For example, 1gbps network switch would use about the same amount of power when it is fully loaded vs when it is just turned on. O implement some kind of "variable bandwidth" that would also save electricity you would have to have different hardware for when you only need less bandwidth and some way of automatically switching between them (low load - turn off 1gbps switch, turn on 100mbps switch, high load - turn on 1gbps switch). This would substantially increase the complexity of the network because of the additional hardware, it would also be difficult to maintain and in the end probably not worth it.
Also, client access hardware (DSLAM, dial-in modem etc) uses the same amount of power no matter the load. So, if everyone is using 10kbps then all of the client access hardware has to be on (otherwise they would get 0kbps). If only one client is saturating his line while everyone else is away then you could in theory shut down their access hardware to save power, but be prepared for angry calls if you do not turn it back on when someone wants to use their connection.
Because bandwidth can not be stored one needs excess bandwidth, because once you put all that low priority porn in the pipe you can't take it out to service priority traffic. You are pretty well committed once you send it.
Pipes are short, buffers are big, so the porn packet can sit in queue while email packets skip it. Also, wasn't ATM created for that purpose, sending small cells instead of big packets you reduce the latency for high priority traffic?
Besides, nobody feels that their traffic should be de-prioritized, and the porn download is just as important to someone and the email.
That can be simple to rectify. Allow the user to set priority of their packets and limit the capacity based on it. You can get 64kbps of VoIP priority traffic, 512kbps of normal traffic and 5mbps for lowest priority. So, if you tag your packets as VoIP, you only get 64kbps, but the packets are sent with lowest latency. The point being that file downloads can tolerate a lot of latency and jitter, web browsing can tolerate less and VoIP can tolerate the least.
You can't do that giving away unlimited bandwidth to people who pay a tiny portion of the cost they impose on the system.
Measure the power usage when my connection is idle, measure it when my connection is saturated. The difference is the direct cost that I impose on the system. Maintenance costs should be split among all subscribers because everyone needs the system working. Add some profit and you can send me the bill.
Its never going to happen your way.
One ISP I know did this in the past - the de-prioritized P2P packets so that web browsing would be faster. Now they have upgraded the network and do not do that anymore.
partial propane (which is ALWAYS prepaid in these parts).
But yes, they come and fill up the propane tank, then I pay them.
So, it's not prepaid. You pay after they fill it up and pay for the amount they filled (be it 85% of the empty tank of 10% of a tank that already had 75%). It's not like you pay $whatever for 10 refills/month and if you do not have an empty tank the next time they let the gas out and then fill up the tank.
How do you know how hot it's going to be tomorrow?
Well, there are weather predictions, also, no matter how hot, I can still leave the AC off or turn something else off and turn on the AC, but when I find out that the site downloaded 10MB it's already too late.
Because it is cheaper to them. The wires going from the power plant to your house cost the same to maintain no matter if you use 1W or 1kW. The variable costs in electricity generation come from fuel used, building new power plants and maintaining old ones (if the load was lower, some power plants could be turned off and not need maintenance). So, as your usage increases, the fixed costs make up for lower portion of the total cost, which is reflected in your bill.
Simply slowing down some traffic doesn't remove congestion. The pipe is full. Queuing up some data for later does not improve anything, it just prolongs the congestion.
So what? The pipe is not going to burst or overflow. The whole point of priority levels is that packets that are less important can wait until there is a pot, while packets that are more important get sent faster. So, my movie download will finish 10 seconds later, but your browsing or VoIP call will have low latency.
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?
Except that bandwidth cannot be stored. If nobody is using it, then it is wasted while the ISP pays for it. Network gear does not need vacations and since bandwidth cannot be stored you cannot turn the gear off for an hour a day and use the stored bandwidth saving electricity.
One obvious difference is that electricity is usually generated by burning some sort of fuel. If I turn on my radio, the power plant is going to burn more fuel than it would if my radio stayed off. Te network of an ISP does uses more of less the same amount of power and whether it is loaded 10% or 100%, the biggest part of the cost is maintenance (hardware fails sometimes), upgrades and the power that is uses by just being turned on.
If everyone in $country decided to use no more than 10W of electricity for a month, a lot of power plants would be shut down and less fuel would be used during that month. If everyone in $country decided to load their internet connection no more than 10kbps, the ISPs network would remain on and would use the same amount of power.
Also, I can control how much power I use by using more efficient devices, turning off what I am not using etc. If I am using an incandescent t light bulb it means I chose to do it. If I leave my PC on 24/7 it means I chose to do it knowing that I will have to pay more. I can use a wattmeter to find out how much power a device is using in a few seconds and then calculate how much it would cost me to keep it 24/7 or whatever.
When I go to a web site, I may not know how big it is. I can measure the size only by downloading it which means I pay full price for the measurement. Only then I may never come back again or choose use (ad|flash)block. Also, somebody could send unsolicited packets to my IP address causing me to pay for them even if my firewall drops them.
So, you want to use ActiveX, but a version that runs on multiple operating systems and CPUs. Would the same binary be able to run anywhere or would the server have to have separate files for x86/Windows, x86_64/Windows, x86/MacOS, x86/Debian, x86/Fedora, x86_64/Debian, x86_64/Fedora, ARM/Linux, ARM/Symbian, ???/iPhoneOS etc?
Of course there is a relationship between violent video games and violence. Violent people like violent things, for example, video games, torturing cats, beating up people etc. Some people like violent video games because they allow them to cause violence but without real world consequences (I can shoot a lot of people in a video game, but I would have problems shooting a real person who was not threatening my life even if the law allowed it), others play games for their story and play a mix of violent and nonviolent games (a violent game can still have a good story).
There is also a relationship between guns and murders - if you want to kill someone, using a gun is most likely the easiest/most efficient way to do it.
Now, whether violent video games can make nonviolent people (more) violent, that's the question. Young kids and some adults cannot perceive the difference between reality and fiction, so they could try to emulate the video game in reality, but little kids should not be allowed to play GTA and the aforementioned adults probably already are a danger to themselves and/or others. The question that remains is whether "normal" adults are affected and whether a video game can make a killer out of someone who, before playing the game, would not harm even a fly.
Well, he could have searched for the crack in a library, at school or at a friends place. He could get the crack but could not get his machine connected to the net to activate.
I make much less money than he does and also I recommended him to save money and keep using this laptop because it works fast enough. My dad does the same thing he did 9 years ago and this laptop, while it still works (and it does) is really well suited for it. MS Office works really well on this laptop and even 60GB hard drive is impossible to fill with.doc and.xls files (IIRC my dad said that all his work in the past 10 years fits in a few gigabytes, which would make a nice big stack of printed documents). It's not slow. Office is fast as is Firefox with flashblock installed.
The point is, the laptop was good for the job 9 years ago, it's still good for the same job now. No reason to pay money for a new laptop to to the same job, and the new laptop may be less reliable.
How do you call the thing where the forward, back buttons are and where you can type in c:\windows\system32 to get to that directory?
Windows Explorer has address bar since Windows 95 IE5 (?) desktop upgrade. Except that in all older OSs the layout is manu bar on top, tool bar below manu bar and address bar below tool bar.
Windows 7 Explorer only has the address bar (which now has back and forward buttons) and the "Organize" bar by default. I installed Classic Shell and got the usual menu bar and tool bar, but they appear below the address bar. I can change their position relative to each other, but the address bar cannot be moved (or at least I do not know how).
Explorer is plenty customizable, and is vastly superior to Explorer in XP or Vista.
How do you move the address bar in Explorer down? I already have the menu bar and toolbar, but the layout is still wrong because the address bar is above the menu bar.
The difference was that 133MHz system was slow even with 95, that is, Windows worked fine, but apps were slow (for example I could only record CDs at 1x speed even though my writer supported 4x because otherwise I would get a buffer underrun) and it's not a surprise given the CPU speed. If I wanted to upgrade my PC to a 400MHz one, I could continue to run 95 or 98 or I could upgrade to 2000/XP. 2000 was much more stable than 9x and XP was better for games than 2000 and that could be a reason to upgrade. But I did not buy a new PC just so I cold run a new OS, I bought it because I wanted to play newer games etc.
However, a PC with 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM is good enough for a lot of things, for example MS Office 2003 works nicely, so does Firefox and Opera. You can watch SD movies on it too. I suppose I could buy a dual core 3GHz PC with 3GB RAM and continue to use MS Office, Firefox and watch SD movies, but that would be a waste of money because the new PC is not much more useful than the old because I do not do CPU intensive tasks like 3D gaming, video encoding etc.
However, I can still try to customize it to be more like what I am used to. For example I customize Opera to look like a mix between version 7 and 8 because it is better for me.
Same with Windows - I will try to customize it to better suit my needs rather than just accepting the way it is. Maybe I'll find a way to (for example) move the address bar down, maybe I won't, but I can certainly try.
But other than the UI and that it seems to be slower than 2003 (which I have in an another VM) it seems to be about the same as XP for me. UI can be adjusted and the performance, I hope, too, so it's really not a bad OS. On the other hand, it's not so much better than XP that I would just format and reinstall Windows on my main PC or my laptop.
Oh, good to know then. After reading about the DRM in Vista and the problems with recording (separately) I just though that this was the feature of the DRM, the blocking of recording. I can still record to a cassette or r2r tape and no DRM will prevent that.
Classic Shell brings back the old start menu and toolbar and menu in the explorer window. You can't move the address bar down, or at least I could not find a way yet.
Classic theme reduces the window border size, looks like Windows 2000/2003.
Windows comes with a lot of drivers for the hardware that existed when that version of Windows was made, for example, Windows XP supports Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller without installing additional drivers. Linux does too.
And what's supporting what does not really matter. If the app does not work on the OS then it does not work. Same with hardware. It does not really matter if the OS is coded in such a way that makes the device impossible or the manufacturer did not make a driver for that device on that OS. The result is that I cannot use the device. The same is when a new laptop does not have drivers that work on Windows XP.
And, BTW, mention ONE, just ONE mainstream piece of hardware that currently doesn't work on GNU/Linux. I double dare you.
Well, I had a problem when I wanted to use Linux on my laptop, Acer Aspire 5021WLMi. I replaced the WiFi card with one made by Atheros, but then I had to install a special driver for the WiFi button. I could make it work, but then the WiFi driver would break, so it was either working WiFi driver, but the card turned off, or a tuned on card and a nonworking WiFi driver. And I see where a less computer savvy person would not even be able to make the button work.
That was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now.
IIRC since Vista there are restrictions on audio software, something about not allowing to record the output of another program or something like that. As I said, I did not try to do it because the PC the VM runs on does not have sound card.
I didn't know about that, but the computer runs several other VMs so at times the CPUs are loaded. As for giving two CPUs to the VM to make it faster, that would not be a setting in the OS, it would be equivalent of adding more hardware to a real PC and I'm looking for ways to make the OS faster without using faster hardware.
I actually have Windows 7 installed in a virtual machine on a computer with 3x 700MHz CPUs (the VM has one CPU and 1GB RAM) and am trying to find settings that make it faster (since whatever is reasonably fast on a 700MHz CPU will fly on a 2GHz CPU) and also make the UI look more like 2000/XP, I don't like changes. This is for my eventual purchase of a new laptop when my current one breaks beyond repair because I most likely will not be able to find drivers for XP by then.
Win7 looks to me like an OK OS, though I have not tried anything that could have problems with the included DRM, but for now it looks OK. Not good enough for me to format any of my PCs and reinstall Windows though.
Great, when the time comes to reinstall Windows on my dads laptop I'll install Win7.
Windows XP works nicely on a 1GHz Mobile P3 CPU and 512MB of PC133 RAM. Since 7 is a good replacement for XP, it will surely work just as fast as XP works now. Right?
Well, at least it runs all the non-software I need and supports all the useless hardware I have, unlike REAL operating systems which refuse to run nonsense such as games, some business apps and supports only useful hardware, unlike WiFi, specific laptop hardware and other nonsense like that.
Well, probably more people who test their speeds feel that the speed is inadequate (or the real speed is less than what the ISP promised), so more DSL users and not fiber users. Fiber users test the speed a few times and then don't test it again, while DSL users test the speed more often.
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For example, 1gbps network switch would use about the same amount of power when it is fully loaded vs when it is just turned on. O implement some kind of "variable bandwidth" that would also save electricity you would have to have different hardware for when you only need less bandwidth and some way of automatically switching between them (low load - turn off 1gbps switch, turn on 100mbps switch, high load - turn on 1gbps switch). This would substantially increase the complexity of the network because of the additional hardware, it would also be difficult to maintain and in the end probably not worth it.
Also, client access hardware (DSLAM, dial-in modem etc) uses the same amount of power no matter the load. So, if everyone is using 10kbps then all of the client access hardware has to be on (otherwise they would get 0kbps). If only one client is saturating his line while everyone else is away then you could in theory shut down their access hardware to save power, but be prepared for angry calls if you do not turn it back on when someone wants to use their connection.
Because bandwidth can not be stored one needs excess bandwidth, because once you put all that low priority porn in the pipe you can't take it out to service priority traffic. You are pretty well committed once you send it.
Pipes are short, buffers are big, so the porn packet can sit in queue while email packets skip it. Also, wasn't ATM created for that purpose, sending small cells instead of big packets you reduce the latency for high priority traffic?
Besides, nobody feels that their traffic should be de-prioritized, and the porn download is just as important to someone and the email.
That can be simple to rectify. Allow the user to set priority of their packets and limit the capacity based on it. You can get 64kbps of VoIP priority traffic, 512kbps of normal traffic and 5mbps for lowest priority. So, if you tag your packets as VoIP, you only get 64kbps, but the packets are sent with lowest latency. The point being that file downloads can tolerate a lot of latency and jitter, web browsing can tolerate less and VoIP can tolerate the least.
You can't do that giving away unlimited bandwidth to people who pay a tiny portion of the cost they impose on the system.
Measure the power usage when my connection is idle, measure it when my connection is saturated. The difference is the direct cost that I impose on the system. Maintenance costs should be split among all subscribers because everyone needs the system working. Add some profit and you can send me the bill.
Its never going to happen your way.
One ISP I know did this in the past - the de-prioritized P2P packets so that web browsing would be faster. Now they have upgraded the network and do not do that anymore.
partial propane (which is ALWAYS prepaid in these parts).
But yes, they come and fill up the propane tank, then I pay them.
So, it's not prepaid. You pay after they fill it up and pay for the amount they filled (be it 85% of the empty tank of 10% of a tank that already had 75%). It's not like you pay $whatever for 10 refills/month and if you do not have an empty tank the next time they let the gas out and then fill up the tank.
How do you know how hot it's going to be tomorrow?
Well, there are weather predictions, also, no matter how hot, I can still leave the AC off or turn something else off and turn on the AC, but when I find out that the site downloaded 10MB it's already too late.
Because it is cheaper to them. The wires going from the power plant to your house cost the same to maintain no matter if you use 1W or 1kW. The variable costs in electricity generation come from fuel used, building new power plants and maintaining old ones (if the load was lower, some power plants could be turned off and not need maintenance). So, as your usage increases, the fixed costs make up for lower portion of the total cost, which is reflected in your bill.
And my electricity company drops the rates a bit if I used 12000kWh last year and promise to do so this year too.
Simply slowing down some traffic doesn't remove congestion. The pipe is full. Queuing up some data for later does not improve anything, it just prolongs the congestion.
So what? The pipe is not going to burst or overflow. The whole point of priority levels is that packets that are less important can wait until there is a pot, while packets that are more important get sent faster. So, my movie download will finish 10 seconds later, but your browsing or VoIP call will have low latency.
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?
Except that bandwidth cannot be stored. If nobody is using it, then it is wasted while the ISP pays for it. Network gear does not need vacations and since bandwidth cannot be stored you cannot turn the gear off for an hour a day and use the stored bandwidth saving electricity.
One obvious difference is that electricity is usually generated by burning some sort of fuel. If I turn on my radio, the power plant is going to burn more fuel than it would if my radio stayed off. Te network of an ISP does uses more of less the same amount of power and whether it is loaded 10% or 100%, the biggest part of the cost is maintenance (hardware fails sometimes), upgrades and the power that is uses by just being turned on.
If everyone in $country decided to use no more than 10W of electricity for a month, a lot of power plants would be shut down and less fuel would be used during that month. If everyone in $country decided to load their internet connection no more than 10kbps, the ISPs network would remain on and would use the same amount of power.
Also, I can control how much power I use by using more efficient devices, turning off what I am not using etc. If I am using an incandescent t light bulb it means I chose to do it. If I leave my PC on 24/7 it means I chose to do it knowing that I will have to pay more. I can use a wattmeter to find out how much power a device is using in a few seconds and then calculate how much it would cost me to keep it 24/7 or whatever.
When I go to a web site, I may not know how big it is. I can measure the size only by downloading it which means I pay full price for the measurement. Only then I may never come back again or choose use (ad|flash)block. Also, somebody could send unsolicited packets to my IP address causing me to pay for them even if my firewall drops them.
So, you want to use ActiveX, but a version that runs on multiple operating systems and CPUs. Would the same binary be able to run anywhere or would the server have to have separate files for x86/Windows, x86_64/Windows, x86/MacOS, x86/Debian, x86/Fedora, x86_64/Debian, x86_64/Fedora, ARM/Linux, ARM/Symbian, ???/iPhoneOS etc?
Of course there is a relationship between violent video games and violence. Violent people like violent things, for example, video games, torturing cats, beating up people etc. Some people like violent video games because they allow them to cause violence but without real world consequences (I can shoot a lot of people in a video game, but I would have problems shooting a real person who was not threatening my life even if the law allowed it), others play games for their story and play a mix of violent and nonviolent games (a violent game can still have a good story).
There is also a relationship between guns and murders - if you want to kill someone, using a gun is most likely the easiest/most efficient way to do it.
Now, whether violent video games can make nonviolent people (more) violent, that's the question. Young kids and some adults cannot perceive the difference between reality and fiction, so they could try to emulate the video game in reality, but little kids should not be allowed to play GTA and the aforementioned adults probably already are a danger to themselves and/or others. The question that remains is whether "normal" adults are affected and whether a video game can make a killer out of someone who, before playing the game, would not harm even a fly.
Well, he could have searched for the crack in a library, at school or at a friends place. He could get the crack but could not get his machine connected to the net to activate.
I make much less money than he does and also I recommended him to save money and keep using this laptop because it works fast enough. My dad does the same thing he did 9 years ago and this laptop, while it still works (and it does) is really well suited for it. MS Office works really well on this laptop and even 60GB hard drive is impossible to fill with .doc and .xls files (IIRC my dad said that all his work in the past 10 years fits in a few gigabytes, which would make a nice big stack of printed documents). It's not slow. Office is fast as is Firefox with flashblock installed.
The point is, the laptop was good for the job 9 years ago, it's still good for the same job now. No reason to pay money for a new laptop to to the same job, and the new laptop may be less reliable.
How do you call the thing where the forward, back buttons are and where you can type in c:\windows\system32 to get to that directory?
Windows Explorer has address bar since Windows 95 IE5 (?) desktop upgrade. Except that in all older OSs the layout is manu bar on top, tool bar below manu bar and address bar below tool bar.
Windows 7 Explorer only has the address bar (which now has back and forward buttons) and the "Organize" bar by default. I installed Classic Shell and got the usual menu bar and tool bar, but they appear below the address bar. I can change their position relative to each other, but the address bar cannot be moved (or at least I do not know how).
Explorer is plenty customizable, and is vastly superior to Explorer in XP or Vista.
How do you move the address bar in Explorer down? I already have the menu bar and toolbar, but the layout is still wrong because the address bar is above the menu bar.
The difference was that 133MHz system was slow even with 95, that is, Windows worked fine, but apps were slow (for example I could only record CDs at 1x speed even though my writer supported 4x because otherwise I would get a buffer underrun) and it's not a surprise given the CPU speed. If I wanted to upgrade my PC to a 400MHz one, I could continue to run 95 or 98 or I could upgrade to 2000/XP. 2000 was much more stable than 9x and XP was better for games than 2000 and that could be a reason to upgrade. But I did not buy a new PC just so I cold run a new OS, I bought it because I wanted to play newer games etc.
However, a PC with 1GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM is good enough for a lot of things, for example MS Office 2003 works nicely, so does Firefox and Opera. You can watch SD movies on it too. I suppose I could buy a dual core 3GHz PC with 3GB RAM and continue to use MS Office, Firefox and watch SD movies, but that would be a waste of money because the new PC is not much more useful than the old because I do not do CPU intensive tasks like 3D gaming, video encoding etc.
However, I can still try to customize it to be more like what I am used to. For example I customize Opera to look like a mix between version 7 and 8 because it is better for me.
Same with Windows - I will try to customize it to better suit my needs rather than just accepting the way it is. Maybe I'll find a way to (for example) move the address bar down, maybe I won't, but I can certainly try.
But other than the UI and that it seems to be slower than 2003 (which I have in an another VM) it seems to be about the same as XP for me. UI can be adjusted and the performance, I hope, too, so it's really not a bad OS. On the other hand, it's not so much better than XP that I would just format and reinstall Windows on my main PC or my laptop.
Oh, good to know then. After reading about the DRM in Vista and the problems with recording (separately) I just though that this was the feature of the DRM, the blocking of recording. I can still record to a cassette or r2r tape and no DRM will prevent that.
Classic Shell brings back the old start menu and toolbar and menu in the explorer window. You can't move the address bar down, or at least I could not find a way yet.
Classic theme reduces the window border size, looks like Windows 2000/2003.
Windows comes with a lot of drivers for the hardware that existed when that version of Windows was made, for example, Windows XP supports Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller without installing additional drivers. Linux does too.
And what's supporting what does not really matter. If the app does not work on the OS then it does not work. Same with hardware. It does not really matter if the OS is coded in such a way that makes the device impossible or the manufacturer did not make a driver for that device on that OS. The result is that I cannot use the device. The same is when a new laptop does not have drivers that work on Windows XP.
And, BTW, mention ONE, just ONE mainstream piece of hardware that currently doesn't work on GNU/Linux. I double dare you.
Well, I had a problem when I wanted to use Linux on my laptop, Acer Aspire 5021WLMi. I replaced the WiFi card with one made by Atheros, but then I had to install a special driver for the WiFi button. I could make it work, but then the WiFi driver would break, so it was either working WiFi driver, but the card turned off, or a tuned on card and a nonworking WiFi driver. And I see where a less computer savvy person would not even be able to make the button work.
That was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now.
IIRC since Vista there are restrictions on audio software, something about not allowing to record the output of another program or something like that. As I said, I did not try to do it because the PC the VM runs on does not have sound card.
I didn't know about that, but the computer runs several other VMs so at times the CPUs are loaded. As for giving two CPUs to the VM to make it faster, that would not be a setting in the OS, it would be equivalent of adding more hardware to a real PC and I'm looking for ways to make the OS faster without using faster hardware.
I actually have Windows 7 installed in a virtual machine on a computer with 3x 700MHz CPUs (the VM has one CPU and 1GB RAM) and am trying to find settings that make it faster (since whatever is reasonably fast on a 700MHz CPU will fly on a 2GHz CPU) and also make the UI look more like 2000/XP, I don't like changes. This is for my eventual purchase of a new laptop when my current one breaks beyond repair because I most likely will not be able to find drivers for XP by then.
Win7 looks to me like an OK OS, though I have not tried anything that could have problems with the included DRM, but for now it looks OK. Not good enough for me to format any of my PCs and reinstall Windows though.
Great, when the time comes to reinstall Windows on my dads laptop I'll install Win7.
Windows XP works nicely on a 1GHz Mobile P3 CPU and 512MB of PC133 RAM. Since 7 is a good replacement for XP, it will surely work just as fast as XP works now. Right?
Well, at least it runs all the non-software I need and supports all the useless hardware I have, unlike REAL operating systems which refuse to run nonsense such as games, some business apps and supports only useful hardware, unlike WiFi, specific laptop hardware and other nonsense like that.
Well, probably more people who test their speeds feel that the speed is inadequate (or the real speed is less than what the ISP promised), so more DSL users and not fiber users. Fiber users test the speed a few times and then don't test it again, while DSL users test the speed more often.