I live in the UK, and tried one towards the end of last year. (*) In all honesty, I really couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
Even accounting for the fact it may have been marginally stale- since it was an import- it had that almost "uncanny valley" fake quality to it of something that would never have been conventionally "fresh" in the first place. It reminded me of some off-the-shelf (also long-life) waffles I'd tried previously and been similarly unimpressed with.
The snack itself was just bland; mediocre cake and an uninteresting, over-sweet cream filling. Nothing disgusting, just... pointless.
"Long life" baked goods like Twinkies don't seem to be as culturally important over here. I'm only guessing, but possibly the popularity of long-life snacks like the Twinkie may be greater in the US because being more geographically spread out than other countries made keeping goods fresh more of an issue, particuarly when Twinkies (etc.) rose to prominence in the mid-20th-century.
(*) The fact this was around the time of the bankruptcy was pretty coincidental; a new shop importing US snacks had opened, and I was curious to try one. I paid something silly for it- around £1.75 IIRC- but again I doubt that was because of the bankruptcy- the shop markup was already high, and they were charging more for individual ones split from their packs.
You came up with the exact same conclusion as the author of the article you just read:
Actually, his conclusion *was* very different, but Slashdot's malfunctioning compression algorithm didn't realise this and inadvertantly replaced it with a duplicate of the original instead.
I remember reading that the Commodore 1541 disk drive has the same CPU (6502?) and ram 64k as the main machine
Apparently it does have a 6502 (the C64 has a 6510, which is a slightly enhanced 6502) but it only has 2KB of RAM.
That sounds more sensible- I'd have been gobsmacked if they *had* put 64K in there as well. 64K might be peanuts nowdays, but it was a *lot* of memory (and still not cheap) when the C64 launched, and would probably have been overkill for a disk drive.
The Atari 810 and 850 (disk drives for the Atari 8-bit computers) use the 6507 CPU, which is internally identical to the 6502, but with fewer external address lines. Ironically, even though that's a lower spec on paper (though I don't know the clock speed(s)), the performance of the drives was better because the C64 / 1541 was hobbled by a flawed interface design.
Some people also eat their own toe jam, so there's that.
The name "toe jam" neglects the important contribution of sock fluff to the overall substance. I therefore encourage the use of the term "Toe/Sock Jam".
"Microsoft Account (previously Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport,.NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID)"
I'd have said that MS's stupidly confusing naming is marketing-over-clarity, but *it's not even good marketing!!* I bet the man on the street doesn't have a clue what MS's constantly-changing brands-of-the-week are supposed to mean to him anyway, beyond being a confusing and counter-productive mish-mash of pseudo-terminology.
The quintessential ironic example of how MS just don't get it was their (then-)latest media-player compatibility scheme called "Plays for Sure" which obviously implied Apple-style "no brainer just works" straightforwardness. They proceeded to totally undermine this by renaming it to tie in with "Certified for Windows Vista" (which also encompassed other schemes) and launched a separate, incompatible DRM/compatibility scheme for their now-defunct Zune range. Does anyone know (or care) what MS's attention-deficit clusterf*** of overlapping brands are supposed to mean?!
The Yanks are so used to accessing Google on their bloated 2K TS-1000s, that they seem to have forgetten that those of us with the original British 1K ZX81 won't be able to access their website securely any more.
I bet those tossers are so spoiled they have blackjack and hookers, and 16K rampacks on their servers. Hope someone wobbles them (*) and they lose all their data. Gits.
(*) The rampacks, I mean. I've no idea what wobbling a hooker would do to your data.
How about we hold their eyes open and force them to watch horrific, violent videos, preferably multiple at a time.
They'll be cured all right.
Inspector: Dr. Brodsky, that boy you were treating... I have to inform you that he's just killed another man and committed serious assault and sexual violence against a further twelve people.
Brodsky: What?!
Inspector: Even worse, he told us that he'd really enjoyed the treatment, and that all those films you showed him got him "ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence".
Brodsky: What? This can't be... we forced him to watch acts of bloody sadism and violence for a fortnight.
Inspector: You *assured* us that the association of violent and sexual images with the unpleasant and traumatising effects of the serum would cause permanent avoidance of such behaviour in future and render him safe. What the blazes happened, woman?!
Brodsky: (Trying to remember something) Serum, serum... oh, you mean the fear-inducing drugs. Damn... I *knew* there was something we'd forgotten. My bad!
These days, arcade gaming is dead because of well, the iPhone.
I thought that- with the exception of some niche games like Dance Dance Revolution- arcade gaming had already all but died in most Western countries during the 1990s, when home consoles became as cutting edge as their arcade brethren. That was well before the iPhone. (It supposedly lasted longer in Japan, but even there it's apparently declined badly in recent years).
There wasn't a separate "hardware" portion of Atari, at least not when it was split in 1984. There was a computer/home-console division (which became Jack Tramiel's Atari Corp.), and an arcade division (Atari Games, later sold off). What the *precise* ownership of some of the gaming rights became as both those entities fizzled out towards meaningless from the mid-90s to early-noughties is unclear to me though.
I work for atari games while it was 'Time Warner Interactive' in the 90's. While it had a new owner many of the original atari employees were still employed at that time. I worked with the original creators of asteroids, missile command, etc. It still seemed like the old atari games to me.
In your opinion, then, when did Atari Games "truly" die? Was it still meaningfully the same entity when Midway took it over and renamed it? Did it survive until Midway exited the arcade business in the early-noughties (which surely must be the latest point one could choose, as after that Midway Games West was apparently a trademark and IP holder only).
Atari Games existed for a few year in the mid-'80s, but in the late '80s went defunct, getting bought up by Time Warner, which later became AOL, which later sold them to Midway Games, which was later acquired by Warner Bros. So it's basically a copyright holding company owned by some group of investors that is several degrees of separation removed from anyone who actually worked on an Atari game.
You're broadly right, but wrong in some of the details.
"Atari Games" (the arcade division) existed under that name until well into the nineties, and after that as "Midway Games West", though as Midway left the arcade market in the early-noughties, that's now dead.
Ironically, Warner Communications- one of Time Warner's predecessors- was the owner of Atari Inc. (i.e. *the* original Atari company) in its heyday from just before the VCS launch until the 1984 split.
Atari Corporation (Tramiel's company that you mistakenly referred to as "Atari Computer") actually lasted until 1996, when it was basically shut down via a merger with a third-rate hard drive maker.
You're mostly right, though. The original Atari is long gone, and any direct continuation of its original business (i.e. Atari Games and Atari Corp.) are now also long-dead. The current "Atari" have the name and IP in common, and that's it.
The problem here is that unlike most of Boeing's previous aircraft launches, the 787 is having some shockingly serious problems crop up. I think the evidence is mounting that they cut a few to many corners in their bid to cut weight and cost.
The problem with the 787, and the reason that it was years behind schedule and has so many problems, is that the executive geniuses at Boeing decided to outsource as much of the engineering as they could ("outsource" here referring to both domestic and offshore outsourcing). Many of the companies that engineering was outsourced to simply didn't have the expertise. Large airliners are not exactly the kind of thing that every job shop and subcontractor has the know-how to design. There are only two companies worth mentioning in the world that do.
The only way they got the 787 out the door at all (and stemmed the financial bleeding of Boeing) was by taking emergency steps to find a large cadre of engineers who had decades of deep experience in airliner design. They found them at (surprise, surprise) Boeing! Golly, you mean there was some wisdom to the way the world's most successful airliner manufacturer has designed planes for decades? Whodda thunk it? No doubt the top execs at Boeing will get large bonuses for discovering this brilliant last minute solution, and blame Boeing engineering for the problems that do remain.
So, it sounds like they tried to "cut corners" in more than one sense, and also paid for that. (I'd credit the poster of the above personally for his/her insightful comment, but it was posted anonymously).
Yeah, I was going to comment on Personal Computer World too, if only to contrast how that has *already* been dead for four years- so its US near-namesake has actually done quite well. Perhaps the economies of scale in the larger market made keeping its head above water possible. Then again, other UK magazines are still going, so perhaps it was specific issues with its position in the market that led to the former's downfall. PC Advisor (which is effectively the UK edition of PC World, renamed to avoid confusion with the aforementioned) is still going, though apparently it's down from a circulation of around 65,000 in 2007 to 16,500 in 2012. Wonder if they'll keep that going.
Back to Personal Computer World, though. I bought it in the late-90s up until (I'd guess) the mid-00s, though I remembered noting when it was discontinued that I hadn't bought it for quite some time (2-3 years?). Even then, while it still had good parts that made it worth buying (the editorial columns, and tutorial/technical bits near the back), it was also clearly past its glory days, including as it did a lot of boring beige-box PC group tests and the like that no-one would care about even 3 months later. It also tried to make itself look as dull and like any other boring PC mag as possible by featuring a beige box PC system (complete with CRT) on the cover every month. Yawn.
A mile is 8 furlongs and a gallon is 8 pints. So this car can do 262 furlongs per pint.
Is that an English pint or an Imperial pint? There's a significant difference between them (around 20%).
Remember that "English" units are the version used by Americans, whereas the English use Imperial units. Got that? Great!;-)
That's quite an achievement considering it's mass is 125 stones.
Ironically, you can't blame the Americans for stones, as they don't have a clue what that is. Ironic, given their fetish for "traditional" non-metric units.
It's an American thing. We use you and your instead of one - just fill in 'one' in the correct form wherever you see 'you' or 'your' and so on.
It's not just an American thing.
Despite American preconceptions and stereotypes about "British" (cut glass upper-class "posh" English) accents and use of language , everyone has butlers, etc.), few people here would use "one" in that context either. Actually, I'm not sure where it *is* in common usage...
I don't understand *how* that usage came to be associated with being "posh"; it isn't a problem in French for example (e.g. "on peut.." = "one can..."). Standard English is also pretty lame in that it doesn't have an effective plural "you" either; my boss was being snobbish about one of my colleague's "oary" use of the local dialect when he said "yous" (cf. American "y'all"), but as I pointed out, it's actually better than "proper" English in that respect.
China had a ruthlessly exploited work force not seen since the early industrial age. Basically people doing the most unimaginably routine monotonous work, with extended hours, little time off up to the point of failure and then replaced. Things like sticking keys on a keyboard by hand, packing playing cards in boxes manually etc. the sort of work that was automated in the early 20th century in the west.
Thirty years ago or so, robots and computerised automation were supposed to be the future, and people from back then might have been quite surprised that a generation down the line *people* are still doing work like this.
It could be argued that the ultra-cheap labour brought about by the delayed industrialisation of China distorted this otherwise likely path, with dirt-cheap, no-investment and very flexible humans working out cheaper than expensive machinery- at least in the short term. It looks, however, like we're now returning to the predicted path...?
I expect Sony will probably be feeding back some patches.
You expect, but it's not at all required. If you want code back, use a different license.
Greeny-Yellow Alert.... Greeny-Yellow Alert... Early warning signs of potential thread hijacking into yet another identikit GPL vs. BSD discussion detected. Please monitor situation and take preventative measures if necessary. Thank you. (^_^)
That link you posted was about Netflix saving people money by offering free caching servers, which are much cheaper than the bandwidth. Here's a free car, you just need to provide gas.. ZOMG, they're making me pay for the gas!
Oh, that's nice. They provide the servers (on *their* terms), which- as you say- are the cheap part, and want the ISP to bear all the bandwidth costs.
One of the links in the Slashdot story is dead, but here's a currently working version.
Netflix- who have a position that is (at best) dominant and plenty of exclusive deals- were *choosing* to not provide access to customers whose ISPs hadn't signed up to conditions that suited *them*. Netflix say:-
Super HD requires that your Internet Provider is part of the Netflix Open Connect network. Please contact your Internet Provider to request that they join the Netflix Open Connect network so you can get Super HD.
But as the article points out
Neither my ISP nor the open Internet is preventing Netflix from allowing me to access its HD content. Netflix is choosing to block me from accessing its HD content because my ISP hasn’t agreed to host Netflix equipment for free and Netflix doesn’t want to pay another CDN to deliver HD content to my ISP.
In short, they were trying to leverage their dominant market position to make ISPs look bad and force them- and ultimately *all* that ISP's customers- to pay for the costs involved in supporting their *oh-so-generous* free caching servers under the terms of the agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never had a twinkie. I want to try.
I live in the UK, and tried one towards the end of last year. (*) In all honesty, I really couldn't see what all the fuss was about.
Even accounting for the fact it may have been marginally stale- since it was an import- it had that almost "uncanny valley" fake quality to it of something that would never have been conventionally "fresh" in the first place. It reminded me of some off-the-shelf (also long-life) waffles I'd tried previously and been similarly unimpressed with.
The snack itself was just bland; mediocre cake and an uninteresting, over-sweet cream filling. Nothing disgusting, just... pointless.
"Long life" baked goods like Twinkies don't seem to be as culturally important over here. I'm only guessing, but possibly the popularity of long-life snacks like the Twinkie may be greater in the US because being more geographically spread out than other countries made keeping goods fresh more of an issue, particuarly when Twinkies (etc.) rose to prominence in the mid-20th-century.
(*) The fact this was around the time of the bankruptcy was pretty coincidental; a new shop importing US snacks had opened, and I was curious to try one. I paid something silly for it- around £1.75 IIRC- but again I doubt that was because of the bankruptcy- the shop markup was already high, and they were charging more for individual ones split from their packs.
You came up with the exact same conclusion as the author of the article you just read:
Actually, his conclusion *was* very different, but Slashdot's malfunctioning compression algorithm didn't realise this and inadvertantly replaced it with a duplicate of the original instead.
Scott Becquerel was awesome in Quantum Leap, shame he had to sully his name with Enterprise.
You idiot, that wasn't his name! It was Scott *Blacula*.
Sheesh.
I remember reading that the Commodore 1541 disk drive has the same CPU (6502?) and ram 64k as the main machine
Apparently it does have a 6502 (the C64 has a 6510, which is a slightly enhanced 6502) but it only has 2KB of RAM.
That sounds more sensible- I'd have been gobsmacked if they *had* put 64K in there as well. 64K might be peanuts nowdays, but it was a *lot* of memory (and still not cheap) when the C64 launched, and would probably have been overkill for a disk drive.
The Atari 810 and 850 (disk drives for the Atari 8-bit computers) use the 6507 CPU, which is internally identical to the 6502, but with fewer external address lines. Ironically, even though that's a lower spec on paper (though I don't know the clock speed(s)), the performance of the drives was better because the C64 / 1541 was hobbled by a flawed interface design.
That's why some say GNU/Linux.
Some people also eat their own toe jam, so there's that.
The name " toe jam" neglects the important contribution of sock fluff to the overall substance. I therefore encourage the use of the term "Toe/Sock Jam".
Thank you.
This is the same company changed the name of its "passport" service a ludicrous amount of times:-
.NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_account
"Microsoft Account (previously Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport,
I'd have said that MS's stupidly confusing naming is marketing-over-clarity, but *it's not even good marketing!!* I bet the man on the street doesn't have a clue what MS's constantly-changing brands-of-the-week are supposed to mean to him anyway, beyond being a confusing and counter-productive mish-mash of pseudo-terminology.
The quintessential ironic example of how MS just don't get it was their (then-)latest media-player compatibility scheme called "Plays for Sure" which obviously implied Apple-style "no brainer just works" straightforwardness. They proceeded to totally undermine this by renaming it to tie in with "Certified for Windows Vista" (which also encompassed other schemes) and launched a separate, incompatible DRM/compatibility scheme for their now-defunct Zune range. Does anyone know (or care) what MS's attention-deficit clusterf*** of overlapping brands are supposed to mean?!
I missread the title as Anus CEO .. I saddened there is no knock off brand called Anus. :(
Asus themselves danced around the edges of that joke.
Are you sure they were dancing? I mean, it's possible that they might be Butthole Surfers...
The Yanks are so used to accessing Google on their bloated 2K TS-1000s, that they seem to have forgetten that those of us with the original British 1K ZX81 won't be able to access their website securely any more.
I bet those tossers are so spoiled they have blackjack and hookers, and 16K rampacks on their servers. Hope someone wobbles them (*) and they lose all their data. Gits.
(*) The rampacks, I mean. I've no idea what wobbling a hooker would do to your data.
How about we hold their eyes open and force them to watch horrific, violent videos, preferably multiple at a time.
They'll be cured all right.
Inspector: Dr. Brodsky, that boy you were treating... I have to inform you that he's just killed another man and committed serious assault and sexual violence against a further twelve people.
Brodsky: What?!
Inspector: Even worse, he told us that he'd really enjoyed the treatment, and that all those films you showed him got him "ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence".
Brodsky: What? This can't be... we forced him to watch acts of bloody sadism and violence for a fortnight.
Inspector: You *assured* us that the association of violent and sexual images with the unpleasant and traumatising effects of the serum would cause permanent avoidance of such behaviour in future and render him safe. What the blazes happened, woman?!
Brodsky: (Trying to remember something) Serum, serum... oh, you mean the fear-inducing drugs. Damn... I *knew* there was something we'd forgotten. My bad!
These days, arcade gaming is dead because of well, the iPhone.
I thought that- with the exception of some niche games like Dance Dance Revolution- arcade gaming had already all but died in most Western countries during the 1990s, when home consoles became as cutting edge as their arcade brethren. That was well before the iPhone. (It supposedly lasted longer in Japan, but even there it's apparently declined badly in recent years).
There wasn't a separate "hardware" portion of Atari, at least not when it was split in 1984. There was a computer/home-console division (which became Jack Tramiel's Atari Corp.), and an arcade division (Atari Games, later sold off). What the *precise* ownership of some of the gaming rights became as both those entities fizzled out towards meaningless from the mid-90s to early-noughties is unclear to me though.
I work for atari games while it was 'Time Warner Interactive' in the 90's. While it had a new owner many of the original atari employees were still employed at that time. I worked with the original creators of asteroids, missile command, etc. It still seemed like the old atari games to me.
In your opinion, then, when did Atari Games "truly" die? Was it still meaningfully the same entity when Midway took it over and renamed it? Did it survive until Midway exited the arcade business in the early-noughties (which surely must be the latest point one could choose, as after that Midway Games West was apparently a trademark and IP holder only).
Atari Games existed for a few year in the mid-'80s, but in the late '80s went defunct, getting bought up by Time Warner, which later became AOL, which later sold them to Midway Games, which was later acquired by Warner Bros. So it's basically a copyright holding company owned by some group of investors that is several degrees of separation removed from anyone who actually worked on an Atari game.
You're broadly right, but wrong in some of the details.
"Atari Games" (the arcade division) existed under that name until well into the nineties, and after that as "Midway Games West", though as Midway left the arcade market in the early-noughties, that's now dead.
Ironically, Warner Communications- one of Time Warner's predecessors- was the owner of Atari Inc. (i.e. *the* original Atari company) in its heyday from just before the VCS launch until the 1984 split.
Atari Corporation (Tramiel's company that you mistakenly referred to as "Atari Computer") actually lasted until 1996, when it was basically shut down via a merger with a third-rate hard drive maker.
Here's my potted summary of the timeline in full.
You're mostly right, though. The original Atari is long gone, and any direct continuation of its original business (i.e. Atari Games and Atari Corp.) are now also long-dead. The current "Atari" have the name and IP in common, and that's it.
Dupe, dupe, dupe, Dupe of URL Dupe, dupe, Dupe of URL Yes, oh, I, I'm gonna link you Nothing can stop me now 'Cause I'm the Dupe of URL...
This was funny five years ago, it is now redundant and boring.
Oh well... I propose we go with something fresh and original. Like this, which will *never* get annoying (honest)...
Dupe dupe, dupe dupe, dupe dupe dupe... Dupey dupe dupe dupe, dupe dupe dupe
Er. well at least it's direct and to the point. (^_^)
The problem here is that unlike most of Boeing's previous aircraft launches, the 787 is having some shockingly serious problems crop up. I think the evidence is mounting that they cut a few to many corners in their bid to cut weight and cost.
It's been commented previously on Slashdot (following the previous problems) that...
The problem with the 787, and the reason that it was years behind schedule and has so many problems, is that the executive geniuses at Boeing decided to outsource as much of the engineering as they could ("outsource" here referring to both domestic and offshore outsourcing). Many of the companies that engineering was outsourced to simply didn't have the expertise. Large airliners are not exactly the kind of thing that every job shop and subcontractor has the know-how to design. There are only two companies worth mentioning in the world that do.
The only way they got the 787 out the door at all (and stemmed the financial bleeding of Boeing) was by taking emergency steps to find a large cadre of engineers who had decades of deep experience in airliner design. They found them at (surprise, surprise) Boeing! Golly, you mean there was some wisdom to the way the world's most successful airliner manufacturer has designed planes for decades? Whodda thunk it? No doubt the top execs at Boeing will get large bonuses for discovering this brilliant last minute solution, and blame Boeing engineering for the problems that do remain.
So, it sounds like they tried to "cut corners" in more than one sense, and also paid for that. (I'd credit the poster of the above personally for his/her insightful comment, but it was posted anonymously).
Yeah, I was going to comment on Personal Computer World too, if only to contrast how that has *already* been dead for four years- so its US near-namesake has actually done quite well. Perhaps the economies of scale in the larger market made keeping its head above water possible. Then again, other UK magazines are still going, so perhaps it was specific issues with its position in the market that led to the former's downfall. PC Advisor (which is effectively the UK edition of PC World, renamed to avoid confusion with the aforementioned) is still going, though apparently it's down from a circulation of around 65,000 in 2007 to 16,500 in 2012. Wonder if they'll keep that going.
Back to Personal Computer World, though. I bought it in the late-90s up until (I'd guess) the mid-00s, though I remembered noting when it was discontinued that I hadn't bought it for quite some time (2-3 years?). Even then, while it still had good parts that made it worth buying (the editorial columns, and tutorial/technical bits near the back), it was also clearly past its glory days, including as it did a lot of boring beige-box PC group tests and the like that no-one would care about even 3 months later. It also tried to make itself look as dull and like any other boring PC mag as possible by featuring a beige box PC system (complete with CRT) on the cover every month. Yawn.
A mile is 8 furlongs and a gallon is 8 pints. So this car can do 262 furlongs per pint.
Is that an English pint or an Imperial pint? There's a significant difference between them (around 20%).
Remember that "English" units are the version used by Americans, whereas the English use Imperial units. Got that? Great! ;-)
That's quite an achievement considering it's mass is 125 stones.
Ironically, you can't blame the Americans for stones, as they don't have a clue what that is. Ironic, given their fetish for "traditional" non-metric units.
[Morsi] is human and he needs to be loved, just like everybody else does.
I see what you did there... (^_^)
It's an American thing. We use you and your instead of one - just fill in 'one' in the correct form wherever you see 'you' or 'your' and so on.
It's not just an American thing.
Despite American preconceptions and stereotypes about "British" (cut glass upper-class "posh" English) accents and use of language , everyone has butlers, etc.), few people here would use "one" in that context either. Actually, I'm not sure where it *is* in common usage...
I don't understand *how* that usage came to be associated with being "posh"; it isn't a problem in French for example (e.g. "on peut.." = "one can..."). Standard English is also pretty lame in that it doesn't have an effective plural "you" either; my boss was being snobbish about one of my colleague's "oary" use of the local dialect when he said "yous" (cf. American "y'all"), but as I pointed out, it's actually better than "proper" English in that respect.
If you don't like it, don't buy it! Simple.
I suspect that he's *not* going to buy it. Does that preclude him from expressing his opinion anyway?
Is it April 1st again?
On the contrary, *every* day of the year is a potential day for contrived attention-grabbing publicity stunts.
China had a ruthlessly exploited work force not seen since the early industrial age. Basically people doing the most unimaginably routine monotonous work, with extended hours, little time off up to the point of failure and then replaced. Things like sticking keys on a keyboard by hand, packing playing cards in boxes manually etc. the sort of work that was automated in the early 20th century in the west.
Thirty years ago or so, robots and computerised automation were supposed to be the future, and people from back then might have been quite surprised that a generation down the line *people* are still doing work like this.
It could be argued that the ultra-cheap labour brought about by the delayed industrialisation of China distorted this otherwise likely path, with dirt-cheap, no-investment and very flexible humans working out cheaper than expensive machinery- at least in the short term. It looks, however, like we're now returning to the predicted path...?
I expect Sony will probably be feeding back some patches.
You expect, but it's not at all required. If you want code back, use a different license.
Greeny-Yellow Alert.... Greeny-Yellow Alert... Early warning signs of potential thread hijacking into
yet another identikit GPL vs. BSD discussion detected. Please monitor situation and take preventative measures if necessary. Thank you. (^_^)
(Note; the above is apparently a reply to this comment, not mine).
That link you posted was about Netflix saving people money by offering free caching servers, which are much cheaper than the bandwidth. Here's a free car, you just need to provide gas.. ZOMG, they're making me pay for the gas!
Oh, that's nice. They provide the servers (on *their* terms), which- as you say- are the cheap part, and want the ISP to bear all the bandwidth costs. One of the links in the Slashdot story is dead, but here's a currently working version.
Netflix- who have a position that is (at best) dominant and plenty of exclusive deals- were *choosing* to not provide access to customers whose ISPs hadn't signed up to conditions that suited *them*. Netflix say:-
Super HD requires that your Internet Provider is part of the Netflix Open Connect network. Please contact your Internet Provider to request that they join the Netflix Open Connect network so you can get Super HD.
But as the article points out
Neither my ISP nor the open Internet is preventing Netflix from allowing me to access its HD content. Netflix is choosing to block me from accessing its HD content because my ISP hasn’t agreed to host Netflix equipment for free and Netflix doesn’t want to pay another CDN to deliver HD content to my ISP.
In short, they were trying to leverage their dominant market position to make ISPs look bad and force them- and ultimately *all* that ISP's customers- to pay for the costs involved in supporting their *oh-so-generous* free caching servers under the terms of the agreement.