Windows has too much of a legacy going for it, and I'm surprised they held on to it this long. Apple realized that it's legacy code was no good years ago and succesfully ditched it in favor of something more modern, why can't windows do the same?
Apple?! With all due respect to Apple fans, their market share is insignificant next to Windows. There are tons of manufacturing and industrial shops using software running on Windows 3.1, DOS, OS/2, OS/9000 and other "legacy" operating systems.
Apple's segment of the market is one that upgrades whenever Steve invents a new shade of blue for the case. Industrial manufacturers frequently take the attitude "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and have custom software that was written in GW-BASIC, Pascal or Cobol that has been running PERFECTLY for 10-20 years.
I've been called in twice in the last two years to maintain code where the original company was not only out of business, but the main programmer has DIED. Hell, in one case he died 5 YEARS AGO and "Company A" was still running the software on a laser cutting machine blissfully ignorant until they needed to make a code change.
One other company ended up paying $995 for a driver that allowed their OS/9000-68K ultrasonic bonding machine to WRITE TO MSDOS-FORMAT FLOPPY DISKS. You remember OS/9000-68K? It came out the year BEFORE Apple released the Mac -- 1983.
Exactly how many people still run businesses on Apple IIs or Lisas?
So the short answer to your question as to why Microsoft doesn't dump the "legacy" code like Apple is because there is still money to be made and customers to support.
-Charles
Gotten More, but Seen Less
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
The spam that *tries* to get to my mailbox has been on an ever increasing curve for years. It did not slow down in 2005, nor in the first part of 2006.
However, the amount that actually makes it to my inbox has dwindled to maybe 1 or 2 a month. Spam filtering technology has outpaced and outperformed the spam sending technology beginning last year (IMHO).
On the other hand, I have not noticed an serious change in the spam algorithms in the last 6-8 months. It may be that there is a sufficient number of unguarded mailboxes so those that have protection aren't worth the effort.
I have had very good experiences with Dell technical support.
Note that their business support and desktop support divisions seems to be totally separate. I have never been routed to anyone I have had trouble understanding in the least, once I enter the express code for a business piece of equipment. Home computers are another story.
If you have "Gold" or "Platinum" service, where they have 4-hour response for equipment you get transferred to a separate department. I've never had that phone ring more than twice before talking to someone and getting parts swapped out almost immediately.
Fast, courteous & efficient has been my experience with them over the last 2.5 years.
So did you talk them into upgrading? I find loading up anything good on an old box is a noticable slowdown:(
I almost always convinced them to install more RAM. Many of the machines were an anemic 128 Mb of RAM. Boosting them to 512 Mb made a big difference, Windows or Linux.
Beyond that, only one person had an old, old machine (350 MHz P-2, 128 Mb RAM Dell Optiplex GX-1) and Slackware 10.2 runs fine on that. It runs absolutely great after I had them upgrade the RAM to 512 Mb. They use it for e-mail, web surfing and IM.
I can't justify telling someone who mostly runs Word, Excel, AIM, Outlook Express and IE (now Firefox) to buy a faster computer. For what a lot of them do, a 750 MHz P3 is blazing.
For the people who I converted to dual-boot systems, that is basically what I did for their Windows side. I added Firefox with a half-dozen extensions including Adblock and the FilterSet.G updater; made sure their AV was up-to-date and configured to update itself nightly; made sure they had anti-spyware software installed and configured; etc.
You're right, they were all doing something "wrong". They all had virused.exe attachments in their mailbox sent by "friends"; they all had visits to "questionable" websites in their cache. Most had NO anti-virus or anti-spyware sofware and most had no firewall -- just a straight plug-in from the cable modem to their PC. *shudder*
Finally, a little education about clicking not everything they get e-mailed or IMed.
...if Microsoft had had the extra time and not released the patch until they considered it "fully tested", would they have caught these bugs as well?
Knowing that the WMF code is now under the microscope, will they divert resources to specifically re-vet that code, or will they sit on their rear ends and wait until another exploit is found for them?
As a tidbit of information, I have "converted" three of my neighbors to Linux -- at least dual booting, if not whole penguin -- in the last two months. Each time was at their request and for the exact same reason. Their Windows PC regularly gets trashed by spyware, viruses and worms and they've just damn well had enough in having to deal with it all. They want to get their work done, not fight with malware and have to upgrade machines because their old one isn't powerful enough to run their apps AND all the "keep me safe" software.
I'd vote for it being alive, but all these stupid discussions on if it's alive or dead are killing it. It's all this spam and nonsense and a lack of quality web design that's turning it into a bunch of useless junk.
You're alive. Do you have any idea how much bacteria and other junk clutters up your system? The system does not need to be pristine to function, much less "live".
"Intent to annoy"? Every sibling, spouse and co-worker in America could be charged under this clause!
My wife LIVES to annoy me! It is one of her main goals in life. I'm fairly certain each of my kids also has a primary purpose to annoy one or more of their siblings, their mother, all their teachers and many of the other kids at school. Frequently phones are involved.
...(who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands)...
Actually, a footnote to the article says he had his forearm blown off in the same accident that cost him his hearing and most of his sight -- fiddling with high explosives. It also mentions he developed a photographic memory. Absolutely amazing stuff.
KDE 3.5 is a full release, and has nothing to do with nightlies or any other developer build. Notice the work "release" in my original post? That's the clue I wasn't talking about developer builds, nightlies, SVN/CVS builds or anything other than the official, stable packages.
The criticism wasn't constructive, it was trollish whining.
I just installed Slackware 10.2 and upgraded to KDE 3.5 & OpenOffice 2.0.1 on my neighbor's computer over the weekend. 350 MHz P-II w/192 Mb of RAM and the system is very usable. It is faster in booting, program load and overall use than the Windows 2000 that was on there.
Firefox does load slower than IE did, but more than a few seconds. However, once up it is more than fast enough and the benefits of things like adblock make it more worthwhile.
OpenOffice also load slower than MS Works, which is what was on there. It is fast enough, though.
By "fast enough" I mean it doesn't elicit complaints about speed and no excessive swapping to disk. In most cases, faster than Win2000 w/Works on the same machine. K3B, Amarok and the overall interface get compliments on their responsiveness and feature set. The latest Kopete supports MSN webcams, and that was the last "feature request".
The machine is used for browsing, homework, playing music, IM and burning CDs. The number one compliment by my neighbor was "I'm not going to get viruses, spyware and trojans? I don't need to run anti-virus software? And it can play my MP3s and read my Word docs? Excellent!"
Yes, I took the time to set the local firewall, modify the KDE menus to remove 90% of the stuff they'll never, ever use and install a decent set of extensions to Firefox. I even tweaked Firefox on what domains to never accept cookies from.
As far as "how KDE runs out of the box" -- that isn't KDE's issue. It is an issue with the distribution packagers. The problem stems from trying to please all of the people all of the time.
Windows and Mac run nice "out of the box" because they contain no end-user software other than a few basics. Neither come with an image processing program worth a damn. No sound or video editor, either. You buy that stuff afterward. Less options up front means less configuration.
Hell, XP is only decent "out of the box" if you didn't get that box from a major manufacturer. Dell, HP & Gateway throw so much extra bullshit on there it takes 30 minutes to clean everything up before it is usable.
I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly would cause one direction to be hotter than another direction?
It would only then look uniform if you were are the center of it, and it all spread out from where you were.
If you were on one side, it would look hotter on the side it came from and cooler on the side it went to after passing you.
DNA doesn't lie. Modern homosapiens are all from the same place.
Except the article isn't talking about modern homo sapiens. They are talking about much older -- pre-homo erectus, pre-homo ergaster -- both of which pre-date homo sapiens.
Neanderthals were once considered "homo sapiens neanderthalis" but are now considered by many scientists as a co-lateral development from homo erectus and thus "homo neanderthales" (minus the sapiens part), a distinct species.
If homo erectus can have two parallel branches, why not earlier? Why is it impossible that homo ergaster and homo floresiensis (those hobbit-like ones) and maybe another formed co-lateral branches of evolution of which only the line to modern humans survived?
Wouldn't it be possible that pre-humans migrated to different locations and finished their evolution separately? Considering Neandrathals are no longer considered in a direct evolutionary line to modern humans, that indicates a separate branch of evolution.
Distinctly different environments, like Asia and Africa, could account for something like this. Multiple evolutionary paths, occurring in multiple physical locations on the planet. Why do scientists seem so attached to the "Eve" theory?
How much max would you be prepared to pay for that service per month for your household?
$100 per month if it includes the broadband ISP charges. $200 if it also included telephone and cable TV w/DVR capabilities.
That's about what I'm paying now for cable TV, cable internet, 3 x X-Box Live accounts and VoIP thru Packet8.
I'm investigating running my own TeamSpeak server and possibly dropping the X-Box Live accounts. America's Army is better on PC (Linux!) than X-Box. Call of Duty 2 is excellent on PC (Windows), and I'm not willing to shell out for an X-Box 360 when I already have the game on a PC.
I've got three teenage kids who will sit for hours, if I let them, on XBox Live and chat with friends while playing Halo 2, America's Army and other "team" games.
When not on live, they also browse MySpace and usually are chatting with IM clients. Yes, they get outside plenty. When you live up north (northern hemisphere) and it gets dark less than an hour after school gets out, going outside to play isn't an attractive option.
Instead of having to have multiple phone lines, or even cell phones for the kids, they all chat with friends -- local and long distance -- via XBox Live & IM.
Microsoft is spot on and when looking at new consoles next year, the question will be does the PS3 and Revolution have a good online community and voice chat? If not, XBox 360 it will be.
Some of us actually use that bandwidth. For example...
My phone is VoIP, and I have a total of 3 X-Box game systems in the house -- one for each kid. All three of them do the same thing -- get online (Live) and voice-chat with their friends in Halo 2 or America's Army.
I also work from home, with a lot of e-mail, IM and WebEx conferencing.
So, it is quite possible to have 4 VoIP connections running at the same time as a WebEx conference and a file transfer or two.
More bandwidth means I can use video conferencing for some calls, where you have to actually see the product or layout and it isn't digital.
True about 2600.com, but if you Google for some of the proper key words, you'll get dozens of hits. This is a "poster boy" story and was reported widely.
When Homeland Security agents arrived at the Pufferbelly Toys store, the lead agent asked owner Stephanie Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. Invoking the Patriot Act, he told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.
Search Google for "patriot act pufferbelly toy store" for lots of entertaining details.
P.S. -- The Magic Cube was a properly licensed toy. Even if this WAS in the purvue of the Dept of Homeland Security, they were wrong. Something that would have come up in a normal "cease and desist" law case.
I thought the iPod would play unrestricted MP3s? What is stopping anyone from buying an MP3 from Rhapsody, MP3.com, AllofMP3.com or anywhere else from putting them on their iPod? How is this holding back the *music* industry?
I can see how it is holding back the portable music player industry, since they can't access iTunes, but they are direct competitors to Apple in the hardware arena. Apple made it easier to get to their service with their software, but that is the name of the game.
This means that my customer is not getting the full 1.54mbps bandwidth their SLA guarantees, and by effect neither would I. This is {potentially} interference with interstate commerce and is also discriminatory in deciding whose traffic goes where, not to mention breach of contract (violating the SLA).
Wrong.
You'll get the full T1 from your termination point to theirs. That is ALL the SLA covers. You are not guaranteed any type on link to other networks at all. Never ever. Telcos don't guarantee service on their competitors networks.
What most people dont' realize is that the common carriers DO THIS ALREADY. The connection equipment of choice is ATM, and that supports QoS. Leased circuits were configured with QoS depending on what was paid for by the customer. As a field engineer at Lucent, it was explicitly explained to us "see that level there, marked 'no guarantee, best effort'? That is all the Internet traffic -- lowest priority there is."
However, all this is done at the network level and not the transport level. Major carriers routinely ran their own circuits high priority. Anyone else who paid for one, also got high priority circuits. Everone else got 'best effort' links. Links where they didn't control both endpoints, like to a competitor thru a peering agreement, were 'best effort'.
The fuss is not that the carriers are doing this, it is that they want to do this further up the stack. They want to become more than carriers and get into the realm of "content providers". Thus, not just provide the wires, but the stuff on the wires as well. This is where they run afoul of the existing laws.
In essence, they want to do QoS at the TCP level. Personally, I think that is fine by me as long as it is TARRIFED like services are now. If SBC wants to do it for SBC produced content, they have to charge that division the same as if it was a Google, Yahoo or NBC service. The "premium" costs the same no matter WHO you are.
I'd love to have end-to-end QoS available, even if at a premium.
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Windows has too much of a legacy going for it, and I'm surprised they held on to it this long. Apple realized that it's legacy code was no good years ago and succesfully ditched it in favor of something more modern, why can't windows do the same?
Apple?! With all due respect to Apple fans, their market share is insignificant next to Windows. There are tons of manufacturing and industrial shops using software running on Windows 3.1, DOS, OS/2, OS/9000 and other "legacy" operating systems.
Apple's segment of the market is one that upgrades whenever Steve invents a new shade of blue for the case. Industrial manufacturers frequently take the attitude "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and have custom software that was written in GW-BASIC, Pascal or Cobol that has been running PERFECTLY for 10-20 years.
I've been called in twice in the last two years to maintain code where the original company was not only out of business, but the main programmer has DIED. Hell, in one case he died 5 YEARS AGO and "Company A" was still running the software on a laser cutting machine blissfully ignorant until they needed to make a code change.
One other company ended up paying $995 for a driver that allowed their OS/9000-68K ultrasonic bonding machine to WRITE TO MSDOS-FORMAT FLOPPY DISKS. You remember OS/9000-68K? It came out the year BEFORE Apple released the Mac -- 1983.
Exactly how many people still run businesses on Apple IIs or Lisas?
So the short answer to your question as to why Microsoft doesn't dump the "legacy" code like Apple is because there is still money to be made and customers to support.
-Charles
The spam that *tries* to get to my mailbox has been on an ever increasing curve for years. It did not slow down in 2005, nor in the first part of 2006.
However, the amount that actually makes it to my inbox has dwindled to maybe 1 or 2 a month. Spam filtering technology has outpaced and outperformed the spam sending technology beginning last year (IMHO).
On the other hand, I have not noticed an serious change in the spam algorithms in the last 6-8 months. It may be that there is a sufficient number of unguarded mailboxes so those that have protection aren't worth the effort.
Yet.
-Charles
I have had very good experiences with Dell technical support.
Note that their business support and desktop support divisions seems to be totally separate. I have never been routed to anyone I have had trouble understanding in the least, once I enter the express code for a business piece of equipment. Home computers are another story.
If you have "Gold" or "Platinum" service, where they have 4-hour response for equipment you get transferred to a separate department. I've never had that phone ring more than twice before talking to someone and getting parts swapped out almost immediately.
Fast, courteous & efficient has been my experience with them over the last 2.5 years.
-Charles
So did you talk them into upgrading? I find loading up anything good on an old box is a noticable slowdown :(
I almost always convinced them to install more RAM. Many of the machines were an anemic 128 Mb of RAM. Boosting them to 512 Mb made a big difference, Windows or Linux.
Beyond that, only one person had an old, old machine (350 MHz P-2, 128 Mb RAM Dell Optiplex GX-1) and Slackware 10.2 runs fine on that. It runs absolutely great after I had them upgrade the RAM to 512 Mb. They use it for e-mail, web surfing and IM.
I can't justify telling someone who mostly runs Word, Excel, AIM, Outlook Express and IE (now Firefox) to buy a faster computer. For what a lot of them do, a 750 MHz P3 is blazing.
-Charles
For the people who I converted to dual-boot systems, that is basically what I did for their Windows side. I added Firefox with a half-dozen extensions including Adblock and the FilterSet.G updater; made sure their AV was up-to-date and configured to update itself nightly; made sure they had anti-spyware software installed and configured; etc.
.exe attachments in their mailbox sent by "friends"; they all had visits to "questionable" websites in their cache. Most had NO anti-virus or anti-spyware sofware and most had no firewall -- just a straight plug-in from the cable modem to their PC. *shudder*
You're right, they were all doing something "wrong". They all had virused
Finally, a little education about clicking not everything they get e-mailed or IMed.
-Charles
...if Microsoft had had the extra time and not released the patch until they considered it "fully tested", would they have caught these bugs as well?
Knowing that the WMF code is now under the microscope, will they divert resources to specifically re-vet that code, or will they sit on their rear ends and wait until another exploit is found for them?
As a tidbit of information, I have "converted" three of my neighbors to Linux -- at least dual booting, if not whole penguin -- in the last two months. Each time was at their request and for the exact same reason. Their Windows PC regularly gets trashed by spyware, viruses and worms and they've just damn well had enough in having to deal with it all. They want to get their work done, not fight with malware and have to upgrade machines because their old one isn't powerful enough to run their apps AND all the "keep me safe" software.
-Charles
I'd vote for it being alive, but all these stupid discussions on if it's alive or dead are killing it. It's all this spam and nonsense and a lack of quality web design that's turning it into a bunch of useless junk.
You're alive. Do you have any idea how much bacteria and other junk clutters up your system? The system does not need to be pristine to function, much less "live".
-Charles
"Intent to annoy"? Every sibling, spouse and co-worker in America could be charged under this clause!
My wife LIVES to annoy me! It is one of her main goals in life. I'm fairly certain each of my kids also has a primary purpose to annoy one or more of their siblings, their mother, all their teachers and many of the other kids at school. Frequently phones are involved.
-Charles
...(who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands)...
Actually, a footnote to the article says he had his forearm blown off in the same accident that cost him his hearing and most of his sight -- fiddling with high explosives. It also mentions he developed a photographic memory. Absolutely amazing stuff.
KDE 3.5 is a full release, and has nothing to do with nightlies or any other developer build. Notice the work "release" in my original post? That's the clue I wasn't talking about developer builds, nightlies, SVN/CVS builds or anything other than the official, stable packages.
The criticism wasn't constructive, it was trollish whining.
I just installed Slackware 10.2 and upgraded to KDE 3.5 & OpenOffice 2.0.1 on my neighbor's computer over the weekend. 350 MHz P-II w/192 Mb of RAM and the system is very usable. It is faster in booting, program load and overall use than the Windows 2000 that was on there.
Firefox does load slower than IE did, but more than a few seconds. However, once up it is more than fast enough and the benefits of things like adblock make it more worthwhile.
OpenOffice also load slower than MS Works, which is what was on there. It is fast enough, though.
By "fast enough" I mean it doesn't elicit complaints about speed and no excessive swapping to disk. In most cases, faster than Win2000 w/Works on the same machine. K3B, Amarok and the overall interface get compliments on their responsiveness and feature set. The latest Kopete supports MSN webcams, and that was the last "feature request".
The machine is used for browsing, homework, playing music, IM and burning CDs. The number one compliment by my neighbor was "I'm not going to get viruses, spyware and trojans? I don't need to run anti-virus software? And it can play my MP3s and read my Word docs? Excellent!"
Yes, I took the time to set the local firewall, modify the KDE menus to remove 90% of the stuff they'll never, ever use and install a decent set of extensions to Firefox. I even tweaked Firefox on what domains to never accept cookies from.
As far as "how KDE runs out of the box" -- that isn't KDE's issue. It is an issue with the distribution packagers. The problem stems from trying to please all of the people all of the time.
Windows and Mac run nice "out of the box" because they contain no end-user software other than a few basics. Neither come with an image processing program worth a damn. No sound or video editor, either. You buy that stuff afterward. Less options up front means less configuration.
Hell, XP is only decent "out of the box" if you didn't get that box from a major manufacturer. Dell, HP & Gateway throw so much extra bullshit on there it takes 30 minutes to clean everything up before it is usable.
-Charles
You haven't used KDE lately, have you?
Each release has been faster than before with 3.5 being noticably faster than 3.4.1.
Finally, get off your whiney ass and compile it for yourself using Konstruct. Pick just exactly what you want and make it nice and slim for you.
That is what the source code is for, you know.
I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly would cause one direction to be hotter than another direction?
It would only then look uniform if you were are the center of it, and it all spread out from where you were.
If you were on one side, it would look hotter on the side it came from and cooler on the side it went to after passing you.
-Charles
DNA doesn't lie. Modern homosapiens are all from the same place.
Except the article isn't talking about modern homo sapiens. They are talking about much older -- pre-homo erectus, pre-homo ergaster -- both of which pre-date homo sapiens.
Neanderthals were once considered "homo sapiens neanderthalis" but are now considered by many scientists as a co-lateral development from homo erectus and thus "homo neanderthales" (minus the sapiens part), a distinct species.
If homo erectus can have two parallel branches, why not earlier? Why is it impossible that homo ergaster and homo floresiensis (those hobbit-like ones) and maybe another formed co-lateral branches of evolution of which only the line to modern humans survived?
-Charles
Wouldn't it be possible that pre-humans migrated to different locations and finished their evolution separately? Considering Neandrathals are no longer considered in a direct evolutionary line to modern humans, that indicates a separate branch of evolution.
Distinctly different environments, like Asia and Africa, could account for something like this. Multiple evolutionary paths, occurring in multiple physical locations on the planet. Why do scientists seem so attached to the "Eve" theory?
-Charles
How much max would you be prepared to pay for that service per month for your household?
$100 per month if it includes the broadband ISP charges. $200 if it also included telephone and cable TV w/DVR capabilities.
That's about what I'm paying now for cable TV, cable internet, 3 x X-Box Live accounts and VoIP thru Packet8.
I'm investigating running my own TeamSpeak server and possibly dropping the X-Box Live accounts. America's Army is better on PC (Linux!) than X-Box. Call of Duty 2 is excellent on PC (Windows), and I'm not willing to shell out for an X-Box 360 when I already have the game on a PC.
-Charles
I've got three teenage kids who will sit for hours, if I let them, on XBox Live and chat with friends while playing Halo 2, America's Army and other "team" games.
When not on live, they also browse MySpace and usually are chatting with IM clients. Yes, they get outside plenty. When you live up north (northern hemisphere) and it gets dark less than an hour after school gets out, going outside to play isn't an attractive option.
Instead of having to have multiple phone lines, or even cell phones for the kids, they all chat with friends -- local and long distance -- via XBox Live & IM.
Microsoft is spot on and when looking at new consoles next year, the question will be does the PS3 and Revolution have a good online community and voice chat? If not, XBox 360 it will be.
-Charles
Some of us actually use that bandwidth. For example...
My phone is VoIP, and I have a total of 3 X-Box game systems in the house -- one for each kid. All three of them do the same thing -- get online (Live) and voice-chat with their friends in Halo 2 or America's Army.
I also work from home, with a lot of e-mail, IM and WebEx conferencing.
So, it is quite possible to have 4 VoIP connections running at the same time as a WebEx conference and a file transfer or two.
More bandwidth means I can use video conferencing for some calls, where you have to actually see the product or layout and it isn't digital.
-Charles
True about 2600.com, but if you Google for some of the proper key words, you'll get dozens of hits. This is a "poster boy" story and was reported widely.
Here's another couple:
t /cpt?action=cpt&expire=&urlID=8164533&fb=Y&partner ID=565 [Strip club owner]
http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/1441 [Photographing the VPs entourage at a public hotel]
http://reviewjournal.printthis.clickability.com/p
-Charles
When Homeland Security agents arrived at the Pufferbelly Toys store, the lead agent asked owner Stephanie Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. Invoking the Patriot Act, he told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.
Search Google for "patriot act pufferbelly toy store" for lots of entertaining details.
P.S. -- The Magic Cube was a properly licensed toy. Even if this WAS in the purvue of the Dept of Homeland Security, they were wrong. Something that would have come up in a normal "cease and desist" law case.
-Charles
yes. post on a topic like google zeitgeist when you could be protesting against the unconstitutional power grab by the president. fuck you.
You must be new here...
I thought the iPod would play unrestricted MP3s? What is stopping anyone from buying an MP3 from Rhapsody, MP3.com, AllofMP3.com or anywhere else from putting them on their iPod? How is this holding back the *music* industry?
I can see how it is holding back the portable music player industry, since they can't access iTunes, but they are direct competitors to Apple in the hardware arena. Apple made it easier to get to their service with their software, but that is the name of the game.
[For the unenlightened, the rules DO change if you are a convicted monopolist.]
-Charles
Or BellSouth. The SBC chairman speculated on possibly merging with BellSouth but said he didn't think it would fly with regulators.
-Charles
This means that my customer is not getting the full 1.54mbps bandwidth their SLA guarantees, and by effect neither would I. This is {potentially} interference with interstate commerce and is also discriminatory in deciding whose traffic goes where, not to mention breach of contract (violating the SLA).
Wrong.
You'll get the full T1 from your termination point to theirs. That is ALL the SLA covers. You are not guaranteed any type on link to other networks at all. Never ever. Telcos don't guarantee service on their competitors networks.
What most people dont' realize is that the common carriers DO THIS ALREADY. The connection equipment of choice is ATM, and that supports QoS. Leased circuits were configured with QoS depending on what was paid for by the customer. As a field engineer at Lucent, it was explicitly explained to us "see that level there, marked 'no guarantee, best effort'? That is all the Internet traffic -- lowest priority there is."
However, all this is done at the network level and not the transport level. Major carriers routinely ran their own circuits high priority. Anyone else who paid for one, also got high priority circuits. Everone else got 'best effort' links. Links where they didn't control both endpoints, like to a competitor thru a peering agreement, were 'best effort'.
The fuss is not that the carriers are doing this, it is that they want to do this further up the stack. They want to become more than carriers and get into the realm of "content providers". Thus, not just provide the wires, but the stuff on the wires as well. This is where they run afoul of the existing laws.
In essence, they want to do QoS at the TCP level. Personally, I think that is fine by me as long as it is TARRIFED like services are now. If SBC wants to do it for SBC produced content, they have to charge that division the same as if it was a Google, Yahoo or NBC service. The "premium" costs the same no matter WHO you are.
I'd love to have end-to-end QoS available, even if at a premium.
-Charles