If a company with 3,200 employees is so incompetent that they can't get their software ported to Java SE 7 then they deserve to be abandoned by their customers.
Should companies running 10 year old software that has reached end of support several years ago, expect the software to be updated to support the latest Java version? Upgrading time and attendance software (like most enterprise software) is non-trivial, since it affects when people are scheduled to work and how people are paid and people tend to become irate when they aren't paid correctly.
If a licensee can't be bothered to move to the new runtime for supposedly critical software then they have bigger problems and they should go on neglecting stuff until they get pwned and grownups take over
It is not simply a matter of moving to a new runtime, as software releases are often tested against specific Java versions (or at best sets). A vendor doesn't want the risk that their software breaks as an unintended consequence of a change to fix a bug.
Nobody, except the foolish want to be on the bleeding edge with mission critical software and many businesses, workforce scheduling is mission critical.
I rarely login to facebook, but I do have pidgin connected via XMPP and that works fine for chatting with non-technical friends on facebook.
Facebook switching to a private protocol would be a shame, but I'm not sure I would bother installing a separate client.
A more realistic figure would be software price after it has been discounted by the sales person.. Most (all?) enterprise software is discounted heavily and comes with large ongoing maintenance and support fees.
No. Windows handles DST rules in the registry, so it's perfectly capable of date-dependent DST rule handling. The article discusses those recommendations as a way to avoid problems caused by issues with Outlook and Exchange 2003
An automatic update will be released after the end of the 2006 daylight saving time transition. This update will reset the affected time zones back to their regular end date. Customers who have Automatic Updates enabled do not have to take any additional action.
Alternatively, customers can manually remove the KB 912475 update at this point. Manually removing the KB 912475 update will also reset the affected time zones back to their regular end date. Customers who do not have automatic updates enabled and who installed the KB 912475 update must manually remove this update.
.
It appears that date ranges for time zone rules might have been fixed in Vista onwards as the product is not listed.
TImezones is possibly an issue that those not planning to migrate from Windows XP may not have considered.
Why doesn't java use the operating system to provide that information in the first place? At least on operating systems that provide that sort of information, which isn't just "linux" but pretty much all unices.
The problem is Windows. My understanding is that Windows cannot handle date dependant daylight savings rules. For example in 2006, Daylight Savings was extended for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and then reverted to the normal rules in 2006. The solution at the time was to patch Windows prior to the Olympics and then patch again at some point in the future.
KB909915 about the change includes these gems of advice:
- Do not create future appointments in the overlap period in all successive years, until the operating system is back to the regular time zone.
- As soon as possible after the overlap period ends, change the operating system back to the correct time zone for your location.
This reminds me of back before 2000, when a new grad was asked to write a simple website for businesses registering for GST in Australia. He used the same technique with no authentication on the URL. It wasn't a pleasant experience to turn up at a client site and be greeted by the question "Didn't your company build this website?" and to be shown the newspaper article. As the GST was highly political the Australian Federal Police (AFP) paid a visit to the office.
The decision by Microsoft set the system clock to local time, rather than UTC makes me give thanks frequently that the USA has timezones. I hate to think what abhorrent mess would have been created if the USA had a single timezone.
Westpac are reported not to be vulnerable to this hack, but their online banking usernames are a 8 digit number and the password are only six characters. The available characters are [a-z] and [0-9]. This is the login page.
Google have a distinct advantage in emerging markets over Apple because Chinese manufacturers will sell Android devices at a price point that more people can afford. However, that cannot happen without first providing wireless access.
The whole point of fibre in Kansas was to demonstrate that direct FTTP could be provided at a reasonable cost and challenge the existing players to provide a better product. This may be a similar tactic in Africa.
Remember for Google, the end game is for you to use their services in the cloud and that requires a network.
The thing I most care about is if the "hangout protocol" will be supported by libpurple, preferably by google written code.
It would be great if the protocol was open source to ease the implementation.
I don't mind having a variety of IM protocols because it adds fault tolerance, but I want to run only one client. Several clients use libpurple now so it is even resistant to one development team's idea of what is the next best GUI idea.
I've been running LMDE for the past 12 months and find that Cinnamon is usable. Stability has definitely improved with Update 5 & 6. I wouldn't say it is perfect, but having previously used Gnome 2, it lets me get work done.
In Australia we vote for candidates who represent parties. In the lower house (Representatives) the Member represents a seat (geographical area) and if the Member leaves parliament, then a by-election is held and candidates need to (re-)nominate. In the upper house (Senate) the member represents the state (twelve per state) and is elected based on obtaining a quota (1/6 of formal vote + 1). If a senator leaves parliament then their party nominates the candidate which is approved by the State Government. This is fair as a the preferential system means that a senate election for 1 candidate would be unfair.
This might sound a little confusing, but the Australian Electoral Commission has some excellent resources that explain this in more detail.
The big advantage is protest votes. For example, lets say I have libertarian leanings. In my electorate a libertarian could stand as a candidate and I could then vote for them as my first preference and use my second (or third) preference for a candidate from the major parties. This has two effects:
- The libertarian candidate can win compromises from a major candidate in return for directing preferences
- The major parties have clear evidence of how much support exists for the libertarian view
In a first past the post system, my vote is likely to be wasted unless I vote for one of the two major party candidates.
> 1. Analogy to water or electricity is flawed. Water and electricity are limited resources--but data is neverending. The only limit here is bandwidth
Bandwidth requires two components: pipe size and routers to move the data. Moving more data is expensive.
> 2. Past a certain point, more speed is irrelevant, but when you hit the data cap, your speed drops to zero (or your bill goes up in a way that is biased unfairly toward the ISP).
In Australia speed is capped at between 128Kbps - 512Kbps - still reasonable for browsing the web & checking email.
> 3. "With fibre that increases to 1Gbps and 324TB/month." You're arguing from the presupposition that users will max out their connection 24/7. That is silly.
> 4. A customer who uses 10% of his data cap pays x, but a customer who uses 101% of his data cap pays 1.2x. The 90% of unused bandwidth more than makes up for the extra 1% used by the other customer
The ISP still has to buy sufficient backhaul to support your 101% utilisation. In countries where caps exist (e.g Australia) the ISPs model on people using significantly less than their broadband cap. NBNCo provided a couple of example usages:
* 12/1Mbps 50GB plan with an assumed average download of 18GB
* 50/20Mbps 500GB plan with an assumed average download of 75GB.
Remember these are averages so for someone downloading 500GB there have to be ~6 people downloading 5GB to arrive at an average of 75GB, except that it doesn't work like that because the RSP most likely has a 100GB quota plan and most of the people only downloading 5GB a month would choose that. Change the 5GB to 50GB and then it becomes 17.
Essentially what you are asking is that I suffer slow speeds to subsidise your heavy downloading with speed caps. As a technically literate person you would understand that the cost to lay fibre is exactly the same regardless of the speed and that speed caps are software setting. Supporting more data requires investment in larger backhaul and faster routers.
It is trivial to setup a computer to saturate a 1Gbps link. Sadly it requires only a couple of script kiddies to do it and performance of the ISP goes down the tube or their costs sky rocket.
> 5. Your contrived scenario is internally flawed, as well: what if the file the "someone" has to wait a month(!) to download is media from a family member overseas? a recorded video, photos...? Who made you judge of what is more justly important to random people?
By imposing speed caps you are forever denying the opportunity to experience a truly fast internet, where as with download quotas people can choose what content is more important, therefore I consider my point about it being socially unjust valid.
> 6 Yeah, my ISP (AT&T)...
So your ISP sucks. In Australia we can choose between multiple ISPs much to the disgust of Telstra. As you've probably guessed by now, I'm also making these comments in the context of Australia where the government is the the process of re-nationalising our telecommunications infrastructure.
> 7. "For me personally, I would much prefer 1Gbps with 100GB quota, than 12Mbps with no quota." That's a terrible example. What can you NOT do with a 12 Mbps download rate?
High definition video conferencing is one example. The througput recommended by NBNCo is 100/100Mbps. If you only use your connection sparingly for such services then 100GB is fine. I'm regularly under 100Mbps.
You might also be interested to know that the anti-fibre brigade in Australia use exactly your argument to stop the roll out of fibre.
> In conclusion, you're deluded or lying, a fool or a shill.
Or you have a fundamental lack of understanding, especially of the situation outside of the USA. I'll leave to others to decide.
The way it works with other countries is that data speeds are capped. For example in Australia after exceeding your quota, speeds are typically capped to between 64Kbps to 256Kbps. Some ISPs also offer the ability to purchase data blocks if you exceed your quota to restore full speed. There are a couple of ISPs who offer 500MB quotas and then charge 10c/MB. Way to easy to rack up huge bills.
The slow speed enable people to send/receive emails and browse facebook but not consume video or use P2P that effectively. A bit like cutting the flow of water so you could pour a glass of water, but not fill the swimming pool in any reasonable period of time.
The tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, which dates back to grazing cows on common land causing degradation. It applies equally well to the internet where backhaul is shared.
People need to consider if data caps or faster speeds are more important to them. If ISPs are not permitted to impose data caps then they have very little incentive to upgrade the network speed. Currently an average ADSL2+ connection is around 10Mbps and cable is 100Mbps. That means in an non-congested network 10 times more data could be downloaded. With fibre that increases to 1Gbps and 324TB/month. It is doubtful that customers are prepared to pay sufficiently increased prices to deliver an adequate return on investment to the ISP.
Data caps provide a way for ISPs to invest in upgrading speeds and deliver those speeds to everyone while recouping the costs from those who make the most use of the network by downloading more. In the same way it is possible for a person to ration their usage of water or electricity, the time of data usage can be selected by the end user, but I'm not aware of ISPs that offer instant speed changes. This leads to the situation where a person cannot video conference with family once a month because they cannot justify the higher speeds just for 30 minutes. This is much more socially unjust than someone having to wait until next month to download a file. Some ISPs with quotas also permit customers to buy extra quota during a month.
For me personally, I would much prefer 1Gbps with 100GB quota, than 12Mbps with no quota.
Look, data caps don't help congestion at all (except, perhaps, through fear of using your service?) If the services are over-subscribed then at peak times the load is more than the bandwidth they advertise -- Think rush hour traffic.
This is an excellent analogy. Every ISP over subscribes the bandwidth that is allocated, based on the valid assumption that not everyone is using their service all the time. Over subscription was fine prior to P2P and video streaming.
What happens in Australia is that many ISPs offer peak and off/peak quota with a typical 50/50 split. We also have a range of plans from 30GB to 1TB/month. After exceeding your cap, speed is slowed down to 256Kbps
The problem is that there are more folks trying to use the same sized pipe during peak times -- Not that the damn routers run out of bits!
It may not even be more people, it may just the same number using the pipes for longer. Do you want to pay more for the ISP to build a bigger pipe? Also the routers will need to upgraded to support more traffic
MY PIPES! DE CAPS DO NOTHING!
Actually caps mean that towards the end of the billing period that larger downloaders are speed capped and their behaviour is having less effect on network performance. I realise you may not like it and that ISPs in USA may be increasing profitability more than is warranted but caps are effective.
To post the comment, the poster has visited slashdot. It is likely the poster might have visited wikipedia. In both cases this means the poster has benefited from RMS' work.
Actually we in Australia are becoming increasingly disappointed with the National Broadband Network (NBN), especially when you compare it with Google Fibre.
* NBN is costing ~$40 billion compared with Google Fibre estimate of $150 billion for a Nationwide roll-out.
Now Australia has a similar land mass to the US, but less than 1/10th the population and is heavily urbanised.
* Google is 1Gbps for $70. Currently the highest NBN plan is 100/40Mbps with 1TB quota for $164.95/month.
1Gbps will be available in a couple of years on the NBN, but price is $150 plus data (100/40Mbps wholesale is $38/month so retail prices will be likely to be double wholesale).
* 50% on the NBN are predicted to connect at 12/1Mbps (page 64 of NBNCo Corporate Plan (2012-15)) at ~$40-$50 for 30GB month.
* Current NBNCo wholesale prices are discounted, as per page 67 of the NBNCo Corporate Plan
- 1000/400Mbps falls from $150 to $90, while the average speed grows from 30Mbps to 230Mbps. So price falls by 40% while average speed grows by 7.6 times
- price of CVC falls by 2.5 times, while the data usage grows by 20 times
Sadly, too many people in Australia have read the "1Gbps Fibre announcement made during the 2010 Federal election campaign in response to Google Fibre Announcement. Very little investigation has been done to appreciate what is being delivered for fear that like other government initiatives, the delivery will be a failure. The reality is that for 50% 12/1Mbps will be what they experience and for maybe 25% 100/40Mbps with download quotas. The rich will have their 1Gbps connections subsidised by the national roll-out. Rather than revolutionary the NBN will be little better than current 100Mbps cable services. NBNCo are also focusing on areas already serviced by cable to re-enforce their natural monopoly and reduce competition.
The alternative would have been to release uncapped fibre speeds (everybody receives 1Gbps) and charge for data. This is fair as low quota users put hardly any load on the network, while heavy downloaders do. We would then have had something closer to Google Fibre and truly revolutionary. To quote Simon Hackett (Internode):
"They could charge that average to everyone, and open the ports up to full speed for everyone (this is my personal preference, FWIW)." post by Simon Hackett
Instead we have a fibre network where anyone downloading less than 5GB month (national average is ~20GB (ABS) is probably better using a 4G connection and ditching the land line. If we accept that NBNCo are correct in predicting that 50% will connect at 12/1Mbps, then based on the fact that 25/5Mbps plans are only $5 extra a month there is a significant number of people who may find wireless better value.
In the past (and possibly now) the majority of jobs were repetitive low skilled (e.g. digging holes with a shovel, porter, assembly line worker, etc.) that just about anyone could do with a bit of on the job training. To leave school at 15 was not uncommon 20 years ago. The service / knowledge economy jobs require a much more highly skilled workforce. If you look at the previous transition from farm labourer to assembly line worker both jobs were relatively similar in terms of the type of personal attributes required.
My concern for society is that with education standards dropping coupled with an entitlement / victim mentality that many people are being disenfranchised and have little chance of contributing to society. We cannot stop change, but we should plan for it.
The idea of custom channels sounds very appealing. especially channels curated by well known identities. Apps are currently promoted by blogs etc. and the effect of a channel would be to provide a list of all the Apps recommended by someone. Although this might also be covered better by "recommended" lists, which to some extent could be implemented by a hooks to Google+.
While they might not have been Microsoft Clients, it is now unlikely that they every will be.
What would worry Microsoft (and investors) is that this significantly reduces the growth potential for Microsoft in one of the few areas in the world where the economy is growing. For linux it is great news, because a more diverse eco-system reduces vendor lock in and the same devices could easily run a linux distribution.
I wonder how hard it would be to feed the input into an existing game engine? Gamers could identify potential targets and based on reputation / number of ids the target could be investigated further. You could use something like Amzon mechanical Turk to set challenges.
With the Army's Blimp providing more data, analysis will become increasingly more challenging.
I wonder if this a push from Europeans, where they have sought to protect products like champagne for use exclusively for wines from a certain region. Champagne used to be the common term for sparkling wine.
Civet Coffee is so fifteen-seconds-ago. the latest and greatest thing is Elephant Coffee!
Extra value because elephants are likely to become extinct any second now due to excessive poaching for ivory.
It depends on if selling elephant processed coffee or ivory delivers more profit. One could argue processing coffee with elephants is a renewable resource, so it might be possible to make coffee elephants more profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
If a company with 3,200 employees is so incompetent that they can't get their software ported to Java SE 7 then they deserve to be abandoned by their customers.
Should companies running 10 year old software that has reached end of support several years ago, expect the software to be updated to support the latest Java version? Upgrading time and attendance software (like most enterprise software) is non-trivial, since it affects when people are scheduled to work and how people are paid and people tend to become irate when they aren't paid correctly.
If a licensee can't be bothered to move to the new runtime for supposedly critical software then they have bigger problems and they should go on neglecting stuff until they get pwned and grownups take over
It is not simply a matter of moving to a new runtime, as software releases are often tested against specific Java versions (or at best sets). A vendor doesn't want the risk that their software breaks as an unintended consequence of a change to fix a bug.
Nobody, except the foolish want to be on the bleeding edge with mission critical software and many businesses, workforce scheduling is mission critical.
I rarely login to facebook, but I do have pidgin connected via XMPP and that works fine for chatting with non-technical friends on facebook. Facebook switching to a private protocol would be a shame, but I'm not sure I would bother installing a separate client.
A more realistic figure would be software price after it has been discounted by the sales person.. Most (all?) enterprise software is discounted heavily and comes with large ongoing maintenance and support fees.
No. Windows handles DST rules in the registry, so it's perfectly capable of date-dependent DST rule handling. The article discusses those recommendations as a way to avoid problems caused by issues with Outlook and Exchange 2003
I refer you to KB912475 - Australian daylight saving time 2006 update for environments that do not use Exchange Server has now expired, where it states:
An automatic update will be released after the end of the 2006 daylight saving time transition. This update will reset the affected time zones back to their regular end date. Customers who have Automatic Updates enabled do not have to take any additional action.
Alternatively, customers can manually remove the KB 912475 update at this point. Manually removing the KB 912475 update will also reset the affected time zones back to their regular end date. Customers who do not have automatic updates enabled and who installed the KB 912475 update must manually remove this update.
.
It appears that date ranges for time zone rules might have been fixed in Vista onwards as the product is not listed.
TImezones is possibly an issue that those not planning to migrate from Windows XP may not have considered.
.
Why doesn't java use the operating system to provide that information in the first place? At least on operating systems that provide that sort of information, which isn't just "linux" but pretty much all unices.
The problem is Windows. My understanding is that Windows cannot handle date dependant daylight savings rules. For example in 2006, Daylight Savings was extended for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and then reverted to the normal rules in 2006. The solution at the time was to patch Windows prior to the Olympics and then patch again at some point in the future.
KB909915 about the change includes these gems of advice:
This reminds me of back before 2000, when a new grad was asked to write a simple website for businesses registering for GST in Australia. He used the same technique with no authentication on the URL. It wasn't a pleasant experience to turn up at a client site and be greeted by the question "Didn't your company build this website?" and to be shown the newspaper article. As the GST was highly political the Australian Federal Police (AFP) paid a visit to the office.
The decision by Microsoft set the system clock to local time, rather than UTC makes me give thanks frequently that the USA has timezones. I hate to think what abhorrent mess would have been created if the USA had a single timezone.
Westpac are reported not to be vulnerable to this hack, but their online banking usernames are a 8 digit number and the password are only six characters. The available characters are [a-z] and [0-9]. This is the login page.
Google have a distinct advantage in emerging markets over Apple because Chinese manufacturers will sell Android devices at a price point that more people can afford. However, that cannot happen without first providing wireless access.
The whole point of fibre in Kansas was to demonstrate that direct FTTP could be provided at a reasonable cost and challenge the existing players to provide a better product. This may be a similar tactic in Africa.
Remember for Google, the end game is for you to use their services in the cloud and that requires a network.
The thing I most care about is if the "hangout protocol" will be supported by libpurple, preferably by google written code. It would be great if the protocol was open source to ease the implementation.
I don't mind having a variety of IM protocols because it adds fault tolerance, but I want to run only one client. Several clients use libpurple now so it is even resistant to one development team's idea of what is the next best GUI idea.
XP source code has been available to academics for a long time. Alternatively, it might be what has people looking more seriously at wine.
I've been running LMDE for the past 12 months and find that Cinnamon is usable. Stability has definitely improved with Update 5 & 6. I wouldn't say it is perfect, but having previously used Gnome 2, it lets me get work done.
Your understanding is wrong.
In Australia we vote for candidates who represent parties. In the lower house (Representatives) the Member represents a seat (geographical area) and if the Member leaves parliament, then a by-election is held and candidates need to (re-)nominate. In the upper house (Senate) the member represents the state (twelve per state) and is elected based on obtaining a quota (1/6 of formal vote + 1). If a senator leaves parliament then their party nominates the candidate which is approved by the State Government. This is fair as a the preferential system means that a senate election for 1 candidate would be unfair.
This might sound a little confusing, but the Australian Electoral Commission has some excellent resources that explain this in more detail.
The big advantage is protest votes. For example, lets say I have libertarian leanings. In my electorate a libertarian could stand as a candidate and I could then vote for them as my first preference and use my second (or third) preference for a candidate from the major parties. This has two effects:
- The libertarian candidate can win compromises from a major candidate in return for directing preferences
- The major parties have clear evidence of how much support exists for the libertarian view
In a first past the post system, my vote is likely to be wasted unless I vote for one of the two major party candidates.
> 1. Analogy to water or electricity is flawed. Water and electricity are limited resources--but data is neverending. The only limit here is bandwidth
Bandwidth requires two components: pipe size and routers to move the data. Moving more data is expensive.
> 2. Past a certain point, more speed is irrelevant, but when you hit the data cap, your speed drops to zero (or your bill goes up in a way that is biased unfairly toward the ISP).
In Australia speed is capped at between 128Kbps - 512Kbps - still reasonable for browsing the web & checking email.
> 3. "With fibre that increases to 1Gbps and 324TB/month." You're arguing from the presupposition that users will max out their connection 24/7. That is silly.
> 4. A customer who uses 10% of his data cap pays x, but a customer who uses 101% of his data cap pays 1.2x. The 90% of unused bandwidth more than makes up for the extra 1% used by the other customer
The ISP still has to buy sufficient backhaul to support your 101% utilisation. In countries where caps exist (e.g Australia) the ISPs model on people using significantly less than their broadband cap. NBNCo provided a couple of example usages:
* 12/1Mbps 50GB plan with an assumed average download of 18GB
* 50/20Mbps 500GB plan with an assumed average download of 75GB. Remember these are averages so for someone downloading 500GB there have to be ~6 people downloading 5GB to arrive at an average of 75GB, except that it doesn't work like that because the RSP most likely has a 100GB quota plan and most of the people only downloading 5GB a month would choose that. Change the 5GB to 50GB and then it becomes 17.
Essentially what you are asking is that I suffer slow speeds to subsidise your heavy downloading with speed caps. As a technically literate person you would understand that the cost to lay fibre is exactly the same regardless of the speed and that speed caps are software setting. Supporting more data requires investment in larger backhaul and faster routers.
It is trivial to setup a computer to saturate a 1Gbps link. Sadly it requires only a couple of script kiddies to do it and performance of the ISP goes down the tube or their costs sky rocket.
> 5. Your contrived scenario is internally flawed, as well: what if the file the "someone" has to wait a month(!) to download is media from a family member overseas? a recorded video, photos...? Who made you judge of what is more justly important to random people?
By imposing speed caps you are forever denying the opportunity to experience a truly fast internet, where as with download quotas people can choose what content is more important, therefore I consider my point about it being socially unjust valid.
> 6 Yeah, my ISP (AT&T)...
So your ISP sucks. In Australia we can choose between multiple ISPs much to the disgust of Telstra. As you've probably guessed by now, I'm also making these comments in the context of Australia where the government is the the process of re-nationalising our telecommunications infrastructure.
> 7. "For me personally, I would much prefer 1Gbps with 100GB quota, than 12Mbps with no quota." That's a terrible example. What can you NOT do with a 12 Mbps download rate?
High definition video conferencing is one example. The througput recommended by NBNCo is 100/100Mbps. If you only use your connection sparingly for such services then 100GB is fine. I'm regularly under 100Mbps.
You might also be interested to know that the anti-fibre brigade in Australia use exactly your argument to stop the roll out of fibre.
> In conclusion, you're deluded or lying, a fool or a shill.
Or you have a fundamental lack of understanding, especially of the situation outside of the USA. I'll leave to others to decide.
The way it works with other countries is that data speeds are capped. For example in Australia after exceeding your quota, speeds are typically capped to between 64Kbps to 256Kbps. Some ISPs also offer the ability to purchase data blocks if you exceed your quota to restore full speed. There are a couple of ISPs who offer 500MB quotas and then charge 10c/MB. Way to easy to rack up huge bills.
The slow speed enable people to send/receive emails and browse facebook but not consume video or use P2P that effectively. A bit like cutting the flow of water so you could pour a glass of water, but not fill the swimming pool in any reasonable period of time.
The tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, which dates back to grazing cows on common land causing degradation. It applies equally well to the internet where backhaul is shared.
People need to consider if data caps or faster speeds are more important to them. If ISPs are not permitted to impose data caps then they have very little incentive to upgrade the network speed. Currently an average ADSL2+ connection is around 10Mbps and cable is 100Mbps. That means in an non-congested network 10 times more data could be downloaded. With fibre that increases to 1Gbps and 324TB/month. It is doubtful that customers are prepared to pay sufficiently increased prices to deliver an adequate return on investment to the ISP.
Data caps provide a way for ISPs to invest in upgrading speeds and deliver those speeds to everyone while recouping the costs from those who make the most use of the network by downloading more. In the same way it is possible for a person to ration their usage of water or electricity, the time of data usage can be selected by the end user, but I'm not aware of ISPs that offer instant speed changes. This leads to the situation where a person cannot video conference with family once a month because they cannot justify the higher speeds just for 30 minutes. This is much more socially unjust than someone having to wait until next month to download a file. Some ISPs with quotas also permit customers to buy extra quota during a month.
For me personally, I would much prefer 1Gbps with 100GB quota, than 12Mbps with no quota.
This is an excellent analogy. Every ISP over subscribes the bandwidth that is allocated, based on the valid assumption that not everyone is using their service all the time. Over subscription was fine prior to P2P and video streaming.
What happens in Australia is that many ISPs offer peak and off/peak quota with a typical 50/50 split. We also have a range of plans from 30GB to 1TB/month. After exceeding your cap, speed is slowed down to 256Kbps
It may not even be more people, it may just the same number using the pipes for longer. Do you want to pay more for the ISP to build a bigger pipe? Also the routers will need to upgraded to support more traffic
Actually caps mean that towards the end of the billing period that larger downloaders are speed capped and their behaviour is having less effect on network performance. I realise you may not like it and that ISPs in USA may be increasing profitability more than is warranted but caps are effective.
To post the comment, the poster has visited slashdot. It is likely the poster might have visited wikipedia. In both cases this means the poster has benefited from RMS' work.
Now Australia has a similar land mass to the US, but less than 1/10th the population and is heavily urbanised.
1Gbps will be available in a couple of years on the NBN, but price is $150 plus data (100/40Mbps wholesale is $38/month so retail prices will be likely to be double wholesale).
- 1000/400Mbps falls from $150 to $90, while the average speed grows from 30Mbps to 230Mbps. So price falls by 40% while average speed grows by 7.6 times
- price of CVC falls by 2.5 times, while the data usage grows by 20 times
Sadly, too many people in Australia have read the "1Gbps Fibre announcement made during the 2010 Federal election campaign in response to Google Fibre Announcement. Very little investigation has been done to appreciate what is being delivered for fear that like other government initiatives, the delivery will be a failure. The reality is that for 50% 12/1Mbps will be what they experience and for maybe 25% 100/40Mbps with download quotas. The rich will have their 1Gbps connections subsidised by the national roll-out. Rather than revolutionary the NBN will be little better than current 100Mbps cable services. NBNCo are also focusing on areas already serviced by cable to re-enforce their natural monopoly and reduce competition.
The alternative would have been to release uncapped fibre speeds (everybody receives 1Gbps) and charge for data. This is fair as low quota users put hardly any load on the network, while heavy downloaders do. We would then have had something closer to Google Fibre and truly revolutionary. To quote Simon Hackett (Internode):
Instead we have a fibre network where anyone downloading less than 5GB month (national average is ~20GB (ABS) is probably better using a 4G connection and ditching the land line. If we accept that NBNCo are correct in predicting that 50% will connect at 12/1Mbps, then based on the fact that 25/5Mbps plans are only $5 extra a month there is a significant number of people who may find wireless better value.
In the past (and possibly now) the majority of jobs were repetitive low skilled (e.g. digging holes with a shovel, porter, assembly line worker, etc.) that just about anyone could do with a bit of on the job training. To leave school at 15 was not uncommon 20 years ago. The service / knowledge economy jobs require a much more highly skilled workforce. If you look at the previous transition from farm labourer to assembly line worker both jobs were relatively similar in terms of the type of personal attributes required.
My concern for society is that with education standards dropping coupled with an entitlement / victim mentality that many people are being disenfranchised and have little chance of contributing to society. We cannot stop change, but we should plan for it.
The idea of custom channels sounds very appealing. especially channels curated by well known identities. Apps are currently promoted by blogs etc. and the effect of a channel would be to provide a list of all the Apps recommended by someone. Although this might also be covered better by "recommended" lists, which to some extent could be implemented by a hooks to Google+.
While they might not have been Microsoft Clients, it is now unlikely that they every will be.
What would worry Microsoft (and investors) is that this significantly reduces the growth potential for Microsoft in one of the few areas in the world where the economy is growing. For linux it is great news, because a more diverse eco-system reduces vendor lock in and the same devices could easily run a linux distribution.
I wonder how hard it would be to feed the input into an existing game engine? Gamers could identify potential targets and based on reputation / number of ids the target could be investigated further. You could use something like Amzon mechanical Turk to set challenges.
With the Army's Blimp providing more data, analysis will become increasingly more challenging.
I wonder if this a push from Europeans, where they have sought to protect products like champagne for use exclusively for wines from a certain region. Champagne used to be the common term for sparkling wine.
Civet Coffee is so fifteen-seconds-ago. the latest and greatest thing is Elephant Coffee!
Extra value because elephants are likely to become extinct any second now due to excessive poaching for ivory.
It depends on if selling elephant processed coffee or ivory delivers more profit. One could argue processing coffee with elephants is a renewable resource, so it might be possible to make coffee elephants more profitable.