But if you had widespread adoption [...] being economical for society. Not if that $5k per window were better spent on something else. E.g., more fuel-efficient cars.
But the $5k spent on a more fuel efficient car could be used to find a more efficient fuel, or that money could be spent to cure cancer, or or or or or or...
The argument that $x could be spent better by applying it to y is almost always false when it comes to the environment. The fact remains, environmental / ecological change happens on a thousand different fronts. Imagine if we had the most fuel efficient cars possible (zero carbon footprint) yet our factories poured carcinogenic effluent into the atmosphere, our houses ran as efficiently as a dead horse and leaked heat, cold, moisture, etc.
If the technology proves to be something that can and will save money while at the same time benefiting the environment, economy of scale will come into effect and the cost will drop significantly. If not, it will fall flat like so many other things and we'll divert our attention elsewhere (like more fuel efficient cars).
And there is now a BOINC package in newer releases of Fedora.
Fantastic!
Now, I've just got a couple glitches to work out in my Fedora 9 installation;
Video drivers
Wireless LAN
Getting KDE to function and allow access to all the Fedora software utilities properly
Allowing me to use groupinstall/groupremove for KDE/Gnome without mucking up my entire graphical environment
Providing me a KDE utility to graphically change video settings would be spectacular
Fixing the GNOME graphic settings utility to allow for advanced changes like video timings, output selection, etc. would be a real boon as well
Convincing the package manager to look at the DVD instead of the Internet every time I ask it to install another package
On the plus side; since my Fedora installation is all but useless, I might as well donate some spare CPU cycles to something. I've got lots of them; I can't use the computer to save my life
Hmph. Sounds just like a PHB when they propose a new development project. "Well, see, we want to use [ SAP | Lotus Notes | Teamcenter | other complex technology here ], but we're not really sure how we'd use it.
For fsck's sake, if you don't already know HOW you would use something, you probably DON'T NEED IT!
As the old addage goes; when the only tool you have is a hammer suddenly every problem looks like a nail.
Actually, no-one other than the British do, AFAIK. Haven't seen a switch in a socket in Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Italy or the US. Maybe Ireland?
Even better, the sooner you realize the utter shit that entertainment companies crank out is totally useless and stop buying it, and spend your time doing something more interesting or worthwhile... the sooner DRM doesn't matter, too.
That's sort of the problem. Entertainment is fleeting and some might even say it's useless. You could apply the same metric to a baseball, hockey, soccer, etc. game. You saw it, it's over, right? However when you experience things like sporting events and movies you then have something else to discuss with your friends and co-workers. Your life has been enriched by the experience. Or, in some cases the movie was so bad you have something to complain about and that makes a lot of people {coughSLASHDOTTERScough} happy.
Sure, it's a wonderful ideal that instead of watching that 2 hour movie you could, instead, program something. Go for a walk. Ride a bike. Play a game. Read a book (the fact that so many books these days are utter trite aside). Or, hell, there's about a thousand things you could do other than watching a movie. Hell, you could go to a bar and get drunk, you could engage in a street race, you could,...
What it really comes down to is perspective and priorities. See, people have been claiming that modern movies and entertainment is crap for the last several decades. But people still lap it up. Why? Because the entertainment industry employ thousands and spend billions to bring people what people want. The fact that they're as profitable as they are seems to negate your point that all modern movies are crap.
My advice to you? Find a good movie, turn down the lights and up the volume and get lost for a couple hours. You sound stressed.:)
Engineer: Because I can.
Businessman: Because people want it.
Just in case you were wondering why businessmen run the world. Yeah. I remember all the protests in the streets of people marching to demand DRM...
As soon as you realize that you (one who intends to copy digital media) don't mean a whit to entertainment companies you'll stop crying on forums about DRM. The people who wanted DRM are the executives and boards of directors at those very companies who stand to make (more) money because of DRM.
The other option is, of course, to purchase the box, but most people, myself included, would rather rent it from the cable company. If my purchased equipment caffs on me I'm on the hook to buy another (warranty period notwithstanding). If their rented equipment caffs on me, I bring it to the store and get a shiny new one.
Everything you describe is dependent on that box.
Everything you describe is dependent on the VCR.
You're limited to what the provider of the box conceded to let you do. You're lucky, because you can still hook the device to a burner or use analog connection to connect to a classic recorder. But everything could go away whenever the provider choose. For example, I really doubt you have any solution to record shows in HD.
I can connect an external firewire recorder to my HD cable box and record in HD with 5.1 sound.
Whereas with a VCR, you don't depend on an exernal box and on what the provider decided to let you do. You just plug the damn VCR to the cable and do pretty much whatever you want to do.
Yeah, and wind up watches were great because you didn't have to rely on a damned battery!
VCRs are old, kludgy, clunky, inconvenient, have a reduced shelf life due to their moving parts, are expensive to run over the long term (added cost of tapes), fragile, etc. Comparing a VCR to a digital DVR is only good for pure nostalgic purposes. There's really no advantage to a VCR anymore and in fact when I move in 2 days I'll be disposing of mine and all accompanying VHS tapes.
You don't need a specific box obtainable only from your provider.
Actually, I can purchase a digital STB from my local box electronics store.
But instead, what we are starting to see is cable companies who force you to rent *their* box and that's the only single way to access the content of their channels.
Actually, I have something to the order of six cable outlets in my home. One has an HD STB connected to it, one has a regular STB connected, two of the others have regular televisions connected and the other two are presently not in use but are active.
I only need the STBs to access higher (newer) 'specialty' digital channels, PPV events and high definition content.
This situation may not apply in all countries, but that's what I'm seeing here around (Switzerland).
Of course, Switzerland, United States, Canada, Argentina, Poland, England, Ireland, etc. are all different. However the common fact remains; VCRs are still useless.:)
If it were only so simple. At some point, all your DSL connections are aggregated somewhere and that aggregation point becomes the bottleneck.
Yes, all ISPs have that very same bottleneck and it's typically extremely large. The coaxial cable running through many residential neighborhoods quickly reaches saturation similar to that of an old 10Base2 Thinnet network where if a small handful of computers are using lots of bandwidth at once the collision rate goes up and the available bandwidth to all homes in that segment (typically hundreds, if not thousands) find saturated links and slowed browsing.
However the "bottleneck" at the ISP level - the famous defense of the cable aficionados, is usually extremely large to the point where it would take hundreds or thousands of users saturating their individual links in order to slow the connection appreciably.
When you can remove the smallest bottleneck, that being the last mile, you are able to issue a higher guaranteed level of service to each individual segment of your network (nee, each individual user).
The best comparison of cable versus DSL is water. Bandwidth travels through pipes, as it were, just like water. Now, the source of that water coming into the house is very generous and operates at a pressure level higher than that of any individual fixture. Now, when you have a water line that branches off to the washer, two toilets, the shower, the kitchen sink, dishwasher, and two bathroom sinks you can see how easy it is to saturate the link. Anybody who's ever been in the shower when someone turned on a clothes / dish washer or flushed a toilet knows first hand what I'm talking about.
Now, the new(er) solution to this age old problem is a method of plumbing that sends a single water pipe to each and every fixture in the house. The pipe is straight and dedicated. This means when you're showering and some insensitive bonehead flushes the toilet you'll be safe from scalding.
Now, one could say that the bottleneck exists in the water main, be it 4", 5", 6", 8", whatever (which is a significant order of magnitude more pressure-filled than any home supply), or the large supply pipes that feed the individual mains; somewhere to the order of 12" and higher, or the filtration station that pumps the water into the entire system or even the lake, stream or underground well that feeds the filtration system in the first place. But in all likelyhood the reason you're being burned in the shower or losing water pressure while trying to hose off your car is because somebody else in the house has used up more than their fair share on you.
The long and short of it is this; the last mile is the biggest, most problematic, most expensive bottleneck to cure. It's easy enough to add a new OC line in a data centre but it's a much more prohibitive task to upgrade several thousand individual homes.
Bell has claimed that your neighbors activities have no impact on your internet connection. For that to be the case, it has to be true right to the edge of their network, NOT just to the CO.
Wow, do you ever have a limited understanding of broadband technologies. Have you ever used thinnet in your house? Do you comprehend the difference between it and a switched network using Cat-5? Now can you extend that knowledge to a residential area of a few hundred subscribers or is that too much for you? (Or does it just run too far against your slanted viewpoint?)
But keep on drinking the kool-aid.
Well there you go. You've solidified your ignorance with an over-used Slashdot-ism. It's the perfect replacement for understanding of any subject. How's the weather up on that bandwagon?
they made promises they can't live up to and now they are handling it by censoring the internet. I don't care if it is "necessary", they screwed up and it should be handled in a responsible way - by upgrading the network
How much more are you willing to pay on a monthly basis for this proposed upgrade? Would you rather pay a flat fee, a speed surcharge or a charge per volume of traffic?
Please, don't tell me, tell Bell. While you're at it if you could draft up an agreeable schedule that would allow them to collect additional money from the disproportionate bandwidth users which would, in turn, permit them to upgrade their infrastructure, that would be great.
In the meantime quit crying. The world isn't free and it does not revolve around your torrent downloads. Put up or shut up.
I recall seeing Bell advertisements that DSL from Bell was better than cable, because there are "no slowdowns". I also recall advertisements, but I can't remember if they were specifically Bell advertisements, that your bandwidth was dedicated. I didn't really believe it then, and now it seems that neither does Bell.
Way to twist something out of context in the interests of karma whoring. My karma is quite strong so I can shed some light on the situation without fear of reprisal from the groupthink mods;
Bell's commercials stated that there was no effect of one's neighbors saturating bandwidth as there is with cable internet connection because the connection to the central office is dedicated to each home. The commercials have always been quite explicit, even the recent ones with Frank & Gordon (Bell's Beavers) which couldn't get more explicit. Remember the one with the megaphone where Gordon asked all the neighbors to "get off the Internet" because Frank wanted to download something?
Bell doesn't have a monopoly on internet access in Canada. Correct, but they own the infrastructure and have been throttling the competition, which is effectively circumventing CRTC regulations requiring them to lease lines to competitors.
Ok, so when are Bell's competition going to start deploying their own infrastructure as was the original plan? The Baby Bell's (and really anybody with a few thousand dollars, some rack space and ambition) have been piggy-backing on Bell's infrastructure, directly competing with Bell for years and not actually deploying any major infrastructure of their own.
So Bell does all the heavy lifting and the little guys come in and ride their coat tails. Seems fair enough to me.
So back to the topic at hand; let's see, P2P causes extreme excess bandwidth congestion on a national ISP's network. Gee, on the surface, it seems like that's 100% correct. God, are those ISP folks ever assholes! I mean, they've been charging the same ludicrously low rate for years all the while increasing the available bandwidth and a small percentage of people abuse it and take more than their fair share. Why is this a problem? If you take too much - you have to pay extra, otherwise expect to be throttled back.
Why is this a problem? In the real world it's not, but only here on Slashdot where everything related to the Internet should be free and unlimited and some mysterious benefactor should provide all the fibre and all the equipment to pass the packets. Now explain to me how this should be expected to work IN THE REAL WORLD?
This is one of those topics that really highlights just how infantile and demanding the general Slashdot population really are. Every time one of these stories comes up all I see are cries of "We want more for less!" but no actual proposed solutions. So please, if any of you are going to respond to me, please, propose a solution to the bandwidth saturation problem; make certain you cover the present generation of P2P applications. Otherwise, I'm just not interested in your foot stamping.
It's FILM at 11. The news anchor obviously already has the news, why would he make you wait till 11 ? So that the other channels can outrun him ?
Actually the popular cliche is "story at 11" or "more at 11". It's a popular teaser for North American news anchors to titilate the primetime viewers enough to stay on the present channel to see their news casts. The more subtle and curiousity inducing a soundbyte the better.
"A popular dinner side dish could be killing you right now! More at 11."
"Which {area} neighborhood is at risk of this violent, dangerous sexual predator? Find out at 11!"
"Are your light bulbs giving you cancer? This story and more coming up at 11."
Can you turn off the "Awesomebar"?
No?
Not interested.
Why in the name of all that is holy would you want to? Finally I can type something to go to a recent page (sorry; "frecent") and it'll display relevant results for me. If it's not in my history it searches my default search engine (Google) and I find it anyways.
I personally find the Awesomebar (or whatever you call it) a rather intuitive step forward for open source products. Gone are the days when you had to click five times for something you do a dozen times a day. Now it's all right at my fingertips.
Once a contract is executed, any change to its terms requires the execution of a *new* contract, that covers the subject matter of these changes, that has a new "meeting of the minds between parties", and (very important!) has new *consideration*.
Nice try, but no. When you enter an on-going agreement for services there are nearly always clauses whereby one, both (or all) parties can change various terms "with xx days written notice".
If contracts were iron clad we wouldn't have contract law and the lawyers and court resources to support it.
Don't forget this is upload and download. This limits your ability to run as a server and will lead to a more centralized internet.
False. As always, if you want to run a server you should install a business class line. SOHO and residential services are for home use, not servers. Read your EULA.
It always pains me to order beer at a restaurant. Not only am I paying out the arse for it, I have to be lucky for them to have something other than piss water. I'll just take clean water thank you.
Wow. Can you tell me where you are so I won't go there?:)
I'm quite happy to order beer in a restaurant. Sure, I pay extra for it, but I'd hardly say I'm paying "out the arse" by any stretch. Someone else is responsible for cleaning up after me, my beer comes cold to the table and quite often it's served by an attractive young thing. Said beer accompanies good food (I don't frequent bad restaurants, naturally.;), good friends and a good time.
But aside from that, it amazes me how people complain about the rising costs of everything, but never seem to notice fountain drinks.
Or furniture, or stereo equipment (electronics), or or or...
I personally don't drink pop (soda, soft drinks, whatever) unless it's mixed with Crown Royal so the horrendous markup doesn't affect me in the least.
You can get a dedicated 10Mbit line in a large datacenter for under 300$ / month.
Running lines between data centers is cheap, relatively. Your home isn't a data center, however, and does not have the economy of scale. The "last mile" is the expensive part.
I'd ask AC for a cite, but that's like asking my dog to say "thank you" when I feed her.
What our friend Anonymous seems to forget is that a) a "large data centre" is far from home, and b) data centre pricing goes up rather sharply when you want to add equipment to the mix. It goes up again when you decide to turn it on, which consumes power and cooling and waste heat all at the same time.
No longer do datacentres care about bandwidth (when you've got two dozen providers laying fibre to your doorstep it ceases to be a priority); Kilowatt Hours per Foot is the new math.
You can thank two professions for this:
1. Marketing departments bait you in
2. Lawyers switch it out on you.
3. Customers who rush headlong for the "best deal" without considering all the facts or reading the fine print.
I'm in sales. Customer service, advertising and marketing are all part of my profession. The simple truth of the matter is that most of us hate the way our products are marketed to the general population but if we don't play the same games, use the same fine print or advertise the same unbelievable, too good to be true offers then customers won't contact us and we won't make sales.
Customer loyalty is a tricky business. Customers are, by and large, finicky creatures. You win them over with a special super-duper sale promotion, you take care of them and provide top notch customer service only to have them jump ship when another super-duper sale promotion comes along down the road. Then customers complain when they're not receiving top notch customer service anymore.
n.b. I'm not talking about all customers, obviously, but an extremely significant number of customers fit into this mold - enough to make companies stand up and take notice.
In terms of broadband service, we have customers who were lured into specials over a decade ago when it first hit the mainstream here in North America. At that time, the infrastructure was new and completely untested in any practical terms, content was scarce and not nearly as multimedia rich as it is today. So now the infrastructure has grown by leaps and bounds (otherwise known in industry terms as "billions of dollars"), the content has grown exponentially faster, and by and large the prices haven't really gone up very far. The risk each broadband company faces is to be the first to implement a cap or limitation and lose too much business to the competition. I've been a long time supporter of tier-based broadband connections but it's a very sensitive issue around here. The majority opinion (or the vocal minority, whichever the case may be) has always been for a consistently low, flat cost for unlimited bandwidth. Unfortunately this model is simply not sustainable so things are going to change.
Both major players in Ontario, Canada; namely Rogers Cable and Bell Sympatico (ADSL) have implemented caps on their plans ranging from 25GB to 75GB per month with a set fee for each additional GB thereafter. Transmission speeds remain constant, save for peak periods in heavily saturated areas of cable access, but seem to be acceptable overall.
At the end of it all, though, is the fact that bandwidth does cost exponentially more than the vast majority of home consumers are paying. The broadband model is still that of burstable traffic where the low volume users pay for the excessive ways of the high volume users. In reality, the people who should be screaming here are the low volume users - the occasional web surfers and e-mail checkers who use somewhere between 10MB and a couple GB per month yet who are still forced to pay for the torrenters who saturate their connections 24x7 and consume hundreds of GB per month.
Get a grip dude. I read the article. Actually I read about it in several places. My argument is not really about bandwidth caps, but truth in advertising. They are thinking of sneaking in bandwidth caps after people have signed up. This is not right. If you sign up for one thing then they say they are changing the rules, that is bullshit. Pure and simple.
What led you to believe that the terms of service would remain identical ad infinitum?
Well, something like this would mean they're not saying "unlimited" anymore. I couldn't find anything on comcast.com about the service being unlimited. Where (other than in the mind of whiney torrenters with a sense of entitlement) does it say that?
But! But! But! For $39.95/month I should be able to download at speeds of a fractional T3 all month long without caps or recourse! Bandwidth is free! Every ISP has 1000 TerraBits available at ALL TIMES! They're just greedy, money hungry capitalists who want to buy another Ferrari with my bandwidth dollar!
I should be able to download ALL the Linux ISOs I want! (Because, you see, I download 25-30 distributions in a typical month. Full resolution 720p, panoramic widescreen, H.264, AC3 5.1 surround sound distributions. Of, uhm, Redhat.)
A really quick Google search turned up this article which will hopefully put things into a bit of perspective. $2 billion to build a coal plant; while I grant you it'll generate more than 16MWh/year, is still a damn hefty pricetag. How many year (nee: decades) will it take to pay one of those off?
Also, FYI; 40 year mortgage amortizations are becoming very commonplace while some companies are looking towards the prospect of 50 year ams.
As for maintainence costs; how much does it cost to maintain a coal fired plant? How much does it cost to maintain a nuclear plant? How much does it cost to handle the waste product from same? How much ongoing environmental impact is there?
I'm no tree hugger by any stretch, but the fact that a town was able to generate an annual surplus of natural energy with no environmental by-products is a pretty decent little achievement. A small step towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
If people are dying after having a Taser used on them and it cannot be shown that these persons would have probably died anyway, then Taser should be financially responsible. The fact that it causes pain when used is not my objection; it has to do that to serve its functionality--but what it is not supposed to do is kill people. The whole point of these devices was that they were "non-lethal", and then when a few people died they changed it to "less-than-lethal".
Anybody who calls a taser a "non lethal" device is either ill-informed or an anti-taser propagandist. Tasers fall in the category of less lethal weaponry. Period, full stop.
Slashdot Mirror
But the $5k spent on a more fuel efficient car could be used to find a more efficient fuel, or that money could be spent to cure cancer, or or or or or or ...
The argument that $x could be spent better by applying it to y is almost always false when it comes to the environment. The fact remains, environmental / ecological change happens on a thousand different fronts. Imagine if we had the most fuel efficient cars possible (zero carbon footprint) yet our factories poured carcinogenic effluent into the atmosphere, our houses ran as efficiently as a dead horse and leaked heat, cold, moisture, etc.
If the technology proves to be something that can and will save money while at the same time benefiting the environment, economy of scale will come into effect and the cost will drop significantly. If not, it will fall flat like so many other things and we'll divert our attention elsewhere (like more fuel efficient cars).
Fantastic!
Now, I've just got a couple glitches to work out in my Fedora 9 installation;
On the plus side; since my Fedora installation is all but useless, I might as well donate some spare CPU cycles to something. I've got lots of them; I can't use the computer to save my life
For fsck's sake, if you don't already know HOW you would use something, you probably DON'T NEED IT!
As the old addage goes; when the only tool you have is a hammer suddenly every problem looks like a nail.
New Zealand does (Thanks, Discovery Channel!)
That's sort of the problem. Entertainment is fleeting and some might even say it's useless. You could apply the same metric to a baseball, hockey, soccer, etc. game. You saw it, it's over, right? However when you experience things like sporting events and movies you then have something else to discuss with your friends and co-workers. Your life has been enriched by the experience. Or, in some cases the movie was so bad you have something to complain about and that makes a lot of people {coughSLASHDOTTERScough} happy.
Sure, it's a wonderful ideal that instead of watching that 2 hour movie you could, instead, program something. Go for a walk. Ride a bike. Play a game. Read a book (the fact that so many books these days are utter trite aside). Or, hell, there's about a thousand things you could do other than watching a movie. Hell, you could go to a bar and get drunk, you could engage in a street race, you could, ...
What it really comes down to is perspective and priorities. See, people have been claiming that modern movies and entertainment is crap for the last several decades. But people still lap it up. Why? Because the entertainment industry employ thousands and spend billions to bring people what people want. The fact that they're as profitable as they are seems to negate your point that all modern movies are crap.
My advice to you? Find a good movie, turn down the lights and up the volume and get lost for a couple hours. You sound stressed. :)
As soon as you realize that you (one who intends to copy digital media) don't mean a whit to entertainment companies you'll stop crying on forums about DRM. The people who wanted DRM are the executives and boards of directors at those very companies who stand to make (more) money because of DRM.
The other option is, of course, to purchase the box, but most people, myself included, would rather rent it from the cable company. If my purchased equipment caffs on me I'm on the hook to buy another (warranty period notwithstanding). If their rented equipment caffs on me, I bring it to the store and get a shiny new one.
Everything you describe is dependent on that box.Everything you describe is dependent on the VCR.
You're limited to what the provider of the box conceded to let you do. You're lucky, because you can still hook the device to a burner or use analog connection to connect to a classic recorder. But everything could go away whenever the provider choose. For example, I really doubt you have any solution to record shows in HD.I can connect an external firewire recorder to my HD cable box and record in HD with 5.1 sound.
Whereas with a VCR, you don't depend on an exernal box and on what the provider decided to let you do. You just plug the damn VCR to the cable and do pretty much whatever you want to do.Yeah, and wind up watches were great because you didn't have to rely on a damned battery!
VCRs are old, kludgy, clunky, inconvenient, have a reduced shelf life due to their moving parts, are expensive to run over the long term (added cost of tapes), fragile, etc. Comparing a VCR to a digital DVR is only good for pure nostalgic purposes. There's really no advantage to a VCR anymore and in fact when I move in 2 days I'll be disposing of mine and all accompanying VHS tapes.
You don't need a specific box obtainable only from your provider.Actually, I can purchase a digital STB from my local box electronics store.
But instead, what we are starting to see is cable companies who force you to rent *their* box and that's the only single way to access the content of their channels.Actually, I have something to the order of six cable outlets in my home. One has an HD STB connected to it, one has a regular STB connected, two of the others have regular televisions connected and the other two are presently not in use but are active.
I only need the STBs to access higher (newer) 'specialty' digital channels, PPV events and high definition content.
This situation may not apply in all countries, but that's what I'm seeing here around (Switzerland).Of course, Switzerland, United States, Canada, Argentina, Poland, England, Ireland, etc. are all different. However the common fact remains; VCRs are still useless. :)
Yes, all ISPs have that very same bottleneck and it's typically extremely large. The coaxial cable running through many residential neighborhoods quickly reaches saturation similar to that of an old 10Base2 Thinnet network where if a small handful of computers are using lots of bandwidth at once the collision rate goes up and the available bandwidth to all homes in that segment (typically hundreds, if not thousands) find saturated links and slowed browsing.
However the "bottleneck" at the ISP level - the famous defense of the cable aficionados, is usually extremely large to the point where it would take hundreds or thousands of users saturating their individual links in order to slow the connection appreciably.
When you can remove the smallest bottleneck, that being the last mile, you are able to issue a higher guaranteed level of service to each individual segment of your network (nee, each individual user).
The best comparison of cable versus DSL is water. Bandwidth travels through pipes, as it were, just like water. Now, the source of that water coming into the house is very generous and operates at a pressure level higher than that of any individual fixture. Now, when you have a water line that branches off to the washer, two toilets, the shower, the kitchen sink, dishwasher, and two bathroom sinks you can see how easy it is to saturate the link. Anybody who's ever been in the shower when someone turned on a clothes / dish washer or flushed a toilet knows first hand what I'm talking about.
Now, the new(er) solution to this age old problem is a method of plumbing that sends a single water pipe to each and every fixture in the house. The pipe is straight and dedicated. This means when you're showering and some insensitive bonehead flushes the toilet you'll be safe from scalding.
Now, one could say that the bottleneck exists in the water main, be it 4", 5", 6", 8", whatever (which is a significant order of magnitude more pressure-filled than any home supply), or the large supply pipes that feed the individual mains; somewhere to the order of 12" and higher, or the filtration station that pumps the water into the entire system or even the lake, stream or underground well that feeds the filtration system in the first place. But in all likelyhood the reason you're being burned in the shower or losing water pressure while trying to hose off your car is because somebody else in the house has used up more than their fair share on you.
The long and short of it is this; the last mile is the biggest, most problematic, most expensive bottleneck to cure. It's easy enough to add a new OC line in a data centre but it's a much more prohibitive task to upgrade several thousand individual homes.
Wow, do you ever have a limited understanding of broadband technologies. Have you ever used thinnet in your house? Do you comprehend the difference between it and a switched network using Cat-5? Now can you extend that knowledge to a residential area of a few hundred subscribers or is that too much for you? (Or does it just run too far against your slanted viewpoint?)
But keep on drinking the kool-aid.Well there you go. You've solidified your ignorance with an over-used Slashdot-ism. It's the perfect replacement for understanding of any subject. How's the weather up on that bandwagon?
How much more are you willing to pay on a monthly basis for this proposed upgrade? Would you rather pay a flat fee, a speed surcharge or a charge per volume of traffic?
Please, don't tell me, tell Bell. While you're at it if you could draft up an agreeable schedule that would allow them to collect additional money from the disproportionate bandwidth users which would, in turn, permit them to upgrade their infrastructure, that would be great.
In the meantime quit crying. The world isn't free and it does not revolve around your torrent downloads. Put up or shut up.
Way to twist something out of context in the interests of karma whoring. My karma is quite strong so I can shed some light on the situation without fear of reprisal from the groupthink mods;
Bell's commercials stated that there was no effect of one's neighbors saturating bandwidth as there is with cable internet connection because the connection to the central office is dedicated to each home. The commercials have always been quite explicit, even the recent ones with Frank & Gordon (Bell's Beavers) which couldn't get more explicit. Remember the one with the megaphone where Gordon asked all the neighbors to "get off the Internet" because Frank wanted to download something?
Ok, so when are Bell's competition going to start deploying their own infrastructure as was the original plan? The Baby Bell's (and really anybody with a few thousand dollars, some rack space and ambition) have been piggy-backing on Bell's infrastructure, directly competing with Bell for years and not actually deploying any major infrastructure of their own.
So Bell does all the heavy lifting and the little guys come in and ride their coat tails. Seems fair enough to me.
So back to the topic at hand; let's see, P2P causes extreme excess bandwidth congestion on a national ISP's network. Gee, on the surface, it seems like that's 100% correct. God, are those ISP folks ever assholes! I mean, they've been charging the same ludicrously low rate for years all the while increasing the available bandwidth and a small percentage of people abuse it and take more than their fair share. Why is this a problem? If you take too much - you have to pay extra, otherwise expect to be throttled back.
Why is this a problem? In the real world it's not, but only here on Slashdot where everything related to the Internet should be free and unlimited and some mysterious benefactor should provide all the fibre and all the equipment to pass the packets. Now explain to me how this should be expected to work IN THE REAL WORLD?
This is one of those topics that really highlights just how infantile and demanding the general Slashdot population really are. Every time one of these stories comes up all I see are cries of "We want more for less!" but no actual proposed solutions. So please, if any of you are going to respond to me, please, propose a solution to the bandwidth saturation problem; make certain you cover the present generation of P2P applications. Otherwise, I'm just not interested in your foot stamping.
Actually the popular cliche is "story at 11" or "more at 11". It's a popular teaser for North American news anchors to titilate the primetime viewers enough to stay on the present channel to see their news casts. The more subtle and curiousity inducing a soundbyte the better.
Why in the name of all that is holy would you want to? Finally I can type something to go to a recent page (sorry; "frecent") and it'll display relevant results for me. If it's not in my history it searches my default search engine (Google) and I find it anyways.
I personally find the Awesomebar (or whatever you call it) a rather intuitive step forward for open source products. Gone are the days when you had to click five times for something you do a dozen times a day. Now it's all right at my fingertips.
Once a contract is executed, any change to its terms requires the execution of a *new* contract, that covers the subject matter of these changes, that has a new "meeting of the minds between parties", and (very important!) has new *consideration*.
Nice try, but no. When you enter an on-going agreement for services there are nearly always clauses whereby one, both (or all) parties can change various terms "with xx days written notice".
If contracts were iron clad we wouldn't have contract law and the lawyers and court resources to support it.
The tech who came in from sympatico when I moved to a new location said "We put a cap at 4."
Im not sure why he would lie about this.
If you knew what qualifications were required to be a Sympatico install tech you wouldn't ask that question.
False. As always, if you want to run a server you should install a business class line. SOHO and residential services are for home use, not servers. Read your EULA.
Wow. Can you tell me where you are so I won't go there? :)
I'm quite happy to order beer in a restaurant. Sure, I pay extra for it, but I'd hardly say I'm paying "out the arse" by any stretch. Someone else is responsible for cleaning up after me, my beer comes cold to the table and quite often it's served by an attractive young thing. Said beer accompanies good food (I don't frequent bad restaurants, naturally. ;), good friends and a good time.
But aside from that, it amazes me how people complain about the rising costs of everything, but never seem to notice fountain drinks.Or furniture, or stereo equipment (electronics), or or or ...
I personally don't drink pop (soda, soft drinks, whatever) unless it's mixed with Crown Royal so the horrendous markup doesn't affect me in the least.
I'd ask AC for a cite, but that's like asking my dog to say "thank you" when I feed her.
What our friend Anonymous seems to forget is that a) a "large data centre" is far from home, and b) data centre pricing goes up rather sharply when you want to add equipment to the mix. It goes up again when you decide to turn it on, which consumes power and cooling and waste heat all at the same time.
No longer do datacentres care about bandwidth (when you've got two dozen providers laying fibre to your doorstep it ceases to be a priority); Kilowatt Hours per Foot is the new math.
You can thank two professions for this:
1. Marketing departments bait you in
2. Lawyers switch it out on you.
3. Customers who rush headlong for the "best deal" without considering all the facts or reading the fine print.
I'm in sales. Customer service, advertising and marketing are all part of my profession. The simple truth of the matter is that most of us hate the way our products are marketed to the general population but if we don't play the same games, use the same fine print or advertise the same unbelievable, too good to be true offers then customers won't contact us and we won't make sales.
Customer loyalty is a tricky business. Customers are, by and large, finicky creatures. You win them over with a special super-duper sale promotion, you take care of them and provide top notch customer service only to have them jump ship when another super-duper sale promotion comes along down the road. Then customers complain when they're not receiving top notch customer service anymore.
n.b. I'm not talking about all customers, obviously, but an extremely significant number of customers fit into this mold - enough to make companies stand up and take notice.
In terms of broadband service, we have customers who were lured into specials over a decade ago when it first hit the mainstream here in North America. At that time, the infrastructure was new and completely untested in any practical terms, content was scarce and not nearly as multimedia rich as it is today. So now the infrastructure has grown by leaps and bounds (otherwise known in industry terms as "billions of dollars"), the content has grown exponentially faster, and by and large the prices haven't really gone up very far. The risk each broadband company faces is to be the first to implement a cap or limitation and lose too much business to the competition. I've been a long time supporter of tier-based broadband connections but it's a very sensitive issue around here. The majority opinion (or the vocal minority, whichever the case may be) has always been for a consistently low, flat cost for unlimited bandwidth. Unfortunately this model is simply not sustainable so things are going to change.
Both major players in Ontario, Canada; namely Rogers Cable and Bell Sympatico (ADSL) have implemented caps on their plans ranging from 25GB to 75GB per month with a set fee for each additional GB thereafter. Transmission speeds remain constant, save for peak periods in heavily saturated areas of cable access, but seem to be acceptable overall.
At the end of it all, though, is the fact that bandwidth does cost exponentially more than the vast majority of home consumers are paying. The broadband model is still that of burstable traffic where the low volume users pay for the excessive ways of the high volume users. In reality, the people who should be screaming here are the low volume users - the occasional web surfers and e-mail checkers who use somewhere between 10MB and a couple GB per month yet who are still forced to pay for the torrenters who saturate their connections 24x7 and consume hundreds of GB per month.
Get a grip dude. I read the article. Actually I read about it in several places. My argument is not really about bandwidth caps, but truth in advertising. They are thinking of sneaking in bandwidth caps after people have signed up. This is not right. If you sign up for one thing then they say they are changing the rules, that is bullshit. Pure and simple.
What led you to believe that the terms of service would remain identical ad infinitum?
But! But! But! For $39.95/month I should be able to download at speeds of a fractional T3 all month long without caps or recourse! Bandwidth is free! Every ISP has 1000 TerraBits available at ALL TIMES! They're just greedy, money hungry capitalists who want to buy another Ferrari with my bandwidth dollar!
I should be able to download ALL the Linux ISOs I want! (Because, you see, I download 25-30 distributions in a typical month. Full resolution 720p, panoramic widescreen, H.264, AC3 5.1 surround sound distributions. Of, uhm, Redhat.)
A really quick Google search turned up this article which will hopefully put things into a bit of perspective. $2 billion to build a coal plant; while I grant you it'll generate more than 16MWh/year, is still a damn hefty pricetag. How many year (nee: decades) will it take to pay one of those off?
Also, FYI; 40 year mortgage amortizations are becoming very commonplace while some companies are looking towards the prospect of 50 year ams.
As for maintainence costs; how much does it cost to maintain a coal fired plant? How much does it cost to maintain a nuclear plant? How much does it cost to handle the waste product from same? How much ongoing environmental impact is there?
I'm no tree hugger by any stretch, but the fact that a town was able to generate an annual surplus of natural energy with no environmental by-products is a pretty decent little achievement. A small step towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
Cite please.
Anybody who calls a taser a "non lethal" device is either ill-informed or an anti-taser propagandist. Tasers fall in the category of less lethal weaponry. Period, full stop.