Unfortunately, ISPs have been successful by lobbying [payoffs] to keep from being classified as a common carrier. They like to enjoy some of the privilages, but are reluctant to "pay" for these privilages.
If a an ISP wants to extort from Google, Vonage,Yahoo, YouTube for not screwing with their traffic, I'd say let them. And as soon as they do, start holding them criminally liable for every gambling transaction, spam scam, phishing attack or kiddie porn transaction that originates, terminates or transits their network.
However, if they want to be immune from what others are doing on their network without their knowledge, they need to be transparent to the origin/destination/content type of data they are transmitting/receiving.
That was the most glaring ommision from the article. There were two photos of geeks standing around a projector and some other gear. It would have seemed a pretty obvious time for a demo. I guess it's possible the reported was using a film camera (unlikely ) or a digital SLR that's "immune". But an article with pictures about obscuring pictures that doesn't include a sample is pretty lame.
Could the the geeks have been so happy to get their faces on a web site they turned their device off?
I'm sure there are oil companies dying for someone of repute to go against the tide and say they aren't ruining the planet.
But they have to just sit and wait for someone else to fund the study. Any study funded by an oil company, or even a subsidiary twice removed from an oil company will be automatically bashed for being "bought" by said oil company.
It's a valid analogy. Content is also how it's being prioritized. ISPs have already been busted for messing with VOIP traffic. P2P traffic is routinely blocked or throttled. The original linked article said:
"Net neutrality, also called network neutrality, is the philosophy that network operators should not be allowed to prioritize content and services--particularly video--that come across their pipes."
The ISPs attempting to leech profits intend to do so based on content as well as origin/destination. Once they make decisions based on content they should be liable for all the content.
If they want to filter the traffic and charge based on the destination or content, I say let them.
However, if they do, they are now responsible for 100% of the illegal stuff that goes across their wires. Someone downloads kiddy porn? Arrest the CEO. Gambling? Arrest them. Drug purchases? Seize their assets. DDOS attack orginating or terminating on your network? You pay for lost time, damages, penalties.
When you're a transparent pipe it's resonable that you won't be liable for something you're not condoning or monitoring, like un-moderated bulletin boards. But if you want to filter the traffic so you can bill based on content or origin/destination you are no longer transparent. You are now liable for any bad stuff that you monitored and let go through.
It's as if a shipping company opened up every single package and was going to bill a higher price per pound for magazines than for books w/o pictures. If they were to see the magazines were kiddie porn, but since that was a higher profit shippment they put it back in the box and collect their fee. They'd sure as heck be criminally liable then.
Make this the rule for anyone who wants to filter, load level or restrict based on anything other than pure bandwidth or traffic from their customers. I think they'd learn very quickly that they have more to lose being responsible for every bit that they pass on than they'd evey gain by trying to extort Google. The email issues alone would make them crack. Make them responsible for every virus, phishing or other fraudulent email sent by someone or received by someone on their system. If they filter too harshly and cause someone to lose a vital message, hold them liable.
Don't let them claim transparency AND try to bill based on content or origin/destination.
Metricom was a real shame. I actually think the flood of money from Paul Allen is what killed them. Rather than struggle a while and go slow they went into an orgy of spending and growth and burned out quick.
I had Metricom from 1996-1999. It was only 28.8 at first, but in 1996 dialup was 28.8. At $40 a month it was less than the cost of dialup plus a 2nd phone line, so the mobile part was a bonus. It was unmetered and always on. In 1997 I could sit outside Starbucks and get work done, send/receive email, surf the web. The modem was a little bulky, but the battery lasted longer than my laptop's battery so it was usable.
This was before WiFi, before GPRS. And it worked. I beta tested the 128k stuff. It was faster than dialup when most people still didn't have cable or DSL. It was mobile and unmetered.
They blew the money, made bad business decisions. But the product I got from them worked as advertised. That's more than most of the dot-flops can say.
And now, MetroFi is putting wireless internet on light poles, just like Metricom
In Phoenix they have a schedule, and it changes with the seasons. The goal there seems to be to reduce peak comsumption, so it's tied to things like everyone coming home from work in the summer and turning on the AC.
A truly smart system would be one that was variable in realtime with communications out to the consumers. If peak consumption is threatening brownouts, raise the realtime rate a little so that systems know to turn off or run on batteries for a while.
When I lived in Phoenix and in Hunstville, AL, both places had time of day billing.
In Phoenix you can buy boxes that will make your appliances "smart" in an attempt to minimize the power you use during peak times. Kinda like a dishwasher you turn on when you go to work, but it comes on when the midday price drop occurs.
According to the article, time of use metering is going to be a requirement soon.
Just like building your own "Tivo", if these guys come up with a scheme that works, way too many people will just build their own. It sounds no different than a whole-building UPS.
At night when the rates drop, plug it in to charge. When the rates are high, unplug it. If unplugged during the day and running too low, beep so someone knows to either cut usage or plug it back in ( probably on bypass so you aren't consuming and charging at the same time during peak time )
The only tricky bits would be if in addition to time of day billing you were billed on a scale that increased if your peak consumption crossed a line. In that case you'd want to share the load between the UPS and the incoming power. But rather than doing something fancy to actually share the load you could probably just have a portion of your equipment running on the UPS and the rest on incoming power.
If your consumption was primarily with PCs, an integrated UPS/PC Power Supply might do the trick. Charge it at night, run directly off the battery ( no re-conversion to AC) during the day. Bascially a laptop with a really big battery that you only plug in when you leave the office at night.
If EchoStar's lawyers argued the case with lines like:
"I don't think 190,000 people would have bought this particular toy if they could have gotten it free from their cable company."
no wonder they lost. I think that was TiVo's point, free boxes from the cable companies ( if you want to call subsidized by higher cable rates "free") cost Tivo sales.
Similar to the post above this, I do a quick search and if I don't see the results I'm looking for I reformulate the query. If the first page doesn't have what you are looking for, and lower ranked pages are supposedly less useful, your problem is likely the query, not the results.
After serveral iterations of re-doing the query I'll then go deeper and deeper in the pages on the chance that what I'm looking for it more is more esoteric than what the top ranked pages contain.
Also like the previous post I'll often hop off to Wikipedia. Since often a Wikipedia link is included in the original search results I don't really expect to find the answer there, but it might have additional information to help me refine my search.
I thought the linked article was lacking in that it didn't seem to reference re-searching. It might just as well be true that people will reformat their queries until the results they want are in the first three pages. Why read 10 pages of summaries if adding an additional search term will bring a link from page 10 to page 1?
Since most navigation companies buy their map databases from someone else they'll have to pass the info on to their supplier and maybe make a tweak to their local copy. It might be as simple as classifying the road as "dirt" vs "county road" to keep it from being used as part of a route.
However, that will only fix things for the people who get the next version of the updated maps. Customers driving around with 4 year old maps in their built-in navigation systems will still be SOL.
So, as someone suggested, a sign is the best and quickest solution. Even the quickest response by all the various Nav system manufacturers and map data suppliers won't fix un-updated systems in the field.
If the analysts do predict, stock price will still fluctuate.
Uncertainty may cause volatility, and Wall Street *does* like volatility. When stock prices go up and down it's due to people buying and selling. Every broker and the exchange makes money on trades, not on stock value. More trades, more money for them.
While it is possible for a company can cause price changes in the stock, much of the smaller ups and downs are caused by the analysts or just plain herd instinct from investors that cause changes of cents in price to become changes in dollars.
Very often the reasons given for a stock going up or down after the release of a quarterly report is for how they did in relation to analysts expectations. If they fail to meet analysts expectations the stock is likely to go down, regardless if that quarter showed profitability or growth higher than the previous period. You never hear "Boy, the analysts blew it this time".
Google has an obiligation to their stockholders and the founders are stockholders. The obligation is to increase profits and increase the value of the company. Sucking up to analysts isn't a obligation.
Mine works fine when the power goes out, as does my WiFi router, cordless phone and TiVos. All are are on UPS's
I'd be willing to bet there are many, many people on POTS lines with only cordless phones of the type that require power ( some have battery backup ). All those people are screwed if the power goes out.
Given how many people have cell phones, I'd be most times power goes out people will reach for the cell without giving it a second thought. And with customers using VOIP and broadband I'd guess that the percentage with cell phones is pretty darn high.
Why, if you're concerned about bandwidth limitations would you encourage all your users to connect at once? Just like TiVo lets viewers watch at their leisure, podcasts let people download when they want to watch, not during some arbitrary time something interesting is happening.
Set up a video podcast. You may host it all that way, but it's not designed around having everyone sucking bandwidth at the same time. You'll want a delayed download option anyway so those who can't sit in front of the screen when something interesting is happening, so you might as well build around that. If it's a regular occurance letting the users subscribe will let them catch everything, but not necessarily at the same moment.
You could have a GPS based system that knew where it was well enough to stay in a lane. I work with auto-steering tractors that can guide themselves down to an inch. Yep, it would be expensive.
The bigger barrier is that no one knows where the lanes are. When they put stripes down on all those roads no one surveyed them in to the inch. I dealt with customers in the 90's who wanted their GPS tracking systems to be able to tell them what lane or what mailbox they were in front of. It was hard to convince them that the map didn't exist that had all the lanes and mailboxes mapped out to that accuracy.
GPS time just counts intervals, and it started the count in weeks, days, seconds in January, 1980. The system is aware if UTC though, and one of the various messages sent from the satellites includes the UTC offset. So if you receive and decode that message you'd know the UTC time.
Since the leap second was added at midnight UTC, it was already noon back on the international dateline. So the adjustment was 1/2 way through the first day of the year.
I heartily agree with the Sandisk SD card with built-in USB. I have one on my keychain now, though I'd like a beefier holder. Better than your basic thumb drive, I can I also plug it in as-is into my PDA or camera. I can't imagine buying another SD card that wasn't one of these. No cable, no readers. Now I can put my keychain drive into my PDA to review a document or picture or movie. It's also smaller than most every thumb drive out there.
Lexar had their "jump drive" years back with USB on a CF card, but it took a cable to plug into a proprietary connector on the card's backside.
You could say the same thing about concrete or asphalt right? Heat soaked up and re-radiated later isn't exactly the same as heat reflected. Which is "bad" or "worse" gets complicated and is location dependant.
It's the gist of the article is actually pretty simple: Planting a tree in the north because you cut one down in the south isn't parity. While the C02 consumption might be the same the overall effect on climate isn't. If you want to "buy back" the CO2 you are dumping into the air with your car, planting a tree just anywhere may take care of the CO2, but not necessarily have the net result on the climate you were going for. The world might just be better off if you dumped less CO2 in the first place rather than planting trees to suck it up.
The problem is the Pepper Pad is 4x the size and more than 2x the price. It's not very pocketable. If Nokia had at least made the storage a real SD card that would have meant it would have a tie to some existing common hardware.
If/When the Pepper Pad people go belly up I'd be happy to grab one or two for $100 from Woot or eBay. They could replace my Audreys as generic web viewing devices.
I'd be all over this as a remote tool using VNC to either my Mac or PC. The higher-rez screen than we usually see in something this small is the big appeal.
Additionally, I'd use it as a portable viewer of some sort. But what kills it for me is that it doesn't have a standard USB host port or a standard SD or CF slot. Either/Both of those would let me plug in a memory card or thumbdrive and view/transfer/share the contents. RS-MMC is not going to cut it if you'd like to pop in the card from your camera and see images on the screen, and without the standard USB host connector you can't even use a cheap card reader to view. (a hack will enable host mode, but the connector won't be right and can't supply power by itself )
Bluetooth and WiFi are great, but being able to read/write common external storage devices are important too. The lack of them is what killed it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, ISPs have been successful by lobbying [payoffs] to keep from being classified as a common carrier. They like to enjoy some of the privilages, but are reluctant to "pay" for these privilages.
If a an ISP wants to extort from Google, Vonage,Yahoo, YouTube for not screwing with their traffic, I'd say let them. And as soon as they do, start holding them criminally liable for every gambling transaction, spam scam, phishing attack or kiddie porn transaction that originates, terminates or transits their network.
However, if they want to be immune from what others are doing on their network without their knowledge, they need to be transparent to the origin/destination/content type of data they are transmitting/receiving.
Wikipedia on Common Carriers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
That was the most glaring ommision from the article. There were two photos of geeks standing around a projector and some other gear. It would have seemed a pretty obvious time for a demo. I guess it's possible the reported was using a film camera (unlikely ) or a digital SLR that's "immune". But an article with pictures about obscuring pictures that doesn't include a sample is pretty lame.
Could the the geeks have been so happy to get their faces on a web site they turned their device off?
I'm sure there are oil companies dying for someone of repute to go against the tide and say they aren't ruining the planet.
But they have to just sit and wait for someone else to fund the study. Any study funded by an oil company, or even a subsidiary twice removed from an oil company will be automatically bashed for being "bought" by said oil company.
It's a valid analogy. Content is also how it's being prioritized. ISPs have already been busted for messing with VOIP traffic. P2P traffic is routinely blocked or throttled. The original linked article said:
"Net neutrality, also called network neutrality, is the philosophy that network operators should not be allowed to prioritize content and services--particularly video--that come across their pipes."
The ISPs attempting to leech profits intend to do so based on content as well as origin/destination. Once they make decisions based on content they should be liable for all the content.
If they want to filter the traffic and charge based on the destination or content, I say let them.
However, if they do, they are now responsible for 100% of the illegal stuff that goes across their wires. Someone downloads kiddy porn? Arrest the CEO. Gambling? Arrest them. Drug purchases? Seize their assets. DDOS attack orginating or terminating on your network? You pay for lost time, damages, penalties.
When you're a transparent pipe it's resonable that you won't be liable for something you're not condoning or monitoring, like un-moderated bulletin boards. But if you want to filter the traffic so you can bill based on content or origin/destination you are no longer transparent. You are now liable for any bad stuff that you monitored and let go through.
It's as if a shipping company opened up every single package and was going to bill a higher price per pound for magazines than for books w/o pictures. If they were to see the magazines were kiddie porn, but since that was a higher profit shippment they put it back in the box and collect their fee. They'd sure as heck be criminally liable then.
Make this the rule for anyone who wants to filter, load level or restrict based on anything other than pure bandwidth or traffic from their customers. I think they'd learn very quickly that they have more to lose being responsible for every bit that they pass on than they'd evey gain by trying to extort Google.
The email issues alone would make them crack. Make them responsible for every virus, phishing or other fraudulent email sent by someone or received by someone on their system. If they filter too harshly and cause someone to lose a vital message, hold them liable.
Don't let them claim transparency AND try to bill based on content or origin/destination.
Metricom was a real shame. I actually think the flood of money from Paul Allen is what killed them. Rather than struggle a while and go slow they went into an orgy of spending and growth and burned out quick.
I had Metricom from 1996-1999. It was only 28.8 at first, but in 1996 dialup was 28.8. At $40 a month it was less than the cost of dialup plus a 2nd phone line, so the mobile part was a bonus. It was unmetered and always on. In 1997 I could sit outside Starbucks and get work done, send/receive email, surf the web. The modem was a little bulky, but the battery lasted longer than my laptop's battery so it was usable.
This was before WiFi, before GPRS. And it worked. I beta tested the 128k stuff. It was faster than dialup when most people still didn't have cable or DSL. It was mobile and unmetered.
They blew the money, made bad business decisions. But the product I got from them worked as advertised. That's more than most of the dot-flops can say.
And now, MetroFi is putting wireless internet on light poles, just like Metricom
Midday isn't always the highest.
Salt River Project Time-of-Use schedule (home)
http://www.srpnet.com/prices/home/tou.aspx
Time-of-Use schedule (business)
http://www.srpnet.com/prices/business/tou.aspx
For home: Winter peak hours:
5 a.m. to 9 a.m. weekdays
5 p.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays
You might want the dishwasher running in the middle of the day, rather than when you want it quiet to watch TV or sleep.
In Phoenix they have a schedule, and it changes with the seasons. The goal there seems to be to reduce peak comsumption, so it's tied to things like everyone coming home from work in the summer and turning on the AC.
A truly smart system would be one that was variable in realtime with communications out to the consumers. If peak consumption is threatening brownouts, raise the realtime rate a little so that systems know to turn off or run on batteries for a while.
When I lived in Phoenix and in Hunstville, AL, both places had time of day billing.
In Phoenix you can buy boxes that will make your appliances "smart" in an attempt to minimize the power you use during peak times. Kinda like a dishwasher you turn on when you go to work, but it comes on when the midday price drop occurs.
According to the article, time of use metering is going to be a requirement soon.
Just like building your own "Tivo", if these guys come up with a scheme that works, way too many people will just build their own.
It sounds no different than a whole-building UPS.
At night when the rates drop, plug it in to charge.
When the rates are high, unplug it.
If unplugged during the day and running too low, beep so someone knows to either cut usage or plug it back in ( probably on bypass so you aren't consuming and charging at the same time during peak time )
The only tricky bits would be if in addition to time of day billing you were billed on a scale that increased if your peak consumption crossed a line. In that case you'd want to share the load between the UPS and the incoming power. But rather than doing something fancy to actually share the load you could probably just have a portion of your equipment running on the UPS and the rest on incoming power.
If your consumption was primarily with PCs, an integrated UPS/PC Power Supply might do the trick. Charge it at night, run directly off the battery ( no re-conversion to AC) during the day. Bascially a laptop with a really big battery that you only plug in when you leave the office at night.
If EchoStar's lawyers argued the case with lines like:
"I don't think 190,000 people would have bought this particular toy if they could have gotten it free from their cable company."
no wonder they lost. I think that was TiVo's point, free boxes from the cable companies ( if you want to call subsidized by higher cable rates "free") cost Tivo sales.
Similar to the post above this, I do a quick search and if I don't see the results I'm looking for I reformulate the query. If the first page doesn't have what you are looking for, and lower ranked pages are supposedly less useful, your problem is likely the query, not the results.
After serveral iterations of re-doing the query I'll then go deeper and deeper in the pages on the chance that what I'm looking for it more is more esoteric than what the top ranked pages contain.
Also like the previous post I'll often hop off to Wikipedia. Since often a Wikipedia link is included in the original search results I don't really expect to find the answer there, but it might have additional information to help me refine my search.
I thought the linked article was lacking in that it didn't seem to reference re-searching. It might just as well be true that people will reformat their queries until the results they want are in the first three pages. Why read 10 pages of summaries if adding an additional search term will bring a link from page 10 to page 1?
Since most navigation companies buy their map databases from someone else they'll have to pass the info on to their supplier and maybe make a tweak to their local copy. It might be as simple as classifying the road as "dirt" vs "county road" to keep it from being used as part of a route.
However, that will only fix things for the people who get the next version of the updated maps. Customers driving around with 4 year old maps in their built-in navigation systems will still be SOL.
So, as someone suggested, a sign is the best and quickest solution. Even the quickest response by all the various Nav system manufacturers and map data suppliers won't fix un-updated systems in the field.
For some reason I got to thinking about Phill Zimmerman and DVD John [Johansen]. Both seem to pop up now and then and give us all reasons to smile.
Hmm... I wonder if Phil could come up with security that Jon couldn't find a way around?
If the analysts do predict, stock price will still fluctuate.
Uncertainty may cause volatility, and Wall Street *does* like volatility. When stock prices go up and down it's due to people buying and selling. Every broker and the exchange makes money on trades, not on stock value. More trades, more money for them.
While it is possible for a company can cause price changes in the stock, much of the smaller ups and downs are caused by the analysts or just plain herd instinct from investors that cause changes of cents in price to become changes in dollars.
Very often the reasons given for a stock going up or down after the release of a quarterly report is for how they did in relation to analysts expectations. If they fail to meet analysts expectations the stock is likely to go down, regardless if that quarter showed profitability or growth higher than the previous period. You never hear "Boy, the analysts blew it this time".
Google has an obiligation to their stockholders and the founders are stockholders. The obligation is to increase profits and increase the value of the company. Sucking up to analysts isn't a obligation.
Mine works fine when the power goes out, as does my WiFi router, cordless phone and TiVos. All are are on UPS's
I'd be willing to bet there are many, many people on POTS lines with only cordless phones of the type that require power ( some have battery backup ). All those people are screwed if the power goes out.
Given how many people have cell phones, I'd be most times power goes out people will reach for the cell without giving it a second thought. And with customers using VOIP and broadband I'd guess that the percentage with cell phones is pretty darn high.
Why, if you're concerned about bandwidth limitations would you encourage all your users to connect at once? Just like TiVo lets viewers watch at their leisure, podcasts let people download when they want to watch, not during some arbitrary time something interesting is happening.
Set up a video podcast. You may host it all that way, but it's not designed around having everyone sucking bandwidth at the same time. You'll want a delayed download option anyway so those who can't sit in front of the screen when something interesting is happening, so you might as well build around that. If it's a regular occurance letting the users subscribe will let them catch everything, but not necessarily at the same moment.
If you were trying to make a Terminator reference, it's Skynet, not Skylab.
Skylab: 1970's orbiting space station:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab
Skynet: 1980's science fiction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet
You could have a GPS based system that knew where it was well enough to stay in a lane. I work with auto-steering tractors that can guide themselves down to an inch. Yep, it would be expensive.
The bigger barrier is that no one knows where the lanes are. When they put stripes down on all those roads no one surveyed them in to the inch. I dealt with customers in the 90's who wanted their GPS tracking systems to be able to tell them what lane or what mailbox they were in front of. It was hard to convince them that the map didn't exist that had all the lanes and mailboxes mapped out to that accuracy.
GPS time just counts intervals, and it started the count in weeks, days, seconds in January, 1980. The system is aware if UTC though, and one of the various messages sent from the satellites includes the UTC offset. So if you receive and decode that message you'd know the UTC time.
As of yesterday, the difference between UTC and GPS time is 14 seconds.
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/series14.txt
Since the leap second was added at midnight UTC, it was already noon back on the international dateline. So the adjustment was 1/2 way through the first day of the year.
I heartily agree with the Sandisk SD card with built-in USB. I have one on my keychain now, though I'd like a beefier holder. Better than your basic thumb drive, I can I also plug it in as-is into my PDA or camera. I can't imagine buying another SD card that wasn't one of these. No cable, no readers. Now I can put my keychain drive into my PDA to review a document or picture or movie. It's also smaller than most every thumb drive out there.
Lexar had their "jump drive" years back with USB on a CF card, but it took a cable to plug into a proprietary connector on the card's backside.
You could say the same thing about concrete or asphalt right? Heat soaked up and re-radiated later isn't exactly the same as heat reflected. Which is "bad" or "worse" gets complicated and is location dependant.
It's the gist of the article is actually pretty simple: Planting a tree in the north because you cut one down in the south isn't parity. While the C02 consumption might be the same the overall effect on climate isn't. If you want to "buy back" the CO2 you are dumping into the air with your car, planting a tree just anywhere may take care of the CO2, but not necessarily have the net result on the climate you were going for. The world might just be better off if you dumped less CO2 in the first place rather than planting trees to suck it up.
The problem is the Pepper Pad is 4x the size and more than 2x the price. It's not very pocketable. If Nokia had at least made the storage a real SD card that would have meant it would have a tie to some existing common hardware.
If/When the Pepper Pad people go belly up I'd be happy to grab one or two for $100 from Woot or eBay. They could replace my Audreys as generic web viewing devices.
I'd be all over this as a remote tool using VNC to either my Mac or PC. The higher-rez screen than we usually see in something this small is the big appeal.
Additionally, I'd use it as a portable viewer of some sort. But what kills it for me is that it doesn't have a standard USB host port or a standard SD or CF slot. Either/Both of those would let me plug in a memory card or thumbdrive and view/transfer/share the contents. RS-MMC is not going to cut it if you'd like to pop in the card from your camera and see images on the screen, and without the standard USB host connector you can't even use a cheap card reader to view. (a hack will enable host mode, but the connector won't be right and can't supply power by itself )
Bluetooth and WiFi are great, but being able to read/write common external storage devices are important too. The lack of them is what killed it for me.