>>Every phone I've tried browsing the web on makes me just about cry with frustration - I feel like I'm back in college with a 2400 baud modem
Exaggerate much? The 2400 baud* modem you're talking about is a 2k connection. That's slow enough you can see the text scroll across the screen. I doubt your cell is anywhere near that slow. Voice calling alone requires at least 8k data rate to produce intelligible speech, and most phones will provide greater than dialup speeds (>50k). They are several orders of magnitude faster than 2k.
Have you tried installing Opera Mini web browser? It uses text/image compression. There's a demo of it here with side-by-side speed test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpTCS3g-cBY
* * Trivia: The baud rate is actually 600 with 4 bits per symbol. == 2400 bps
>>>by the Roman Catholic Church. Smashing printing presses
Complete and utter garbage. Fact? No more like urban legend. The reality: One of the first purchasers of the printing press was the Pope himself, because he figured it would save money to lay-off all the scribes, and use the machine instead to print Bibles and church correspondence.
>>>15% of accidents in the UK definitely, probably or possibly include excessive speed..... Install speed bumps (you can even buy them on ebay) rather than cameras
Correlation is not causation. Since virtually all Americans speed, it's obvious that speeding will be part of the accident, but is that what *caused* the accident? In my experience - no. Most accidents are caused by rapid lane changes or zig-zagging. i.e Reckless driving.
I speed all the time and yet have never had an accident in my twenty year history. Why? Because I keep lots of space between the car in front, and I stay in my lane (no lane changes == no potential for mistake). You can drive fast AND be safe at the same time, simply by not being reckless.
Granted - but my point was that I should not be criticized for accepting the money.
It's MY life not somebody else's, and if I want to be compensated I have that right, and they can keep their dumb-assed hippy opinion ("work for free!") to themselves. I don't like Bible thumpers preaching at me, and I certain don't need hippies preaching at me either. If I waste days of my life finding a bug, I expect payment.
>>>they should not have advertised and sold their service as unlimited.
Most don't. Most advertise the cap. Example: Comcast at 250GB. - And yet you *still* bitch, and say the cap should not exist. Basically no matter what they do, it's wrong in your (and other person's) eyes.
>>>Electricity is completely different from network capacity. Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials... Usage of an ISP network is not permanently consumed.
That's amazing. I didn't realize the servers ran on 0 Watt power, or that fiber optics magically planted themselves in the ground to expand network capacityt. I guess you learn something new everyday. /end sarcasm. Actually an internet network is just like a electricity network. The more you use it, the more power gets burned, and the more raw materials (coal, etc) must be consumed. Plus labor costs for maintenance and upgrades. So if everyone started taking advantage of their "unlimited" line to download 1 terabyte each, instead of the current average of ~0.1, there would indeed be increased consumption of natural resources and cost borne by the company.
>>>If they paid for unlimited then they are not using more than they paid for
That's true for most people, but not for the splurgers. They'd be burning-up electricity that cost ~$2000 to generate, but only paying $400 each month. They are taking more than what they paid for, and incurring a loss for the company. It's equivalent to if I took 2000 gallons of gasoline, but only paid for 400 gallons. Great for me - sucks for everyone else that has to subsidize my greed.
>>>you'd be surprised how much telecommunications infrastructure in the United States was researched and paid for by the U.S. government
But you cited the electrification act, fiber/56k upgrade plan of 1996, and ARPAnet, none of which have fuck-all to do with Comcast, Cox, and other companies laying down coaxial cable to city and suburban homes to provide TV in the 70s/80s. That project was done using their own monies, and not one dollar of government money.
>>>the only thing that counts for getting into university is a test that takes a few hours.
No not really. Colleges also ask for transcripts of your last four years of grades, your class rank (top 5%, 10%, et cetera), plus a list of extracurricular activities like newspaper, sports, or whatever. Oftentimes a college will reject a high SAT in favor of a low SAT if that student was active in school, or was near the top of his class. (Or at least that's what the colleges tell us.)
You're basically accepting payment for lost life (which can never be recovered). "I'll spend 40 hours programming your software, and I want $1000 in return for my precious life wasted."
BTW for those who think Europe is "heaven on earth" for internet?
Telenet built their network with support of the Belgium government, and now has a monopoly on cable internet. In other words they are worse off than us Americans - while most of us do have Comcast/Cox/whatever monopolies at least those coaxial cables were laid usage Comcast's money, not government money.
According to Telenet's website, the "Turbonet" service supplies 30Mbps download speeds. So that's pretty close to what I estimated. About 7 hours a day of downloading.
With my $15 connection at 768k, I could download a maximum of 248 gigabytes but only if I did nothing but download. No surfing or emailing... just pure downloading of file-after-file.
So this 2700 GB user must have at least at 9 Mbit/s. If we assume he only spends 8 hours a day downloading or watching videos, then that translates to a 25 Mbit/s line..... typical speed for a shared Cable Internet connection.
>>>How are such people data-hogs? They are using what they have paid for.
Not really. Imagine if electricity worked like internet data. i.e. You pay $400 a month and get unlimited usage. Most of us would use around 1000 KWh per month, but then you'd have a few people that would run their AC at 50 degrees, while the whole house was lighted even in rooms that are not being used, and have an electric-powered pool in the back with an elaborate fountain running all day and night. i.e. Splurging.
They are not paying for the electricity they used. They are taking MORE (~$2000 worth) than what they paid for ($400), and that net loss must be covered by the rest of us (prices go up). Plus the environmental damage caused by the splurgers.
This is why pricing is (or should be) metered. It's a negative feedback loop that encourages people to limit themselves, or else pay a very high bill. It also benefits those that use very little, like grandmas, because their bills might only be $50 metered rather than $400 flat. Pricing tied to consumption is the "invisible hand" that regulates use.
No different than how SATs work when evaluating students. You take this long elaborate test, and then get assigned a number which determines your future.
As for the boycott, perhaps the citizens of L.A. ought to organize their own boycott - stop paying school taxes. Remind the teachers their place in society (their paychecks depend upon taxpayer generosity), and that they do not decide what information the Public gets to see. They are servants of the people, not masters. I'm sorry they didn't like the results of their text, but I didn't like the results of my SAT either - do I get to hide it from college admissions?
>>>if you read more than the first 4 words of my previous comment
Hello:-)
I did read the whole comment, but what you said doesn't excuse intellectual laziness (i.e. being flat wrong). The original poster's comment that his connection was as slow as a 2k modem was an *idiotic* statement. It was equivalent of saying 1000 + 1000 = 2 instead of 2000. Or that he has a Dual Core PC that feels as slow as a 1 megahertz CPU.
It was not just an error..... it was off by several orders of magnitude. If this was just your average ordinary website I'd forget it, but slashdot is filled with engineers, technicians, and programmers who should know better. A 2k modem is damn slow - it would take almost an hour to download a website. Even the simpler 1990s pages were 100k in size, or about 7 minutes to download via a 2400 modem.
>>>The problem with that is that the ISP can't control anything outside of their network.
Neither can they guarantee your computer will be fast enough to accept the data, but they can guarantee the speed from their Central Office to your home will be at least 500k. It's just the same way the phone company guarantees a working line from their CO to your home, but makes no promises about the line inside your home, or whoever you're trying to call.
I get 53 k out of my phoneline modem - that's the maximum limit allowed in the US, due to FCC speed limits. Otherwise it would be a solid 56k as advertised and per the V.90 spec.
>>>POTS (Plain old telephone service) : 64kbps line that carries uncompressed 8kHz 8-bit mono audio (that's why phone calls sound like crap when they're on TV / Radio talk shows). Also sort of explains why the fastest dialup modems were around 56k (after data protocol and error correction overhead). >>>
POTS is actually only 7 bits, because the 8th bit is used for control signals. Hence 56k. Also the sample rate is 8000 times but the actual frequency width is only 4 kilohertz.
I was staying in a hotel in Michigan where I literally had a 19.2k connection.
Yes it was still possible to browse the web at that speed, but only with text/image compression turned on (increases effective speed to 190). Without that it would have been horrible. The best connection I was able to get was 26k, and it was at that speed I downloaded the latest episodes of Stargate and Galactica. Sloooow.
Fortunately I only had to stay there one month, and then I moved to a new hotel with cable internet (~1000 k)
>>>Every phone I've tried browsing the web on makes me just about cry with frustration - I feel like I'm back in college with a 2400 baud modem again.
That means it would take nearly an Hour to download a single webpage, like slashdot. (800,000 bytes == 6,400,000 bits / 2000 bps (actual throughput of 2400 baud modem) == 3200 seconds == 0.9 hours.)
That's hella slow! No wonder you're bitchin' about your lousy cellphone service. I would be too.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Every phone I've tried browsing the web on makes me just about cry with frustration - I feel like I'm back in college with a 2400 baud modem
Exaggerate much? The 2400 baud* modem you're talking about is a 2k connection. That's slow enough you can see the text scroll across the screen. I doubt your cell is anywhere near that slow. Voice calling alone requires at least 8k data rate to produce intelligible speech, and most phones will provide greater than dialup speeds (>50k). They are several orders of magnitude faster than 2k.
Have you tried installing Opera Mini web browser? It uses text/image compression. There's a demo of it here with side-by-side speed test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpTCS3g-cBY
*
* Trivia: The baud rate is actually 600 with 4 bits per symbol. == 2400 bps
>>>It was controlled by the church via a 'rights' management by:
>>>1) only producing the Bible in a specific language
Yeah. English. What a difficult hurdle to overcome.
.
>>>2) controlling who was taught that language
The government held that control, not the church. It's not as if the church outlawed learning - quite the opposite in fact.
>>>by the Roman Catholic Church. Smashing printing presses
Complete and utter garbage. Fact? No more like urban legend. The reality: One of the first purchasers of the printing press was the Pope himself, because he figured it would save money to lay-off all the scribes, and use the machine instead to print Bibles and church correspondence.
>>>15% of accidents in the UK definitely, probably or possibly include excessive speed..... Install speed bumps (you can even buy them on ebay) rather than cameras
Correlation is not causation. Since virtually all Americans speed, it's obvious that speeding will be part of the accident, but is that what *caused* the accident? In my experience - no. Most accidents are caused by rapid lane changes or zig-zagging. i.e Reckless driving.
I speed all the time and yet have never had an accident in my twenty year history. Why? Because I keep lots of space between the car in front, and I stay in my lane (no lane changes == no potential for mistake). You can drive fast AND be safe at the same time, simply by not being reckless.
Granted - but my point was that I should not be criticized for accepting the money.
It's MY life not somebody else's, and if I want to be compensated I have that right, and they can keep their dumb-assed hippy opinion ("work for free!") to themselves. I don't like Bible thumpers preaching at me, and I certain don't need hippies preaching at me either. If I waste days of my life finding a bug, I expect payment.
>>>they should not have advertised and sold their service as unlimited.
Most don't. Most advertise the cap. Example: Comcast at 250GB.
- And yet you *still* bitch, and say the cap should not exist.
Basically no matter what they do, it's wrong in your (and other person's) eyes.
>>>Electricity is completely different from network capacity. Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials... Usage of an ISP network is not permanently consumed.
That's amazing. I didn't realize the servers ran on 0 Watt power, or that fiber optics magically planted themselves in the ground to expand network capacityt. I guess you learn something new everyday. /end sarcasm. Actually an internet network is just like a electricity network. The more you use it, the more power gets burned, and the more raw materials (coal, etc) must be consumed. Plus labor costs for maintenance and upgrades. So if everyone started taking advantage of their "unlimited" line to download 1 terabyte each, instead of the current average of ~0.1, there would indeed be increased consumption of natural resources and cost borne by the company.
>>>If they paid for unlimited then they are not using more than they paid for
That's true for most people, but not for the splurgers. They'd be burning-up electricity that cost ~$2000 to generate, but only paying $400 each month. They are taking more than what they paid for, and incurring a loss for the company. It's equivalent to if I took 2000 gallons of gasoline, but only paid for 400 gallons. Great for me - sucks for everyone else that has to subsidize my greed.
.
>>>you'd be surprised how much telecommunications infrastructure in the United States was researched and paid for by the U.S. government
But you cited the electrification act, fiber/56k upgrade plan of 1996, and ARPAnet, none of which have fuck-all to do with Comcast, Cox, and other companies laying down coaxial cable to city and suburban homes to provide TV in the 70s/80s. That project was done using their own monies, and not one dollar of government money.
>>>the only thing that counts for getting into university is a test that takes a few hours.
No not really. Colleges also ask for transcripts of your last four years of grades, your class rank (top 5%, 10%, et cetera), plus a list of extracurricular activities like newspaper, sports, or whatever. Oftentimes a college will reject a high SAT in favor of a low SAT if that student was active in school, or was near the top of his class. (Or at least that's what the colleges tell us.)
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to step on your lawn nazi. He's a cute little lawn ornament.
31373 is my favorite Commodore=64 game. I love blowing things up in my first-person spaceship, and fighting Thargoids.
You're basically accepting payment for lost life (which can never be recovered). "I'll spend 40 hours programming your software, and I want $1000 in return for my precious life wasted."
BTW for those who think Europe is "heaven on earth" for internet?
Telenet built their network with support of the Belgium government, and now has a monopoly on cable internet. In other words they are worse off than us Americans - while most of us do have Comcast/Cox/whatever monopolies at least those coaxial cables were laid usage Comcast's money, not government money.
P.S.
According to Telenet's website, the "Turbonet" service supplies 30Mbps download speeds. So that's pretty close to what I estimated. About 7 hours a day of downloading.
These don't appear to be leased lines.
With my $15 connection at 768k, I could download a maximum of 248 gigabytes but only if I did nothing but download. No surfing or emailing... just pure downloading of file-after-file.
So this 2700 GB user must have at least at 9 Mbit/s. If we assume he only spends 8 hours a day downloading or watching videos, then that translates to a 25 Mbit/s line..... typical speed for a shared Cable Internet connection.
>>>How are such people data-hogs? They are using what they have paid for.
Not really. Imagine if electricity worked like internet data. i.e. You pay $400 a month and get unlimited usage. Most of us would use around 1000 KWh per month, but then you'd have a few people that would run their AC at 50 degrees, while the whole house was lighted even in rooms that are not being used, and have an electric-powered pool in the back with an elaborate fountain running all day and night. i.e. Splurging.
They are not paying for the electricity they used. They are taking MORE (~$2000 worth) than what they paid for ($400), and that net loss must be covered by the rest of us (prices go up). Plus the environmental damage caused by the splurgers.
This is why pricing is (or should be) metered. It's a negative feedback loop that encourages people to limit themselves, or else pay a very high bill. It also benefits those that use very little, like grandmas, because their bills might only be $50 metered rather than $400 flat. Pricing tied to consumption is the "invisible hand" that regulates use.
No different than how SATs work when evaluating students. You take this long elaborate test, and then get assigned a number which determines your future.
As for the boycott, perhaps the citizens of L.A. ought to organize their own boycott - stop paying school taxes. Remind the teachers their place in society (their paychecks depend upon taxpayer generosity), and that they do not decide what information the Public gets to see. They are servants of the people, not masters. I'm sorry they didn't like the results of their text, but I didn't like the results of my SAT either - do I get to hide it from college admissions?
Nope. Then neither do they.
P.S. How many people do you know that uses the other minority OS, Apple Macintosh? And Windows?
Me: 2 and ~100.
How many people do you know (besides yourself) that uses Ubuntu Linux on their computer?
Me: 0.
>>>if you read more than the first 4 words of my previous comment
Hello :-)
I did read the whole comment, but what you said doesn't excuse intellectual laziness (i.e. being flat wrong). The original poster's comment that his connection was as slow as a 2k modem was an *idiotic* statement. It was equivalent of saying 1000 + 1000 = 2 instead of 2000. Or that he has a Dual Core PC that feels as slow as a 1 megahertz CPU.
It was not just an error..... it was off by several orders of magnitude. If this was just your average ordinary website I'd forget it, but slashdot is filled with engineers, technicians, and programmers who should know better. A 2k modem is damn slow - it would take almost an hour to download a website. Even the simpler 1990s pages were 100k in size, or about 7 minutes to download via a 2400 modem.
I'm sure the guy's cellphone isn't that slow.
>>>The problem with that is that the ISP can't control anything outside of their network.
Neither can they guarantee your computer will be fast enough to accept the data, but they can guarantee the speed from their Central Office to your home will be at least 500k. It's just the same way the phone company guarantees a working line from their CO to your home, but makes no promises about the line inside your home, or whoever you're trying to call.
I get 53 k out of my phoneline modem - that's the maximum limit allowed in the US, due to FCC speed limits. Otherwise it would be a solid 56k as advertised and per the V.90 spec.
The up speed is 48k.
>>>POTS (Plain old telephone service) : 64kbps line that carries uncompressed 8kHz 8-bit mono audio (that's why phone calls sound like crap when they're on TV / Radio talk shows). Also sort of explains why the fastest dialup modems were around 56k (after data protocol and error correction overhead).
>>>
POTS is actually only 7 bits, because the 8th bit is used for control signals. Hence 56k. Also the sample rate is 8000 times but the actual frequency width is only 4 kilohertz.
I was staying in a hotel in Michigan where I literally had a 19.2k connection.
Yes it was still possible to browse the web at that speed, but only with text/image compression turned on (increases effective speed to 190). Without that it would have been horrible. The best connection I was able to get was 26k, and it was at that speed I downloaded the latest episodes of Stargate and Galactica. Sloooow.
Fortunately I only had to stay there one month, and then I moved to a new hotel with cable internet (~1000 k)
>>>Every phone I've tried browsing the web on makes me just about cry with frustration - I feel like I'm back in college with a 2400 baud modem again.
That means it would take nearly an Hour to download a single webpage, like slashdot. (800,000 bytes == 6,400,000 bits / 2000 bps (actual throughput of 2400 baud modem) == 3200 seconds == 0.9 hours.)
That's hella slow! No wonder you're bitchin' about your lousy cellphone service. I would be too.