We weren't discussing telcos. We were discussing internet companies, which means someone like Quantum Link (now AOL) or Erols or Earthlink. Those were the ones I was discussing which gradually grew from 1.2k to 56k to 12,000k connections. They didn't have to do that, but they did, in order to keep customers happy.
>>>The US is the in the bandwidth dark ages compared to other first-world countries.
The U.S. average is approximately 10 megabit/s. The E.U. average and Canadian average and Australian average is also 10 megabit/s. I don't see how we're falling behind.
As for the $200 billion, that was given for *telephone line improvements*, not just fiber optics. Most of the money was earmarked for upgrading rural telephone lines from analog to digital connections. Stop reading PBS articles, and go read the actual 1996 bill, and you'll see that was I say is true.
What concerns me is how Comcast Cable responded to the growing "legal video streaming" phenomenon. If you're trying to watch Heroes on NBC.com, and they determine you are streaming too much data, they can temporarily-limit your access to 192kbit/s. Although some video sites like CWTV.com will operate as low as 128k, NBC's site requires at least 512k.
Your Heroes video will be effectively cutoff from viewing. That's anti-competitive; it's Comcast trying to force their users to watch Heroes on cable, rather than internet. It's comcast trying to protect their older business from NBC's new internet-based business.
>>>And so we return to metered access, where people have to watch the download meter instead of the clock to ensure they don't face a ridiculously hefty bill. >>>
Isn't metered access better than hitting a 20 gigabyte cap (U.K. average), and then being cut-off completely? I know I'd rather choose the former than the latter.
And what's so horrible about metered plans anyway? We use meters virtually everywhere else: gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, natural gas, electricity, phone calls (long distance), and on and on. I can not think of any reason why internet should be different than every other utility. '
A person who downloads 200 gigabytes a month should pay a hell of a lot more (~$20 flat rate + $90 metered rate) than poor Grandma who only downloaded 1 gig of email last month (~$20 flat rate). I think that's entirely fair. Same way all your other utilities work.
>>>I would never trust a company to use excess money to increase/improve infrastructure... >>>
I disagree. Internet companies have a long history of improving infrastructure. Many American ISPs have histories dating back to the 1980s, when speeds were a slow 1200 bits/second. Over time they improved themselves to 2400, then 9600, 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and finally 56k. They used their profits to upgrade their modems and networks to handle ever-increasing speeds. ----- But they didn't stop there. Next they offered DSL which can range from 500k upto 12000k. The latest technology called "FiOS" is being rolled-out, and that apparently can offer 100,000k connections.
Over the least twenty years, these companies HAVE invested their excess dollars into providing faster and faster and faster service. From a lowly 1.2k all the way upto 100,000k, these companies have served their customers extremely well, and provided the rapidly-increasing bandwidth necessary to grow from text-only BBSes to full-on video downloads.
Do I think companies will continue upgrading their infrastructure? I know of no other way to predict the future, except to look at the past, and the past shows that they have and they will.
My Azureus can download the latest 150 megabyte SG Atlantis episode in just an hour across my 700 kbit/s line. That's because it has lots of seeds.
Vice-versa if I'm trying to download something that has just one seed, then it can take seemingly forever. It's not the client but how many connections you can make that determines the overall speed of a P2P client.
>>>the citizens asking the government to kill this man.
Tyranny of the majority to kill the individual, is still a tyranny. The right of the individual to freedom of speech & liberty of life supercedes the will of the Demos. The demos is committing an act of murder against an innocent man, and the 50%+x majority that support this act are no better than a tyrannical dictator who exterminates his citizens.
But of course, rights are defined by government. This Afghani doesn't right to speak freely, or a right to life, unless granted from the politicians./end sarcasm
The sad thing is that many people believe that. I'm not one of them. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government..."
The young Afghani, by the mere fact he is a human being, has the inalienable right to speak his mind, and his government is wrong to deny him that inalienable right. That government should be abolished, and a new one instituted, which recognizes the liberty of the individual.
>>>I mean, really - mods from the early 1990s? That's a decade late;)
Yes. The earliest game mods I can recall were from Balderdash on the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 computers. You could hack the 5 1/4" floppy with your own maps. Later on, the company released an official Balderdash Construction Set for the non-hackers to create mods.
TRIVIA - A recent study in the U.K. shows that bandwidth use of *legal* video streaming is going up. Peer-2-Peer traffic has dropped from 30% to 24% of traffic. Legal video streaming has increased from 4% to 11% of total traffic. Users are gradually switching to legal methods to watch their favorite TV shows.
I don't have any data for MMOs or online gaming, but I imagine it too has seen a boost in traffic. It will be interesting to see how ISPs respond. When they declared war on P2P they tried to block the connections. Will they now try to block users access to sites like BBC.com, NBC.com, or worldofwarcraft.com in order to lower traffic (or competition)???
>>>If you're an average U.K. user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month...... For you, sucking back a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for -- >>>
The internet companies could eliminate this problem if they, like other utilities, provided for metered usage. Say $0.50 per gigabyte. Then an average user like myself wouldn't need to "plan" or "worry" about going over the cap. Instead I could just grab the 2 gigabyte update and pay an extra $1 that month.
And the internet companies would benefit too, because they could take the extra money and invest in upgrades to the network.
>>>I said it's "just" an economic downturn. NOT a matter of "survival". Tell me how it puts your life at risk, and I might agree "survival" is appropriate. >>>
"I have no food in the freezer, and I was laid-off from work, so now I have no money to buy food." Get it now? NOW do you understand why the word survival is appropriate?
Fine. Because I was working at a store, I had NO TIME for my hobbies. You know, things like updating open source software. That is why open source will experience a contraction during the next year, as laid-off engineers reprioritize their lives and focus on *money generating* activities rather than OS hobbies.
I don't think Open Source will die. I think it will just contract, like everything else in the economy is contracting, but due to lack of funding the OS will contract much more dramatically than the closed-source software.
I used to have GEOS on my Commodore 64. I have absolutely no idea how many lines of code it used, but it could squeeze itself into just 20 kilobytes of RAM, and yet had lots of functionality (as good as an 80s-era Mac). I consider "how much RAM occupied" to be a FAR more useful metric.
I would love to see someone develop an OS that followed a similar philosophy of using as little RAM as possible.
No. I think they'll stop doing "charitable work" like updating OpenOffice and other hobbyist projects. That will be put on the back-burner while the unemployed engineer is busy searching for a new job in the closed-source arena.
Instead of "free" I would have said, "Well it's not really free. It's like television - with commercials." I'd also be sure to point-out Hulu is no more illegal than watching the same shows at nbc.com
When I was laid-off during the 1999-2000 dot-com crash, "survival" was the appropriate term to use. I even got a job at the local store just to cover my bills. And that term will be appropriate again during this current crash.
Don't be surprised if Microsoft pushes-back some projects, due to lack of available cash. It would be similar to A.C. Propulsion's decision to postpone release of their EV Sedan from 2009 to 2012.
No. I'm assuming they ARE employed, and about to get laid-off due to the recession. Therefore they might not be able to pay their bills, and their priority will be survival, not opensource programming.
>>>BBC is a much better example of public broadcasting done right.
At $300 a year?
Pass. I prefer my television to be free. No matter how poor you are, if you live in the U.S., all you need to do is erect an antenna and there it is. Free television.
What these "educational" channels need to do is stop measuring themselves by the ratings/number of viewers. They need to stop paying Nielsen and instead focus on providing good product.
Also "300 Spartans" was a good documentary. Ditto "Lost Civilizations". And "Underground Cities" which covers the past, mostly the middle ages. "The Barbarians" was a 10-part documentary about the fall of Rome and eventual formation of modern Europe. From time-to-time they also show great movies or miniseries like "Holocaust".
There's a lot more good stuff on History Channel than bad.
Science also once thought flies spontaneous-generated from rotting meat. That light traveled through an invisible fluid in space. That planets moved in perfect circles (because God is perfect, and his creation is perfect).
The point I was making is that scientific beliefs (yes that's the correct word) change from generation-to-generation. Wait another twenty years, and don't be surprised if scientists have an entirely different explanation for why the earth warmed-up. Ever heard the phrase "paradigm shift"? If not read this: http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083
The more-likely event, if CO2 causes warming, is that we'll revert to an environment similar to 70 million years ago when the dinosaurs were still alive. There was no ice on the poles during that period. The earth was mostly a tropical climate.
Slashdot Mirror
>>>Telcos
We weren't discussing telcos. We were discussing internet companies, which means someone like Quantum Link (now AOL) or Erols or Earthlink. Those were the ones I was discussing which gradually grew from 1.2k to 56k to 12,000k connections. They didn't have to do that, but they did, in order to keep customers happy.
>>>The US is the in the bandwidth dark ages compared to other first-world countries.
The U.S. average is approximately 10 megabit/s. The E.U. average and Canadian average and Australian average is also 10 megabit/s. I don't see how we're falling behind.
As for the $200 billion, that was given for *telephone line improvements*, not just fiber optics. Most of the money was earmarked for upgrading rural telephone lines from analog to digital connections. Stop reading PBS articles, and go read the actual 1996 bill, and you'll see that was I say is true.
Yeah that works too.
What concerns me is how Comcast Cable responded to the growing "legal video streaming" phenomenon. If you're trying to watch Heroes on NBC.com, and they determine you are streaming too much data, they can temporarily-limit your access to 192kbit/s. Although some video sites like CWTV.com will operate as low as 128k, NBC's site requires at least 512k.
Your Heroes video will be effectively cutoff from viewing. That's anti-competitive; it's Comcast trying to force their users to watch Heroes on cable, rather than internet. It's comcast trying to protect their older business from NBC's new internet-based business.
>>>And so we return to metered access, where people have to watch the download meter instead of the clock to ensure they don't face a ridiculously hefty bill.
>>>
Isn't metered access better than hitting a 20 gigabyte cap (U.K. average), and then being cut-off completely? I know I'd rather choose the former than the latter.
And what's so horrible about metered plans anyway? We use meters virtually everywhere else: gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, natural gas, electricity, phone calls (long distance), and on and on. I can not think of any reason why internet should be different than every other utility. '
A person who downloads 200 gigabytes a month should pay a hell of a lot more (~$20 flat rate + $90 metered rate) than poor Grandma who only downloaded 1 gig of email last month (~$20 flat rate). I think that's entirely fair. Same way all your other utilities work.
>>>I would never trust a company to use excess money to increase/improve infrastructure...
>>>
I disagree. Internet companies have a long history of improving infrastructure. Many American ISPs have histories dating back to the 1980s, when speeds were a slow 1200 bits/second. Over time they improved themselves to 2400, then 9600, 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and finally 56k. They used their profits to upgrade their modems and networks to handle ever-increasing speeds. ----- But they didn't stop there. Next they offered DSL which can range from 500k upto 12000k. The latest technology called "FiOS" is being rolled-out, and that apparently can offer 100,000k connections.
Over the least twenty years, these companies HAVE invested their excess dollars into providing faster and faster and faster service. From a lowly 1.2k all the way upto 100,000k, these companies have served their customers extremely well, and provided the rapidly-increasing bandwidth necessary to grow from text-only BBSes to full-on video downloads.
Do I think companies will continue upgrading their infrastructure? I know of no other way to predict the future, except to look at the past, and the past shows that they have and they will.
My Azureus can download the latest 150 megabyte SG Atlantis episode in just an hour across my 700 kbit/s line. That's because it has lots of seeds.
Vice-versa if I'm trying to download something that has just one seed, then it can take seemingly forever. It's not the client but how many connections you can make that determines the overall speed of a P2P client.
>>>the citizens asking the government to kill this man.
Tyranny of the majority to kill the individual, is still a tyranny. The right of the individual to freedom of speech & liberty of life supercedes the will of the Demos. The demos is committing an act of murder against an innocent man, and the 50%+x majority that support this act are no better than a tyrannical dictator who exterminates his citizens.
>>>Basic Human Rights?
But of course, rights are defined by government. This Afghani doesn't right to speak freely, or a right to life, unless granted from the politicians. /end sarcasm
The sad thing is that many people believe that. I'm not one of them. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government..."
The young Afghani, by the mere fact he is a human being, has the inalienable right to speak his mind, and his government is wrong to deny him that inalienable right. That government should be abolished, and a new one instituted, which recognizes the liberty of the individual.
>>>George Bush: The Republican Jimmy Carter.
Actually Bush is more like Richard Nixon - an unpopular president during an unpopular war and a crumbling economy.
BARACK OBAMA will be the next Jimmy Carter - inheriting a royal mess and unable to clean-it-up in just four years time.
>>>I mean, really - mods from the early 1990s? That's a decade late ;)
Yes. The earliest game mods I can recall were from Balderdash on the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 computers. You could hack the 5 1/4" floppy with your own maps. Later on, the company released an official Balderdash Construction Set for the non-hackers to create mods.
That was sometime around 1982 or 83.
P.S.
TRIVIA - A recent study in the U.K. shows that bandwidth use of *legal* video streaming is going up. Peer-2-Peer traffic has dropped from 30% to 24% of traffic. Legal video streaming has increased from 4% to 11% of total traffic. Users are gradually switching to legal methods to watch their favorite TV shows.
I don't have any data for MMOs or online gaming, but I imagine it too has seen a boost in traffic. It will be interesting to see how ISPs respond. When they declared war on P2P they tried to block the connections. Will they now try to block users access to sites like BBC.com, NBC.com, or worldofwarcraft.com in order to lower traffic (or competition)???
>>>If you're an average U.K. user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month...... For you, sucking back a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for --
>>>
The internet companies could eliminate this problem if they, like other utilities, provided for metered usage. Say $0.50 per gigabyte. Then an average user like myself wouldn't need to "plan" or "worry" about going over the cap. Instead I could just grab the 2 gigabyte update and pay an extra $1 that month.
And the internet companies would benefit too, because they could take the extra money and invest in upgrades to the network.
>>>I said it's "just" an economic downturn. NOT a matter of "survival". Tell me how it puts your life at risk, and I might agree "survival" is appropriate.
>>>
"I have no food in the freezer, and I was laid-off from work, so now I have no money to buy food." Get it now? NOW do you understand why the word survival is appropriate?
>>>OMG!! The local store? Why, I never!
Jeez. Do I have to spell it out???
Fine. Because I was working at a store, I had NO TIME for my hobbies. You know, things like updating open source software. That is why open source will experience a contraction during the next year, as laid-off engineers reprioritize their lives and focus on *money generating* activities rather than OS hobbies.
I don't think Open Source will die. I think it will just contract, like everything else in the economy is contracting, but due to lack of funding the OS will contract much more dramatically than the closed-source software.
I used to have GEOS on my Commodore 64. I have absolutely no idea how many lines of code it used, but it could squeeze itself into just 20 kilobytes of RAM, and yet had lots of functionality (as good as an 80s-era Mac). I consider "how much RAM occupied" to be a FAR more useful metric.
I would love to see someone develop an OS that followed a similar philosophy of using as little RAM as possible.
No. I think they'll stop doing "charitable work" like updating OpenOffice and other hobbyist projects. That will be put on the back-burner while the unemployed engineer is busy searching for a new job in the closed-source arena.
Instead of "free" I would have said, "Well it's not really free. It's like television - with commercials." I'd also be sure to point-out Hulu is no more illegal than watching the same shows at nbc.com
When I was laid-off during the 1999-2000 dot-com crash, "survival" was the appropriate term to use. I even got a job at the local store just to cover my bills. And that term will be appropriate again during this current crash.
Don't be surprised if Microsoft pushes-back some projects, due to lack of available cash. It would be similar to A.C. Propulsion's decision to postpone release of their EV Sedan from 2009 to 2012.
No. I'm assuming they ARE employed, and about to get laid-off due to the recession. Therefore they might not be able to pay their bills, and their priority will be survival, not opensource programming.
>>>BBC is a much better example of public broadcasting done right.
At $300 a year?
Pass. I prefer my television to be free. No matter how poor you are, if you live in the U.S., all you need to do is erect an antenna and there it is. Free television.
What these "educational" channels need to do is stop measuring themselves by the ratings/number of viewers. They need to stop paying Nielsen and instead focus on providing good product.
Also "300 Spartans" was a good documentary. Ditto "Lost Civilizations". And "Underground Cities" which covers the past, mostly the middle ages. "The Barbarians" was a 10-part documentary about the fall of Rome and eventual formation of modern Europe. From time-to-time they also show great movies or miniseries like "Holocaust".
There's a lot more good stuff on History Channel than bad.
And why is a comedy on the Science (and fantasy)-Fiction Channel? It doesn't belong there. It fits under neither genre.
Science also once thought flies spontaneous-generated from rotting meat. That light traveled through an invisible fluid in space. That planets moved in perfect circles (because God is perfect, and his creation is perfect).
The point I was making is that scientific beliefs (yes that's the correct word) change from generation-to-generation. Wait another twenty years, and don't be surprised if scientists have an entirely different explanation for why the earth warmed-up. Ever heard the phrase "paradigm shift"? If not read this: http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083
The more-likely event, if CO2 causes warming, is that we'll revert to an environment similar to 70 million years ago when the dinosaurs were still alive. There was no ice on the poles during that period. The earth was mostly a tropical climate.