Hell, I'd pay for Napster the way it was in the glory days. I'd say 50% of the files I downloaded were good rips with correct naming. Another 25% had something nominally wrong with them: something quirky with the RIP or naming. Another 10% had something really annoying, and 15% were just something I pitched because the naming was wrong or the RIP was totally braindamaged.
I think generally it worked pretty well, and I think the popularity and overall quality attests to this.
I'd pay even more ($15/mo?) for a service that let me download guaranteed quality MP3s of any artist/any song. That's $180/year and it's way more money than the record industry has ever gotten out of me or ever will for CD purchases.
The better example would be writing off your losses against your property taxes. But the Supreme Court has ruled more than once that the police do not have an obligation to prevent crime, so you can't hold them responsible when you get robbed.
Re:I may be an old fart but...
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 1
I keep thinking that the solution needs to be NO TLDs, and some scheme for charging exponentially more for each domain name registered to a given legal entity. $35 for the first, $1225 for the second, $42,875 for the third and so on.
This kind of sliding scale would effectively kill off speculation and hoarding by making it so expensive to do "honestly" and so time consuming to do dishonestly (shell corporations to hide ownership).
The problem with inventing new TLDs is that the rights holders all buy/sue/bully their way into owning mytrademark.somenewdomain. You only mariginally increase the number of new domains by doing this, since the "lucrative" domains are already taken by people with the money to beat their way into ownership.
Wasn't the dirty secret about Andromeda that it was actually orginally developed on earth?
There's a scene at the end of the movie after the virus has broken out where they're looking at computer projections of the virus' spread. The computer has a lot of detailed info about Andromeda's propegation and one scientist gets rather upset and says something like "You knew all along..." and the lead guy says something like "Yes, but it was for national defense" or something.
There was an article in the local paper about this. Qwest is apparently looking to push DSL into areas currently unreachable for whatever the reason -- distance, circuit quality or fiber muxes. They were planning on upgrading the little green boxes into larger green boxes with climate controls (I'd think they could fix the heat problem with lots of fans, but the humidty'd be a killer) and DSLAMs. I'd imagine the box/DSLAM vs. climate problem is easier to solve than the "DSL data backhaul problem", unless they're planning on upgrading the existing fiber muxes to something more data friendly.
One of the rich guys where I work lives on a cul-de-sac, way out of reach of DSL but both he and his neighbors can get it thanks to the whining of politically connected neighbors. He says that one day US West showed up and dropped what looked like 1/3 of a shipping container with an A/C where the dinky phone box had been. I think this represents basically the type of "upgrade" Qwest is talking about, a micro-CO, that can support interesting data bits on the inside.
There's probably a market for DSLAM vendors to come up with DSLAMs that need little more than power and good venting and can withstand wide environmental conditions, like heat and humidity, so that the Qwests of the world don't have to build buildings with A/C everywhere. Since the upgrade to "digital cable" in my neighborhood, I see a fair number of what look like school lockers bolted onto the phone poles. I think they must be breakout points for the cable system, they have power running into them and what looks like CATV coax running out. If they can do it, DSL can too..
Fully buzzword compliant, but missing the point entirely.
DSL requires copper pairs from the DSL CPE to the DSLAM at the CO. Works great in "older" neighborhoods whose COs, known in Telco parlance as "wirecenters" really are that, wire centers. A building that has thousands of copper pairs running into it from the entire surrounding geographic area. The wire center makes a great place to put DSLAMs, since it has switching equipment, air conditioning, and more than likely an ATM OC-3 or OC-12 back to the regional central office.
Many new housing developments (new as in the past 5-10 years) are part of entirely new, far-flung semi-rural suburbs whose explosive growth coupled with developments in technology have made the traditional, high-density wire centers impractical. Instead copper is pulled from houses to a neighborhood concentrator and backhauled via fiber to either the "original" wire center or a new wire center.
In these cases DSL doesn't work because there's no place to put the DSLAMs. The neighborhood concentrators are in small metal boxes or in vaults where there's inadequate power, environmental controls or upstream connectivity for DSLAMs. However, some ILECs like Qwest have been talking about "extending DSL" by placing more DSLAMs in the field near the customers instead of relying solely on copper to the wirecenter. It's expensive because you need a mini-building or a hardened DSLAM, upstream connectivity, etc etc.
Your second line about use of frame-relay is pure BS. Many CLECs like Covad lease an essentially dry voice pair from the ILEC, but to the best of my knowledge they are not running channelized DS1 signalling and frame-relay encoding on these, they run DSL. Whether leasing a pair from the phone company is cost effective is debatable, but running DSLAMs in a zillion wire centers more than likely isn't.
DSL customer service sucks because the DSL business, at least from the ILEC perspective, is a huge capital investment and a major growth effort which saps people, management and cash resources quicker than they can be replaced. ISPs have *always* had shitty tech support, and that the most critical part of their customer connectivity is being handled by a third party (ILEC or CLEC DSL vendor) only makes it worse. That there's no competition doesn't help, but they have such a huge customer backlog that the whiners in the crowd who don't like it really don't matter.
Apparently, Mac users were already buying most of their CRT monitors elsewhere.
Around here we ditched several worthwhile 21" displays simply because they didn't "match" the CPU case. No, it had nothing to do with the display quality -- they were all high-quality Sony displays -- the users just complained that they didn't match.
I think it's a conspiracy on Apple's part to get people to buy the more expensive component because it fits their aesthetics model.
...and the local gas station raises prices _the next day_ citing OPEC as the cause of new shortages. You know for a fact that the gas in the holding tanks was purchased at pre- OPEC-induced shortage prices, as was just about everything at the refinery and most any of the oil already currently in the United States. Yet somehow an action taken at a meeting in Vienna for a product that travels on a boat for 45 days before it reaches the US is instantly felt on main street? C'mon!
The same thing is true of computer parts. In spite of JIT no-inventory management systems, most of the components Dell et al buys were bought on contract for a fixed price/unit from Intel and others. Adjusting the price to account for the cost of what components cost NOW rather than what was paid for them WEEKS AGO doesn't make any sense AT ALL.
And I have seen WITH MY OWN TWO EYES Dell do dyamnic pricing ala Amazon. A 2450 rackmount was nearly $1000 more expensive Monday morning when I logged in with our corporate account than it was Sunday night as a random web user. I immediately saw that I was getting raped for being a "corporate" customer.
All of these schemes are nothing more than excuses for charging the MAXIMUM amount of money, they have no basis in supply-demand.
You didn't answer the power question, though. All 32 processors in this cluster are using less power than 8 PIII/1GHz. Can 8 PIII/1GHz CPU's do more computation than 32 G4/450MHz CPU's with Altivec? How much cooling does that room have?
Who gives a shit? The marginal costs of power and cooling for Intel hardware are *trivial* next to the increased performance for dollar invested. If I can make $10 for every 5M keys, why would I buy a more expensive computer that makes does fewer keys to save $50 on the monthly power bill when it would cost me thousands of dollars in lost work? That kind of argument works in outer space, the desert or someplace where every watt matters, but in the real world that most people work in it doesn't mean a damn thing.
Check your math. The G4 listed is only 29% faster than the PIII listed, not 75% or 50% in terms of keys/sec.
If you're doing some kind of weird comparison based on keys/Mhz, it's 189% faster, but I'm not sure that's a comparison that makes any sense since you can't build systems that way.
A more interesting comparison would be keys/$ -- ie, how much cracking power can you buy for a given dollar amount. By a very crude measure, a 466Mhz G4 is $1600 and a 1Ghz Dell is closer to $1000.
If you have $5k to spend, the Dell buys you 28,432,490 keys/sec and the Mac buys you 22,166,475 keys/sec. The Dell system would then give you 5,686 keys/$, the Mac 4,618 keys/$.
Since nobody does these projects for $5k or desktop machines, I'd imagine that the performance gap would actually grow substantially in favor of Intel hardware for the same money spent.
So apparently HP doesn't even think much of HP-UX; so why do I and so many other people in my company have to use HP-UX workstations?
You use them because they are, overall, the most cost-effective tool for producing whatever it is you produce. Presumably your business management has done homework on what capital investments they can make which will yield the greatest return.
HP has undoubtedly done this analysis as well and has decided that the best ROI is to use an x86 email system -- staffing, software, hardware, compatibility, all represent hard or soft costs to the company that need an ROI.
What surprises me is why one of the big boys hasn't ditched ALL.exe-based mail systems for some kind of web-based "groupware" that could more easily be integrated with their web presence, supply chain, and so on. They obviously have the talent and the resources, and it would seem to make more sense from an ROI perspective than the "swallow the string" routine that MS applications represent.
I keep wondering if the trend away from in-house developed custom systems will continue, or if someone will finally realize that it's a better investment to pay the salary of N programmers to develop/maintain an application that meets 100% of your business needs vs. licensing software that meets less than 100% of your business needs.
There's a convenience store in northern Minnesota, that's supposedly heated and cooled almost entirely by a large supply of ground water which is cycled through a heat exchanger.
I'm not sure how much supplemental heat they have to use in the winter (-30F is not uncommon), but they're apparently able to run the coolers and the building A/C exclusively off of the ground water.
Now if you could just steal enough electricity from the phone lines, you could run the heat pumps for free..
The best part is that they have labels on them with weird graphics and little or no text. I did one today with a cropped picture of a mohawk-haired Robert DeNiro from Taxi Driver and the text "WE ARE THE PEOPLE" (the "candidate's" slogan from the movie). I imagine that most get thrown away.
I should start putting a track at the end of the disc that has "thanks for listening to me. email me at..." to see if anyone does listen.
I just make disposable music. In order to avoid clutter in the car, I only carry 10 CDs at a time. They're all copies or mixes made from CDs or MP3s on the computer. When I get sick of them I pitch them in the trash (or leave them on the driver's side window of other cars in parking garages...) and make new ones. At $0.17/ea I hardly feel guilty; a pack of gum provides less enjoyment per dollar.
Even at $0.51/ea I wouldn't feel guilty. I'm old enough to remember when a 10 pack of quality cassettes was $25. Sure they were reusable, but I seldom reused them. Even at $50/100, CD-Rs are a major bargain.
The idea of subscribing to the preferences of others is intriguing. What would be make it particularly interesting is if these preferences could be coupled with some kind of learning filter that would let me personalize the "value judgements" of whomever I subscribed to. It'd be great if I could so something logical with the preferences -- ie, I like John's values with my modifications but not Bob's.
The sales dork isn't in policy and enforcement, besides, he was probably selling dishwashers the week before so what does he know?
Even if he was in the know, just what constitutes "hogging" cable's superior bandwidth, anyway? I think statements like that get down to brass tacks about what cable can and can't do, and what its superior bandwidth is vulnerable to.
The shared-neighborhood bandwidth thing will be cable's chief bugaboo until they come up with some neat trick to rate-limit connections. It'll provide a convenient excuse for CATV people to not deliver on a decent two-way IP network and instead deliver an interactive-infoentertainment package instead.
Some reasons why DSL is better than cable:
competition between vendors
You understate the value of this, IMHO. The competition between vendors means that there's product differentiation -- ISPs have to do something to make themselves stand out, and one thing mine does is allow me to do whatever I want with my connection -- run servers, connect my home LAN, and so on.
Every SA I've ever seen from a cable company comes down to the fact that they want you downloading HTTP content and anything that remotely resembles anything other than the computer equivilent of watching TV is expressly forbidden.
I also think the idea that cable is a better basic infrastructure is flawed. One reason the cable companies are so paranoid about services is that their infrastructure limitations often limit the amount of bandwidth they can apply to specific geographic regions; you share bandwidth up to whatever point they've determined constitutes a LAN. My understanding is that in most "phase I" internet setups this is a pretty large area, and heavy usage can pretty dramatically impact performance.
DSL's private bandwidth is some advantage; I'm not on the same broadcast domain as the other people in my neighborhood! I don't get a bunch of BS traffic I don't need.
St. Cloud, Minnesota is a better choice. 41F mean annual temperature (26F Oct-Apr), and it's just a few miles from Xcel (formerly NSP's) Monticello nuclear power plant.
Interesting. The Romans were famous for their civil engineering prowress (aquaducts, Colosseum, et al), but did they have the tooling and measurement systems to produce the kinds of sophisticated, high tolerance machines that we normally associate with steam? Crude pistons for moving doors are one thing, but a multipiston engine and drive system may have been beyond their engineering skills.
It's always fun to wonder what might have happened if "revolutionary" technologies had been grasped much earlier in history.
Now that's what I'd like: cheap transceivers on every card and device, and short lengths of fiber connecting them up. Bye bye to SCSI, IDE, USB, Firewire...
You're forgetting that the interconnect technology and the layer 2 protocols needed to connect such technologies can be seperate. AFAIK there's no reason you can't run any of the above interconnects over fiber, but you still have the problem of different protocols that allow the host and devices to communicate. And as another poster mentioned, some of these provide power for the end node devices as well as signalling.
What would be nice would be a common bus protocol that enabled multiple interconnect technologies. A slot-in spec for cards, and a cable spec over fiber and copper for internal and external devices all using a common bus protocol.
Unfortunately for standards, no one wants to develop this and make it public, they want to make it and patent it and charge per device to use it.
As far as PCI goes, I'm betting it has a lot of life yet. We're only fairly recently seeing the widespread deployment of 64 bit 33mhz PCI which I think most systems would have some difficulty maxing out. Even if they were close, doesn't PCI extend to 64-bit, 64Mhz? If my math is right, that's something like 4 Gbit/sec, which few devices could keep busy.
Why not just pull a length of pull twine that's 2x as long as the conduit? That way you can reuse the same length every time.
The even simpler solution, albeit mildly destructive, is to use an existing run of cable *as* pull cord. Pull 2x the required cable so you can return the line you've used as a pull line. The excess line returned can just be recoiled. I've done this with existing electrical runs where there was no string used and the pipe was too full and serpantine to run my fishtape through.
Which reminds me of my other gripe, I wish the 1000' pull-paks of cat5 were actually dual 500' spools. I've never pulled a single line and always find myself having to handcrank the line onto multiple spools so I can pull more than one run at the same time.
I know, I could buy multiple packs, but I'm cheap, and the plywood, conduit and empty spools were available to make my multispool rig for free..
I only went to two Minicons, 85 and 86. In 85 I was too young to drink legally, but through the magic of badge swapping and the fact that I was 6'1-195 I managed to get into the Blog Suite and partake.
In '86 we got into something a lot weirder than Blog. I was still technically too young, but it didn't matter as much then.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the government is only charging me Marginal_Tax_Rate, it seems a little specious to write off more than Marginal_Tax_Rate.
Hell, I'd pay for Napster the way it was in the glory days. I'd say 50% of the files I downloaded were good rips with correct naming. Another 25% had something nominally wrong with them: something quirky with the RIP or naming. Another 10% had something really annoying, and 15% were just something I pitched because the naming was wrong or the RIP was totally braindamaged.
I think generally it worked pretty well, and I think the popularity and overall quality attests to this.
I'd pay even more ($15/mo?) for a service that let me download guaranteed quality MP3s of any artist/any song. That's $180/year and it's way more money than the record industry has ever gotten out of me or ever will for CD purchases.
The better example would be writing off your losses against your property taxes. But the Supreme Court has ruled more than once that the police do not have an obligation to prevent crime, so you can't hold them responsible when you get robbed.
I keep thinking that the solution needs to be NO TLDs, and some scheme for charging exponentially more for each domain name registered to a given legal entity. $35 for the first, $1225 for the second, $42,875 for the third and so on.
This kind of sliding scale would effectively kill off speculation and hoarding by making it so expensive to do "honestly" and so time consuming to do dishonestly (shell corporations to hide ownership).
The problem with inventing new TLDs is that the rights holders all buy/sue/bully their way into owning mytrademark.somenewdomain. You only mariginally increase the number of new domains by doing this, since the "lucrative" domains are already taken by people with the money to beat their way into ownership.
Wasn't the dirty secret about Andromeda that it was actually orginally developed on earth?
There's a scene at the end of the movie after the virus has broken out where they're looking at computer projections of the virus' spread. The computer has a lot of detailed info about Andromeda's propegation and one scientist gets rather upset and says something like "You knew all along..." and the lead guy says something like "Yes, but it was for national defense" or something.
There was an article in the local paper about this. Qwest is apparently looking to push DSL into areas currently unreachable for whatever the reason -- distance, circuit quality or fiber muxes. They were planning on upgrading the little green boxes into larger green boxes with climate controls (I'd think they could fix the heat problem with lots of fans, but the humidty'd be a killer) and DSLAMs. I'd imagine the box/DSLAM vs. climate problem is easier to solve than the "DSL data backhaul problem", unless they're planning on upgrading the existing fiber muxes to something more data friendly.
One of the rich guys where I work lives on a cul-de-sac, way out of reach of DSL but both he and his neighbors can get it thanks to the whining of politically connected neighbors. He says that one day US West showed up and dropped what looked like 1/3 of a shipping container with an A/C where the dinky phone box had been. I think this represents basically the type of "upgrade" Qwest is talking about, a micro-CO, that can support interesting data bits on the inside.
There's probably a market for DSLAM vendors to come up with DSLAMs that need little more than power and good venting and can withstand wide environmental conditions, like heat and humidity, so that the Qwests of the world don't have to build buildings with A/C everywhere. Since the upgrade to "digital cable" in my neighborhood, I see a fair number of what look like school lockers bolted onto the phone poles. I think they must be breakout points for the cable system, they have power running into them and what looks like CATV coax running out. If they can do it, DSL can too..
Fully buzzword compliant, but missing the point entirely.
DSL requires copper pairs from the DSL CPE to the DSLAM at the CO. Works great in "older" neighborhoods whose COs, known in Telco parlance as "wirecenters" really are that, wire centers. A building that has thousands of copper pairs running into it from the entire surrounding geographic area. The wire center makes a great place to put DSLAMs, since it has switching equipment, air conditioning, and more than likely an ATM OC-3 or OC-12 back to the regional central office.
Many new housing developments (new as in the past 5-10 years) are part of entirely new, far-flung semi-rural suburbs whose explosive growth coupled with developments in technology have made the traditional, high-density wire centers impractical. Instead copper is pulled from houses to a neighborhood concentrator and backhauled via fiber to either the "original" wire center or a new wire center.
In these cases DSL doesn't work because there's no place to put the DSLAMs. The neighborhood concentrators are in small metal boxes or in vaults where there's inadequate power, environmental controls or upstream connectivity for DSLAMs. However, some ILECs like Qwest have been talking about "extending DSL" by placing more DSLAMs in the field near the customers instead of relying solely on copper to the wirecenter. It's expensive because you need a mini-building or a hardened DSLAM, upstream connectivity, etc etc.
Your second line about use of frame-relay is pure BS. Many CLECs like Covad lease an essentially dry voice pair from the ILEC, but to the best of my knowledge they are not running channelized DS1 signalling and frame-relay encoding on these, they run DSL. Whether leasing a pair from the phone company is cost effective is debatable, but running DSLAMs in a zillion wire centers more than likely isn't.
DSL customer service sucks because the DSL business, at least from the ILEC perspective, is a huge capital investment and a major growth effort which saps people, management and cash resources quicker than they can be replaced. ISPs have *always* had shitty tech support, and that the most critical part of their customer connectivity is being handled by a third party (ILEC or CLEC DSL vendor) only makes it worse. That there's no competition doesn't help, but they have such a huge customer backlog that the whiners in the crowd who don't like it really don't matter.
Apparently, Mac users were already buying most of their CRT monitors elsewhere.
Around here we ditched several worthwhile 21" displays simply because they didn't "match" the CPU case. No, it had nothing to do with the display quality -- they were all high-quality Sony displays -- the users just complained that they didn't match.
I think it's a conspiracy on Apple's part to get people to buy the more expensive component because it fits their aesthetics model.
...and the local gas station raises prices _the next day_ citing OPEC as the cause of new shortages. You know for a fact that the gas in the holding tanks was purchased at pre- OPEC-induced shortage prices, as was just about everything at the refinery and most any of the oil already currently in the United States. Yet somehow an action taken at a meeting in Vienna for a product that travels on a boat for 45 days before it reaches the US is instantly felt on main street? C'mon!
The same thing is true of computer parts. In spite of JIT no-inventory management systems, most of the components Dell et al buys were bought on contract for a fixed price/unit from Intel and others. Adjusting the price to account for the cost of what components cost NOW rather than what was paid for them WEEKS AGO doesn't make any sense AT ALL.
And I have seen WITH MY OWN TWO EYES Dell do dyamnic pricing ala Amazon. A 2450 rackmount was nearly $1000 more expensive Monday morning when I logged in with our corporate account than it was Sunday night as a random web user. I immediately saw that I was getting raped for being a "corporate" customer.
All of these schemes are nothing more than excuses for charging the MAXIMUM amount of money, they have no basis in supply-demand.
You didn't answer the power question, though. All 32 processors in this cluster are using less power than 8 PIII/1GHz. Can 8 PIII/1GHz CPU's do more computation than 32 G4/450MHz CPU's with Altivec? How much cooling does that room have?
Who gives a shit? The marginal costs of power and cooling for Intel hardware are *trivial* next to the increased performance for dollar invested. If I can make $10 for every 5M keys, why would I buy a more expensive computer that makes does fewer keys to save $50 on the monthly power bill when it would cost me thousands of dollars in lost work? That kind of argument works in outer space, the desert or someplace where every watt matters, but in the real world that most people work in it doesn't mean a damn thing.
Check your math. The G4 listed is only 29% faster than the PIII listed, not 75% or 50% in terms of keys/sec.
If you're doing some kind of weird comparison based on keys/Mhz, it's 189% faster, but I'm not sure that's a comparison that makes any sense since you can't build systems that way.
A more interesting comparison would be keys/$ -- ie, how much cracking power can you buy for a given dollar amount. By a very crude measure, a 466Mhz G4 is $1600 and a 1Ghz Dell is closer to $1000.
If you have $5k to spend, the Dell buys you 28,432,490 keys/sec and the Mac buys you 22,166,475 keys/sec. The Dell system would then give you 5,686 keys/$, the Mac 4,618 keys/$.
Since nobody does these projects for $5k or desktop machines, I'd imagine that the performance gap would actually grow substantially in favor of Intel hardware for the same money spent.
So apparently HP doesn't even think much of HP-UX; so why do I and so many other people in my company have to use HP-UX workstations?
.exe-based mail systems for some kind of web-based "groupware" that could more easily be integrated with their web presence, supply chain, and so on. They obviously have the talent and the resources, and it would seem to make more sense from an ROI perspective than the "swallow the string" routine that MS applications represent.
I keep wondering if the trend away from in-house developed custom systems will continue, or if someone will finally realize that it's a better investment to pay the salary of N programmers to develop/maintain an application that meets 100% of your business needs vs. licensing software that meets less than 100% of your business needs.
You use them because they are, overall, the most cost-effective tool for producing whatever it is you produce. Presumably your business management has done homework on what capital investments they can make which will yield the greatest return.
HP has undoubtedly done this analysis as well and has decided that the best ROI is to use an x86 email system -- staffing, software, hardware, compatibility, all represent hard or soft costs to the company that need an ROI.
What surprises me is why one of the big boys hasn't ditched ALL
There's a convenience store in northern Minnesota, that's supposedly heated and cooled almost entirely by a large supply of ground water which is cycled through a heat exchanger.
I'm not sure how much supplemental heat they have to use in the winter (-30F is not uncommon), but they're apparently able to run the coolers and the building A/C exclusively off of the ground water.
Now if you could just steal enough electricity from the phone lines, you could run the heat pumps for free..
The best part is that they have labels on them with weird graphics and little or no text. I did one today with a cropped picture of a mohawk-haired Robert DeNiro from Taxi Driver and the text "WE ARE THE PEOPLE" (the "candidate's" slogan from the movie). I imagine that most get thrown away.
I should start putting a track at the end of the disc that has "thanks for listening to me. email me at..." to see if anyone does listen.
I just make disposable music. In order to avoid clutter in the car, I only carry 10 CDs at a time. They're all copies or mixes made from CDs or MP3s on the computer. When I get sick of them I pitch them in the trash (or leave them on the driver's side window of other cars in parking garages...) and make new ones. At $0.17/ea I hardly feel guilty; a pack of gum provides less enjoyment per dollar.
Even at $0.51/ea I wouldn't feel guilty. I'm old enough to remember when a 10 pack of quality cassettes was $25. Sure they were reusable, but I seldom reused them. Even at $50/100, CD-Rs are a major bargain.
The idea of subscribing to the preferences of others is intriguing. What would be make it particularly interesting is if these preferences could be coupled with some kind of learning filter that would let me personalize the "value judgements" of whomever I subscribed to. It'd be great if I could so something logical with the preferences -- ie, I like John's values with my modifications but not Bob's.
The sales dork isn't in policy and enforcement, besides, he was probably selling dishwashers the week before so what does he know?
Even if he was in the know, just what constitutes "hogging" cable's superior bandwidth, anyway? I think statements like that get down to brass tacks about what cable can and can't do, and what its superior bandwidth is vulnerable to.
The shared-neighborhood bandwidth thing will be cable's chief bugaboo until they come up with some neat trick to rate-limit connections. It'll provide a convenient excuse for CATV people to not deliver on a decent two-way IP network and instead deliver an interactive-infoentertainment package instead.
Some reasons why DSL is better than cable: competition between vendors
You understate the value of this, IMHO. The competition between vendors means that there's product differentiation -- ISPs have to do something to make themselves stand out, and one thing mine does is allow me to do whatever I want with my connection -- run servers, connect my home LAN, and so on.
Every SA I've ever seen from a cable company comes down to the fact that they want you downloading HTTP content and anything that remotely resembles anything other than the computer equivilent of watching TV is expressly forbidden.
I also think the idea that cable is a better basic infrastructure is flawed. One reason the cable companies are so paranoid about services is that their infrastructure limitations often limit the amount of bandwidth they can apply to specific geographic regions; you share bandwidth up to whatever point they've determined constitutes a LAN. My understanding is that in most "phase I" internet setups this is a pretty large area, and heavy usage can pretty dramatically impact performance.
DSL's private bandwidth is some advantage; I'm not on the same broadcast domain as the other people in my neighborhood! I don't get a bunch of BS traffic I don't need.
Are you telling me that they couldn't have a called in an electrician and pulled new circuits to drive the surrounding cages?
St. Cloud, Minnesota is a better choice. 41F mean annual temperature (26F Oct-Apr), and it's just a few miles from Xcel (formerly NSP's) Monticello nuclear power plant.
Interesting. The Romans were famous for their civil engineering prowress (aquaducts, Colosseum, et al), but did they have the tooling and measurement systems to produce the kinds of sophisticated, high tolerance machines that we normally associate with steam? Crude pistons for moving doors are one thing, but a multipiston engine and drive system may have been beyond their engineering skills.
It's always fun to wonder what might have happened if "revolutionary" technologies had been grasped much earlier in history.
Now that's what I'd like: cheap transceivers on every card and device, and short lengths of fiber connecting them up. Bye bye to SCSI, IDE, USB, Firewire ...
You're forgetting that the interconnect technology and the layer 2 protocols needed to connect such technologies can be seperate. AFAIK there's no reason you can't run any of the above interconnects over fiber, but you still have the problem of different protocols that allow the host and devices to communicate. And as another poster mentioned, some of these provide power for the end node devices as well as signalling.
What would be nice would be a common bus protocol that enabled multiple interconnect technologies. A slot-in spec for cards, and a cable spec over fiber and copper for internal and external devices all using a common bus protocol.
Unfortunately for standards, no one wants to develop this and make it public, they want to make it and patent it and charge per device to use it.
As far as PCI goes, I'm betting it has a lot of life yet. We're only fairly recently seeing the widespread deployment of 64 bit 33mhz PCI which I think most systems would have some difficulty maxing out. Even if they were close, doesn't PCI extend to 64-bit, 64Mhz? If my math is right, that's something like 4 Gbit/sec, which few devices could keep busy.
Why not just pull a length of pull twine that's 2x as long as the conduit? That way you can reuse the same length every time.
The even simpler solution, albeit mildly destructive, is to use an existing run of cable *as* pull cord. Pull 2x the required cable so you can return the line you've used as a pull line. The excess line returned can just be recoiled. I've done this with existing electrical runs where there was no string used and the pipe was too full and serpantine to run my fishtape through.
Which reminds me of my other gripe, I wish the 1000' pull-paks of cat5 were actually dual 500' spools. I've never pulled a single line and always find myself having to handcrank the line onto multiple spools so I can pull more than one run at the same time.
I know, I could buy multiple packs, but I'm cheap, and the plywood, conduit and empty spools were available to make my multispool rig for free..
I only went to two Minicons, 85 and 86. In 85 I was too young to drink legally, but through the magic of badge swapping and the fact that I was 6'1-195 I managed to get into the Blog Suite and partake.
In '86 we got into something a lot weirder than Blog. I was still technically too young, but it didn't matter as much then.
Blog is a beverage, a weird kind of booze punch. I had it at MiniCon in '85.