I'm not sure if you're being deliberately contrarian or if you're legitimately dense.
Saying they "paid for lower QOS for Google" is misleading; they would actually have paid for higher QOS for themselves, which is perfectly reasonable.
It wouldn't have been of any benefit to Yahoo to increase their QOS with Google's remaining unchanged. I'm saying that they could have partnered with companies that owned large portions of the network to slow down Google's access. If Google couldn't crawl it, it couldn't index it. If they couldn't index it, their search results wouldn't have been as good.
Google won because they were better, and they were better because they won?
Pretty much, yeah.
That's rather circular reasoning.
Perhaps but it's not wrong.
In actual fact, Google's search engine business would never have been a viable business on its own; it simply didn't make enough revenue. Google's search engine only survived because it was cross-subsidized by Google's advertising revenue.
It's extraordinarily difficult to make a profit on a "Free" service without advertising.
Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't support the argument that it was "better".
Net neutrality, in the end, is an arrangement where companies like Google can push ads on you and monetize free content and have you pay for the privilege through your ISP fees.
Except that with Net Neutrality in place, you are free to choose one of their competitors without the network penalizing you.
A few big companies have come to completely dominate the market because of that particular arrangement.
In a market where all are given the same access, a few companies dominating it are just proof that the market chose them.
Even if the completely unrealistic worst-case scenario of ISPs all replacing Google and Facebook with their own private offerings
That's a strawman. I never argues that.
They wouldn't be able to directly replace them, they would be able to give preferential treatment to the traffic of their own competitor. They can't replace them but they can make them near unusable to their customers.
Companies like Verizon and Comcast would take over those markets. Why would that be a bad thing?
Less choice is in any of itself a bad thing. It just so happens to be a bad thing that leads to worse things.
How could Yahoo have "slowed down Google's traffic"? They were both just search engines.
By partnering with (paying) MCI, UUNET and others to shape the traffic and provide lower QOS to Google.
Hence my use of the phrase "make deals" to do it.
And based on what criteria was Google "better"?
That varied from user to user but for me, it was more relevant search results and a cleaner interface.
You're basically saying that you think Google is great and that hence the government should interfere in order to structure the market to make it advantageous for companies like Google.
No. I'm saying that Google was better than Yahoo. Because Google was better than Yahoo, they toppled them from their position as the go-to search engine and the government should interfere to keep the marketplace available for the next upstart to come along and topple Google, if they can.
You'll be just as perplexed when someone takes offense at your use of the word "Uncle" because it's not only patriarchal but assumes the gender of the sibling of one of your equal co-parents.
These companies know that "net neutrality" is in their financial advantage and makes it harder for small companies to compete.
More than that, it makes it harder for access providers to leverage their position as access providers to make inroads as content providers.
If Net Neutrality truly dies, Verizon and Comcast will be able to prioritize the traffic from their own competing services to harm Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Google.
Without using traffic shaping, QOS or similar means to disadvantage the competition, any new upstart has to actually be better than an existing service.
Google beat Yahoo because Google was better at doing something. That wouldn't have happened if Yahoo had been able to make deals to slow Google's traffic to dial-up speeds.
They were motivated by more than just nationalism.
There have been centuries of discrimination against Irish Catholics.
It would seem to me that the actions my government is taking with regard to muslims is only going to exacerbate a problem that could have remained a regional, political conflict.
Several years ago I had a manager whom I could not stand and who was not fond of me. I chose to apply for a position in a new department and moved there.
If the person is a manager, they're adept at playing the game. They're going to beat you at office politics. Unless you have knowledge that they're stealing or otherwise ethically/legally compromised, don't try to fight them. Get out.
I was 8 years old when I wrote my first BASIC program on an Apple ][ E. I felt that same world-changing around me sensation.
I didn't get my first modem until I was 18. I was away at college and discovered BBSes, Gopher, Telnet, MUDs, MUSHs and IRC networks.
I was exposed to people from different walks of life, from different corners of the planet and of different points of view.
I'm far from the most open-minded person around but I know and appreciate the differences between people so much more than I would have if that experience of learning to code hadn't expanded my mind when I was 8 years old.
I hope that this young lady gets to experience some of what you and I did when beginning the journey.
Needless to say, he returned to our company as a consultant on some project that had incurred budgetary overruns and incompetency.
All at the hands of our so-called American trained "engineers."
I can't speak to the specifics of this situation but I have seen others where the desires of in-house personnel were ignored but when the same initiatives are suggested by a consultant, they're followed with gusto.
I get it. That's a part of why I typically try to negotiate non-standard start times when I take a position. Starting work at 09:30 makes for a much more relaxed commute both to and from work.
If/When telecommuting become the norm, most of my problems will be behind me because I'll be able to live and work far enough outside of the city that none of their decisions will have any impact upon me.
I had a cousin and her family come to town from Maryland and when it was time for them to go home, I tried to give them directions to the Turnpike. It was literally take the next four right turns and then drive about 6 miles, you'll see the signs.
She was like Nope, I'm GPSing it. The GPS gives her valid directions but they were longer and more complicated.
Whomever performed the modification, if that modification is the cause of the incident.
It's not like we're discovering new issues here.
In 1968, if you took your Buick to your neighborhood fix-it guy and he used sub-standard wheel bearings and they caused the wheel to fall off and kill someone, Mr. Fix-it would be liable.
Really, this isn't rocket science just because the story includes the word "firmware".
I have always felt that pain killers should be used sparingly and that one should only take the minimum level necessary to make the pain tolerable.
For me, it wasn't about avoiding addiction. I don't like the feeling of having my mind feel cloudy.
When I had my wisdom teeth removed, the doctor gave me a prescription for Lortab. I declined to fill it. I said that if Tylenol or Aleve made it tolerable, that's what I would use. Even though I had already made my decision, when a friend offered to buy them from me, I was even more certain that I made the right choice.
You don't know anything about the city, and probably weren't born there.
I was born out of state but I have been here in Pittsburgh since I was an infant, more than 40 years.
I bike year round in Pittsburgh, with studded tires for use in the winter.
I'm sure that you and the three other people who will face sub-zero temperatures on their bikes appreciate it but those lanes would be more useful with cars in them.
The chairs at Market Square were removed due to issues with loitering and drug use
I believe that those excuses were pretexts.
How does removing amenities make "more room" anyway?
By providing more space for outdoor dining areas for the restaurants. When (not if) they expand, that seating will be private property that can be limited to paying customers.
Gentrification of the Hill District is a strange thing
It's not just the Hill District. It's Homewood and East Liberty too. 10-15 years ago, it was Lawrenceville. I suspect that the Hazelwood/Glenwood area will be next.
The drug problems are real, but they were real in the 1980's too, it's just white people didn't notice except when they saw them on Hill Street Blues.
Nice try but it's not going to work here. I'm not white. I lived in the Duquesne projects back in the 1970s. I was harassed by cops during the drug wars in the 1990s. There is a black middle class in the region and most of us moved to the suburbs to escape the problems of the city. Now the city is sending those problems our way.
So much is being done to attract people to the region that it is making it unbearable for those of us who have always been here. We're giving up lanes on major city streets to make room for bike lanes that are only usable for 5 months out of the year.
The city just removed the chairs from Market Square to make more room for the patrons of the upscale restaurants that surround the place.
The glut of well-to-do out of towners has led to the gentrification of several areas like Homewood, The Hill District and East Liberty which is in turn creating problems out in the suburbs. Basically, people are going in and buying blocks of low value property, renovating them and charging more for rent than the current occupants can afford. Those people move further and further away from the city and when you have an influx of low income people, a small but extremely destructive minority of drug dealers comes with them. We have had numerous heroin busts just a few miles from my house in an area that never saw that kind of activity before.
When people like me complain about it, we're met with the response that this is how things go in other cities. My reply is that if I wanted to live in those cities, I'd move there. I live in Pittsburgh and I like it.
I understand how they can be a security risk but I think the way I use it won't help an attacker.
Here's an example. My mother's godfather had a nickname that he used to call me. I haven't talked to anyone about this in over 30 years. If my password hint is "D. W. nicknamed you this", I would immediately remember what the password is but no one else would have any idea of what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I am still curious about the real story behind his absence from comedy.
LK
Why would I use an intermediary to do it, and if I did then how would the intermediary make any money competing with a free service?
PayPal has strong buyer protections, even if they're completely boning the sellers.
If buyers insist on PayPal, there will be sellers who have to go along.
LK
I'm not sure if you're being deliberately contrarian or if you're legitimately dense.
Saying they "paid for lower QOS for Google" is misleading; they would actually have paid for higher QOS for themselves, which is perfectly reasonable.
It wouldn't have been of any benefit to Yahoo to increase their QOS with Google's remaining unchanged. I'm saying that they could have partnered with companies that owned large portions of the network to slow down Google's access. If Google couldn't crawl it, it couldn't index it. If they couldn't index it, their search results wouldn't have been as good.
Google won because they were better, and they were better because they won?
Pretty much, yeah.
That's rather circular reasoning.
Perhaps but it's not wrong.
In actual fact, Google's search engine business would never have been a viable business on its own; it simply didn't make enough revenue. Google's search engine only survived because it was cross-subsidized by Google's advertising revenue.
It's extraordinarily difficult to make a profit on a "Free" service without advertising.
Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't support the argument that it was "better".
No, more people choosing Google over Yahoo, Bing and AOL means that it is/was better.
Net neutrality, in the end, is an arrangement where companies like Google can push ads on you and monetize free content and have you pay for the privilege through your ISP fees.
Except that with Net Neutrality in place, you are free to choose one of their competitors without the network penalizing you.
A few big companies have come to completely dominate the market because of that particular arrangement.
In a market where all are given the same access, a few companies dominating it are just proof that the market chose them.
Even if the completely unrealistic worst-case scenario of ISPs all replacing Google and Facebook with their own private offerings
That's a strawman. I never argues that.
They wouldn't be able to directly replace them, they would be able to give preferential treatment to the traffic of their own competitor. They can't replace them but they can make them near unusable to their customers.
LK
It sucks when people treat your unfairly because of your opinion, doesn't it?
What's that? Irony.
LK
Companies like Verizon and Comcast would take over those markets. Why would that be a bad thing?
Less choice is in any of itself a bad thing. It just so happens to be a bad thing that leads to worse things.
How could Yahoo have "slowed down Google's traffic"? They were both just search engines.
By partnering with (paying) MCI, UUNET and others to shape the traffic and provide lower QOS to Google.
Hence my use of the phrase "make deals" to do it.
And based on what criteria was Google "better"?
That varied from user to user but for me, it was more relevant search results and a cleaner interface.
You're basically saying that you think Google is great and that hence the government should interfere in order to structure the market to make it advantageous for companies like Google.
No. I'm saying that Google was better than Yahoo. Because Google was better than Yahoo, they toppled them from their position as the go-to search engine and the government should interfere to keep the marketplace available for the next upstart to come along and topple Google, if they can.
LK
If you're lucky, you'll get here one day.
You'll be just as perplexed when someone takes offense at your use of the word "Uncle" because it's not only patriarchal but assumes the gender of the sibling of one of your equal co-parents.
LK
These companies know that "net neutrality" is in their financial advantage and makes it harder for small companies to compete.
More than that, it makes it harder for access providers to leverage their position as access providers to make inroads as content providers.
If Net Neutrality truly dies, Verizon and Comcast will be able to prioritize the traffic from their own competing services to harm Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Google.
Without using traffic shaping, QOS or similar means to disadvantage the competition, any new upstart has to actually be better than an existing service.
Google beat Yahoo because Google was better at doing something. That wouldn't have happened if Yahoo had been able to make deals to slow Google's traffic to dial-up speeds.
LK
A pedant, probably but most likely not a troll.
LK
Some of us are over 40.
I ran a Hermes II BBS for a couple of years. I miss BBS days.
LK
It's more than likely just push it to other sites.
In the past few weeks, I have noticed that more meme pages on social media are posting videos that play on weird, ad laden domains.
LK
What if someone's standing on the North Pole?
They were motivated by more than just nationalism.
There have been centuries of discrimination against Irish Catholics.
It would seem to me that the actions my government is taking with regard to muslims is only going to exacerbate a problem that could have remained a regional, political conflict.
LK
Several years ago I had a manager whom I could not stand and who was not fond of me. I chose to apply for a position in a new department and moved there.
If the person is a manager, they're adept at playing the game. They're going to beat you at office politics. Unless you have knowledge that they're stealing or otherwise ethically/legally compromised, don't try to fight them. Get out.
LK
I was 8 years old when I wrote my first BASIC program on an Apple ][ E. I felt that same world-changing around me sensation.
I didn't get my first modem until I was 18. I was away at college and discovered BBSes, Gopher, Telnet, MUDs, MUSHs and IRC networks.
I was exposed to people from different walks of life, from different corners of the planet and of different points of view.
I'm far from the most open-minded person around but I know and appreciate the differences between people so much more than I would have if that experience of learning to code hadn't expanded my mind when I was 8 years old.
I hope that this young lady gets to experience some of what you and I did when beginning the journey.
LK
Needless to say, he returned to our company as a consultant on some project that had incurred budgetary overruns and incompetency.
All at the hands of our so-called American trained "engineers."
I can't speak to the specifics of this situation but I have seen others where the desires of in-house personnel were ignored but when the same initiatives are suggested by a consultant, they're followed with gusto.
Don't blame the engineers, blame the management.
LK
I get it. That's a part of why I typically try to negotiate non-standard start times when I take a position. Starting work at 09:30 makes for a much more relaxed commute both to and from work.
If/When telecommuting become the norm, most of my problems will be behind me because I'll be able to live and work far enough outside of the city that none of their decisions will have any impact upon me.
LK
I had a cousin and her family come to town from Maryland and when it was time for them to go home, I tried to give them directions to the Turnpike. It was literally take the next four right turns and then drive about 6 miles, you'll see the signs.
She was like Nope, I'm GPSing it. The GPS gives her valid directions but they were longer and more complicated.
I was amused but she got home safely.
LK
Whomever performed the modification, if that modification is the cause of the incident.
It's not like we're discovering new issues here.
In 1968, if you took your Buick to your neighborhood fix-it guy and he used sub-standard wheel bearings and they caused the wheel to fall off and kill someone, Mr. Fix-it would be liable.
Really, this isn't rocket science just because the story includes the word "firmware".
LK
I have always felt that pain killers should be used sparingly and that one should only take the minimum level necessary to make the pain tolerable.
For me, it wasn't about avoiding addiction. I don't like the feeling of having my mind feel cloudy.
When I had my wisdom teeth removed, the doctor gave me a prescription for Lortab. I declined to fill it. I said that if Tylenol or Aleve made it tolerable, that's what I would use. Even though I had already made my decision, when a friend offered to buy them from me, I was even more certain that I made the right choice.
LK
You don't know anything about the city, and probably weren't born there.
I was born out of state but I have been here in Pittsburgh since I was an infant, more than 40 years.
I bike year round in Pittsburgh, with studded tires for use in the winter.
I'm sure that you and the three other people who will face sub-zero temperatures on their bikes appreciate it but those lanes would be more useful with cars in them.
The chairs at Market Square were removed due to issues with loitering and drug use
I believe that those excuses were pretexts.
How does removing amenities make "more room" anyway?
By providing more space for outdoor dining areas for the restaurants. When (not if) they expand, that seating will be private property that can be limited to paying customers.
Gentrification of the Hill District is a strange thing
It's not just the Hill District. It's Homewood and East Liberty too. 10-15 years ago, it was Lawrenceville. I suspect that the Hazelwood/Glenwood area will be next.
The drug problems are real, but they were real in the 1980's too, it's just white people didn't notice except when they saw them on Hill Street Blues.
Nice try but it's not going to work here. I'm not white. I lived in the Duquesne projects back in the 1970s. I was harassed by cops during the drug wars in the 1990s. There is a black middle class in the region and most of us moved to the suburbs to escape the problems of the city. Now the city is sending those problems our way.
LK
So much is being done to attract people to the region that it is making it unbearable for those of us who have always been here. We're giving up lanes on major city streets to make room for bike lanes that are only usable for 5 months out of the year.
The city just removed the chairs from Market Square to make more room for the patrons of the upscale restaurants that surround the place.
The glut of well-to-do out of towners has led to the gentrification of several areas like Homewood, The Hill District and East Liberty which is in turn creating problems out in the suburbs. Basically, people are going in and buying blocks of low value property, renovating them and charging more for rent than the current occupants can afford. Those people move further and further away from the city and when you have an influx of low income people, a small but extremely destructive minority of drug dealers comes with them. We have had numerous heroin busts just a few miles from my house in an area that never saw that kind of activity before.
When people like me complain about it, we're met with the response that this is how things go in other cities. My reply is that if I wanted to live in those cities, I'd move there. I live in Pittsburgh and I like it.
LK
If the government wants to make an example of you, it doesn't really matter what you did or what the law says.
This is true the world over, even in a "free" country.
LK
Guilty about being white. Nowadays it's a crime to not be a minority, woman, or LGBTBBQ.
The police won't kill you for being white.
LK
I understand how they can be a security risk but I think the way I use it won't help an attacker.
Here's an example. My mother's godfather had a nickname that he used to call me. I haven't talked to anyone about this in over 30 years. If my password hint is "D. W. nicknamed you this", I would immediately remember what the password is but no one else would have any idea of what it is.
LK