For the record, the researchers survive by making money through selling DMS Clarity Suite performance monitoring utilities to banks and other institutions. Which does not mean that they're wrong, but does reduce the potential objectivity. The CTO has as much invested in panicking potential customers about their system performances as an Antivirus company does about panicking people about hackers.
Read TFA. It just claims that Windows 7 consumes all available RAM. That is the "empirical evidence." System slowdown was NOT measured.
Utilizing all available RAM is a pretty well understood technique at this point. All web browsers do this now, as do many other applications. One would expect a well-designed modern OS to do this. Consuming all memory itself is not a sign of poor programming itself, so long as disk caching of things that should be in RAM doesn't occur. This is not something that the people in the article has measured.
I'm going to side with the guy who appears to make his living testing these sorts of things.
Bad science is bad irrespective of the person conducting it. And whatever the original tester said is getting filtered through the viewpoint of the gentleman writing the article. Considering that he says that "Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is," yet never once compares statistics to Vista (or even mentions it outside of this statement), I'd take the conclusions from these stats with a grain of salt.
Let's see. The top programming errors are: Let people inject code into your website through cross site scripting. Let people inject code into your database by improperly sanitizing your inputs. Let people run code by not checking buffer sizes. Granting more access than necessary. Granting access through unreliable methods.
Geez, #7 is fricking directory traversal. DIRECTORY TRAVERSAL. In 2010! It's not like your drawbridge is getting nuked by terrorists here. Generally bridges are built to withstand certain calamaties, like small bombs, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. Being successfully assaulted through a directory traversal attack is like someone breaking into the drawbridge control room because you didn't install locks on the doors and left it open in the middle of the night. Why not leave out cookies and milk for the terrorists with a nice note saying "please don't kill us all [smiley face]" and consider that valid security for a major public-facing application.
Further down the list: Failing to encrypt sensitive data. Array index validation. Open redirects. Etc, etc, etc. These aren't super sophisticated attacks and preventative measures we're talking about here. Letting people upload and run PHP scripts! If you fall for THAT one, that's like a bridge that falls because some drunk highschooler hits it with a broken beer bottle. Forget contractual financial reprisals. If your code falls for that, the biggest reprisal should be an overwhelming sense of shame at the absolute swill that you've stunk out.
And yes, security takes longer than doing it improperly. It always does, and that has to be taken seriously. And it is still cheaper than cleaning up the costs of exposing your customer's banking information to hackers, or your research to competitors in China. Stop whining, man up, and take your shit seriously.
It has already happened, kind of. Esquire has done covershoots on a video camera, then selected individual frames to pull out for photos and the cover.
Of course, what the article is talking about is changing how high-speed photography happens in order to get high-speed video on the same chip... essentially, dividing each CCD into 16 subsequent regions, and firing off those sequentially to form 16 frames of video or 1 image. There is some image degradation inherent in what they're talking about doing, of course. Each frame of video is going to be 1/16th the otherwise resolution, and the overall image exposure time will be longer than it would have been if they had fired all at once. But it is a nifty trick to better utilize these CCD beasts we've made.
I spent 2,000 dollars on my laptop 3 years ago, including the highest-end graphics card that it would take. BioShock 1 runs at 20 fps with no reflections, AA off, 640x480, medium textures.
I really wish PC developers would take laptop users into account when making games. I'd argue that one reason why WoW has been so successful, is because it runs on hardware that we actually F**ing have.
Virtually every engine written since then, by a half-decent team, has included mulitprocessor support.
How many PC engines have been written from scratch or properly updated, compared to the overall number of games released in a year? Say that the benchmarks are coming from games that are a year old (2008 holiday season), and those were major titles (3 year dev cycles)... That puts us back to how we were developing games in 2005. I remember a lot of platform panicking around how to get the 360 and PS3 working, how to make DS ports of all code, and laughing at the useless Wii that was never going to go anywhere. I also remember that PC gaming was dying except for the casuals. If you count that the majority of those were licensed engines, and you may very well be looking at code that started in 2003.
I don't know. In the 90's, the PC was the lead platform for a lot of projects. Now, at least in the developer's houses that I've seen, the development effort for the past few years has focused on the more sexy, confusing, and profitable console side of things. I have no doubt that games written and released now are properly multithreaded. But considering the amount of engine licensing going on from old code (not everyone is AAA), and hesitations around investing additional effort in PC versions of projects, I'm not surprised that it has been trickling in more slowly than it should.
Telephone lines were deemed essential to rural security, and a major push was made to run them. Same with power. Water lines are owned by your city (or at least, used to be), so they were run with your tax dollars.
A big problem is that there have been pushes for city-owned rural fiber in underserved markets that have been quashed by large ISP's through intimidation and court proceedings. Any town that wants to run their own broadband had better be ready for a sudden major court fight by a provider that wouldn't have given them the time of day.
As a side note, you might be able to get ISDN to your area. They don't generally advertise it, but AT&T at least used to be willing to do ISDN basically anywhere for 50 a month. It's not great, but it's better than dial-up and with less latency (though much lower throughput) than satellite.
This is from the FCC, not a particular politician. The FCC has a lot of stick-to-it-ive-ness compared to other agencies.
If history is any indication, 100 years from now our children's children will still be paying a 100 / 100 fee to the telcos, and enjoying the benefits of 10 Mbps broadband.
You realize that 400 KiloBytes per second is actually about 3 Megabits per second? Add in network overhead, and unless you've got a particularly fat pipe it might actually be your pipe that is getting saturated.
Either way, considering most businesses struggle to get a fast enough pipe to them (including ISP's, sadly), 100Mbps to everyone should help everyone.
1. If you read the presentation, he's actually setting the 100 Mbps as a goal, and sets out some "recommendations" for ways to achieve it. No mandates yet.
2. 100Mbps in 10 years from now ought to be a dawdle. Hell, 100Mbps next week would be possible here if the Fios people would install to my building. Japan's average network speed right now is 50 Mbps. US companies know that it would cost them money to upgrade their infrastructure, and with most markets being historically-defined monopolies or oligopoloys, they have no incentive to compete.
3. Of course it's the government's place to mandate minimum speeds and other standards. What do you think the FCC does? "These frequencies use that standard with that much energy. This telephone exchange uses that protocol with these power standards at that transmission rate." They define "broadband" as minimum 750kbps (ha!). If they want to define the "High-Speed Broadband" label as minimum 100Mbps for clarity's sake, and encourage its adoption, that's exactly what they're there for.
The FCC's definition of broadband and most of the rest of the world's definition of broadband are not connected. Further, that only measures sustained transfer rate... fine if you're uploading files over FTP, but can have extremely inconsistent performance for simple HTML. The linked article goes into how that 1/2 second gap can add up to a full minute to load a single web page. To me, that sounds comparable to ISDN performance, which is not generally considered broadband.
Even if you go by their own estimates, HughesNet basic home satellite network service loads an idealized 100K web page in 5 seconds, approximately 3 times faster than 56k dialup. That puts it in the realm of 168kbps, or nowhere near the federal government's paultry definition of Broadband.
You might be happy with it. That's great. I'm glad if your Satellite connection meets your needs, especially since it fits a niche nicely for rural areas without viable alternative options. And yay for that: dial up throughput is terrible. But you're not going to realize the advantages of Skype over that. You'll spend more time waiting for pages to load, interactive conferences are right out, video conferencing with your kids while they're at college is not possible. Online gaming is out, which excises a lot of online communities. And for the kind of remote interactive work of a lot of IT professionals, the latency kills any advantages of working from home. For my grandmother it would be fine. For people transitioning from intermittent-on dial-up service, it's fine. For the rest of us, used to interacting with work files from home as if they were local, or streaming music between devices on disparate networks, or just getting stuff done remotely, satellite provides just a subset of the advantages of a full broadband connection.
I think you're misunderstanding. Net Neutrality legislation is not intended to prevent ISP's from selling 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 4Mbps, etc tiered services. Net Neutrality legislation is intended to prevent ISP's from requiring extra premiums be paid to access specific websites and competitor services. For example, Comcast could not (as has been discussed) charge an extra $10 per month to access Youtube.com, or use VOIP competitors like skype (above and beyond basic bandwidth usage charges). Further, it would prevent last-mile providers from attempting to extort money from 3rd party websites (like Google) through degrading that specific website's traffic below the advertised natural bandwidth.
These are not theoretical concerns. These are all options that have been debated and attempted by ISP's of various sizes.
Basically, Net Neutrality ensures that free-market competition at the internet resource level is not prevented by local monopolies at the service provider gateway.
On the one hand, total bandwidth usage can be difficult wherever it is found and maxed out.
On the other hand, P2P generates a surprisingly large amount of routing overhead, which can quickly overwhelm networking equipment in less fault-tolerant ways than other protocols. If you're downloading 1,000 packets from an FTP server, the server's single connection will wait patiently for clogged pipes to free up. But 1,000 connections from 1,000 P2P sources will generate 1,000 times the network overhead in packet confirmations, server pings, etc as the connection clogs up. Very little the end-user can do will kill a connection faster than an accidental P2P DDos.
Also, most modern connections are very upstream-limited. 5 Mb down, 1Mb up... that sort of thing. P2P is by definition a symmetric standard. Youtube videos, on the other hand, only hit downstream. Hence, a 1 Mbps Netflix stream only consumes 20% of a connection, but a 1 Mbps P2P transmission consumes 100% of the usable pipe.
And finally, it's just less legitimate. I love Bittorrent, and think it is a proper replacement for FTP for the future of transferring large files. But I know that it's currently a really, really small percentage of traffic that goes to Linux ISO's. Most of that is torrenting games, movies, and other stuff illegally. If I had to prioritize traffic between people making international Skype calls, shouting at eachother on Xbox Live, or illegally downloading hacked versions of Burnout Paradise, I'd prioritize the realtime, legitimate uses.
If you don't think P2P is a huge part of the problem, you've clearly never worked in an ISP.
I think that's what his point was. Some people see Net Neutrality as "My download of Serenity.iso should never be throttled!" Others are, perhaps more legitimately, worried about plans to diminish service to specific websites or services if they do not pay a ransom. Both opinions seem to be currently part of the debate, and that window allows the ISP's to argue that traffic shaping is essential for providing a reasonable level of service (it is).
Of course, it is one step between "traffic shaping is essential for providing a reasonable level of service" and "all online video providers should pay us a ransom to cover the buildout costs of not-throttling their bandwith in line with a reasonable level of service." But the basic principle, at least, is sound.
Latency on a single satellite connection can be up to 1/2 second, compared to 50 milliseconds for other broadband options. This is sufficient to make it untennable for VOIP, gaming applications, cloud applications, and video streaming (depending on the implementation). This is why companies like My Blue Dish advertise themselves as "an excellent replacement for dial up." The satellite internet providers know that they aren't a good substitute for ground-based network options. Add in weather patterns messing up your network connection, and satellite internet is basically a stopgap measure between dial-up and a real broadband connection.
Most DSL are resellers for a few fixed companies like Covad, etc. That "even more competition" that you refer to is an illusion... Your local ISP can provide upstream after the Covad-leased line (after they extract their ridiculous cut, frequently higher than they charge end-users for the service), but it is basically just a rebranding of the same thing. Further, DSL speeds are incredibly variable depending on the quality of local phone lines, local wiring, distance to center, if water has built up anywhere, phase of the moon, and any one of a number of other factors. In older cities, DSL is not a reliable option.
Which leaves cable (a regulated monopoly), and fiber (rare, but getting more available). That's not a whole lot of competition there.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up. It could be used to transfer information for someone, but if you've capped people and so they're not using it because they're over their caps, you have all this telco equipment doing absolutely nothing.
Whether that is a valid argument depends entirely upon whether there is excess capacity to be had and how the costs are allocated.
I suspect this is why companies have been hesitant to announce their bandwidth throttling policies. There isn't a strong reason to throttle users before their lines are maxed out, but when they are maxed out it is basically a physical imperative that it happens. You probably wouldn't bother to cap an Xbox Live user who watches lots of streaming Netflix in the middle of the night, but someone opening lots of bittorrent connections at 3 in the afternoon will probably have to be choked off if your VOIP customers are to retain adequate service. A simple bandwidth cap might not adequately represent the various dimensions which go into a proper bandwidth management process.
Further, in my experience most lines are far more oversold than the companies would like you to believe. "We participate in some traffic management" is pretty vague and safe. "We shape traffic between the hours of 6 AM and midnight, as our corporate parents won't let us spend more money running lines to the trunk" is a bit more insight into business processes than most people would like. It's just not good policy to announce that your users will probably never hit the advertised speeds.
With electricity, I'm being charged for the consumption of coal/gas/uranium (plus some overhead for transport). What exactly am I being charged for consuming when I download a bit?
The cost of the equipment to deliver that bit, the electricity needed to power that equipment, the staff needed to manage that equipment, depreciation, insurance, upstream bandwidth costs from other suppliers and a number of other costs.
Uranium is more complicated than that, as excess capacity electricity must still be generated by nuclear power plants during non-peak demand hours.
That having been said, one major cost to mid-range ISPs is getting sufficient capacity to support peak usage with minimum of complaints. The amount of bits per second flying around can quickly skyrocket, and digging up streets / running more lines to trunk providers is extremely not cheap. Transfer volume is a simple shorthand (like "minutes" from your cellphone provider), but there are definite costs there. I wouldn't be surprised to see separate rates for non-peak and peak transfers in metered broadband.
If Google provides me from everything from a computer to internet to applications... It's a scary thought if someone else starts running the show, with the only goal of seperating me from as many dollars as possible.
Maybe. But remember when your Dial-up provider was different from your ISP? Or when you had to source all of your computer parts separately, assemble them all together, and pray that they worked?
Having one company responsible for larger chunks isn't necessarily a bad idea, especially if they make sense to group together. If Google is the one who finally gets ISP's off their butts to run fiber to the home, that seems to me like a good thing. If someone could choose Hotmail, Comcast networking, and a Dell, or Gmail, on Gfiber, on a G-branded netbook... is there really leverage there to make a mess of things? I don't know. Relying on 5 different companies for different links in the uptime chain seems more fragile than relying on 1 company whose servers are likely to go down all at once or not at all (with a backup provider, of course).
I never had a personal Bayesian filter get the same accuracy as a large, managed online box. At the provider level, the system can know if 200 other people received the same message. Other users help train the spam filter for you before they get to your inbox. The orbs blacklist can be kept up-to-date more quickly on a managed host.
Bayesian filters, on the other hand, take a lot of user interaction and constant oversight. I've had a few mailing-list style mails fall into Google's trap, but the Bayesian filter I setup and trained for a year still caught about 1 totally legitimate mail from a friend or co-worker per week. And then the moment I had to switch mail clients, the filter needed training all over again.
At least in my experience, personal Bayseian filtering provides a lower accuracy rate for a lot more oversight, in exchange for more privacy (assuming you trust your SMTP provider).
Where many people used to have service in the $30-$40 range, more and more people seem to be paying closer to $100 (pre-tax) for cell service.
When was there $30 phone service? I remember entry level 300 minute AT&T clocking in at $40 plus gas food and tolls.
One big difference between then and now, was that then the phone companies expected you to go over your minutes, and reaped financial profits from those $100 bill months. Now, entry-level phone service includes enough minutes for anyone but teenagers and prats in BMW's, but baseline at $50 or so (family plans excluded). Add required data plans onto that, and the loss of over-minute gouging is made up for by data and text gouging.
Shutting off internal graphics cards when not in need is a trick that has been in use for a while now, though usually it requires a reboot.
Considering this is specifically targeted for the low-cost, low power netbook market, don't expect anything approaching acceptable graphics performance, however. The current highest-end Nvidia notebook graphics card just hit 38.4 GT/s fill rate, whereas the current ion is at 3.6. That's just 10% of the full "notebook" cousin performance. And that's assuming that your games aren't being bottlenecked by the main processor speed (hint: they are).
This GPU seems like it's better suited to watching DVD's than playing Team Fortress 2. 17" laptops can get away with much more intensive chipsets, frequently using standard desktop parts for laptop applications. That's why they're good. Get into fully laptop chipsets, and you sacrifice power for size and portability. Get into netbooks, and that tradeoff is magnified tenfold.
On the one hand, I'd agree with the other posters that detecting rootkits once they're installed is incredibly difficult.
On the other hand, that windows is so rootable is a problem. Yay for adding malware tools to window. But the standard operating procedure of adding layer after layer of new code for new functionality is getting pretty creaky. It opens more avenues for rootkits and other problems to break through.
I love how a loved old property from our childhood (Star Wars) is just a pretty facade onto a loved new property from our kids' childhoods (the Lego games).
Young Indiana Jones was actually pretty good. I have fond memories of that show, and feel it didn't get the run that it deserved. And television is a far dirtier process that should allow other people's creativities to flow into what goes on-screen. Maybe that will make up for Lucas's atrocious dialog. Let's hope the actors can ad-lib.
That having been said, wanting a 400 run show is just asinine. Planning for 2 or 3 parallel spinoffs 3 years down the line is the kind of bloated, dillute thinking that put all the good parts of Episode 1 - 3 right at the end. They need to make the first season worth watching, and coming up with enough compelling material for 15 hours is incredibly difficult. That's what they should be focusing on, not taking good bits here and there and saving them for the sequels.
Yes. Clearly the internet is lacking in pornography because of Google's efforts. There's just wave after wave of nothing out there.
Personally, I wouldn't mind uncensored content in a walled off room of YouTube. But I understand that would be a hard sell for investors. And quite frankly, vomiting up a video of racist, homophobic, sexist viewpoints to a private server is pretty cheap and easy to do these days. It just isn't needed.
In this case, I applaud Google's efforts. Australia's BS Refused Classification status is a complete cop-out that everyone in the creative industries has been dealing with for years. Either man up to banning stuff that you don't like, or let it in an accept that 15 year olds will need to sort out on their own which holes the pointy bits go into.
I sat here for barely a minute and came up with three ways to mislead and confuse the drones that would almost certainly have a high degree of success. And I'm no expert.
I'm guessing armed robot drones in the UK aren't there to catch Ocean's 11 level criminals. Quelling soccer riots, following fleeing vehicles, traveling along with protest groups... the drones are probably going to replace the more expensive and slower helicopter crews in the UK police force. Most of the time you just need to let people know that the police are watching, and they'll behave. Or they'll panic and run, and be followed.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, the researchers survive by making money through selling DMS Clarity Suite performance monitoring utilities to banks and other institutions. Which does not mean that they're wrong, but does reduce the potential objectivity. The CTO has as much invested in panicking potential customers about their system performances as an Antivirus company does about panicking people about hackers.
Read TFA. It just claims that Windows 7 consumes all available RAM. That is the "empirical evidence." System slowdown was NOT measured.
Utilizing all available RAM is a pretty well understood technique at this point. All web browsers do this now, as do many other applications. One would expect a well-designed modern OS to do this. Consuming all memory itself is not a sign of poor programming itself, so long as disk caching of things that should be in RAM doesn't occur. This is not something that the people in the article has measured.
I'm going to side with the guy who appears to make his living testing these sorts of things.
Bad science is bad irrespective of the person conducting it. And whatever the original tester said is getting filtered through the viewpoint of the gentleman writing the article. Considering that he says that "Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is," yet never once compares statistics to Vista (or even mentions it outside of this statement), I'd take the conclusions from these stats with a grain of salt.
Let's see. The top programming errors are:
Let people inject code into your website through cross site scripting.
Let people inject code into your database by improperly sanitizing your inputs.
Let people run code by not checking buffer sizes.
Granting more access than necessary.
Granting access through unreliable methods.
Geez, #7 is fricking directory traversal. DIRECTORY TRAVERSAL. In 2010! It's not like your drawbridge is getting nuked by terrorists here. Generally bridges are built to withstand certain calamaties, like small bombs, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. Being successfully assaulted through a directory traversal attack is like someone breaking into the drawbridge control room because you didn't install locks on the doors and left it open in the middle of the night. Why not leave out cookies and milk for the terrorists with a nice note saying "please don't kill us all [smiley face]" and consider that valid security for a major public-facing application.
Further down the list: Failing to encrypt sensitive data. Array index validation. Open redirects. Etc, etc, etc. These aren't super sophisticated attacks and preventative measures we're talking about here. Letting people upload and run PHP scripts! If you fall for THAT one, that's like a bridge that falls because some drunk highschooler hits it with a broken beer bottle. Forget contractual financial reprisals. If your code falls for that, the biggest reprisal should be an overwhelming sense of shame at the absolute swill that you've stunk out.
And yes, security takes longer than doing it improperly. It always does, and that has to be taken seriously. And it is still cheaper than cleaning up the costs of exposing your customer's banking information to hackers, or your research to competitors in China. Stop whining, man up, and take your shit seriously.
It has already happened, kind of. Esquire has done covershoots on a video camera, then selected individual frames to pull out for photos and the cover.
Of course, what the article is talking about is changing how high-speed photography happens in order to get high-speed video on the same chip... essentially, dividing each CCD into 16 subsequent regions, and firing off those sequentially to form 16 frames of video or 1 image. There is some image degradation inherent in what they're talking about doing, of course. Each frame of video is going to be 1/16th the otherwise resolution, and the overall image exposure time will be longer than it would have been if they had fired all at once. But it is a nifty trick to better utilize these CCD beasts we've made.
I spent 2,000 dollars on my laptop 3 years ago, including the highest-end graphics card that it would take. BioShock 1 runs at 20 fps with no reflections, AA off, 640x480, medium textures.
I really wish PC developers would take laptop users into account when making games. I'd argue that one reason why WoW has been so successful, is because it runs on hardware that we actually F**ing have.
Virtually every engine written since then, by a half-decent team, has included mulitprocessor support.
How many PC engines have been written from scratch or properly updated, compared to the overall number of games released in a year? Say that the benchmarks are coming from games that are a year old (2008 holiday season), and those were major titles (3 year dev cycles)... That puts us back to how we were developing games in 2005. I remember a lot of platform panicking around how to get the 360 and PS3 working, how to make DS ports of all code, and laughing at the useless Wii that was never going to go anywhere. I also remember that PC gaming was dying except for the casuals. If you count that the majority of those were licensed engines, and you may very well be looking at code that started in 2003.
I don't know. In the 90's, the PC was the lead platform for a lot of projects. Now, at least in the developer's houses that I've seen, the development effort for the past few years has focused on the more sexy, confusing, and profitable console side of things. I have no doubt that games written and released now are properly multithreaded. But considering the amount of engine licensing going on from old code (not everyone is AAA), and hesitations around investing additional effort in PC versions of projects, I'm not surprised that it has been trickling in more slowly than it should.
Telephone lines were deemed essential to rural security, and a major push was made to run them. Same with power. Water lines are owned by your city (or at least, used to be), so they were run with your tax dollars.
A big problem is that there have been pushes for city-owned rural fiber in underserved markets that have been quashed by large ISP's through intimidation and court proceedings. Any town that wants to run their own broadband had better be ready for a sudden major court fight by a provider that wouldn't have given them the time of day.
As a side note, you might be able to get ISDN to your area. They don't generally advertise it, but AT&T at least used to be willing to do ISDN basically anywhere for 50 a month. It's not great, but it's better than dial-up and with less latency (though much lower throughput) than satellite.
This is from the FCC, not a particular politician. The FCC has a lot of stick-to-it-ive-ness compared to other agencies.
If history is any indication, 100 years from now our children's children will still be paying a 100 / 100 fee to the telcos, and enjoying the benefits of 10 Mbps broadband.
You realize that 400 KiloBytes per second is actually about 3 Megabits per second? Add in network overhead, and unless you've got a particularly fat pipe it might actually be your pipe that is getting saturated.
Either way, considering most businesses struggle to get a fast enough pipe to them (including ISP's, sadly), 100Mbps to everyone should help everyone.
1. If you read the presentation, he's actually setting the 100 Mbps as a goal, and sets out some "recommendations" for ways to achieve it. No mandates yet.
2. 100Mbps in 10 years from now ought to be a dawdle. Hell, 100Mbps next week would be possible here if the Fios people would install to my building. Japan's average network speed right now is 50 Mbps. US companies know that it would cost them money to upgrade their infrastructure, and with most markets being historically-defined monopolies or oligopoloys, they have no incentive to compete.
3. Of course it's the government's place to mandate minimum speeds and other standards. What do you think the FCC does? "These frequencies use that standard with that much energy. This telephone exchange uses that protocol with these power standards at that transmission rate." They define "broadband" as minimum 750kbps (ha!). If they want to define the "High-Speed Broadband" label as minimum 100Mbps for clarity's sake, and encourage its adoption, that's exactly what they're there for.
The FCC's definition of broadband and most of the rest of the world's definition of broadband are not connected. Further, that only measures sustained transfer rate... fine if you're uploading files over FTP, but can have extremely inconsistent performance for simple HTML. The linked article goes into how that 1/2 second gap can add up to a full minute to load a single web page. To me, that sounds comparable to ISDN performance, which is not generally considered broadband.
Even if you go by their own estimates, HughesNet basic home satellite network service loads an idealized 100K web page in 5 seconds, approximately 3 times faster than 56k dialup. That puts it in the realm of 168kbps, or nowhere near the federal government's paultry definition of Broadband.
You might be happy with it. That's great. I'm glad if your Satellite connection meets your needs, especially since it fits a niche nicely for rural areas without viable alternative options. And yay for that: dial up throughput is terrible. But you're not going to realize the advantages of Skype over that. You'll spend more time waiting for pages to load, interactive conferences are right out, video conferencing with your kids while they're at college is not possible. Online gaming is out, which excises a lot of online communities. And for the kind of remote interactive work of a lot of IT professionals, the latency kills any advantages of working from home. For my grandmother it would be fine. For people transitioning from intermittent-on dial-up service, it's fine. For the rest of us, used to interacting with work files from home as if they were local, or streaming music between devices on disparate networks, or just getting stuff done remotely, satellite provides just a subset of the advantages of a full broadband connection.
I think you're misunderstanding. Net Neutrality legislation is not intended to prevent ISP's from selling 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 4Mbps, etc tiered services. Net Neutrality legislation is intended to prevent ISP's from requiring extra premiums be paid to access specific websites and competitor services. For example, Comcast could not (as has been discussed) charge an extra $10 per month to access Youtube.com, or use VOIP competitors like skype (above and beyond basic bandwidth usage charges). Further, it would prevent last-mile providers from attempting to extort money from 3rd party websites (like Google) through degrading that specific website's traffic below the advertised natural bandwidth.
These are not theoretical concerns. These are all options that have been debated and attempted by ISP's of various sizes.
Basically, Net Neutrality ensures that free-market competition at the internet resource level is not prevented by local monopolies at the service provider gateway.
On the one hand, total bandwidth usage can be difficult wherever it is found and maxed out.
On the other hand, P2P generates a surprisingly large amount of routing overhead, which can quickly overwhelm networking equipment in less fault-tolerant ways than other protocols. If you're downloading 1,000 packets from an FTP server, the server's single connection will wait patiently for clogged pipes to free up. But 1,000 connections from 1,000 P2P sources will generate 1,000 times the network overhead in packet confirmations, server pings, etc as the connection clogs up. Very little the end-user can do will kill a connection faster than an accidental P2P DDos.
Also, most modern connections are very upstream-limited. 5 Mb down, 1Mb up... that sort of thing. P2P is by definition a symmetric standard. Youtube videos, on the other hand, only hit downstream. Hence, a 1 Mbps Netflix stream only consumes 20% of a connection, but a 1 Mbps P2P transmission consumes 100% of the usable pipe.
And finally, it's just less legitimate. I love Bittorrent, and think it is a proper replacement for FTP for the future of transferring large files. But I know that it's currently a really, really small percentage of traffic that goes to Linux ISO's. Most of that is torrenting games, movies, and other stuff illegally. If I had to prioritize traffic between people making international Skype calls, shouting at eachother on Xbox Live, or illegally downloading hacked versions of Burnout Paradise, I'd prioritize the realtime, legitimate uses.
If you don't think P2P is a huge part of the problem, you've clearly never worked in an ISP.
I think that's what his point was. Some people see Net Neutrality as "My download of Serenity.iso should never be throttled!" Others are, perhaps more legitimately, worried about plans to diminish service to specific websites or services if they do not pay a ransom. Both opinions seem to be currently part of the debate, and that window allows the ISP's to argue that traffic shaping is essential for providing a reasonable level of service (it is).
Of course, it is one step between "traffic shaping is essential for providing a reasonable level of service" and "all online video providers should pay us a ransom to cover the buildout costs of not-throttling their bandwith in line with a reasonable level of service." But the basic principle, at least, is sound.
Latency on a single satellite connection can be up to 1/2 second, compared to 50 milliseconds for other broadband options. This is sufficient to make it untennable for VOIP, gaming applications, cloud applications, and video streaming (depending on the implementation). This is why companies like My Blue Dish advertise themselves as "an excellent replacement for dial up." The satellite internet providers know that they aren't a good substitute for ground-based network options. Add in weather patterns messing up your network connection, and satellite internet is basically a stopgap measure between dial-up and a real broadband connection.
Most DSL are resellers for a few fixed companies like Covad, etc. That "even more competition" that you refer to is an illusion... Your local ISP can provide upstream after the Covad-leased line (after they extract their ridiculous cut, frequently higher than they charge end-users for the service), but it is basically just a rebranding of the same thing. Further, DSL speeds are incredibly variable depending on the quality of local phone lines, local wiring, distance to center, if water has built up anywhere, phase of the moon, and any one of a number of other factors. In older cities, DSL is not a reliable option.
Which leaves cable (a regulated monopoly), and fiber (rare, but getting more available). That's not a whole lot of competition there.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up. It could be used to transfer information for someone, but if you've capped people and so they're not using it because they're over their caps, you have all this telco equipment doing absolutely nothing.
Whether that is a valid argument depends entirely upon whether there is excess capacity to be had and how the costs are allocated.
I suspect this is why companies have been hesitant to announce their bandwidth throttling policies. There isn't a strong reason to throttle users before their lines are maxed out, but when they are maxed out it is basically a physical imperative that it happens. You probably wouldn't bother to cap an Xbox Live user who watches lots of streaming Netflix in the middle of the night, but someone opening lots of bittorrent connections at 3 in the afternoon will probably have to be choked off if your VOIP customers are to retain adequate service. A simple bandwidth cap might not adequately represent the various dimensions which go into a proper bandwidth management process.
Further, in my experience most lines are far more oversold than the companies would like you to believe. "We participate in some traffic management" is pretty vague and safe. "We shape traffic between the hours of 6 AM and midnight, as our corporate parents won't let us spend more money running lines to the trunk" is a bit more insight into business processes than most people would like. It's just not good policy to announce that your users will probably never hit the advertised speeds.
With electricity, I'm being charged for the consumption of coal/gas/uranium (plus some overhead for transport). What exactly am I being charged for consuming when I download a bit?
The cost of the equipment to deliver that bit, the electricity needed to power that equipment, the staff needed to manage that equipment, depreciation, insurance, upstream bandwidth costs from other suppliers and a number of other costs.
Uranium is more complicated than that, as excess capacity electricity must still be generated by nuclear power plants during non-peak demand hours.
That having been said, one major cost to mid-range ISPs is getting sufficient capacity to support peak usage with minimum of complaints. The amount of bits per second flying around can quickly skyrocket, and digging up streets / running more lines to trunk providers is extremely not cheap. Transfer volume is a simple shorthand (like "minutes" from your cellphone provider), but there are definite costs there. I wouldn't be surprised to see separate rates for non-peak and peak transfers in metered broadband.
If Google provides me from everything from a computer to internet to applications... It's a scary thought if someone else starts running the show, with the only goal of seperating me from as many dollars as possible.
Maybe. But remember when your Dial-up provider was different from your ISP? Or when you had to source all of your computer parts separately, assemble them all together, and pray that they worked?
Having one company responsible for larger chunks isn't necessarily a bad idea, especially if they make sense to group together. If Google is the one who finally gets ISP's off their butts to run fiber to the home, that seems to me like a good thing. If someone could choose Hotmail, Comcast networking, and a Dell, or Gmail, on Gfiber, on a G-branded netbook... is there really leverage there to make a mess of things? I don't know. Relying on 5 different companies for different links in the uptime chain seems more fragile than relying on 1 company whose servers are likely to go down all at once or not at all (with a backup provider, of course).
I never had a personal Bayesian filter get the same accuracy as a large, managed online box. At the provider level, the system can know if 200 other people received the same message. Other users help train the spam filter for you before they get to your inbox. The orbs blacklist can be kept up-to-date more quickly on a managed host.
Bayesian filters, on the other hand, take a lot of user interaction and constant oversight. I've had a few mailing-list style mails fall into Google's trap, but the Bayesian filter I setup and trained for a year still caught about 1 totally legitimate mail from a friend or co-worker per week. And then the moment I had to switch mail clients, the filter needed training all over again.
At least in my experience, personal Bayseian filtering provides a lower accuracy rate for a lot more oversight, in exchange for more privacy (assuming you trust your SMTP provider).
Where many people used to have service in the $30-$40 range, more and more people seem to be paying closer to $100 (pre-tax) for cell service.
When was there $30 phone service? I remember entry level 300 minute AT&T clocking in at $40 plus gas food and tolls.
One big difference between then and now, was that then the phone companies expected you to go over your minutes, and reaped financial profits from those $100 bill months. Now, entry-level phone service includes enough minutes for anyone but teenagers and prats in BMW's, but baseline at $50 or so (family plans excluded). Add required data plans onto that, and the loss of over-minute gouging is made up for by data and text gouging.
Shutting off internal graphics cards when not in need is a trick that has been in use for a while now, though usually it requires a reboot.
Considering this is specifically targeted for the low-cost, low power netbook market, don't expect anything approaching acceptable graphics performance, however. The current highest-end Nvidia notebook graphics card just hit 38.4 GT/s fill rate, whereas the current ion is at 3.6. That's just 10% of the full "notebook" cousin performance. And that's assuming that your games aren't being bottlenecked by the main processor speed (hint: they are).
This GPU seems like it's better suited to watching DVD's than playing Team Fortress 2. 17" laptops can get away with much more intensive chipsets, frequently using standard desktop parts for laptop applications. That's why they're good. Get into fully laptop chipsets, and you sacrifice power for size and portability. Get into netbooks, and that tradeoff is magnified tenfold.
On the one hand, I'd agree with the other posters that detecting rootkits once they're installed is incredibly difficult.
On the other hand, that windows is so rootable is a problem. Yay for adding malware tools to window. But the standard operating procedure of adding layer after layer of new code for new functionality is getting pretty creaky. It opens more avenues for rootkits and other problems to break through.
Sorry for the offtopic message, but Lego Universe is going into Beta, which your kids may enjoy.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/13104-lego-universe-beta-sign-ups-now-open/
I love how a loved old property from our childhood (Star Wars) is just a pretty facade onto a loved new property from our kids' childhoods (the Lego games).
Young Indiana Jones was actually pretty good. I have fond memories of that show, and feel it didn't get the run that it deserved. And television is a far dirtier process that should allow other people's creativities to flow into what goes on-screen. Maybe that will make up for Lucas's atrocious dialog. Let's hope the actors can ad-lib.
That having been said, wanting a 400 run show is just asinine. Planning for 2 or 3 parallel spinoffs 3 years down the line is the kind of bloated, dillute thinking that put all the good parts of Episode 1 - 3 right at the end. They need to make the first season worth watching, and coming up with enough compelling material for 15 hours is incredibly difficult. That's what they should be focusing on, not taking good bits here and there and saving them for the sequels.
Yes. Clearly the internet is lacking in pornography because of Google's efforts. There's just wave after wave of nothing out there.
Personally, I wouldn't mind uncensored content in a walled off room of YouTube. But I understand that would be a hard sell for investors. And quite frankly, vomiting up a video of racist, homophobic, sexist viewpoints to a private server is pretty cheap and easy to do these days. It just isn't needed.
In this case, I applaud Google's efforts. Australia's BS Refused Classification status is a complete cop-out that everyone in the creative industries has been dealing with for years. Either man up to banning stuff that you don't like, or let it in an accept that 15 year olds will need to sort out on their own which holes the pointy bits go into.
I sat here for barely a minute and came up with three ways to mislead and confuse the drones that would almost certainly have a high degree of success. And I'm no expert.
I'm guessing armed robot drones in the UK aren't there to catch Ocean's 11 level criminals. Quelling soccer riots, following fleeing vehicles, traveling along with protest groups... the drones are probably going to replace the more expensive and slower helicopter crews in the UK police force. Most of the time you just need to let people know that the police are watching, and they'll behave. Or they'll panic and run, and be followed.