an Apple II, and the administrative offices had a few of them (with hard drives, woo!).
The drafting class had *ONE* PC with AutoCAD or something, that the teacher wouldn't let anyone even touch. I asked to play with it, but the closest I got to it was he once asked me how to delete this file. "DEL whatever.ext". "But file names can only have 8 characters!"
Sean
Your price comparison is off base in a few ways...
:-)
First of all, you concentrate on the $4/GB, but ignoring the $50/month cap. If you go just a little over, you may pay as little as $4. Doesn't seem like highway robbery to me. If you go a LOT over, you don't have to pay more than $86. No threats of being cut off like with Comcast... You get to have unlimited Internet for $86. Again, doesn't seem like highway robbery to me.
You talk about how much wholesale Internet costs, but this just isn't wholesale so the comparison is not realistic. You mention $25/Mbps, which is a reasonable per Mbps price *IF* you are buying 100mbps, with a 3 year contract. That's ninety thousand dollars. Still makes $86/month not look like highway robbery. If you want wholesale prices, get a DS3 into your house.
If you are just buying a megabit at a facility, it's probably going to be closer to $200/mbps. A megabit is around 325GB in a month, if used steadily. Most people don't use the Internet that way though -- they use it 4 to 6 hours a day. So that makes 80GB for say $160/month. Or $4/GB...
These are all prices you are likely to see in a data center for bandwidth, ignoring cross-connect fees. I can say that with some authority, I've gotten quotes from half a dozen data centers over the last month and I buy Internet services for my company and make recommendations for several clients.
Can you get it more cheaply? Yes. But I don't think it's fair to call this highway robbery.
Cheaper would be Cogent at $10/Mbps, month-to-month, again for 100mbps. And you can drop that to maybe $6/mbps with a 3 year commit (verbal quote from Cogent last week). Or, if you're in CA, Hurricane Electric has a great deal on a cabinet plus power plus 100Mbps for $600/month for 3 years. But that's capped at 100Mbps, where the others are burstable above 100Mbps. But, these are real wholesale prices, and particularly in the Cogent case you'd probably need to be multi-homing with another provider, which will double or more your costs.
In short, I don't think it's unreasonable to pay $50/month in overage when the alternative requires a $2,500/month commitment.
Remember, they cap their overage charges at $50. So, the max you can pay with this is around $86/month (the "Lite" plan is $36/month). That's around $83USD.
:-)
For comparison, the Extreme Plus plan is about what I'm paying in the US for Comcast, at $70/month. That offers 125GB of transfer per month, or half the Comcast cap. Of course, it also offers 25mbps download and 1mbps upload, which is better than the 16mbps and 876kbps I get.
But what happens if I go over my 250GB cap? Comcast seems to be saying they'll provide you a warning if you do it once, and will shut you off if you do it regularly. I'd rather pay $4/GB if I go over, up to a cap of $50, than just be cut off. It doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me... Sure, I pay less per GB at my hosting facility, but I'm sure if I was giving Comcast thousands of dollars per month they'd move on that $4/GB as well.
You need to provide some citations. Because I'm pretty sure that satellite Internet has Rogers hands-down when it comes to geographical coverage. That's one of the ways we've gotten Internet coverage at the family cabin up near Flin Flon. There's also province-wide dial-up from the telcos, not that that's a real alternative. My wife also says that all the cell phone towers have WiFi on them, but I've never heard the full story on that. And the population (as opposed to geographical) coverage certainly has access to DSL. When we were up in Fort McMurray visiting family for Canadian Thanksgiving we had both cable and DSL service in the house (my nephew is a big gamer and buys his own dedicated cable connection).
So, I'm pretty sure that most people are a long ways from having to entirely give up on the Internet if they drop Rogers.
The closest I've come to being hit by a car was in a parking-lot where some dude in a Prius was driving on the "wrong" side of the lane. I was walking into the lot on the left hand side, and then started to cross over, looked over my shoulder and a Prius was doing around 3x my speed a few paces behind me, and passed within a few feet of me. I'd been lifting my foot to step out before I noticed him, I couldn't hear it at all.
:-)
Sure, this guy shouldn't have been coming up from behind me to pass going so much faster than me. particularly driving on the left hand side of the lane, but it wouldn't have been a problem in almost any other car. At least someone on a bicycle probably would have said "On your right", because they KNOW that pedestrians probably can't hear them. But, more importantly, if a pedestrian steps out in front of a bicycle, the bicyclist is probably going to be hurt as badly or worse than the pedestrian, so they have a vested interest in you knowing they're there. Not so much with a car.
Can these things run some fans, or have some speakers installed to make some kind of noise so we can hear them? People are *USED* to hearing cars approaching. It's a simple fix. I'm sure one day cars will use their cameras and/or radar (like the adaptive cruise control radar) to detect pedestrians and make their presence known via audible or other signals. Until then, run a fan or speaker or something. Play La Cuccaracha for all I care.
I don't know about the cost/benefit for most people, but we're all running SSDs for our laptops now, and it's definitely worth it.
Once I realized that I could fit on a 64GB SSD comfortably if I didn't keep my ENTIRE photo collection on my laptop, it was a pretty easy decision to make to try them.
And after some testing, I've decided that it's enough worth it for us that we're all using them. In most cases it isn't a bit noticeable difference. But for some things it really does make a difference, and not having to wait for them is a big gain. The things that are a lot faster are: booting (rarely, but you're entirely "down" while doing it), opening big apps like OpenOffice, re-opening firefox or thunderbird when they flake out, and doing big find/grep jobs. Searching through e-mail and the like? Great.
For a long time, CPU increases were way outpacing the disc performance gains. We how have CPUs that are faster than most of my staff can really take advantage of on our laptops. But disc performance, even at 7200 RPM, was often the bottleneck.
So, we've traded volume for performance, and been very happy with it.
It seems like, if you were a company that did this and were taken to court over it, you'd use the "How is this different from the Y2K?" defense? ;-/
Tetris is singlehandedly responsible for a dramatic increase in sudden lane-changes as you approach a stop-light.
Sean
Oh, I forgot to mention that my initial photo load was 3400-ish photos. So, about half the size of the OPs set of photos.
I was recently wanting to do something similar. I decided on using the open source Digikam software (which may not be an option for you under Windows), because it has powerful photo management functionality, but also because it stores tags and more all as XMP data directly within my JPEG file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform
There is work being done to do face recognition to tag people in photos, one of the things that is taking most of the time for me.
My application was a custom photo-blog, with some neat tag-based features (like "show me the pictures taken at this person's house that have this oher person it them").
So, I tag them in digikam, do cropping and comments, and then save the image. I then wrote some Python programs to check this data for consistency, and to load the data into a database for the web server. The web server also has the ability to edit tags and comments, so I then have code to, once reviewed, write these changes out to the XMP meta-data.
But, the photos themselves are the authoritative source for this information. If I lost the database, no problem. The photos are the authoritative source for all that information.
Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the tools in the upload chain is to get rid of albums and instead encode it in the file with a tag called something like "Blog/Group/$UUID_STRING". It also saves off the "album thumbnail" in a similar way ("Blog/Group/IsAlbumThumbnail").
It's worked extremely well.
I use the command-line "exiv2" program to export and import the XMP data as XML, then I process it (the parts mentioned above) as XML.
A lot of the replies bring up problems of going completely with this solution (how do you get it started if you need things spinning first, how do you tow a car with one of these). Admittedly not an optimal solution, but a very effective one could be to still have a clutch in the mix for some of these situations. Considering that the clutch would only be used fairly rarely, and could be engaged while the rest of the system is in neutral (meaning it's fairly low engagement load), it could be much smaller and have a much longer life than the typical clutch arrangement.
Clutches don't have to have a short life. The clutch in one of my cars that I've owned since 20 miles now has just under 200K miles on it. I've been expecting to have to replace it for a decade. But, the way I drive it seems to pamper the clutch.
Sean
Check out top fuel dragsters. They make around 8K horsepower out of an 8 liter engine, but the top fuel and funny car rules limitations on many things. So, yeah, doesn't seem that far off to get 10K horsepower out of a 7L engine. In these cars, nearly a thousand horsepower is going into running the supercharger. But, they use around 15 gallons of fuel for a single quarter mile run. :-)
One idea that I've had but haven't had an opportunity to try is doing this in LVM. "pvmove" lets you move a physical extent from one device to another, so if you can track which extents are hot you can move them to the SSD. But pvmove works by mirroring the extent from one device to another, so it would seem that you could keep it on the spinning disc and mirror it for reads. But if it is write heavy you probably need it to stay on the SSD primary.
:-)
Of course, what we really want is more than just one level, we want hierarchical storage: Tape for bulk storage of infrequently needed stuff, maybe optical. 5400RPM big drives, 15K for faster IO on that, MLC for faster, and SLC for fastest. That's totally what we need, right?
I could totally see 4GB of SLC, 32GB of MLC, and then a 500GB hard drive in my laptop.
I don't agree with your statement that "high bandwidth users" don't want to pay proportionally more. The thing is that most ISPs just simply won't offer other plans, or they do in insane ways. For example, with Comcast they have added a 250GB "cap" over which you risk getting cut off. They don't have a plan for paying $100/month for 500GB. They have 2 plans: 5Mbps/.7Mbps 250GB for $40, or 8Mbps/.7Mbps 250GB for $60. They have no other plans. We have a wireless ISP that offers a 5Mbps/2Mbps service for $100/month which I signed up for, then found there's a neighbors tree in the way.
The low usage users that are interested in paying for less can easily be handled by having a traffic limited service that is 20% cheaper, whether offered by the same ISP that is servicing the heavy users, or by a competitor that wants to take these lower use users.
You don't have to try to alienate the high usage users in order to increase profits. Just make your service plans plans reasonable...
You're co-mingling the two options. If option 1 is selected by google, then there is no blocking and no need to switch ISPs. If option 2 is selected, then there are alternatives: the ISPs that aren't asking google for the money (since google isn't paying it, why would other ISPs demand the non-existent money and cut off access to google?).
"If they started to selectively block certain ISPs then they would be facing a *huge* antitrust lawsuit."
It really depends on the terms... If the telcoms were to make an ultimatum like "we're going to start billing you on May 1 for traffic you send", then google could stop passing traffic to them. This kind of reminds me of the situation that lead to me installing the only global filter rule I've ever done in the 12 years I've been running an (admittedly small) ISP. I forget the exact details, but this guy mailed saying that he considered traffic coming from our network to be "computer trespass" or similar wording. What choice do I have other than to block traffic going to his IPs? ISTR that the exact situation was that he had subscribed to a mailing list that one of our customers runs, and a spam message got through to the mailing list, and this was the action he decided to take instead of using the "unsubscribe" Mailman URL.
But, I think the person who said "option 3: Google does nothing and lets the telecoms do the blocking" has it exactly right.
It's not like these telecoms customers are paying them for access to the Internet, so they need to get their revenue from somewhere. Oh, wait...
This is not cable TV, you can't "unbundle premium channels", stop clinging to your ancient business models and come up with a good one.
What I don't think they've fully thought out is the end-game. Possible options:
1) Google pays them. Google then starts getting invoices from every ISP around, from the little mom-and-pops to the tier-1s demanding a cut of the pie.
2) Google cuts them off so that the above doesn't happen. These ISPs customers start screaming "Why am I paying you for access to the Internet, when you aren't providing it?" and they start switching to other providers that aren't pulling this.
Come on, telcoms! You're already charging users for access to the Internet, and the businesses they visit for access to the Internet. How many more times do you need to get paid?
They seem to think they're in a position of power because they control the "eyeballs", but those eyeballs will go to another provider if you don't provide access to the services they want.
Sure, out East in the fat markets, where Verizon is offering fiber to the home, I'm sure the high-speed Internet picture looks great.
Here in Colorado, we don't have Verizon FTTH. We have QWest, who only this year started putting DSLAMs out in neighborhoods instead of just the central offices. They didn't put DSLAMs out in the neighborhoods because doing so would have allowed the CLECs to put them out there, and eat away at areas where QWest didn't want to spend the money to put them. Contrast this to Saskattoon, Saskatchewan Canada, which is very similar to where I live, as far as town size, ruralness, etc... Back in 2000 when I was there, they had deployed remote DSLAMs and had coverage of over 90% of the city.
So, I'm fairly confident that Verizon has a more rosy picture of what the US high-speed network connectivity to the home looks like.
Don't forget, the phone companies got an extra fee added to our phone bills to delivery fiber to the home by 2000. They raised 2 billion dollars from that (or was it 20?), and as far as I can tell they largely pocketed it.
Sean
I'm ok with a 250GB cap on my 8Mbps cable line. I'm ok paying double if I need to use 500GB. What I'm not ok with is the gouging. I calculated out one of the wireless providers overage charges, though I can't remember which one right now. I think it was T-mobile. The first 5GB was $60/month. The second 5GB was $1,000. So, I'm quite happy with Cricket, who says "If you go over 5GB/month, we reserve the right to throttle you." Much more sane than "If you go over, we'll do our best to bankrupt you." ;-/
Sean
I think the mythbusters did a very nice job of demonstrating that you shouldn't conduct a job interview or take the SAT while driving on an obstacle course. What I wish they would have done is to have also run the course with someone in the car asking a similar barrage of questions while they were driving the obstacle course. There's a huge difference between using a cell phone and being asked complex questions, and using the phone to say "hey, I'm going to be 10 minutes late."
I'd rather someone made a simple call saying they'd be a few minutes late, than that they were speeding, trying to make up time, for example of a possible unintended consequence.
Sean
I disagree. If it requires 100% of your attention to drive down an empty, straight, rural interstate in the middle of the day, then I can guarantee that you are a severe hazard in the rain or snow or heavy traffic. Various driving environments demand varying degrees of effort, attention, and skill.
I don't know what the current numbers are, but as of a couple of years ago the story was that the leading cause of distracted driver accidents was messing with the climate control and radio. So, yeah, let's go for saving lives and make it so you can't change the radio station, volume, or adjust the temperature. There will probably have to be congressional hearings on whether defogging of the windows is worth the risk involved in enabling it. I guess for safety's sake we should just make defogging be on all the time, just in case.
I personally think that the real problem is people not giving the driving the attention it requires. Whether it's your child (my wife was once rear-ended by a woman in a SUV because she was watching her child in the back seat -- did I mention we drive an impossible-to-miss yellow car), having a beverage, or adjusting the climate control... You need to pay attention to the weapon you are steering.
Sean
See the graphs in the article, but the majority of users were indeed running 5.2GHz and 802.11n.
:-)
I tell by getting candidate APs and testing them. The Netgear I used had issues when running WPA, but as the event was running wide open, and my testing had no issues, I was happy.
The gear I really wanted was 3Com's equivalent, for 33% more, but my vendor said they didn't expect to get the first shipment until the week before the conference. Not enough time to test. And I'm glad I didn't even think about it -- at the event I checked my vendor and they still didn't have them in.
Sean