My own kids have this problem. They assume that if they type something into Google, they'll find what they need. The problem is, they don't know how to properly structure their queries so they find the relevant stuff quickly, so they end up wasting time just in the searching. Take the time to instruct the kids on how to structure a query in Google, and you'll save them a lot of time so they can actually complete their assignments quicker. Also, introduce them to other information sites like Wolfram Alpha or searching through a local newspaper database, so that they're aware that sites other than Wikipedia even exist.
Sure a T1 connection is god damn slow but it's what's being offered in the area for a reasonable fee. The main thing is that T1 defines a single connection rated at 1.55mbps both ways. So instead of running a single T1, it's not much more expensive to go and run a T3 (10 T1) or an E3 (10 T3) connections or as someone else pointed out, simply run fiber. You can get Pre-terminated fiber in 2km lenghts for a pretty fucking reasonable price per cable.
Ugh. It's not as if it's that hard to look up since you obviously don't know.
A DS3 (or T3, as you call it) is equivalent to 28 DS1 (or T1s). Not 10. Roughly 45 Mbps.
An E3 is roughly 34 Mbps, which is 16 E1 channels plus an additional signaling channel. It's also not going to be available in North America, where AT&T operates and where this person lives.
If you're looking for security, setup a RADIUS server and use 802.1x authentication instead of PSK.
Not to get nitpicky, but it's Slashdot and we're supposed to know better. The standard is 802.1X, not 802.1x. Capital letters for stand-alone standards, lowercase for addendums to a standard.
Case matters, people.
Drivers who wait until they reach the road workers before trying to merge into the correct lane so they can pass everyone else who already queued up to go through the construction.
I agreed with you up to this point. Everyone queuing up in one lane before you reach the point of lane closure just means that you're slamming all of that traffic into half of the available space, and creating an even longer line and wait. I've been in too many jams where I wanted to get off at an exit two miles down the road, but there was construction five miles past that, and everyone was queuing up in a single lane (thanks to "helpful" truckers who sat in the free lane to prevent people from jumping ahead of everyone else).
Use ALL the available lanes, until you're forced not to. Seriously, it's better.
Rating inflation
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I read the review before I really noticed the rating. How does this book earn an 8 for a rating? The reviewer states that Chapters 1 was unnecessary, and has some harsh things to say about several other areas:
Chapter 3 is about text navigation. Sadly, the book doesn't go into as much detail on movement commands as I would've liked.
I had high hopes for Chapter 6 and 7, which deal with Vim scripting, but I was largely disappointed.
If you're looking for any advancing information on writing your own functions in Vim script, you're mostly out of luck here.
Overall, stylistically the book is a bit dry and humorless
I do feel the book should've gone into more detail in many areas. At 244 pages, the book is short and gives a rather shallow view of many of Vim's features.
There's nothing in this book you won't find in Vim's built-in documentation
At best, it seems like this would earn a 5 rating.
If you're trying to combine different types of access (leased-line, cable, DSL), I think you're out of luck with trying to aggregate everything into a single "super circuit". However, you can certainly utilize all of those individual circuits. Look up policy-based routing. Most every platform out there should support it through some method. Set it up so that email goes over the DSL, your database queries goes over the cable connection, and your VoIP goes over the leased-line. You'll probably need to tweak it a bit at first until you get a nice blend of traffic, and you'll want to make sure to set up some default routes to handle things if you have an outage on one of your circuits, but you'll see better performance on individual circuits and use all of them. If you've got the same type of access, but through different providers, you'll probably have to do the same. If you've got the same type of access through the same provider, then MLPPP or GRE should work.
Because there's no such thing as IPv4 multicast... Oh, wait. That's exactly what cable companies have already been doing with switched digital. Multicast isn't the main reason a cable company would go with IPv6. The biggest problem Comcast (and other cable companies) has is that your cable modem gets two, and sometimes three IP addresses, let alone all those set-top boxes doing that switched digital. One to manage it, one to give you your "public" IP, and perhaps a third for your phone. 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) only gives you 16 million addresses, and that's assuming you're utilizing them rather effectively. They're probably using the 172.16.0.0/12 for their internal network, but even so, that only gets you an extra million addresses. Look at the number of customers Comcast has, and you begin to see the problem they have just with addressing all those cable modems and set-top boxes.
Don't expect to be getting your own IPv6 address any time soon. Most likely, they're going to roll it out for managing all those devices first, and you'll still be assigned an IPv4 address for your Internet connectivity.
Do you really trust the routing registry? And I'm talking about more than just using an SSL cert to verify their information. How frequently do they update their entries? I saw a number of problems dealing with RADB when I worked at Sprint a few years back. Customers get assigned blocks that used to be assigned to other customers, and RADB didn't always reflect that change in usage in a timely manner.
That's where your money's going to go. Creating a secure registry, and the infrastructure to handle the amounts of changes that occur on a daily basis.
It's more than just authenticating your neighbor. It's also about confirming that they have the right to be announcing the blocks that they're trying to announce to you.
The Post Office is a good example for the Internet. Right around the holidays, everyone starts to send catalogs, Christmas cards, and other packages. Far more than the Post Office deals with on a normal basis. Which causes delays in delivery. They even warn people: send everything by such-and-such date or it won't arrive in time for Christmas.
That's pretty much the Internet. Everyone expects a certain amount of bandwidth to be used. Occasionally, someone will exceed that, but usually at the same time, someone else isn't using theirs, so it's okay. But with Torrent, it's basically everyone using their bandwidth all at the same time. It's always Christmas. Now, the Post Office could staff for that situation, but obviously, prices will have to go up to accommodate their extra load. Likewise, your ISP can provide all the bandwidth necessary to let everyone use their limit of bandwidth all the time, but they're going to have to raise the prices a lot in order to provide that.
There's a couple of reasons. One has to do with size. It's the same reason why you put boxers and wrestlers into weight categories. You're putting kids that weigh a lot less into the same category as larger girls, and in this case, that gives a huge advantage to the smaller, lighter girls.
There's also the question of responsibility. You're putting extremely young girls into a situation where they could be injured. A 16 year-old competing at the Olympics probably starts learning how to do the really hard routines when they're about 14. And an athlete competing at the age of 14 probably started out learning their routine around the age of 12. There comes a point where you have to be the responsible parent/coach/athletic authority and say that's too young.
Finally, like any sport, it's just the rule. It's an arbitrary number in some ways, but that's the way it is. Why do I have to wait until I'm 21 before I can gamble? I can vote at 18, drive a car at 16, detassle corn at 14... You'd think if I was making my own money at 14, I'd be allowed to spend it. But rules are rules, and in sports, if you don't follow the rules, you get penalized. Unless your Chinese.
So that means the dinosaurs (huge cold blooded reptiles) were an evolutionary dead end?
No wonder they disappeared.
Dinosaurs weren't reptiles. There's more and more evidence that shows that they were warm-blooded. And dinosaurs didn't really disappear. They just look different now. Step outside and look at all those feathered things flying around. Those are modern dinosaurs.
> lets say one router costs a (ridiculous) million dollars
It's not that ridiculous. In fact, I'd say you're low-balling the cost by quite a bit. And if you want to have redundancy (no one likes having their service disrupted for days while you're waiting for a replacement card), you can start doubling that automatically. Not only that, but you're not accounting for the cost of doing anything with those connections. A local ISP has to buy service from one or more of the Tier 1/2s. Oddly enough, purchasing an OC-192 (that's that 10 Gbps pipe) isn't exactly cheap. Considering most of the world's backbones consist of OC-48s and OC-192s, and considering that the backbone providers don't want to oversaturate their own lines, they charge the local guys a heck of a lot for that OC-192. No local ISP could ever afford to purchase an OC-192 just for 800 users, and no backbone provider could ever support it as well.
The pricing worked rather well when people were only downloading relatively small files periodically. As long as traffic is bursty, that is. It's when people start downloading large files (like movies) constantly where everything goes awry. If you honestly expect to use that cable providers 5 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up service at $60/mo, when they in turn have to purchase 4 T1 circuits at ~$500/mo to support you, you deserve the crappy service you get. If you want to push that much traffic constantly, buy the T1s yourself.
My wife's a librarian, and she would laugh at the idea of using LoC numbers for a collection this small. Dewey's far simpler to figure out mentally for a collection that isn't the size of your local state university's. Heck, for a collection this size, you could go with the standard used book store layout. Just use general catagories and label the shelves so you know what they are. History (maybe break down into Ancient, European, American, etc. if you have a lot of history books), Religion, Science, Math, Art, etc. Fiction could be seperated into genres like Mystery, Fantasy, and Romance, or just organized alphabetically. The beauty is, you probably already know where these books should be catagorized, and you could probably do it all in the span of a few hours. Trying to do anything else, including assigning Dewey call numbers, is going to take a lot more time and effort for not much more benefit.
Which multicast? Setting up stuff like PIM-SM or SSM is actually not that hard to do in a Cisco or Juniper router. Managing it isn't even all that hard. I used to manage multicast for a big global ISP, and other than the occassional SA-flood from MSDP neighbors (which you wouldn't see with SSM), there wasn't too much to have to do, once you got everything set up correctly. However, there's issues with doing things that way. For example, your #3. Also, most of your consumer-grade equipment (the D-Links, Belkins, and Linksyses) aren't really going to support multicast, or have support disabled by default. A shame, really, since DOCSIS 1.0 and later are all supposed to support multicast (well, 1.1 and later. Some potential issues with 1.0) and that means a whole bunch of home users are primed for it.
2. Save lots of money for bandwidth from the content providers to them
It does save a lot of money. It's hard to figure out exactly how much. That lack of hard numbers causes a number of problems for companies.
3. Profit
Who profits? Let's say I'm the content provider. I've got a show that's sure to be a hit, and I want to get it out to the public. So I stream it out with multicast. Who's viewing it? Good question. Because I'm sending out a single stream of data. One person, 100 people, 15 million? I don't know. It all gets replicated somewhere out there in the Internet. I'm saving huge money on distribution costs, because I only need a T1 to get this show out to the public, but I have no idea how many people are watching. And my advertisers, those that give me the money to create this programming, really want to know who's watching. Then you start figuring out ways to get that information. Have the application send back data on who's viewing, how long they viewed the program, which parts they skipped, which parts they repeated, if they liked the show or not, etc. All that stuff that TiVo is reporting back on my current viewing habits. But that all ends up being single connections between the viewers and my systems again, and that's not going to be multicasted. Sure, it's still a lot less data than putting out the show unicast to everyone, but I can unicast it out today, and get information on numbers of people today because they're hitting my website to actually download it, and I can force them to register, providing me with demographic information. I need a lot of new software written if I want to get that kind of information out of a multicast distribution.
The other problem is the network providers. They make money selling bandwidth. It's very hard to convince them to push multicast, because that means their customers will be using less bandwidth. Again, I managed multicast for a very large ISP for several years, and had a yearly battle with layers of management who liked the idea of supporting new technologies, but couldn't figure out why we should support something that would make them less money. There's a lot of dark fiber out there that's pretty cheap, so increasing bandwidth makes more sense to them than trying to conserve it.
That profit part is really tough to figure out when it comes to multicast.
>Kind of. There's tricks you can do, for example carousel,
> where you continously send the same file out again and
> again. So people can start listening at any point, receive
> to the end of the file in the current sending, then listen
> for the first half when it's broadcast again.
What? So I should watch the last half of a show to see the ending and THEN watch the first half of it? That is completely pointless.
Not quite. I've worked with some software from Digital Fountain. Pretty neat stuff. Think about it like this. Take a two hour movie, break it into about forty pieces. Each of those pieces is going to be a multicast group, which is constantly running. Each of those pieces contain data from all portions of the movie, but in slightly different degrees. So, piece #1 would be about 70% from the first three minutes, 15% from the next three minutes, 5% from the next ten minutes, 5% from the next 20 minutes, and 5% from the rest of the movie. Piece #35 might be something more like 70% from the last 30 minutes, 20% from the last hour, and 10% from the first hour. The algorithm to actually split it up is quite a bit more complicated, but that's the general idea. Now, when you start up a movie, you wait about 10 minutes for the buffer to fill. Then it starts playing, from the beginning, and keeps on downloading in the background, filling in the areas you haven't got to yet. In the end, you're going to see the entire film, with just a 10 minute buffer to wait through at the beginning (and it'll probably be filled with advertising or previews of other films, if it's a commercial venture), and it's all multicasted. The hosting company is basically spilling out bandwidth for a single copy of the movie (plus some overhead) constantly, which can then get to any number of users simultaneously. It's very cool technology, and worked extremely well three years ago when I was playing around with it. I can only imagine they've improved on it since then.
According to Wikipedia, they have discovered a dwarf species of mammoth on Wrangel Island off the east coast of Siberia. I don't know if this is the species that they're decoding the DNA for, though.
But how are you going to get on the internet? In my experience, having a computer is increasingly irrelevant if that computer does not enhance your ability to obtain and share information.
You're absolutely right. I know that my computer was just sitting around, completely useless, until I was finally able to connect to the Internet in 1994. Prior to that, it was a very expensive paperweight for two years.
The Internet isn't everything. There's plenty of useful things a computer can accomplish without having to talk to other computers. Which, actually, these laptops can do. A child's laptop will be able to communicate with another laptop in their village, even without a connection to the Internet. The goal isn't to get more people hooked up to AIM, or browsing web pages. It's to provide a tool for education. Have a teacher pop in a CD with some form of documentation, and let all the kids be able to view it on their own computer. Take it home, and still read it. Work on it. Figure it out. Collaborate with others. Give a man a fishing pole kinda stuff.
Lava.net does. I know that a couple of ISPs in Ohio, and a cable modem provider up in Maine did for a period of time (no idea if they still do). DOCSIS standards require multicast support in cable modems. No such requirement for DSL providers, but I've worked with various DSL providers in the past and know they had multicast working.
A big problem is manufacturers of home networking equipment. They don't support multicast. And of course, uneducated network providers. The big boys (MCI, Sprint, Level3, etc.) support multicast, but until Comcast or Verizon decide to actually turn it on in their routers, and Cisco starts forcing Linksys to support it on their low-end equipment, you probably won't see it in your house until IPv6 comes along.
See here for a list of other multicast-savvy ISPs. If your ISP isn't listed, bug them.
Slashdot Mirror
My own kids have this problem. They assume that if they type something into Google, they'll find what they need. The problem is, they don't know how to properly structure their queries so they find the relevant stuff quickly, so they end up wasting time just in the searching. Take the time to instruct the kids on how to structure a query in Google, and you'll save them a lot of time so they can actually complete their assignments quicker. Also, introduce them to other information sites like Wolfram Alpha or searching through a local newspaper database, so that they're aware that sites other than Wikipedia even exist.
Sure a T1 connection is god damn slow but it's what's being offered in the area for a reasonable fee. The main thing is that T1 defines a single connection rated at 1.55mbps both ways. So instead of running a single T1, it's not much more expensive to go and run a T3 (10 T1) or an E3 (10 T3) connections or as someone else pointed out, simply run fiber. You can get Pre-terminated fiber in 2km lenghts for a pretty fucking reasonable price per cable.
Ugh. It's not as if it's that hard to look up since you obviously don't know.
A DS3 (or T3, as you call it) is equivalent to 28 DS1 (or T1s). Not 10. Roughly 45 Mbps.
An E3 is roughly 34 Mbps, which is 16 E1 channels plus an additional signaling channel. It's also not going to be available in North America, where AT&T operates and where this person lives.
If you're looking for security, setup a RADIUS server and use 802.1x authentication instead of PSK.
Not to get nitpicky, but it's Slashdot and we're supposed to know better. The standard is 802.1X, not 802.1x. Capital letters for stand-alone standards, lowercase for addendums to a standard. Case matters, people.
Drivers who wait until they reach the road workers before trying to merge into the correct lane so they can pass everyone else who already queued up to go through the construction.
I agreed with you up to this point. Everyone queuing up in one lane before you reach the point of lane closure just means that you're slamming all of that traffic into half of the available space, and creating an even longer line and wait. I've been in too many jams where I wanted to get off at an exit two miles down the road, but there was construction five miles past that, and everyone was queuing up in a single lane (thanks to "helpful" truckers who sat in the free lane to prevent people from jumping ahead of everyone else).
Use ALL the available lanes, until you're forced not to. Seriously, it's better.
Chapter 3 is about text navigation. Sadly, the book doesn't go into as much detail on movement commands as I would've liked.
I had high hopes for Chapter 6 and 7, which deal with Vim scripting, but I was largely disappointed.
If you're looking for any advancing information on writing your own functions in Vim script, you're mostly out of luck here.
Overall, stylistically the book is a bit dry and humorless
I do feel the book should've gone into more detail in many areas. At 244 pages, the book is short and gives a rather shallow view of many of Vim's features.
There's nothing in this book you won't find in Vim's built-in documentation
At best, it seems like this would earn a 5 rating.
ATM is hugely popular in the US. Lots of DSL providers are running it in their network.
It caught on very briefly with the backbone providers, but had a huge amount of overhead compared to packet-over-SONET or more recently, Ethernet.
If you're trying to combine different types of access (leased-line, cable, DSL), I think you're out of luck with trying to aggregate everything into a single "super circuit". However, you can certainly utilize all of those individual circuits. Look up policy-based routing. Most every platform out there should support it through some method. Set it up so that email goes over the DSL, your database queries goes over the cable connection, and your VoIP goes over the leased-line. You'll probably need to tweak it a bit at first until you get a nice blend of traffic, and you'll want to make sure to set up some default routes to handle things if you have an outage on one of your circuits, but you'll see better performance on individual circuits and use all of them. If you've got the same type of access, but through different providers, you'll probably have to do the same. If you've got the same type of access through the same provider, then MLPPP or GRE should work.
Because there's no such thing as IPv4 multicast... Oh, wait. That's exactly what cable companies have already been doing with switched digital. Multicast isn't the main reason a cable company would go with IPv6. The biggest problem Comcast (and other cable companies) has is that your cable modem gets two, and sometimes three IP addresses, let alone all those set-top boxes doing that switched digital. One to manage it, one to give you your "public" IP, and perhaps a third for your phone. 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) only gives you 16 million addresses, and that's assuming you're utilizing them rather effectively. They're probably using the 172.16.0.0/12 for their internal network, but even so, that only gets you an extra million addresses. Look at the number of customers Comcast has, and you begin to see the problem they have just with addressing all those cable modems and set-top boxes.
Don't expect to be getting your own IPv6 address any time soon. Most likely, they're going to roll it out for managing all those devices first, and you'll still be assigned an IPv4 address for your Internet connectivity.
Do you really trust the routing registry? And I'm talking about more than just using an SSL cert to verify their information. How frequently do they update their entries? I saw a number of problems dealing with RADB when I worked at Sprint a few years back. Customers get assigned blocks that used to be assigned to other customers, and RADB didn't always reflect that change in usage in a timely manner.
That's where your money's going to go. Creating a secure registry, and the infrastructure to handle the amounts of changes that occur on a daily basis.
It's more than just authenticating your neighbor. It's also about confirming that they have the right to be announcing the blocks that they're trying to announce to you.
The Post Office is a good example for the Internet. Right around the holidays, everyone starts to send catalogs, Christmas cards, and other packages. Far more than the Post Office deals with on a normal basis. Which causes delays in delivery. They even warn people: send everything by such-and-such date or it won't arrive in time for Christmas.
That's pretty much the Internet. Everyone expects a certain amount of bandwidth to be used. Occasionally, someone will exceed that, but usually at the same time, someone else isn't using theirs, so it's okay. But with Torrent, it's basically everyone using their bandwidth all at the same time. It's always Christmas. Now, the Post Office could staff for that situation, but obviously, prices will have to go up to accommodate their extra load. Likewise, your ISP can provide all the bandwidth necessary to let everyone use their limit of bandwidth all the time, but they're going to have to raise the prices a lot in order to provide that.
There's a couple of reasons. One has to do with size. It's the same reason why you put boxers and wrestlers into weight categories. You're putting kids that weigh a lot less into the same category as larger girls, and in this case, that gives a huge advantage to the smaller, lighter girls.
There's also the question of responsibility. You're putting extremely young girls into a situation where they could be injured. A 16 year-old competing at the Olympics probably starts learning how to do the really hard routines when they're about 14. And an athlete competing at the age of 14 probably started out learning their routine around the age of 12. There comes a point where you have to be the responsible parent/coach/athletic authority and say that's too young.
Finally, like any sport, it's just the rule. It's an arbitrary number in some ways, but that's the way it is. Why do I have to wait until I'm 21 before I can gamble? I can vote at 18, drive a car at 16, detassle corn at 14... You'd think if I was making my own money at 14, I'd be allowed to spend it. But rules are rules, and in sports, if you don't follow the rules, you get penalized. Unless your Chinese.
The Titans did all the hard work. All Zeus did was lead a hostile revolt and spread his Olympian seed everywhere.
I believe the appropriate response would have been Dan Quayle.
Dinosaurs weren't reptiles. There's more and more evidence that shows that they were warm-blooded. And dinosaurs didn't really disappear. They just look different now. Step outside and look at all those feathered things flying around. Those are modern dinosaurs.
There's some photos on Peter Lothberg's site that might be his mom playing with her new connection.
> lets say one router costs a (ridiculous) million dollars
It's not that ridiculous. In fact, I'd say you're low-balling the cost by quite a bit. And if you want to have redundancy (no one likes having their service disrupted for days while you're waiting for a replacement card), you can start doubling that automatically. Not only that, but you're not accounting for the cost of doing anything with those connections. A local ISP has to buy service from one or more of the Tier 1/2s. Oddly enough, purchasing an OC-192 (that's that 10 Gbps pipe) isn't exactly cheap. Considering most of the world's backbones consist of OC-48s and OC-192s, and considering that the backbone providers don't want to oversaturate their own lines, they charge the local guys a heck of a lot for that OC-192. No local ISP could ever afford to purchase an OC-192 just for 800 users, and no backbone provider could ever support it as well.
The pricing worked rather well when people were only downloading relatively small files periodically. As long as traffic is bursty, that is. It's when people start downloading large files (like movies) constantly where everything goes awry. If you honestly expect to use that cable providers 5 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up service at $60/mo, when they in turn have to purchase 4 T1 circuits at ~$500/mo to support you, you deserve the crappy service you get. If you want to push that much traffic constantly, buy the T1s yourself.
I had some experience with Olives as well. However, their performance wasn't that great. Especially compared to a M10. ASICs made a huge difference.
My wife's a librarian, and she would laugh at the idea of using LoC numbers for a collection this small. Dewey's far simpler to figure out mentally for a collection that isn't the size of your local state university's. Heck, for a collection this size, you could go with the standard used book store layout. Just use general catagories and label the shelves so you know what they are. History (maybe break down into Ancient, European, American, etc. if you have a lot of history books), Religion, Science, Math, Art, etc. Fiction could be seperated into genres like Mystery, Fantasy, and Romance, or just organized alphabetically. The beauty is, you probably already know where these books should be catagorized, and you could probably do it all in the span of a few hours. Trying to do anything else, including assigning Dewey call numbers, is going to take a lot more time and effort for not much more benefit.
I don't think the spruce goose has landing gear.
It was a flying boat. Its hull is its landing gear.
1. Get multicast working
Which multicast? Setting up stuff like PIM-SM or SSM is actually not that hard to do in a Cisco or Juniper router. Managing it isn't even all that hard. I used to manage multicast for a big global ISP, and other than the occassional SA-flood from MSDP neighbors (which you wouldn't see with SSM), there wasn't too much to have to do, once you got everything set up correctly. However, there's issues with doing things that way. For example, your #3. Also, most of your consumer-grade equipment (the D-Links, Belkins, and Linksyses) aren't really going to support multicast, or have support disabled by default. A shame, really, since DOCSIS 1.0 and later are all supposed to support multicast (well, 1.1 and later. Some potential issues with 1.0) and that means a whole bunch of home users are primed for it.
2. Save lots of money for bandwidth from the content providers to them
It does save a lot of money. It's hard to figure out exactly how much. That lack of hard numbers causes a number of problems for companies.
3. Profit
Who profits? Let's say I'm the content provider. I've got a show that's sure to be a hit, and I want to get it out to the public. So I stream it out with multicast. Who's viewing it? Good question. Because I'm sending out a single stream of data. One person, 100 people, 15 million? I don't know. It all gets replicated somewhere out there in the Internet. I'm saving huge money on distribution costs, because I only need a T1 to get this show out to the public, but I have no idea how many people are watching. And my advertisers, those that give me the money to create this programming, really want to know who's watching. Then you start figuring out ways to get that information. Have the application send back data on who's viewing, how long they viewed the program, which parts they skipped, which parts they repeated, if they liked the show or not, etc. All that stuff that TiVo is reporting back on my current viewing habits. But that all ends up being single connections between the viewers and my systems again, and that's not going to be multicasted. Sure, it's still a lot less data than putting out the show unicast to everyone, but I can unicast it out today, and get information on numbers of people today because they're hitting my website to actually download it, and I can force them to register, providing me with demographic information. I need a lot of new software written if I want to get that kind of information out of a multicast distribution.
The other problem is the network providers. They make money selling bandwidth. It's very hard to convince them to push multicast, because that means their customers will be using less bandwidth. Again, I managed multicast for a very large ISP for several years, and had a yearly battle with layers of management who liked the idea of supporting new technologies, but couldn't figure out why we should support something that would make them less money. There's a lot of dark fiber out there that's pretty cheap, so increasing bandwidth makes more sense to them than trying to conserve it.
That profit part is really tough to figure out when it comes to multicast.
>Kind of. There's tricks you can do, for example carousel,
> where you continously send the same file out again and
> again. So people can start listening at any point, receive
> to the end of the file in the current sending, then listen
> for the first half when it's broadcast again.
What? So I should watch the last half of a show to see the ending and THEN watch the first half of it? That is completely pointless.
Not quite. I've worked with some software from Digital Fountain. Pretty neat stuff. Think about it like this. Take a two hour movie, break it into about forty pieces. Each of those pieces is going to be a multicast group, which is constantly running. Each of those pieces contain data from all portions of the movie, but in slightly different degrees. So, piece #1 would be about 70% from the first three minutes, 15% from the next three minutes, 5% from the next ten minutes, 5% from the next 20 minutes, and 5% from the rest of the movie. Piece #35 might be something more like 70% from the last 30 minutes, 20% from the last hour, and 10% from the first hour. The algorithm to actually split it up is quite a bit more complicated, but that's the general idea. Now, when you start up a movie, you wait about 10 minutes for the buffer to fill. Then it starts playing, from the beginning, and keeps on downloading in the background, filling in the areas you haven't got to yet. In the end, you're going to see the entire film, with just a 10 minute buffer to wait through at the beginning (and it'll probably be filled with advertising or previews of other films, if it's a commercial venture), and it's all multicasted. The hosting company is basically spilling out bandwidth for a single copy of the movie (plus some overhead) constantly, which can then get to any number of users simultaneously. It's very cool technology, and worked extremely well three years ago when I was playing around with it. I can only imagine they've improved on it since then.
I want a mini-mammoth (oxymoron)
According to Wikipedia, they have discovered a dwarf species of mammoth on Wrangel Island off the east coast of Siberia. I don't know if this is the species that they're decoding the DNA for, though.
But how are you going to get on the internet? In my experience, having a computer is increasingly irrelevant if that computer does not enhance your ability to obtain and share information.
You're absolutely right. I know that my computer was just sitting around, completely useless, until I was finally able to connect to the Internet in 1994. Prior to that, it was a very expensive paperweight for two years.
The Internet isn't everything. There's plenty of useful things a computer can accomplish without having to talk to other computers. Which, actually, these laptops can do. A child's laptop will be able to communicate with another laptop in their village, even without a connection to the Internet. The goal isn't to get more people hooked up to AIM, or browsing web pages. It's to provide a tool for education. Have a teacher pop in a CD with some form of documentation, and let all the kids be able to view it on their own computer. Take it home, and still read it. Work on it. Figure it out. Collaborate with others. Give a man a fishing pole kinda stuff.
Lava.net does. I know that a couple of ISPs in Ohio, and a cable modem provider up in Maine did for a period of time (no idea if they still do). DOCSIS standards require multicast support in cable modems. No such requirement for DSL providers, but I've worked with various DSL providers in the past and know they had multicast working.
A big problem is manufacturers of home networking equipment. They don't support multicast. And of course, uneducated network providers. The big boys (MCI, Sprint, Level3, etc.) support multicast, but until Comcast or Verizon decide to actually turn it on in their routers, and Cisco starts forcing Linksys to support it on their low-end equipment, you probably won't see it in your house until IPv6 comes along.
See here for a list of other multicast-savvy ISPs. If your ISP isn't listed, bug them.