I couldn't care one whit for what Michael Dell does right at the moment.
They have had opportunities in the past to support Linux properly and they've discarded them for working with Microsoft- which is their right as a company. This whole sorta love it, sorta not affair with Dell has been ongoing for nearly 10 years now. I know about it because I was in the wings on parts of it all throughout.
The bulk of the argument Michael Dell's making is specious as it doesn't apply for Dell Computers as they're only really concerned about kernel support of the device buildup on a given machine- for all they care, they need only drop Debian, Ubuntu, or, god forbid, even Linspire on their product lines to "ensure that they work on delivery". If the kernel has support for the devices they ship on a given desktop and laptop, this will simply work and people can choose other distributions as they see fit for them- so long as any of their custom apps use something like the Loki Games installer or Autopackage (I'm for using Autopackage myself...).
This is all nice, but in the end, he's asking for Linux to be more like Windows (which it's not...) when he really ought to be less concerned about all of that and pick a default distribution they can comfortably support and support the devices in the Kernel however they can. It's not at all hard Michael- happens every day of the week. I've got a laptop from one of your competitors, any distribution will install on it, and the bulk of the devices (with the notable exception of the Broadcom WiFi (which there's a usable workaround, though I'd rather they didn't use that chipset...) and the silly on-board flash reader (which TI's preventing a version to be made- nifty device really, too bad TI's being stupid about it...), it all just went on and worked- with each and every distribution I put on it in 32-bit mode (64 bit modes work, but since the ATI chipset's...twitchy...it is more difficult to get 64-bit modes going. And it's nothing to do with the distributions per se, it's ATI's doing...).
They might just leave Windows support at the XP level (Not likely, mind, but there's nothing other than potential customer alienation to keep them from doing that...). They might require only the Windows product development teams to have Vista, etc. and require everyone else to use RedHat and Workplace (Which is very likely...)- if you're not doing Windows development, you may not get to upgrade to Vista (Which, in a company that size, is effectively "no one will upgrade"...).
Companies not ready for disclosure of things of this nature almost always flatly deny them occuring- just witness XGI being bought by ATI recently; both companies denied they were doing it- but they did it anyway. I've little doubts that they may have done this- they've been building up to it for several years now. Now whether it's actually going to happen, on the other hand, remains to be seen.
Well, you can DO your calculations that way, but it'd not work out well in practice.
1) Peak data rates will cause you to drop traffic, messing up the conference. 2) iLBC's data rate only is the codec rate. Most implementations will add error correction amongst other things. 3) We don't know what Skype is actually using, but it's not iLBC: Quoth Skype:
Skype automatically selects the best codec depending on the connection between yourself and the person you are calling. On average, Skype uses between 3-16 kilobytes/sec depending on bandwidth available for other party, network conditions in between, callers CPU performance, etc.
3-16 kilobytes per second is in the ballpark of the three streams you quoted- and is a bigger deal.
With the above in mind:
3 * 8 = 21kbps -- That's just ONE stream at it's lowest bandwidth... 21 * 3 = 63kbps -- That's the outbound stream for all of the conference...
That's about half of the bandwidth on a 128k upstream. You'd better get a QoS prioritizer box in there if you're going to do anything other than that conference or you'll run the risk of dropping packets and garbling the conversation on one or more people's parts. You can probably get away with 1-2 more people, but you're beginning to push your luck past four people.
Considering that I DO have business service (and only for $100US/mo...), I do happen to pay for that bandwidth. And, I'd be torqued off if I didn't see MOST of my 15Mbits down and 2Mbits up most of the time.
Do NOT advertise something unless you're going to GIVE it. It doesn't matter if business is guaranteed or not, it matters if they advertise one thing and give another- which is what is actually going on here. In many of the countries with broadband, that'd be called a "bait and switch"- and it's QUITE illegal in the country we're talking about, the US.
The Holy Bible points out that we will truly NOT know the end times, for Jesus will come as a theif in the night and take all the believers that are not intended to stand at the end times and bear witness. That's right, folks. While you shouldn't be living like there's no God (For you'd be WRONG...), you should worry about living the full life that Jesus promises you if you walk along his path. Hellfire and brimstone, the world is coming to an end, will NOT convert those that don't believe.
Simply put, limiting the scope in this manner is highly bogus- no matter HOW you slice it. And,like you said, it's stupid and serves no purpose other than to alienate your customers, esp. in this day and age. MS got away with their little impropriety because they did it before the Internet got prevalent; nowadays, word gets around a LOT quicker.
Sound software typically is optimized quite well for both company's offerings, esp. if you don't use special features of the other brand. To be sure, there's edge cases where you need that- but Skype's NOT one of them nor is there evidence that there's the degredation you claim happened with your app experience. (Not to mention that there's tons of other P2P VoIP applications that use SIP and Jabber technology that work as good or better than Skype, and there's other commercial proprietary systems (such as Eyeball Networks' stuff...) that DOES handle up to 10 people (or more as bandwidth will allow...) without needing a dual core anything, let alone an Intel one.)
This is plain and simple being bought to support one over the other. Please don't try to defend this- it's not something that has much of any good explanation for this, especially considering that they actually DO appear to be just CPUIDing and crippling the app if it's not a dual core Intel CPU...
Considering that SIPPhone already HAS voice conference calls of at least 10 or more, works with ANY SIP enabled device that's not crippled to a single provider (Vonage devices come immediately to mind...), and costs nothing for VoIP calls- I'd say, skip Skype all together, especially after this little stunt.
Unless Skype's playing reflector for the whole conference, each peer's connectivity limits what you can/can't do.
At 128kbps (the average upstream speed on broadband these days in the US...), you can typically host a four to six way voice conference or a 2-3 way video conference. This is because you have to provide the outbound traffic for each of the peers and control traffic. With a reflector system, you can host larger conferences, limited only by the inbound bandwidth because the reflector is flipping the traffic from your mic (and possibly camera...) to all the participants. However, that's REALLY bandwidth intensive, so to keep it economical, you'd probably limit it to 10 participants or so to limit hogging of that limited resource.
Now, this is all due to everything being unicast UDP. If we had IPv6 and Multicast support for the same available, one could handle at least up to the 10 without needing a reflector as the router infrastructure would handle it right along with the video on demand, etc. streams. However, since this is not likely to happen in our or several generations' lifetimes at the rates things are going, waiting or wishing for that is a waste of time.:-)
They're distracting the populace from what's really important. If people knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what the PATRIOT Act actually did, instead of mapping the meaning of the word that was formed from the acronym of the REAL name of the act, they'd probably go ballistic on them- once it was explained what was done to them all in the name of the War on Terror.
I'm all for protecting the country from the problem- but the PATRIOT Act doesn't really do what needs to be done (folks, it needs to be out in the open...) and few of the things they enacted to "protect" us would have done squat to protect us from what happened on 9/11. That'd be more effort than they probably want to spend on things- after all, we have all those pork barrel projects to fund as well, you know...
All humor aside, if an ISP offers 15x2Mbit peak bandwidth, they'd better by god GIVE that bandwidth or be guilty of false and misleading advertising. I don't care if they're budgeting for only 30% of the advertised bandwidth ever being used or billing at the rate that reflects that they only really have that much behind the offering. That, folks, isn't your problem- it's THIERS. If they can't deliver on it for whatever reasons, they should have thought about what they were marketing and what they were actually selling and made the reality match the pitch.
Don't be selling 6Mbit, 15Mbits, or whatever unless you mean it totally.
Considering that they shouldn't be even OPERATING the aircraft with gear in that condition...
Anyhow, I'd be worried about something along those lines- because in the AOA portion of the Airport there's loads of RF interferance that's at a higher signal strength than would be expected. The biggest issue I've got with the GPS line (and other instrumentation on the avionics of the plane...) is that the frequencies are all way off for them to be an issue unless they're using sub-standard gear in violation of FCC regulations.
As you can see, it's nestled in the middle, GPS is. Not enough difference to make major harmonics differences and a system should reject signals not in it's band outright unless there's many watts from the transmitter involved and you're inductively inducing the signal into the gear itself- if it has that big of a problem with signals of this nature, it's not a good GPS system, I wouldn't navigate a rickshaw by it, let alone an airplane.
What we're seeing here is a "annoyance" abatement policy that is being wrapped around a psuedo-technical reason that the masses buy because they don't know any better.
Considering that if you HAVE no work to pay for things, at some point it breaks down and you end up with a depression in the economy.
At some point, it all collapses because there's nobody left in the country that are able to pay for what is being offered, albeit at lower prices (though I don't see housing going down, I see it going up along with the ability to pay for it going down hard...).
They got snookered by their rep, telling them they had to have an OS with them, or they thought the same- and Windows is the only option, in many cases, from Dell's website and their reps.
But, they're a niche player in the markets that they work in. I mean, they had a metallic green RoboSapien and a red RoboSapien V2- wow... (I'll admit the RS exclusive RoboSapien is a neat addition to my animatronic toy collection, but I'm pretty certain that most of those toys ended up being bought from someplace other than RatShack- I mean, $69 vs $99, c'mon...)
There's a reason they posted such a dismal last quarter.
They had a good edge on sound systems. They ceded it. They had a decent market on TV's. They all but ditched it. They had the top Personal/Business Computer lineup at one point in time- had they pressed it, they could have given IBM a run for their money. They ceded it. They had the top of the line Portable computer product lineup. They shuttered that division's doors, even though it was a decently profitable division by itself.
I go into RatShack for electronics tools when I don't want to go into Fry's these days- and for the odd part that doesn't show up in an Auto Parts store... Nothing else. They DO have nice electronics tools, but that is insufficient to keep them afloat.
Radio Shack is a business trying to find a place to be. They used to have it, but then they either shedded the lines of business that kept them marginally profitable or ran them into the ground because of lack of competant management. I do wish them well, but I don't know how they're going to at least keep a toehold on things.
Until the car stereo players, mobile units, etc. support Ogg, while it's a superior format (and it IS...), it's just not going to get used. I've got an in-dash that plays MP3's. It's supposed to do WMA's as well, but it didn't like some of the stuff that our housemate fed to it recently. It DOES do quite a good job of playing MP3's and it'd just say "Huh" on an Ogg file. What? Get a player that supports Ogg? I don't know of any units that do, and I suspect that IF there were one, it'd take a while for me to even budget the thing into the picture. I got the in-dash because the other methods were sub-optimal in the way playback is done and it means another device floating in the cab- and it's nothing for me to take the SD card out of the deck and stick it in a portable MP3 player and go on my merry way.
Unless I can do that with Ogg, I'm just stuck with playing those on a PC or a TV media player at home.
...they're under the impression that they're a hardware company (iPod, etc.) but then they charge for that OS and it's upgrades (which should probably be free if they're "just a hardware company"...).
...that what Google's doing here is insuring the quality and integrity of that product.
Advertisers can't get to you if you don't use Google. If they allow gaming of the pagerank features of the search engine to go undealt with, then we quit using Google because it's not anywhere near as good- because that too is a product. You see, Google's got two products going on here, one that is provided as a free service in order to obtain the materials (as it were) for the second one that you mentioned. If the first product isn't palatable to the first set of customers, the second set won't get their product offering- and they're the one's paying for it all.
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I couldn't care one whit for what Michael Dell does right at the moment.
They have had opportunities in the past to support Linux properly and they've discarded them for working with Microsoft- which is their right as a company. This whole sorta love it, sorta not affair with Dell has been ongoing for nearly 10 years now. I know about it because I was in the wings on parts of it all throughout.
The bulk of the argument Michael Dell's making is specious as it doesn't apply for Dell Computers as they're only really concerned about kernel support of the device buildup on a given machine- for all they care, they need only drop Debian, Ubuntu, or, god forbid, even Linspire on their product lines to "ensure that they work on delivery". If the kernel has support for the devices they ship on a given desktop and laptop, this will simply work and people can choose other distributions as they see fit for them- so long as any of their custom apps use something like the Loki Games installer or Autopackage (I'm for using Autopackage myself...).
This is all nice, but in the end, he's asking for Linux to be more like Windows (which it's not...) when he really ought to be less concerned about all of that and pick a default distribution they can comfortably support and support the devices in the Kernel however they can. It's not at all hard Michael- happens every day of the week. I've got a laptop from one of your competitors, any distribution will install on it, and the bulk of the devices (with the notable exception of the Broadcom WiFi (which there's a usable workaround, though I'd rather they didn't use that chipset...) and the silly on-board flash reader (which TI's preventing a version to be made- nifty device really, too bad TI's being stupid about it...), it all just went on and worked- with each and every distribution I put on it in 32-bit mode (64 bit modes work, but since the ATI chipset's...twitchy...it is more difficult to get 64-bit modes going. And it's nothing to do with the distributions per se, it's ATI's doing...).
They might just leave Windows support at the XP level (Not likely, mind, but there's nothing other than potential customer alienation to keep them from doing that...). They might require only the Windows product development teams to have Vista, etc. and require everyone else to use RedHat and Workplace (Which is very likely...)- if you're not doing Windows development, you may not get to upgrade to Vista (Which, in a company that size, is effectively "no one will upgrade"...).
Companies not ready for disclosure of things of this nature almost always flatly deny them occuring- just witness XGI being bought by ATI recently; both companies denied they were doing it- but they did it anyway. I've little doubts that they may have done this- they've been building up to it for several years now. Now whether it's actually going to happen, on the other hand, remains to be seen.
I believe this was said in terms of thier internal machines, not the deliverables.
Either is compelling as a statement from Big Blue, but the latter of the two is much more devastating
as it means QUITE a bit of revenue on MS' part.
1) Peak data rates will cause you to drop traffic, messing up the conference.
2) iLBC's data rate only is the codec rate. Most implementations will add error correction amongst other things.
3) We don't know what Skype is actually using, but it's not iLBC: Quoth Skype:
Considering that I DO have business service (and only for $100US/mo...), I do happen to pay for that bandwidth. And, I'd be torqued off if I didn't see MOST of my 15Mbits down and 2Mbits up most of the time.
Do NOT advertise something unless you're going to GIVE it. It doesn't matter if business is guaranteed or not, it matters if they advertise one thing and give another- which is what is actually going on here. In many of the countries with broadband, that'd be called a "bait and switch"- and it's QUITE illegal in the country we're talking about, the US.
That'll teach me to not preview before posting... NOT!!!
The Holy Bible points out that we will truly NOT know the end times, for Jesus will come as a theif in the night and take all the believers that are not intended to stand at the end times and bear witness. That's right, folks. While you shouldn't be living like there's no God (For you'd be WRONG...), you should worry about living the full life that Jesus promises you if you walk along his path. Hellfire and brimstone, the world is coming to an end, will NOT convert those that don't believe.
Only His truth will do that.
...http://www.kickassgear.com/Articles/Microsoft.h tm>"limiting the scope" of a given product.
And, we know where that ended up, don't we?
Simply put, limiting the scope in this manner is highly bogus- no matter HOW you slice it. And,like you said, it's stupid and serves no purpose other than to alienate your customers, esp. in this day and age. MS got away with their little impropriety because they did it before the Internet got prevalent; nowadays, word gets around a LOT quicker.
Sound software typically is optimized quite well for both company's offerings, esp. if you don't use special features of the other brand. To be sure, there's edge cases where you need that- but Skype's NOT one of them nor is there evidence that there's the degredation you claim happened with your app experience. (Not to mention that there's tons of other P2P VoIP applications that use SIP and Jabber technology that work as good or better than Skype, and there's other commercial proprietary systems (such as Eyeball Networks' stuff...) that DOES handle up to 10 people (or more as bandwidth will allow...) without needing a dual core anything, let alone an Intel one.)
This is plain and simple being bought to support one over the other. Please don't try to defend this- it's not something that has much of any good explanation for this, especially considering that they actually DO appear to be just CPUIDing and crippling the app if it's not a dual core Intel CPU...
Considering that SIPPhone already HAS voice conference calls of at least 10 or more, works with ANY SIP enabled device that's not crippled to a single provider (Vonage devices come immediately to mind...), and costs nothing for VoIP calls- I'd say, skip Skype all together, especially after this little stunt.
Unless Skype's playing reflector for the whole conference, each peer's connectivity limits what you can/can't do.
:-)
At 128kbps (the average upstream speed on broadband these days in the US...), you can typically host a four to six way voice conference or a 2-3 way video conference. This is because you have to provide the outbound traffic for each of the peers and control traffic. With a reflector system, you can host larger conferences, limited only by the inbound bandwidth because the reflector is flipping the traffic from your mic (and possibly camera...) to all the participants. However, that's REALLY bandwidth intensive, so to keep it economical, you'd probably limit it to 10 participants or so to limit hogging of that limited resource.
Now, this is all due to everything being unicast UDP. If we had IPv6 and Multicast support for the same available, one could handle at least up to the 10 without needing a reflector as the router infrastructure would handle it right along with the video on demand, etc. streams. However, since this is not likely to happen in our or several generations' lifetimes at the rates things are going, waiting or wishing for that is a waste of time.
They're distracting the populace from what's really important. If people knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what the PATRIOT Act actually did, instead of mapping the meaning of the word that was formed from the acronym of the REAL name of the act, they'd probably go ballistic on them- once it was explained what was done to them all in the name of the War on Terror.
I'm all for protecting the country from the problem- but the PATRIOT Act doesn't really do what needs to be done (folks, it needs to be out in the open...) and few of the things they enacted to "protect" us would have done squat to protect us from what happened on 9/11. That'd be more effort than they probably want to spend on things- after all, we have all those pork barrel projects to fund as well, you know...
+---+ /|
|\
| X |
|/ \|
+---+
Ooo... Nice try, thank you for playing.
All humor aside, if an ISP offers 15x2Mbit peak bandwidth, they'd better by god GIVE that bandwidth or be guilty of false and misleading advertising. I don't care if they're budgeting for only 30% of the advertised bandwidth ever being used or billing at the rate that reflects that they only really have that much behind the offering. That, folks, isn't your problem- it's THIERS . If they can't deliver on it for whatever reasons, they should have thought about what they were marketing and what they were actually selling and made the reality match the pitch.
Don't be selling 6Mbit, 15Mbits, or whatever unless you mean it totally.
Anyhow, I'd be worried about something along those lines- because in the AOA portion of the Airport there's loads of RF interferance that's at a higher signal strength than would be expected. The biggest issue I've got with the GPS line (and other instrumentation on the avionics of the plane...) is that the frequencies are all way off for them to be an issue unless they're using sub-standard gear in violation of FCC regulations.
As you can see, it's nestled in the middle, GPS is. Not enough difference to make major harmonics differences and a system should reject signals not in it's band outright unless there's many watts from the transmitter involved and you're inductively inducing the signal into the gear itself- if it has that big of a problem with signals of this nature, it's not a good GPS system, I wouldn't navigate a rickshaw by it, let alone an airplane.
What we're seeing here is a "annoyance" abatement policy that is being wrapped around a psuedo-technical reason that the masses buy because they don't know any better.
Considering that if you HAVE no work to pay for things, at some point it breaks down and you end up with a depression in the economy.
At some point, it all collapses because there's nobody left in the country that are able to pay for what is being offered, albeit at lower prices (though I don't see housing going down, I see it going up along with the ability to pay for it going down hard...).
It might be able to grip it by the husk...
They got snookered by their rep, telling them they had to have an OS with them, or they thought the same- and Windows is the only option, in many cases, from Dell's website and their reps.
But, they're a niche player in the markets that they work in. I mean, they had a metallic green RoboSapien and a red RoboSapien V2- wow... (I'll admit the RS exclusive RoboSapien is a neat addition to my animatronic toy collection, but I'm pretty certain that most of those toys ended up being bought from someplace other than RatShack- I mean, $69 vs $99, c'mon...)
There's a reason they posted such a dismal last quarter.
They had a good edge on sound systems. They ceded it.
They had a decent market on TV's. They all but ditched it.
They had the top Personal/Business Computer lineup at one point in time- had they pressed it, they could have given IBM a run for their money. They ceded it.
They had the top of the line Portable computer product lineup. They shuttered that division's doors, even though it was a decently profitable division by itself.
I go into RatShack for electronics tools when I don't want to go into Fry's these days- and for the odd part that doesn't show up in an Auto Parts store... Nothing else. They DO have nice electronics tools, but that is insufficient to keep them afloat.
Radio Shack is a business trying to find a place to be. They used to have it, but then they either shedded the lines of business that kept them marginally profitable or ran them into the ground because of lack of competant management. I do wish them well, but I don't know how they're going to at least keep a toehold on things.
...nice to meet you. :-)
Until the car stereo players, mobile units, etc. support Ogg, while it's a superior format (and it IS...), it's just not going to get used. I've got an in-dash that plays MP3's. It's supposed to do WMA's as well, but it didn't like some of the stuff that our housemate fed to it recently. It DOES do quite a good job of playing MP3's and it'd just say "Huh" on an Ogg file. What? Get a player that supports Ogg? I don't know of any units that do, and I suspect that IF there were one, it'd take a while for me to even budget the thing into the picture. I got the in-dash because the other methods were sub-optimal in the way playback is done and it means another device floating in the cab- and it's nothing for me to take the SD card out of the deck and stick it in a portable MP3 player and go on my merry way.
Unless I can do that with Ogg, I'm just stuck with playing those on a PC or a TV media player at home.
...they're under the impression that they're a hardware company (iPod, etc.) but then they charge for that OS and it's upgrades (which should probably be free if they're "just a hardware company"...).
Go figure.
It's just that all of his articles are ridiculous these days...
...should be indicative that they're THAT clueless in the first place.
...that what Google's doing here is insuring the quality and integrity of that product.
Advertisers can't get to you if you don't use Google. If they allow gaming of the pagerank features of the search engine to go undealt with, then we quit using Google because it's not anywhere near as good- because that too is a product. You see, Google's got two products going on here, one that is provided as a free service in order to obtain the materials (as it were) for the second one that you mentioned . If the first product isn't palatable to the first set of customers, the second set won't get their product offering- and they're the one's paying for it all.