It's not completely the same thing. Normally people can't congest the road except by shear weight of people. Congesting a local net historically has only required a single fast machine with a good protocol stack.
There are techniques to minimise the impact a single person can have, but this is still going to be an issue. And the more differences there are between the way the road behaves and the way the internet behaves the less your analogy holds.
Also, it's not clear that this is a natural monopoly; the wireless internets are shaping up to be final mile technologies to bridge onto the ISPs that provide access to the internet backbones. The wireless internets can have firewalls around the internet(!) and provide tunnelling to allow their customers access.
That also means that there may not be monopolies in the long run.
One of the issues, particularly with twitch games, but also others as well, is that some players have less lag than others.
I simply think that the server should be able to set a minimum lag for the players, and if a player is well below that, the server should introduce extra artificial lag- upto the minimum atleast.
I mean, if you're 3l337 it won't make any difference right?;-)
The other advantage is to the developer- if there are some serious playability issues when the lag reaches a certain threshold, the designers can find this out during testing.
I've actually been on servers that work the other way- if your link starts to lag for a few tens of seconds, you get booted. That really sucks big time. Like you've done something wrong, you deserve to lose the frags you built up, because someone else did an ftp download? Uh huh. That makes sense.
>I hate to deflate your bubble, but Linux is looking less and less likely to be popular in the future as >every day goes by. As the Microsoft juggernaut moves forward, they leave Linux further and further in the dust.
It's hard to say. Linux is competing at the technical level; for example installation is now easier than with Microsoft for Mandrake 8.1. So far as I know the % of the desktop captured by Linux isn't going down; and the server market is fairly stable, so its not like Linux is going anywhere.
It's still hard to see how Linux can lose, but Microsoft can certainly lose; the DOJ case is still looking bad for them, and some of the other companies are lining up to beat them up in court.
Bearing in mind that there is not exactly an overwhelming demand for Linux on the Desktop, charging for the Linux version will mean that they will basically get no money from that direction.
Given that they will make no money, and they won't be able to persuade new Linux users to use Star Office in future; and Linux is looking like it will be popular in future; they're losing lots of future profit.
If they had waited till it was popular then they would have been able to do the switch THEN, and have a way of screwing money out of most of the Linux users from that point on; they'll lose this.
Also, it's a bad idea because Sun is a competitor of Microsoft, and Linux is challenging Microsoft for the desktop, and your enemies enemy is your friend.
- the 1797 Clock Tax (taxing your clocks!) - Window Tax (taxing your windows!) - poll tax (taxing your head!)- OS tax (thanks Microsoft- and you get to pay it even if you don't have their OS!!!!)
If you run into something that totally blocks the wheels- yes you go flying. BUT-
Something big enough to block the wheels would have to be almost 1/2 the diameter of the wheels; I bet they chose the wheel diameter to be bigger than any curbs you're likely to meet. And if you make it over the curb at all, the balancing mechanism will almost certainly recover the balance.
As far as I can tell, that's not actually correct. UV and the bluer light frequencies cause damage, but provided the intensity isn't too high the lower frequencies cause no known damage.
In this case there is no reason the intensity would be sufficient to cause any damage.
Maybe they are thinking that Prodigy won't be able to afford such good legal counsel as BT and may lose the case. Even if BT shouldn't win, they could win, and that would be bad...
Personally, I don't think they have a snowballs chance in Hell, but the court of law is a funny place. Look what happened to OJ Simpson. That case was open and shut at the beginning too...
It would bode lots of companies to rally around Prodigy and give them a hand with legal costs. Even the EFF might be interested in this one.
Probably in that case you would use non directional antennas and a mesh topology, and keep the power way down; kinda like a cell phone network, only smaller.
Provided the ISP gives a firewall that each user can tunnel through using VPN software, there shouldn't be any problem there either.
The ISP can traffic shape each individual user if they have to; so sharing wouldn't be harmful.
No, you don't pay for bandwidth, you pay for peak bandwidth. The bandwidth you get is related to the peak bandwidth anyway, so it's an easier model to charge to; and providers can traffic shape to ensure you don't use more bandwidth than you are paying for.
Charging per packet is a royal pain, it's been tried. It can work sometimes, but its a lot more hassle; and usually more expensive.
That's not exactly messed up. It's not like they get no bandwidth; everyone is actually getting a fair crack at the bandwidth; and in this case, everyone is getting 50% of their maximum. That's pretty good actually, I'd be quite happy with that.
>The pricing is done according to this sort of ratio. 2000 to 5000 users to a T1. However, when you have a Cable modem user allowed to burst to 1Mb/sec,
>and he runs at that speed all the time it only takes 45 like him to suck down that entire T1. Hence, they need to charge more.
I don't agree that they need to charge more. If there's noone using the bandwidth (it's 4:30am and its just Kazaa servers are running), then I don't see the issue- why should anyone pay more for bandwidth that noone is using anyway?
If it's peak usage time, then traffic shaping the heavy hitters makes a great deal of sense; then sure, go ahead, smack down the heavy hitters.
>The _problem_ starts when someone starts using 100% of the bandwidth available to them, almost ALL the time.
Your example is false. You can't use all the bandwidth; the internet congestion protocols stop you using it all.
> The problem is when there are about 50-100 people that does that. I'm not sure what speed Rogers is offering, but say its 512Kbps. If 100 users use all that, they need a T3 just for 100 users!
ISPs use a contention ratio of between 20 and 50. Therefore there would be a T3 for between 2000 and 5000 people.
>Microsoft's security problems come partly from feeling that they don't have to care, apparently.
Or more precisely, that features were literally more important than security.
If they spend 80% of their time trying to improve their feature set, then they will only be able to spend 20% worryting about security; and if that turns out not to be enough, tough.
What's been happening recently is the fact that Linux is competing with them, and is seen as more reliable, has actually hit Microsoft in their pocket books. They are having to change their priorities to adapt to this new threat to them.
It will be interesting to see if they can change perceptions quickly enough.
>Also, maybe there is some secret U.S. government surveillance agency that requires that Microsoft
>operating systems not be secure. For years the U.S. government tried to prevent cryptography.
That's more or less one of the two jobs that the NSA does, to 'protect national security' the other is to protect commerce. The latter probably requires a secure OS, the former doesn't. (That's why there were export versions of software). NSA is pretty schizoid organisation; but most of the time they do a good job.
Mars and earth are completely different situations. To a pretty good approximation- Mars doesn't HAVE an atmosphere- it's only 1% of a standard earth atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere has the force of 15 bags of sugar on each square inch of your body. On Mars it would be more like 1/6 of a bag.
Above a certain altitude the reentry speeds are climbing up into the 1km/s range, that's 3600km/hour. What chance has a bit of epoxy and some thread got of reentering intact? None. Nada. Zip.
Sure, there's a lot of energy, but it's spread over an enormous distance; and that energy is going to vapourise that tether real good. You really don't need to sweat this one.
Eastward in fact. The tether is rotating west to east with the earth, and the higher up bits are going faster, until at geosynchronous orbit the centrifugal force matches the gravity at that point.
If the tether snaps, the pieces drop, and keep their horizontal speed- so the tether pieces go east relative to the ground. (Actually, the bits speed up a little due to conservation of angular momentum as they fall, but not a lot.)
Efficiency is irrelevant really. The problem is expense. Rockets are efficient enough- it works out at about 14 lbs of fuel per pound of payload. Sounds a lot till you realise that that is about $14 per lb of payload cost. The rest is building and maintaining the rocket and the launch site, mission control etc. etc.
Research into cheaper rockets goes on. The cheapest rocket at the moment costs about $2500/lb (Proton rocket); but they make a good % profit per launch, I can tell you.
The tether is expected to get chopped down occasionally by meteorites or space debris. It would be designed to burn up during reentry. It would not harm the earth in any way. The remaining lower length would end up in the ocean, and can probably be collected up and incinerated.
Besides. it's only 20 tonnes initially, an earth killer? I don't think so.
No, this is covered in the paper. The tether would melt and reenter harmlessly above a 100km or so. Below that it would survive, but its a pretty predictable landing zone; and one of the cleverer ideas he had is building it in the sea where it won't hurt anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not completely the same thing. Normally people can't congest the road except by shear weight of people. Congesting a local net historically has only required a single fast machine with a good protocol stack.
There are techniques to minimise the impact a single person can have, but this is still going to be an issue. And the more differences there are between the way the road behaves and the way the internet behaves the less your analogy holds.
Also, it's not clear that this is a natural monopoly; the wireless internets are shaping up to be final mile technologies to bridge onto the ISPs that provide access to the internet backbones. The wireless internets can have firewalls around the internet(!) and provide tunnelling to allow their customers access.
That also means that there may not be monopolies in the long run.
One of the issues, particularly with twitch games, but also others as well, is that some players have less lag than others.
;-)
I simply think that the server should be able to set a minimum lag for the players, and if a player is well below that, the server should introduce extra artificial lag- upto the minimum atleast.
I mean, if you're 3l337 it won't make any difference right?
The other advantage is to the developer- if there are some serious playability issues when the lag reaches a certain threshold, the designers can find this out during testing.
I've actually been on servers that work the other way- if your link starts to lag for a few tens of seconds, you get booted. That really sucks big time. Like you've done something wrong, you deserve to lose the frags you built up, because someone else did an ftp download? Uh huh. That makes sense.
>I hate to deflate your bubble, but Linux is looking less and less likely to be popular in the future as
>every day goes by. As the Microsoft juggernaut moves forward, they leave Linux further and further in the dust.
It's hard to say. Linux is competing at the technical level; for example installation is now easier than with Microsoft for Mandrake 8.1. So far as I know the % of the desktop captured by Linux isn't going down; and the server market is fairly stable, so its not like Linux is going anywhere.
It's still hard to see how Linux can lose, but Microsoft can certainly lose; the DOJ case is still looking bad for them, and some of the other companies are lining up to beat them up in court.
Business is amoral. (Not immoral or moral; amoral).
Yes, I expect there would be some issues; but Sun would end up with more money; and would be sticking the knife into Microsoft in the meantime.
Bearing in mind that there is not exactly an overwhelming demand for Linux on the Desktop, charging for the Linux version will mean that they will basically get no money from that direction.
Given that they will make no money, and they won't be able to persuade new Linux users to use Star Office in future; and Linux is looking like it will be popular in future; they're losing lots of future profit.
If they had waited till it was popular then they would have been able to do the switch THEN, and have a way of screwing money out of most of the Linux users from that point on; they'll lose this.
Also, it's a bad idea because Sun is a competitor of Microsoft, and Linux is challenging Microsoft for the desktop, and your enemies enemy is your friend.
Reminds me of the other novel taxes in the past:
- the 1797 Clock Tax (taxing your clocks!)
- Window Tax (taxing your windows!)
- poll tax (taxing your head!)- OS tax (thanks Microsoft- and you get to pay it even if you don't have their OS!!!!)
None of which worked very well...
Beowulf cluster? That's called a government isn't it?
Possibly.
;-)
;-)
For those not familiar with Terry Pratchett, that would be something like a 'spin doctor'.
For those familiar with Terry Pratchett; that would presumably be Sun speak for 'head liar'.
Every company should have one. Actually, come to think of it, every company probably does have one
I agree, I'd gladly pay all my salary, and give away my first born for any fun web sites.
If you run into something that totally blocks the wheels- yes you go flying. BUT-
Something big enough to block the wheels would have to be almost 1/2 the diameter of the wheels; I bet they chose the wheel diameter to be bigger than any curbs you're likely to meet. And if you make it over the curb at all, the balancing mechanism will almost certainly recover the balance.
> Any kind of light ultimately damages the eye.
As far as I can tell, that's not actually correct. UV and the bluer light frequencies cause damage, but provided the intensity isn't too high the lower frequencies cause no known damage.
In this case there is no reason the intensity would be sufficient to cause any damage.
Probably nothing.
Maybe they are thinking that Prodigy won't be able to afford such good legal counsel as BT and may lose the case. Even if BT shouldn't win, they could win, and that would be bad...
Personally, I don't think they have a snowballs chance in Hell, but the court of law is a funny place. Look what happened to OJ Simpson. That case was open and shut at the beginning too...
It would bode lots of companies to rally around Prodigy and give them a hand with legal costs. Even the EFF might be interested in this one.
Probably in that case you would use non directional antennas and a mesh topology, and keep the power way down; kinda like a cell phone network, only smaller.
Provided the ISP gives a firewall that each user can tunnel through using VPN software, there shouldn't be any problem there either.
The ISP can traffic shape each individual user if they have to; so sharing wouldn't be harmful.
No, you don't pay for bandwidth, you pay for peak bandwidth. The bandwidth you get is related to the peak bandwidth anyway, so it's an easier model to charge to; and providers can traffic shape to ensure you don't use more bandwidth than you are paying for.
Charging per packet is a royal pain, it's been tried. It can work sometimes, but its a lot more hassle; and usually more expensive.
That's not exactly messed up. It's not like they get no bandwidth; everyone is actually getting a fair crack at the bandwidth; and in this case, everyone is getting 50% of their maximum. That's pretty good actually, I'd be quite happy with that.
>The pricing is done according to this sort of ratio. 2000 to 5000 users to a T1. However, when you have a Cable modem user allowed to burst to 1Mb/sec,
>and he runs at that speed all the time it only takes 45 like him to suck down that entire T1. Hence, they need to charge more.
I don't agree that they need to charge more. If there's noone using the bandwidth (it's 4:30am and its just Kazaa servers are running), then I don't see the issue- why should anyone pay more for bandwidth that noone is using anyway?
If it's peak usage time, then traffic shaping the heavy hitters makes a great deal of sense; then sure, go ahead, smack down the heavy hitters.
>The _problem_ starts when someone starts using 100% of the bandwidth available to them, almost ALL the time.
Your example is false. You can't use all the bandwidth; the internet congestion protocols stop you using it all.
> The problem is when there are about 50-100 people that does that. I'm not sure what speed Rogers is offering, but say its 512Kbps. If 100 users use all that, they need a T3 just for 100 users!
ISPs use a contention ratio of between 20 and 50. Therefore there would be a T3 for between 2000 and 5000 people.
Yes, that would be just the raw silicon. Normal chips are typically under a cm^2 in size; everything else is packaging.
>Microsoft's security problems come partly from feeling that they don't have to care, apparently.
Or more precisely, that features were literally more important than security.
If they spend 80% of their time trying to improve their feature set, then they will only be able to spend 20% worryting about security; and if that turns out not to be enough, tough.
What's been happening recently is the fact that Linux is competing with them, and is seen as more reliable, has actually hit Microsoft in their pocket books. They are having to change their priorities to adapt to this new threat to them.
It will be interesting to see if they can change perceptions quickly enough.
>Also, maybe there is some secret U.S. government surveillance agency that requires that Microsoft
>operating systems not be secure. For years the U.S. government tried to prevent cryptography.
That's more or less one of the two jobs that the NSA does, to 'protect national security' the other is to protect commerce. The latter probably requires a secure OS, the former doesn't. (That's why there were export versions of software). NSA is pretty schizoid organisation; but most of the time they do a good job.
Did you try every possible file path, including '..' embedded CRs etc. etc.
Somehow I suspect you've missed soemthing...
Mars and earth are completely different situations. To a pretty good approximation- Mars doesn't HAVE an atmosphere- it's only 1% of a standard earth atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere has the force of 15 bags of sugar on each square inch of your body. On Mars it would be more like 1/6 of a bag.
Above a certain altitude the reentry speeds are climbing up into the 1km/s range, that's 3600km/hour. What chance has a bit of epoxy and some thread got of reentering intact? None. Nada. Zip.
Sure, there's a lot of energy, but it's spread over an enormous distance; and that energy is going to vapourise that tether real good. You really don't need to sweat this one.
Eastward in fact. The tether is rotating west to east with the earth, and the higher up bits are going faster, until at geosynchronous orbit the centrifugal force matches the gravity at that point.
If the tether snaps, the pieces drop, and keep their horizontal speed- so the tether pieces go east relative to the ground. (Actually, the bits speed up a little due to conservation of angular momentum as they fall, but not a lot.)
Efficiency is irrelevant really. The problem is expense. Rockets are efficient enough- it works out at about 14 lbs of fuel per pound of payload. Sounds a lot till you realise that that is about $14 per lb of payload cost. The rest is building and maintaining the rocket and the launch site, mission control etc. etc.
Research into cheaper rockets goes on. The cheapest rocket at the moment costs about $2500/lb (Proton rocket); but they make a good % profit per launch, I can tell you.
The tether is expected to get chopped down occasionally by meteorites or space debris. It would be designed to burn up during reentry. It would not harm the earth in any way. The remaining lower length would end up in the ocean, and can probably be collected up and incinerated.
Besides. it's only 20 tonnes initially, an earth killer? I don't think so.
No, this is covered in the paper. The tether would melt and reenter harmlessly above a 100km or so. Below that it would survive, but its a pretty predictable landing zone; and one of the cleverer ideas he had is building it in the sea where it won't hurt anyone.