It's not at all like that - you're metered and billed for the electricity you use, but not for your broadband connection. You pay a flat fee and get "unlimited" access.
The problem here is that (surprise surprise) "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, because at the time these deals were created, the ISP customer base had certain usage patterns that meant that it was OK to offer "practically unlimited" service. Customer usage has changed, and people are downloading/streaming more video and now the figures don't stack up.
The BBC will be paying several times more for their bandwidth than an ADSL consumer is on a £20/month unlimited plan. The ISPs need to rethink their pricing in the light of video becoming popular.
Those who moan about how they should be able to download the entire internets every night for £20/month clearly don't understand what a contended service is. You can get uncontended (1:1 ratio) ADSL service for about £1000/month. Buy it and knock yourself out, but don't expect the same level of service for 1/50th of the cost.
The services may have been sold as "unlimited*", but the * was always there, and the service was always contended with certain usage restrictions.
Badgering the BBC etc for payments to support their business plans is cowardly though. The ISPs are feeling the pain of the overly competitive market they've created (with the help of Ofcom). The best thing that could happen now is that Ofcom mandate that all-inclusive plans are axed and replaced with per GB billing all round. I wouldn't have a problem with that because I pay already for my gas/petrol/electricity/baked-beans/socks that way.
Notes: Yes, I used to work for a UK ISP. Yes, I know what the running costs are. No, I'm not biased, just realistic. No I don't use P2P regularly, but if I did I'd expect to pay more for it, just the same as I pay more for everything else if I use more of it.
More cutting-edge innovation?
on
How MP3 Was Born
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From TFA:
As director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Brandenburg continues to be involved in the cutting edge of digital music. Researchers under his supervision are working on technology that would, for example, analyze a user's tastes based on music he or she has already downloaded, search the Internet for other tunes in the same genre, and automatically assemble a playlist. Brandenburg is also involved in research to deliver more realistic, true-to-life media than anything now available. Perhaps he'll even help touch off another revolution.
US law is pretty identical to UK in this respect. But the point here is that the customers *haven't* been charged for the goods, so it could be argued that there is no contract.
I'm not so sure it is so identical. We have a multitude of consumer protections in this country that I don't think the US has.
A contract of sale can still be established even is the agreed price is zero (and it was agreed, because it's what the website presented to the customer and was what the card was charged).
I don't know about US law, but in the UK once the goods have been paid for and received, the contract of sale has been established and they couldn't do anything about it. They agreed to sell the goods for a particular price, and provided the goods. I don't see how they could demand additional payment.
Think about it this way: You go to Asda (or Wal-Mart or whatever) and buy something. If the supermarket decided that there was an error in the price, or found that their till has miscalculated some promotion in some way, could they come to your house and demand more money or the goods back? No, they couldn't.
As an interesting side point, the supermarket near me will effectively pay you to take home food from the reductions counter when their tills apply a promotional discount greater than the price the food has been reduced to! I don't think they'd have a leg to stand on if they demanded it back after the sale had completed.
2.7GB per square inch would would require a linear data density of 152292 dpi.
Neither my scanner nor my printer come within a hundredth of this. The main problem with the printer at such resolutions is bleeding of the inks into the paper.
To form the different shapes several dots would be necessary, which would further decrease the effective resolution by an order of magnitude. For example, suppose a 3x3 grid was used to form each character, the article states that there are four different shapes used, yet that 3x3 grid could encode 512 different patterns.
Realistically, at 600dpi (giving 360000 dots per square inch), with 3 ink colours (yielding 8 different colours) you would get 360000 bytes per square inch, or 33MB per A4 page - somewhat short of the 256GB promised. You'd also need to dedicate around 25% of the capacity for error correction.
This is complete and utter bollocks.
A related article in the british press quotes an average cost of £48 per year (= ~ $90) for a TV standby power usage.
That works out to about 80 watts. I know for a fact that my TV only uses 2 watts in standby mode because it says so in the manual and I've measured it. It appears to me that this whole thing is a scam by the electronics industry to sell replacement "low power" electronic goods to everyone.
Honestly, there's no point going to the effort of unplugging the TV for the amount you're going to save. Beside, the energy used will only turn into heat, so the heating in your house will need to work 0.0001% harder and you'll save the $0.75 back over a year anyway.
but if I can download HTTP at the full 8mbit but only 2mbit from a torrent, something is wrong.
No, that's the way it's supposed to work! If the traffic shaping is working properly, true real-time traffic like VoIP and gaming will be full speed, near real-time traffic like HTTP should be next in line, and the non-time critical traffic like P2P should use what's left of the remaining bandwidth.
That way, people who just want to use the web and so on don't get their service degraded by those who chose to download large files by P2P.
Let's face it, if I start a large movie download at 10pm, I really don't care if it finishes at 1am or 5am. Interactive applications like web browsing or gaming are a different matter entirely.
Speaking as someone who works for a british ISP who traffic shapes, I can definately say that traffic shaping is here to stay.
Bandwidth isn't free, and while you always have the chance to move to a different ISP if you don't agree with traffic shaping, ultimately there won't be any ISPs left who either a) traffic shape or b) have gone bankrupt.
Broadband is a contended service and a lot of people seem to forget that. Sure, you can get an uncontended connection to do what you want with, but be prepared to spend £1000+ per month for it.
Thinking it's reasonable to max out your connection 24x7 is about as reasonable as walking into an all-you-can-eat restaurant with a spade and wheelbarrow. You could hardly complain about being thrown out.
Depends how quickly you notice. If somebody stole the rear number plate I'm not sure I'd notice for a good few days, and even a few hours is enough to perpetrate whatever crime you need to.
Don't forget that Americans can only make stuff illegal in the USA. The rest of the world couldn't give a flying fuck what's illegal there. Do I care about the DMCA? No, because I don't live in the USA.
If this kind of legislation continues to go through, the USA will end up back in the tehcnological stone age as emerging economies such as India and China overtake. Don't forget that these economies still make stuff for the west too. Does your Toyoya have all the dashboard icons in Japanese? Of course not.
There are a groing number of bands rejecting the copy protection that the labels are applying to their CDs. I'm sure the film industry will follow soon. How long before the next Hollywood blockbuster is produced by a non-USA company because they know the USA film industry's anti-consumer practices will actually harm the films success.
My only fear living here in Europe is that our brain-dead politicians will follow suit with the USAs practices. There's still a lot of work to do to make sure we don't.
According to the ROKSO list there's only really a hundred or so Levines and Richters out there. They are collectively responsible for a huge percentage of all the spam though. The rest is sent by amateur spammers sending to a few tens of thousands of people. The real spammers on the ROKSO list have databases of 1 billion + addresses.
I work for a large ISP, and if I log into one of our authentication servers and run something like this:
SELECT COUNT(*) AS numof, password FROM users GROUP BY password ORDER BY numof DESC LIMIT 100...to get our top 100 passwords, you tend to find that the most popular password (letmein) is used by about 5% of the users.
The rest of the top 100 are mostly kids or pets names or soccer teams. The most prominent are ones like 'harry', 'katie', 'arsenal', 'david' or, one of the all-time l8m3r passwords like 'computer' or 'internet'.
Slashdot Mirror
This smells fishy, because if I remember correctly, Google owns a significant share of Baidu.
It's not at all like that - you're metered and billed for the electricity you use, but not for your broadband connection. You pay a flat fee and get "unlimited" access.
The problem here is that (surprise surprise) "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, because at the time these deals were created, the ISP customer base had certain usage patterns that meant that it was OK to offer "practically unlimited" service. Customer usage has changed, and people are downloading/streaming more video and now the figures don't stack up.
The BBC will be paying several times more for their bandwidth than an ADSL consumer is on a £20/month unlimited plan. The ISPs need to rethink their pricing in the light of video becoming popular.
Those who moan about how they should be able to download the entire internets every night for £20/month clearly don't understand what a contended service is. You can get uncontended (1:1 ratio) ADSL service for about £1000/month. Buy it and knock yourself out, but don't expect the same level of service for 1/50th of the cost.
The services may have been sold as "unlimited*", but the * was always there, and the service was always contended with certain usage restrictions.
Badgering the BBC etc for payments to support their business plans is cowardly though. The ISPs are feeling the pain of the overly competitive market they've created (with the help of Ofcom). The best thing that could happen now is that Ofcom mandate that all-inclusive plans are axed and replaced with per GB billing all round. I wouldn't have a problem with that because I pay already for my gas/petrol/electricity/baked-beans/socks that way.
Notes: Yes, I used to work for a UK ISP. Yes, I know what the running costs are. No, I'm not biased, just realistic. No I don't use P2P regularly, but if I did I'd expect to pay more for it, just the same as I pay more for everything else if I use more of it.
From TFA:
As director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Brandenburg continues to be involved in the cutting edge of digital music. Researchers under his supervision are working on technology that would, for example, analyze a user's tastes based on music he or she has already downloaded, search the Internet for other tunes in the same genre, and automatically assemble a playlist. Brandenburg is also involved in research to deliver more realistic, true-to-life media than anything now available. Perhaps he'll even help touch off another revolution.
Er, nothing like audioscrobbler/last.fm then?
US law is pretty identical to UK in this respect. But the point here is that the customers *haven't* been charged for the goods, so it could be argued that there is no contract.
I'm not so sure it is so identical. We have a multitude of consumer protections in this country that I don't think the US has. A contract of sale can still be established even is the agreed price is zero (and it was agreed, because it's what the website presented to the customer and was what the card was charged).
I don't know about US law, but in the UK once the goods have been paid for and received, the contract of sale has been established and they couldn't do anything about it. They agreed to sell the goods for a particular price, and provided the goods. I don't see how they could demand additional payment.
Think about it this way: You go to Asda (or Wal-Mart or whatever) and buy something. If the supermarket decided that there was an error in the price, or found that their till has miscalculated some promotion in some way, could they come to your house and demand more money or the goods back? No, they couldn't.
As an interesting side point, the supermarket near me will effectively pay you to take home food from the reductions counter when their tills apply a promotional discount greater than the price the food has been reduced to! I don't think they'd have a leg to stand on if they demanded it back after the sale had completed.
There was a BBC radio programme about this a few months ago:
e -poacher/
http://jamesholden.net/2005/04/23/the-lincolnshir
2.7GB per square inch would would require a linear data density of 152292 dpi. Neither my scanner nor my printer come within a hundredth of this. The main problem with the printer at such resolutions is bleeding of the inks into the paper. To form the different shapes several dots would be necessary, which would further decrease the effective resolution by an order of magnitude. For example, suppose a 3x3 grid was used to form each character, the article states that there are four different shapes used, yet that 3x3 grid could encode 512 different patterns. Realistically, at 600dpi (giving 360000 dots per square inch), with 3 ink colours (yielding 8 different colours) you would get 360000 bytes per square inch, or 33MB per A4 page - somewhat short of the 256GB promised. You'd also need to dedicate around 25% of the capacity for error correction. This is complete and utter bollocks.
A related article in the british press quotes an average cost of £48 per year (= ~ $90) for a TV standby power usage. That works out to about 80 watts. I know for a fact that my TV only uses 2 watts in standby mode because it says so in the manual and I've measured it. It appears to me that this whole thing is a scam by the electronics industry to sell replacement "low power" electronic goods to everyone. Honestly, there's no point going to the effort of unplugging the TV for the amount you're going to save. Beside, the energy used will only turn into heat, so the heating in your house will need to work 0.0001% harder and you'll save the $0.75 back over a year anyway.
The MD5 has of that file doesn't match the one given by Viodentia in the doom9 forums.
The file here: http://jamesholden.net/fairuse4m-download/ matches though.
This soooo reminds me of the Sinclair C5 "urban" low emissions car.
http://www.sinclairc5.com.nyud.net:8080/
I'd be terrified of being smushed by a truck while driving one.
but if I can download HTTP at the full 8mbit but only 2mbit from a torrent, something is wrong. No, that's the way it's supposed to work! If the traffic shaping is working properly, true real-time traffic like VoIP and gaming will be full speed, near real-time traffic like HTTP should be next in line, and the non-time critical traffic like P2P should use what's left of the remaining bandwidth. That way, people who just want to use the web and so on don't get their service degraded by those who chose to download large files by P2P. Let's face it, if I start a large movie download at 10pm, I really don't care if it finishes at 1am or 5am. Interactive applications like web browsing or gaming are a different matter entirely.
oops. s/won't be any/will only be/
Speaking as someone who works for a british ISP who traffic shapes, I can definately say that traffic shaping is here to stay.
Bandwidth isn't free, and while you always have the chance to move to a different ISP if you don't agree with traffic shaping, ultimately there won't be any ISPs left who either a) traffic shape or b) have gone bankrupt.
Broadband is a contended service and a lot of people seem to forget that. Sure, you can get an uncontended connection to do what you want with, but be prepared to spend £1000+ per month for it.
Thinking it's reasonable to max out your connection 24x7 is about as reasonable as walking into an all-you-can-eat restaurant with a spade and wheelbarrow. You could hardly complain about being thrown out.
This is pretty stupid. It's obvious that all DRM schemes boil down to this:
if (rightsholders criteria are satisfied)
{
play the content
}
else
{
do not play the content
}
If the DRM code is open source, then anyone could reverse the logic. I really don't understand where they're going with this.
Depends how quickly you notice. If somebody stole the rear number plate I'm not sure I'd notice for a good few days, and even a few hours is enough to perpetrate whatever crime you need to.
Of course, all you really need to steal is the number plate though.
operation designed to drive criminals off the road.
Errr, I think they meant operation designed to make criminals steal more cars.Don't forget that Americans can only make stuff illegal in the USA. The rest of the world couldn't give a flying fuck what's illegal there. Do I care about the DMCA? No, because I don't live in the USA.
If this kind of legislation continues to go through, the USA will end up back in the tehcnological stone age as emerging economies such as India and China overtake. Don't forget that these economies still make stuff for the west too. Does your Toyoya have all the dashboard icons in Japanese? Of course not.
There are a groing number of bands rejecting the copy protection that the labels are applying to their CDs. I'm sure the film industry will follow soon. How long before the next Hollywood blockbuster is produced by a non-USA company because they know the USA film industry's anti-consumer practices will actually harm the films success.
My only fear living here in Europe is that our brain-dead politicians will follow suit with the USAs practices. There's still a lot of work to do to make sure we don't.
According to the ROKSO list there's only really a hundred or so Levines and Richters out there. They are collectively responsible for a huge percentage of all the spam though. The rest is sent by amateur spammers sending to a few tens of thousands of people. The real spammers on the ROKSO list have databases of 1 billion + addresses.
Not trolling... I code PHP for a living. I maintain a codebase of around 750,000 lines of complicated legacy code.
I use vim, but make sure you set ctags up.
...what a fscking bunch of hypocritical bastards.
Erm.... b***ocks. I'm running Linux on an Athlon64 for six months now, and everything's there and functional on the hardware you mention.
OK there's no 64 bit openoffice yet, but the 32 bit binary version works perfectly.
You're talking utter rubbish. Everything works, including IDE, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, 8x AGP and accelerated graphics. It plays Doom 3 like a dream.
WTF did you do wrong?!!
I work for a large ISP, and if I log into one of our authentication servers and run something like this:
...to get our top 100 passwords, you tend to find that the most popular password (letmein) is used by about 5% of the users.
SELECT COUNT(*) AS numof, password FROM users GROUP BY password ORDER BY numof DESC LIMIT 100
The rest of the top 100 are mostly kids or pets names or soccer teams. The most prominent are ones like 'harry', 'katie', 'arsenal', 'david' or, one of the all-time l8m3r passwords like 'computer' or 'internet'.
Well, that's correct. But he has of course been wrongly accused of doing something illegal. That's slanderous, and illegal in itself.