Selling a 100mbit line and then saying "Oh, you're using a little much" would never fly in the business world.
Not only does it fly, it's the usual way business plans are sold: by connection speed and monthly traffic volume. It's also how the ISPs do business with each other.
If it had been up to Microsoft and Sony, we'd still be stuck with overpriced $2000 executive toys running Microsoft Vista like molasses.
FOSS has made it possible to create these machines and circumvent Microsoft's near monopoly, because if any of these companies had asked Microsoft to keep XP going for ultralights, Microsoft would have told them to go f*ck themselves. FOSS has also made it possible for these companies to design and sell $400 machines.
And the motivation for it all has not been that people begrudge Bill Gates his collection of 19th century gold plated toilet plungers, but the fact that people want choices and free markets in software and hardware. All Microsoft has to offer is a gigantic marketing budget and Stalinist central planning.
Let him. Just make sure the router and switches prioritize traffic per-user, based on the number of packets they've sent/received in the last hour or 24 hours.
That's not sufficient because the same bottlenecks occur all over the network, so this kind of logic needs to be deployed in all routers. In addition, some people are willing to pay for sustained 50 Mbps, so you need traffic classes. And to make it all work, you need more than the current TCP/IP protocols. So, although you may not be aware of it, you're basically saying that people should do what they're already trying to do.
But, actually, I think simple volume pricing is, in fact, preferable, because the "just make sure" you propose means that ISPs get much more fine grained control over traffic than they have right now.
I thought the exchange of information over the Internet was supposed to be a good thing?
It is. And that's why it's a good thing if my neighbor is discouraged from eating up 99% of the bandwidth with hundreds of simultaneous connections while I'm trying to work over ssh, or if he is at least made to pay for the necessary upgrades to our shared wire.
Why don't we use wireless networks to reduce the traffic on the wired infrastructure?
Let us know if you come up with something that works. Having suffered through WiFi-based home Internet access for a few months, I certainly don't want to go back. Of course, it kind of caps your bandwidth implicitly.
For example, BitTorrent is excellent for rapidly increasing the availability of popular files while automatically balancing the network traffic, since the faster and closer connections will automatically wind up being favored.
P2P and BitTorrent are horrifically wasteful because the same packets keep traversing the same wires. And they seem fast to you for file distribution because they make many connections and grab an unfair share of available bandwidth.
Instead, we have an increasing trend for anti-technology technologies and twisted narrow economic solutions such as those discussed in the NYTimes article
First, perhaps you could show us some evidence that there is an "increasing trend".
Then you might discuss how today compares to, oh, 20 years ago and 10 years ago in terms of maximum throughput, latency, and cost per megabyte.
As for P2P, combined with standard Internet protocols, it really is a technological disaster, even if it is a social success.
If this is patented, then it's doomed to fail. And a little startup together with Westinghouse doesn't sound like a good beginning. To get this off the ground, they need several laptop and cell phone manufacturers.
I'm an audiophile, and I have to tell you, these cables are AMAZING. They bring out nuances in the sound that you never knew were there. Listen to a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos in the classic 1972 vinyl recording with the Berlin Philharmonica, and you'll swear you're sitting there with Christian Ludwig right in the room, hearing his every borborygmus and flatus. These cables are so subtle that they even allow you to separate the overtones from the bass notes of his snart! And the Goldberg Variations with Glenn Gould... just breathtaking. You hear every note he sings (and the piano is pretty good, too).
Usability is great, too: you'll never spend half an hour wondering which way to plug these things in, since the marking on them finally make it clear that it doesn't matter; now, why didn't anybody think of that before?
If you're an audio professional, these cables will pay for themselves in a week. And if you're a serious amateur, they'll give you an audio experience you won't soon forget.
What does Nokia produce? Hardware, software, and services. There are dozens of other phone hardware manufacturers producing devices that are at least as nice as Nokia's. Their software breaks down into buggy and slow proprietary stuff, and some open source components that are so tightly integrated that they can't be improved. And their services are an attempt to squeeze extra revenue from phone buyers.
So, why should I as a user want to "live with" Nokia? They happen to be the best of the current crop of proprietary phone manufacturers, but that's a low standard indeed. I don't want to "live with" them, I want to replace them, as quickly as possible.
I have a Nokia phone right now, but give me Linux on an HTC phone any day over a Nokia.
well thats the wonder of the GPL, we can just take the most current version of QT and FORK.
We can, but that leaves commercial developers in the dust, whose closed source applications then can't use the open source Qt fork anymore, no matter how much money they pay to Nokia.
Companies try to paint people who object to DRM and closed source as some kind of religiously driven zealots, but that's bullshit.
The reason I loathe DRM is because it's a hassle and because I know companies like Nokia, Apple, and Microsoft are going to screw me with it.
Likewise, the reason I loathe Nokia's software (I have an S60 phone) is not because it's closed source, but because it's buggy and user hostile, and because Nokia is trying to use it as a vehicle to push even more of their crap on me. The only reason I don't use anything else is because the other commercial offerings are even worse.
I don't want a "dialog" with Nokia, I want someone to ship less crappy software for mobile phones (Apple zealots: spare me the iPhone lecture). Given that Nokia's phones are getting worse with every release, I'm in line for an Android phone as soon as they come out, and I'm going to contribute to Android.
Why am I going to contribute to Android? Because Android actually lets me fix things. Nokia is such an obsessive control freak that they don't even let me remap the Mail key from their bogus mail application to a third party application.
Open source wasn't created because a bunch of people randomly decided on a new philosophy. Open source was created because companies like Nokia have been shipping such poor products and have been so greedy and unresponsive that users simply don't have any other reasonable choice than to take matters into their own hands.
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Selling a 100mbit line and then saying "Oh, you're using a little much" would never fly in the business world.
Not only does it fly, it's the usual way business plans are sold: by connection speed and monthly traffic volume. It's also how the ISPs do business with each other.
If it had been up to Microsoft and Sony, we'd still be stuck with overpriced $2000 executive toys running Microsoft Vista like molasses.
FOSS has made it possible to create these machines and circumvent Microsoft's near monopoly, because if any of these companies had asked Microsoft to keep XP going for ultralights, Microsoft would have told them to go f*ck themselves. FOSS has also made it possible for these companies to design and sell $400 machines.
And the motivation for it all has not been that people begrudge Bill Gates his collection of 19th century gold plated toilet plungers, but the fact that people want choices and free markets in software and hardware. All Microsoft has to offer is a gigantic marketing budget and Stalinist central planning.
Let him. Just make sure the router and switches prioritize traffic per-user, based on the number of packets they've sent/received in the last hour or 24 hours.
That's not sufficient because the same bottlenecks occur all over the network, so this kind of logic needs to be deployed in all routers. In addition, some people are willing to pay for sustained 50 Mbps, so you need traffic classes. And to make it all work, you need more than the current TCP/IP protocols. So, although you may not be aware of it, you're basically saying that people should do what they're already trying to do.
But, actually, I think simple volume pricing is, in fact, preferable, because the "just make sure" you propose means that ISPs get much more fine grained control over traffic than they have right now.
P2P is a technological success in reducing the load on any one point on the network.
Reducing relative to what? Heck, USENET is a more efficient distribution mechanism than P2P.
If you make the assumption that the cost of bandwidth grows nonlinearly,
Using 'em big words again without knowing what they mean, eh?
I thought the exchange of information over the Internet was supposed to be a good thing?
It is. And that's why it's a good thing if my neighbor is discouraged from eating up 99% of the bandwidth with hundreds of simultaneous connections while I'm trying to work over ssh, or if he is at least made to pay for the necessary upgrades to our shared wire.
Why don't we use wireless networks to reduce the traffic on the wired infrastructure?
Let us know if you come up with something that works. Having suffered through WiFi-based home Internet access for a few months, I certainly don't want to go back. Of course, it kind of caps your bandwidth implicitly.
For example, BitTorrent is excellent for rapidly increasing the availability of popular files while automatically balancing the network traffic, since the faster and closer connections will automatically wind up being favored.
P2P and BitTorrent are horrifically wasteful because the same packets keep traversing the same wires. And they seem fast to you for file distribution because they make many connections and grab an unfair share of available bandwidth.
Instead, we have an increasing trend for anti-technology technologies and twisted narrow economic solutions such as those discussed in the NYTimes article
First, perhaps you could show us some evidence that there is an "increasing trend".
Then you might discuss how today compares to, oh, 20 years ago and 10 years ago in terms of maximum throughput, latency, and cost per megabyte.
As for P2P, combined with standard Internet protocols, it really is a technological disaster, even if it is a social success.
If this is patented, then it's doomed to fail. And a little startup together with Westinghouse doesn't sound like a good beginning. To get this off the ground, they need several laptop and cell phone manufacturers.
I'm an audiophile, and I have to tell you, these cables are AMAZING. They bring out nuances in the sound that you never knew were there. Listen to a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos in the classic 1972 vinyl recording with the Berlin Philharmonica, and you'll swear you're sitting there with Christian Ludwig right in the room, hearing his every borborygmus and flatus. These cables are so subtle that they even allow you to separate the overtones from the bass notes of his snart! And the Goldberg Variations with Glenn Gould... just breathtaking. You hear every note he sings (and the piano is pretty good, too).
Usability is great, too: you'll never spend half an hour wondering which way to plug these things in, since the marking on them finally make it clear that it doesn't matter; now, why didn't anybody think of that before?
If you're an audio professional, these cables will pay for themselves in a week. And if you're a serious amateur, they'll give you an audio experience you won't soon forget.
(-; for the humor impaired)
What does Nokia produce? Hardware, software, and services. There are dozens of other phone hardware manufacturers producing devices that are at least as nice as Nokia's. Their software breaks down into buggy and slow proprietary stuff, and some open source components that are so tightly integrated that they can't be improved. And their services are an attempt to squeeze extra revenue from phone buyers.
So, why should I as a user want to "live with" Nokia? They happen to be the best of the current crop of proprietary phone manufacturers, but that's a low standard indeed. I don't want to "live with" them, I want to replace them, as quickly as possible.
I have a Nokia phone right now, but give me Linux on an HTC phone any day over a Nokia.
But thinking "ZOMG there were living cells in the meteorite!" is just crossing the line.
What line would that be?
The theory is called "panspermia" and many prominent physicists and astronomers believe it's a reasonable theory (Google for it, look on Wikipedia).
They're not taking down commentaries that quote or reference.
That is exactly what they are doing.
Then they wither and die. Welcome to the real world of business. It isn't always nice.
That's also bad for KDE, however, because it means that basically there would be no non-GPL native apps for it at all anymore.
well thats the wonder of the GPL, we can just take the most current version of QT and FORK.
We can, but that leaves commercial developers in the dust, whose closed source applications then can't use the open source Qt fork anymore, no matter how much money they pay to Nokia.
Companies try to paint people who object to DRM and closed source as some kind of religiously driven zealots, but that's bullshit.
The reason I loathe DRM is because it's a hassle and because I know companies like Nokia, Apple, and Microsoft are going to screw me with it.
Likewise, the reason I loathe Nokia's software (I have an S60 phone) is not because it's closed source, but because it's buggy and user hostile, and because Nokia is trying to use it as a vehicle to push even more of their crap on me. The only reason I don't use anything else is because the other commercial offerings are even worse.
I don't want a "dialog" with Nokia, I want someone to ship less crappy software for mobile phones (Apple zealots: spare me the iPhone lecture). Given that Nokia's phones are getting worse with every release, I'm in line for an Android phone as soon as they come out, and I'm going to contribute to Android.
Why am I going to contribute to Android? Because Android actually lets me fix things. Nokia is such an obsessive control freak that they don't even let me remap the Mail key from their bogus mail application to a third party application.
Open source wasn't created because a bunch of people randomly decided on a new philosophy. Open source was created because companies like Nokia have been shipping such poor products and have been so greedy and unresponsive that users simply don't have any other reasonable choice than to take matters into their own hands.