Envision a large netbook. 10 inches, say. Two screens, one sliding from behind the other. Touchscreens. The keyboard base has a single, rotating hinge. That's the future of laptops and tablets in my eyes.
A couple things you aren't taking into consideration. Bell and Rogers were heavily subsidized by the Canadian government (recall "information super highway") to build national fiber networks. So tax payers have paid for the backbone of our big providers. They have imminent domain rights to property that smaller ISPs will never have, so the CRTC mandated that they allow smaller ISPs to use their last mile access.
Some of the arguments put forth by Bell/Rogers/Shaw is that a small percentage of users were taking up most of the available bandwidth and that it was increasing costs. In reality, it is the practice of basing your required bandwidth to support X number of customers on the lowest bandwidth users, then taking the results and averaging it over a 24 hour period. Divide that number by 10 to get your 10:1 standard telco over-subscription and you get the current bandwidth problem. These bandwidth problems aren't as bad as Bell and Rogers are letting on. Distributed content networks like Akamai allow them to keep streaming the content local. Youtube, Bittorrent and other media sites are the big targets for Bell and Rogers because it allows Canadians to download tons of content without paying a PPV fee. The really big problems stem from the fact that ISP A and ISP B co-locate in the same building yet they do not peer with each other in a non-transit capacity...Along comes US ISP C that both A and B connect to, now if a user from ISP A wants to download data(torrent) from a user on ISP B he has to transit an expensive US carrier.
Now cut to the future, imagine communities being able to communicate via streaming channels on the net without requiring ANY rogers or bell IP TV services. I can be Bob the cabinet maker and have a daily show streamed from my house to a local, regional, national and international community for $40/mo. I can be Jane the concert pianist and I can internet stream one of my performances. I can be the "Next Great Band" and allow people to stream our music or download it without UMG, WMG or BMG ever seeing a dime. There are a thousand different uses for Fiber to the Home level bandwidth and none of them make money for Rogers and Bell....Hence the situation we are in.
Solutions:
Don't base your capacity planning on the lowest common denominator
Don't over-subscribe links so much
Make every Canadian ISP peer with every other Canadian ISP so that if the content exists in Canada there is no need to pay US carrier costs.
Enable a national multicast backbone and MAKE Rogers and Bell be a part of it.
Invest in more local content caching
pay Bram Cohen to add an Autonomous System affinity into bittorrent to have peers local to Canada higher on the desirable seed list. Cost about 500 bucks.
Ever heard of reverse proxies. Hell, set up a shared IP to all severs, and linking (physical) sites with IP tunels, and then setting up port 80 as trigger port only, randomly redirecting to the assigned high port for a given nodes' httpd instance - IOW NAT load balancing. With UPnP control to direct server specific requests when the can not be serviced directly.
Symmetric NAT with UPnP would also enable severs (the ISP routers have to be set up to do reverse NAT based on SRV records, but that's not a big deal. And combined with Tor, and say DNSCurve, CERT records for SSL Auth, and IPSec crypto would make the logs look... intersting, to say the least.
A well set up symmetric NAT, with UPnP, and SRV record support on the application layer would create no such issues. Now go and implemented it for fucks sake. A NAT router is another name for high performance anonymizing proxy.
Software and entertainment need different licensing models, and with minimal (note: (!=0)) government interference. China style (I don't think even they go that far) tracking is not minimal in any way. The ISPs are doing the right thing in every sense of the word. People have a right to privacy. If the media cartels want to get rid of file sharing, then out-compete them. Flood the torrents with fakes, and low quality rips, burned in the video hungarian subtitles, you name it. The average user is not going to want to handle all that crap, and would rather pay up, and have a nice experience. Though at this point, legitimate media is about as obnoxious, and you have to pay for it. The torrents/etc. aren't all that bad at this point, and they are free. What else would you expect? But out-competing would mean getting rid of DRM (trust me, only a tiny percentage of people would even think of uploading their rips, and those who do think of it, aren't going to be stopped by it). Also, getting rid of that zoning crap, and the unskipable ads, and acknowledging fair use rights. But that would mean that they would have to downgrade to a silver toilet in their new yachts, instead of gold. Poor guys.
I think the issue most slashdotters have is the lack of acknowledgment to alternate licensing methods (FLOSS), and the conflict patent law creates. An exemption for such software would cure most such problems, even if patents remain broad. Though after a certain limit, the described algorithms are too abstract and catchall to be reasonably patented. Not to mention patents on formats...
Why did Sun pay so much for MySQL? Branding. They didn't monetarize, but branding has value, especially in the Wintel market. Also, competent programmers still need to be paid for effectively reinventing the wheel. Not to mention the patent portfolio that may be required regardless of who implemented the relevant algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
UI?
Envision a large netbook. 10 inches, say. Two screens, one sliding from behind the other. Touchscreens. The keyboard base has a single, rotating hinge. That's the future of laptops and tablets in my eyes.
http://demotivate.me/mediafiles/full/4162010103910AM_doublefacepalm.jpg
A couple things you aren't taking into consideration. Bell and Rogers were heavily subsidized by the Canadian government (recall "information super highway") to build national fiber networks. So tax payers have paid for the backbone of our big providers. They have imminent domain rights to property that smaller ISPs will never have, so the CRTC mandated that they allow smaller ISPs to use their last mile access.
Some of the arguments put forth by Bell/Rogers/Shaw is that a small percentage of users were taking up most of the available bandwidth and that it was increasing costs. In reality, it is the practice of basing your required bandwidth to support X number of customers on the lowest bandwidth users, then taking the results and averaging it over a 24 hour period. Divide that number by 10 to get your 10:1 standard telco over-subscription and you get the current bandwidth problem. These bandwidth problems aren't as bad as Bell and Rogers are letting on. Distributed content networks like Akamai allow them to keep streaming the content local. Youtube, Bittorrent and other media sites are the big targets for Bell and Rogers because it allows Canadians to download tons of content without paying a PPV fee. The really big problems stem from the fact that ISP A and ISP B co-locate in the same building yet they do not peer with each other in a non-transit capacity...Along comes US ISP C that both A and B connect to, now if a user from ISP A wants to download data(torrent) from a user on ISP B he has to transit an expensive US carrier.
Now cut to the future, imagine communities being able to communicate via streaming channels on the net without requiring ANY rogers or bell IP TV services. I can be Bob the cabinet maker and have a daily show streamed from my house to a local, regional, national and international community for $40/mo. I can be Jane the concert pianist and I can internet stream one of my performances. I can be the "Next Great Band" and allow people to stream our music or download it without UMG, WMG or BMG ever seeing a dime. There are a thousand different uses for Fiber to the Home level bandwidth and none of them make money for Rogers and Bell....Hence the situation we are in.
FTFY.
They ought to split information service providers into infrastructure brokers (backbone and last-mile), and content producers.
Reference PMITA federal prisons.
I do. Cue drug discussion.
It's fraud.
Is just me that finds something perversely attractive in multi-layer NATs, and getting around them in a protocol agnostic manner?
Apple don't sell software or hardware, they sell an experience. Licensing is irrelevant. They sell closed products.
No, not the carriers, the manufacturers, more like it. Thing is, nobody seems to have a spine, except Apple, but that is subject to change.
Cue GNUStep port for MeeGo and tablets in...
Doesn't your Lisp compiler support mutually recursive function optimization?
(XD>
Use tags instead.
And ICEs and fuel cells don't?
Don't feed the trolls.
Sony is still under line of fire for fraud, IMHO.
IOW the repo should be public, but accessed only by SSL over tor. Or perform syncs via SMTP/GPG through multiple throwaway email accounts.
Ever heard of reverse proxies. Hell, set up a shared IP to all severs, and linking (physical) sites with IP tunels, and then setting up port 80 as trigger port only, randomly redirecting to the assigned high port for a given nodes' httpd instance - IOW NAT load balancing. With UPnP control to direct server specific requests when the can not be serviced directly.
Symmetric NAT with UPnP would also enable severs (the ISP routers have to be set up to do reverse NAT based on SRV records, but that's not a big deal. And combined with Tor, and say DNSCurve, CERT records for SSL Auth, and IPSec crypto would make the logs look... intersting, to say the least.
The IPv6 migration path goes through NAT any way...
A well set up symmetric NAT, with UPnP, and SRV record support on the application layer would create no such issues. Now go and implemented it for fucks sake. A NAT router is another name for high performance anonymizing proxy.
Software and entertainment need different licensing models, and with minimal (note: (!=0)) government interference. China style (I don't think even they go that far) tracking is not minimal in any way. The ISPs are doing the right thing in every sense of the word. People have a right to privacy. If the media cartels want to get rid of file sharing, then out-compete them. Flood the torrents with fakes, and low quality rips, burned in the video hungarian subtitles, you name it. The average user is not going to want to handle all that crap, and would rather pay up, and have a nice experience. Though at this point, legitimate media is about as obnoxious, and you have to pay for it. The torrents/etc. aren't all that bad at this point, and they are free. What else would you expect? But out-competing would mean getting rid of DRM (trust me, only a tiny percentage of people would even think of uploading their rips, and those who do think of it, aren't going to be stopped by it). Also, getting rid of that zoning crap, and the unskipable ads, and acknowledging fair use rights. But that would mean that they would have to downgrade to a silver toilet in their new yachts, instead of gold. Poor guys.
I think the issue most slashdotters have is the lack of acknowledgment to alternate licensing methods (FLOSS), and the conflict patent law creates. An exemption for such software would cure most such problems, even if patents remain broad. Though after a certain limit, the described algorithms are too abstract and catchall to be reasonably patented. Not to mention patents on formats...
Why did Sun pay so much for MySQL? Branding. They didn't monetarize, but branding has value, especially in the Wintel market. Also, competent programmers still need to be paid for effectively reinventing the wheel. Not to mention the patent portfolio that may be required regardless of who implemented the relevant algorithms.