Or... the headline and summary are misleading in order to give Trump Derangement Syndrome another outlet to express itself.
“Companies appear to be streamlining and updating their processes, and workforce reductions are increasingly becoming a part of these decisions. Consumer behavior and advances in technology are driving many of these cuts,” said Andrew Challenger, Vice President of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
or
The majority of cuts this year are due to “restructuring;” 49,868 cuts have been announced due to this reason. Bankruptcy claimed another 40,218 this year, a 33.8% increase over the first quarter of last year. Another 27,380 cuts were due to plant, unit, or store closings, 104.7% higher than the 13,374 cuts due to closings through this point last year.
The article also talks about how the sectors laying off are also hiring more than they laid off, while trying to position the layoffs as being a potential symptom of an economic downturn (due to federal shenanigans), but the numbers, taken in context, simply don't support that conclusion.
I'd liken it to dropping a penny and finding a dollar when you bend over to pick it up.
196,000 jobs were added last month, a rebound from the February report. Economic analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected a gain of about 170,000 jobs in March. It was the 102nd straight month of job gains.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
Both Netflix AND the ISP save tons of upstream bandwidth.
Or, without neutrality, ISP throttles the hell out of Netflix and zero rates CrapeeStreaming (a wholly owned subsidiary) and gives their customers the middle finger suggesting they go back to dial-up if they don't like it.
Actually, zero rating is specifically permitted in the net neutrality regs.
And folks forget, the reason comcast was throttling netflix was because they were overloading a public gig-e link in order to get to part of the comcast network. netflix didn't have a direct peerage agreement with comcast back then, nor did their ISP. (which is how ISPs get paid for sinking traffic, BTW).
the bottom line is, that model has worked well since day 1. It only appears unfair if you don't understand that it does, in fact, cost money to carry someone's traffic, and the 'no cost' peering arrangements are predicated on the idea that the traffic flow is fairly even. pretty much every peering contract I've ever seen sets forth penalties and fees if your traffic starts going too much in one direction or the other, because at that point, one is using the link as a transit connection, which requires payment.
Only folks who don't understand this seem to think that comcast was 'out to get' netflix.
data caps are the result of capacity and planning analysis. it' straightforward math.
It's also the end result of about 100 years of telecom experience with managing shared resources in order to keep end user costs down, while still providing everyone service.
If X people have access to a network link of Y size, the sum total of what they can all transfer is Z (where Z is some amazingly ridiculous number that is much much larger than Y), you can do a statistical analysis of every user and see that for every user that consumes more than their 'fair' share of Z, you have 10 or 20 or 50 who are no where close to using their fair share. As long as you set the expectation that there is a penalty for going too far over that limit, EVERYONE on the system always has great performance, because the total transfer amount for everyone together is below Y for the month.
Or to put it simply, the neighborhood never overloaded their uplink.
The difference between BT and commercial content distribution systems is... one is designed to be open and replicate data. the other is designed to service an application while also controlling who has access to the content, and ensure the content OWNER that their stuff isn't being randomly ripped off. Putting it physically close to the end users (setting up a streamer in the cable company office), just cuts down on both the bandwidth bill for your streaming service as well as for the cable operator. It's a win for everyone, because the service works even better than having to run through links that are potentially overly congested with other traffic...
Having seen what the 'open for all' internet looks like, before the ability of telecom/ISP companies to effectively manage the impact of bad actors, the idea that people, in their ignorance, actually believe such nonsense as 'every packet is equal' is disturbing.
This version of 'net neutrality' does not protect end users. read the thing. read ALL of it. For every headline in the regs that says 'protect end user privilege', there are 8-30 exceptions that essentially allow an ISP/Telco to do exactly what people claim they do not want to allow them to do. Don't want to be charged 'extra' for access to netflix? No problem, says FCC/ISP: You now have a bandwidth cap per month, and once you go over it, we charge you extra... unless you use our streaming service, which is zero rated (I.E. doesn't count against your bandwidth cap).
The entire regulatory framework is filled with that kind of crap. And the best part? the FCC declares itself as the sole arbiter of anything going wrong online... So before, where you could go to the FTC (which has all the experience shutting down protectionist, monopolistic behaviour), the FCC now gets to determine if google or verizon doing something that is expressly allowed by it's regs (but is clearly a violation of anti-trust laws) is legal!
WAKE UP PEOPLE. Stop thinking with your hearts and read the crap being shown to you as 'the protection you need from your evil ISP'.
The internet/web is a mirror of humanity. No matter what kind of control system you try to impose on it, human nature will be reflected and sometimes magnified by the tools we use.
The Web, and the social media system that grows on it, are a great example of the fun-house mirror result you get when people's thought processes and discrimination ability lag behind technology. I first wrote about this in 1999, as the net.sheep effect.
People have been conditioned by 100s of years of text-as-truth to trust anything they READ (because putting things down in writing was once an epic effort, requiring not only a great deal of money, but also the expectation that the quality of the words would be worthy of the effort to put them down and publish them).
It's only when a small portion of the user base begins to leverage that habit, that the abuse of being able to reach the entire planet with a rumor begins to become clear... not because gossip is new, but because making gossip seem not only true, but authoritative (by virtue of being written/published/repeated by thousands of sites) is.
The only way to address that with technology is by bringing back the one thing that makes a modern society civil : Personal Accountability. Virtual Reputation needs to not only be a 'thing', but a 'thing' that has consequences.
Facebook has been a little slow on this, because they recognize their site is a huge rumor mill... if they start squashing rumors, what will that do to their numbers?
All in all, the answer to this issue is the same as it was when the printing press was invented, when radio came out, when TV came out: People who are going to report/spread information have to be held accountable for the accuracy of that information as well as the damage they create by doing rumors instead of facts.
People keep using 'net neutrality' as if it's going to provide some kind of amazing magical protection for end users...
The one thing that doesn't 'fix' your user experience is making rules with thousands of loopholes in them. And that's what you get when you demand lawmakers to fix problems for you. They build a compromise based on what's best for the providers and what is acceptable to them to give up to make you feel better.
Holding data hoarding companies to a standard of responsible use for your personal info is perfect. that stuff needs to be defined as your own personal property, that you lease,rent or otherwise permit them to use it for due and fair consideration.
Won't be missed. Never really was able to get past the foolishness of people who were supposedly really smart.
Real smart folks just don't roll that way.
Consider it infrastructure. If you were to start building a new city from scratch in the last 20 years, you would know to leave plenty of room for multiple carriers to drop fiber and copper all over the place. Now come back to reality, where you have 100 year old copper in places where there may or may not be physical access to run fiber to replace it, may or may not be a place to put equipment to support your ideal high speed infrastructure (you can go further with an analog electrical signal, than with a digital one, hence DSL limits), and frankly, rolling out 30 cities worth of fiber infrastructure to cover a good percentage of the population is harder, more expensive, and takes longer than building out 1 city and 2 population centers that are barely 100 miles apart.
The difference boils down to engineering and scaling problems. I would compare the two like this: lets say 'small country' is using a pickup truck to move his family across the street, while 'big country' has to use 100 tractor trailer rigs to move an office building worth of people 2000 miles. I'm sure the folks in the office look to have terrible performance from their moving company, if you decide to just compare how long it takes to move. Doesn't really capture the whole 'heft' of the project though, does it. what WOULD be interesting, would be to show how much each country 'lifts' with it's access, and create a consumption based metric for internet quality.
But it's not a 'sunk' cost. Facilities have to be maintained, and upgraded. Right of ways have to be paid for and maintained. and municipalities expect more and more every year/contract cycle for the access to those rights of way.
Bandwidth on the edge provider's network isn't the MAIN problem. it's getting it OFF that network to someplace useful that is.
Thats because the uplink isn't public shared bandwidth. TDS gets a private handoff for all the DSL customers, at a tariffed rate, and then it's TDS's problem to put them on their OWN network (not AT&Ts).
Netflix bandwidth is in no danger of collapsing anyone's backbone. The issue has always been how it gets handed off between carriers. When you have huge amounts of high speed eyeballs on your network, (netflix's target audience), you should be asking 'why isn't netflix buying bandwidth from networks with a high amount of my target cutomer?' instead they just go with the cheapest carrier they can cut a deal with, without taking into consideration the realities of 'why things work on the network', and stomp their feet about how unfair those evil carriers are.
until you can show some widespread example of carriers who have streaming video services with the same library at netflix, and are actively redirecting people's browsers to netflix, there isn't any predatory practice going on here.
I have spent a lot of time on this. I will share where the rabble rousing going on here is _off_, and let you decide.
1) Net Neutrality is... A new buzzword hijacking 'Open Internet', which is the philosophy carriers and network operators have been using since day one to guide their decisions on how to make the network work. It is based on the idea of fairness, openness, and equal access for everyone as an ideal, but allows for the reality of private ownership of infrastructure, and business drivers that dictate how the network infrastructure is managed and operated.
2) Net Neutrality is NOT.. .
a) a fight to ensure you 'get what you paid for'. If you believe this, you have been mislead as to what you paid for. You did not pay for 100Mb/s to netflix. You did not pay for 5Mb/s to netflix. You paid for shared public access to the rest of the networks your carrier has connections with, subject to availability of common shared resources, with NO guarantees of uptime, packet delivery or even that it will work when you switch it on. The mentality that 'I'm not getting what I paid for' is promoted by content providers in order to make you feel cheated. it is not reality.
Since people like using roads as an example, I will just point out, your road taxes are small, because you share the roads with everyone in your city. When you all try to go someplace at once, you end up creating congestion. Why are you not out protesting that 'I paid for my lane, the city just needs to build more roads so I don't have to wait'? Because it's a ridiculous statement, thats why. a large percentage of the time, those roads simply aren't over-used, so it would be a poor use of time and materials to make it larger to absorb a short window of time when it's running at capacity.
For those who like to point out how much America sucks for Internet speeds, Whip out your calculator, and tell me how the hell you expect to connect 300 million people spread out over an area of nearly 4 MILLION square miles, for a comparable cost to connecting 25 million people over 38,000 square miles. and 10 million of those people live in one relatively small metro area. Distance covered increases costs, and it's not only unfair but profoundly unrealistic to expect costs to be anywhere close to similar comparing such vastly different infrastructure requirements.
b) a gimmick for your ISP to shake you down for more money to get what you want. If this were true, you would already be paying for access by country or site or anything else. You don't. You won't. The technical challenges alone make this a non-profitable exercise. Anyone remember when some LD companies figured out that billing in 5 minute increments instead of 1 minute increments meant they actually made MORE profit, because they saved on the time and effort it took to do all the accounting?
c) some way to force content providers to choose a slow lane or pay extra for a fast lane. I wouldn't call this 'force'. I would call it the same option that has always been present in the design of the network. I would also observe that the reality of 'fast lane/slow lane' is based on our freeway example, not on some kind of toll road vs HOV lane example. The fact is, the way things work now, the 'fast lane' is dedicated bandwidth a company buys to improve it's performance when transferring larger amounts of data than the shared best effort peering infrastructure is willing to invest in supporting. Throw a little math at the problem. If you have a shared exchange interface with 20 other networks, and ONE network is consuming > 50% of the bandwidth, that is UNFAIR to all the other networks, if that also means the total bandwidth begins to regularly exceed the available bandwidth. To further simplify matters, lets say 95% of that bandwidth is coming from ONE customer on that other network. The network engineers all look at each other and say 'this isn't natural growth of the network, this
You need digital signage, not a tablet. Only one person at a time can use a tablet.
A couple of flat screens off a cheap PC hidden up in the ceiling or a closet, and use Xibo.
nothing is wrong with it. but if you can't communicate well, how are the rest of us supposed to know of your awesomeness?
the answer is, we won't, because someone with the same skill set, and better communications skills will drown you out.
furthermore, why do you suppose ANY job outside of a code sweatshop does NOT require communications skills. either step up, or set your expectations lower.
how one sided.
Every hostile IT shop I have ever encountered is always run by insecure, almost talented wanna-be s, who believe they are so good at what they do, no one would ever understand what it is they do.
and 100% of the time so far, they have been completely wrong.
as an old boss of mine said "never believe your own press"
the best IT shops go out of their way to show the rest of the company the value they bring to the company, in terms everyone understands, and can respect. The one thing these shops have in common is an understanding that what they do is just as an important as what others in the company do, and take an active interest in understanding what it is the COMPANY does.
In other words, IT is one of a very few professions where you can be an insecure ass, and still keep a job.
So, keep feeding your sense of entitlement. Keep feeling like IT is the most important thing in your company. I promise you, unless your company makes 'it expertise", you are just overhead to the real job being done there.
and it may be painful to replace you, but the smarter managers are learning, they don't have to put up with your attitude to get your so-called expertise, when there are plenty of more well adjusted people out there to take your place.
I've been waiting for some access provider to have the balls to stand up and RUN their network, instead of letting it run them...
Should be interesting to see how long they last.
After reading the article, it is quite clear that these folks are getting caught up in their own metaphors.
The only reason you need more power is if you need to defend your self from more powerful forces.
On the internet, power, while not equally distributed, is far less disparate than in the 'real world'.
Why do I need an Army? In case another tribe decides they want to secure a resource I want, or decides to infringe on my territory.
What is the equivalent online? Who is this 'defense' supposed to be against?
This reminds me of the 'the poor don't have enough on ramps to the internet' argument. Politicians hear that are start crying how we need 'more money for on ramps to the internet for the poor! we need to build more on ramps!'
[facepalm]
The Internet community does not need an organization to take responsibility for access security. Where would you draw 'the border'? are we gong to build Great Firewall 2.0 for the US? Maybe we are going to start including commercial data as 'in the national interest' and start sending out fighter planes and smart bombs when someone steals a few million credit cards from a data base in the states?
The net result of such policies would mean a lot of money for a few people, less flexibility for the day to day users, and less freedom to do as one sees fit online.
We have a huge e-book library, and went with mobi for pretty much everything from the beginning. We just picked up a couple of Bookeen Cybook 3s via the NAEBLLC group for the amazing price of $375 a piece.
This thing is a very good appliance, IMHO, as it focuses on being an easy to use reader, with little to distract you from that. Supports html,txt, mobi, and PDF, the only DRMd content it supports is mobipocket!
For the price and the features (for some reason, they shoe horned an MP3 player in there as well), it's hard to beat the bookeen for value. It looks like a card reader/usb drive to any computer, and doesn't require special software to put books on it.
with the same e-ink screen as the sony/kindle, what more do you want? Sure if I didn't care about how much it cost, the iLiad is a much niftier gadget, but I just want to read!
Booklights work the same on e-ink as they do on dead trees, and there is virtually no issue reading in full sunlight, outdoors.
Any openfont or true type font I want to use is also supported.
Free content is easily available as well, both ToR and Baen have been giving away e versions of their paperbacks for sometime, and all the classics are available from project Gutenberg. Not to mention all the courseware from MIT.
Make the leap. If for nothing else, being able to carry around a reference library the size of a large building in your laptop bag has got to be worth the $400....
My 5 year old has enjoyed playing video games with her dad for the last year or so. She loves throwing curve balls and change ups at me in wii baseball, and is wicked at wii tennis (bowling bores her, as does golf)
About 3 months ago, we were playing a kart racing sim (she steers, I work the gas), when I had to get up for something. I was ASTONISHED to come back and see her playing on her own, after having relocated the pedals to where she could hit them with her one foot, while standing up, and steering with the table mounted steering wheel! Not only that, but she actually managed to stay on the track without bouncing from wall to wall.
I watched her quietly for about 3 minutes before I asked in my booming daddy voice 'What are you doing!' The look on her face was worth the wait...
She cant pass the CPU yet, but she does enjoy just driving in practice mode by herself.
http://www.bookeen.com/ebook/ebook-reading-device.aspx from further down.
e-ink is a lot easier on the eyes than those little screens. (For the record, I am reading on a 700p at the moment, and before that, another Palm.)
old cheap laptops make decent (if not really easy to port) readers, but as a mass-consumer of e-books, I'm really ready for the e-ink version.
Not having eye strain after pursuing a story to it's finish is worth the extra $$$$.
Indeed, the difference is it supports mobipocket format (xml), so there are TONS of DRM free content for it. Sony's does not, and has no plans to.
There are only a couple of e-ink books that support mobipocket, Kindle is one (but I dont like the price and the virtual leash amazon has on it), and there is another, but it is twice the price (but does annotations, and has wifi)
For Free content for ebooks, start with Baen Books. They have like 100 mainstream sci-fi storys online for FREE.
BTW, the Gen3 supports PDF as well, so that should make you happy.:)
Just like the phone bills of old did not have the taxes broken out seperatly, so to VoIP providers dont break them out and pass them on. This bill would allow them to pass those taxes on to the actuall end users, instead of having to pay them and eat the costs.
But I guess we dont really want voip carriers to prosper, so we should make sure they cant pass that cost on to their end users.
Slashdot Mirror
So much more practical and realistic than 'alter the earth's climate to suit ourselves'.
Or... the headline and summary are misleading in order to give Trump Derangement Syndrome another outlet to express itself. “Companies appear to be streamlining and updating their processes, and workforce reductions are increasingly becoming a part of these decisions. Consumer behavior and advances in technology are driving many of these cuts,” said Andrew Challenger, Vice President of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. or The majority of cuts this year are due to “restructuring;” 49,868 cuts have been announced due to this reason. Bankruptcy claimed another 40,218 this year, a 33.8% increase over the first quarter of last year. Another 27,380 cuts were due to plant, unit, or store closings, 104.7% higher than the 13,374 cuts due to closings through this point last year. The article also talks about how the sectors laying off are also hiring more than they laid off, while trying to position the layoffs as being a potential symptom of an economic downturn (due to federal shenanigans), but the numbers, taken in context, simply don't support that conclusion. I'd liken it to dropping a penny and finding a dollar when you bend over to pick it up.
196,000 jobs were added last month, a rebound from the February report. Economic analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected a gain of about 170,000 jobs in March. It was the 102nd straight month of job gains. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
Both Netflix AND the ISP save tons of upstream bandwidth.
Or, without neutrality, ISP throttles the hell out of Netflix and zero rates CrapeeStreaming (a wholly owned subsidiary) and gives their customers the middle finger suggesting they go back to dial-up if they don't like it.
Actually, zero rating is specifically permitted in the net neutrality regs. And folks forget, the reason comcast was throttling netflix was because they were overloading a public gig-e link in order to get to part of the comcast network. netflix didn't have a direct peerage agreement with comcast back then, nor did their ISP. (which is how ISPs get paid for sinking traffic, BTW). the bottom line is, that model has worked well since day 1. It only appears unfair if you don't understand that it does, in fact, cost money to carry someone's traffic, and the 'no cost' peering arrangements are predicated on the idea that the traffic flow is fairly even. pretty much every peering contract I've ever seen sets forth penalties and fees if your traffic starts going too much in one direction or the other, because at that point, one is using the link as a transit connection, which requires payment. Only folks who don't understand this seem to think that comcast was 'out to get' netflix.
data caps are the result of capacity and planning analysis. it' straightforward math. It's also the end result of about 100 years of telecom experience with managing shared resources in order to keep end user costs down, while still providing everyone service. If X people have access to a network link of Y size, the sum total of what they can all transfer is Z (where Z is some amazingly ridiculous number that is much much larger than Y), you can do a statistical analysis of every user and see that for every user that consumes more than their 'fair' share of Z, you have 10 or 20 or 50 who are no where close to using their fair share. As long as you set the expectation that there is a penalty for going too far over that limit, EVERYONE on the system always has great performance, because the total transfer amount for everyone together is below Y for the month. Or to put it simply, the neighborhood never overloaded their uplink. The difference between BT and commercial content distribution systems is... one is designed to be open and replicate data. the other is designed to service an application while also controlling who has access to the content, and ensure the content OWNER that their stuff isn't being randomly ripped off. Putting it physically close to the end users (setting up a streamer in the cable company office), just cuts down on both the bandwidth bill for your streaming service as well as for the cable operator. It's a win for everyone, because the service works even better than having to run through links that are potentially overly congested with other traffic...
Having seen what the 'open for all' internet looks like, before the ability of telecom/ISP companies to effectively manage the impact of bad actors, the idea that people, in their ignorance, actually believe such nonsense as 'every packet is equal' is disturbing. This version of 'net neutrality' does not protect end users. read the thing. read ALL of it. For every headline in the regs that says 'protect end user privilege', there are 8-30 exceptions that essentially allow an ISP/Telco to do exactly what people claim they do not want to allow them to do. Don't want to be charged 'extra' for access to netflix? No problem, says FCC/ISP: You now have a bandwidth cap per month, and once you go over it, we charge you extra... unless you use our streaming service, which is zero rated (I.E. doesn't count against your bandwidth cap). The entire regulatory framework is filled with that kind of crap. And the best part? the FCC declares itself as the sole arbiter of anything going wrong online... So before, where you could go to the FTC (which has all the experience shutting down protectionist, monopolistic behaviour), the FCC now gets to determine if google or verizon doing something that is expressly allowed by it's regs (but is clearly a violation of anti-trust laws) is legal! WAKE UP PEOPLE. Stop thinking with your hearts and read the crap being shown to you as 'the protection you need from your evil ISP'.
The internet/web is a mirror of humanity. No matter what kind of control system you try to impose on it, human nature will be reflected and sometimes magnified by the tools we use. The Web, and the social media system that grows on it, are a great example of the fun-house mirror result you get when people's thought processes and discrimination ability lag behind technology. I first wrote about this in 1999, as the net.sheep effect. People have been conditioned by 100s of years of text-as-truth to trust anything they READ (because putting things down in writing was once an epic effort, requiring not only a great deal of money, but also the expectation that the quality of the words would be worthy of the effort to put them down and publish them). It's only when a small portion of the user base begins to leverage that habit, that the abuse of being able to reach the entire planet with a rumor begins to become clear... not because gossip is new, but because making gossip seem not only true, but authoritative (by virtue of being written/published/repeated by thousands of sites) is. The only way to address that with technology is by bringing back the one thing that makes a modern society civil : Personal Accountability. Virtual Reputation needs to not only be a 'thing', but a 'thing' that has consequences. Facebook has been a little slow on this, because they recognize their site is a huge rumor mill... if they start squashing rumors, what will that do to their numbers? All in all, the answer to this issue is the same as it was when the printing press was invented, when radio came out, when TV came out: People who are going to report/spread information have to be held accountable for the accuracy of that information as well as the damage they create by doing rumors instead of facts.
People keep using 'net neutrality' as if it's going to provide some kind of amazing magical protection for end users... The one thing that doesn't 'fix' your user experience is making rules with thousands of loopholes in them. And that's what you get when you demand lawmakers to fix problems for you. They build a compromise based on what's best for the providers and what is acceptable to them to give up to make you feel better. Holding data hoarding companies to a standard of responsible use for your personal info is perfect. that stuff needs to be defined as your own personal property, that you lease,rent or otherwise permit them to use it for due and fair consideration.
How do I get my part of the settlement? I've got 2 Vizos. :)
Won't be missed. Never really was able to get past the foolishness of people who were supposedly really smart. Real smart folks just don't roll that way.
Consider it infrastructure. If you were to start building a new city from scratch in the last 20 years, you would know to leave plenty of room for multiple carriers to drop fiber and copper all over the place. Now come back to reality, where you have 100 year old copper in places where there may or may not be physical access to run fiber to replace it, may or may not be a place to put equipment to support your ideal high speed infrastructure (you can go further with an analog electrical signal, than with a digital one, hence DSL limits), and frankly, rolling out 30 cities worth of fiber infrastructure to cover a good percentage of the population is harder, more expensive, and takes longer than building out 1 city and 2 population centers that are barely 100 miles apart.
The difference boils down to engineering and scaling problems. I would compare the two like this: lets say 'small country' is using a pickup truck to move his family across the street, while 'big country' has to use 100 tractor trailer rigs to move an office building worth of people 2000 miles. I'm sure the folks in the office look to have terrible performance from their moving company, if you decide to just compare how long it takes to move. Doesn't really capture the whole 'heft' of the project though, does it.
what WOULD be interesting, would be to show how much each country 'lifts' with it's access, and create a consumption based metric for internet quality.
But it's not a 'sunk' cost. Facilities have to be maintained, and upgraded. Right of ways have to be paid for and maintained. and municipalities expect more and more every year/contract cycle for the access to those rights of way. Bandwidth on the edge provider's network isn't the MAIN problem. it's getting it OFF that network to someplace useful that is.
Thats because the uplink isn't public shared bandwidth. TDS gets a private handoff for all the DSL customers, at a tariffed rate, and then it's TDS's problem to put them on their OWN network (not AT&Ts). Netflix bandwidth is in no danger of collapsing anyone's backbone. The issue has always been how it gets handed off between carriers. When you have huge amounts of high speed eyeballs on your network, (netflix's target audience), you should be asking 'why isn't netflix buying bandwidth from networks with a high amount of my target cutomer?' instead they just go with the cheapest carrier they can cut a deal with, without taking into consideration the realities of 'why things work on the network', and stomp their feet about how unfair those evil carriers are. until you can show some widespread example of carriers who have streaming video services with the same library at netflix, and are actively redirecting people's browsers to netflix, there isn't any predatory practice going on here.
I have spent a lot of time on this. I will share where the rabble rousing going on here is _off_, and let you decide.
1) Net Neutrality is...
A new buzzword hijacking 'Open Internet', which is the philosophy carriers and network operators have been using since day one to guide their decisions on how to make the network work. It is based on the idea of fairness, openness, and equal access for everyone as an ideal, but allows for the reality of private ownership of infrastructure, and business drivers that dictate how the network infrastructure is managed and operated.
2) Net Neutrality is NOT..
.
a) a fight to ensure you 'get what you paid for'. If you believe this, you have been mislead as to what you paid for. You did not pay for 100Mb/s to netflix. You did not pay for 5Mb/s to netflix. You paid for shared public access to the rest of the networks your carrier has connections with, subject to availability of common shared resources, with NO guarantees of uptime, packet delivery or even that it will work when you switch it on. The mentality that 'I'm not getting what I paid for' is promoted by content providers in order to make you feel cheated. it is not reality.
Since people like using roads as an example, I will just point out, your road taxes are small, because you share the roads with everyone in your city. When you all try to go someplace at once, you end up creating congestion. Why are you not out protesting that 'I paid for my lane, the city just needs to build more roads so I don't have to wait'? Because it's a ridiculous statement, thats why. a large percentage of the time, those roads simply aren't over-used, so it would be a poor use of time and materials to make it larger to absorb a short window of time when it's running at capacity.
For those who like to point out how much America sucks for Internet speeds, Whip out your calculator, and tell me how the hell you expect to connect 300 million people spread out over an area of nearly 4 MILLION square miles, for a comparable cost to connecting 25 million people over 38,000 square miles. and 10 million of those people live in one relatively small metro area. Distance covered increases costs, and it's not only unfair but profoundly unrealistic to expect costs to be anywhere close to similar comparing such vastly different infrastructure requirements.
b) a gimmick for your ISP to shake you down for more money to get what you want. If this were true, you would already be paying for access by country or site or anything else. You don't. You won't. The technical challenges alone make this a non-profitable exercise. Anyone remember when some LD companies figured out that billing in 5 minute increments instead of 1 minute increments meant they actually made MORE profit, because they saved on the time and effort it took to do all the accounting?
c) some way to force content providers to choose a slow lane or pay extra for a fast lane. I wouldn't call this 'force'. I would call it the same option that has always been present in the design of the network. I would also observe that the reality of 'fast lane/slow lane' is based on our freeway example, not on some kind of toll road vs HOV lane example. The fact is, the way things work now, the 'fast lane' is dedicated bandwidth a company buys to improve it's performance when transferring larger amounts of data than the shared best effort peering infrastructure is willing to invest in supporting. Throw a little math at the problem. If you have a shared exchange interface with 20 other networks, and ONE network is consuming > 50% of the bandwidth, that is UNFAIR to all the other networks, if that also means the total bandwidth begins to regularly exceed the available bandwidth. To further simplify matters, lets say 95% of that bandwidth is coming from ONE customer on that other network. The network engineers all look at each other and say 'this isn't natural growth of the network, this
You need digital signage, not a tablet. Only one person at a time can use a tablet. A couple of flat screens off a cheap PC hidden up in the ceiling or a closet, and use Xibo.
nothing is wrong with it. but if you can't communicate well, how are the rest of us supposed to know of your awesomeness?
the answer is, we won't, because someone with the same skill set, and better communications skills will drown you out. furthermore, why do you suppose ANY job outside of a code sweatshop does NOT require communications skills. either step up, or set your expectations lower.
how one sided. Every hostile IT shop I have ever encountered is always run by insecure, almost talented wanna-be s, who believe they are so good at what they do, no one would ever understand what it is they do. and 100% of the time so far, they have been completely wrong. as an old boss of mine said "never believe your own press" the best IT shops go out of their way to show the rest of the company the value they bring to the company, in terms everyone understands, and can respect. The one thing these shops have in common is an understanding that what they do is just as an important as what others in the company do, and take an active interest in understanding what it is the COMPANY does. In other words, IT is one of a very few professions where you can be an insecure ass, and still keep a job. So, keep feeding your sense of entitlement. Keep feeling like IT is the most important thing in your company. I promise you, unless your company makes 'it expertise", you are just overhead to the real job being done there. and it may be painful to replace you, but the smarter managers are learning, they don't have to put up with your attitude to get your so-called expertise, when there are plenty of more well adjusted people out there to take your place.
I've been waiting for some access provider to have the balls to stand up and RUN their network, instead of letting it run them... Should be interesting to see how long they last.
After reading the article, it is quite clear that these folks are getting caught up in their own metaphors. The only reason you need more power is if you need to defend your self from more powerful forces. On the internet, power, while not equally distributed, is far less disparate than in the 'real world'. Why do I need an Army? In case another tribe decides they want to secure a resource I want, or decides to infringe on my territory. What is the equivalent online? Who is this 'defense' supposed to be against? This reminds me of the 'the poor don't have enough on ramps to the internet' argument. Politicians hear that are start crying how we need 'more money for on ramps to the internet for the poor! we need to build more on ramps!' [facepalm] The Internet community does not need an organization to take responsibility for access security. Where would you draw 'the border'? are we gong to build Great Firewall 2.0 for the US? Maybe we are going to start including commercial data as 'in the national interest' and start sending out fighter planes and smart bombs when someone steals a few million credit cards from a data base in the states? The net result of such policies would mean a lot of money for a few people, less flexibility for the day to day users, and less freedom to do as one sees fit online.
We have a huge e-book library, and went with mobi for pretty much everything from the beginning. We just picked up a couple of Bookeen Cybook 3s via the NAEBLLC group for the amazing price of $375 a piece.
This thing is a very good appliance, IMHO, as it focuses on being an easy to use reader, with little to distract you from that. Supports html,txt, mobi, and PDF, the only DRMd content it supports is mobipocket!
For the price and the features (for some reason, they shoe horned an MP3 player in there as well), it's hard to beat the bookeen for value. It looks like a card reader/usb drive to any computer, and doesn't require special software to put books on it.
with the same e-ink screen as the sony/kindle, what more do you want? Sure if I didn't care about how much it cost, the iLiad is a much niftier gadget, but I just want to read!
Booklights work the same on e-ink as they do on dead trees, and there is virtually no issue reading in full sunlight, outdoors.
Any openfont or true type font I want to use is also supported.
Free content is easily available as well, both ToR and Baen have been giving away e versions of their paperbacks for sometime, and all the classics are available from project Gutenberg. Not to mention all the courseware from MIT.
Make the leap. If for nothing else, being able to carry around a reference library the size of a large building in your laptop bag has got to be worth the $400....
My 5 year old has enjoyed playing video games with her dad for the last year or so. She loves throwing curve balls and change ups at me in wii baseball, and is wicked at wii tennis (bowling bores her, as does golf) About 3 months ago, we were playing a kart racing sim (she steers, I work the gas), when I had to get up for something. I was ASTONISHED to come back and see her playing on her own, after having relocated the pedals to where she could hit them with her one foot, while standing up, and steering with the table mounted steering wheel! Not only that, but she actually managed to stay on the track without bouncing from wall to wall. I watched her quietly for about 3 minutes before I asked in my booming daddy voice 'What are you doing!' The look on her face was worth the wait... She cant pass the CPU yet, but she does enjoy just driving in practice mode by herself.
http://www.bookeen.com/ebook/ebook-reading-device.aspx from further down. e-ink is a lot easier on the eyes than those little screens. (For the record, I am reading on a 700p at the moment, and before that, another Palm.)
old cheap laptops make decent (if not really easy to port) readers, but as a mass-consumer of e-books, I'm really ready for the e-ink version. Not having eye strain after pursuing a story to it's finish is worth the extra $$$$.
Indeed, the difference is it supports mobipocket format (xml), so there are TONS of DRM free content for it. Sony's does not, and has no plans to. There are only a couple of e-ink books that support mobipocket, Kindle is one (but I dont like the price and the virtual leash amazon has on it), and there is another, but it is twice the price (but does annotations, and has wifi) For Free content for ebooks, start with Baen Books. They have like 100 mainstream sci-fi storys online for FREE. BTW, the Gen3 supports PDF as well, so that should make you happy. :)
Has to be the Bookeen Cybook Gen3.
http://www.bookeen.com/ebook/ebook-reading-device.aspx
The only thing that could make this thing cooler is a wifi connection.
Just like the phone bills of old did not have the taxes broken out seperatly, so to VoIP providers dont break them out and pass them on. This bill would allow them to pass those taxes on to the actuall end users, instead of having to pay them and eat the costs. But I guess we dont really want voip carriers to prosper, so we should make sure they cant pass that cost on to their end users.