In the UK and several other European countries the incumbent telco's have been required to 1) account for the cost of operating their "local loop"/last mile separately, 2) resell access at X% above cost. The X% profit they're allowed to take is their incentive.
It works.
I can choose from several ADSL providers that all can provide differentiated service by having equipment in the local exchanges - several of them offers higher speeds than BT (the incumbent in the UK). I can also choose from dozens of ADSL providers that pay BT to maintain the ADSL connection and backhaul IP to one or more central locations where they provide customer service, peering and other differentiating services.
There are still some issues: The barrier to entry to put equipment in the local exchanges is high, but that's a cost issue and not easy to overcome. Customers still need a BT line to be able to buy ADSL, so even if the charge is pretty minimal, you still have a customer relationship to BT to deal with too - it'd be better if that was the ISPs responsibility, as you now have two people to complain to if there are problems.
I'd like to see it taken one step further: Nationalize ownership of the physical connections and have companies bid on maintaining the local exchanges and upgrading the connectivity and managing the resale, and give the ISPs and/or customers at each exchange a say in who gets the contracts, so that there's competitive pressure to upgrade the exchanges and the physical connections too.
Nothing is "crumbling". Just as in the US, UK broadband companies want to extract as much money as they possibly can from everyone and deliver as little as possible, so they are whining and complaining. They are still delivering the service - they just want to make larger profits.
And the US providers are just even sneakier about capping, combined with lower rate "last mile" connections so their users are less likely to shaft them.
Telewest and NTL practically owned the UK market between them - I don't think there are any others left. If there are, it's tiny local ones only - there are certainly no other large ones.
People get what they pay for. And people are clearly demonstrating that as much as they complain about offshore call centers, are fairly large part of the market continues to buy from these companies because price is more important to them than avoiding those call centers episodes. So while the customer appreciation of the call centers goes down, presumably enough people appreciate the overall value of the product enough to keep buying them.
It didn't bother reading most of your post, but two points:
Mortgages have gone up in length because people are prepared to commit longer to get better properties, or to stay in more desirable locations. For what I'm paying to own a house in central London I could buy a house that would be many times the size of what a typical two income family could afford a few decades ago.
As for cars, you don't have to go very far back before most people couldn't afford even a single car. Now many households have two, three or even more. That, and the fact most people don't pick the cheap low end cars that would be comparable to what they would've been able to buy decades ago, is why the length of car loans have gone up.
The fact that people are willing and ABLE to take on increasing loan burdens is generally an indication of wealth, when subtracting blips like the incompetent banks going into the sub-prime market.
I, because of the salary I'm on, could if I wanted to get a mortgage over 32 years at about 5 times salary. When I grew up, my parents weren't doing badly, but banks in Norway at the time would never grant loans to "normal people" at over 2-2.5 times salary of the main income earner + maybe half of the second earner, and rarely more than 20 (apart from a government backed one that offered 30, which was considered exceptional).
Despite that, I'll end up paying substantially less in terms of percent of my income in mortgage payments over my lifetime than my parents did, for properties that are larger and better standards. When they were 30, they bought a small 2-bed flat in the suburbs of Oslo. When I was 30 I bought a large 3 bedroom house with a garden i London in the middle of a property boom.
Yeah, that's why everyone is unemployed in Europe. And of course we don't have 20-30 days a year of paid vacation depending on country (wtf makes people in the US accept 10?!?), or working hours typically set at 37.5 (less in some countries) either.
Oh, and all our companies are close to bankruptcy, and no executives and shareholders ever manage to take out huge bonuses and dividends..
Seriously, unions are why you don't still have 12+ hour working days in the US and most of the rest of the world. It took decades of campaigning, strikes that often were illegal and bloodshed when police struck down on strikers for the US unions to get employers to accept the 8 hour working day.
It's a paradox that the rest of the world can thank US unions for the 8 hour day, when your unions have been reduced to festering corpses, and that May Day was established as an international day for the working class to demonstrate directly in response and support of the US unions, while the US working class was quickly subverted into accepting the watered down Labor day.
A huge part of the improvements in working conditions in the latter half of the 1800's and well into the 1900's were a direct result of strong unions in the US.
I liked the movie, but for people who haven't read the books it takes a second viewing to really get the story. The voiceover was added exactly because it otherwise would've been either far too long or completely incomprehensible to the audience. As it was it was still too dense, and suffered massively from it in terms of critics and box office results.
The mini-series was much better despite shitty CGI mainly because it had the time without having to take all kinds of shortcuts and relying on visuals, voiceovers and the dialogue to convey different aspects of the story all at the same time.
But then Lynch isn't exactly the posterchild for easily digestible movies to start with.
It's not the amount of mass that's making it a black hole, but the density - there are stars with far more mass than the smallest known black holes. I don't believe there's any basis for saying that the density will reduce due to Hawking radiation.
I really don't want "sexy" photos of the dead presidents and ugly old presidents wives that the 419 scams I get typically claim to be from, thank you very much.
A company I did consulting for at one point did this by posting a top ten list in a very visible spot in the office regularly. No identifiable information, even though all outgoing requests were forced through Squid and so they had the internal static IP addresses of everyone. Within a week visits to "undesirable" sites had dropped to near zero, and there was no reason to deal with anyone - just a gentle reminder that their requests _had_ been logged seemed to be more than enough.
I've been whining about memory issues with Firefox at least since 1.5, because FF slowly started getting unusable for me - I had to restart several times a day to prevent it from growing beyond 1GB-2GB and causing massive trashing. Since I installed FF 3 beta 4 a few days ago I haven't restarted it. I'm not celebrating yet, because I'm using it far less (I use Webkit for most of my browsing now almost exclusively because the FF memory leaks), but it is very promising, and if beta 5 is even better I may actually stop complaining about it.
At my last company we were looking at EC2 as a "backup" solution to handle spikes - for that it may be cost effective. But looking at our bandwidth graphs, and the cost differential, spikes of the kind of magnitude where it'd make a difference were incredibly rare. We had maybe one event over 2+ years where it'd made a difference. If you prepare your system for virtualization anyway, you could handle that by bringing up just extra capacity on EC2 and using your cheaper host for normal day to day use.
In fact, if you prepare for that, the cost differential is likely to grow, as if you have EC2 as a fallback you can afford to get closer to full load and bandwidth usage before you add more physical boxes...
EC2 is just too expensive to be worth it for normal use...
Yes you can. Nothing stops you using EC2 for "overflow". EC2 for instances you use most of the time isn't cost effective compared to a number of other hosting providers, which is no surprise since you pay for Amazon to keep a huge amount of spare capacity to handle surges.
You're right, but large scale pirates aren't exactly going to be using DVD-R's and consumer grade burners. They're using industrial production equipment not very unlike what the studios use. My wife just the other day had a friend offer to lend her a couple of pirated movies that was definitively not DVD-R's.
It would've been far faster if more people cared yet. My local shops have about two meters worth of cabinets with Blueray vs. 40-50+ for DVD's, at least. The stakes aren't high enough yet.
Ironically, this news might make me consider buying a Blueray player - what's held me back is that I want to be guaranteed a way of copying the movies to my file server (so I don't have to have the disks easily accessible, or have to change them - yes I'm lazy) before I move to another format. Buying a format I can't copy is not something I'd consider even for a second.
Actually it was a physical impossibility on the early Amiga's and Mac's because the CPU's in the early models didn't have a MMU. Virtual memory simply couldn't be implemented in any meaningful way. They could've implemented some really nasty overlay systems, but the benefit just wouldn't be there.
"Running the risk"? I already consider them corrupt and irrelevant, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Of course I don't have PROOF of corruption, and so this is my opinion only, but whether or not actual corruption has taken place, what they have done is inexcusable of anything supposedly being a serious standards organization.
Re:Banks has shown us the bottom of his bag of tri
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I frankly don't recognize your description in any of his books. Maybe in Use of Weapons.
And frankly, they are all "about the Culture". Often the plot will be pushed aside for him to go into great deals of details about some aspect of the Culture. Look to Windward, for example, blatantly used various non-events on the Masaq Orbital as an excuse for describing aspects of life in the Culture, the orbitals and the AI minds. Excession was 90% expository about the Culture and 10% moving the plot forward. The trickiest things for Banks seems to be to get the balance spot on - I love reading the material about the Culture, but the plot needs to move forward too.
The problem you've run into seems to be that writing purely about the Culture would be far harder - utopia's get boring. In fact, in all the material about the Culture in Look to Windward a lot of it is devoted exactly to how people in the Culture go to great deals of length to try to create excitement, even to the point of giving up safety and purposefully creating dangers for themselves. The most exciting stories in that kind of environment are likely to be found in how it clashes with something else.
Besides I get the feeling that Banks really would prefer to write books that are "all Culture" but holds back exactly because it's an environment that'd be extremely hard to write an exciting story about without compromising. It's "too perfect" and he either needs to introduce flaws or have someone else (other aliens) provide the flaws.
There are seeds, though, and he could probably write a book about a conspiracy inside the Culture, or about one of the splinter groups.
Re:something I had trouble with
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There are plenty of non-hominid aliens mentioned and also described at great length in several of his books.
It makes sense, though, that being relatively close in appearance would share the most, and so be more likely to share habitats. Trying to accommodate a lot of different requirements for pressure, breathable atmosphere etc. would be impractical at best. Look to Windward contains a lot of descriptions about the complexities for different species that are even roughly of the same shape and requirements to interact, as well as prominently featuring some of the weirdest non-humanoid aliens so far - the Behemothaurs (huge sentient dirigibles) and the entire ecology around them.
But for that matter we have no basis for even knowing whether or not aliens will be particularly diverse. It's perfectly possible that a biped humanoid shape is so close to ideal for planets that can sustain life that we'll see it over and over again if we come across aliens. We just don't know, and so I find it a perfectly valid idea to build into a fictional universe.
Pavane is ok, but I really didn't care for the ending. Talk about deus ex machina.... I think it's one of those books that I'd like better as a movie, as long as it got visuals to go with the descriptions. I could imaged Terry Gilliam doing a fantastic job with something like Pavane, for example.
Re:Banks is not a good author
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I've seen him get plenty of good placements in bookstores in London.
As for his lack of explanations, I really don't agree. Part of the appeal is that you're being dropped in the middle of a completely alien environment, and that is often the predicament his characters find themselves in too - you have to learn about the environment together with the character, and constantly have your assumptions challenged.
Newsflash: In the real world people makes decisions about things you don't know about and aren't told about all the time, and you just have to do your best to understand what's going on.
If you want everything served on a platter in nice, easily digestable chunks, then he's probably not for you. As much as I love Terry Pratchett, his books are mostly light entertainment. They are great light entertainment, but they don't try to be much more. Banks books are far more complex in what they are presenting to you, and yes they take more effort.
Slashdot Mirror
It works.
I can choose from several ADSL providers that all can provide differentiated service by having equipment in the local exchanges - several of them offers higher speeds than BT (the incumbent in the UK). I can also choose from dozens of ADSL providers that pay BT to maintain the ADSL connection and backhaul IP to one or more central locations where they provide customer service, peering and other differentiating services.
There are still some issues: The barrier to entry to put equipment in the local exchanges is high, but that's a cost issue and not easy to overcome. Customers still need a BT line to be able to buy ADSL, so even if the charge is pretty minimal, you still have a customer relationship to BT to deal with too - it'd be better if that was the ISPs responsibility, as you now have two people to complain to if there are problems.
I'd like to see it taken one step further: Nationalize ownership of the physical connections and have companies bid on maintaining the local exchanges and upgrading the connectivity and managing the resale, and give the ISPs and/or customers at each exchange a say in who gets the contracts, so that there's competitive pressure to upgrade the exchanges and the physical connections too.
And the US providers are just even sneakier about capping, combined with lower rate "last mile" connections so their users are less likely to shaft them.
The BBC doesn't have the power to increase TV license fees - TV license fees are set by the government, and the BBC can only ask/beg for more.
Telewest and NTL practically owned the UK market between them - I don't think there are any others left. If there are, it's tiny local ones only - there are certainly no other large ones.
People get what they pay for. And people are clearly demonstrating that as much as they complain about offshore call centers, are fairly large part of the market continues to buy from these companies because price is more important to them than avoiding those call centers episodes. So while the customer appreciation of the call centers goes down, presumably enough people appreciate the overall value of the product enough to keep buying them.
Mortgages have gone up in length because people are prepared to commit longer to get better properties, or to stay in more desirable locations. For what I'm paying to own a house in central London I could buy a house that would be many times the size of what a typical two income family could afford a few decades ago.
As for cars, you don't have to go very far back before most people couldn't afford even a single car. Now many households have two, three or even more. That, and the fact most people don't pick the cheap low end cars that would be comparable to what they would've been able to buy decades ago, is why the length of car loans have gone up.
The fact that people are willing and ABLE to take on increasing loan burdens is generally an indication of wealth, when subtracting blips like the incompetent banks going into the sub-prime market.
I, because of the salary I'm on, could if I wanted to get a mortgage over 32 years at about 5 times salary. When I grew up, my parents weren't doing badly, but banks in Norway at the time would never grant loans to "normal people" at over 2-2.5 times salary of the main income earner + maybe half of the second earner, and rarely more than 20 (apart from a government backed one that offered 30, which was considered exceptional).
Despite that, I'll end up paying substantially less in terms of percent of my income in mortgage payments over my lifetime than my parents did, for properties that are larger and better standards. When they were 30, they bought a small 2-bed flat in the suburbs of Oslo. When I was 30 I bought a large 3 bedroom house with a garden i London in the middle of a property boom.
Oh, and all our companies are close to bankruptcy, and no executives and shareholders ever manage to take out huge bonuses and dividends..
Seriously, unions are why you don't still have 12+ hour working days in the US and most of the rest of the world. It took decades of campaigning, strikes that often were illegal and bloodshed when police struck down on strikers for the US unions to get employers to accept the 8 hour working day.
It's a paradox that the rest of the world can thank US unions for the 8 hour day, when your unions have been reduced to festering corpses, and that May Day was established as an international day for the working class to demonstrate directly in response and support of the US unions, while the US working class was quickly subverted into accepting the watered down Labor day.
A huge part of the improvements in working conditions in the latter half of the 1800's and well into the 1900's were a direct result of strong unions in the US.
The mini-series was much better despite shitty CGI mainly because it had the time without having to take all kinds of shortcuts and relying on visuals, voiceovers and the dialogue to convey different aspects of the story all at the same time.
But then Lynch isn't exactly the posterchild for easily digestible movies to start with.
It's not the amount of mass that's making it a black hole, but the density - there are stars with far more mass than the smallest known black holes. I don't believe there's any basis for saying that the density will reduce due to Hawking radiation.
Apparently it's causing glitches in time too.
I really don't want "sexy" photos of the dead presidents and ugly old presidents wives that the 419 scams I get typically claim to be from, thank you very much.
A company I did consulting for at one point did this by posting a top ten list in a very visible spot in the office regularly. No identifiable information, even though all outgoing requests were forced through Squid and so they had the internal static IP addresses of everyone. Within a week visits to "undesirable" sites had dropped to near zero, and there was no reason to deal with anyone - just a gentle reminder that their requests _had_ been logged seemed to be more than enough.
I've been whining about memory issues with Firefox at least since 1.5, because FF slowly started getting unusable for me - I had to restart several times a day to prevent it from growing beyond 1GB-2GB and causing massive trashing. Since I installed FF 3 beta 4 a few days ago I haven't restarted it. I'm not celebrating yet, because I'm using it far less (I use Webkit for most of my browsing now almost exclusively because the FF memory leaks), but it is very promising, and if beta 5 is even better I may actually stop complaining about it.
Read JWZ's livejournal page, it addresses both your problems.
In fact, if you prepare for that, the cost differential is likely to grow, as if you have EC2 as a fallback you can afford to get closer to full load and bandwidth usage before you add more physical boxes...
EC2 is just too expensive to be worth it for normal use...
Yes you can. Nothing stops you using EC2 for "overflow". EC2 for instances you use most of the time isn't cost effective compared to a number of other hosting providers, which is no surprise since you pay for Amazon to keep a huge amount of spare capacity to handle surges.
Most SLA's are worthless. Unless there are SIGNIFICANT financial penalties for downtime they make little difference.
You're right, but large scale pirates aren't exactly going to be using DVD-R's and consumer grade burners. They're using industrial production equipment not very unlike what the studios use. My wife just the other day had a friend offer to lend her a couple of pirated movies that was definitively not DVD-R's.
Ironically, this news might make me consider buying a Blueray player - what's held me back is that I want to be guaranteed a way of copying the movies to my file server (so I don't have to have the disks easily accessible, or have to change them - yes I'm lazy) before I move to another format. Buying a format I can't copy is not something I'd consider even for a second.
Actually it was a physical impossibility on the early Amiga's and Mac's because the CPU's in the early models didn't have a MMU. Virtual memory simply couldn't be implemented in any meaningful way. They could've implemented some really nasty overlay systems, but the benefit just wouldn't be there.
"Running the risk"? I already consider them corrupt and irrelevant, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Of course I don't have PROOF of corruption, and so this is my opinion only, but whether or not actual corruption has taken place, what they have done is inexcusable of anything supposedly being a serious standards organization.
And frankly, they are all "about the Culture". Often the plot will be pushed aside for him to go into great deals of details about some aspect of the Culture. Look to Windward, for example, blatantly used various non-events on the Masaq Orbital as an excuse for describing aspects of life in the Culture, the orbitals and the AI minds. Excession was 90% expository about the Culture and 10% moving the plot forward. The trickiest things for Banks seems to be to get the balance spot on - I love reading the material about the Culture, but the plot needs to move forward too.
The problem you've run into seems to be that writing purely about the Culture would be far harder - utopia's get boring. In fact, in all the material about the Culture in Look to Windward a lot of it is devoted exactly to how people in the Culture go to great deals of length to try to create excitement, even to the point of giving up safety and purposefully creating dangers for themselves. The most exciting stories in that kind of environment are likely to be found in how it clashes with something else.
Besides I get the feeling that Banks really would prefer to write books that are "all Culture" but holds back exactly because it's an environment that'd be extremely hard to write an exciting story about without compromising. It's "too perfect" and he either needs to introduce flaws or have someone else (other aliens) provide the flaws.
There are seeds, though, and he could probably write a book about a conspiracy inside the Culture, or about one of the splinter groups.
It makes sense, though, that being relatively close in appearance would share the most, and so be more likely to share habitats. Trying to accommodate a lot of different requirements for pressure, breathable atmosphere etc. would be impractical at best. Look to Windward contains a lot of descriptions about the complexities for different species that are even roughly of the same shape and requirements to interact, as well as prominently featuring some of the weirdest non-humanoid aliens so far - the Behemothaurs (huge sentient dirigibles) and the entire ecology around them.
But for that matter we have no basis for even knowing whether or not aliens will be particularly diverse. It's perfectly possible that a biped humanoid shape is so close to ideal for planets that can sustain life that we'll see it over and over again if we come across aliens. We just don't know, and so I find it a perfectly valid idea to build into a fictional universe.
Pavane is ok, but I really didn't care for the ending. Talk about deus ex machina.... I think it's one of those books that I'd like better as a movie, as long as it got visuals to go with the descriptions. I could imaged Terry Gilliam doing a fantastic job with something like Pavane, for example.
As for his lack of explanations, I really don't agree. Part of the appeal is that you're being dropped in the middle of a completely alien environment, and that is often the predicament his characters find themselves in too - you have to learn about the environment together with the character, and constantly have your assumptions challenged.
Newsflash: In the real world people makes decisions about things you don't know about and aren't told about all the time, and you just have to do your best to understand what's going on.
If you want everything served on a platter in nice, easily digestable chunks, then he's probably not for you. As much as I love Terry Pratchett, his books are mostly light entertainment. They are great light entertainment, but they don't try to be much more. Banks books are far more complex in what they are presenting to you, and yes they take more effort.