Open Source is good as a concept and should obviously be furthered, and maybe Opera will eventually go Open source, but to want a company to burn and their quality product to die off simply because they want to remain closed source is probably the most childish thing I can think of.
The alternative is that the patent office would refuse patents then the company filing the patent would bring in the lawyers. Eventually you would end up with the patent office spending all its budget on lawyers to try and stop the odd obvious patent.
That said, it's still worth having (like Vista) with UAC turned off, simply because the aggressive prefetching loads frequently used programs into RAM.
Is it only me that finds UAC useful in Windows 7? I like the fact that applications have to pop up a single extra dialog box to ask me if they are allowed to make changes to my computer. Each app only seems to prompt once when it is run and I generally only get asked by applications that I am expecting to modify my PC anyway.
But a larger factor was four years of sustained full employment at high wages had transferred quite a bit of wealth and created a robust middle that would only start to be systematically dismantled when Reagan took office.
I would like to say that you missed off the most important part: That an economy with very high employment rates is actually bad for business as it puts to much power in the hands of the workforce and has a nasty habit of leading to increased unionisation.
In the sort of low wage, low skill jobs that dominate labour market a high unemployment rate allows me to just get rid of any trouble makers in the workforce and replace them at the drop of a hat. If you have low unemployment and replacing them is going to be a pain in the arse you have to be more careful.
Also, high unemployment makes it easier to keep wages lower. It allows me to pay less and even hand out pay or overtime cuts as people fear losing their job if they know getting another one will be difficult. If your employer asked you choose between a paycut and 20% of your department being laid off which would you choose? Which would you choose if unemployment rates were lower and getting a job would just be case of asking for one? There is nothing scarier for an employer of low skilled labour than 100% employment.
Also remember that if the low end of the labour market wages rise, this has knock on effect across the board. After all, why do a high stress, high skill job if you can find a less demanding job for the same money? Sure some people will do it for the challenge but the fear of not being able to support your family is a much better motivator than job satisfaction any day.
Until you have the hardware to run DX10 in full details (i7 CPU) what is the point in having a DX10 OS?
Because you do not need I7 to run DX11. It runs fine and dandy on my Dual Core Duo running at 3.3 Ghz out of the box (no overclocking)
I still have problems with my overclocked dual core at 3.3Ghz to run all the DX9 games at full details at 60FPS.
What else is running on you system? Are you running 64 bit XP or Vista? Do you have a decent graphics card?
My GTX260 storms through everything at 75FPS. I do not need any higher since my monitor only supports a 75Hz refresh rate at 1400*900.
All I use my windows machine for is gaming and it rocks under Windows 7. Under XP I cannot take advantage of all 4Gb of memory it has and since I never bothered buying Vista running the Windows 7 RC was a no brainer for me as I had just bought this rig when it came out.
So, until I can get an overclocked i7 at 4.0Ghz I'll stick to DX9 and WinXP. Since why overclock to gain FPS and lose them with Vista / Win7?
To use the full memory you have on you MB and not be stuck with 64 bit XP, the thrown together rehash that it is. XP was designed to be a 32Bit OS, so why bother running it on a 64bit processor since it cannot take advantage of it to its fullest. Even when they bodge it to compile in 64 bit mode it is still a 32Bit OS at heart.
I also doubt that many modern games are tested under 64Bit Windows XP since it is now End of Life.
Specifically, GTA 4 needs a monstrously powerful CPU in order for the engine to draw the city at a decent framerate. This is probably a result of poor programming by the folks that ported the game, but in any case you need a beefy CPU to enjoy GTA4.
More likely is that it is a result of the colossal amount of vastly improved physics modelling it has to do behind the scenes. The ragdoll physics when people are run over are stunning in GTA4, far better than in any of the GTA3 series.
I especially like that if you do not run them over but trap them between you car an a wall they just sort of slump, instantly dead, but still held up by you car until you drive off.
I also love the way you go tumbling down the road via the windscreen when you collide with a tree at high speeds.
Are you running the latest Nvidia drivers? Here is the list of games I am currently running under Windows 7:
Quake 4 - tweaked to run at 1400*900 in widescreen since the game did not support widescreen without editing the ini files.
GTA4 - Worked out of the box
Americas Army 3 - Game has plenty of issues due to the game itself but has only crashed once. Since this game is notoriously buggy I would blame it on the game rather than the OS. Works fine most of the time though, and even lets me play on PB enabled servers.
Americas Army 2 - The game ran fine but Punkbuster kicked me for "Invalid OS hook" or something when I tried to play online.
It really does sound like your drivers a fubared. Try uninstalling your nvidia drivers then reinstalling the latest available from the nvidia website.
I'm still pissed about Vista not having the XP style. That one was much nicer.
I remember people saying the same thing about Windows XP and Windows 2000. Personally I hated the Windows XP theme. Currently I am using Windows XP at work in Windows Classic mode.
I have not felt the need to do this on my Windows 7 box at home so I guess I prefer it.
The screen setup is all in one place and you don't have to work out which driver-specific app you have to use.
Strange. I thought that I had this custom Nvidia specific nvidia control panel application that was entirely different to the windows display properties box and installed with the Nvidia Driver. Maybe I imagined it though:)
Can actually support two monitors at the same resolution without ugly vsync tearing.
When did it start doing this? I used to use a matrox G550 across two monitors running at the same resolution years ago and I never saw this. The only thing that annoyed me was that if I had them both as one desktop it centered windows at the edge of the screen.
Once I played with it though I realised I preferred the Linux solution of having two entirely different desktops that you could could move the mouse between. This enabled me to have different gnome applications on the menus and quick launches of each monitor as generally each monitor was used for entirely different tasks. While I understand that some people would have preferred to have two separate monitors they could point at different virtual desktops at will the solution I choose suited my working style well.
It also let me set the desktop background of one monitor to be the output from my TV card. The ease with which you can point any application to render your desktop background under X windows has still not been matched under Windows to my knowledge. If it has please let me know how.
If all you want is the same thing cloned onto both screens like I use now then Linux and Windows are pretty much equal.
Not sure what you were doing wrong, but I have found the Nvidia linux driver to be brilliant. You need to run nvidia settings with root priv's so it can output the xorg.conf file, but this is to be expected. Even without root privileges you can change most stuff in the current session to get dual screens working, it will just forget it all next time it run.
My setup is to have one screen running at 1200*800 on my laptops native lcd, then have a TV output using a VGA to TV converter running at 1024*768 as this is the highest resolution it supports. I do have to choose which part of the screen I want to view but that is to be expected as it cannot scale two different shaped rectangles to be the same shape without distorting one, and that would annoy me.
This might be different if I was interesting in dual heading them or something but since I want them running in clone mode where both have the same image on them I knew things would be a little clunky.
Round pegs rarely fit into square holes without a little bit of persuasion:)
the turban is NOT part of the muslim faith...neither optional nor required.
I personally do not associate Turbans with the Muslim faith but they are mentioned on the page I linked to so I thought it best to hedge my bets a little. Thanks for the correction.
Would the average American find me joking about the World Trade Center funny just because I thought the joke was about the lunatics flying the planes? I personally think not, so I would not risk telling jokes of that nature.
This sort of racist bollocks is what has been getting people attacked in the US for wearing them, despite them being an optional part of the Muslim faith so most turban wearers are from entirely different religions which actually require them.
Of course that's just a warning, not just dumping them to the error page. It IS annoying that we do such stupid browser detection tricks instead of coding to standards.
I really do wish it were that easy. Unfortunately the guys in sales always bitch when something does not look perfect in all crummy versions of IE you dig up back to 6 at least. Then marketing bitch that it looks crummy on their MAC. Ultimately however much you try to avoid it, you are almost always forced in some godawful hack.
Even if IE8 was the most standards compliant browser (I think its not bad) on the planet we are still going to have to do this until every corporate browser in the world has been forced to upgrade from IE6. Microsoft are never going to do this though as it will piss off people who do not understand what a crummy browser it is to develop web sites for.
Poster was talking about British food. Not International-Food-that-happens-to-be-findable-in-Britain. Curry is no more British than Crepes.
He did not say Curry, he said "Curry Sauce", there is a difference. Curry sauce is about as related to curry is as McDonalds is to Rump steak. They might have some similar ingredients but the similarity ends there. It is certainly not an Indian creation since they have better taste.
Both curry sauce and mushy pease are strange liquids that us Brits pour over chips (thick cut French Fries but made from real potato, not reformed mash). Curry Sauce is this strange muddy brown liquid that looks disturbing like diarrea. Mushy Peas is peas that have been boiled for so long they become a textureless green slop.
In order to truly appreciate these delicacies they need to be consumed after 6 pints of strong bitter and while trying to remember where you live.
If it was me, and they didn't have a warrant, I've asked them politely to leave and shot them dead if they displayed armed force and refused.
They would just produce a warrant since the same government passed a bill that allowed police to write their own without needing to get those pesky lefty judges involved.
Thatcher did this, four years after she left office the prime minister's office (1990), and two years after she left parliament (1992)?
Yes she did, laws take time to be passed. Firstly, she appointed Michael Howard who had this crock of shit drawn up and then introduced it to parliament. John Major only kept him in the cabinet, she promoted him originally and probably gave him the mandate to oversee this being drafted as he was a barrister.
Also remember that one of the major events that brought this law into being occured 9 years before the bill was passed:
It was this that event and the way it was portrayed in the media that led to this bill sailing through parliament and onto the statute books.
And to top it all off, Major was just another of her chronies anyway. I never actually beleived that anything changed about who governed Britain when she left office as it was still the same party in power. She was so authoritarian in the early days of her leadership that she moulded that party into her image. It has taken them 10 years of oposition to get some fresh blood in that is even slightly willing to look at things differently.
I am still not convinced they have changed much now, but that is a different issue we can find out at the next election, since they are probably going to be back in power soon.
Perhaps with all the citations and links you could have at least made sure your leading claim lined up with some dates. All your grand ideas about 'government approved this' and 'capitalist that' seemed like the drug-induced foggy ravings of someone who doesn't even have their dates right.
Oh, and a lovely insult to finish your post off, how charming.
That is the ratio of you upload speed to download speed, what does that have to do with how many times they sell the same bandwidth.
That means even with 50:1 overbooking ISP should NEVER run out of upload, that would require every fifth customer to be online and streaming full speed into the world. That never happens.
Actually no. A provider with 50:1 ratio will sell the same bandwidth 50 times. That means that you only obtain you maximum speed if you are the only person out of all 50 using it. As soon as one other person uses it, then in theory you could be only getting half of what bandwidth you pay for. I say "in theory" for the reasons below.
They get away with these high ratios without most of us noticing as:
1) Most of the time they are way under the contention ratio they quote as the number given is only a maximum. If they get anywhere close they upgrade the network. This is certainly the case in the UK as otherwise they would be in breach of contract.
2) Most people do not use the net all the time. This is where P2P becomes a pain because you are expecting to always use the maximum bandwidth they quoted as a maximum when you signed up. If everyone ran P2P the whole system would break down and contention ratios would have to go out the window.
Is that customers fault? or the retards running those companies?
Depends if the customer agrees to it. The last time I signed up to a broadband account the contention ratio was plainly stated on the home page next to the maximum speed, along with a description of what it was. Now I have just looked and this information has completely disappeared from every ISP I have looked at.
I have also called one just for kicks to see if they would quote it to me down the phone, they said they were unable to. They said theirs was "very low".
In my mind that changes quite a lot since you have know about something to agree to it. When I move house in a month or two I am going to have loads of fun (not) trying to find out what the hell I will be paying for on whatever new internet provider I sign up to. Might have to call in some favours at telcos.
The problem is that these companies are advertising that people will get 5 Mb/s and relegating the "or less" part to the fine print.
I know this is a little deceptive, but this happens in more situations than just ISP's. The simple answer is that before signing a contract you have to read it, thoroughly. In my country (UK) it is recognised that this happens and so there is a cooling off period for people when they sign certain contracts, but a cunning business can still find ways around it legally by offering a trial period on better terms.
Companies will always capitalise on people not reading contracts and signing away more than they bargained unless protection from this is enshrined in law. But maybe protecting people from their own stupidity is interfering with the free market too much for Americans or Canadians to stomach. I really have no idea either way since I do not live in either country and cant even make up my mind whether I like the idea of people being able to back out of something they signed just because they did not read it.
You obviously did not read the entirety of my comment and know nothing about the terms and conditions under which and ISP's sell access.
Almost every ISP sells the same bandwidth over and over again up to the number of times in they declare as the contention ratio when you sign up. ie - 1:50 contention ratio (standard residential last time I checked) means they will sell the same bandwidth 50 times. The bandwidth they quote is the maximum available bandwidth if you were the only person using it.
If you do not like this, get internet with no contention ratio (1:1). This is usually known as a leased line and is vastly more expensive as the only people who really need guaranteed bandwidth 24/7 are businesses. Even where I work we subscribe to SDSL with a contention ratio of 1:20 since we do not need all of our bandwidth all of the time.
I did however just read on the following link that apparently in the US ISP's are less likely to declare the contention ratio when you sign up than they are in my country (UK). If this is the case maybe you should complain to the FTC or whoever about this since it is a very important piece of information to know when you sign up to an internet account.
I once did voluntary work at a small community ISP. We only had a few hundred users at most but so many people used napster and then gnutella that we had to implement traffic shaping.
The reality is that if you do not, then badly configured clients with no upload limit set will saturate whatever bandwidth is available if the user is sharing something popular. In our case that number of requests coming in prevented people from being able to access their webmail so we started traffic shaping based on port.
Not a perfect solution since some people put their client on port 80 which we did not shape but largely it worked since we had lots of download bandwidth coming in, but were much more restricted on upload due to using ADSL lines. At the time an ADSL line was too expensive for most people so this way we could all share one and split the cost (£3 per month).
Anyway, we found that without traffic shaping everything ground to a halt, with it we could provide a balanced service for everyone. When you step into the person who wants a cheap net connection and has no need to use tons of bandwidth traffic shaping becomes a reasonable tool to ensure they can always get what they pay for.
Since most ISP's declare they will do this in their terms and conditions and they usually tell you the contention ratio of users to bandwidth I do not see how people can really object. If you want to always use the full possible bandwidth then buy an internet account with a 1:1 contention ratio. I know these are ridiculously expensive, but that is because the vast majority of people do not need this.
Only if you don't count online downloads (for cable/DSL users) or CDs by mail (for dial-up, satellite, and mobile broadband users).
Can these be relied on as the sole method of distribution and still guarantee you the same return on the money invested in producing the game? If not then try explaining why you are abandoning the retail market to your bank manager or investors.
Cue UK government announcing multi billion plan to make the internet 'safe' with new content filtering, anti-filesharing and communication logging schemes in 5... 4... 3...
Someone obviously does not keep up with current events. Most UK ISP's already filter content to keep the world safe from kiddie porn and 70's album covers.
Slashdot Mirror
Open Source is good as a concept and should obviously be furthered, and maybe Opera will eventually go Open source, but to want a company to burn and their quality product to die off simply because they want to remain closed source is probably the most childish thing I can think of.
He's a Stallman baby, what do you expect?
The alternative is that the patent office would refuse patents then the company filing the patent would bring in the lawyers. Eventually you would end up with the patent office spending all its budget on lawyers to try and stop the odd obvious patent.
That said, it's still worth having (like Vista) with UAC turned off, simply because the aggressive prefetching loads frequently used programs into RAM.
Is it only me that finds UAC useful in Windows 7? I like the fact that applications have to pop up a single extra dialog box to ask me if they are allowed to make changes to my computer. Each app only seems to prompt once when it is run and I generally only get asked by applications that I am expecting to modify my PC anyway.
Boy, that sounds like utopia, sign me up.
You dont need to sign up, you already live here. It is called capitalism.
But a larger factor was four years of sustained full employment at high wages had transferred quite a bit of wealth and created a robust middle that would only start to be systematically dismantled when Reagan took office.
I would like to say that you missed off the most important part: That an economy with very high employment rates is actually bad for business as it puts to much power in the hands of the workforce and has a nasty habit of leading to increased unionisation.
In the sort of low wage, low skill jobs that dominate labour market a high unemployment rate allows me to just get rid of any trouble makers in the workforce and replace them at the drop of a hat. If you have low unemployment and replacing them is going to be a pain in the arse you have to be more careful.
Also, high unemployment makes it easier to keep wages lower. It allows me to pay less and even hand out pay or overtime cuts as people fear losing their job if they know getting another one will be difficult. If your employer asked you choose between a paycut and 20% of your department being laid off which would you choose? Which would you choose if unemployment rates were lower and getting a job would just be case of asking for one? There is nothing scarier for an employer of low skilled labour than 100% employment.
Also remember that if the low end of the labour market wages rise, this has knock on effect across the board. After all, why do a high stress, high skill job if you can find a less demanding job for the same money? Sure some people will do it for the challenge but the fear of not being able to support your family is a much better motivator than job satisfaction any day.
Until you have the hardware to run DX10 in full details (i7 CPU) what is the point in having a DX10 OS?
Because you do not need I7 to run DX11. It runs fine and dandy on my Dual Core Duo running at 3.3 Ghz out of the box (no overclocking)
I still have problems with my overclocked dual core at 3.3Ghz to run all the DX9 games at full details at 60FPS.
What else is running on you system? Are you running 64 bit XP or Vista? Do you have a decent graphics card?
My GTX260 storms through everything at 75FPS. I do not need any higher since my monitor only supports a 75Hz refresh rate at 1400*900.
All I use my windows machine for is gaming and it rocks under Windows 7. Under XP I cannot take advantage of all 4Gb of memory it has and since I never bothered buying Vista running the Windows 7 RC was a no brainer for me as I had just bought this rig when it came out.
So, until I can get an overclocked i7 at 4.0Ghz I'll stick to DX9 and WinXP. Since why overclock to gain FPS and lose them with Vista / Win7?
To use the full memory you have on you MB and not be stuck with 64 bit XP, the thrown together rehash that it is. XP was designed to be a 32Bit OS, so why bother running it on a 64bit processor since it cannot take advantage of it to its fullest. Even when they bodge it to compile in 64 bit mode it is still a 32Bit OS at heart.
I also doubt that many modern games are tested under 64Bit Windows XP since it is now End of Life.
Specifically, GTA 4 needs a monstrously powerful CPU in order for the engine to draw the city at a decent framerate. This is probably a result of poor programming by the folks that ported the game, but in any case you need a beefy CPU to enjoy GTA4.
More likely is that it is a result of the colossal amount of vastly improved physics modelling it has to do behind the scenes. The ragdoll physics when people are run over are stunning in GTA4, far better than in any of the GTA3 series.
I especially like that if you do not run them over but trap them between you car an a wall they just sort of slump, instantly dead, but still held up by you car until you drive off.
I also love the way you go tumbling down the road via the windscreen when you collide with a tree at high speeds.
Are you running the latest Nvidia drivers? Here is the list of games I am currently running under Windows 7:
Quake 4 - tweaked to run at 1400*900 in widescreen since the game did not support widescreen without editing the ini files.
GTA4 - Worked out of the box
Americas Army 3 - Game has plenty of issues due to the game itself but has only crashed once. Since this game is notoriously buggy I would blame it on the game rather than the OS. Works fine most of the time though, and even lets me play on PB enabled servers.
Americas Army 2 - The game ran fine but Punkbuster kicked me for "Invalid OS hook" or something when I tried to play online.
It really does sound like your drivers a fubared. Try uninstalling your nvidia drivers then reinstalling the latest available from the nvidia website.
I'm still pissed about Vista not having the XP style. That one was much nicer.
I remember people saying the same thing about Windows XP and Windows 2000. Personally I hated the Windows XP theme. Currently I am using Windows XP at work in Windows Classic mode.
I have not felt the need to do this on my Windows 7 box at home so I guess I prefer it.
The screen setup is all in one place and you don't have to work out which driver-specific app you have to use.
Strange. I thought that I had this custom Nvidia specific nvidia control panel application that was entirely different to the windows display properties box and installed with the Nvidia Driver. Maybe I imagined it though :)
Can actually support two monitors at the same resolution without ugly vsync tearing.
When did it start doing this? I used to use a matrox G550 across two monitors running at the same resolution years ago and I never saw this. The only thing that annoyed me was that if I had them both as one desktop it centered windows at the edge of the screen.
Once I played with it though I realised I preferred the Linux solution of having two entirely different desktops that you could could move the mouse between. This enabled me to have different gnome applications on the menus and quick launches of each monitor as generally each monitor was used for entirely different tasks. While I understand that some people would have preferred to have two separate monitors they could point at different virtual desktops at will the solution I choose suited my working style well.
It also let me set the desktop background of one monitor to be the output from my TV card. The ease with which you can point any application to render your desktop background under X windows has still not been matched under Windows to my knowledge. If it has please let me know how.
If all you want is the same thing cloned onto both screens like I use now then Linux and Windows are pretty much equal.
Not sure what you were doing wrong, but I have found the Nvidia linux driver to be brilliant. You need to run nvidia settings with root priv's so it can output the xorg.conf file, but this is to be expected. Even without root privileges you can change most stuff in the current session to get dual screens working, it will just forget it all next time it run.
My setup is to have one screen running at 1200*800 on my laptops native lcd, then have a TV output using a VGA to TV converter running at 1024*768 as this is the highest resolution it supports. I do have to choose which part of the screen I want to view but that is to be expected as it cannot scale two different shaped rectangles to be the same shape without distorting one, and that would annoy me.
This might be different if I was interesting in dual heading them or something but since I want them running in clone mode where both have the same image on them I knew things would be a little clunky.
Round pegs rarely fit into square holes without a little bit of persuasion :)
the turban is NOT part of the muslim faith...neither optional nor required.
I personally do not associate Turbans with the Muslim faith but they are mentioned on the page I linked to so I thought it best to hedge my bets a little. Thanks for the correction.
Unacceptable to whom? And why?
I would imagine that any of this guys family might not see the funny side of the joke:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
Would the average American find me joking about the World Trade Center funny just because I thought the joke was about the lunatics flying the planes? I personally think not, so I would not risk telling jokes of that nature.
Anyone can write software to look for a turban
This sort of racist bollocks is what has been getting people attacked in the US for wearing them, despite them being an optional part of the Muslim faith so most turban wearers are from entirely different religions which actually require them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turban
Please educate yourself before posting such drivel.
Of course that's just a warning, not just dumping them to the error page. It IS annoying that we do such stupid browser detection tricks instead of coding to standards.
I really do wish it were that easy. Unfortunately the guys in sales always bitch when something does not look perfect in all crummy versions of IE you dig up back to 6 at least. Then marketing bitch that it looks crummy on their MAC. Ultimately however much you try to avoid it, you are almost always forced in some godawful hack.
Even if IE8 was the most standards compliant browser (I think its not bad) on the planet we are still going to have to do this until every corporate browser in the world has been forced to upgrade from IE6. Microsoft are never going to do this though as it will piss off people who do not understand what a crummy browser it is to develop web sites for.
Maybe Russia should institute the same policy the US did and not allow Americans to use their toilet because of cost issues.
Poster was talking about British food. Not International-Food-that-happens-to-be-findable-in-Britain. Curry is no more British than Crepes.
He did not say Curry, he said "Curry Sauce", there is a difference. Curry sauce is about as related to curry is as McDonalds is to Rump steak. They might have some similar ingredients but the similarity ends there. It is certainly not an Indian creation since they have better taste.
Both curry sauce and mushy pease are strange liquids that us Brits pour over chips (thick cut French Fries but made from real potato, not reformed mash). Curry Sauce is this strange muddy brown liquid that looks disturbing like diarrea. Mushy Peas is peas that have been boiled for so long they become a textureless green slop.
In order to truly appreciate these delicacies they need to be consumed after 6 pints of strong bitter and while trying to remember where you live.
If it was me, and they didn't have a warrant, I've asked them politely to leave and shot them dead if they displayed armed force and refused.
They would just produce a warrant since the same government passed a bill that allowed police to write their own without needing to get those pesky lefty judges involved.
Thatcher did this, four years after she left office the prime minister's office (1990), and two years after she left parliament (1992)?
Yes she did, laws take time to be passed. Firstly, she appointed Michael Howard who had this crock of shit drawn up and then introduced it to parliament. John Major only kept him in the cabinet, she promoted him originally and probably gave him the mandate to oversee this being drafted as he was a barrister.
Also remember that one of the major events that brought this law into being occured 9 years before the bill was passed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beanfield
It was this that event and the way it was portrayed in the media that led to this bill sailing through parliament and onto the statute books.
And to top it all off, Major was just another of her chronies anyway. I never actually beleived that anything changed about who governed Britain when she left office as it was still the same party in power. She was so authoritarian in the early days of her leadership that she moulded that party into her image. It has taken them 10 years of oposition to get some fresh blood in that is even slightly willing to look at things differently.
I am still not convinced they have changed much now, but that is a different issue we can find out at the next election, since they are probably going to be back in power soon.
Perhaps with all the citations and links you could have at least made sure your leading claim lined up with some dates. All your grand ideas about 'government approved this' and 'capitalist that' seemed like the drug-induced foggy ravings of someone who doesn't even have their dates right.
Oh, and a lovely insult to finish your post off, how charming.
Now upload/download ratio is usually 1:10
That is the ratio of you upload speed to download speed, what does that have to do with how many times they sell the same bandwidth.
That means even with 50:1 overbooking ISP should NEVER run out of upload, that would require every fifth customer to be online and streaming full speed into the world. That never happens.
Actually no. A provider with 50:1 ratio will sell the same bandwidth 50 times. That means that you only obtain you maximum speed if you are the only person out of all 50 using it. As soon as one other person uses it, then in theory you could be only getting half of what bandwidth you pay for. I say "in theory" for the reasons below.
They get away with these high ratios without most of us noticing as:
1) Most of the time they are way under the contention ratio they quote as the number given is only a maximum. If they get anywhere close they upgrade the network. This is certainly the case in the UK as otherwise they would be in breach of contract.
2) Most people do not use the net all the time. This is where P2P becomes a pain because you are expecting to always use the maximum bandwidth they quoted as a maximum when you signed up. If everyone ran P2P the whole system would break down and contention ratios would have to go out the window.
Is that customers fault? or the retards running those companies?
Depends if the customer agrees to it. The last time I signed up to a broadband account the contention ratio was plainly stated on the home page next to the maximum speed, along with a description of what it was. Now I have just looked and this information has completely disappeared from every ISP I have looked at.
I have also called one just for kicks to see if they would quote it to me down the phone, they said they were unable to. They said theirs was "very low".
In my mind that changes quite a lot since you have know about something to agree to it. When I move house in a month or two I am going to have loads of fun (not) trying to find out what the hell I will be paying for on whatever new internet provider I sign up to. Might have to call in some favours at telcos.
The problem is that these companies are advertising that people will get 5 Mb/s and relegating the "or less" part to the fine print.
I know this is a little deceptive, but this happens in more situations than just ISP's. The simple answer is that before signing a contract you have to read it, thoroughly. In my country (UK) it is recognised that this happens and so there is a cooling off period for people when they sign certain contracts, but a cunning business can still find ways around it legally by offering a trial period on better terms.
Companies will always capitalise on people not reading contracts and signing away more than they bargained unless protection from this is enshrined in law. But maybe protecting people from their own stupidity is interfering with the free market too much for Americans or Canadians to stomach. I really have no idea either way since I do not live in either country and cant even make up my mind whether I like the idea of people being able to back out of something they signed just because they did not read it.
You obviously did not read the entirety of my comment and know nothing about the terms and conditions under which and ISP's sell access.
Almost every ISP sells the same bandwidth over and over again up to the number of times in they declare as the contention ratio when you sign up. ie - 1:50 contention ratio (standard residential last time I checked) means they will sell the same bandwidth 50 times. The bandwidth they quote is the maximum available bandwidth if you were the only person using it.
If you do not like this, get internet with no contention ratio (1:1). This is usually known as a leased line and is vastly more expensive as the only people who really need guaranteed bandwidth 24/7 are businesses. Even where I work we subscribe to SDSL with a contention ratio of 1:20 since we do not need all of our bandwidth all of the time.
I did however just read on the following link that apparently in the US ISP's are less likely to declare the contention ratio when you sign up than they are in my country (UK). If this is the case maybe you should complain to the FTC or whoever about this since it is a very important piece of information to know when you sign up to an internet account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contention_ratio
I once did voluntary work at a small community ISP. We only had a few hundred users at most but so many people used napster and then gnutella that we had to implement traffic shaping.
The reality is that if you do not, then badly configured clients with no upload limit set will saturate whatever bandwidth is available if the user is sharing something popular. In our case that number of requests coming in prevented people from being able to access their webmail so we started traffic shaping based on port.
Not a perfect solution since some people put their client on port 80 which we did not shape but largely it worked since we had lots of download bandwidth coming in, but were much more restricted on upload due to using ADSL lines. At the time an ADSL line was too expensive for most people so this way we could all share one and split the cost (£3 per month).
Anyway, we found that without traffic shaping everything ground to a halt, with it we could provide a balanced service for everyone. When you step into the person who wants a cheap net connection and has no need to use tons of bandwidth traffic shaping becomes a reasonable tool to ensure they can always get what they pay for.
Since most ISP's declare they will do this in their terms and conditions and they usually tell you the contention ratio of users to bandwidth I do not see how people can really object. If you want to always use the full possible bandwidth then buy an internet account with a 1:1 contention ratio. I know these are ridiculously expensive, but that is because the vast majority of people do not need this.
Only if you don't count online downloads (for cable/DSL users) or CDs by mail (for dial-up, satellite, and mobile broadband users).
Can these be relied on as the sole method of distribution and still guarantee you the same return on the money invested in producing the game? If not then try explaining why you are abandoning the retail market to your bank manager or investors.
Cue UK government announcing multi billion plan to make the internet 'safe' with new content filtering, anti-filesharing and communication logging schemes in 5... 4... 3...
Someone obviously does not keep up with current events. Most UK ISP's already filter content to keep the world safe from kiddie porn and 70's album covers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/07/brit_isps_censor_wikipedia/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/05/features/the-hidden-censors-of-the-internet.aspx
Couple that with Libel laws that are routinely used as a method of silencing what should be protected as free speech:
http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/334
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/14/law.unitednations
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/29/1411207
This results in a country where they have no need to bring in any draconian laws, since they have been here for some time.
(Full Disclosure - I am a British citizen and resident)