What technical limitations do you think prevents roaming partners from sharing their billing information (even if solely for fraud detection purposes!) in real-time?
Enormous, incompatible, byzantine billing systems. The fact that it's possible to design instant billing systems doesn't mean it's economic or even feasible to upgrade every existing billing system and renegotiate all the contracts.
I suspect it's probably because cable is inherently contended. With DSL you have dedicated copper to the exchange so can have as little or as much contention as you like, but with cable the loop is shared before it hits any telco kit so there is a lower limit on the level of contention.
As for "fair", a 40 GB cap would only affect the very heaviest of users, so from that perspective it is fair. That cap is in the ballpark of caps on many standard UK ISP accounts and relatively few people pay the extra for the higher caps (a lot more pay less for lower caps), so 40 GB does seem adequate for the majority. As a single data-point, 40 GB would be more than double what my household (3 people, 4 computers, one server, one PS3, all used more or less daily) have ever used in a month, so would be adequate even if we added an hour a day of DVD-quality streaming video to our current usage.
What really gives me the horn isn't the data, it's the fact that I can physically move hard drive heads on the other side of the planet in a fraction of a second. Somehow knowing I caused a little metal arm to twitch is much more exciting than turning a few transistors and lasers on and off.
Furthermore, it does not cost the ISP any more for me to use x gb over y gb. The pipe costs x$ regardless of its use.
Right up until that pipe is full and they need to buy a bigger one. If 95% of people fit down one pipe and you need another identical pipe for the other 5% are you honestly trying to convince yourself that it's costing the same to supply each group of customers?
Is that DHTML frontend the default now? I unticked the box to test the new discussion system a long, long time ago and have never seen it since. Poke about in the preferences, the "good" (unless there's more than 6 levels of nesting) old system is still available. You can subscribe to get rid of the ads too, I used to when I was using my 7" Eee a lot and needed the screen real-estate (way better than adblock, because the pages don't have gaps or an odd layout and you're not being anti-social). $0.005 per page isn't very expensive.
Of course they have enough bandwidth to fulfil their contracts, because their contracts say the service is contended. Thus, when the system is busy and slows down they aren't in breach of contract. If you think every customer with a 5 Mbps line has a dedicated 5 Mbps to the ISP's peering points, or ever will, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.
I'd love to have an ISP that could do something like the following:
1. My hardware identifies traffic streams as 'Interactive', 'Download', and 'Bulk Download'. 'Interactive' is the obvious ssh, rdp, etc traffic. 'Download' is for stuff I want sooner rather than later, 'Bulk Download' is for stuff that I don't necessarily want so fast (eg torrents).
2. I get 'Interactive' traffic at full speed for the first 10MBytes and then at a much lower speed after that, eg a Token Bucket Filter. The 'much lower speed' is to stop customers just classifying their p2p data as 'Interactive', but the initial 10Mbyte bucket ensures that you'll never hit it otherwise.
3. I get 'Download' traffic at full speed (lower than interactive though) for the first (say) 200MBytes and then at a lower speed after that. I'm not sure how well TBF's scale up to the bucket being 1GByte though...
4. I get 'Bulk Download' traffic at whatever is left over after other customers 'Interactive' and 'Download' traffic is taken into account, up to my monthly download limit (eg 20G or whatever)
5. Wankers tag their bittorrent traffic as interactive, the net result being the people taking an unfair share at the moment get an even larger, even more unfair share.
Now if all customers started demanding what they actually paid for the system breaks down. I would call that a flawed system.
First, you didn't pay for an uncontended, unlimited service so you shouldn't be surprised if that's not what you get. You can get uncontended, unlimited services but they cost a lot more than consumer broadband. Second, almost every other service or utility you pay for is similarly "flawed" - electricity, roads, even you bank can't pay out everyone's deposits at once. Yet strangely enough we don't have blackouts, gridlock and runs on banks every day.
Ultimately, my point is, and I think the one of the person who started this chain, is that charging by bit or byte is fine, but then the onus is on the ISP to make it very clear both what my costs and usage are. If they did that, then it would be easier for us to adjust to that new model.
Most UK ISPs are limited now and they do provide web pages to check your usage and emails giving you warning as you approach your limit (mine trigger at 50% 75% and 90% IIRC). Better ones also allow unlimited off-peak and allow you to carry over or borrow against the previous/next months allowance.
I use 10-20 GB a month (2 desktops, 2 laptops, one server, one PS3). My dad never uses more than 1 GB a month. He pays less than the old unlimited packages and I pay about the same. People who use hundreds of GB per month pay more.
Theres nothing like an odometer to measure you're overall useage of bandwidth.
Really? So what are the data sent and data received numbers on one of the configuration pages of my router telling me? What is my ISP's bandwidth usage page telling me? It's trivial to count up all the bytes in all the packets and every router I've ever had does exactly that.
These ISPs are SERIOUSLY overselling their network capacity to create an artificial scarcity.
Oh, stop trolling. They will sell you an uncontended service if you ask for it and, more importantly, pay more for it. They sell contended services because not everybody uses all their bandwidth at the same time, so it would be idiotic to have millions of dollars worth of connectivity which was never, ever used. Bandwidth costs money so it seems only fair that those who use it should pay for it. Why should I, as a modest bandwidth user, subsidise someone who saturates their connection 24/7?
If contention at your ISP is excessive, find a new one. If you only have a choice of one then write to your elected representatives to demand a free market, start your own competitive ISP (if the current ones are gouging you can sell better, cheaper services and still make a handsome profit, right?), or move somewhere with a more free market, as appropriate.
In case you didn't know, all your other utilities are contended too. If everyone in your city tried to call the next town it wouldn't work. If everyone with a cellphone tried to use it at once it wouldn't work. If everyone turned on all their gas or electrical appliances at once the distribution grids would go down under the load. If everyone tried to use their cars at once there would be gridlock. Do you think governments don't build one road per car to create artificial scarcity too?
Why did nobody do it before there was $10m on offer then? As soon as there was, people were queuing up. It may not be about the money, but you need the money so that if you win you are at least guaranteed not to have made a loss. You need the money so people take you seriously.
I didn't know about SAGE. Very interesting stuff, I'm glad you mentioned it. I love the fact that the terminal had a built-in cigarette lighter and ashtray.
I liked it and I too am a Mac user. I wonder if there's any correlation?
Not only did I like it, but it worked. I think of Bill Gates as less of a prick than I used to and by extension Microsoft as less of a prickish company than I used to. Not by a lot, and I'm technical enough that I generally choose my products on merit rather than gut feeling, but if their plan was to make Microsoft look like less of a faceless corporation the ad did its job.
Is Flash on MIPS your work? You seem unusually keen to defend it. I can't imagine any other reason why you'd go through such mental gymnastics to not merely attempt to justify its deficiencies, but claim they are in fact benefits.
Oh, get a grip. It appears in its own window because its an incomplete implementation, not because it's better that way. It cannot present web pages as they are designed; that's not a feature, it's a deficiency. It's worse because it's not what was intended when the pages were designed and it's not what users have come to expect.
I thought it was the other way round - dumbed-down adverts only convey information, because subtlety requires brains. UK advertising is full of meaningless adverts, but I wouldn't call them dumbed-down. They're just advertising types wanking off. Stuff like this.
I saw Doogie Howser MD dubbed into German. (This was a long time ago.) Doogie sounded like a 44-year-old baritone who smoked 60 a day. We all cracked up the moment he opened his mouth.
It's more like saying a car has six seats when four of them are on the roof. There are six seats, but you're not getting what you imagine when you think of a car with six seats.
Just because it will appear differently (it's own window), doesn't mean it won't do everything they want it to do.
What if they don't want it in its own window? What if they want it to appear in the web page as it does on their real computer, as the designer intended, as it should?
By "it won't be embedded" you mean "it won't appear within the page in the browser as it does in IE", yes? That is the normal way people use Flash (not that they typically know that's what they're doing), so if it doesn't do that it doesn't work for the normal case. If it doesn't do what IE/Firefox/Safari do, if it opens a new window or they have to go through some machinations to see it at all, as far as they're concerned it doesn't really work properly.
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Enormous, incompatible, byzantine billing systems. The fact that it's possible to design instant billing systems doesn't mean it's economic or even feasible to upgrade every existing billing system and renegotiate all the contracts.
I have to read the entire sentences before replying now? Holy crap, I though reading TFA was bad enough.
Uh, OK, guilty as charged.
I suspect it's probably because cable is inherently contended. With DSL you have dedicated copper to the exchange so can have as little or as much contention as you like, but with cable the loop is shared before it hits any telco kit so there is a lower limit on the level of contention.
As for "fair", a 40 GB cap would only affect the very heaviest of users, so from that perspective it is fair. That cap is in the ballpark of caps on many standard UK ISP accounts and relatively few people pay the extra for the higher caps (a lot more pay less for lower caps), so 40 GB does seem adequate for the majority. As a single data-point, 40 GB would be more than double what my household (3 people, 4 computers, one server, one PS3, all used more or less daily) have ever used in a month, so would be adequate even if we added an hour a day of DVD-quality streaming video to our current usage.
What really gives me the horn isn't the data, it's the fact that I can physically move hard drive heads on the other side of the planet in a fraction of a second. Somehow knowing I caused a little metal arm to twitch is much more exciting than turning a few transistors and lasers on and off.
Right up until that pipe is full and they need to buy a bigger one. If 95% of people fit down one pipe and you need another identical pipe for the other 5% are you honestly trying to convince yourself that it's costing the same to supply each group of customers?
Is that DHTML frontend the default now? I unticked the box to test the new discussion system a long, long time ago and have never seen it since. Poke about in the preferences, the "good" (unless there's more than 6 levels of nesting) old system is still available. You can subscribe to get rid of the ads too, I used to when I was using my 7" Eee a lot and needed the screen real-estate (way better than adblock, because the pages don't have gaps or an odd layout and you're not being anti-social). $0.005 per page isn't very expensive.
Of course they have enough bandwidth to fulfil their contracts, because their contracts say the service is contended. Thus, when the system is busy and slows down they aren't in breach of contract. If you think every customer with a 5 Mbps line has a dedicated 5 Mbps to the ISP's peering points, or ever will, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.
5. Wankers tag their bittorrent traffic as interactive, the net result being the people taking an unfair share at the moment get an even larger, even more unfair share.
First, you didn't pay for an uncontended, unlimited service so you shouldn't be surprised if that's not what you get. You can get uncontended, unlimited services but they cost a lot more than consumer broadband. Second, almost every other service or utility you pay for is similarly "flawed" - electricity, roads, even you bank can't pay out everyone's deposits at once. Yet strangely enough we don't have blackouts, gridlock and runs on banks every day.
Most UK ISPs are limited now and they do provide web pages to check your usage and emails giving you warning as you approach your limit (mine trigger at 50% 75% and 90% IIRC). Better ones also allow unlimited off-peak and allow you to carry over or borrow against the previous/next months allowance.
I use 10-20 GB a month (2 desktops, 2 laptops, one server, one PS3). My dad never uses more than 1 GB a month. He pays less than the old unlimited packages and I pay about the same. People who use hundreds of GB per month pay more.
Really? So what are the data sent and data received numbers on one of the configuration pages of my router telling me? What is my ISP's bandwidth usage page telling me? It's trivial to count up all the bytes in all the packets and every router I've ever had does exactly that.
Oh, stop trolling. They will sell you an uncontended service if you ask for it and, more importantly, pay more for it. They sell contended services because not everybody uses all their bandwidth at the same time, so it would be idiotic to have millions of dollars worth of connectivity which was never, ever used. Bandwidth costs money so it seems only fair that those who use it should pay for it. Why should I, as a modest bandwidth user, subsidise someone who saturates their connection 24/7?
If contention at your ISP is excessive, find a new one. If you only have a choice of one then write to your elected representatives to demand a free market, start your own competitive ISP (if the current ones are gouging you can sell better, cheaper services and still make a handsome profit, right?), or move somewhere with a more free market, as appropriate.
In case you didn't know, all your other utilities are contended too. If everyone in your city tried to call the next town it wouldn't work. If everyone with a cellphone tried to use it at once it wouldn't work. If everyone turned on all their gas or electrical appliances at once the distribution grids would go down under the load. If everyone tried to use their cars at once there would be gridlock. Do you think governments don't build one road per car to create artificial scarcity too?
Why did nobody do it before there was $10m on offer then? As soon as there was, people were queuing up. It may not be about the money, but you need the money so that if you win you are at least guaranteed not to have made a loss. You need the money so people take you seriously.
I didn't know about SAGE. Very interesting stuff, I'm glad you mentioned it. I love the fact that the terminal had a built-in cigarette lighter and ashtray.
I do wish TFS would make the distinction between software crashes and aircraft crashes.
I liked it and I too am a Mac user. I wonder if there's any correlation?
Not only did I like it, but it worked. I think of Bill Gates as less of a prick than I used to and by extension Microsoft as less of a prickish company than I used to. Not by a lot, and I'm technical enough that I generally choose my products on merit rather than gut feeling, but if their plan was to make Microsoft look like less of a faceless corporation the ad did its job.
Is Flash on MIPS your work? You seem unusually keen to defend it. I can't imagine any other reason why you'd go through such mental gymnastics to not merely attempt to justify its deficiencies, but claim they are in fact benefits.
Huh? The Mac ads targeted specific features. PC in a wheelchair to push the mag-safe adapter, PC with a cold to push the lack of viruses, etc.
Oh, get a grip. It appears in its own window because its an incomplete implementation, not because it's better that way. It cannot present web pages as they are designed; that's not a feature, it's a deficiency. It's worse because it's not what was intended when the pages were designed and it's not what users have come to expect.
Were you a used car salesman in a former life?
I thought it was the other way round - dumbed-down adverts only convey information, because subtlety requires brains. UK advertising is full of meaningless adverts, but I wouldn't call them dumbed-down. They're just advertising types wanking off. Stuff like this.
I saw Doogie Howser MD dubbed into German. (This was a long time ago.) Doogie sounded like a 44-year-old baritone who smoked 60 a day. We all cracked up the moment he opened his mouth.
It's more like saying a car has six seats when four of them are on the roof. There are six seats, but you're not getting what you imagine when you think of a car with six seats.
What if they don't want it in its own window? What if they want it to appear in the web page as it does on their real computer, as the designer intended, as it should?
By "it won't be embedded" you mean "it won't appear within the page in the browser as it does in IE", yes? That is the normal way people use Flash (not that they typically know that's what they're doing), so if it doesn't do that it doesn't work for the normal case. If it doesn't do what IE/Firefox/Safari do, if it opens a new window or they have to go through some machinations to see it at all, as far as they're concerned it doesn't really work properly.
It sounds like the "narrow" case applies to normal people using a web browser in the normal way. That doesn't sound very narrow to me.
The US economy consists of more than the Chinese debt and the goods it bought, dumbass.
You walk around with a 35lb backpack? Are you working up to training for SAS selection or something?