There've been a few reply posts to point out the fact that flying is safer than driving regardless of exposure, but here are some numbers for the interested:
According to the Research and Special Programs Administration Office of Hazardous Materials Safety (who said our government is bloated?) here are the stats:
Motor Vehicle -General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 6,300 per year -1.7 deaths per 100 million veh. miles
Commercial Air Carriers (Includes large and commuter airlines) - General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 1,568,000 per year - 0.19 deaths per million aircraft departures
To compare trip by trip risk, I'll estimate an average car trip at 20 miles. That yields 1.7 deaths per 5 million car trips, compared to about 1 death per 5 million airline departures. So using this estimate of car trip length, taking a car ride is almost twice as risky as taking a flight.
For some more perspective, I took a class on health care two years ago that spent a lot of time on an Institute of Medicine report. The report is famous for showing that preventable medical errors in hospitals are responsible for more deaths every year than motor vehicle accidents.
And the industry that health care experts often use as a model for improvement? The airline industry.
So you're healthiest in a plane...if you can't afford to fly all day, then a car will do. But don't go to a hospital!
Some of the drafters of the Constitution worried that the populace would just vote for whoever was popular in their state (this was before everybody had phones and TVs, so states were much more important). Hamilton argued that the Electoral College would counter the degree to which the election was a popularity contest:
"The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union."
cite
So originally, it was (at least partially) intended to select a candidate who was popular across the entire Union and supported by the body of Electors who were entrusted with the duty of selecting somebody who they believed would be most qualified.
In today's world, people aren't voting for an Elector whom they trust to select a quality candidate -- they're just voting for a party, since most Electors are pledged to their nominating party (this wasn't anticipated at the time). The result of this strict two-party system and our increasingly national awareness is something much closer to mob rule.
but I'd imagine their main objection would be not so much the loss of control as that they don't want to be locked into a specific set of HTML
I think you (like many other Slashdotters) give Google too much credit. Don't confuse "don't be evil" with "be good all the time." It's not that they don't want to break 3rd party apps when they change HTML, it's that they don't make advertising revenue when people screen scrape their content. If the COGS (Cost of Goods and Services) of Gmail began exceeding advertising revenue, Google would have no choice but to cripple the service or shut it down unless they found a better way to monetize it.
Of course, to play devil's advocate to my own argument, Google may be angry at 3rd party tools like this not because they want more money, but because they don't want such a great service to be ruined by people who break its business model.
Are you talking about day-to-day use, or high-performance use? If you use Apple in a high-performance setting, your lab may be more the norm than where I worked. And I did leave 9 months ago, so who knows what's changed since then...but knowing the speed of academia, probably not much.
That's a bit broad. K-12 education, sure, but at the bioinformatics lab I worked with, we worked exclusively with IBM. The attractiveness of using consumer-level Macs in a grade school setting most certainly doesn't translate to a high-performance computing environment. That might change as Apple moves into this space, however...we'll see.
I know this won't be a popular argument on Slashdot, but I can think of one scenario where DRM is potentially enabling.
Take, for example, the fact that you can't download The Lion King on the Internet right now (I mean from Disney, not BitTorrent). I'd guess that this is because Disney can't afford to put such valuable IP on the Internet without being able to control its distribution...yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and whatever, but can you REALLY blame Disney for not liberating something that DESERVEDLY makes them money?
The only way we're going to see experimentation with content distribution is with DRM like this. It's better to boycott Disney's draconian DRM and have them loosen it than to not have any DRM and content distribution at all.
And to those of you who will say "but Apple got music distributors to accept DRM that doesn't include analog out screening!": in my opinion, this may be a slightly different beast. Today's music industry is pop hit obsessed -- the business model is based on short-term success. With movies, it's a little different. Even though rentals occur most frequently soon after a movie's release, I'd think the tail stretches out much farther.
You know, I've read this argument a couple of times here on Slashdot, and I've never in my life heard of this happening to anybody I know. Can somebody provide an example?
And why do you say the patches "particularly [break] competitor's applications"? All this means to me is that Microsoft tests the patches thoroughly with their own software. I certainly wouldn't expect them to release patches that break their own software (that they know and can test) more than their competitors' software.
It's not like patients take their VR machines home with them and dope up when their doctor isn't looking:-P
In all seriousness though, it's not like the simulation is of Cindy Crawford consoling you about your amazingly traumatic experience. It's an ACTUAL SIMULATION of your amazingly traumatic experience. How likely is it that people would turn away from normal life for the comfort of that?
I took an anxiety disorders class with one of the most famous voices in PTSD (McNally), so IANAP but IW a student of a psychologist.
One of the aspects of virtual reality treatments for phobias (we didn't study its use for PTSD) is that the patient is always accompanied by their psychologist, and they always have the option of opting out, even mid-simulation. And a nice fact of psychology is that if you have a feeling of control (whether you have control or not), you're less likely to run away. So while many may be too fearful to go through with the treatment, it happens in a supportive, controled environment, and that can be very helpful. The result may well be better than what we've got now, since PTSD's not easy to treat.
A "refutation" of their claim to have been "collecting data since 1995". I put refutation in quotes because they have no proof other than pointing out that in 1995 mi2g was mainly a portal for automotive information. Yeah, I, too, doubt that they were collecting security info back then, but a) who knows, and b) who cares, it's just a marketing line.
A "refutation" that chairmain DK Matai doesn't have a PhD. I put refutation in quotes because it doesn't look like he's pretending to have one. He doesn't put PhD after his name, and his only claim is that in 1999 he was "in the process of submitting his PhD thesis". That's probably not a lie...maybe he dropped out before his defense to get a job; maybe he failed his defense and didn't want to try again. Either way, who cares?
A "proof" that mi2g dubiously uses attrition.org's numbers when counting security breaches. I put proof in quotation marks because the only proof they have is a claim in 1999 from mi2g that "there have been over 1,700 serious attacks world-wide in the first half of this year, costing more than 4.3 billion." Supposedly this number is suspiciously close to what you'd get if you added up the number of breaches on attrition.org and divide by 2 (because they were reporting for half of the year). Ummm...yeah. I don't even need to explain why this isn't even close to proof.
See a pattern here? It's that attrition.org doesn't have any serious proof of wrongdoing at all, just some circumstancial evidence that isn't even particularly strong.
And just for fun, I'll put some flamebait in here: it really pisses me off that I've seen all these posts saying the article is FUD, when y'all mod up posts that are clearly more FUD than the original article.
The customers are saying, in no uncertain terms, the restrictions on usage imposed by Windows DRM are unacceptable.
No offense, but you're full of shit. I buy my music from Apple because all I have to do is download a well-made GUI that everybody knows about. I tried using the service built into Windows Media Player, and it just plain sucked (despite the fact that Microsoft soothed me with built-in-ness).
This has nothing to do with my music wanting to be free.
The missing W key story is one of the best debunked lies of this administration. Which is an impressive feat.
Check this story out. Yes, the place was a mess, but the General Services Administration determined that "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy."
If you read the story, you'll also see that the GAO and the GSA have both said that there is no documented evidence of vandalism.
But then again, who needs documentation when your support base never looks any further than innuendo?
I'm tired of hearing this argument. In order to "trust your computer," you need to a) read through ALL of the source of the software you're running, b) read through the source of the compiler you use, and c) use that compiler to compile all of your programs (OS included).
I'm guessing that you haven't fulfilled a single one of these requirements. And if you have, it doesn't matter, since 99.999999% of computer users haven't.
Take Windows, for example. Do you currently "trust" Windows to do what you want? You shouldn't trust it any more than a Windows box with TC, that's for sure, since you never saw the source to it in the first place.
If you run ANY closed source software, you're ALREADY entrusting your computer to the company that made the software.
According to this nytimes story, seven computers of his were seized on Tuesday. And he apparently admitted to the FBI already that he did it. So I think it's safe to say that the FBI's been keeping enough tabs on him to not let him slip away.
And his name is Jeffrey Lee Parson. Too bad user jparson is a lurker, otherwise we might be able to see if this is the same jparson.
That's actually why I didn't submit the story myself around 1:30 in the morning:-P
I wonder if once the kid's name comes out (or his 1337 h4x0r name), will the editors look for a variant of it in the userdb? I'd like to see the posting history of a person like this...
2. Unix has a much longer history than Windows NT+. It's had more time for the holes and buffer problems and other stuff to be fixed. Linux essentially "lengthens" its short history because it has so many eyes looking at it. ... Unix is just built better. It has a longer history. I'll ceed that perhaps with a larger user base (pretend Unix has 90% market share) it would be a bigger target, but it is *not* as susceptible as Windows is. Not by a large margin.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to this conclusion. Even though there's a huge community working on open source code, plenty of companies stake their survival on the quality of their code (Microsoft included).
Check out this story, for example. Some company called Reasoning did a code audit on Apache and found a defect density of.53 defects per 1000 lines of code, compared to an average.51 defect density for commercial products. Now, this was a review of Apache and not the Linux kernel, of course, but there's clearly going to be a correlation. I also think any reasonable person would agree that Microsoft's defect density probably isn't very different from the commercial average. Despite what you may feel about them, they certainly have some of the most qualified software engineers working for them.
This has been said already in this article's comments, but people who say it aren't getting modded up, so I'll try again:
Honestly, I think they may be including more than just OS crashes in these statistics. I'd say that in the past month, my computer (running WinXP) has crashed a handful of times. Of those crashes, one was severe (I think explorer restarted and apps closed? whatever happened I didn't need to restart).
The other 5 (estimated) or so "crashes" were IE going down. Of the 5 times IE went down, a couple were caused by espn.com and a couple were caused by a nasty ad on nytimes.com.
But here's my point: when I had my "severe crash", I reported it via Watson, and it didn't know wtf went wrong. When espn.com crashed the first time, I reported it via Watson and it told me Flash died. For the other 4 times Flash killed IE, I force-killed the program and DIDN'T report the problem because I knew what it was.
So my statistics for the month are: a handful of app crashes (1 reported) and 1 os crash (1 reported). So I'm right on par with their data, that 50% of my REPORTED crashes were OS crashes (Microsoft's fault) and the other crash was IE going down (not Microsoft's fault).
In the end, based on my personal experience, I'm guessing that they include app crashes in their data, or at least IE crashes (since it's "tied" to the OS). It might not be a driver issue, and it might not be Microsoft's inherently flawed paradigm for writing code at all.
He could also have been referring to design patents. If you write a cloned program from scratch you can't copy any copyrighted source, but you can definitely copy patented UI elements.
I'd like to emphasize the importance of meaningfulness to help combat procrastination.
When I started college, I was a psychology major. Whenever I sat down to do work, I could never bring myself to do it before midnight, just like you. In fact, I'd often procrastinate by doing work on the school newspaper's website.
After a year and a half of procrastination hell every night I suddenly realized that if I procrastinate by writing code (alright, it was ASP, and VBScript doesn't really count), maybe I should make CS what I do ALL the time. I became a CS major and have been happier ever since.
As a side note, even though I'm much happier I still don't start work early (usually around 10 PM). Do yourself a favor and don't put unreasonable expectations on yourself -- don't sit down at 3 PM and say "okay, let's get cracking!" if you know you won't. Relax until after dinner, and then start up work. It'll save you a lot of frustration and you'll probably get started on your work sooner.
And PLEASE don't take ritalin or something else like that. 60% of the students I know procrastinate their asses off. It's not because all of us have ADD, it's because sometimes studying sucks. To underscore this point, whenever I've worked a real job (two internships doing CS stuff) I've never procrastinated simply because I find significantly more motivation to do the work. So it's not like my rampant procrastination was a mental defect.
No thanks, I'll stick with my iMac and iTunes store, thanks...
Maybe that works for you if you're at home, but I'm at work right now and I'm sure as hell not on a Mac. I used to bring in my MP3 player to work, but it eats up so many batteries that I just downloaded a couple of songs from this site, and I have to admit, I'm excited about it.
This explanation must be somewhat simplistic, because everybody already did some 100 mbps transfers on fast-Ethernet LANs (even with a couple of routers), and we did not notice that the transfer speed was oscillating between 50 and 100 mbps.
That's because the oscillation happens so fast that you can't see it happening (or see the next paragraph for an alternate explanation). I mean, it is not a disputed fact that TCP will frequently halve its window during a large file transfer under normal Internet conditions, so there are definitely changes in TX speed that you can't see (your FTP program will probably average over a longer period of time to determine its displayed speed).
As for you saying you got 100 mbps throughput on a 100 mbps line with routers...it's possible that the router is designed to handle that much traffic in its buffer. I think most routers only start barfing when they get lots of traffic on multiple input links, but that's an IIRC, not something I'm sure of.
Slashdot Mirror
How come everybody's always gotta be hatin' on mode?
There've been a few reply posts to point out the fact that flying is safer than driving regardless of exposure, but here are some numbers for the interested:
According to the Research and Special Programs Administration Office of Hazardous Materials Safety (who said our government is bloated?) here are the stats:
Motor Vehicle
-General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 6,300 per year
-1.7 deaths per 100 million veh. miles
Commercial Air Carriers (Includes large and commuter airlines)
- General population risk for accidental death: 1 in 1,568,000 per year
- 0.19 deaths per million aircraft departures
To compare trip by trip risk, I'll estimate an average car trip at 20 miles. That yields 1.7 deaths per 5 million car trips, compared to about 1 death per 5 million airline departures. So using this estimate of car trip length, taking a car ride is almost twice as risky as taking a flight.
For some more perspective, I took a class on health care two years ago that spent a lot of time on an Institute of Medicine report. The report is famous for showing that preventable medical errors in hospitals are responsible for more deaths every year than motor vehicle accidents.
And the industry that health care experts often use as a model for improvement? The airline industry.
So you're healthiest in a plane...if you can't afford to fly all day, then a car will do. But don't go to a hospital!
So originally, it was (at least partially) intended to select a candidate who was popular across the entire Union and supported by the body of Electors who were entrusted with the duty of selecting somebody who they believed would be most qualified.
In today's world, people aren't voting for an Elector whom they trust to select a quality candidate -- they're just voting for a party, since most Electors are pledged to their nominating party (this wasn't anticipated at the time). The result of this strict two-party system and our increasingly national awareness is something much closer to mob rule.
but I'd imagine their main objection would be not so much the loss of control as that they don't want to be locked into a specific set of HTML
I think you (like many other Slashdotters) give Google too much credit. Don't confuse "don't be evil" with "be good all the time." It's not that they don't want to break 3rd party apps when they change HTML, it's that they don't make advertising revenue when people screen scrape their content. If the COGS (Cost of Goods and Services) of Gmail began exceeding advertising revenue, Google would have no choice but to cripple the service or shut it down unless they found a better way to monetize it.
Of course, to play devil's advocate to my own argument, Google may be angry at 3rd party tools like this not because they want more money, but because they don't want such a great service to be ruined by people who break its business model.
Are you talking about day-to-day use, or high-performance use? If you use Apple in a high-performance setting, your lab may be more the norm than where I worked. And I did leave 9 months ago, so who knows what's changed since then...but knowing the speed of academia, probably not much.
"Apple has always had a stronghold in academics"
That's a bit broad. K-12 education, sure, but at the bioinformatics lab I worked with, we worked exclusively with IBM. The attractiveness of using consumer-level Macs in a grade school setting most certainly doesn't translate to a high-performance computing environment. That might change as Apple moves into this space, however...we'll see.
I know this won't be a popular argument on Slashdot, but I can think of one scenario where DRM is potentially enabling.
Take, for example, the fact that you can't download The Lion King on the Internet right now (I mean from Disney, not BitTorrent). I'd guess that this is because Disney can't afford to put such valuable IP on the Internet without being able to control its distribution...yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and whatever, but can you REALLY blame Disney for not liberating something that DESERVEDLY makes them money?
The only way we're going to see experimentation with content distribution is with DRM like this. It's better to boycott Disney's draconian DRM and have them loosen it than to not have any DRM and content distribution at all.
And to those of you who will say "but Apple got music distributors to accept DRM that doesn't include analog out screening!": in my opinion, this may be a slightly different beast. Today's music industry is pop hit obsessed -- the business model is based on short-term success. With movies, it's a little different. Even though rentals occur most frequently soon after a movie's release, I'd think the tail stretches out much farther.
You know, I've read this argument a couple of times here on Slashdot, and I've never in my life heard of this happening to anybody I know. Can somebody provide an example?
And why do you say the patches "particularly [break] competitor's applications"? All this means to me is that Microsoft tests the patches thoroughly with their own software. I certainly wouldn't expect them to release patches that break their own software (that they know and can test) more than their competitors' software.
The quick Harvard wit already picked up on that one. Everybody on campus (other than the CS majors) calls the building "Max Dork".
:-P
I'm not kidding
It's not like patients take their VR machines home with them and dope up when their doctor isn't looking :-P
In all seriousness though, it's not like the simulation is of Cindy Crawford consoling you about your amazingly traumatic experience. It's an ACTUAL SIMULATION of your amazingly traumatic experience. How likely is it that people would turn away from normal life for the comfort of that?
I took an anxiety disorders class with one of the most famous voices in PTSD (McNally), so IANAP but IW a student of a psychologist.
One of the aspects of virtual reality treatments for phobias (we didn't study its use for PTSD) is that the patient is always accompanied by their psychologist, and they always have the option of opting out, even mid-simulation. And a nice fact of psychology is that if you have a feeling of control (whether you have control or not), you're less likely to run away. So while many may be too fearful to go through with the treatment, it happens in a supportive, controled environment, and that can be very helpful. The result may well be better than what we've got now, since PTSD's not easy to treat.
- A "refutation" of their claim to have been "collecting data since 1995". I put refutation in quotes because they have no proof other than pointing out that in 1995 mi2g was mainly a portal for automotive information. Yeah, I, too, doubt that they were collecting security info back then, but a) who knows, and b) who cares, it's just a marketing line.
- A "refutation" that chairmain DK Matai doesn't have a PhD. I put refutation in quotes because it doesn't look like he's pretending to have one. He doesn't put PhD after his name, and his only claim is that in 1999 he was "in the process of submitting his PhD thesis". That's probably not a lie...maybe he dropped out before his defense to get a job; maybe he failed his defense and didn't want to try again. Either way, who cares?
- A "proof" that mi2g dubiously uses attrition.org's numbers when counting security breaches. I put proof in quotation marks because the only proof they have is a claim in 1999 from mi2g that "there have been over 1,700 serious attacks world-wide in the first half of this year, costing more than 4.3 billion." Supposedly this number is suspiciously close to what you'd get if you added up the number of breaches on attrition.org and divide by 2 (because they were reporting for half of the year). Ummm...yeah. I don't even need to explain why this isn't even close to proof.
See a pattern here? It's that attrition.org doesn't have any serious proof of wrongdoing at all, just some circumstancial evidence that isn't even particularly strong.And just for fun, I'll put some flamebait in here: it really pisses me off that I've seen all these posts saying the article is FUD, when y'all mod up posts that are clearly more FUD than the original article.
The customers are saying, in no uncertain terms, the restrictions on usage imposed by Windows DRM are unacceptable.
No offense, but you're full of shit. I buy my music from Apple because all I have to do is download a well-made GUI that everybody knows about. I tried using the service built into Windows Media Player, and it just plain sucked (despite the fact that Microsoft soothed me with built-in-ness).
This has nothing to do with my music wanting to be free.
The missing W key story is one of the best debunked lies of this administration. Which is an impressive feat.
Check this story out. Yes, the place was a mess, but the General Services Administration determined that "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy."
If you read the story, you'll also see that the GAO and the GSA have both said that there is no documented evidence of vandalism.
But then again, who needs documentation when your support base never looks any further than innuendo?
Not an Etch-A-Sketch, but you're close -- he uses a Mac.
I'm tired of hearing this argument. In order to "trust your computer," you need to a) read through ALL of the source of the software you're running, b) read through the source of the compiler you use, and c) use that compiler to compile all of your programs (OS included).
I'm guessing that you haven't fulfilled a single one of these requirements. And if you have, it doesn't matter, since 99.999999% of computer users haven't.
Take Windows, for example. Do you currently "trust" Windows to do what you want? You shouldn't trust it any more than a Windows box with TC, that's for sure, since you never saw the source to it in the first place.
If you run ANY closed source software, you're ALREADY entrusting your computer to the company that made the software.
According to this nytimes story, seven computers of his were seized on Tuesday. And he apparently admitted to the FBI already that he did it. So I think it's safe to say that the FBI's been keeping enough tabs on him to not let him slip away.
And his name is Jeffrey Lee Parson. Too bad user jparson is a lurker, otherwise we might be able to see if this is the same jparson.
That's actually why I didn't submit the story myself around 1:30 in the morning :-P
I wonder if once the kid's name comes out (or his 1337 h4x0r name), will the editors look for a variant of it in the userdb? I'd like to see the posting history of a person like this...
2. Unix has a much longer history than Windows NT+. It's had more time for the holes and buffer problems and other stuff to be fixed. Linux essentially "lengthens" its short history because it has so many eyes looking at it.
.53 defects per 1000 lines of code, compared to an average .51 defect density for commercial products. Now, this was a review of Apache and not the Linux kernel, of course, but there's clearly going to be a correlation. I also think any reasonable person would agree that Microsoft's defect density probably isn't very different from the commercial average. Despite what you may feel about them, they certainly have some of the most qualified software engineers working for them.
...
Unix is just built better. It has a longer history. I'll ceed that perhaps with a larger user base (pretend Unix has 90% market share) it would be a bigger target, but it is *not* as susceptible as Windows is. Not by a large margin.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to this conclusion. Even though there's a huge community working on open source code, plenty of companies stake their survival on the quality of their code (Microsoft included).
Check out this story, for example. Some company called Reasoning did a code audit on Apache and found a defect density of
This has been said already in this article's comments, but people who say it aren't getting modded up, so I'll try again:
Honestly, I think they may be including more than just OS crashes in these statistics. I'd say that in the past month, my computer (running WinXP) has crashed a handful of times. Of those crashes, one was severe (I think explorer restarted and apps closed? whatever happened I didn't need to restart).
The other 5 (estimated) or so "crashes" were IE going down. Of the 5 times IE went down, a couple were caused by espn.com and a couple were caused by a nasty ad on nytimes.com.
But here's my point: when I had my "severe crash", I reported it via Watson, and it didn't know wtf went wrong. When espn.com crashed the first time, I reported it via Watson and it told me Flash died. For the other 4 times Flash killed IE, I force-killed the program and DIDN'T report the problem because I knew what it was.
So my statistics for the month are: a handful of app crashes (1 reported) and 1 os crash (1 reported). So I'm right on par with their data, that 50% of my REPORTED crashes were OS crashes (Microsoft's fault) and the other crash was IE going down (not Microsoft's fault).
In the end, based on my personal experience, I'm guessing that they include app crashes in their data, or at least IE crashes (since it's "tied" to the OS). It might not be a driver issue, and it might not be Microsoft's inherently flawed paradigm for writing code at all.
He could also have been referring to design patents. If you write a cloned program from scratch you can't copy any copyrighted source, but you can definitely copy patented UI elements.
I'd like to emphasize the importance of meaningfulness to help combat procrastination.
When I started college, I was a psychology major. Whenever I sat down to do work, I could never bring myself to do it before midnight, just like you. In fact, I'd often procrastinate by doing work on the school newspaper's website.
After a year and a half of procrastination hell every night I suddenly realized that if I procrastinate by writing code (alright, it was ASP, and VBScript doesn't really count), maybe I should make CS what I do ALL the time. I became a CS major and have been happier ever since.
As a side note, even though I'm much happier I still don't start work early (usually around 10 PM). Do yourself a favor and don't put unreasonable expectations on yourself -- don't sit down at 3 PM and say "okay, let's get cracking!" if you know you won't. Relax until after dinner, and then start up work. It'll save you a lot of frustration and you'll probably get started on your work sooner.
And PLEASE don't take ritalin or something else like that. 60% of the students I know procrastinate their asses off. It's not because all of us have ADD, it's because sometimes studying sucks. To underscore this point, whenever I've worked a real job (two internships doing CS stuff) I've never procrastinated simply because I find significantly more motivation to do the work. So it's not like my rampant procrastination was a mental defect.
Erm...Apple's worldwide market share is only 2.3% according to IDC. Prolly cause Macs cost too much :P
google cache of IDC info
Maybe that works for you if you're at home, but I'm at work right now and I'm sure as hell not on a Mac. I used to bring in my MP3 player to work, but it eats up so many batteries that I just downloaded a couple of songs from this site, and I have to admit, I'm excited about it.
This explanation must be somewhat simplistic, because everybody already did some 100 mbps transfers on fast-Ethernet LANs (even with a couple of routers), and we did not notice that the transfer speed was oscillating between 50 and 100 mbps.
That's because the oscillation happens so fast that you can't see it happening (or see the next paragraph for an alternate explanation). I mean, it is not a disputed fact that TCP will frequently halve its window during a large file transfer under normal Internet conditions, so there are definitely changes in TX speed that you can't see (your FTP program will probably average over a longer period of time to determine its displayed speed).
As for you saying you got 100 mbps throughput on a 100 mbps line with routers...it's possible that the router is designed to handle that much traffic in its buffer. I think most routers only start barfing when they get lots of traffic on multiple input links, but that's an IIRC, not something I'm sure of.