I don't know about everyone else, but here's my experience:
I had a SprintSpectrum GSM phone when they first came out, loved it, then Sprint dumped it and went to CDMA SprintPCS. And I've had one of those since. Ever since it's deployment, service has gotten steadily worse in the Washington, DC area, and there are parts of major roads where you are guaranteed to drop a call.
Then I moved, and my phone got even more odd. I've been through several, and each has this behavior. If I stand up in my apartment, I have tolerable reception, if I sit down, zero. Seriously. I called Sprint, they said "well, we don't guarantee it will work in home or office, only outside". Wow, isn't that helpful.
So, since most of my friends travel a lot, they have GSM phones from Voicestream (now T-Mobile), and I decided to get one of those spiffy new SonyEriccson T68i phones for $50 from Amazon. When I finally got it from back-order, it was ready to go, and weighed nothing, and had excellent coverage at home, office, car, and has only dropped one call, when I was driving by the CIA.
Now, I didn't want one of the overlay numbers for Northern VA (571 area code), so I called them, and they thoughtfully changed my number to a 202 on the phone. Effective immediately. No cost, thank you for being a customer.
I have had only one problem with coverage, and that's my new office, in the middle of nowhere. But Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile work only sporadically in the building, so I don't take it personally. It's just annoying.
I do think what they do in Europe is more normal... you can get a cheap phone that's locked, or you can pay a bit more for an unlocked phone (T-Mobile gave me the unlock codes for my phone). Then, since *everyone* uses the same system, you can change carriers as you see fit.
Oh yeah, I forgot. Notifications, and Distributed Objects are trivial in Objective-C. They rule, they rock, they're fast to build IPC with. They have different goals, but they are very quick for specific targets, read about them, worship them, they are what Aqua uses all over hte place.
As someone who grew up around Macs, and then moved to NeXT, I'd have to say that if you know C, and understand OO principles (prefferably in the Smalltalk model, not C++), then you can pick up Objective-C in an afternoon. It's really just some extensions to C. Carbon is a great set of APIs if you've got 10 years of Toolbox experience on the Mac, but otherwise, it's much harder to learn the ins and outs.
Cocoa, because of it's past with NeXTstep, has a lot of emphasis on rapid-prototyping and dynamicism. Lots of delegation, lots of easy stuff to do to get an effective solution. As for Java, I'd have to follow Aaron Hilldegrass' advice... don't. Not on the Mac, not unless your goal is cross-platform. If you're writing for the Mac, write in Objective-C, C++, or even REALbasic, but not Java. There's simply no good reason.
Having written nearly identical programs many years ago for Mac, PC and NeXTstep, I'd say this. Mac and PC (Mac = traditional Toolbox on OS7.x) and Win32 are roughly equivelent to get the work done. Different, but one isn't necessarily easier. The NeXTstep app was implemented in 1/3 of the time, and that included me learning NeXTstep.
There is a difference between having an OC-48 to an OC-192 "regional" backbone, and having an OC-48 to a Tier-1 provider. IU is talking to the Tier-1 providers of the world (AT&T, Verizon/Genuity, L3, Qwest, Sprint, etc), not to a regional backbone that *still* is one or two layers below the real backbones of the Internet.
Without getting in to a rather ugly discussion of oversubscription and aggregation, I highly doubt that if your Swedish University needs to access www.google.com, that it gets 10Gb of bandidth:-) Esp considering there's not that much bandwidth across the Atlantic currently.
You seem live in some world where there are no recurring costs to maintaining a massive backbone infrastructure. To give you a "rough" idea, building out a single POP can cost $5-25M, and a single Juniper M160 router (what the big boys use) costs $1M (roughly). I don't know where you get your OC-192 fantasies, but only a few providers have them, basically just the telco players (UUnet, AT&T, Sprint, Genuity, L3, Qwest).
On top of that, you have to add the costs of maintaining fiber, fixing it when some idiot with a backhoe goes through it, replacing failing optical amplifiers, SONET gear, regen equipment, much of which costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there are thousands of them in a large network. And oh yeah, did you want someone to monitor it 24x7? From multiple NOCs?
The going rate in the industry for providing a single Megabit of bandwidth at the Tier 1 level, including all "services" is somewhere in the $400-600 range. Do the math and you find out that it requires heavy oversubscription at the lower tiers to make this work for cable modems.
The reality is, it's absolutely necessary to pay by the megabit of bandwidth, because that's how everyone bills. Just because you pay $500/mo for a T1, doesn't mean you're not paying by the megabit. BTW, that $500 doesn't include the $150 MINIMUM local loop, or the more likely $300-400 local loop.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and eats duck food... it's a duck. Regardless of whether it's paid dues to the International Association of Duck Approvers.
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I don't know about everyone else, but here's my experience:
I had a SprintSpectrum GSM phone when they first came out, loved it, then Sprint dumped it and went to CDMA SprintPCS. And I've had one of those since. Ever since it's deployment, service has gotten steadily worse in the Washington, DC area, and there are parts of major roads where you are guaranteed to drop a call.
Then I moved, and my phone got even more odd. I've been through several, and each has this behavior. If I stand up in my apartment, I have tolerable reception, if I sit down, zero. Seriously. I called Sprint, they said "well, we don't guarantee it will work in home or office, only outside". Wow, isn't that helpful.
So, since most of my friends travel a lot, they have GSM phones from Voicestream (now T-Mobile), and I decided to get one of those spiffy new SonyEriccson T68i phones for $50 from Amazon. When I finally got it from back-order, it was ready to go, and weighed nothing, and had excellent coverage at home, office, car, and has only dropped one call, when I was driving by the CIA.
Now, I didn't want one of the overlay numbers for Northern VA (571 area code), so I called them, and they thoughtfully changed my number to a 202 on the phone. Effective immediately. No cost, thank you for being a customer.
I have had only one problem with coverage, and that's my new office, in the middle of nowhere. But Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile work only sporadically in the building, so I don't take it personally. It's just annoying.
I do think what they do in Europe is more normal... you can get a cheap phone that's locked, or you can pay a bit more for an unlocked phone (T-Mobile gave me the unlock codes for my phone). Then, since *everyone* uses the same system, you can change carriers as you see fit.
Oh yeah, I forgot. Notifications, and Distributed Objects are trivial in Objective-C. They rule, they rock, they're fast to build IPC with. They have different goals, but they are very quick for specific targets, read about them, worship them, they are what Aqua uses all over hte place.
As someone who grew up around Macs, and then moved to NeXT, I'd have to say that if you know C, and understand OO principles (prefferably in the Smalltalk model, not C++), then you can pick up Objective-C in an afternoon. It's really just some extensions to C. Carbon is a great set of APIs if you've got 10 years of Toolbox experience on the Mac, but otherwise, it's much harder to learn the ins and outs.
Cocoa, because of it's past with NeXTstep, has a lot of emphasis on rapid-prototyping and dynamicism. Lots of delegation, lots of easy stuff to do to get an effective solution. As for Java, I'd have to follow Aaron Hilldegrass' advice... don't. Not on the Mac, not unless your goal is cross-platform. If you're writing for the Mac, write in Objective-C, C++, or even REALbasic, but not Java. There's simply no good reason.
Having written nearly identical programs many years ago for Mac, PC and NeXTstep, I'd say this. Mac and PC (Mac = traditional Toolbox on OS7.x) and Win32 are roughly equivelent to get the work done. Different, but one isn't necessarily easier. The NeXTstep app was implemented in 1/3 of the time, and that included me learning NeXTstep.
There is a difference between having an OC-48 to an OC-192 "regional" backbone, and having an OC-48 to a Tier-1 provider. IU is talking to the Tier-1 providers of the world (AT&T, Verizon/Genuity, L3, Qwest, Sprint, etc), not to a regional backbone that *still* is one or two layers below the real backbones of the Internet.
:-) Esp considering there's not that much bandwidth across the Atlantic currently.
Without getting in to a rather ugly discussion of oversubscription and aggregation, I highly doubt that if your Swedish University needs to access www.google.com, that it gets 10Gb of bandidth
You seem live in some world where there are no recurring costs to maintaining a massive backbone infrastructure. To give you a "rough" idea, building out a single POP can cost $5-25M, and a single Juniper M160 router (what the big boys use) costs $1M (roughly). I don't know where you get your OC-192 fantasies, but only a few providers have them, basically just the telco players (UUnet, AT&T, Sprint, Genuity, L3, Qwest).
On top of that, you have to add the costs of maintaining fiber, fixing it when some idiot with a backhoe goes through it, replacing failing optical amplifiers, SONET gear, regen equipment, much of which costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there are thousands of them in a large network. And oh yeah, did you want someone to monitor it 24x7? From multiple NOCs?
The going rate in the industry for providing a single Megabit of bandwidth at the Tier 1 level, including all "services" is somewhere in the $400-600 range. Do the math and you find out that it requires heavy oversubscription at the lower tiers to make this work for cable modems.
The reality is, it's absolutely necessary to pay by the megabit of bandwidth, because that's how everyone bills. Just because you pay $500/mo for a T1, doesn't mean you're not paying by the megabit. BTW, that $500 doesn't include the $150 MINIMUM local loop, or the more likely $300-400 local loop.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and eats duck food... it's a duck. Regardless of whether it's paid dues to the International Association of Duck Approvers.