I'm not so quick to forget why I dropped IE in the first place. To get away from ActiveX and general apathetic browser security. Where's that represented in benchmark?
I dropped IE for tabbed browsing. After a company takeover made me revert to IE 6, I was excited to get tabs back and got approved for an early IE 7 roll-out. No open link in new tab option, anything that navigated me away from a form I was completing lost the work I'd done (agonizing when crafting wiki articles), etc. I finally got IE 8, but I still prefer to use Firefox for basic functionality reasons.
I did try Chrome, but for whatever reason Yahoo Mail crashes constantly, so "good bye"
Generally speaking, if your ping is 150ms round trip you will not be able to distinguish a delay during an audio conversation, unless you're in the same room with them. Latency up to 300ms round trip is generally considered acceptable.
I've been watching VOIP for about 12-13 years, since I did a technology analysis to access how they would affect our Telco consulting clients. At 150 ms, while you may not be able to say "there's a delay on my line", it definitely impacts the conversational flow and results in people talking over one another, stilted conversations, etc. We use those slight pauses in conversations to segue off one another, and thats more than enough time to throw off the conversational rhythm 300 ms (1/3rd of a second) would be annoying as h@#!.
But it depends on why you are on the phone. If you are just looking to talk to grandma, or you are talking to co-workers in an office 200 miles away, thats acceptable. If you are selling million dollar products to corporate executives, a conversational misstep could be very expensive. 4 years ago I moved from a single office technical company whose smallest deal was $500k to a multi-state mid-sized company with a call center; one of the first things I did move to a consolidated VOIP PBX from the each site has their own PBX model. Even with a dedicated MPLS network guaranteeing low latency, latency remains an issue, but our sales are more often made face to face and conversational flow of a call center call is not a big issue
Even with normal quality codecs we've had to inject comfort noise for years.
Biggest shock I got starting to work on PBX's is the realization the "Dial Tone" is meaningless noise injected to reassure you "The phone is working, start dialing"
Seriously, 4 colors? I dreamed of 4 colors. I had 2 colors, black and not black (sometimes green, sometimes amber, sometimes a gray we liked to call white) and only had about 100 characters we could work with on a 24x80 grid to play our space simulators, etc.
I remember laughing at the old timers and their computers with just 8 lights and a printer, and modems you had to stick the handset into...
Tell that to kids these days and they won't believe you!
I'd settle for less bloat-ware. Back in the day amazing things were done with extremely limited CPU resources by programming closer to the wire
Thus leading to the year 2000 debacle. Things go a lot faster when you assume great swaths of stuff, don't do bounds checking, leverage hardware quirks, etc.
Not that software development hasn't lagged behind hardware development and there are great steaming piles of bad software out there (Really, you query the entire database contents out then search the results in software?), but there's also some good reasons why its more bloated. Security, error checking, bounds checking, transportability, etc all cost
Companies will agree all they want - someone who isn't party to that agreement will be happy to exploit the competitive advantage.
Except for the whole "Barrier to Entry" thing. For someone to exploit the competitive advantage, there is generally a huge investment that needs to be made; once made, the existing players can react locally, spreading losses to markets where they maintain their monopoly. New entrant folds, losing his infrastructure investments. Yep, te free market will just be rushing to fill that gap.
Pure gold would probably be less painful, as it is the most malleable and ductile pure metal known.
I'll take Mercury if we have to crap metals, thanks. Just because its a soft metal won't make teh experience any better, you comparison is akin to jumping off a 100 story building versus jumping out of a plane, you are losing big time either way...
True. I mean, the whole point of adding your name to a petition is, well, adding your name. Petition without names aren't worth the "paper" it's written on, like those stupid email petition spam.
No, but if the signers had known their names would be made public, they might not have signed.
This is like dad grounding you for catching your hands in a cookie jar that your mom said you could raid.
And why would you assume that when you sign a petition your name would be kept anonymous? Did they promise you that when you signed it? I've always assumed it wasn't because you are usually signing it on a public street, in full view of the person who asked you to sign it. What about that process says "no one will ever know I signed this?"
Sorry, but I fail to see the controversy, this seems like a pretty straightforward decision to me.
What the hell are you going to do with gold when the zombie apocalypse comes?
Bludgeon the zombies with the gold, classy and effective.
Given that gold is one of the softest metals available, I take issue with "effective". Sure, Zombie's brittle bones will shatter if hit with a log of fresh goat cheese, but what happens if you accidentally connect with a Non-Zombie Item (NZI)? The NZI will wreck your Zombie Defense System (ZDS), and then welcome to the Great Zombie Army (GZA)...
Actually, I suspect its even better than that. They are comparing the "Value" o Corporate IP vs the "Value" of Personal information. What metrics did they use, Black market prices (your personal info isn't worth much), potential monetization via advertising, how much thieves could earn from you stolen identity, or how much it would cost tooffer every ID stolen a credit watch service (astonomical costs)?
Its simple, compliance forces you to categorize Personal info as needing the highest protection, just rate you corporate IP as the same category and the two budgets are practically one. Hell, they often are, as the client list is often the most important IP in a company. Maybe the secret formula to Coca-Cola is more valuable, but most companies don't really have that valuable IP, their value is in Brand, people, and inertia, which can't be stolen.
If the deadbeats "need" a car, they really "need" to save enough money to buy one
I've bought 3 cars in my life for under $200 each, you don't "need" to buy a car on credit.
Anyone stupid enough to loan money to someone who has walked away from their previous debts deserves the chance to lose any money they loan that person.
And if they've loaned that money on the condition they can reclaim the car/home/kidney if the debtor stops paying, they have the right to reclaim it. I'm pretty confident those dealers aren't losing money on these loans. Its a much worse deal for the consumer than it is for the dealer, you can be sure of that
Well, Arther Anderson pulled it off-- how many forgot they are now known as Accenture? (The people who brought you Enron.)
Different group. Arther Anderson split into a Accounting and Consulting group, the Consultants re-branded and the Accountants tanked in the wake of Enron. Not that Price-Waterhouse Coopers wasn't doing the same stuff, they were lucky enough not to have the Enron account is all. I was going for my E-MBA at the time, there were a lot of folks who lost their jobs for just following industry practices.
Alas, the exclusivity agreements were a requirement to get the infrastructure built, noone wanted to invest the millions to string cable unless they were confident of recouping their investment, and as a one way network, installing it as a "shared resource" where competitors could access the lines after the installation investment was recovered isn't practical.
I suspect part of the real reason Verizon and other Telcos are stringing fiber to compete with the cable companies is because:
1) Their cable infrastructure needed major updating anyway, and simplifies management significantly
2) Their landline business is drying up as consumers move to cell services. This allows them to capture more $$$ per household using the infrastructure they want to install anyway.
Just spent a week at a friends place with Comcast, their cable internet went out about every hour with use, the techs say a modern spec cable needs to be run to teh house, but Comcast won't do it. I wonder how long it will take once the "Verizon FIOS in here" flyer shows up on their door?
> I kind of doubt Microsoft is ever going to fix this, as this will end up forcing a bunch of people off of XP if the switch ever happens.
Sure. Or they could buy an IPv6 NAT gateway with a IPv4 DNS server running on it. They cost under $50, may ISP's give them away with service. Thats assuming your ISP is still giving you a routable IP address.
Even on hardware with a service plan, the hardware failed (even under warranty) they would replace the hardware and refuse to update to lifetime subscription unless you paid another $150..
Sounds like grounds for a nice, fat lawsuit as well.
Except that the "Lifetime contract was for the lifetime of the hardware, not the lifetime of the person who bought the box. It was in the in the language of the contract he signed.
Seriously, every one of these conflicts that Cogent gets involved in seems to involve Cogent acting like a bunch of dicks
Interesting perspective. Level 3 de-peered Cogent because they wanted Cogent to pay for the access. I believe the others were similar. Since when is not rolling over for a bully the same as "acting like a bunch of dicks"?
Personally, the drive for higher quality standards has driven this more than anything else I imagine. Add something that you don't have documentation for, and its likely to get reverted.
.
Then add the pile of people doing snow jobs, Steven Colbert stunts, reversion wars, etc, and I don't think its surprising at all.
Why not locate your data center outside of Silicon Valley? With modern server systems, the needs to go hands on is pretty limited, you can access KVM type interfaces via the web (easy enough to set up on a private network), power cycle via the web, mount ISO images, etc.
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Yes, Silicon Valley is one of the original official "public" peering points, but so is Northern Virginia. And today, the majority of peering is occurring in private, and backbone speeds have increased by orders of magnitude, the need to be near one of these points is dropping.
.
I accept the argument that Silicon Valley has a special vibe that encourages innovation, where an area like DC the innovation culture gets buried under politics and military cultures, and going to a market w/o a strong draw to the technical elite like SF, DC, or NY means finding talent can be painful (my company opened a technical office in a "burgeoning tech market" and its been frustrating finding qualified people)., but don't see much reason to locate servers in an area w/ high rents and known power issues...
Back around 2000 they were selling Fast Ethernet to this market for about the price most other carriers charged for 2-3 T1s (i.e. 3-4 Mbps for $2-4K.) I don't think most of their customers expected sustained dependable throughput of 100 Mbps for that price - but just about everybody expected to get more than 3 Mbps almost all the time, so it was a win, especially as a second carrier connection.
You might not have expected it, but they delivered it. We signed up for Cogent when our OC-3 ran past its 3 month install (it eventually too 15+ months); we received reliable 50Mbps links on a 100Mbps circuit. We ran this link at a steady 50Mbps 24x7x365, andwe were actively considering upgrading to the Gigabit service when I left because it had been so good.
Keep in mind, it was a Half Duplex Fast Ethernet connection, so that is very close to real world maximums.
#1 - The CRA expansion in 1995, which put 30% more people on the housing market than there should have been, creating an incredible sellers' market in which housing, which previously had roughly paced inflation, spiraled up until people were looking at "house value" increases of over 200%.
I just don't buy this as causation. I know the deregulation crowd has a raging boner for this as a cause, since it implicates regulation as cause, and implies deregulation is the answer. But it doesn't really add up; the creation of new finance vehicles, acceptance of 100% financing, highly leveraged investors fleeing the dot com bubble for the "sure thing" of real estate, and the detachment of risk from those originating the loans from those actually holding the loan, etc. seem far more likely causes than regulation forbidding red-lining that applies to only local banks
I agree with you blaming Bush for this mess is ill-advised, though the Republican focus on Deregulation led to Sarbanes-Oxley by allowing the Enron collapse to happen. But trying to pin this collapse on on guy, or even a small group of guys, is a mistake in that you let thousands of other contributors off easy. Like blaming global warming on cows, or pollution on cars. Reform is tough.
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I'm not so quick to forget why I dropped IE in the first place. To get away from ActiveX and general apathetic browser security. Where's that represented in benchmark?
I dropped IE for tabbed browsing. After a company takeover made me revert to IE 6, I was excited to get tabs back and got approved for an early IE 7 roll-out. No open link in new tab option, anything that navigated me away from a form I was completing lost the work I'd done (agonizing when crafting wiki articles), etc. I finally got IE 8, but I still prefer to use Firefox for basic functionality reasons.
I did try Chrome, but for whatever reason Yahoo Mail crashes constantly, so "good bye"
Generally speaking, if your ping is 150ms round trip you will not be able to distinguish a delay during an audio conversation, unless you're in the same room with them. Latency up to 300ms round trip is generally considered acceptable.
I've been watching VOIP for about 12-13 years, since I did a technology analysis to access how they would affect our Telco consulting clients. At 150 ms, while you may not be able to say "there's a delay on my line", it definitely impacts the conversational flow and results in people talking over one another, stilted conversations, etc. We use those slight pauses in conversations to segue off one another, and thats more than enough time to throw off the conversational rhythm 300 ms (1/3rd of a second) would be annoying as h@#!.
But it depends on why you are on the phone. If you are just looking to talk to grandma, or you are talking to co-workers in an office 200 miles away, thats acceptable. If you are selling million dollar products to corporate executives, a conversational misstep could be very expensive. 4 years ago I moved from a single office technical company whose smallest deal was $500k to a multi-state mid-sized company with a call center; one of the first things I did move to a consolidated VOIP PBX from the each site has their own PBX model. Even with a dedicated MPLS network guaranteeing low latency, latency remains an issue, but our sales are more often made face to face and conversational flow of a call center call is not a big issue
Even with normal quality codecs we've had to inject comfort noise for years.
Biggest shock I got starting to work on PBX's is the realization the "Dial Tone" is meaningless noise injected to reassure you "The phone is working, start dialing"
But that's for the British convention of dd/mm/yy. What happens if you read October 10th with mm/dd/yy?
I need my dates machine sortable. What happens if I use yy/mm/dd?
16 colors??
Luxury! Back in my day we only had 4
Seriously, 4 colors? I dreamed of 4 colors. I had 2 colors, black and not black (sometimes green, sometimes amber, sometimes a gray we liked to call white) and only had about 100 characters we could work with on a 24x80 grid to play our space simulators, etc.
I remember laughing at the old timers and their computers with just 8 lights and a printer, and modems you had to stick the handset into...
Tell that to kids these days and they won't believe you!
How about writing better software. Stuff that doesn't require 24 cores and 64GB of RAM?
Or solving smaller problems? When I was a kid we were happy to control a dot on our TV
Chip fab in space up next
I'd settle for less bloat-ware. Back in the day amazing things were done with extremely limited CPU resources by programming closer to the wire
Thus leading to the year 2000 debacle. Things go a lot faster when you assume great swaths of stuff, don't do bounds checking, leverage hardware quirks, etc.
Not that software development hasn't lagged behind hardware development and there are great steaming piles of bad software out there (Really, you query the entire database contents out then search the results in software?), but there's also some good reasons why its more bloated. Security, error checking, bounds checking, transportability, etc all cost
Companies will agree all they want - someone who isn't party to that agreement will be happy to exploit the competitive advantage.
Except for the whole "Barrier to Entry" thing. For someone to exploit the competitive advantage, there is generally a huge investment that needs to be made; once made, the existing players can react locally, spreading losses to markets where they maintain their monopoly. New entrant folds, losing his infrastructure investments. Yep, te free market will just be rushing to fill that gap.
[...]or crap solid gold.
Pure gold would probably be less painful, as it is the most malleable and ductile pure metal known.
I'll take Mercury if we have to crap metals, thanks. Just because its a soft metal won't make teh experience any better, you comparison is akin to jumping off a 100 story building versus jumping out of a plane, you are losing big time either way...
True. I mean, the whole point of adding your name to a petition is, well, adding your name. Petition without names aren't worth the "paper" it's written on, like those stupid email petition spam.
No, but if the signers had known their names would be made public, they might not have signed.
This is like dad grounding you for catching your hands in a cookie jar that your mom said you could raid.
And why would you assume that when you sign a petition your name would be kept anonymous? Did they promise you that when you signed it? I've always assumed it wasn't because you are usually signing it on a public street, in full view of the person who asked you to sign it. What about that process says "no one will ever know I signed this?"
Sorry, but I fail to see the controversy, this seems like a pretty straightforward decision to me.
Tell that to my router... 20Mbps/1.3Mbps
Verizon FIOS here, my basic bundled rate is 25 Mbps/ 25Mbps. I could opt for faster
What the hell are you going to do with gold when the zombie apocalypse comes?
Bludgeon the zombies with the gold, classy and effective.
Given that gold is one of the softest metals available, I take issue with "effective". Sure, Zombie's brittle bones will shatter if hit with a log of fresh goat cheese, but what happens if you accidentally connect with a Non-Zombie Item (NZI)? The NZI will wreck your Zombie Defense System (ZDS), and then welcome to the Great Zombie Army (GZA)...
Actually, I suspect its even better than that. They are comparing the "Value" o Corporate IP vs the "Value" of Personal information. What metrics did they use, Black market prices (your personal info isn't worth much), potential monetization via advertising, how much thieves could earn from you stolen identity, or how much it would cost tooffer every ID stolen a credit watch service (astonomical costs)?
Its simple, compliance forces you to categorize Personal info as needing the highest protection, just rate you corporate IP as the same category and the two budgets are practically one. Hell, they often are, as the client list is often the most important IP in a company. Maybe the secret formula to Coca-Cola is more valuable, but most companies don't really have that valuable IP, their value is in Brand, people, and inertia, which can't be stolen.
If the deadbeats "need" a car, they really "need" to save enough money to buy one
I've bought 3 cars in my life for under $200 each, you don't "need" to buy a car on credit.
Anyone stupid enough to loan money to someone who has walked away from their previous debts deserves the chance to lose any money they loan that person.
And if they've loaned that money on the condition they can reclaim the car/home/kidney if the debtor stops paying, they have the right to reclaim it. I'm pretty confident those dealers aren't losing money on these loans. Its a much worse deal for the consumer than it is for the dealer, you can be sure of that
Well, Arther Anderson pulled it off-- how many forgot they are now known as Accenture? (The people who brought you Enron.)
Different group. Arther Anderson split into a Accounting and Consulting group, the Consultants re-branded and the Accountants tanked in the wake of Enron. Not that Price-Waterhouse Coopers wasn't doing the same stuff, they were lucky enough not to have the Enron account is all. I was going for my E-MBA at the time, there were a lot of folks who lost their jobs for just following industry practices.
Alas, the exclusivity agreements were a requirement to get the infrastructure built, noone wanted to invest the millions to string cable unless they were confident of recouping their investment, and as a one way network, installing it as a "shared resource" where competitors could access the lines after the installation investment was recovered isn't practical.
I suspect part of the real reason Verizon and other Telcos are stringing fiber to compete with the cable companies is because:
1) Their cable infrastructure needed major updating anyway, and simplifies management significantly
2) Their landline business is drying up as consumers move to cell services. This allows them to capture more $$$ per household using the infrastructure they want to install anyway.
Just spent a week at a friends place with Comcast, their cable internet went out about every hour with use, the techs say a modern spec cable needs to be run to teh house, but Comcast won't do it. I wonder how long it will take once the "Verizon FIOS in here" flyer shows up on their door?
> I kind of doubt Microsoft is ever going to fix this, as this will end up forcing a bunch of people off of XP if the switch ever happens. Sure. Or they could buy an IPv6 NAT gateway with a IPv4 DNS server running on it. They cost under $50, may ISP's give them away with service. Thats assuming your ISP is still giving you a routable IP address.
Sure pulling the plug is easier, but, really, how hard would it have been to just stop routing packets to that MAC address?
Brilliant. That downloader will never be able to get a new Mac address. Unless he types one in.
Even on hardware with a service plan, the hardware failed (even under warranty) they would replace the hardware and refuse to update to lifetime subscription unless you paid another $150..
Sounds like grounds for a nice, fat lawsuit as well.
Except that the "Lifetime contract was for the lifetime of the hardware, not the lifetime of the person who bought the box. It was in the in the language of the contract he signed.
Seriously, every one of these conflicts that Cogent gets involved in seems to involve Cogent acting like a bunch of dicks
Interesting perspective. Level 3 de-peered Cogent because they wanted Cogent to pay for the access. I believe the others were similar. Since when is not rolling over for a bully the same as "acting like a bunch of dicks"?
.
Then add the pile of people doing snow jobs, Steven Colbert stunts, reversion wars, etc, and I don't think its surprising at all.
Yes, Silicon Valley is one of the original official "public" peering points, but so is Northern Virginia. And today, the majority of peering is occurring in private, and backbone speeds have increased by orders of magnitude, the need to be near one of these points is dropping.
I accept the argument that Silicon Valley has a special vibe that encourages innovation, where an area like DC the innovation culture gets buried under politics and military cultures, and going to a market w/o a strong draw to the technical elite like SF, DC, or NY means finding talent can be painful (my company opened a technical office in a "burgeoning tech market" and its been frustrating finding qualified people)., but don't see much reason to locate servers in an area w/ high rents and known power issues...
Back around 2000 they were selling Fast Ethernet to this market for about the price most other carriers charged for 2-3 T1s (i.e. 3-4 Mbps for $2-4K.) I don't think most of their customers expected sustained dependable throughput of 100 Mbps for that price - but just about everybody expected to get more than 3 Mbps almost all the time, so it was a win, especially as a second carrier connection.
You might not have expected it, but they delivered it. We signed up for Cogent when our OC-3 ran past its 3 month install (it eventually too 15+ months); we received reliable 50Mbps links on a 100Mbps circuit. We ran this link at a steady 50Mbps 24x7x365, andwe were actively considering upgrading to the Gigabit service when I left because it had been so good.
Keep in mind, it was a Half Duplex Fast Ethernet connection, so that is very close to real world maximums.
#1 - The CRA expansion in 1995, which put 30% more people on the housing market than there should have been, creating an incredible sellers' market in which housing, which previously had roughly paced inflation, spiraled up until people were looking at "house value" increases of over 200%.
I just don't buy this as causation. I know the deregulation crowd has a raging boner for this as a cause, since it implicates regulation as cause, and implies deregulation is the answer. But it doesn't really add up; the creation of new finance vehicles, acceptance of 100% financing, highly leveraged investors fleeing the dot com bubble for the "sure thing" of real estate, and the detachment of risk from those originating the loans from those actually holding the loan, etc. seem far more likely causes than regulation forbidding red-lining that applies to only local banks
I agree with you blaming Bush for this mess is ill-advised, though the Republican focus on Deregulation led to Sarbanes-Oxley by allowing the Enron collapse to happen. But trying to pin this collapse on on guy, or even a small group of guys, is a mistake in that you let thousands of other contributors off easy. Like blaming global warming on cows, or pollution on cars. Reform is tough.
If you're a server jockey incapable of installing your own AV software, you're not really a server jockey