It's not particularly difficult to get 15-25 Mbit download speeds on a consumer line
Well you're right. Comcast has "burst speeds" of 16,000 kbit/s but it costs $53 plus $3 tax, and then drops to 8000k after the first 5 seconds of each file transfer. I don't think so. Pass. Back in the days of my 14k modem I could have hooked-into 128k ISDN but it was outrageously expensive. Ditto Comcast.
NOT those kinds of files. I'm taking about things like my resume, the PCI Express specification, a list of resistor color codes, VHDL references, some MP3 music, and so on. Classified documents are not even allowed on networks (which always makes me wonder how these files leaked. You would have to carry a physical disk out of the sealed room, which is specifically forbidden).
That's $20 too much. Goodbye CVI Guide to Earth Final Conflict! (yes that was the name of my site - haven't updated it since Y2K)
Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speed were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today.
Hmmm. I had a 14.4k modem in 1995, so my modern connection should be 14,000-28,000 kbit/s today. (looks around). Where is this slashodot? I don't have anything even close to the speed. Mine's only 750 k.
(shrug) Check this out - my website might survive after all: "Yahoo! GeoCities Plus customers: When GeoCities closes, you won't experience any change to your site, and we'll show you how to move your files to Yahoo! Web Hosting automatically, at no extra cost." Hmmmm.
Yes Geocities was pretty early in the history of the Web. I first got Mosaic on my Amiga late-1993, and the Geocities company was founded only one year later.
I'm annoyed. Geocities was a convenient place for me to dump files I needed to access from home or work. It was also more customizable than Livejournal or Facebook.
I'm not going to show you my site but I used to greet my visitors with this audio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5p15NoBKmo "Another visitor. Stay awhile. Staaaaay forever!"
11 years isn't "no" time. It's a whole decade. I was out-of-work in 2002 due to the dot-com crash, accumulated $30,000 in debt during that time, got a job in 2003, and wiped-out that debt before the end of the year. I would apply the same budgetary restraint to the national debt. Let's just take a quick gander: Current debt is $11 trillion, so we need approximately 1 trillion dollar surplus every year from now through 2020:
- end all wars immediately - As Rome said to Britain in 410: "You'll have to fend for yourself." - 0.2 trillion saved - cut defense budget in half - another 0.2 trillion saved - convert SS to a needs-based system where only poor people get checks (i.e. not people like me) - 0.5 trillion saved - convert Medicare where only poor people get checks (i.e. not middle class people like me) - 0.1 trillion saved - convert Amtrak to a private enterprise w/o government assistance - 0.05 trillion saved - and other smaller cuts all across the budget.
There.
As I said - requires sacrifice. The only reason our current Congressional representatives don't do this is because they are weak and afraid to lead, but it CAN be done..... just as Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were able to eliminate the debt in the early 1800s. All it takes is a goal and a little bit of stubbornness to keep that goal in sight.
Maybe Washington should switch to a "usage fee" model to support its courts. That way even Microsoft could not find a loophole to get-away with not paying its bills. Conveniently the fee would only apply to corporations, not individual citizens.
>>>it's a publicly funded broadcaster that the government has no direct control over.
Then how come it's the UK government that throws me in jail, if I refuse to pay the TV fee? You are pointing-out a differences that, in reality, make no difference whatsoever. The BBC is akin to Obama's "public option" healthcare. If it's optional, why is the government fining me $1000/year starting in 2011 (or else I'll be jailed).
This is just like 1984 - redefining words in hopes people will be fooled. The BBC is "independent" but still uses government-enforced fees. The "option" is not optional since you'll be fined if you don't take it.
When they ask for your annual TV license fee (tax) can you say "no"? Then they hold a monopoly over your wallet. Even if you never, ever watch BBC, they still get paid. We have the same situation with U.S. government schools, where even if I never went there, and never had any kids that went there (home or private-schooled), the local Uncle Sam school still has a monopoly over my wallet ($3500 each year).
I bet Microsoft and Comcast would kill for such a sweet deal. (No you don't Windows of Cable TV, but yes you still have to pay us $100 each year.)
And based upon my previous purchases from the UK, one pound == 1/2 dollar, so 142.5 == 1/2 * $$$ ---> $285. Close to my initial $300/year estimate.
I think this part of the website is funny. Talk about Big Brother - "How do I let you know that I don't need a licence? Answer: Just click here to enter your details. When we receive your declaration, we'll send you a letter confirming the next steps. These are: * We will send a TV Licensing officer to your address to confirm the situation. ** Once our officer has confirmed that you don't need a licence, your address will not be contacted again for at least three years. *** After the three-year period, we will contact you to confirm that you still live at the address, and that your situation hasn't changed. **** If, during a visit, we find that you do in fact need a licence, you'll need to pay the full licence fee. Please note that you may also face prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000." (~1900 dollars)
I filled it out with my American address. I wish I could see the look on the UK officer's face.
Actually it's more like this: CA User's Computer MD User's Computer. A direct connection with no need for a national provider like AOL. Likewise you would connect directly to a BBS.
>>>what was the point of throwing my final line back at me?
Because you were rude. "FYI, the internet consists of more than just/., facebook, myspace, twitter, youtube, etc." There was no need to say that, especially to someone with my name (C64love) whose clearly been around for awhile and pretty much seen it all in regards to online content.
First off the question didn't ask, "What if we lost all networks?" It simply asked, "What if the internet was turned off?" The answer is that we would fall back to the ~100-year-old telephone technology that we used pre-world wide web. Second...
>>>If you were in the middle of accessing something from one BBS, lost connection and could not reconnect to that same BBS, you could resume pretty much exactly where you were from _any_ other BBS, right? >>>
NO. If for example, I was downloading SIswimsuitcover1988.HAM from the Baltimore BBS and I lost connection, I could not go over to the Washington DC BBS and resume, because the two files would not be the same (different sizes or checksums). In fact the DC BBS might not have that file at all! You see each local BBS was independent from the rest. What I would do if I lost connection is set my modem to autodial the Baltimore BBS over-and-over until I got through, and then resume the download.
The only exception to that rule would be Usenet or FIDOnet, which *in theory* had the exact same message forums everywhere. Of course theory and fact are often different. For example I was able to access rec.arts.startrek on Rabbit Hutch BBS (my friend's board), but not on the Baltimore BBS because the owner simply decided not to carry that group.
>>>Please explain how this is fundamentally different than the internet?
It isn't but that wasn't the initial question. The initial question was: What if they turned off the internet? And the answer is that we would fallback on the old phone service that has existed since the 1800s.
Although you provided these citations, I'm not sure they are any more valid than the numerous WWW citations about a guy waking-up in a tub of water and finding a note about his missing kidneys. Every one of those links has a similar theme - "A friend of a friend of a former MS employee told my boss that....." That's urban legend.
I can believe that the same guy developed both VMS and NT. I don't accept that NT == VMS with a new skin.
>>>And you may find yourself not playing many games in future.
No great loss. With the vast collection of games I have acquired since 1977 to the present (Atari SNES Commodore PS1/2 and the Wii), I don't need to buy any future games. I have enough to last me the rest of my life.
>>>I used to think that way too until I stopped a moment to consider: I pay about 60 bucks for a game. I can sell it used after a week for about 30-40, after a month for less than 20. >>>
Apparently you should spend a few more moments "considering" because rather than pay 60 bucks you could just wait 1-2 months and pay 20, same as I do.
You say you value your time, but you forget money IS time. My combined ebay/amazon sales last year (not just games but also books & hardware) were over $3000 - or about 150 hours/4 weeks worth of labor on the job.
>>>knowing you're playing a few years old games while others play the shiny, great new ones would bother me
So if I invite you over to play my 20+ years old Atari, Commodore, and Super Nintendo collection, you won't be RSVPing? Alright. I'll just enjoy these fine games alone. (Point- I think your view is silly. A game is just as fun whether it was released this year or years ago. Classics don't age.)
Darn. I thought this article would be about memory leaks, which make programs like Firefox inexplicable grow from 50,000 to 500,000 bytes of RAM, even after I close all the tabs. I never understood that behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
>>>The minimum FiOS does
The what?
Anon. Coward writes:
It's not particularly difficult to get 15-25 Mbit download speeds on a consumer line
Well you're right. Comcast has "burst speeds" of 16,000 kbit/s but it costs $53 plus $3 tax, and then drops to 8000k after the first 5 seconds of each file transfer. I don't think so. Pass. Back in the days of my 14k modem I could have hooked-into 128k ISDN but it was outrageously expensive. Ditto Comcast.
Haha, funny.
NOT those kinds of files. I'm taking about things like my resume, the PCI Express specification, a list of resistor color codes, VHDL references, some MP3 music, and so on. Classified documents are not even allowed on networks (which always makes me wonder how these files leaked. You would have to carry a physical disk out of the sealed room, which is specifically forbidden).
That's $20 too much. Goodbye CVI Guide to Earth Final Conflict! (yes that was the name of my site - haven't updated it since Y2K)
Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speed were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today.
Hmmm. I had a 14.4k modem in 1995, so my modern connection should be 14,000-28,000 kbit/s today. (looks around). Where is this slashodot? I don't have anything even close to the speed. Mine's only 750 k.
(shrug) Check this out - my website might survive after all: "Yahoo! GeoCities Plus customers: When GeoCities closes, you won't experience any change to your site, and we'll show you how to move your files to Yahoo! Web Hosting automatically, at no extra cost." Hmmmm.
Nah. Let it die.
>>>www.geocities.com/MotorCity/1108
If you paid a dollar a month you could have changed this to something useful like geocities.com/fprintf
I hate using MS-DOS with the Windows overlay.
On a Commodore all you need to do is shove a cartridge in the rear and run an ethernet cable into it. Plug'n'play in 1982 baby! ;-)
Yes Geocities was pretty early in the history of the Web. I first got Mosaic on my Amiga late-1993, and the Geocities company was founded only one year later.
I'm annoyed. Geocities was a convenient place for me to dump files I needed to access from home or work. It was also more customizable than Livejournal or Facebook.
I'm not going to show you my site but I used to greet my visitors with this audio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5p15NoBKmo "Another visitor. Stay awhile. Staaaaay forever!"
>>>>>"million-dollar Comcast"
>>
>>Comcast is a $16 BILLION dollar company.
Not in the UK. It's only a few million in equity.
[edit]
- convert Amtrak [and PBS and CPB] to...
11 years isn't "no" time. It's a whole decade. I was out-of-work in 2002 due to the dot-com crash, accumulated $30,000 in debt during that time, got a job in 2003, and wiped-out that debt before the end of the year. I would apply the same budgetary restraint to the national debt. Let's just take a quick gander: Current debt is $11 trillion, so we need approximately 1 trillion dollar surplus every year from now through 2020:
- end all wars immediately - As Rome said to Britain in 410: "You'll have to fend for yourself." - 0.2 trillion saved
- cut defense budget in half - another 0.2 trillion saved
- convert SS to a needs-based system where only poor people get checks (i.e. not people like me) - 0.5 trillion saved
- convert Medicare where only poor people get checks (i.e. not middle class people like me) - 0.1 trillion saved
- convert Amtrak to a private enterprise w/o government assistance - 0.05 trillion saved
- and other smaller cuts all across the budget.
There.
As I said - requires sacrifice. The only reason our current Congressional representatives don't do this is because they are weak and afraid to lead, but it CAN be done..... just as Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were able to eliminate the debt in the early 1800s. All it takes is a goal and a little bit of stubbornness to keep that goal in sight.
Maybe Washington should switch to a "usage fee" model to support its courts. That way even Microsoft could not find a loophole to get-away with not paying its bills. Conveniently the fee would only apply to corporations, not individual citizens.
P.S.
>>>it's a publicly funded broadcaster that the government has no direct control over.
Then how come it's the UK government that throws me in jail, if I refuse to pay the TV fee? You are pointing-out a differences that, in reality, make no difference whatsoever. The BBC is akin to Obama's "public option" healthcare. If it's optional, why is the government fining me $1000/year starting in 2011 (or else I'll be jailed).
This is just like 1984 - redefining words in hopes people will be fooled.
The BBC is "independent" but still uses government-enforced fees.
The "option" is not optional since you'll be fined if you don't take it.
>>>is the BBC a monopoly?
When they ask for your annual TV license fee (tax) can you say "no"? Then they hold a monopoly over your wallet. Even if you never, ever watch BBC, they still get paid. We have the same situation with U.S. government schools, where even if I never went there, and never had any kids that went there (home or private-schooled), the local Uncle Sam school still has a monopoly over my wallet ($3500 each year).
I bet Microsoft and Comcast would kill for such a sweet deal. (No you don't Windows of Cable TV, but yes you still have to pay us $100 each year.)
And based upon my previous purchases from the UK, one pound == 1/2 dollar, so 142.5 == 1/2 * $$$ ---> $285. Close to my initial $300/year estimate.
I think this part of the website is funny. Talk about Big Brother - "How do I let you know that I don't need a licence? Answer: Just click here to enter your details. When we receive your declaration, we'll send you a letter confirming the next steps. These are: * We will send a TV Licensing officer to your address to confirm the situation. ** Once our officer has confirmed that you don't need a licence, your address will not be contacted again for at least three years. *** After the three-year period, we will contact you to confirm that you still live at the address, and that your situation hasn't changed. **** If, during a visit, we find that you do in fact need a licence, you'll need to pay the full licence fee. Please note that you may also face prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000." (~1900 dollars)
I filled it out with my American address.
I wish I could see the look on the
UK officer's face.
Actually it's more like this: CA User's Computer MD User's Computer. A direct connection with no need for a national provider like AOL. Likewise you would connect directly to a BBS.
>>>what was the point of throwing my final line back at me?
Because you were rude. "FYI, the internet consists of more than just /., facebook, myspace, twitter, youtube, etc." There was no need to say that, especially to someone with my name (C64love) whose clearly been around for awhile and pretty much seen it all in regards to online content.
First off the question didn't ask, "What if we lost all networks?" It simply asked, "What if the internet was turned off?" The answer is that we would fall back to the ~100-year-old telephone technology that we used pre-world wide web. Second...
>>>If you were in the middle of accessing something from one BBS, lost connection and could not reconnect to that same BBS, you could resume pretty much exactly where you were from _any_ other BBS, right?
>>>
NO. If for example, I was downloading SIswimsuitcover1988.HAM from the Baltimore BBS and I lost connection, I could not go over to the Washington DC BBS and resume, because the two files would not be the same (different sizes or checksums). In fact the DC BBS might not have that file at all! You see each local BBS was independent from the rest. What I would do if I lost connection is set my modem to autodial the Baltimore BBS over-and-over until I got through, and then resume the download.
The only exception to that rule would be Usenet or FIDOnet, which *in theory* had the exact same message forums everywhere. Of course theory and fact are often different. For example I was able to access rec.arts.startrek on Rabbit Hutch BBS (my friend's board), but not on the Baltimore BBS because the owner simply decided not to carry that group.
>>>Please explain how this is fundamentally different than the internet?
It isn't but that wasn't the initial question. The initial question was: What if they turned off the internet? And the answer is that we would fallback on the old phone service that has existed since the 1800s.
Although you provided these citations, I'm not sure they are any more valid than the numerous WWW citations about a guy waking-up in a tub of water and finding a note about his missing kidneys. Every one of those links has a similar theme - "A friend of a friend of a former MS employee told my boss that....." That's urban legend.
I can believe that the same guy developed both VMS and NT. I don't accept that NT == VMS with a new skin.
>>>And you may find yourself not playing many games in future.
No great loss. With the vast collection of games I have acquired since 1977 to the present (Atari SNES Commodore PS1/2 and the Wii), I don't need to buy any future games. I have enough to last me the rest of my life.
>>>I used to think that way too until I stopped a moment to consider: I pay about 60 bucks for a game. I can sell it used after a week for about 30-40, after a month for less than 20.
>>>
Apparently you should spend a few more moments "considering" because rather than pay 60 bucks you could just wait 1-2 months and pay 20, same as I do.
>>>a measly $10.
You say you value your time, but you forget money IS time. My combined ebay/amazon sales last year (not just games but also books & hardware) were over $3000 - or about 150 hours/4 weeks worth of labor on the job.
>>>knowing you're playing a few years old games while others play the shiny, great new ones would bother me
So if I invite you over to play my 20+ years old Atari, Commodore, and Super Nintendo collection, you won't be RSVPing? Alright. I'll just enjoy these fine games alone. (Point- I think your view is silly. A game is just as fun whether it was released this year or years ago. Classics don't age.)
>>>secrete leak
I try to convince my wife to let me secrete at least once a week, but keep my leaks to a minimum.
Darn. I thought this article would be about memory leaks, which make programs like Firefox inexplicable grow from 50,000 to 500,000 bytes of RAM, even after I close all the tabs. I never understood that behavior.