"Everyone knows that the biggest users of bandwidth are a few people that are constantly downloading things like movies, all day long."
Actually, we don't know that. We have the words of the people who have a vested interest in that. The day that Comcast opens up their records to let the public see that information is the day I believe.
Let's really start with what everyone knows:
The ISPs are looking to increase rates and charge content providers to traverse their networks (http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/06/technology/phones_internet/index.htm). Download limits are the first obvious step in making that happen. I suspect many people don't realize this because their notion of the internet is one of getting email and browsing websites. This is a 10 year old notion of what happens on the web.
Furthermore, there is a general notion that ISPs connect to each other through quaint notions of T-1's and DS-3, and that peering happens in special rooms at various parts of the internet. This is something that was true about 10-13 years ago, but in fact, the major ISPs within the US peer at many many points and effectively have unlimited bandwidth to trade packets.
Further, let's take comcast's 2007 annual report: http://www.comcast.com/2007annualreview/index.htm. They had revenues last year of $31 BILLION dollars with net income of $2.6 BILLION dollars. 21% of that revenue came from Internet access. So something doesn't add up here. If they had such tremendous revenue and really great revenue and revenue growth, what's the complaint? That they have to spend some money to upgrade their capacity?
The fact that people accept all of Comcast's BS without doing research that's readily available on the Internet, and we get self-proclaimed experts ("Bandwidth is limited! Comcast is doing this for our own good!") makes me fear for the human condition. The facts are laid out. We just need to use our noggins a little bit to ignore the Public Relations BS.
"There's no reason to do a cap, except for finding a new way to raise rates."
There actually is a better reason. Imagine in this constricted environment somebody wants to sell you hi-def movies to download. These movies are 5-10G each in terms of download. Now, if you're paying $1/G, then that's silly. It's cheaper to buy it. But if this company were to, ahem, subsidize the download, then it becomes more interesting.
So this proposal is to:
a) Raise your rates (of course)
b) Raise more revenue by essentially bypassing the rate limits if the *sender* of the data pays for the data to be sent.
c) Nobody really liked Net Neutrality anyway, except consumers.
"When the format wars started there was no copy protection"
DVDs always had copy protection (CSS), and the copy protection on HD-DVD's was a generation ahead (AACS), with BD+ even more extreme (VM to validate the player was legit on top of the AACS encryption). Before that, VHS tapes had Macrovision. At what point do you recall no copy protection on these formats?
"I've already seen proposals for uncrackable systems but they aren't pretty."
Well BD+ was supposed to have a 10 year shelf life, and it took less than that. But that's largely irrelevant. Blu-Ray may have won the format wars, but nobody is sure what they won. There simply isn't a big uptake of the Blu-Ray format, and that has nothing to do with piracy. If they introduce more complexity and yet another new format, the chance of success would be extremely tiny.
If the studios don't sell product, they can't make money. The studio that figures out that people should be allowed to move films to their iPod, or laptop, or phone without trying to institute a pay-per-view model the quicker they'll be able to grow the market. Right now, they're so greedy they're forgetting sales 101... a satisfied customer comes back again.
The truth is, there is *too much* content out there right now. I purchased 100's of DVD movies, and I've yet to watch 25% of them, so when Blu-Ray came out, I decided not to buy any. I rent them at Blockbuster. I realized that there is hardly any more worth watching more than once. And if I do, it's cheaper to rent it a 2nd time.
That's because no one laid out what they were going to do with it.
I wouldn't give my daughter $20 without her being able to explain what she was going to spend it on, but I am supposed to trust the same guys who got us into the economic mess with another $700B?
And how many of those economist that you spoke of were in favor of deregulating the market creating the mess? How many could tell us the likelihood that they'll be back asking for another $700B?
I am just counting down the days until we get the stories of how the corrupt lenders who got us into this mess will profit massively from this transfer of wealth.
I'm amazed even 35% of the people were in favor of it.
"Datapoint. Prohibition. Alcohol was illegal. People murdered over the control of the illicit trade. It's not illegal now, and people are not killing each other to supply it. Alcohol cost much more due to the articial scaricity."
It's worse than that. Prohibition is directly responsible for the rise of organized crime in the United States. If we didn't have prohibition, there would have been no need for Elliot Ness to go after these guys because they wouldn't have existed in the first place. Worse, prohibition was so profitable for organized crime that they lasted for decades after prohibition ended.
That's not to say that there were no social costs of alcohol, there were and are. But there were worse social costs associated with prohibition that finally became obvious to everyone. I see drugs largely the same way. It surprises me that we criminalize users of drugs when you think about it. Seems to me we should draw on the experience of nations and cultures that have legalized certain types of drugs and then make laws that have the greatest long-term good for society. Right now, we seem to be moving the wrong direction in regards to being rational about drugs and how best to deal with them in society.
It also restricts people who want to loan a game to their friend(s). If you think about it, the current inherent DRM of console games is perfect in a way; it allows everyone to treat the game like a book. You can't easily copy it, you "own" it, and you can loan it, and you can sell it.
However, I think you'll find most of the game companies would prefer you couldn't do the last two, and they object strongly to the last item, since it puts them in competition with cheaper, legal copies of their own product.
Again showing why bandwidth caps are backwards
on
Bandwidth Use In MMOs
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· Score: 1
It reminds me of the time limits that ISPs added when the internet got popular. It worked out to 3 hours a day.
And people claimed it was "reasonable" and that "somebody had to set limits".
Seems like a quaint notion today. Kinda like a 250G bandwidth limit. I don't quite understand why anybody but narrow-minded ISPs defend the practice, either.
I was there at the talk. What Ballmer said (and I'm paraphrasing) is that Google Apps have no audience; user growth plateaued months ago and that in their (MS's) own studies almost all college students buy MS Office and use it. He said the only time students are using Google Apps is when they need to collaborate on projects but he talked about how MS is working to beef up their own collaboration tools in Office 2007/08.
Really guys, this is reaching.
Ballmer is a good entertaining speaker, and Gartner analysts are not going to outfox the guy.
At what point will the card issuers finally go to 2-factor authentication? The fact that credit cards still "mean" something in 2008 is a joke. It could be fixed, it would be expensive, but it's going to be less expensive than these multi-billion dollar losses.
There's no excuse for this lack of sophitication today. We could do so much better.
The intent of putting in conditions which aren't legal isn't so much to stand up in court, it's to place obstacles in your path to inhibit you from doing something they don't like.
If you signed a contract with BIG COMPANY that said you could never speak ill of them ever again or be faces with the cost of repairing their reputation plus $1M, I'm guessing you'd shut your mouth. Or do you have months to litigate the issue and 6 figures to fight against BIG COMPANY through all the hearings, processes, court procedures?
The legal system is very much geared towards those that can afford to use it both in terms of time and money and with the exception of those with deep pockets is a place to be avoided almost at any cost.
The entire point of these devices is to force you into a model where Sony or Amazon makes money as the middleman. Otherwise, there would be no reason for the proprietary formats and DRM.
If you had only Windows and Mac, I'd opt for Mozy (http://www.mozy.com) which is owned by EMC. It's $50/year for unlimited storage and their agent is unobtrusive and backs up even open files.
The downside is that it limits upstream bandwidth to 1Mb/s, so your initial backup might take a week. But after that, it takes 3 minutes a night and it does it without prompting. I've strong-armed my immediate family into using it because it also allows me to monitor remotely the status of all backups.
We'll give you X Mb/S, but don't use it, because if you do, we'll throttle you down until you stop using it.
That's their plan. It's insulting enough when they add the metered usage, but then, they won't even let you use the bandwidth in anything other than short burst.
Yikes. This is aimed squarely, IMHO at the emerging streaming video market. It basically makes it useless.
I see you point, but in this case, selling a breath-a-lyzer to be used in court, there is an implied need to provide whatever evidence the court needs, even if it was not part of the contract. After all, common sense tells you that (a) the device will be challenged in court (b) The company has to be willing to work with the court to prove that it's accurate. Seriously, I can't think of a scenario where they thought they could keep the source code secret for very long.
The only way you could morally let the company off the hook is if they said "We will not provide information to the court about how our device works, and if we are forced to, the person buying it agrees to pay damages to us". However, if you assume that you have to obey the laws of the land, I don't see under what circumstances that can turn down a request for the information from a judge. The alternative is for the judge to rule that all convictions against people using the device were not admissible; I suspect the company would like that even less.
I originally put Vista Ultimate on a homebuilt Rig that I built primarily for Video processing (quad core, 4G of RAM) and I had numerous irritating problem such as, only 3.2G of memory could be recognized by any process (not entirely MS's fault), sound drivers that would glitch when you dropped down menus or popped up the Start menu, to general slow performance for network and file operations.
On a hunch, I installed the X64 version of Vista and the improvement has been remarkable; in general, the computer was significantly faster for day to day operations, the sound glitching was gone, and best of all, the OS could now recognize lots of memory, so I promptly upgraded my memory to 6G which makes all my applications faster (less paging).
If you have to run on Windows, Vista x64 is the "good" version.
"Which is to say Joe Bob with his Master Electrician badge is more fit to wire your house than a guy with a PhD in electrical engineering who has 20 years experience in the field."
Joe Bob actually *is* more fit to wire my house. Let me know how hiring a PhE EE works out wiring your house.
Who do you want repairing the engines on your airplane? An aerospace engineer? Or a journeyman airplane mechanic? I'll take my chances with the mechanic, thanks.
You're right about one thing... it is a young industry compared with the legal profession or medical profession, but hopefully, better definition and qualifications will become the norm in this industry. Today, we have a lot of people who know how to program (i.e. EE), but no idea how to solve a problem a customer has (i.e. Electrician).
At a certain point, when you realize the guy isn't squatting, you cut him a check for $250K and you're done with it.
Nissan has spent more than that on lawyer's fees and are further from their goal. If I was on the board of directors, I'd ask to have the guy pushing this fired. Not because of the money, but because of poor judgment. If you can't use common sense in obvious things, you probably can't suddenly turn it on for complex issues.
Really, fire the guy at Nissan Motors who keeps pushing this lawsuit, and then pay the guy a few bucks for the domain.
"How do you think Wal Mart got to be the biggest corporation in the world?"
Superior business methods and a model that lets them understand supplier cost and squeeze them.
Their prices on items which are directly comparable (i.e. iPods, computers, other stuff that is directly comparable) shows them about the same or slightly higher than typical retail elsewhere. They do well on items which are made specially for them. The do less well on items that they have to sell like any other retailer.
"So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense"
Do you seriously think Comcast is going to lower prices to compete with FIOS? Seriously?
They're still charging people the same amount as before, but now they're adding a cap. Comcast has no intention of lowering prices. Ever. That would be stupid. If I was the CEO of Comcast and one of my employees said the way to make the business grow was to cut my main source of revenue, I'd fire them before they got the sentence out. They might create a new tier of service with higher limits, but that won't happen right away. That would be too obvious.
As to moving high-usage customers to FIOS, Verizon probably doesn't care; their physical plant has so much capacity compared to Comcast they can handle significantly more usage than that of Comcast. And if you don't think that's a big deal, it will be in 5 years as data consumption grows. What happens as people want to download high-def movies? If anything, this limit is highlighting the difference in capacity between Verizon and Comcast. Don't you think Verizon will have a field day with this?
This is a short-term win for Comcast, but it does not bode well for them for the longer term.
Slashdot Mirror
"Everyone knows that the biggest users of bandwidth are a few people that are constantly downloading things like movies, all day long."
Actually, we don't know that. We have the words of the people who have a vested interest in that. The day that Comcast opens up their records to let the public see that information is the day I believe.
Let's really start with what everyone knows:
The ISPs are looking to increase rates and charge content providers to traverse their networks (http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/06/technology/phones_internet/index.htm). Download limits are the first obvious step in making that happen. I suspect many people don't realize this because their notion of the internet is one of getting email and browsing websites. This is a 10 year old notion of what happens on the web.
Furthermore, there is a general notion that ISPs connect to each other through quaint notions of T-1's and DS-3, and that peering happens in special rooms at various parts of the internet. This is something that was true about 10-13 years ago, but in fact, the major ISPs within the US peer at many many points and effectively have unlimited bandwidth to trade packets.
Further, let's take comcast's 2007 annual report: http://www.comcast.com/2007annualreview/index.htm. They had revenues last year of $31 BILLION dollars with net income of $2.6 BILLION dollars. 21% of that revenue came from Internet access. So something doesn't add up here. If they had such tremendous revenue and really great revenue and revenue growth, what's the complaint? That they have to spend some money to upgrade their capacity?
The fact that people accept all of Comcast's BS without doing research that's readily available on the Internet, and we get self-proclaimed experts ("Bandwidth is limited! Comcast is doing this for our own good!") makes me fear for the human condition. The facts are laid out. We just need to use our noggins a little bit to ignore the Public Relations BS.
"There's no reason to do a cap, except for finding a new way to raise rates."
There actually is a better reason. Imagine in this constricted environment somebody wants to sell you hi-def movies to download. These movies are 5-10G each in terms of download. Now, if you're paying $1/G, then that's silly. It's cheaper to buy it. But if this company were to, ahem, subsidize the download, then it becomes more interesting.
So this proposal is to:
a) Raise your rates (of course)
b) Raise more revenue by essentially bypassing the rate limits if the *sender* of the data pays for the data to be sent.
c) Nobody really liked Net Neutrality anyway, except consumers.
"When the format wars started there was no copy protection"
DVDs always had copy protection (CSS), and the copy protection on HD-DVD's was a generation ahead (AACS), with BD+ even more extreme (VM to validate the player was legit on top of the AACS encryption). Before that, VHS tapes had Macrovision. At what point do you recall no copy protection on these formats?
"I've already seen proposals for uncrackable systems but they aren't pretty."
Well BD+ was supposed to have a 10 year shelf life, and it took less than that. But that's largely irrelevant. Blu-Ray may have won the format wars, but nobody is sure what they won. There simply isn't a big uptake of the Blu-Ray format, and that has nothing to do with piracy. If they introduce more complexity and yet another new format, the chance of success would be extremely tiny.
If the studios don't sell product, they can't make money. The studio that figures out that people should be allowed to move films to their iPod, or laptop, or phone without trying to institute a pay-per-view model the quicker they'll be able to grow the market. Right now, they're so greedy they're forgetting sales 101... a satisfied customer comes back again.
The truth is, there is *too much* content out there right now. I purchased 100's of DVD movies, and I've yet to watch 25% of them, so when Blu-Ray came out, I decided not to buy any. I rent them at Blockbuster. I realized that there is hardly any more worth watching more than once. And if I do, it's cheaper to rent it a 2nd time.
"Most people opposed the $700 billion bailout."
That's because no one laid out what they were going to do with it.
I wouldn't give my daughter $20 without her being able to explain what she was going to spend it on, but I am supposed to trust the same guys who got us into the economic mess with another $700B?
And how many of those economist that you spoke of were in favor of deregulating the market creating the mess? How many could tell us the likelihood that they'll be back asking for another $700B?
I am just counting down the days until we get the stories of how the corrupt lenders who got us into this mess will profit massively from this transfer of wealth.
I'm amazed even 35% of the people were in favor of it.
Radio works very well. If you want to be really high-tech, then stream it over the web.
Rabbit Ears (that catch hi-def signals) work well. Local TV will have it on.
Lots of options if you think about it.
"Datapoint. Prohibition. Alcohol was illegal. People murdered over the control of the illicit trade. It's not illegal now, and people are not killing each other to supply it. Alcohol cost much more due to the articial scaricity."
It's worse than that. Prohibition is directly responsible for the rise of organized crime in the United States. If we didn't have prohibition, there would have been no need for Elliot Ness to go after these guys because they wouldn't have existed in the first place. Worse, prohibition was so profitable for organized crime that they lasted for decades after prohibition ended.
That's not to say that there were no social costs of alcohol, there were and are. But there were worse social costs associated with prohibition that finally became obvious to everyone. I see drugs largely the same way. It surprises me that we criminalize users of drugs when you think about it. Seems to me we should draw on the experience of nations and cultures that have legalized certain types of drugs and then make laws that have the greatest long-term good for society. Right now, we seem to be moving the wrong direction in regards to being rational about drugs and how best to deal with them in society.
I imagine the court didn't look kindly on the mugging. What was stolen was largely irrelevant.
"The ones who are sharing files on the internet "
It also restricts people who want to loan a game to their friend(s). If you think about it, the current inherent DRM of console games is perfect in a way; it allows everyone to treat the game like a book. You can't easily copy it, you "own" it, and you can loan it, and you can sell it.
However, I think you'll find most of the game companies would prefer you couldn't do the last two, and they object strongly to the last item, since it puts them in competition with cheaper, legal copies of their own product.
It reminds me of the time limits that ISPs added when the internet got popular. It worked out to 3 hours a day.
And people claimed it was "reasonable" and that "somebody had to set limits".
Seems like a quaint notion today. Kinda like a 250G bandwidth limit. I don't quite understand why anybody but narrow-minded ISPs defend the practice, either.
The one drawing showing the internet as envisioned by the elderly was hilarious.
I was there at the talk. What Ballmer said (and I'm paraphrasing) is that Google Apps have no audience; user growth plateaued months ago and that in their (MS's) own studies almost all college students buy MS Office and use it. He said the only time students are using Google Apps is when they need to collaborate on projects but he talked about how MS is working to beef up their own collaboration tools in Office 2007/08.
Really guys, this is reaching.
Ballmer is a good entertaining speaker, and Gartner analysts are not going to outfox the guy.
At what point will the card issuers finally go to 2-factor authentication? The fact that credit cards still "mean" something in 2008 is a joke. It could be fixed, it would be expensive, but it's going to be less expensive than these multi-billion dollar losses.
There's no excuse for this lack of sophitication today. We could do so much better.
Almost no video on YouTube is worth paying for. But I watch them anyway.
Almost no TV show is worth paying for, but I watch them anyway.
I listen to a lot of music on the radio. Very little of it is worth paying for.
I don't see where that is unethical in any way. Please explain where I've gone off the straight and now moral path.
The intent of putting in conditions which aren't legal isn't so much to stand up in court, it's to place obstacles in your path to inhibit you from doing something they don't like.
If you signed a contract with BIG COMPANY that said you could never speak ill of them ever again or be faces with the cost of repairing their reputation plus $1M, I'm guessing you'd shut your mouth. Or do you have months to litigate the issue and 6 figures to fight against BIG COMPANY through all the hearings, processes, court procedures?
The legal system is very much geared towards those that can afford to use it both in terms of time and money and with the exception of those with deep pockets is a place to be avoided almost at any cost.
The entire point of these devices is to force you into a model where Sony or Amazon makes money as the middleman. Otherwise, there would be no reason for the proprietary formats and DRM.
If you had only Windows and Mac, I'd opt for Mozy (http://www.mozy.com) which is owned by EMC. It's $50/year for unlimited storage and their agent is unobtrusive and backs up even open files.
The downside is that it limits upstream bandwidth to 1Mb/s, so your initial backup might take a week. But after that, it takes 3 minutes a night and it does it without prompting. I've strong-armed my immediate family into using it because it also allows me to monitor remotely the status of all backups.
It's seriously good stuff.
"Who *wasn't* damaged?"
People smart enough not to buy one.
We'll give you X Mb/S, but don't use it, because if you do, we'll throttle you down until you stop using it.
That's their plan. It's insulting enough when they add the metered usage, but then, they won't even let you use the bandwidth in anything other than short burst.
Yikes. This is aimed squarely, IMHO at the emerging streaming video market. It basically makes it useless.
I see you point, but in this case, selling a breath-a-lyzer to be used in court, there is an implied need to provide whatever evidence the court needs, even if it was not part of the contract. After all, common sense tells you that (a) the device will be challenged in court (b) The company has to be willing to work with the court to prove that it's accurate. Seriously, I can't think of a scenario where they thought they could keep the source code secret for very long.
The only way you could morally let the company off the hook is if they said "We will not provide information to the court about how our device works, and if we are forced to, the person buying it agrees to pay damages to us". However, if you assume that you have to obey the laws of the land, I don't see under what circumstances that can turn down a request for the information from a judge. The alternative is for the judge to rule that all convictions against people using the device were not admissible; I suspect the company would like that even less.
I originally put Vista Ultimate on a homebuilt Rig that I built primarily for Video processing (quad core, 4G of RAM) and I had numerous irritating problem such as, only 3.2G of memory could be recognized by any process (not entirely MS's fault), sound drivers that would glitch when you dropped down menus or popped up the Start menu, to general slow performance for network and file operations.
On a hunch, I installed the X64 version of Vista and the improvement has been remarkable; in general, the computer was significantly faster for day to day operations, the sound glitching was gone, and best of all, the OS could now recognize lots of memory, so I promptly upgraded my memory to 6G which makes all my applications faster (less paging).
If you have to run on Windows, Vista x64 is the "good" version.
"Which is to say Joe Bob with his Master Electrician badge is more fit to wire your house than a guy with a PhD in electrical engineering who has 20 years experience in the field."
Joe Bob actually *is* more fit to wire my house. Let me know how hiring a PhE EE works out wiring your house.
Who do you want repairing the engines on your airplane? An aerospace engineer? Or a journeyman airplane mechanic? I'll take my chances with the mechanic, thanks.
You're right about one thing... it is a young industry compared with the legal profession or medical profession, but hopefully, better definition and qualifications will become the norm in this industry. Today, we have a lot of people who know how to program (i.e. EE), but no idea how to solve a problem a customer has (i.e. Electrician).
At a certain point, when you realize the guy isn't squatting, you cut him a check for $250K and you're done with it.
Nissan has spent more than that on lawyer's fees and are further from their goal. If I was on the board of directors, I'd ask to have the guy pushing this fired. Not because of the money, but because of poor judgment. If you can't use common sense in obvious things, you probably can't suddenly turn it on for complex issues.
Really, fire the guy at Nissan Motors who keeps pushing this lawsuit, and then pay the guy a few bucks for the domain.
"How do you think Wal Mart got to be the biggest corporation in the world?"
Superior business methods and a model that lets them understand supplier cost and squeeze them.
Their prices on items which are directly comparable (i.e. iPods, computers, other stuff that is directly comparable) shows them about the same or slightly higher than typical retail elsewhere. They do well on items which are made specially for them. The do less well on items that they have to sell like any other retailer.
"So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense"
Do you seriously think Comcast is going to lower prices to compete with FIOS? Seriously?
They're still charging people the same amount as before, but now they're adding a cap. Comcast has no intention of lowering prices. Ever. That would be stupid. If I was the CEO of Comcast and one of my employees said the way to make the business grow was to cut my main source of revenue, I'd fire them before they got the sentence out. They might create a new tier of service with higher limits, but that won't happen right away. That would be too obvious.
As to moving high-usage customers to FIOS, Verizon probably doesn't care; their physical plant has so much capacity compared to Comcast they can handle significantly more usage than that of Comcast. And if you don't think that's a big deal, it will be in 5 years as data consumption grows. What happens as people want to download high-def movies? If anything, this limit is highlighting the difference in capacity between Verizon and Comcast. Don't you think Verizon will have a field day with this?
This is a short-term win for Comcast, but it does not bode well for them for the longer term.
"She cites the case of someone who is upset at reading the divorce case of her parents"
She actually used the excuse "Think of the children". And I thought everybody knew that was a cliche...