Once the auction is complete, it's a sale. Sales are sales, and cannot be reversed after the fact without willingness of both parties, or extenuating circumstances such as a faulty product.
...
The big difference between a bar and eBay is that the contract is agreed to by both parties as soon as the auction ends. Thus the money doesn't have to change hands before the contract goes into effect. This is similar to a sit-down restaurant where you order and consume your food prior to paying. As soon as you order and your order is accepted, the contract is in effect. You imply that you agree to pay for your meal when you order.
IANAL, but my impression of contract law was always that two parties had to receive a mutual benefit for the contract to be valid (e.g. one receives money, another receives a good or service). Then, should someone back out of their half of the contract, your legal recourse was to receive your portion of the contract back, plus maybe some damages. When you are talking about a restaurant bill after you've eaten, you can't really give the food back. But when you are talking about an object like this, and it has not changed hands, I'm surprised that the recourse wasn't to give the buyer a refund of any money already paid, maybe a little extra for damages, a negative review in the sellers ebay account, but the seller would still keep the object.
The same is true for most employment contracts (and here I'm speaking of US law), they can't force you to remain an employee, just as you can't force them to pay your salary after you've been terminated. Is the difference here due to my misunderstanding of the law, a difference in Australia, or, as someone else posted, due to the good being a rare object?
Nova Science Now was looking at the Permian extinction 250 million years ago. The quick summary:
So it starts with volcanoes spewing carbon dioxide; next step: global warming. The oceans heat up and lose their oxygen, nasty bacteria take over, burping out lots of poisonous gas. End result? Mass extinction.
I think what we can learn from any theory is that our time on this planet isn't guaranteed forever. There's a reason people want to look at colonizing other planets and moons.
Looking at the potential causes in the article, everything seemed to point to smarter people resulting in less sex. But as you say, the causation isn't there. People who have less sex may just decide that they better study hard in school, because they won't be remembered for anything else.
There's also something to be said for splitting up the payload. Food and equipment can be sent ahead of time and land much faster than people need to. All the people need is a lightweight lander and some way to travel to the other equipment. Why are they determined to send it in one large complicated package?
Would a space elevator be more feasible on Mars with the reduced gravity and atmosphere? Admittedly, you have to find a way to get a counterweight and cable all the way there, but it may be worth the tradeoff of the high speed landing with airbags, parachutes, rockets, and everything else we lug there to make it a slow crash. And surely rockets would be more useful than they say, otherwise, there's no way to get back off the planet.
Your network isn't secure because you're not able to bring it down. It's secure if during the processes you are able to avoid information leaks. Any network, no matter how secure, using a wrong implementation of a protocol becomes vulnerable.
To clarify, I was referring to physical security, which few networks have. A properly configured network should isolate any poorly configured device as close to the source as possible. So a mis-configured wireless devices should optimally only be able to impact things within it's wireless broadcast range. And on a lan, the closer you can get to limiting the problem to the specific port the better. You probably won't get to the optimal level in the real world, but problems resulting from not doing so should be considered a network problem.
Any non-secured network (either where users can plug into the lan or over wireless) where a device is able to bring down the network should be considered defective. I've seen places were the entire lan was flat with users connecting on cisco's management vlan and could bring down the whole company by plugging in a device that advertised a new route to the internet (legit or not). To a similar point, if a device on a wireless network is able to flood the network, then the access points need to be tuned. Sure, they can jam the airwaves, and there's nothing you can do to stop that DoS. But, you don't have to turn 18,000 requests per second into something that broadcasts across the rest of the network. Every firewall app that I've worked with includes throttling and I would hope these APs do as well.
This doesn't mean that apple released a product without a defect. But if your network crashes because of a defective device, then you should fix your network first.
the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers
Isn't that exact statement also true for the small players? In the mostly-proprietary days it was, "the big players can afford to leverage lots of applications because they can pay for the developers..." and now both sides have the benefit.
Both sides "can" benefit, but the old saying "nobody ever got fired for picking <insert big player here>" still applies. Sure, there are exceptions, especially when you look at small and local companies, or need some custom development. But on average, given the choice between a large organization and a small organization, people tend to pick the bigger one because they have the sales team, name recognition, and frequently the ability to be a one stop shop. With open source, now instead of the big companies licensing software from all the small developers, they simply repackage it.
My favorite line on company business models is that "IBM is not a software company, they are a sales company". Very little of what they sell was written by them. When it makes sense, they buy a company or license their software. And when possible, they are happy to open up their patents and back the open source developers that will create their next product for free.
I think what we are seeing is the never ending desire to have the benefits of an open source model while still having the closed source control. Finding the right balance so that people use your product while still having a reason to pay for the upgraded version or support isn't easy. And what we seem to be seeing these days is that open source isn't leveling the playing field, but rather tilting the game towards the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers. There's a value with knowing how to run a business that the big players are providing and the smaller developers will need to learn if they want to compete.
I was thinking of putting this slightly differently: getting a patent may not recover its own cost in the long run, however, not having a patent may very well cost more. You're better off losing $1 than you are losing $5.
I minored in IT with a CS major. It would have been easy to have changed after the intro courses, but from what I saw, the IT side was a joke at my school. Taking the time to look at them both helped make the decision easy. At the time, these graduates were going off finding programming jobs during the end of the dot-com boom, but most of them were the first to go in the bust. The true CS students that were in it for the science and not the money are still doing fine.
If you want to have a business degree, I'd go for something more initially usable, maybe in the accounting/finance side of things. And the $200/hr consultant that just got out of school is the running joke in businesses today. Also consider the bio, engineering, or physics sciences, where computers are a natural addition. If you find you still love CS and the other major, then do both or a minor, since having a combination like that lets you work with both sides of the right company, which is a skill far too many techies lack.
You're right that I have the right to ignore their request. But I'd rather spend 15 minutes saying "look, there's nothing here" than hire a lawyer, spend a day in court, risk having them demand copies of all my harddrives and a legal search of my property. Sadly, there are many cases in the world where it's easier to let someone violate our rights than it is to do what's right.
To give another example, my father is also a small business owner and was forced to have 2 or 3 days down while the local government audited his business. They were trying to determine if he needed to be at the next level of income that required an extra $20 on his license (and there was no higher level). He offered to just pay them $20 for the license so he could work but they refused. In the end, the city owed him something like $2.50. Consider whether the city was right for standing up for their rights and demanding the audit.
I'm not MS fan (I have linux running on everything where I have a choice), but because of customers that use various MS products, it seemed cheaper when starting my business to subscribe to their Action Pack Subscription (MAPS). They give you more than enough licenses for all the major products (office, server, workstation, visio, maps, etc) which is perfect for reading those files that customers send without forking over the big bucks up front. You have to pay over $300 yearly, which if they were releasing often, it would make sense.
But I'm about to approach the point where purchasing everything outright makes more sense, and they still haven't sent me anything more than a beta for Vista. So if my customers want me to support them, either I'm using a beta to do so, or I have to fork out the cash even though I'm subscribing to MAPS. This may be the last year I renew my subscription unless they have a lot of new software entering the pipe. The worst part is should I cancel, I'm guessing the MS police will be knocking to verify that I don't have anything unlicensed still in use, which I wouldn't, but my time does equal money.
Allowing traffic through requires more bandwidth than blocking traffic.
More importantly, they basically said that when they are allowed to have a tiered internet, they intend on blocking half of the traffic. If you're a generator of traffic to an isp, and you're not paying the tariff/extortion, guess what half you're in?
Yes, I want to see higher gas prices too, preferably in the form of taxes that are set aside to renewable energy. Everyone will say that the poor will suffer the most, and they are probably correct. There will be higher prices for transporting goods, true. But we will also make public transportation more cost effective for some, and encourage local farming for produce and other goods. People can't say it would be the end of the world, because it is already done elsewhere, and they are living with the prices just fine. And I don't see why the poor or the shipping companies should be given more of a right to pollute than anyone else. If you want to pay them for being poor with tax credits, fine, but they still need to see the impact their decisions and lifestyle have on the world.
Start with a $0.05/gal tax across the board on all oil based fuels. Go ahead and add it up, how much will that really cost you at the end of the year. Lets see, 250miles/week = 13,000/year, 35mpg car gets me close to 375 gal/year * $0.05 = $18.57, here's a $20, keep the change. And then increase it every year at a rate above inflation. At some point, renewable sources will start to become cheaper because of the higher cost of non-renewables and all the subsidies they receive from that tax. The US is addicted to cheap oil, and this seems to be the best way to slowly yet efficiently ween ourselves off.
As far as a physical or blood work, that can be obtained by simply asking. I've never not been able to find out up front the price of those services.
Then count yourself lucky. I've tried with insurance companies (asking what their negotiated rate is, since that's what your charge is based off, they won't tell me until after I've signed up for the insurance, incurred the charge, and received the bill), doctors (their reply "it should be covered by your insurance" or "we don't handle the billing"), and labs (same reply as the doctors, and they act confused when I ask what it would cost if it isn't covered). And even with surgery, you should be able to take best and worst case scenarios from multiple doctors and compare them. Just knowing what the doctors are prepared for is insightful. My point isn't that people should pick the lowest cost, but that we should have all the information to make an informed decision, and my experience says it just isn't like that.
Why then is it ok for a doctor to provide care but claim they don't know how much a service costs, and then after the fact send some bill that you can't negotiate or decline?
Perhaps because there may be complications, too many to enumerate, and surgery on you may be easier than surgery on me?
Everything a doctor does it by a charge code that they can give to the insurance company. If your surgery goes wrong, you suddenly have more charge codes (or maybe more time assigned to an hourly code). When you go in for surgery, you'll likely find someone else to give recommendations and do what you can to check that doctors history, because skill is very important there. But when you're having a physical, getting a few stitches, or having some blood work done, that's entirely different.
Give me all the information up front, and if one doctor costs too much, I'll find someone that is cheaper.
So you'd feel comfortable having your surgery at Wal*Mart? Ignore "you get what you pay for" at your own risk.
"You get what you pay for" is absolutely true, but the reverse, "if you pay more, you'll get something better" doesn't always hold true. Think of designer clothes, high quality no-name brands, and the thrift store. Sometimes you are happy to pay more, but other times you're just paying for a name. Only with doctors, you're paying for 1 dead beat, 3 people with really stingy insurance, and a ridiculous malpractice insurance premium when the bill comes to $750 for a 10 minute physical.
I bill customers by the hour for work that I do, and they know the hourly rate, and the maximum number of hours in the contract in addition to reviewing my experience before they agree to do business with me. How many companies do you do business with where they refuse to tell you how much it will cost until after your bill is due and you can't negotiate?
Supply and demand absolutely works even when there are poor people that require care, it just doesn't work the way people want it to. Are you claiming that supply and demand doesn't work for housing because there are homeless and people that live 2 hours from where they work? Would it solve the homeless problem by charging every homeless person $200 a year for not having a home? Would you say it's fair for a landlord to take in someone that needs a home, and then after they've moved in, bill them the first month's rent at some insane rate?
Why then is it ok for a doctor to provide care but claim they don't know how much a service costs, and then after the fact send some bill that you can't negotiate or decline? Give me all the information up front, and if one doctor costs too much, I'll find someone that is cheaper. If no one is cheaper, then perhaps I'll end up like the homeless. I've met a fair number of people with a missing finger over the years. Like I say, it works, just not the way you want it to.
I know they are politicians, but seriously, did they forget about the law of supply and demand? If you increase the demand for a product by charging those that don't purchase it, the supply may (and likely will) increase it's price by that amount.
This will have a really bad effect on small businesses who don't have a large enough pool of employees to get the lowest rates from the insurers. Healthy employees will chose to get their own insurance, leaving only those that have medical issues using the business's insurance, which will drive up the premiums further.
If politicians really want to fix the issue, require all doctors to advertise their prices in advance for every procedure (they have a charge code for everything to work with insurance companies). Then require every insurance company to provide their negotiated rates, copay amounts, etc, for every charge code before you purchase the insurance (put it online or in a booklet that you can review at an agents office if you like). Make it illegal to discriminate against someone based on their medical history, only their lifestyle (e.g. smoker, high risk job, and age) should be considered. And finally, require coverage for all preventive procedures (e.g. yearly physical and blood work). Yes, requiring coverage may make the rate go up, but any doctor can be selected, and now they have to show their rates in advance, allowing the law of supply and demand to actually work.
If we are going to have government subsidized health care, that can be done very easily now. Have doctors bill the government for preventive procedures, but beyond that, make everything a tax credit that only kicks in after you've spent x% of your income on medical expenses. Right now it's a deduction that only reduces your income, and not your tax. Having that x% keeps people from abusing the system. They can even have a list of maximum rates for each charge code just like they have a per diem published now. Sadly, this is much to simple, and there are too many lobbyist, for this to ever happen. And knowing our congress, they wouldn't fix the AMT and it would end up undoing everything they just wrote into law.
Yup, I've actually used their PacketShaper at a previous client when the application didn't perform as advertised. Their solution worked by adjusting window sizes if I recall correctly, which was great at slowing down incoming connections without delaying traffic or acks. This is still a hardware based solution that requires network level data to implement where I'm more interested in an application level algorithm running on the end machine (with imperfect data).
QoS is great at the router level, where you have all the information and can pick which packets to sent over a limited pipe. But when you're at the application level, you can't be sure what else is happening on the machine, let alone the rest of the network. IBM has been pushing some technology called Adaptive Bandwidth Control. From various bits I've seen, they appear to continuously stress the network to determine the peak and then back off from that peak to avoid starving more important applications. This is important when you have a high bandwidth, low priority application, and don't want to update every part of a highly dispersed network to minimize it's impact. Think peer to peer, software deployments, retail organizations with lots of branches and limited WAN connections. The technology exists, but the implementations vary, so I was pondering the best way to implement something like this. Can you determine bandwidth available indirectly, without saturating the connection.
Are latency measurement, dropped packet counts, window size tweaking, or some other magical solution usable to get the full bandwith out of a pipe when it's not being used and yet avoid impacting other users when they need it?
If FastTCP is great for speeding things up over high latency links, what is there for slowing down connections? Particularly when you only want to take the remaining bandwidth and not impact users. I've seen various products that do this, but they never describe how it's done. Is it sufficient to slow down the connection when you see latency increase, or are there better algorithms?
The group also warns that the rules set the stage for selective and perhaps discriminatory enforcement by police.
That pretty much sums up every law that police enforce. More and more laws are being written so that the average citizen will break them and police get to decide if they like you or not. I don't worry about who they decide to enforce the law upon, the bigger issue is who they don't enforce it upon that should raise the most attention. Friends of police officers, people with money and power, middle class america, and most importantly, the law makers would all be furious if they were actually subject to the letter of every law.
It would take a major innovation in device fabrication or power management to get tens of millions of transistors manufactured in a 65nm (or smaller) process down to 10-20 Watts of static power consumption. You could probably make a few million $ and possibly win a Nobel prize if you can figure that one out.
They already have stuff now that can turn on and off certain parts of the processor to conserve energy. So, thinking a little out of the box, put an additional core on a chip that runs similar to what you see in embedded systems (think <10 watts, maybe around 50mhz or so). Transfer your registers from one core to the other and use some fancy power distribution technology to turn off whichever core you aren't using. Suddenly you have a dual speed cpu that goes from a few watts to handle the pings, interrupts, and other minimal cpu task, but when you need it, can be ramped up to a 2ghz chip. Where's my prize?:-)
The cpu would probably be relatively easy in the grand scheme. Getting all the components to work efficiently is more of the challenge. GPU's could be configured to power completely down with the monitors. Harddrives are already coming out with hybrid flash storage to reduce spin up's for small writes. The power supplies could use a few tweaks to efficiently handle the significant drop in power consumption. Then, all we need is usb 3.0 to come along and have the ability to tell devices to turn on and off so they can stop drawing power. Personally, I think the problem is less technology and more motivation, and silicon valley is just starting to get motivated. If they don't, China will, they have far too many new power plants not to see the need for conservation.
I'd like to see computer manufacturers get to the point where all non-essential components can power down when a machine isn't using them. This would be huge for server rooms, where most machines are there waiting for users to connect. For my mythtv server, it's running non-stop, but hardly using any cpu until it's recording or playing back. Same goes for a mail/file server. The 100-200 watt idle numbers are wasteful, lets get this down to 10-20 watts. Hibernating or suspending doesn't work when you need to be standing by to service a user.
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The same is true for most employment contracts (and here I'm speaking of US law), they can't force you to remain an employee, just as you can't force them to pay your salary after you've been terminated. Is the difference here due to my misunderstanding of the law, a difference in Australia, or, as someone else posted, due to the good being a rare object?
Looking at the potential causes in the article, everything seemed to point to smarter people resulting in less sex. But as you say, the causation isn't there. People who have less sex may just decide that they better study hard in school, because they won't be remembered for anything else.
There's also something to be said for splitting up the payload. Food and equipment can be sent ahead of time and land much faster than people need to. All the people need is a lightweight lander and some way to travel to the other equipment. Why are they determined to send it in one large complicated package?
Would a space elevator be more feasible on Mars with the reduced gravity and atmosphere? Admittedly, you have to find a way to get a counterweight and cable all the way there, but it may be worth the tradeoff of the high speed landing with airbags, parachutes, rockets, and everything else we lug there to make it a slow crash. And surely rockets would be more useful than they say, otherwise, there's no way to get back off the planet.
Any non-secured network (either where users can plug into the lan or over wireless) where a device is able to bring down the network should be considered defective. I've seen places were the entire lan was flat with users connecting on cisco's management vlan and could bring down the whole company by plugging in a device that advertised a new route to the internet (legit or not). To a similar point, if a device on a wireless network is able to flood the network, then the access points need to be tuned. Sure, they can jam the airwaves, and there's nothing you can do to stop that DoS. But, you don't have to turn 18,000 requests per second into something that broadcasts across the rest of the network. Every firewall app that I've worked with includes throttling and I would hope these APs do as well.
This doesn't mean that apple released a product without a defect. But if your network crashes because of a defective device, then you should fix your network first.
My favorite line on company business models is that "IBM is not a software company, they are a sales company". Very little of what they sell was written by them. When it makes sense, they buy a company or license their software. And when possible, they are happy to open up their patents and back the open source developers that will create their next product for free.
I think what we are seeing is the never ending desire to have the benefits of an open source model while still having the closed source control. Finding the right balance so that people use your product while still having a reason to pay for the upgraded version or support isn't easy. And what we seem to be seeing these days is that open source isn't leveling the playing field, but rather tilting the game towards the big players who can leverage lots of applications without paying for all of the developers. There's a value with knowing how to run a business that the big players are providing and the smaller developers will need to learn if they want to compete.
I was thinking of putting this slightly differently: getting a patent may not recover its own cost in the long run, however, not having a patent may very well cost more. You're better off losing $1 than you are losing $5.
I minored in IT with a CS major. It would have been easy to have changed after the intro courses, but from what I saw, the IT side was a joke at my school. Taking the time to look at them both helped make the decision easy. At the time, these graduates were going off finding programming jobs during the end of the dot-com boom, but most of them were the first to go in the bust. The true CS students that were in it for the science and not the money are still doing fine.
If you want to have a business degree, I'd go for something more initially usable, maybe in the accounting/finance side of things. And the $200/hr consultant that just got out of school is the running joke in businesses today. Also consider the bio, engineering, or physics sciences, where computers are a natural addition. If you find you still love CS and the other major, then do both or a minor, since having a combination like that lets you work with both sides of the right company, which is a skill far too many techies lack.
You're right that I have the right to ignore their request. But I'd rather spend 15 minutes saying "look, there's nothing here" than hire a lawyer, spend a day in court, risk having them demand copies of all my harddrives and a legal search of my property. Sadly, there are many cases in the world where it's easier to let someone violate our rights than it is to do what's right.
To give another example, my father is also a small business owner and was forced to have 2 or 3 days down while the local government audited his business. They were trying to determine if he needed to be at the next level of income that required an extra $20 on his license (and there was no higher level). He offered to just pay them $20 for the license so he could work but they refused. In the end, the city owed him something like $2.50. Consider whether the city was right for standing up for their rights and demanding the audit.
I'm not MS fan (I have linux running on everything where I have a choice), but because of customers that use various MS products, it seemed cheaper when starting my business to subscribe to their Action Pack Subscription (MAPS). They give you more than enough licenses for all the major products (office, server, workstation, visio, maps, etc) which is perfect for reading those files that customers send without forking over the big bucks up front. You have to pay over $300 yearly, which if they were releasing often, it would make sense.
But I'm about to approach the point where purchasing everything outright makes more sense, and they still haven't sent me anything more than a beta for Vista. So if my customers want me to support them, either I'm using a beta to do so, or I have to fork out the cash even though I'm subscribing to MAPS. This may be the last year I renew my subscription unless they have a lot of new software entering the pipe. The worst part is should I cancel, I'm guessing the MS police will be knocking to verify that I don't have anything unlicensed still in use, which I wouldn't, but my time does equal money.
Yes, I want to see higher gas prices too, preferably in the form of taxes that are set aside to renewable energy. Everyone will say that the poor will suffer the most, and they are probably correct. There will be higher prices for transporting goods, true. But we will also make public transportation more cost effective for some, and encourage local farming for produce and other goods. People can't say it would be the end of the world, because it is already done elsewhere, and they are living with the prices just fine. And I don't see why the poor or the shipping companies should be given more of a right to pollute than anyone else. If you want to pay them for being poor with tax credits, fine, but they still need to see the impact their decisions and lifestyle have on the world.
Start with a $0.05/gal tax across the board on all oil based fuels. Go ahead and add it up, how much will that really cost you at the end of the year. Lets see, 250miles/week = 13,000/year, 35mpg car gets me close to 375 gal/year * $0.05 = $18.57, here's a $20, keep the change. And then increase it every year at a rate above inflation. At some point, renewable sources will start to become cheaper because of the higher cost of non-renewables and all the subsidies they receive from that tax. The US is addicted to cheap oil, and this seems to be the best way to slowly yet efficiently ween ourselves off.
I bill customers by the hour for work that I do, and they know the hourly rate, and the maximum number of hours in the contract in addition to reviewing my experience before they agree to do business with me. How many companies do you do business with where they refuse to tell you how much it will cost until after your bill is due and you can't negotiate?
Supply and demand absolutely works even when there are poor people that require care, it just doesn't work the way people want it to. Are you claiming that supply and demand doesn't work for housing because there are homeless and people that live 2 hours from where they work? Would it solve the homeless problem by charging every homeless person $200 a year for not having a home? Would you say it's fair for a landlord to take in someone that needs a home, and then after they've moved in, bill them the first month's rent at some insane rate?
Why then is it ok for a doctor to provide care but claim they don't know how much a service costs, and then after the fact send some bill that you can't negotiate or decline? Give me all the information up front, and if one doctor costs too much, I'll find someone that is cheaper. If no one is cheaper, then perhaps I'll end up like the homeless. I've met a fair number of people with a missing finger over the years. Like I say, it works, just not the way you want it to.
This will have a really bad effect on small businesses who don't have a large enough pool of employees to get the lowest rates from the insurers. Healthy employees will chose to get their own insurance, leaving only those that have medical issues using the business's insurance, which will drive up the premiums further.
If politicians really want to fix the issue, require all doctors to advertise their prices in advance for every procedure (they have a charge code for everything to work with insurance companies). Then require every insurance company to provide their negotiated rates, copay amounts, etc, for every charge code before you purchase the insurance (put it online or in a booklet that you can review at an agents office if you like). Make it illegal to discriminate against someone based on their medical history, only their lifestyle (e.g. smoker, high risk job, and age) should be considered. And finally, require coverage for all preventive procedures (e.g. yearly physical and blood work). Yes, requiring coverage may make the rate go up, but any doctor can be selected, and now they have to show their rates in advance, allowing the law of supply and demand to actually work.
If we are going to have government subsidized health care, that can be done very easily now. Have doctors bill the government for preventive procedures, but beyond that, make everything a tax credit that only kicks in after you've spent x% of your income on medical expenses. Right now it's a deduction that only reduces your income, and not your tax. Having that x% keeps people from abusing the system. They can even have a list of maximum rates for each charge code just like they have a per diem published now. Sadly, this is much to simple, and there are too many lobbyist, for this to ever happen. And knowing our congress, they wouldn't fix the AMT and it would end up undoing everything they just wrote into law.
Yup, I've actually used their PacketShaper at a previous client when the application didn't perform as advertised. Their solution worked by adjusting window sizes if I recall correctly, which was great at slowing down incoming connections without delaying traffic or acks. This is still a hardware based solution that requires network level data to implement where I'm more interested in an application level algorithm running on the end machine (with imperfect data).
QoS is great at the router level, where you have all the information and can pick which packets to sent over a limited pipe. But when you're at the application level, you can't be sure what else is happening on the machine, let alone the rest of the network. IBM has been pushing some technology called Adaptive Bandwidth Control. From various bits I've seen, they appear to continuously stress the network to determine the peak and then back off from that peak to avoid starving more important applications. This is important when you have a high bandwidth, low priority application, and don't want to update every part of a highly dispersed network to minimize it's impact. Think peer to peer, software deployments, retail organizations with lots of branches and limited WAN connections. The technology exists, but the implementations vary, so I was pondering the best way to implement something like this. Can you determine bandwidth available indirectly, without saturating the connection.
Are latency measurement, dropped packet counts, window size tweaking, or some other magical solution usable to get the full bandwith out of a pipe when it's not being used and yet avoid impacting other users when they need it?
If FastTCP is great for speeding things up over high latency links, what is there for slowing down connections? Particularly when you only want to take the remaining bandwidth and not impact users. I've seen various products that do this, but they never describe how it's done. Is it sufficient to slow down the connection when you see latency increase, or are there better algorithms?
The cpu would probably be relatively easy in the grand scheme. Getting all the components to work efficiently is more of the challenge. GPU's could be configured to power completely down with the monitors. Harddrives are already coming out with hybrid flash storage to reduce spin up's for small writes. The power supplies could use a few tweaks to efficiently handle the significant drop in power consumption. Then, all we need is usb 3.0 to come along and have the ability to tell devices to turn on and off so they can stop drawing power. Personally, I think the problem is less technology and more motivation, and silicon valley is just starting to get motivated. If they don't, China will, they have far too many new power plants not to see the need for conservation.
I'd like to see computer manufacturers get to the point where all non-essential components can power down when a machine isn't using them. This would be huge for server rooms, where most machines are there waiting for users to connect. For my mythtv server, it's running non-stop, but hardly using any cpu until it's recording or playing back. Same goes for a mail/file server. The 100-200 watt idle numbers are wasteful, lets get this down to 10-20 watts. Hibernating or suspending doesn't work when you need to be standing by to service a user.