One of the anti-competitive tricks Standard Oil used was predatory pricing. They would set up shop in a town and sell gas at or below cost, driving any other gas stations out of business. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing And yes, Microsoft was guilty of this as well by giving IE away for free and destroying Netscape's source of revenue.
There might be a leg to stand on in this case against Google. Does Google actually make any money off Android after all the money they invested in it?
On the other hand, what competition does Android even have as a licensed product? Apple does not license iOS. RIM does not license Blackberry OS. Nokia is more or less abandoning Symbian in the face of competiton and moving to Windows Phone 7. I don't think HP licenses WebOS, although they probably would given a chance. PalmOS faltered before Android hit the market, as I recall.
So by my count, only Microsoft, Nokia, or HP might have grounds to fight Google on the basis that they are giving away a product that undermines their positions in the mobile OS market. HP could argue that Android being free is preventing them from licensing WebOS to other tablet makers. Nokia might be able to argue that Android's pricing (or lack thereof) was making it cost prohibitive to continue maintaining and licensing Symbian. But then, Nokia was really late to the smartphone market space and I don't think they ever put forth a real effort. I think that would make it hard for them to argue that it was Android's pricing that pushed them out of the market. Microsoft might have a argument as far as pricing and cost competitiveness, but I figure that any move by Microsoft to push Google on anti-trust grounds wound be a public relations disaster.
So yes, I think Google might be vulnerable on paper, but I just don't think anything will come of it since Apple and RIM are not in competition with Google, and it would be a PR nightmare for Microsoft.
I am in the Education market, which is even more likely to hold onto old equipment than most businesses. I spent the past 3 days working out a sane way to roll out OSX images. I am not a Mac guy, but we have around 100 Macs split between G4s, G5s, and Core 2s and OS's varying from 10.3 to 10.6. We have an x-serve in my rack that I use to manage the Macs, which it does admirably. With recent mac purchases I upgraded the x-serve to 10.6 server to better support the 10.6 clients. Apple's System Image Tool, which is intended to aid in cloning Macs, has always been a headache for me. Not only is it excusably slow, taking 2 to 5 hours to copy and prepare a single disk image, it also inexplicable fails to make working images for some machines. But, then I come to discover that the System Image Tool provided with 10.6 server will not clone any Mac system installs earlier than 10.6. I also used to be able to boot off an OSX install CD, take an image of the hard drive, upload it to the server, and run the System Image Tool to prepare that image. The new tool, requiring me to either find a way to shoehorn the mac desktops into the data closet, or use external drives to clone and sneaker-net back to the server. I believe that Apple broke functionality deliberately in order to make it harder to support older Macs.
After trying in vain for days to work around the issues, I stumbled on a freeware application, Deploy Studio, that does the job faster, better, and with less hassle.
Until Apple starts making real server hardware I can't believe they will make any headway into the market. Even a small-medium sized business wants reliability. A mac mini with a direct attached RAID array doesn't do that. The X-serve didn't do that either. I have an x-serve at work for managing my Macs. It doesn't have redundant power and it doesn't have integrated hardware raid. Small to medium sized businesses also like to conserve space. A 1U rack mount server plus storage array takes up less real estate than a Mac Mini on a desk. On the other hand, a call to Dell or HP for an engineered iSCSI SAN solution with server visualization, backup, and disaster recovery and does that and for a fraction of the cost of a fiber channel SAN. Sure the performance is not as good, but it's good enough for most businesses.
Actually not a math fail, but it is a little overestimated. Just looking at the low end Cisco stuff, and I'm sure the high-end gear has seem more improvement, according to the datasheets, a Catalyst 2900 series switch with 100Mbps ports (circa ~1998) has a total switching capacity of 1.6 Gbps. A more modern Catalyst 2960 (not the 2960S, which has 10Gbps uplink ports) can switch up to 32Gbps. The 2960S series can switch at up to 80Gbps. But it does depend on the particular data traffic. For a switch use to aggregate multiple endpoints to a single uplink, you are correct and it's only a 10x increase. But for a switch at the core of a network with multiple servers or routers attached, modern switches can move much more than 10x the data of yesteryear's switches.
The city of Chillicothe, Ohio did a study of their own intersections after installing traffic cameras. They found that it was more effective to reduce instances of red-light running dramatically by increasing the yellow time. They also concluded that with a sufficiently long red pause between the time the yellow turns red and the cross-traffic red turns green, you can all but eliminate t-bone collisions. That is basically free.
You can see the study PDF here (www.shortyellowlights.com/ChillicotheRLCStudy.pdf)
Not in practice. Satellite is impractical in many areas. It requires a clear view to the geostationary satellites. That means that as you go North (in the Northern hemisphere), those satellites get lower and lower on the horizon, making it harder to get a clear view. In Ohio, satellite TV is not an option for many people. It doesn't help that you have about 50-50 shot of getting an installer with a clue. Out of everyone I know who has satellite TV, about half of them either complain about it all the time, or they talk about how Dish Network (or Direct TV) was so unreliable but Direct TV (or Dish Network) is so much better. Well it's not the network, it's the installation. If the installer puts the dish where it's convenient to install, but not necessarily where there is a clear view of a satellite, your signal will be crappy and you will go back to cable. Sure, they could generally find a place on the property for the dish, but then it would not be a flat $99 installation fee. And in some cases the signal is fine, but then your neighbor's tree grows a couple more feet, and suddenly your signal is gone. In my case, I have a spot where I could put a dish on my property, but it is 50 feet from the house. I'm not going to trench my backyard to install a dish. Any other location would involve chopping down my Neighbor's multiple 100 year-old black walnut trees. That is not going to happen. In denser urban areas it's potentially worse because you can't cut down buildings. Also, most rental agreements I have signed forbid you from attaching a dish to the exterior of the house or building.
The trouble is, if you own a smart phone, no US carrier (besides T-Mobile) will let you use it without paying for the exorbitant data plan.
I have a smart phone, but I don't need a data plan. So, I bought a Nexus One upfront and I joined it to my parents' T-Mobile account for 5 bucks per month, to get voice service only. If AT&T is allowed to go through with their buyout, they will charge me more per month for my voice service and make me pay for data. I expect to see my monthly fees quintuple. So, depending on how the numbers look and what is possible, I expect to be either ditching AT&T for a prepaid SIM card, or removing service from my smart phone and start carrying two phones.
If they intentionally changed Fairplay for only the purpose of breaking RealPlayer's reverse engineering, then that was an anti-competitive act. This is not much different than MS releasing a version of DOS that prevented Lotus 1-2-3 from running, an act they were accused of several times.
Apple had and has an overwhelming majority of the MP3 player and legal music download market. This has been an advantage to Apple when negotiating deals with copyright holders. They also used Fairplay in a way that locked iPods to iTunes. Jobs even used to comment about how attractive their copyright protection scheme was to copyright holders (and then Apple would advise people to burn-rip-play to bypass the protections). Apple also steadfastly refused to license other music players or music stores for Fairplay. There was just the one exception with the Motorola Rokr phone. And to my knowledge, it was not possible for a person to install a plugin in their iPod to enable any other DRM scheme.
If Apple is found to have used their vertical integration to keep others out of the legal music download business, they then they should reap the consequences.
Objection...
KHHHHHHAAAAAANNNNN!!!!! was not Klingon. Whether the product of genetic engineering or selective breeding, he was, in fact, a human being.
Because there is no peering agreement between Netfilix and anyone else. Peering agreements happen between backbone providers. Backbone providers offer to exchange data at private peering points, places where their networks intersect, and carry data for each other. Money flows this way and that depending on which way the traffic is moving through the peering point. Without these private peering points, most internet traffic would pass through one of a handful of public data exchanges, which are natural choke points. ISP's, like Comcast, buy bandwidth from national backbone providers, just like you or I would from an ISP.
Netfix, presumably, pays many ISPs, and possibly one or more backbone providers, for bandwidth. These ISP's and backbone providers are getting paid. But now, cable ISP's, like Comcast and possibly AT&T, are trying to extort Internet based content providers for access to their customers. They see the money services like Netflix and Hulu are raking in, and they recognize that people who use those services are cutting off or reducing their cable TV packages. They want a cut of this money. Recently, Comcast tried to do this by claiming they had a peering agreement with their backbone provider. But this was a load of malarkey, because that is traffic their ISP customers requested, who pay Comcast for that service.
Now, AT&T is in a bit of a unique situation because they do operate an Internet backbone, and may have peering agreements that come into play. But considering the caps, 150GB and 250GB, it looks like they are really just going after the heavy filesharing crowd. And that is a time honored business strategy. There are usually a set of customers who cost a business more money to support than they pay the company for services. I don't know what that limit is for AT&T, but it is entirely reasonable to put some limit of services in a contract, and these caps are not egregious.
I feel Apple is backsliding in this case. There was a time when Macs were designed for ease of maintenance. On the shelf in my office is an iMac G5 where I back off 3 captive screws and the back lifts right out. At that point the motherboard is exposed, the power supply is self contained and modular, it just takes a couple more screws to get out the hard drive, optical drive, cooling fans, etc. I remember a couple of G4 laptops that were almost as easy to service. The G3, 4, and 5 towers opened with a lever and the whole motherboard folded out.
On the other hand. I have some more recent Core 2 Duo iMacs that look almost identical to the G5 and I have to replace the hard drives on about half a dozen of them. On those I have to remove 2 phillips head screws, 4 torx screws (one is longer than the other 3), use 2 strong magnets to release hidden latches, and bend some polycarbonate to get the front off. Then I have to peel up adhesively attached EMI shielding from around the perimeter of the screen (Could someone please explain to me Apple's obsession with excessive EMI shielding), remove 4 recessed torx screws to release the LCD screen (and my magnetic screwdiver with modular torx bits won't fit in the recesses). One that is done, I have to disconnect 2 other connections to the screen, one cable requires a tiny size T1 or T2 torx bit, and then I can lift it out and access the drives, powersupply, and motherboard. The hard drive is pretty easy to take out, but it has an externally attached temperature sensor that uses an adhesive pad that is not reusable. Then there is the matter of the power supply, which comes in 2 pieces, has 2 or 3 separate connections, and has all exposed circuitry. I once shorted out a powersupply capacitor in an old unibody PowerPC Mac and it welded my screwdriver to the computer. So as you can imagine, I am not a fan of exposed powersupply components.
If I didn't know better, I'd think that when Apple switched to Intel processors, they made it harder to work on the computers on purpose.
Look at the map and highlight all of the wired connections technologies, then look at the state of Indiana. The reported consistency of broadband coverage is amazing. Indiana is not that well populated. California, The San Francisco area in particular, looks dramatically under-served for the population density. The Flagstaff, Arizona area looks pretty well over-served for the population.
You could include wireless connection technologies, but the cost for wireless data service is so much greater than wired that I don't consider it a viable option.
This map is reporting the ISPs' advertised rates. I eventually got the site to load up my address. It is a load of baloney. Time Warner is claiming 10 to 25 MB, which may be accurate. But I tried their service for a month last Fall and the service was frequently down for hours or days at a time. Windstream is claiming 6 to 10Mb for my address, and I use theme currently. I was signed up for 3Mb from them, but it turns out I am too far from the CO to support that speed. I had to reduce to 1.5Mb for reliability.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that I'm not the only one living in an area where these claimed data rates are marketing fabrications.
I'm basically a one-man IT shop. Over the years I have purchased a lot of Dells. Mostly they have been Optiplex or Latitudes. And, I always bought the 5 year next-day hardware support. We tend to hold on to desktops around here for 8 to 10 years. No, I'm not kidding. I still have a few PII, Win2k based desktops on the network. While the support contracts are alive I have never had a problem getting Dell to send out a technician with a part the next day. And once the support contracts are up, because Dell sells so many of a model I have no problems finding replacement laptop parts for my aging fleet.
I've never experienced their software support services, and I've heard nothing good about consumer level support. The one time we bought the Dell Dimension desktops was a fiasco. They were only warrantied for 3 years and every one had a hard drive failure before they were 5 years old. Yes I called Dell about it, and no they did not agree to replace the obviously defective hard drives. But, I know I can roll out a fleet of Optiplex desktops or Latitude laptops very quickly with few problems, and I can guarantee they will be running for 5 years, minimum. Sure, some aspects of dealing with Dell can be a pain, but I know exactly what I'm going to get. Every other brand I've dealt with have caused new and unique headaches, and when buying a fleet of machines Dell really knows how to apply discounts, so the prices are good too.
If the rumor is true, I think it would be more like a move towards IBM's business model. With AMD under the Dell umbrella, Dell could make a major play into big iron.
Probable cause is relevant to the suspected crime. If they arrest me in suspicion of an assault that doesn't mean they have probable cause to search my phone for child porn. Because the two crimes are not related and I can't use dirty pictures as a deadly weapon, they should not have the right to search my phone. Even with a search warrant there are supposed to be limitations. If the police are searching my house for a kidnapping victim, they don't have the right to search my dresser drawers for drug paraphernalia.
At least, that's how my high school government teacher explained it in 1993. It looks like the California Supreme Court disagrees. At least in this one case it looks like my state got it right.
Dogs present a couple of problems. Dogs get tired. They would have to have a lot of dogs to rotate on and off duty throughout the day. You also can't just train any dog for bomb sniffing. Most dogs don't have the obsessive personalities required to be a working animal. Dogs without this sort of personality loose interest too quickly. You also have to have a dog that is intelligent enough to learn all the scents for various explosives. Many dogs that do finish work training are never good enough or consistent enough to go on the job. It just might not be possible to train enough dogs to staff every TSA checkpoint.
This will be nothing more than a toy communications protocol or a very niche market for manufacturing or retail outfits that can use a low bandwidth, unreliable, wireless, non-radio communications protocol. It could be really helpful in places with lots of RF interference that precludes the use of the wireless 802.11 protocols. But even if they do address the bandwidth, I can't see how this could be much more reliable than the existing IR or laser based networking products.
Bandwith-wise, this has the same problems as wireless. Wireless communications (aside from lasers or directional microwaves) are by necessity a shared transmission medium. With 802.11b/g (2.4 GHz) you can only colocate 3 access points without them starting to interfere with each other. 802.11a (5 GHz) is better. It allows 4 access points before they impede on each other, but it's also more expensive. That may be fine for some cubical farms, but for most, sharing 33 Mb (802.11b), 162 Mb (802.11g), or 216 Mb (802.11a) of bandwidth is unworkable. Only 802.11n is potentially usable in this sort of situation with a maximum of 600 Mb per access point. These numbers are all theoretical, of course, so real world conditions will reduce throughput significantly. With a white-light based technology you wouldn't probably even have the option of co-locating 3 or 4 transponders. Wired Ethernet does not have this problem, which is why we use it for dense computing environments, like computer labs and cubical farms.
I also think you also misrepresent the costs of a wired installation. At 200 to 400 per drop, your number are probably pretty accurate for a new installation. 10,000 empoyees x $400 = 4 million bucks. But even if these drops only last 3 years, it averages to only around 1.3 million per year in rewiring. However, when reconfiguring a network it is not necessarily required to pull new wire. Wires can be relocated as long as the new location is not farther from the wiring closet. If the original installers were smart, they would also have left some extra wire spooled up just in case of a move. If all that is needed is moving a drop 5 feet to the right, the wire can probably accommodate it, and that will cost far less than pulling new wire. A 12 foot patch cable and some wire management can also mean drops don't have to be relocated. Our hypothetical Fortune 500 will spend far short of tens of millions per year on rewiring. And since you mentioned the trienniel cubical reconfiguration, don't ignore the trienniel desktop refresh. 802.11cards don't come standard in desktops. Dell charges about 50 bucks to add an 802.11b/g wireless card. That's an extra half a million dollars every three years when you refresh desktops for your 10,000 cubical dwellers
OK, so I know my back-of-the-envelope calculations are not exactly accurate either, and I've left out more detail than I included. But every time I hear someone say how much cheaper it is to go wireless, I just have to point out the flaws in the scheme.
That's all well and good until the visible spectrum gets overloaded with competing and incompatible communications protocols. The way out of this mess is for upcoming 802.11 wireless protocols to get their own piece of spectrum.
Maybe. It depends on if Hulu and ESPN and NBC, etc pay Comcast's entry fees. If other content providers pay for content mirrors for Comcast subscribers or just pay Comcast for better throughput, Netflix will look like the crappy one.
I think the 1:5 ration is more because of their customer base. Cable Internet is mostly a technology for private homes. Some businesses use them for Internet access as well, but I doubt they deliver a lot of content to the public over Comcast's network. After having seen the Rube Goldbergian solution my local cable company calls a business class solution, I can't see how any business could deliver content to the public using it.
I'm not really well versed with the intricacies of DOCSIS, but when I asked my local cable Internet provider, they could not provide anything faster than 2.0 MB. They said it was due to limitations in DOCSIS. Any faster upload speed would require them to upgrade their cable network, or else I could have had them run fiber out to my location. That was absurdly expensive. They quoted me 17.5 k about 4 years ago, just to install the fiber. I should hope prices went down, but it's hard to say with these yahoos.
On a related note, after 30 translations the equally dubious phrase "My girlfriend is trilingual and is a professional translator." becomes "My friend is translated into three languages.". Spooky, no?
Unfortunately, the US is not most places. Some US vendors will refuse provide service to smart phones that don't have data plans. AT&T will start charging you for a data plan if they even detect that your SIM card is installed in a smartphone.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the anti-competitive tricks Standard Oil used was predatory pricing. They would set up shop in a town and sell gas at or below cost, driving any other gas stations out of business. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing And yes, Microsoft was guilty of this as well by giving IE away for free and destroying Netscape's source of revenue.
There might be a leg to stand on in this case against Google. Does Google actually make any money off Android after all the money they invested in it?
On the other hand, what competition does Android even have as a licensed product? Apple does not license iOS. RIM does not license Blackberry OS. Nokia is more or less abandoning Symbian in the face of competiton and moving to Windows Phone 7. I don't think HP licenses WebOS, although they probably would given a chance. PalmOS faltered before Android hit the market, as I recall.
So by my count, only Microsoft, Nokia, or HP might have grounds to fight Google on the basis that they are giving away a product that undermines their positions in the mobile OS market. HP could argue that Android being free is preventing them from licensing WebOS to other tablet makers. Nokia might be able to argue that Android's pricing (or lack thereof) was making it cost prohibitive to continue maintaining and licensing Symbian. But then, Nokia was really late to the smartphone market space and I don't think they ever put forth a real effort. I think that would make it hard for them to argue that it was Android's pricing that pushed them out of the market. Microsoft might have a argument as far as pricing and cost competitiveness, but I figure that any move by Microsoft to push Google on anti-trust grounds wound be a public relations disaster.
So yes, I think Google might be vulnerable on paper, but I just don't think anything will come of it since Apple and RIM are not in competition with Google, and it would be a PR nightmare for Microsoft.
Case in point
I am in the Education market, which is even more likely to hold onto old equipment than most businesses. I spent the past 3 days working out a sane way to roll out OSX images. I am not a Mac guy, but we have around 100 Macs split between G4s, G5s, and Core 2s and OS's varying from 10.3 to 10.6. We have an x-serve in my rack that I use to manage the Macs, which it does admirably. With recent mac purchases I upgraded the x-serve to 10.6 server to better support the 10.6 clients. Apple's System Image Tool, which is intended to aid in cloning Macs, has always been a headache for me. Not only is it excusably slow, taking 2 to 5 hours to copy and prepare a single disk image, it also inexplicable fails to make working images for some machines. But, then I come to discover that the System Image Tool provided with 10.6 server will not clone any Mac system installs earlier than 10.6. I also used to be able to boot off an OSX install CD, take an image of the hard drive, upload it to the server, and run the System Image Tool to prepare that image. The new tool, requiring me to either find a way to shoehorn the mac desktops into the data closet, or use external drives to clone and sneaker-net back to the server. I believe that Apple broke functionality deliberately in order to make it harder to support older Macs.
After trying in vain for days to work around the issues, I stumbled on a freeware application, Deploy Studio, that does the job faster, better, and with less hassle.
Look, I came here for an argument!
No, no...this is abuse! (bloody twit)
Until Apple starts making real server hardware I can't believe they will make any headway into the market. Even a small-medium sized business wants reliability. A mac mini with a direct attached RAID array doesn't do that. The X-serve didn't do that either. I have an x-serve at work for managing my Macs. It doesn't have redundant power and it doesn't have integrated hardware raid. Small to medium sized businesses also like to conserve space. A 1U rack mount server plus storage array takes up less real estate than a Mac Mini on a desk. On the other hand, a call to Dell or HP for an engineered iSCSI SAN solution with server visualization, backup, and disaster recovery and does that and for a fraction of the cost of a fiber channel SAN. Sure the performance is not as good, but it's good enough for most businesses.
Actually not a math fail, but it is a little overestimated. Just looking at the low end Cisco stuff, and I'm sure the high-end gear has seem more improvement, according to the datasheets, a Catalyst 2900 series switch with 100Mbps ports (circa ~1998) has a total switching capacity of 1.6 Gbps. A more modern Catalyst 2960 (not the 2960S, which has 10Gbps uplink ports) can switch up to 32Gbps. The 2960S series can switch at up to 80Gbps. But it does depend on the particular data traffic. For a switch use to aggregate multiple endpoints to a single uplink, you are correct and it's only a 10x increase. But for a switch at the core of a network with multiple servers or routers attached, modern switches can move much more than 10x the data of yesteryear's switches.
The city of Chillicothe, Ohio did a study of their own intersections after installing traffic cameras. They found that it was more effective to reduce instances of red-light running dramatically by increasing the yellow time. They also concluded that with a sufficiently long red pause between the time the yellow turns red and the cross-traffic red turns green, you can all but eliminate t-bone collisions. That is basically free.
You can see the study PDF here (www.shortyellowlights.com/ChillicotheRLCStudy.pdf)
Not in practice. Satellite is impractical in many areas. It requires a clear view to the geostationary satellites. That means that as you go North (in the Northern hemisphere), those satellites get lower and lower on the horizon, making it harder to get a clear view. In Ohio, satellite TV is not an option for many people. It doesn't help that you have about 50-50 shot of getting an installer with a clue. Out of everyone I know who has satellite TV, about half of them either complain about it all the time, or they talk about how Dish Network (or Direct TV) was so unreliable but Direct TV (or Dish Network) is so much better. Well it's not the network, it's the installation. If the installer puts the dish where it's convenient to install, but not necessarily where there is a clear view of a satellite, your signal will be crappy and you will go back to cable. Sure, they could generally find a place on the property for the dish, but then it would not be a flat $99 installation fee. And in some cases the signal is fine, but then your neighbor's tree grows a couple more feet, and suddenly your signal is gone. In my case, I have a spot where I could put a dish on my property, but it is 50 feet from the house. I'm not going to trench my backyard to install a dish. Any other location would involve chopping down my Neighbor's multiple 100 year-old black walnut trees. That is not going to happen. In denser urban areas it's potentially worse because you can't cut down buildings. Also, most rental agreements I have signed forbid you from attaching a dish to the exterior of the house or building.
The trouble is, if you own a smart phone, no US carrier (besides T-Mobile) will let you use it without paying for the exorbitant data plan.
I have a smart phone, but I don't need a data plan. So, I bought a Nexus One upfront and I joined it to my parents' T-Mobile account for 5 bucks per month, to get voice service only. If AT&T is allowed to go through with their buyout, they will charge me more per month for my voice service and make me pay for data. I expect to see my monthly fees quintuple. So, depending on how the numbers look and what is possible, I expect to be either ditching AT&T for a prepaid SIM card, or removing service from my smart phone and start carrying two phones.
If they intentionally changed Fairplay for only the purpose of breaking RealPlayer's reverse engineering, then that was an anti-competitive act. This is not much different than MS releasing a version of DOS that prevented Lotus 1-2-3 from running, an act they were accused of several times.
Apple had and has an overwhelming majority of the MP3 player and legal music download market. This has been an advantage to Apple when negotiating deals with copyright holders. They also used Fairplay in a way that locked iPods to iTunes. Jobs even used to comment about how attractive their copyright protection scheme was to copyright holders (and then Apple would advise people to burn-rip-play to bypass the protections). Apple also steadfastly refused to license other music players or music stores for Fairplay. There was just the one exception with the Motorola Rokr phone. And to my knowledge, it was not possible for a person to install a plugin in their iPod to enable any other DRM scheme.
If Apple is found to have used their vertical integration to keep others out of the legal music download business, they then they should reap the consequences.
Objection... KHHHHHHAAAAAANNNNN!!!!! was not Klingon. Whether the product of genetic engineering or selective breeding, he was, in fact, a human being.
Because there is no peering agreement between Netfilix and anyone else. Peering agreements happen between backbone providers. Backbone providers offer to exchange data at private peering points, places where their networks intersect, and carry data for each other. Money flows this way and that depending on which way the traffic is moving through the peering point. Without these private peering points, most internet traffic would pass through one of a handful of public data exchanges, which are natural choke points. ISP's, like Comcast, buy bandwidth from national backbone providers, just like you or I would from an ISP.
Netfix, presumably, pays many ISPs, and possibly one or more backbone providers, for bandwidth. These ISP's and backbone providers are getting paid. But now, cable ISP's, like Comcast and possibly AT&T, are trying to extort Internet based content providers for access to their customers. They see the money services like Netflix and Hulu are raking in, and they recognize that people who use those services are cutting off or reducing their cable TV packages. They want a cut of this money. Recently, Comcast tried to do this by claiming they had a peering agreement with their backbone provider. But this was a load of malarkey, because that is traffic their ISP customers requested, who pay Comcast for that service.
Now, AT&T is in a bit of a unique situation because they do operate an Internet backbone, and may have peering agreements that come into play. But considering the caps, 150GB and 250GB, it looks like they are really just going after the heavy filesharing crowd. And that is a time honored business strategy. There are usually a set of customers who cost a business more money to support than they pay the company for services. I don't know what that limit is for AT&T, but it is entirely reasonable to put some limit of services in a contract, and these caps are not egregious.
I feel Apple is backsliding in this case. There was a time when Macs were designed for ease of maintenance. On the shelf in my office is an iMac G5 where I back off 3 captive screws and the back lifts right out. At that point the motherboard is exposed, the power supply is self contained and modular, it just takes a couple more screws to get out the hard drive, optical drive, cooling fans, etc. I remember a couple of G4 laptops that were almost as easy to service. The G3, 4, and 5 towers opened with a lever and the whole motherboard folded out.
On the other hand. I have some more recent Core 2 Duo iMacs that look almost identical to the G5 and I have to replace the hard drives on about half a dozen of them. On those I have to remove 2 phillips head screws, 4 torx screws (one is longer than the other 3), use 2 strong magnets to release hidden latches, and bend some polycarbonate to get the front off. Then I have to peel up adhesively attached EMI shielding from around the perimeter of the screen (Could someone please explain to me Apple's obsession with excessive EMI shielding), remove 4 recessed torx screws to release the LCD screen (and my magnetic screwdiver with modular torx bits won't fit in the recesses). One that is done, I have to disconnect 2 other connections to the screen, one cable requires a tiny size T1 or T2 torx bit, and then I can lift it out and access the drives, powersupply, and motherboard. The hard drive is pretty easy to take out, but it has an externally attached temperature sensor that uses an adhesive pad that is not reusable. Then there is the matter of the power supply, which comes in 2 pieces, has 2 or 3 separate connections, and has all exposed circuitry. I once shorted out a powersupply capacitor in an old unibody PowerPC Mac and it welded my screwdriver to the computer. So as you can imagine, I am not a fan of exposed powersupply components.
If I didn't know better, I'd think that when Apple switched to Intel processors, they made it harder to work on the computers on purpose.
Look at the map and highlight all of the wired connections technologies, then look at the state of Indiana. The reported consistency of broadband coverage is amazing. Indiana is not that well populated. California, The San Francisco area in particular, looks dramatically under-served for the population density. The Flagstaff, Arizona area looks pretty well over-served for the population.
You could include wireless connection technologies, but the cost for wireless data service is so much greater than wired that I don't consider it a viable option.
This map is reporting the ISPs' advertised rates. I eventually got the site to load up my address. It is a load of baloney. Time Warner is claiming 10 to 25 MB, which may be accurate. But I tried their service for a month last Fall and the service was frequently down for hours or days at a time. Windstream is claiming 6 to 10Mb for my address, and I use theme currently. I was signed up for 3Mb from them, but it turns out I am too far from the CO to support that speed. I had to reduce to 1.5Mb for reliability.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that I'm not the only one living in an area where these claimed data rates are marketing fabrications.
I want to know absolutely everything that's happened up till now.
How about a small school?
I'm basically a one-man IT shop. Over the years I have purchased a lot of Dells. Mostly they have been Optiplex or Latitudes. And, I always bought the 5 year next-day hardware support. We tend to hold on to desktops around here for 8 to 10 years. No, I'm not kidding. I still have a few PII, Win2k based desktops on the network. While the support contracts are alive I have never had a problem getting Dell to send out a technician with a part the next day. And once the support contracts are up, because Dell sells so many of a model I have no problems finding replacement laptop parts for my aging fleet.
I've never experienced their software support services, and I've heard nothing good about consumer level support. The one time we bought the Dell Dimension desktops was a fiasco. They were only warrantied for 3 years and every one had a hard drive failure before they were 5 years old. Yes I called Dell about it, and no they did not agree to replace the obviously defective hard drives. But, I know I can roll out a fleet of Optiplex desktops or Latitude laptops very quickly with few problems, and I can guarantee they will be running for 5 years, minimum. Sure, some aspects of dealing with Dell can be a pain, but I know exactly what I'm going to get. Every other brand I've dealt with have caused new and unique headaches, and when buying a fleet of machines Dell really knows how to apply discounts, so the prices are good too.
If the rumor is true, I think it would be more like a move towards IBM's business model. With AMD under the Dell umbrella, Dell could make a major play into big iron.
Probable cause is relevant to the suspected crime. If they arrest me in suspicion of an assault that doesn't mean they have probable cause to search my phone for child porn. Because the two crimes are not related and I can't use dirty pictures as a deadly weapon, they should not have the right to search my phone. Even with a search warrant there are supposed to be limitations. If the police are searching my house for a kidnapping victim, they don't have the right to search my dresser drawers for drug paraphernalia.
At least, that's how my high school government teacher explained it in 1993. It looks like the California Supreme Court disagrees. At least in this one case it looks like my state got it right.
Dogs present a couple of problems. Dogs get tired. They would have to have a lot of dogs to rotate on and off duty throughout the day. You also can't just train any dog for bomb sniffing. Most dogs don't have the obsessive personalities required to be a working animal. Dogs without this sort of personality loose interest too quickly. You also have to have a dog that is intelligent enough to learn all the scents for various explosives. Many dogs that do finish work training are never good enough or consistent enough to go on the job. It just might not be possible to train enough dogs to staff every TSA checkpoint.
This will be nothing more than a toy communications protocol or a very niche market for manufacturing or retail outfits that can use a low bandwidth, unreliable, wireless, non-radio communications protocol. It could be really helpful in places with lots of RF interference that precludes the use of the wireless 802.11 protocols. But even if they do address the bandwidth, I can't see how this could be much more reliable than the existing IR or laser based networking products.
Bandwith-wise, this has the same problems as wireless. Wireless communications (aside from lasers or directional microwaves) are by necessity a shared transmission medium. With 802.11b/g (2.4 GHz) you can only colocate 3 access points without them starting to interfere with each other. 802.11a (5 GHz) is better. It allows 4 access points before they impede on each other, but it's also more expensive. That may be fine for some cubical farms, but for most, sharing 33 Mb (802.11b), 162 Mb (802.11g), or 216 Mb (802.11a) of bandwidth is unworkable. Only 802.11n is potentially usable in this sort of situation with a maximum of 600 Mb per access point. These numbers are all theoretical, of course, so real world conditions will reduce throughput significantly. With a white-light based technology you wouldn't probably even have the option of co-locating 3 or 4 transponders. Wired Ethernet does not have this problem, which is why we use it for dense computing environments, like computer labs and cubical farms.
I also think you also misrepresent the costs of a wired installation. At 200 to 400 per drop, your number are probably pretty accurate for a new installation. 10,000 empoyees x $400 = 4 million bucks. But even if these drops only last 3 years, it averages to only around 1.3 million per year in rewiring. However, when reconfiguring a network it is not necessarily required to pull new wire. Wires can be relocated as long as the new location is not farther from the wiring closet. If the original installers were smart, they would also have left some extra wire spooled up just in case of a move. If all that is needed is moving a drop 5 feet to the right, the wire can probably accommodate it, and that will cost far less than pulling new wire. A 12 foot patch cable and some wire management can also mean drops don't have to be relocated. Our hypothetical Fortune 500 will spend far short of tens of millions per year on rewiring. And since you mentioned the trienniel cubical reconfiguration, don't ignore the trienniel desktop refresh. 802.11cards don't come standard in desktops. Dell charges about 50 bucks to add an 802.11b/g wireless card. That's an extra half a million dollars every three years when you refresh desktops for your 10,000 cubical dwellers
OK, so I know my back-of-the-envelope calculations are not exactly accurate either, and I've left out more detail than I included. But every time I hear someone say how much cheaper it is to go wireless, I just have to point out the flaws in the scheme.
That's all well and good until the visible spectrum gets overloaded with competing and incompatible communications protocols. The way out of this mess is for upcoming 802.11 wireless protocols to get their own piece of spectrum.
Maybe. It depends on if Hulu and ESPN and NBC, etc pay Comcast's entry fees. If other content providers pay for content mirrors for Comcast subscribers or just pay Comcast for better throughput, Netflix will look like the crappy one.
I think the 1:5 ration is more because of their customer base. Cable Internet is mostly a technology for private homes. Some businesses use them for Internet access as well, but I doubt they deliver a lot of content to the public over Comcast's network. After having seen the Rube Goldbergian solution my local cable company calls a business class solution, I can't see how any business could deliver content to the public using it.
I'm not really well versed with the intricacies of DOCSIS, but when I asked my local cable Internet provider, they could not provide anything faster than 2.0 MB. They said it was due to limitations in DOCSIS. Any faster upload speed would require them to upgrade their cable network, or else I could have had them run fiber out to my location. That was absurdly expensive. They quoted me 17.5 k about 4 years ago, just to install the fiber. I should hope prices went down, but it's hard to say with these yahoos.
On a related note, after 30 translations the equally dubious phrase "My girlfriend is trilingual and is a professional translator." becomes "My friend is translated into three languages.". Spooky, no?
Unfortunately, the US is not most places. Some US vendors will refuse provide service to smart phones that don't have data plans. AT&T will start charging you for a data plan if they even detect that your SIM card is installed in a smartphone.