Adding some disk space is cheap. Doubling bandwidth is not. And while you're correct to some extent that a great deal of cost is not involved with how fast the line is, it basically still boils down to what it costs per magabyte to provide service. Doubling that speed doubles the cost to provide it. That's how cost/mb works.
That's all well and good, but you have to consider the alternatives. The ISP could address this issue in two basic ways.
1) Reduce everyone's actual speed all the time to meet bandwidth costs. 2) Charge users by the Megabyte
I don't like either of those. I use a significant amount of bandwidth. I just don't let it be saturated 24/7. If I had to pay by the MB, i'd be broke. I just don't abuse the system because I can.
So what you're saying is "Things would be cheaper if they weren't more expensive".
The fact of the matter is, the economics of today are what they have to deal with, not what if scenarios. Could it be cheaper? Yeah, but it's not. And your cars could all get 120 miles to the gallon too, but they don't.
A 3 meg pipe may in fact allow your email or web pages to load faster. Potentially 3x faster, especially if they are large pages, large downloads, large emails, etc..
In case you missed it, a 1 meg pipe is 1 megabit PER SECOND while a 3 megabit pipe is 3 megabit PER SECOND. That's 3x faster.
it doesn't work that way. If the ISP's did as you say, they would have to be psychic to know exactly how much bandwidth their customers planned to use. Past usage is no guarantee of future usage. They would also have to be constantly adjusting their rates as new users joined and certain users used more bandwidth than others from month to month.
What it boils down to, is estimating. Further, like insurance costs, that means that high volume users would be pushing the costs up for low volume users. I would guarantee that if you ask the low volume users they'd rather see you capped than their prices go up.
I suppose you also take all the newspapers out of the paperbox when you purchase one. After all, it doesn't say explicitly that you can't.
I suppose you also back a truck up the local gas station and pump thousands of gallons of fountain drink into containers, after all, it doesn't explicitly say you can't.
I suppose you also go the buffet and stay there all day eating constantly, since after all, it doesn't say you can't.
The world is full of cases where there is no explicit verbiage to deny something, but common sense is expected to rule.
I don't know where you live, but I have a lot of options for broadband here. Cable, DSL from a large number of vendors, Satellite, Cellular EVDO from two companies, Wireless... And just because they want to throttle one type of high bandwidth traffic doesn't mean you're only getting dialup speeds.
Why doesn't Canada have the problem? It could be any number of reasons. In many parts of the world the internet is government subsidized. Of course those countries (like Canada) have extremely high tax rates to help out with that (15% sales tax, for instance in Canada alone, and that's not counting income tax and other taxes).
I'm sorry, but just because someone disagrees with your "gimme gimme gimme, but i don't wanna pay" attitude doesn't mean they're an industry shill. It's just common sense. I agree completely that ISP's don't do enough to point out the restrictions in their service, and rely on fine print to handle things, but that's the way the rest of the world works. That's why there are terms of service, and why they are legally binding regardless of whether you read them or not.
That's true, and that's why their bandwidth caps aren't a strict bandwidth/users. That is, your cap is much higher than the amount they oversell you for.
ie. Suppose it costs them $1000 for 1GB (it doesn't but i'm just using nice round numbers here). And they sell that gigabyte to 10 people at $100 each. 9 of which use 10k. However, you use 10GB. That doesn't add up, no matter what you do.
Land is something different than a service. However, there is precisely that sort of thing that goes on, they're called Timeshares, and they're completely legal. Companies often oversell those, as well.
That's the problem. You're not using what you paid for. You're using MORE than you paid for. You're right that you don't know this, or what exactly you've paid for, and that's a serious problem. Also, I don't recall seeing the words "unlimited" in any networking advertisement in years, as this problem has been going on since around Y2k. It's just implied by the lack of stating bandwidth cap.
Your argument is one of ignorance, that since you don't know what the limit is, you should be unlimited and can use whatever you like. That's like saying that since there is no wording on the newspaper box that you can only take one newspaper per purchase that you can take them all. There is often an implied limit on things.
I would much rather have the current situation than have a bandwidth cap or slower connection. Unfortunately, some people like to take advantage of the honor system and ruin it for everyone.
In the eyes of the ISP, they're selling you a 3Mb pipe for burst traffic, so your email or web page loads really fast, not so that you can saturate your pipe 24/7. I'm not saying I agree with that, but that's what the ISP has priced things at. The average person uses nowhere near the bandwidth of his connection, and that allows them to charge cheaper rates by overselling.
To put this another way, if everyone saturated their pipe, they would have to charge upwards of 10x for your cable or DSL connection as they currently do.
The biggest issue with OOo is not that the interface is slightly different, but rather that the functionality of OOo works differently and requires retraining in how it actually works. On top of that, things like macro's and other automation users have built up over the years won't work either.
The new UI may be significantly different in Office, but the functionality still works the same way. The new UI just makes it easier to find stuff, and makes it more obvious how it works. Calling the retraining required "massive" is a bit of an exageration.
That's not the point, really. Apple's presentation made a big deal about how others (presumably, Microsoft) copies OSX, and then proceded to list off a bunch of features that Microsoft and othes have had in their OS for years (Time Machine, Spaces, To-do lists in email, network searching, Web widgets, etc..).
In fact, the only feature I saw that was "new" was their user interface for Time Machine (that was neat).
Actually, Windows has had a similar feature for years called Volume Shadow Copies. Unfortunately, it required a server version of Windows to operate, and didn't have the nifty user interface, but it was there.
I think he'd be better off validating his site before spouting off about others being non-conforming. 400+ errors, and that's not even CSS yet, since the CSS validator won't eve look at it if the XHTML isn't valid.
First, autoexec.bat, config.sys, boot.ini, etc.. have to be in the root of the boot drive, which may not be the drive that Windows is located on. Thus, it would be sily to have a "Windows" directory on a disk that didn't contain Windows.
Second, Recycler and System Volume Information are both drive specific, and again, will exist on partitions (volumes) that don't have Windows on them. They are also both invisibile unless you turn off hiding of system files.
Third, Documents and Settings *IS* the user area. Although in vista this will change to \Users (was stupid to have such a long name with spaces anyways).
Believe it or not, there are reasons for all the things you find stupid.
Believe it or not, some programs demanded that autoexec and config.sys at least be present. They didn't do anything with them, they just had to be there. Stupid, I know.
Uhhh.. those are EESFF chips. That means they are the lowest possible performers. They get that low of a wattage by severely limiting the performance of the chip, as you can tell by the fact that it only has 256K cache.
This is diametrically opposed to the high performance of an 8 core CPU. Why would anyone want 8 underperforming cores?
I hate to cry bullshit, but your story smells to high heaven. While it's entirely possible that the system froze in mid-write and corrupted the disk (the same would probably be true of any filesystem that didn't have data journaling), I have to ask the following questions about your story:
1) You claim some cryptic error message that you wrote in your notes, but fail to follow through with your statement to post it. Why?
2) You claim to have mounted the drive on another workstation "and found dozens of DLL files had mysteriously disappeared from my system32 folder". My question is, how would you know if dozens of DLL's were missing? Do you just so happen to have them all memorized and walked down the list noting which ones were and weren't there? Don't even try to say you compared it to the system32 folder on the other computer, because the files will be different from one system to another depending on what apps, hardware, and other files may be installed.
3) You claim that "some important ones used to process a login" were missing. Which ones? That's awfully vague for someone that knows precisely which files are missing when looking at thousands of files.
4) Your next paragraph says you didn't know what exactly was missing and needed replacing, yet you somehow knew that dozens of them them were missing. How?
I really had no problem believing your story until you appeared to start inventing facts to support it. Nobody is anal enough to write down every message in a notebook and keep it around for years and then make vague claims to back up his story. So why not just come clean and say "I don't remember the details" instead of making up stuff?
Actually, the C64 was 2Mhz, although half of that bandwidth was taken up by the chips, giving you roughly 1Mhz of computing power while video was being displayed (this is why some games blanked the screen during loading and other tasks, to get that speed boost).
I don't know if I could have predicted precisely how much power we'd have today compared to back then (My first computer was an Apple II), but I certainly could have predicted uses for such power. Even in those days, 3D rendering was beginning to get popular (though it could take weeks to render a single frame). I clearly remember reading articles discussing voice recognition, realistic 3D rendering, handwriting recognition, and how the power requirements were quite high.
I do remember people, even as late as 10 years ago scoffing at the need for 100+ GB hard disks. I was not one of them.
I realize that software will expand to consume all resources. That doesn't mean it NEEDS to. As the megahertz climb, the bloat will get worse until "Hello World" takes 2GB of memory and a quad processor to run.
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Adding some disk space is cheap. Doubling bandwidth is not. And while you're correct to some extent that a great deal of cost is not involved with how fast the line is, it basically still boils down to what it costs per magabyte to provide service. Doubling that speed doubles the cost to provide it. That's how cost/mb works.
That's all well and good, but you have to consider the alternatives. The ISP could address this issue in two basic ways.
1) Reduce everyone's actual speed all the time to meet bandwidth costs.
2) Charge users by the Megabyte
I don't like either of those. I use a significant amount of bandwidth. I just don't let it be saturated 24/7. If I had to pay by the MB, i'd be broke. I just don't abuse the system because I can.
So what you're saying is "Things would be cheaper if they weren't more expensive".
The fact of the matter is, the economics of today are what they have to deal with, not what if scenarios. Could it be cheaper? Yeah, but it's not. And your cars could all get 120 miles to the gallon too, but they don't.
A 3 meg pipe may in fact allow your email or web pages to load faster. Potentially 3x faster, especially if they are large pages, large downloads, large emails, etc..
In case you missed it, a 1 meg pipe is 1 megabit PER SECOND while a 3 megabit pipe is 3 megabit PER SECOND. That's 3x faster.
it doesn't work that way. If the ISP's did as you say, they would have to be psychic to know exactly how much bandwidth their customers planned to use. Past usage is no guarantee of future usage. They would also have to be constantly adjusting their rates as new users joined and certain users used more bandwidth than others from month to month.
What it boils down to, is estimating. Further, like insurance costs, that means that high volume users would be pushing the costs up for low volume users. I would guarantee that if you ask the low volume users they'd rather see you capped than their prices go up.
I suppose you also take all the newspapers out of the paperbox when you purchase one. After all, it doesn't say explicitly that you can't.
I suppose you also back a truck up the local gas station and pump thousands of gallons of fountain drink into containers, after all, it doesn't explicitly say you can't.
I suppose you also go the buffet and stay there all day eating constantly, since after all, it doesn't say you can't.
The world is full of cases where there is no explicit verbiage to deny something, but common sense is expected to rule.
I don't know where you live, but I have a lot of options for broadband here. Cable, DSL from a large number of vendors, Satellite, Cellular EVDO from two companies, Wireless... And just because they want to throttle one type of high bandwidth traffic doesn't mean you're only getting dialup speeds.
Why doesn't Canada have the problem? It could be any number of reasons. In many parts of the world the internet is government subsidized. Of course those countries (like Canada) have extremely high tax rates to help out with that (15% sales tax, for instance in Canada alone, and that's not counting income tax and other taxes).
I'm sorry, but just because someone disagrees with your "gimme gimme gimme, but i don't wanna pay" attitude doesn't mean they're an industry shill. It's just common sense. I agree completely that ISP's don't do enough to point out the restrictions in their service, and rely on fine print to handle things, but that's the way the rest of the world works. That's why there are terms of service, and why they are legally binding regardless of whether you read them or not.
That's true, and that's why their bandwidth caps aren't a strict bandwidth/users. That is, your cap is much higher than the amount they oversell you for.
ie. Suppose it costs them $1000 for 1GB (it doesn't but i'm just using nice round numbers here). And they sell that gigabyte to 10 people at $100 each. 9 of which use 10k. However, you use 10GB. That doesn't add up, no matter what you do.
Land is something different than a service. However, there is precisely that sort of thing that goes on, they're called Timeshares, and they're completely legal. Companies often oversell those, as well.
That's the problem. You're not using what you paid for. You're using MORE than you paid for. You're right that you don't know this, or what exactly you've paid for, and that's a serious problem. Also, I don't recall seeing the words "unlimited" in any networking advertisement in years, as this problem has been going on since around Y2k. It's just implied by the lack of stating bandwidth cap.
Your argument is one of ignorance, that since you don't know what the limit is, you should be unlimited and can use whatever you like. That's like saying that since there is no wording on the newspaper box that you can only take one newspaper per purchase that you can take them all. There is often an implied limit on things.
I would much rather have the current situation than have a bandwidth cap or slower connection. Unfortunately, some people like to take advantage of the honor system and ruin it for everyone.
Well, actually, yes.
In the eyes of the ISP, they're selling you a 3Mb pipe for burst traffic, so your email or web page loads really fast, not so that you can saturate your pipe 24/7. I'm not saying I agree with that, but that's what the ISP has priced things at. The average person uses nowhere near the bandwidth of his connection, and that allows them to charge cheaper rates by overselling.
To put this another way, if everyone saturated their pipe, they would have to charge upwards of 10x for your cable or DSL connection as they currently do.
Actually, not really.
The biggest issue with OOo is not that the interface is slightly different, but rather that the functionality of OOo works differently and requires retraining in how it actually works. On top of that, things like macro's and other automation users have built up over the years won't work either.
The new UI may be significantly different in Office, but the functionality still works the same way. The new UI just makes it easier to find stuff, and makes it more obvious how it works. Calling the retraining required "massive" is a bit of an exageration.
That's not the point, really. Apple's presentation made a big deal about how others (presumably, Microsoft) copies OSX, and then proceded to list off a bunch of features that Microsoft and othes have had in their OS for years (Time Machine, Spaces, To-do lists in email, network searching, Web widgets, etc..).
In fact, the only feature I saw that was "new" was their user interface for Time Machine (that was neat).
Since when did a published (both online and in print) Wired news column become "dumbarses on blogs"?
Actually, Windows has had a similar feature for years called Volume Shadow Copies. Unfortunately, it required a server version of Windows to operate, and didn't have the nifty user interface, but it was there.
I think he'd be better off validating his site before spouting off about others being non-conforming. 400+ errors, and that's not even CSS yet, since the CSS validator won't eve look at it if the XHTML isn't valid.
First, autoexec.bat, config.sys, boot.ini, etc.. have to be in the root of the boot drive, which may not be the drive that Windows is located on. Thus, it would be sily to have a "Windows" directory on a disk that didn't contain Windows.
Second, Recycler and System Volume Information are both drive specific, and again, will exist on partitions (volumes) that don't have Windows on them. They are also both invisibile unless you turn off hiding of system files.
Third, Documents and Settings *IS* the user area. Although in vista this will change to \Users (was stupid to have such a long name with spaces anyways).
Believe it or not, there are reasons for all the things you find stupid.
Believe it or not, some programs demanded that autoexec and config.sys at least be present. They didn't do anything with them, they just had to be there. Stupid, I know.
Uhhh.. those are EESFF chips. That means they are the lowest possible performers. They get that low of a wattage by severely limiting the performance of the chip, as you can tell by the fact that it only has 256K cache.
This is diametrically opposed to the high performance of an 8 core CPU. Why would anyone want 8 underperforming cores?
I'm guessing you didn't actually read my whole post before you started firing off a reply.
I agree with you, 100%. That's why I said "So why don't you just come clean and say "I don't remember the details" instead of making stuff up?"
His story would be fine, if he hadn't felt the need to invent facts, which is obvious due to the inconsistency of his story.
I hate to cry bullshit, but your story smells to high heaven. While it's entirely possible that the system froze in mid-write and corrupted the disk (the same would probably be true of any filesystem that didn't have data journaling), I have to ask the following questions about your story:
1) You claim some cryptic error message that you wrote in your notes, but fail to follow through with your statement to post it. Why?
2) You claim to have mounted the drive on another workstation "and found dozens of DLL files had mysteriously disappeared from my system32 folder". My question is, how would you know if dozens of DLL's were missing? Do you just so happen to have them all memorized and walked down the list noting which ones were and weren't there? Don't even try to say you compared it to the system32 folder on the other computer, because the files will be different from one system to another depending on what apps, hardware, and other files may be installed.
3) You claim that "some important ones used to process a login" were missing. Which ones? That's awfully vague for someone that knows precisely which files are missing when looking at thousands of files.
4) Your next paragraph says you didn't know what exactly was missing and needed replacing, yet you somehow knew that dozens of them them were missing. How?
I really had no problem believing your story until you appeared to start inventing facts to support it. Nobody is anal enough to write down every message in a notebook and keep it around for years and then make vague claims to back up his story. So why not just come clean and say "I don't remember the details" instead of making up stuff?
Actually, the C64 was 2Mhz, although half of that bandwidth was taken up by the chips, giving you roughly 1Mhz of computing power while video was being displayed (this is why some games blanked the screen during loading and other tasks, to get that speed boost).
I don't know if I could have predicted precisely how much power we'd have today compared to back then (My first computer was an Apple II), but I certainly could have predicted uses for such power. Even in those days, 3D rendering was beginning to get popular (though it could take weeks to render a single frame). I clearly remember reading articles discussing voice recognition, realistic 3D rendering, handwriting recognition, and how the power requirements were quite high.
I do remember people, even as late as 10 years ago scoffing at the need for 100+ GB hard disks. I was not one of them.
I realize that software will expand to consume all resources. That doesn't mean it NEEDS to. As the megahertz climb, the bloat will get worse until "Hello World" takes 2GB of memory and a quad processor to run.