What you "pay for" is "internet access UP TO X speed".
And the key is that there is oversubscription at the end user cable modem. If everyone was doing time multiplexed operations (like web browsing), each burst of your transmission would likely be near full speed. But when you and all your neighbors are watching Netflix at night at the same time, the network becomes oversubscribed and speeds drop.
When I ran a start-up, I remember the pressure being crazy. I believe I had gastric reflux pretty bad. Then when it failed (like most start-ups do), it hit pretty hard. The good news is that it was an incredible experience, and I learned a great deal about business and life from it.
"What is claimed is: A media player for acquiring and reproducing media program files which represent episodes as said episodes become available, said media player comprising: a digital memory, a communication port..., a processor..., an output unit for reproducing... the media files."
Sounds like iTunes. Version 4.9 of iTunes, launched in June 28, 2005 was the first to have podcast support (according to Wikipedia). I don't even slightly believe that iTunes was the first podcast player.
RealNetwork's had the "RealChannel" concept at some point in the late 1990's (post 1996 though).
All of the "push" systems failed because they were blowing out corporate WAN bandwidth (most companies were connected via 56 kbps, 128 kbps, or 1.5 Mbps Internet connections)
1993: Carl Malamud launched Internet Talk Radio the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert" distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one." I suspect he was using PCM or delta PCM codec, the files were huge, and probably could only be played back on Sun workstations.
1995: Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner started Audionet. Here are downloadable files from Dec. 1996 and I suspect there were earlier ones.
April 1995: RealAudio released by RealNetworks. This was a watershed in audio codec efficiency, and started the launch of a lot of downloadable audio programs.
1996: Microsoft releases NetShow 1.0, a competing streaming player to RealAudio.
I also believe that William Mutual's itv.net was delivering audio files of programs in 1996.
I had a RealAudio server in 1996 and probably was serving up audio files, but frankly I can't remember. I definitely was doing so by 1997.
1) In telecom [telegraph, telex, telephone] "sender pays" has been the rules on settlements. Just like a sender pays to put a stamp on a letter. Even when a customer of a CLEC 1 initiates a call to another CLEC 2 through an ILEC, CLEC 1 pays ILEC, ILEC pays CLEC 2. This is why there were many of these free teleconference systems, they are run by CLECs trying to get settlements by having more people call them long distance.
2) There was a brief period of the Internet where "no one paid" for the Internet because of government support, and the result was a typical tragedy of the commons - horrible congestion (the 56K NSFNet). Eventually the NSFNet had to classify traffic into high-priority terminal sessions and lower priority traffic like FTP.
3) The CIX came along to interconnect large commercial networks. These networks were generally exchanging equal amounts of traffic. Once you bought into CIX, you peered without settlements.
No-Pay peering with others that exchange equal amount of traffic with you in both directions makes technological sense due to symmetric bandwidth capacities of interfaces.
For example, a network service provider's 100 Mbps FDDI connection at the MAE-EAST provides 100 Mbps in both directions. It doesn't make sense to peer with someone who sending you 100 Mbps and only receiving 1 Mbps of your traffic.
Peering and/or settlement agreements between networks have evolved over time to balance the real-world business situation. For example, you might not want to charge as much to a customer that runs a huge, dependable software archive that your other customers benefit from. Similarly, today's cable providers probably should make Netflix pay less, but Netflix should still pay something.
I feel this is something the market should work out.
In the meantime, we need to figure out how to enhance competition in the local ISP market. A Federal law to make local monopoly franchises granted by government illegal would be a good start...
the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge.
I'm curious why this was the rule - is it because most network interfaces are inherently bi-directional? Or was it a feeling that information is valuable, so if your network absorbs valuable information from the outside, it should provide an equivalent amount of valuable information back out?
How is this the worse industrial disaster in US history, compared with the Texas City Disaster that killed 581 people, injured more than 5,000 people, and destroyed 500 homes, 1100 vehicles, and 362 rail cars due to an explosion of 2.9 kilotons TNT equivalent energy?
This is what economists call a Coasian Solution to a problem of externalities. Coase's Theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.
Oh, and before you say "that's why college is stupid" it's also a good indicator of job success. No matter what your job, you're going to have to do things you don't want to.
You would think we could come up with a test cheaper than a $100K+ college education to determine if people are willing to do things they don't want to - perhaps it would be like that reality show "Fear Factor"...
I thought the goal of the SAT was to predict performance in college, not to gauge "important academic skills".
I suspect actual college performance is best predicted by having the students drink, do drugs, and have sex all night - then have a high-stakes test at 6AM in the morning! (You score some for just making it out of bed BTW)
The article mentions Parrot's Ethernet AVB connected systems. The carriage of audio/video media over AVB has been standardized by the AVB Transport Protocol in IEEE 1722, and yes, it is just Ethernet, no IP.
The theory is that your car is a LAN, and does not need to have Layer 3.
I think there is a difference between nuclear power plant operators and nuclear power plant engineers. Kind of like the difference between people that use software and people that write software.
AM broadcast spectrum is about 1 MHz, or about 3.5 Mbps using typical digital modulations. AM antennas need to be very long to be very efficient, so realistic mobile devices may only get 1 Mbps or less. Also AM propagates easily, so it will be tough to have small cells with reasonably powered transmitters.
FM is about 20 MHz, or about 70 Mbps theoretically. They also have a long wavelength, but not anywhere as bad as AM, but worse than TV channels 7-13.
That's how they destroyed their competition and established a monopoly - predatory pricing.
Yes, they destroyed their competition by dramatically and permanently reducing prices to the consumer. Standard Oil revolutionized the technology of kerosene production and made their supply chain highly efficient. This made a lot of their competitors mad, which is why they got such bad press. But it made lighting incredibly cheap for consumers.
The problem is that there has never been an example of "predatory pricing" where the prices to the consumers go back up to the consumer. It is a nice idea, but practically it never happens.
Lest Comcast become the 21st century version of Standard Oil.
I hope so, because in 1865, kerosene cost fifty-eight cents a gallon; by 1880 it was just 9 cents a gallon.
But somehow I doubt that Comcast TWC NBCU will be able to reduce cable prices as much as Standard Oil reduced kerosene prices. After all, Standard Oil did not depend on local government monopoly franchises to achieve their monopoly, but instead only depended on the market.
Any boat traveling the river had to pay or face the cannons of the castle.
Only the Holy Roman Emperor could authorise the collection of tolls along the Rhine - which is just like local governments granting monopoly cable franchises.
[Technically only those requiring tolls outside the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor were known as robber barons (German: Raubritter).]
I wonder if anyone under 50 still uses cable or POTS "phone" service anymore.
I'm under 50, but have a POTS line over cable provider so that when delivery people call us in our apartment we can "buzz them in" the door (would be annoying if they called to our cell phone, but it was on the other side of town or the planet, and we never know which one of us will be home to get the delivery).
Of course no manual shopping any more. It is all Amazon Prime and online grocery delivery.
Indeed, this paper finds that 23% of the variance in educational attainment is due to heritability, and 41% is due to shared family environment. The heritability of education attainment is less than is typically found for cognitive outcomes (such as IQ) for young adults.
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What you "pay for" is "internet access UP TO X speed".
And the key is that there is oversubscription at the end user cable modem. If everyone was doing time multiplexed operations (like web browsing), each burst of your transmission would likely be near full speed. But when you and all your neighbors are watching Netflix at night at the same time, the network becomes oversubscribed and speeds drop.
I'm inclined to go lynch 10,000 homosexuals, just so people would get to see what real discrimination looks like...
Gee, then you must be happy about Matthew Shepard, Brandon Teena, Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder, Arthur Warren, etc.
Plenty of gay people are violently attacked, discriminated against in housing and business, etc.
When I ran a start-up, I remember the pressure being crazy. I believe I had gastric reflux pretty bad. Then when it failed (like most start-ups do), it hit pretty hard. The good news is that it was an incredible experience, and I learned a great deal about business and life from it.
"What is claimed is: A media player for acquiring and reproducing media program files which represent episodes as said episodes become available, said media player comprising: a digital memory, a communication port..., a processor..., an output unit for reproducing ... the media files."
Sounds like iTunes. Version 4.9 of iTunes, launched in June 28, 2005 was the first to have podcast support (according to Wikipedia). I don't even slightly believe that iTunes was the first podcast player.
RealNetwork's had the "RealChannel" concept at some point in the late 1990's (post 1996 though).
PointCast offered audio push as of 1997. Didn't last long.
Supposedly Marimba Castanet had pushed audio support in 1997 as well.
All of the "push" systems failed because they were blowing out corporate WAN bandwidth (most companies were connected via 56 kbps, 128 kbps, or 1.5 Mbps Internet connections)
Good EE programs require also vector calculus (div, grad, curl) so you can prove why a coaxial cable works, etc.
1993: Carl Malamud launched Internet Talk Radio the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert" distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one." I suspect he was using PCM or delta PCM codec, the files were huge, and probably could only be played back on Sun workstations.
1995: Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner started Audionet. Here are downloadable files from Dec. 1996 and I suspect there were earlier ones.
April 1995: RealAudio released by RealNetworks. This was a watershed in audio codec efficiency, and started the launch of a lot of downloadable audio programs.
1996: Microsoft releases NetShow 1.0, a competing streaming player to RealAudio.
I also believe that William Mutual's itv.net was delivering audio files of programs in 1996.
I had a RealAudio server in 1996 and probably was serving up audio files, but frankly I can't remember. I definitely was doing so by 1997.
1) In telecom [telegraph, telex, telephone] "sender pays" has been the rules on settlements. Just like a sender pays to put a stamp on a letter. Even when a customer of a CLEC 1 initiates a call to another CLEC 2 through an ILEC, CLEC 1 pays ILEC, ILEC pays CLEC 2. This is why there were many of these free teleconference systems, they are run by CLECs trying to get settlements by having more people call them long distance.
2) There was a brief period of the Internet where "no one paid" for the Internet because of government support, and the result was a typical tragedy of the commons - horrible congestion (the 56K NSFNet). Eventually the NSFNet had to classify traffic into high-priority terminal sessions and lower priority traffic like FTP.
3) The CIX came along to interconnect large commercial networks. These networks were generally exchanging equal amounts of traffic. Once you bought into CIX, you peered without settlements.
No-Pay peering with others that exchange equal amount of traffic with you in both directions makes technological sense due to symmetric bandwidth capacities of interfaces.
For example, a network service provider's 100 Mbps FDDI connection at the MAE-EAST provides 100 Mbps in both directions. It doesn't make sense to peer with someone who sending you 100 Mbps and only receiving 1 Mbps of your traffic.
Peering and/or settlement agreements between networks have evolved over time to balance the real-world business situation. For example, you might not want to charge as much to a customer that runs a huge, dependable software archive that your other customers benefit from. Similarly, today's cable providers probably should make Netflix pay less, but Netflix should still pay something.
I feel this is something the market should work out.
In the meantime, we need to figure out how to enhance competition in the local ISP market. A Federal law to make local monopoly franchises granted by government illegal would be a good start...
the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge.
I'm curious why this was the rule - is it because most network interfaces are inherently bi-directional? Or was it a feeling that information is valuable, so if your network absorbs valuable information from the outside, it should provide an equivalent amount of valuable information back out?
How is this the worse industrial disaster in US history, compared with the Texas City Disaster that killed 581 people, injured more than 5,000 people, and destroyed 500 homes, 1100 vehicles, and 362 rail cars due to an explosion of 2.9 kilotons TNT equivalent energy?
This is what economists call a Coasian Solution to a problem of externalities. Coase's Theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.
Oh, and before you say "that's why college is stupid" it's also a good indicator of job success. No matter what your job, you're going to have to do things you don't want to.
You would think we could come up with a test cheaper than a $100K+ college education to determine if people are willing to do things they don't want to - perhaps it would be like that reality show "Fear Factor"...
I thought the goal of the SAT was to predict performance in college, not to gauge "important academic skills".
I suspect actual college performance is best predicted by having the students drink, do drugs, and have sex all night - then have a high-stakes test at 6AM in the morning! (You score some for just making it out of bed BTW)
OK so we're talking S-band, 256bps FSK uplink with CP. Is that really "old fashioned"?
What are these "old-fashioned transmitters" that are not available any more? What frequency, bandwidth, and power are required?
For chicken, I feel Gardein is pretty much already there with soy protein isolate. No real need to culture animal cells.
Steak & Fish a bit more challenging to pull off though...
The article mentions Parrot's Ethernet AVB connected systems. The carriage of audio/video media over AVB has been standardized by the AVB Transport Protocol in IEEE 1722, and yes, it is just Ethernet, no IP.
The theory is that your car is a LAN, and does not need to have Layer 3.
I think there is a difference between nuclear power plant operators and nuclear power plant engineers. Kind of like the difference between people that use software and people that write software.
AM broadcast spectrum is about 1 MHz, or about 3.5 Mbps using typical digital modulations. AM antennas need to be very long to be very efficient, so realistic mobile devices may only get 1 Mbps or less. Also AM propagates easily, so it will be tough to have small cells with reasonably powered transmitters.
FM is about 20 MHz, or about 70 Mbps theoretically. They also have a long wavelength, but not anywhere as bad as AM, but worse than TV channels 7-13.
First stage reverses direction and comes back. Very fuel expensive, I'd be amazed if they're planning this.
I suspect parachute braking with fuel only used in the last few feet.
Can't They just live and work in India?
Why can't we all be able to live and work wherever we want?
That's how they destroyed their competition and established a monopoly - predatory pricing.
Yes, they destroyed their competition by dramatically and permanently reducing prices to the consumer. Standard Oil revolutionized the technology of kerosene production and made their supply chain highly efficient. This made a lot of their competitors mad, which is why they got such bad press. But it made lighting incredibly cheap for consumers.
The problem is that there has never been an example of "predatory pricing" where the prices to the consumers go back up to the consumer. It is a nice idea, but practically it never happens.
Lest Comcast become the 21st century version of Standard Oil.
I hope so, because in 1865, kerosene cost fifty-eight cents a gallon; by 1880 it was just 9 cents a gallon.
But somehow I doubt that Comcast TWC NBCU will be able to reduce cable prices as much as Standard Oil reduced kerosene prices. After all, Standard Oil did not depend on local government monopoly franchises to achieve their monopoly, but instead only depended on the market.
[Read Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company]
Any boat traveling the river had to pay or face the cannons of the castle.
Only the Holy Roman Emperor could authorise the collection of tolls along the Rhine - which is just like local governments granting monopoly cable franchises.
[Technically only those requiring tolls outside the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor were known as robber barons (German: Raubritter).]
I wonder if anyone under 50 still uses cable or POTS "phone" service anymore.
I'm under 50, but have a POTS line over cable provider so that when delivery people call us in our apartment we can "buzz them in" the door (would be annoying if they called to our cell phone, but it was on the other side of town or the planet, and we never know which one of us will be home to get the delivery).
Of course no manual shopping any more. It is all Amazon Prime and online grocery delivery.
Indeed, this paper finds that 23% of the variance in educational attainment is due to heritability, and 41% is due to shared family environment. The heritability of education attainment is less than is typically found for cognitive outcomes (such as IQ) for young adults.