Line failure could be handled via dynamic DNS, the voodoo isn't really very difficult, the outgoing connections should be routed fairly normally anyway. In terms of suppliers, a 0.1% failure rate sounds about right for consumer ADSL, so 00.01%, 4 nines isn't bad for a cheapo connection.
Just to help those who don't understand redundancy.
Two providers; A and B. Provider A has a 10% chance of failure, provider B a 5% chance of failure. If you have a single line then you want provider B and have a 5% chance of losing your line. If however, you use both providers at the same time and don't rely on just one of them. You now have only a 0.5% chance of losing your internet connection, assuming both lines are completely independant. The nice thing is that IP was designed from the ground up to take advantage of this feature of probability, it's all built into the routing.
Using two ISP's is a relatively untapped resource today,
Um... It's pretty much been standard practice since day one. It's how the Internet provides robust routing. All businesses relying on their network should be doing it. Diverse home networks? Depends how important your porn supply is to you.
WTF? If a receiving server's down the sending SMTP server will spool the mail until it's back or it times out, usually 5 days. The sender is notified if the mail bounces.
Direct answer to your question: Our T1 line is beyond essential to the daily operation of the organization. It's absolutely mission critical that we're connected at all times, without interruption or major packet loss.
So... Why do you have only one of them? It all comes down to money, did you lose more than the T1 costs when you lost the major client? If so then the IT directors/CIO's f*cked up.
I'm on PlusNet btw. I raised a ticket yesterday. Today, they traced the problem to their LLU supplier Tiscali and did something to my PPP profile, it's been fine so far. Their service has been pretty good as far as I can see. They know there's a problem, they're working on it.
If you depend on the internet and your internet connection is fubar then by definition you are fubar. If your supplier is telling you to go f*ck yourself by denying there's a problem or refusing to fix it then change suppliers. They are in breach of contract.
Y'know, the right for someone other than the local monopoly carrier to come along, plug their own hardware into the local exchange and charge customers for DSL services?
"And thought, damn, nobody's going to buy that, people aren't stupid. Everyone knows that IIIi+ is almost 4, it has to be 3.8 at least so we just decided to rename it 4. Sorry... IV... IV+... Would another plus be overkill do you think?" said a Sun spokesman.
I for instance am naturally introverted in nature, but I'm quite able to go to bars and the like without feelings of anxiety and I'm not shy. I however don't particularly value the type of conversation with the type of people you meet in bars. Chit chat bores me silly. People and their inanities can be very tiresome.
If you understand the general principles, how difficult is it to pick up MS, or Apple products? I haven't used MS Office for decades but I could sit down and be productive with it in about 30 seconds flat. The same is true of an MS Office user sitting down in front of OpenOffice or AbiWord. Most software which performs a similar task actually tends to use similar concepts, look and work in a similar manner.
Take movies for instance. Movie theatres provide a service, they provide a huge screen, surround sound, big comfy seats and "food" with an insanely high sugar content.
Music... Well same thing, big speakers, light show, band on stage, a spectacle. Music as data files are really nothing more than a form of radio.
Both provide an event.
Information such as books are a different case, they are comparatively rare, the demand is relatively low compared to movies and music. This means that they are rather difficult to get hold of, your friend is unlikely to have a copy and they are unlikely to be available on the peer to peer networks which means the supply is relatively limited and the value comparatively higher. Pay for download services for these types of products should be successful.
Software is a service, customisation, support, consultancy etc.
They do pay for themselves in lower bills and longer life. Mine have already paid for themselves.
They aren't dimmer, a 25 Watt CFL produces around 1700 lumens which is almost exactly the same as a 100 Watt incandescent.
I like the fact that they don't blind me. Gives the eyes a chance to react when switched on.
You can get different colour temperatures, the whole range, though they may or may not be available in your local hardware store.
Yeah, the sizes can be a pain, I have one uplighter which won't take a CFL.
I like em and it's the right way to save the world from global warming. They save me money; Align people's economic interest with the environment. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time on the large scale.
A Watt is a Watt, whether it comes from a lightbulb or an electric heater. Having said that I've gone 100% fluorescent and my bills have dropped significantly, not hugely but a sigificant amount, enough to pay for the bulbs and then some.
I'm curious as to where you got those figures. This shows p2p usage of around 10% and pay site usage of around 4% as of March 2005. I would guess the usage of pay sites (iTunes, etc) has increased since then. Hardly a 40-1 ratio. Hell, its not even a 4-1 ratio.
The chart is percentage of users not percentage of downloads, and I think only legal users.
"NPD noted that in March 2005, 243 million songs were downloaded from P2P services. By comparison, 26 million songs were purchased from digital music stores during that same month."
And those figures only account for legal peer to peer systems with centralised management hosts. Gnutella for instance isn't included.
No, if (fifth time I've said this) there are strong social more against unauthorized copying,
And as I said... There aren't and there never will be because the act is trivial and the incremental damage of a copy is also trivial.
You most certainly did make claims about what is preferable when you claimed that certain actions "attempting to control information" would be futile.
It is futile. I consider it stupid but if it's your preference, feel free to rage against the tide. Preferences only apply to individuals, they can't be generalised. I don't make claims about what is preferable.
yet one can correctly state that (for a large class of people), it is not "trivially easy" to get drugs,
It is trivially easy to get drugs. You may not know how to do so but you are a very small sample of the population.
And what would you say to someone who said "The idea that the act of stealing something the victim doesn't really need would ever be thought of as anything more than trivial is risible." ? Got it? Okay, take that argument, and apply it to what you said above.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, you're posing a strawman argument. The fact is that the act of copying a file is trivial. The incremental damage to a record company of that file copy is also insignificant and it's seen that way by the copiers. They will never, ever, shall I say it again... ever be considered equal to physical property rights and trying to equate it to paedophilia is utterly ridiculous.
So. How are you going to physically stop them from copying your files and so reduce the supply?
No right or wrong answers, of course -- I'm simply interested in your best educated guess.
I'd say the record industry in it's traditional form essentially died a few years back, Universal just acknowledged it today. With Itunes and the like there's really no need to sign up to a record company for production and distribution. Instead they'll become marketing organisations and the artists, their clients. The relationship has changed significantly. The current generation of artists grew up with CDs and that's still their mentality, get a recording contract. The next generation of artists will realise that they don't need a recording contract, what they need is an advertising agency.
The number of illegal downloads outnumbers the legal ones in a ratio of around 40 to 1. Around 2% of downloaders use the legal services. Statistically it would be considered an insignificant proportion. I have to say this may well be enough to allow them to survive economically.
You realized your point applied to more than record companies, yet singled out record companies because they were the most reviled group in that set
Ah, so you're telepathic are you? You know my thoughts. Are you aware that belief is a symptom of a psychotic break. Have you been tested for schizophrenia?
You seem to be deliberately confusing the very separate issues of:
1) whether it *is* easy to get access to intellectual works in digital form
2) whether it would be preferable for people to make certain attempts at access more difficult
No. It is easy to access digital information and it is trivially easy to increase the supply essentially to infinity. This is a simple fact. Because all digital information must at some point be made available to the consumer it must always be possible for a copy to be made and that means that it will always be possible to increase the supply of that information essentially infinitely. Therefore the economic value of that digital information will always tend to zero, property rights or not.
I made no statement over whether that situation is preferable or not. It's a simple economic fact of the laws of supply and demand.
You seem to have a rather naive belief that it's possible to have a society where adherence to a set of rules is close to 100%, that is also known as a totalitarian society. The idea that the act of copying a file would ever be thought of as anything more than trivial is risible.
Here I am trying to explain the simple reality of the situation to you and you start taking personal pot shots.
Your point is moot, and therefore irrelevant because copying music is not and never will be considered the way paedophiles are thought of. The incremental damage done to a record company (since that's the focus of the article) is quite correctly thought of as insignificant by the individual performing the copying.
If nobody had qualms about taking property I was standing in front of with a big stick the first person to attempt so would at the very least lose an eye. All subsequent people attempting to do so would look at the one eyed wonder and ask the question; He values it more than my eye, do I value it more than my eye?
Tell me again how do you propose to physically stop someone from making a copy of digital information. How do you propose to limit that supply and give that information value?
Yes, it does. Publishing companies, software houses.
Ah. So you agree then, it was a tad dishonest to portray the potential losers under your ideal rules as being merely "record companies".
1: I'm not remotely dishonest, I did point out originally that all digital information is inherently valueless but the article is about music, hence my focus.
2: They're not my rules. They are economic facts of life for all commodities.
Protecting the value of physical objects is only "relatively simple" because of the broad support for property rights in those physical goods...
Eh nope. It's easy to protect physical property because you can physically stand in front of it with a big pointy stick. The law is just formalised violence. How do you propose to stand in front of a copy of Mariah Carey's latest tune? Without that ability your "property rights" aren't worth the paper they are written on.
"The inventor is basically using a set price and using the demand at that price to set the supply rather than letting the supply and demand set the price. This is the same thing that iTunes, etc. do. They set a price of $0.99 per song and use the demand at that price to determine how much supply to create. This way the problem of a potentially infinite supply does not drop the price to zero as you suggest."
You're making the false assumption that the consumers are unable to copy the music themselves. They are and so the record companies (or any digital information provider) are not in control of the supply. The songs are distributed, the supply increases.
This is why we have the DRM to the eyeballs stuff in Vista and in hardware. It's an attempt to control supply. Doomed to failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Line failure could be handled via dynamic DNS, the voodoo isn't really very difficult, the outgoing connections should be routed fairly normally anyway. In terms of suppliers, a 0.1% failure rate sounds about right for consumer ADSL, so 00.01%, 4 nines isn't bad for a cheapo connection.
Just to help those who don't understand redundancy.
Two providers; A and B. Provider A has a 10% chance of failure, provider B a 5% chance of failure. If you have a single line then you want provider B and have a 5% chance of losing your line. If however, you use both providers at the same time and don't rely on just one of them. You now have only a 0.5% chance of losing your internet connection, assuming both lines are completely independant. The nice thing is that IP was designed from the ground up to take advantage of this feature of probability, it's all built into the routing.
Um... It's pretty much been standard practice since day one. It's how the Internet provides robust routing. All businesses relying on their network should be doing it. Diverse home networks? Depends how important your porn supply is to you.
Is it cheaper/better to...
1: Buy an SDSL business service from one supplier, with SLAs, rigorous uptimes and repair times.
or...
2: Buy cheap ADSL services from two or more suppliers but forget the SLA, uptime and repair time guarantees?
I strongly suspect that (2) is the cheaper and more robust system.
So... Why do you have only one of them? It all comes down to money, did you lose more than the T1 costs when you lost the major client? If so then the IT directors/CIO's f*cked up.
I'm on PlusNet btw. I raised a ticket yesterday. Today, they traced the problem to their LLU supplier Tiscali and did something to my PPP profile, it's been fine so far. Their service has been pretty good as far as I can see. They know there's a problem, they're working on it.
If you depend on the internet and your internet connection is fubar then by definition you are fubar. If your supplier is telling you to go f*ck yourself by denying there's a problem or refusing to fix it then change suppliers. They are in breach of contract.
Y'know, the right for someone other than the local monopoly carrier to come along, plug their own hardware into the local exchange and charge customers for DSL services?
g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_loop_unbundlin
Mmm, looks like you do, so your DSL services should become more competitive.
"And thought, damn, nobody's going to buy that, people aren't stupid. Everyone knows that IIIi+ is almost 4, it has to be 3.8 at least so we just decided to rename it 4. Sorry... IV... IV+... Would another plus be overkill do you think?" said a Sun spokesman.
I for instance am naturally introverted in nature, but I'm quite able to go to bars and the like without feelings of anxiety and I'm not shy. I however don't particularly value the type of conversation with the type of people you meet in bars. Chit chat bores me silly. People and their inanities can be very tiresome.
And you chose Windows, you even agreed to the license agreement. What're you complaining about?
Golf... Athlete?
If you understand the general principles, how difficult is it to pick up MS, or Apple products? I haven't used MS Office for decades but I could sit down and be productive with it in about 30 seconds flat. The same is true of an MS Office user sitting down in front of OpenOffice or AbiWord. Most software which performs a similar task actually tends to use similar concepts, look and work in a similar manner.
Take movies for instance. Movie theatres provide a service, they provide a huge screen, surround sound, big comfy seats and "food" with an insanely high sugar content.
Music... Well same thing, big speakers, light show, band on stage, a spectacle. Music as data files are really nothing more than a form of radio.
Both provide an event.
Information such as books are a different case, they are comparatively rare, the demand is relatively low compared to movies and music. This means that they are rather difficult to get hold of, your friend is unlikely to have a copy and they are unlikely to be available on the peer to peer networks which means the supply is relatively limited and the value comparatively higher. Pay for download services for these types of products should be successful.
Software is a service, customisation, support, consultancy etc.
I like em and it's the right way to save the world from global warming. They save me money; Align people's economic interest with the environment. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time on the large scale.
Next... Heat pumps.
A Watt is a Watt, whether it comes from a lightbulb or an electric heater. Having said that I've gone 100% fluorescent and my bills have dropped significantly, not hugely but a sigificant amount, enough to pay for the bulbs and then some.
The chart is percentage of users not percentage of downloads, and I think only legal users.
"NPD noted that in March 2005, 243 million songs were downloaded from P2P services. By comparison, 26 million songs were purchased from digital music stores during that same month."
And those figures only account for legal peer to peer systems with centralised management hosts. Gnutella for instance isn't included.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/23/guardian_
But the 40:1 ratio comes from here:
"Figures from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) estimate that for each legal download, 40 are done illegally."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5294842.stm
And as I said... There aren't and there never will be because the act is trivial and the incremental damage of a copy is also trivial.
It is futile. I consider it stupid but if it's your preference, feel free to rage against the tide. Preferences only apply to individuals, they can't be generalised. I don't make claims about what is preferable.
It is trivially easy to get drugs. You may not know how to do so but you are a very small sample of the population.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, you're posing a strawman argument. The fact is that the act of copying a file is trivial. The incremental damage to a record company of that file copy is also insignificant and it's seen that way by the copiers. They will never, ever, shall I say it again... ever be considered equal to physical property rights and trying to equate it to paedophilia is utterly ridiculous.
So. How are you going to physically stop them from copying your files and so reduce the supply?
I'd say the record industry in it's traditional form essentially died a few years back, Universal just acknowledged it today. With Itunes and the like there's really no need to sign up to a record company for production and distribution. Instead they'll become marketing organisations and the artists, their clients. The relationship has changed significantly.
The current generation of artists grew up with CDs and that's still their mentality, get a recording contract. The next generation of artists will realise that they don't need a recording contract, what they need is an advertising agency.
The number of illegal downloads outnumbers the legal ones in a ratio of around 40 to 1. Around 2% of downloaders use the legal services. Statistically it would be considered an insignificant proportion. I have to say this may well be enough to allow them to survive economically.
I understand your point fine. Your point is irrelevant, it doesn't represent reality.
Ah, so you're telepathic are you? You know my thoughts. Are you aware that belief is a symptom of a psychotic break. Have you been tested for schizophrenia?
No. It is easy to access digital information and it is trivially easy to increase the supply essentially to infinity. This is a simple fact. Because all digital information must at some point be made available to the consumer it must always be possible for a copy to be made and that means that it will always be possible to increase the supply of that information essentially infinitely. Therefore the economic value of that digital information will always tend to zero, property rights or not.
I made no statement over whether that situation is preferable or not. It's a simple economic fact of the laws of supply and demand.
You seem to have a rather naive belief that it's possible to have a society where adherence to a set of rules is close to 100%, that is also known as a totalitarian society. The idea that the act of copying a file would ever be thought of as anything more than trivial is risible.
Here I am trying to explain the simple reality of the situation to you and you start taking personal pot shots.
Your point is moot, and therefore irrelevant because copying music is not and never will be considered the way paedophiles are thought of. The incremental damage done to a record company (since that's the focus of the article) is quite correctly thought of as insignificant by the individual performing the copying.
If nobody had qualms about taking property I was standing in front of with a big stick the first person to attempt so would at the very least lose an eye. All subsequent people attempting to do so would look at the one eyed wonder and ask the question; He values it more than my eye, do I value it more than my eye?
Tell me again how do you propose to physically stop someone from making a copy of digital information. How do you propose to limit that supply and give that information value?
1: I'm not remotely dishonest, I did point out originally that all digital information is inherently valueless but the article is about music, hence my focus.
2: They're not my rules. They are economic facts of life for all commodities.
Eh nope. It's easy to protect physical property because you can physically stand in front of it with a big pointy stick. The law is just formalised violence. How do you propose to stand in front of a copy of Mariah Carey's latest tune? Without that ability your "property rights" aren't worth the paper they are written on.
"The inventor is basically using a set price and using the demand at that price to set the supply rather than letting the supply and demand set the price. This is the same thing that iTunes, etc. do. They set a price of $0.99 per song and use the demand at that price to determine how much supply to create. This way the problem of a potentially infinite supply does not drop the price to zero as you suggest."
You're making the false assumption that the consumers are unable to copy the music themselves. They are and so the record companies (or any digital information provider) are not in control of the supply. The songs are distributed, the supply increases.
This is why we have the DRM to the eyeballs stuff in Vista and in hardware. It's an attempt to control supply. Doomed to failure.