In Germany (and probably other European countries) in some college degrees you attend lectures for a couple of years and then have an oral or written exam covering several semesters of work.
I should not have been so glib in my response. I do know that there are courses and courses of study where the only thing that counts is the final. There are also a number of professions in the US, such as medicine and law, where there is a final pass or fail exam which you must pass as your final hurdle to receive your license to practice.
The fact that there are such courses does not blunt my question. What do you think when a teacher tells you the ONLY thing that matters in the entire course of study is your score on a single exam to be administered after the course is complete?
What I think I am trying to say above is that the approach of using only a single standardized score to measure student achievement is not academically sound. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one good reason is that standardized tests are typically paper and pencil tests.
Would you allow a surgeon to operate on you who got a perfect score on a paper and pencil test about brain surgery, but who never actually performed any surgery before?
That's an extreme example, but it illustrates one of the fundamental problems with standardized testing. There are others. Over-emphasis on standardized testing would be very dangerous to society.
OMG, you can sue schools/teachers for *grades* in the US?? Now THAT is wrong...
Why not just use independent, state-wide, standardized tests for everything?
You're joking, right? What would you say if you took a class and the teacher on the first day said that 100% of the grade in the course is based a single test at the end of the course?
The FCC decided a long time ago that the answer is no - in fact, their rules say once 85% DTV penetration is reached, the analog broadcasts in any given area get switched off.
Not exactly correct. First of all, the FCC didn't decide this, it was the Congress. Second, the law states that all analog broadcasts will end on Dec 31, 2006.
The 85% DTV rule is a loophole in the legislation which states that if 85% DTV penetration has not been achieved by 12/31/06 then the date may be pushed back.
I got all of this information from this article, which I have posted elsewhere in the thread. If it's not correct, blame msnbc.com, not me.
OTOH, if the 12% is a lower class demographic, they probably have less disposable income and thus are not the people television advertisers are trying to reach.
I have no data to back this up, but I would be willing to bet that the 12% is not so much low income as low interest in television.
For low income families, cable t.v. is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available. A buck or two a day for hours of entertainment. (I believe the average American watches about 4 hours/day)
Some people, believe it or not, do not watch tv. My tv has only been plugged into the antenna 3 days out of the last 4 years. (election day, and first two days of Iraq invasion)
It's possible, from a strictly business point of view, that this could be a good move for broadcasters all around.
As others commenters have stated, the broadcasters have no choice in this matter. The US gov't is going to pull the plug on analog broadcasts and auction off the spectrum. As of now, I believe this is set to occur at the end of 2006. The date will likely get pushed back, but it is definitely going to happen. Read this article for more information about the debate over whether to move back the date.
Really? I don't think anyone in my family is planning on getting rid of their analog TV,
Well, your t.v. is not going away, but analog broadcasts are most definitely going away. You can watch snow on every channel if you want.
Here's a an article for you describing the gov't debate over exactly when they are going to pull the plug. Looks like they're shooting for about 18 months from now: The End of Analog TV
It also sounds like you have an information managment problem - people's outlook account is not really where you should be storing important corporate information.
I would argue that Outlook accounts ARE "important corporate information". If you don't trust Outlook (as implied by your statement), then maybe it shouldn't be used at all.
We don't make electricity from oil. This would save coal equivalent to.05% of the US oil use, but no oil. It's even more useless than you imagine.
You're right. I based my.05% on the following figures quoted in the CNN article:
"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said Markey, who cited Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day.
The country uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.
Now, if those schools would get real and start school after 8:00 like reasonable people, we could get around this little problem and be much more flexable with the time.
I don't remember the exact times and dates, because I was in 1st grade or 2nd grade, but in about 1974 they had Daylight Savings Time in the winter because of the energy crisis. My school started after 8 a.m., but we were getting on the bus before daylight so after a couple weeks they just cut the first hour of the school day so we went in at 9. Missed half a year of science because of it. Maybe that's why I'm so stupid today.
The current proposal is a joke, really, it is expected to save 00.05% of U.S. daily oil usage for two months a year. We need to concentrate on changes that would actually, you know, make a difference.
Start offering things like Anime or SciFi, they can use the expanded market. Once companies realise this is for real, more content will show up.
Exactly. The studios will keep their heads in the sand until guys in their basements are making better content for peanuts.
From TFA: The Internet technology could transform home entertainment. Problem is, what's the point of unlimited channels if studios won't provide content?
The point is the major studios are looking over the precipice of irrelevance. Who cares if major studios take their ball and go home?
We're now in an age when the average home theatre built for a couple thousand bucks provide a better entertainmnent experience than going to a "real" theatre, and somebody is going to provide content to the home via the internet. If the major studios don't do it, someone else will. Likely it will be a distributed effort of many small businesses rather than a few large studios.
It does not take $millions to produce amazing animation or produce, edit, and distribute high quality content anymore. Therefore, the studios are also losing their monopoly on producing high quality content.
The only thing left for the studios will be the $200M blockbusters, but those blockbusters will be competing directly against equally (or more)compelling content created for $200k by small independents or $2k by guys working in their basements.
2. Mandrake: Used to be my second choice, but now you have to pay to get most of the enticing features included. Three CDs for free version, and six CDs for paid version.
>2 GB of data not enough? What is so enticing on those 3 cd's that you dismiss Mandrake as an option for a newbie? I thought that Mandrake was supposed to be one of the most newbie friendly distros.
Unlesss she's a highly unusual user, your friend's wife is going to use about 4 applications. If she must have all the applications under the sun, configure and show her how to use the package manager to download anything her heart desires.
I don't expect back-of-the-envelope calculations, such as you posted, to be 100% correct, but your example implies that quick 'fueling' for electric cars is infeasible because it would be necessary to deliver 8000+ amps to the vehicle.
That sounded crazy to me, so I looked through your numbers quickly. I thought that if electric cars cannnot be rapidly re-fueled, they will never be economically viable, so I thought it was worth 5 minutes of my time to look through your numbers to see if they made any sense. They didn't. Rather than leave that 8000A number Out There unchallenged, I pointed out two significant errors in the assumptions-- the power density of gasoline vs batteries, which is huge, and the relative efficiency of electric vs gas motors --you can't say a 40 percentage point difference in efficiency can be ignored in this situation.
Is that a reason to tell me to shut the hell up? If you are that thin-skinned, you shouldn't be posting to the internets. Nowhere in my replies was I impolite. If you don't want people to reply to your posts, then you probably shouldn't post them.
Another serious problem with your calculations is ignoring the relative efficiency of gasoline and electric systems.
I don't know how authoritative or accurate this information is, but this site says electric motors are in the neighborhood of 80% efficient, with gasoline in the neighborhood of 40% efficient.
So even if you could somehow create a fully electric car with the same weight and driving range as a gasoline car, your calculations are incorrect because the 60% of the energy stored in the 20 gallons of gas you base your calculations on is lost in the conversion to mechanical energy by the motor.
I think your assumption that the batteries in a Prius carry the same energy as a 20 gal tank of gas is incorrect. The big limiting factor of electric cars is the power density of the battery. That is, pound for pound, gasoline stores far more energy than a pound of battery.
That's why the car has both a gas motor and an electric motor. The electric system provides the torque for acceleration, while the small gas motor provides keeps it going down the road.
Your calculations should be based on the batteries , not gasoline.
BTW, a pair of half-inch wires would be adequate for up to 300A, according to this site
The fact is that MS is behind the curve on providing basic security. They may be catching up, but how much of everyone's time and money has been spent playing every-man-for-themselves in the meantime?
Agreed. Win9x/ME were truthfully impossible to secure (not to mention you had no option but to run as root at all times). Security was simply not a concern of Microsofts, and we are all paying the price.
I was just trying to point out that their systems are far more secure than ever before, and that despite being the biggest target of malware, it is now possible with reasonable precautions and good backups to connect a windows machine to the internets and not have it immediately compromised. There are very few measures that have to be taken other than what you should take with any computer, regardless of the OS.
Most of the most seriously b0rked Windows machines I have had to fix were b0rked by spyware and hijackware intentionally installed by the user. It doens't matter how secure the OS is if the user is going to be happily installing malware.
Not trying to get in a flamewar here, just felt that you were spreading the equivalent of FUD.Overstating the shortcomings of Windows achieves nothing. I know you were exaggerating for effect/humor, but the fact is that Windows XP is a pretty good OS for ordinary use (If I had any data I really cared about I would not keep it on this machine, however). I don't like having to use Windows, but until a couple of Windows-only apps I need will run on Linux (or I suppose OS X), I'm pretty much stuck with it.
A new level of security--whether through design or obscurity, your choice. This will save you a few days. Each month. No joke.
No way. I call BS here. If you're talking Win98 or WinME, maybe, but winXP is pretty solid for a non-clueless user who takes a few basic precautions and never uses IE except to download a real browser.
I've stuck with Mozilla for my main usage, but almost always have a Firefox instance open. That way I can be logged into my web-based applications as more than one user, as one example.
Probably the main reason I didn't switch over to Firefox was that when I imported settings from Mozilla there were minor issues that I didnt' feel like resolving at the time. My mail folders didnt' have mail in them and my bookmark bar didn't show up in Firefox. I'm sure if I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting I could fix it, but why bother? I have bonded with Mozilla and will probably stay with it as long as it remains a vital project.
One feature I like that I haven't found in Firefox is profile switching. Not a big deal, but a nice feature.
Also, if you have two applications for mail and browsing, then you have two applications to keep up to date.
I've never understood the whining about "bloat". I like feature-rich applications and my computer can handle them just fine, thank you.
Either way, we have an embarassment of riches. I'm still stuck with Windows on my work machines, but the bulk of the actual work I do is in Mozilla, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. Love them both. Thanks to all the developers! Keep up the great work.
And even bittorrent could handle the job, with a few modifications to the current code.
You could probably enforce shared uploading in the old p2p systems, also.
The difference between the "old" p2p systems and bittorrent is one of emphasis. P2p emphasizes availability of many files. Bittorrent uses very similar technology to emphasize enormous bandwidth capability.
Peercasting is the next logical step. It's not the opposite of P2P sharing or torrent-ing. It's the next evolutionary step, but one that could revolutionize the dissemination of high bandwidth content on the internet.
Remember what it was like way back two years ago, when your favorite distro released a new version, there was a period of days or weeks where you could not hope to get a decent download speed from the mirrors? Not anymore! Thanks to bittorrent, the more people grabbing the file, the faster the download. More importantly, the costs of providing that content has gone to essentially zero, because the costs are shared by thousands or millions of users instead of being borne by the peope providing the content or mirrors.
And even bittorrent could handle the job, with a few modifications to the current code. Though, with every node trying to grab pieces of the file in linear sucession, bittorrent's not as effecient at sharing the load.
With that said, would you care to name some advantage of peercashing now?
Uh, the same as before. Ordinary P2P cannot handle massive and sudden increases in demand for a file. Ordinary bittorrent will not stream content. Peer-casting will do both.
To oversimplify it a little: bittorent + streaming = Peercasting
Really? So writers, actors, and directors work practically for free now? No?
No, but only a very very few are going to command the sort of salaries that they used to make when there were only few studios/networks/labels. There will be more work available for writers, actors, and directors, but for less pay, I would guess. The big studios and labels will have to compete with little guys who work for next to nothing and have next to zero costs. Kinda like Linx vs. Windows.
Peercasting technologies change what will be produced, who will produce it, and the amount of money that the final product will be able to get in the market.
The challenge for content producers will becomme more than ever, to find an audience, rather than to find a network/studio/label/publisher who is willing to take a chance on your work.
Peercasting technology just allows someone to broadcast content more cheaply, which means for some reason you want to force people to watch certain videos at certain times
Not true. Streaming from a library of existing files allows for true Video on Demand (Note that is the subject of my original post), where a user chooses from a menu of available content and they can begin watching immediately. With peer to peer filesharing, you have to wait for the entire file to download before you can open the file. With peer-casting, you can begin to view the stream almost immediately, like ifilm.com.
The difference is, if I post a very popular file I don't have to worry about bandwidth, servers, etc.
Think what this does to the business models of internet content providers who currently finance huge server farms and bandwidth bills with advertising. For them their costs go close to zero, which is good, but it also removes the barrier to entry in the market. You and I have just as much access to provide video on demand or live webcasts to the internet as msnbc.com or ifilm.com.
That way, if you start downloading a very large video file, say, and find out after a couple minutes it's crappy, you can move on to something else.
You have to already have your own channel setup, and millions of users at least previewing it at the time... If not, nobody is going to know there is something worth watching on that channel, at that exact time.
I'm sure there will soon be things similar to suprnova that will aggregate online content, allow for community-based rating and review of content to help the good stuff get noticed.
When the tsunami happened, there were pics, videos, and commentary all over the web within hours. All the big community type websites had threads full of people sharing links, files, and descriptions of events immediatly.
But your bigger point is valid. Obscurity is the real enemy of content providers going forward. When I was young there were 3 channels on the t.v., a couple radio stations, and two newspaperss. Now there are hundreds of tv stations (if I actually wanted to watch t.v.--I dont') dozens and dozens of online radio stations and music sources, I regularly read news from dozens of newspapers from around the world via Google News, rent one of over 20k DVD titles from Netflix every day or two, and havne't read a book in a couple years because of the proliferation of interesting text on the internet.
In fact, I can imagine some radio stations and companies using this.
I can imagine ALL radio stations and tv networks using this!
Peercasting could be a very big deal. No need for Akamai scale server farm and associated bandwidth to broadcast live content worldwide. That brings the cost of hosting even a hugely popular webcast close to zero.
And that goes not just for the major companies, it works for you and me, too. Anyone can broadcast live content to millions around the world, (in the unlikely event they have something that people actually wanted to see or hear).
You're not producing any TV shows with actors, sets, or sufficiently large budgets any time soon, are you?
There's a movie called Tarnation that could win an Oscar this year. It was made for something like $200 on a Mac.
The cost of producing high quality content has dropped to an infinitesimal fraction of what it was only a decade ago.
The cost of disseminating high quality content world-wide, with peer-casting type technology like this, has now taken yet another enormous drop in cost.
Let's say some highly newsworthy event occurs in my backyard. I could hook up a camera to my computer and with my $40/month DSL connection, I could broadcast it live to millions of users.
It seems like the whole world's checking in to report their mobile phone plans on this thread. I knew/. was international, but still fun to see how much so.
Anyway, what I'm wondering is, what are the coverage areas of these plans in other parts of hte world? Do mobile plans in Europe work throughout the EU, for instance?
I think my basic plan covers most of three medium sized U.S. states without any roaming fees, or I could pay something like an extra $20 a month for nationwide service.
Seems the western countries could use some of that competition...
I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to have more competition, but I would think that population density and coverage areas are the biggest factors in cost.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if US rates are lower than average if you somehow factor in the square mileage (kilometerage?) covered by the networks. And that's not to mention that a lot of those miles are very sparsely populated.
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In Germany (and probably other European countries) in some college degrees you attend lectures for a couple of years and then have an oral or written exam covering several semesters of work.
I should not have been so glib in my response. I do know that there are courses and courses of study where the only thing that counts is the final. There are also a number of professions in the US, such as medicine and law, where there is a final pass or fail exam which you must pass as your final hurdle to receive your license to practice.
The fact that there are such courses does not blunt my question. What do you think when a teacher tells you the ONLY thing that matters in the entire course of study is your score on a single exam to be administered after the course is complete?
What I think I am trying to say above is that the approach of using only a single standardized score to measure student achievement is not academically sound. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one good reason is that standardized tests are typically paper and pencil tests.
Would you allow a surgeon to operate on you who got a perfect score on a paper and pencil test about brain surgery, but who never actually performed any surgery before?
That's an extreme example, but it illustrates one of the fundamental problems with standardized testing. There are others. Over-emphasis on standardized testing would be very dangerous to society.
OMG, you can sue schools/teachers for *grades* in the US?? Now THAT is wrong...
Why not just use independent, state-wide, standardized tests for everything?
You're joking, right? What would you say if you took a class and the teacher on the first day said that 100% of the grade in the course is based a single test at the end of the course?
The FCC decided a long time ago that the answer is no - in fact, their rules say once 85% DTV penetration is reached, the analog broadcasts in any given area get switched off.
Not exactly correct. First of all, the FCC didn't decide this, it was the Congress. Second, the law states that all analog broadcasts will end on Dec 31, 2006.
The 85% DTV rule is a loophole in the legislation which states that if 85% DTV penetration has not been achieved by 12/31/06 then the date may be pushed back.
I got all of this information from this article, which I have posted elsewhere in the thread. If it's not correct, blame msnbc.com, not me.
OTOH, if the 12% is a lower class demographic, they probably have less disposable income and thus are not the people television advertisers are trying to reach.
/day)
I have no data to back this up, but I would be willing to bet that the 12% is not so much low income as low interest in television.
For low income families, cable t.v. is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available. A buck or two a day for hours of entertainment. (I believe the average American watches about 4 hours
Some people, believe it or not, do not watch tv. My tv has only been plugged into the antenna 3 days out of the last 4 years. (election day, and first two days of Iraq invasion)
It's possible, from a strictly business point of view, that this could be a good move for broadcasters all around.
As others commenters have stated, the broadcasters have no choice in this matter. The US gov't is going to pull the plug on analog broadcasts and auction off the spectrum. As of now, I believe this is set to occur at the end of 2006. The date will likely get pushed back, but it is definitely going to happen. Read this article for more information about the debate over whether to move back the date.
Analog TV really is going away.
Really? I don't think anyone in my family is planning on getting rid of their analog TV,
Well, your t.v. is not going away, but analog broadcasts are most definitely going away. You can watch snow on every channel if you want.
Here's a an article for you describing the gov't debate over exactly when they are going to pull the plug. Looks like they're shooting for about 18 months from now: The End of Analog TV
It also sounds like you have an information managment problem - people's outlook account is not really where you should be storing important corporate information.
I would argue that Outlook accounts ARE "important corporate information". If you don't trust Outlook (as implied by your statement), then maybe it shouldn't be used at all.
We don't make electricity from oil. This would save coal equivalent to .05% of the US oil use, but no oil. It's even more useless than you imagine.
.05% on the following figures quoted in the CNN article:
You're right. I based my
"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said Markey, who cited Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day.
The country uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.
Now, if those schools would get real and start school after 8:00 like reasonable people, we could get around this little problem and be much more flexable with the time.
I don't remember the exact times and dates, because I was in 1st grade or 2nd grade, but in about 1974 they had Daylight Savings Time in the winter because of the energy crisis. My school started after 8 a.m., but we were getting on the bus before daylight so after a couple weeks they just cut the first hour of the school day so we went in at 9. Missed half a year of science because of it. Maybe that's why I'm so stupid today.
The current proposal is a joke, really, it is expected to save 00.05% of U.S. daily oil usage for two months a year. We need to concentrate on changes that would actually, you know, make a difference.
Start offering things like Anime or SciFi, they can use the expanded market. Once companies realise this is for real, more content will show up.
Exactly. The studios will keep their heads in the sand until guys in their basements are making better content for peanuts.
From TFA: The Internet technology could transform home entertainment. Problem is, what's the point of unlimited channels if studios won't provide content?
The point is the major studios are looking over the precipice of irrelevance. Who cares if major studios take their ball and go home?
We're now in an age when the average home theatre built for a couple thousand bucks provide a better entertainmnent experience than going to a "real" theatre, and somebody is going to provide content to the home via the internet. If the major studios don't do it, someone else will. Likely it will be a distributed effort of many small businesses rather than a few large studios.
It does not take $millions to produce amazing animation or produce, edit, and distribute high quality content anymore. Therefore, the studios are also losing their monopoly on producing high quality content.
The only thing left for the studios will be the $200M blockbusters, but those blockbusters will be competing directly against equally (or more)compelling content created for $200k by small independents or $2k by guys working in their basements.
2. Mandrake: Used to be my second choice, but now you have to pay to get most of the enticing features included. Three CDs for free version, and six CDs for paid version.
>2 GB of data not enough? What is so enticing on those 3 cd's that you dismiss Mandrake as an option for a newbie? I thought that Mandrake was supposed to be one of the most newbie friendly distros.
Unlesss she's a highly unusual user, your friend's wife is going to use about 4 applications. If she must have all the applications under the sun, configure and show her how to use the package manager to download anything her heart desires.
Do some math on your own or shut the hell up.
Nice.
I don't expect back-of-the-envelope calculations, such as you posted, to be 100% correct, but your example implies that quick 'fueling' for electric cars is infeasible because it would be necessary to deliver 8000+ amps to the vehicle.
That sounded crazy to me, so I looked through your numbers quickly. I thought that if electric cars cannnot be rapidly re-fueled, they will never be economically viable, so I thought it was worth 5 minutes of my time to look through your numbers to see if they made any sense. They didn't. Rather than leave that 8000A number Out There unchallenged, I pointed out two significant errors in the assumptions-- the power density of gasoline vs batteries, which is huge, and the relative efficiency of electric vs gas motors --you can't say a 40 percentage point difference in efficiency can be ignored in this situation.
Is that a reason to tell me to shut the hell up? If you are that thin-skinned, you shouldn't be posting to the internets. Nowhere in my replies was I impolite. If you don't want people to reply to your posts, then you probably shouldn't post them.
20 gallons of gas = 20*121 MJ/gal = 2420MJ
Another serious problem with your calculations is ignoring the relative efficiency of gasoline and electric systems.
I don't know how authoritative or accurate this information is, but this site says electric motors are in the neighborhood of 80% efficient, with gasoline in the neighborhood of 40% efficient.
So even if you could somehow create a fully electric car with the same weight and driving range as a gasoline car, your calculations are incorrect because the 60% of the energy stored in the 20 gallons of gas you base your calculations on is lost in the conversion to mechanical energy by the motor.
I think your assumption that the batteries in a Prius carry the same energy as a 20 gal tank of gas is incorrect. The big limiting factor of electric cars is the power density of the battery. That is, pound for pound, gasoline stores far more energy than a pound of battery.
That's why the car has both a gas motor and an electric motor. The electric system provides the torque for acceleration, while the small gas motor provides keeps it going down the road.
Your calculations should be based on the batteries , not gasoline.
BTW, a pair of half-inch wires would be adequate for up to 300A, according to this site
The fact is that MS is behind the curve on providing basic security. They may be catching up, but how much of everyone's time and money has been spent playing every-man-for-themselves in the meantime?
Agreed. Win9x/ME were truthfully impossible to secure (not to mention you had no option but to run as root at all times). Security was simply not a concern of Microsofts, and we are all paying the price.
I was just trying to point out that their systems are far more secure than ever before, and that despite being the biggest target of malware, it is now possible with reasonable precautions and good backups to connect a windows machine to the internets and not have it immediately compromised. There are very few measures that have to be taken other than what you should take with any computer, regardless of the OS.
Most of the most seriously b0rked Windows machines I have had to fix were b0rked by spyware and hijackware intentionally installed by the user. It doens't matter how secure the OS is if the user is going to be happily installing malware.
Not trying to get in a flamewar here, just felt that you were spreading the equivalent of FUD.Overstating the shortcomings of Windows achieves nothing. I know you were exaggerating for effect/humor, but the fact is that Windows XP is a pretty good OS for ordinary use (If I had any data I really cared about I would not keep it on this machine, however). I don't like having to use Windows, but until a couple of Windows-only apps I need will run on Linux (or I suppose OS X), I'm pretty much stuck with it.
A new level of security--whether through design or obscurity, your choice. This will save you a few days. Each month. No joke.
No way. I call BS here. If you're talking Win98 or WinME, maybe, but winXP is pretty solid for a non-clueless user who takes a few basic precautions and never uses IE except to download a real browser.
What am i missing?
I've stuck with Mozilla for my main usage, but almost always have a Firefox instance open. That way I can be logged into my web-based applications as more than one user, as one example.
Probably the main reason I didn't switch over to Firefox was that when I imported settings from Mozilla there were minor issues that I didnt' feel like resolving at the time. My mail folders didnt' have mail in them and my bookmark bar didn't show up in Firefox. I'm sure if I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting I could fix it, but why bother? I have bonded with Mozilla and will probably stay with it as long as it remains a vital project.
One feature I like that I haven't found in Firefox is profile switching. Not a big deal, but a nice feature.
Also, if you have two applications for mail and browsing, then you have two applications to keep up to date.
I've never understood the whining about "bloat". I like feature-rich applications and my computer can handle them just fine, thank you.
Either way, we have an embarassment of riches. I'm still stuck with Windows on my work machines, but the bulk of the actual work I do is in Mozilla, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. Love them both. Thanks to all the developers! Keep up the great work.
And even bittorrent could handle the job, with a few modifications to the current code.
You could probably enforce shared uploading in the old p2p systems, also.
The difference between the "old" p2p systems and bittorrent is one of emphasis. P2p emphasizes availability of many files. Bittorrent uses very similar technology to emphasize enormous bandwidth capability.
Peercasting is the next logical step. It's not the opposite of P2P sharing or torrent-ing. It's the next evolutionary step, but one that could revolutionize the dissemination of high bandwidth content on the internet.
Remember what it was like way back two years ago, when your favorite distro released a new version, there was a period of days or weeks where you could not hope to get a decent download speed from the mirrors? Not anymore! Thanks to bittorrent, the more people grabbing the file, the faster the download. More importantly, the costs of providing that content has gone to essentially zero, because the costs are shared by thousands or millions of users instead of being borne by the peope providing the content or mirrors.
And even bittorrent could handle the job, with a few modifications to the current code. Though, with every node trying to grab pieces of the file in linear sucession, bittorrent's not as effecient at sharing the load.
With that said, would you care to name some advantage of peercashing now?
Uh, the same as before. Ordinary P2P cannot handle massive and sudden increases in demand for a file. Ordinary bittorrent will not stream content. Peer-casting will do both.
To oversimplify it a little: bittorent + streaming = Peercasting
Or: Streaming P2P + swarming bandwidth = Peercasting
Really? So writers, actors, and directors work practically for free now? No?
No, but only a very very few are going to command the sort of salaries that they used to make when there were only few studios/networks/labels. There will be more work available for writers, actors, and directors, but for less pay, I would guess. The big studios and labels will have to compete with little guys who work for next to nothing and have next to zero costs. Kinda like Linx vs. Windows.
Peercasting technologies change what will be produced, who will produce it, and the amount of money that the final product will be able to get in the market.
The challenge for content producers will becomme more than ever, to find an audience, rather than to find a network/studio/label/publisher who is willing to take a chance on your work.
Peercasting technology just allows someone to broadcast content more cheaply, which means for some reason you want to force people to watch certain videos at certain times
Not true. Streaming from a library of existing files allows for true Video on Demand (Note that is the subject of my original post), where a user chooses from a menu of available content and they can begin watching immediately. With peer to peer filesharing, you have to wait for the entire file to download before you can open the file. With peer-casting, you can begin to view the stream almost immediately, like ifilm.com.
The difference is, if I post a very popular file I don't have to worry about bandwidth, servers, etc.
Think what this does to the business models of internet content providers who currently finance huge server farms and bandwidth bills with advertising. For them their costs go close to zero, which is good, but it also removes the barrier to entry in the market. You and I have just as much access to provide video on demand or live webcasts to the internet as msnbc.com or ifilm.com.
That way, if you start downloading a very large video file, say, and find out after a couple minutes it's crappy, you can move on to something else.
You have to already have your own channel setup, and millions of users at least previewing it at the time... If not, nobody is going to know there is something worth watching on that channel, at that exact time.
I'm sure there will soon be things similar to suprnova that will aggregate online content, allow for community-based rating and review of content to help the good stuff get noticed.
When the tsunami happened, there were pics, videos, and commentary all over the web within hours. All the big community type websites had threads full of people sharing links, files, and descriptions of events immediatly.
But your bigger point is valid. Obscurity is the real enemy of content providers going forward. When I was young there were 3 channels on the t.v., a couple radio stations, and two newspaperss. Now there are hundreds of tv stations (if I actually wanted to watch t.v.--I dont') dozens and dozens of online radio stations and music sources, I regularly read news from dozens of newspapers from around the world via Google News, rent one of over 20k DVD titles from Netflix every day or two, and havne't read a book in a couple years because of the proliferation of interesting text on the internet.
In fact, I can imagine some radio stations and companies using this.
I can imagine ALL radio stations and tv networks using this!
Peercasting could be a very big deal. No need for Akamai scale server farm and associated bandwidth to broadcast live content worldwide. That brings the cost of hosting even a hugely popular webcast close to zero.
And that goes not just for the major companies, it works for you and me, too. Anyone can broadcast live content to millions around the world, (in the unlikely event they have something that people actually wanted to see or hear).
I've had trouble convincing people of the benefits of a TiVo; anything more complicated than that will take some time to get much traction.
Of course it will take time. I didn't say it will happen tomorrow, but it will certainly happen,don't you agree?
You're not producing any TV shows with actors, sets, or sufficiently large budgets any time soon, are you?
There's a movie called Tarnation that could win an Oscar this year. It was made for something like $200 on a Mac.
The cost of producing high quality content has dropped to an infinitesimal fraction of what it was only a decade ago.
The cost of disseminating high quality content world-wide, with peer-casting type technology like this, has now taken yet another enormous drop in cost.
Let's say some highly newsworthy event occurs in my backyard. I could hook up a camera to my computer and with my $40/month DSL connection, I could broadcast it live to millions of users.
We're all t.v. networks now.
If I were a major media executive I would be seriously worried about my businiess model.
In Sweden we pay
/. was international, but still fun to see how much so.
It seems like the whole world's checking in to report their mobile phone plans on this thread. I knew
Anyway, what I'm wondering is, what are the coverage areas of these plans in other parts of hte world? Do mobile plans in Europe work throughout the EU, for instance?
I think my basic plan covers most of three medium sized U.S. states without any roaming fees, or I could pay something like an extra $20 a month for nationwide service.
Seems the western countries could use some of that competition...
I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to have more competition, but I would think that population density and coverage areas are the biggest factors in cost.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if US rates are lower than average if you somehow factor in the square mileage (kilometerage?) covered by the networks. And that's not to mention that a lot of those miles are very sparsely populated.
\not going to do the math myself, though.
I have never met anyone who uses a computer and doesn't realize the difference between left click, right click and double click.
HAHAHAHAHA!! Thanks for the laugh.
Hehehehehe.
I know people who have been double clicking on hyperlinks for YEARS...