Wow, I didn't know they had the power to force Sony to reprint CD's!
Intentionally obtuse is still obtuse.
As you well know, insurance, at least conceptually, offers you financial compensation for your lost property for the purpose of replacing that property.
You can use your insurance check to buy whatever you please, including CDs, iTMS downloads, a new kitty or...
If what you lost is not replaceable--for whatever reason--then that's unfortunate, but welcome to life my friend. There's many of us in the boat, but we'll slide down to make room for another sad soul.
I haven't bothered to confirm that it's still using HTTP to interact with Logitech servers--as I suspect--but the Harmony OS X Client that I downloaded several weeks ago is a also fully stand-alone package not requiring a separate browser session.
So far I've been very impressed. Prior to this version, I was having a heap of trouble with both OS X and XP SP2 clients not working properly.
Now I've got exactly zero problems and zero complaints. I love my 688.
3. Spamhaus only connection to the US is US companies utilize the service. And ICANN/IANA, the US-based corporation(s) that control the roots of the legitimate Internet domain name services and all IP address allocations/assignments.
But I suppose the missing connection isn't relavent to the topic at hand here, eh?
I actually hope a Republican DOESN'T win in 2008 so we can have a 4 year reprieve from the incessant bitching...
I hope a Republican doesn't win in 2008 too. For different, less petty reasons.
(I didn't vote for Bush.)
Perhaps if your votes were more congruent with your apparent political sensibilities you would find this incessant disclaimer less necessary. I'm sure it's nearly as tiresome to type as it is for us to read.
Would you be defending this situation in the exact same manner as you just did if it the Republican and Democratic tables in this situation were turned?
How does this bear on the factual basis behind the defense of or attack on Maryland's voting process?
Does it make it more likely that the governer is behaving reasonably, and with honorable intentions? No. Does it make it less likely that the Democratic opponents of his actions are behaving unreasonably or in a nefarious manner? No.
As a matter of plain logic, your question--splattered across lo' these many posts--does not move us any closer to the objective truth of this matter. So then what--beyond personal interest, I wonder--is your motive for persistently pursuing this ad hominem track?
In several other posts, I note that you disclaim a personal bias of your own, though the content of your posts isn't well aligned with the disclaimers. Can you explain that?
If this were a Democratic governor wanting to get rid of e-voting and Republicans fighting it, ask yourself: would a post like the parent really be modded up?
I think the modding of your own posts in this thread weaken your underlying assertions.
I'm not critiquing the quality of your posts, nor the modding. I'm just pointing out that your posts lambasting--good word BTW--Slashdot's alledged Democratic bias have fared pretty well, considering.
Yup, and if they don't do it this way, they'll find another way to suppress turnout.
[list]
Nice list. So is your point that since cheating has 31 flavors we should not ban chocolate? Is having other ways to do bad things a good reason not to stop one way of doing a bad thing? I guess I miss the logic.
In my Cisco experience, that is _highly_ platform, IOS and purpose dependent. On one hand, I've had several Cisco boxes at the "high" end ($XXX,XXX.XX), several at the low end ($xxxx.xx) and several in between that have stayed up for years. On the other hand, I've had other Ciscos in each of those same price points enter death spirals as often as daily.
One 7206VXR I had to reboot every three days to stave off a spewing CEF memory leak. The ESR platform is a flat out nightmare when certain features are in play.
It really matters which features you use, on what platforms, and in what combinations. Especially the combinations.
Corporations are vastly inefficient organisations which get nothing really worthwhile done
Could you, at your convenience, provide me contact information for the presumably unincorporated manufacturers of all the hardware, including chips, boards, and display and user-interface technology that you use to operate and/or develop free software? I'm interested.
If it's not too much additional bother, please provide additional information on the unincorporated manufacturers of your furniture, appliances, stereo, TV, clothing and automobile.
This is absolutely the wrong incident for anti-machine-voting people to be harping on, because it's so easily dismissed by the manufacturers. "Well, when the biggest problem you can find with our machine is that someone forgot to bring it's paper stock"... doesn't make the argument against voting machines sound terribly strong.
I agree. It's an unfortunate example. However, I believe the strong argument would be, "If the machine's are so trivially crippled by human error, then why use them when other machines are not?
I too am considering a small business aimed at home/soho network setup & maintenance, rather than a PC helpdesk play.
One concern I have not seen addressed is how to cover liability for going into someone else's home/business and mucking about with their hardware and other property-based liabilities. I've noted plenty of the "be sure to back up their files" type suggestions, but is there any insurance or bonding specific advice that someone may offer?
Also, are there any good strategies out there for establishing vendor (eg. Linksys etc.) wholesaler relationships if you're a small fry? Their (and others) reseller criteria online doesn't look promising...
It's not about the percentage of people who use one or the other. It's about who benefits from flaws in the machines, and the relative risk of exploiting those flaws.
Who may benefit from flaws in ATMs? The manufacturer, the institution operating the machine, and the end-user. However, the damage done by any consumer distrust of ATMs outweighs the institutional profits gained by operational savings and service fees. For the manufacturer, any institutional distrust of their products just means more sales for competitors. Plus, the risk of being charged with criminally prosecutable banking fraud is high enough to ensure that few people (consumers, banks, etc) will try to game the system. Banking transactions are heavily audited as a matter of course.
Who may benefit from flaws or exploits in voting machines? Whoever is in office, or wants to get into office. Oh, and the manufacturers may find that assisting the folks who will pass beneficial laws is quite worthwhile. Voters already distrust the body politic, so there's little risk there. And elections may be, well, "selectively" audited depending on who the audit benefits most.
And you missed mine that the modern PSTN networks and the Internet are both fundamentally the same: packet switching networks...the 1960s called...Most modern...ATM or VoIP...leisure suits...1980s.
To say that the traditional time-division multiplexed (TDM) circuit-switched PSTN is globally extinct or nearly so is completely wrong. But I really, really wish you were right--since packets are my bread & butter. At this time, of course, there are limited areas of telecom where packet-switching is getting traction, but most POTS dialtone providers (from major RBOC/ILECs to small independents) will not adopt next-gen tech until IP softswitches offer all the same Class 5 features their current switches do. Right now that's not the case.
The telco arm of my employer had the packet-switching vision early on, so we do quite a bit in the small-medium business & healthcare business with an IP Centrex product. We've been at it about five years, and we have had to push the technology and harrass vendors to fix serious flaws every step along the way. Frequently, there's missing or unstable functinoality in our industry-leading softswitches, and our "as bulletproof as anyone can be" IP architecture still fails more than our TDM network.
The technology is just not mature enough yet to displace tradional switches in most PSTN applications. Despite making as serious a softswitch play as any other regional carrier in the US or Canada, our IP voice traffic is hundreds of thousands of minutes each month compared to our TDM voice traffic at several millions of minutes each month. We exchange minutes with all sorts of carriers including AT&T, MCI, SPRINT (Embarq) and the small fries too.
Asian and European markets may be better off with greenfield installs and state-subsidized(1) rebuilds, but to say that TDM is currently a third world technology is woefully inaccurate. In fact, quite a few US and Canadian telcos are still operating TDM switches that don't support "*" features or caller-id. SS7, the out-of-band signaling method that supports those features, among others, was ratified by the ITU in 1981. Talk about leisure suits.
(1) And being far, far from Libertarian, I wish all levels of our Gov't took a more visionary stance on infrastructure.
in both cases the measurement is drastically simplified when one uses the maximum transfer unit and only concerns himself with peak capacity which is really the only thing that matters in this discussion
You're mixing measurements. The MTU of a pipe is measured in bits, not bits over time. I think you mean maximum bandwidth, as in "bits per second".
And if you're arguing that the way either traditional TDM or "modern" packet-switched PSTN networks are capacity engineered is that the "network-side" max capacity is always equal-to or greater-than the "subscriber-side" max capacity, then you're wrong either way.
The old PSTN and emerging PSTN both have many more subscriber lines than interswitch capacity. They get away with that by using the tried-and-true Erlang modeling that you've disregarded several times now. Just like a well-administered survey sample population maps well to larger populations, the Erlang model gives an accurate picture of how much capacity one must have in order to avoid busy-signals. I sit across the aisle from people who do this for a living.
There is no similar mathematical model for pure IP networks. I wish there was--or more pointedly I wish I had the horsepower to create one. My job would be easier and my career would be much better for it.
I fail to see how are you are planning to accomplish this when 300 x 5Mb/s = 1500Mb/s and your uptsream is mere 800MB/s, not counting your "thousands" of T1s, OC3s and what not also competing for this bandwith.
Well, for one thing, you're confusing several measures there. The 1500 Mbps measure would be the maximum *possible* bandwidth for 300 customers iff each one had a 5Mbps DSL service--which they actu
First, if you want to have a discussion where we share information that may help both of us understand each other's perspective a bit, then let's do that. If you just want to get your hard-on berating someone and volleying snarky insults that serve no useful purpose, then you probably should find someone who actually gives some fraction of a fuck what you personally think of them. I'm not that guy.
Second, you missed my point, that the PSTN is a very limited access network in every way *except* that it's usually available for use 24/7, but that the internet is a very open network that allows end-users a great depth and breadth of access and flexibility to create and run all sorts of applications--and is also mostly available 24/7. It is precisely this difference that you're either blind to or ignoring that makes the PSTN so much more straightforward relative to managing capacity.
Third, the PSTN is *not* packet-switched. It's circuit switched. That means for each call a complete end-to-end circuit is built upon connection that stays up for the duration, and then is torn down. That circuit is either 56K or 64K depending on transport segments. It does *not* matter a tinker's damn whether there's complete silence in both directions or if there's a constant din of chatter. The circuit size, bandwidth required, and network resources consumed never, ever changes during a call. This includes faxes and data modem calls, too BTW.
Fourth, rather than meaning "dick", Erlangs are still the ubiquitous method by which PSTN network capacity is engineered, and again faxes and modems are just normal calls from the PSTN perspective. Systemically, they both look and act exactly like a call to Mom on Mother's Day.
Fifth, to all your rants about promises and advertising, I can speak for the network I operate and say that customers are free to fill their connections with whatever traffic they want in either direction, and if they fill it completely I'm happy to sell them and support a larger connection. On the backend, there is no congestion internal to my network and no congestion to peers and upstreams. I fail to see the problem in this picture.
They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network.
Hardly. They offer very limited access to the telephone network--you can make and receive phone calls with a limited finite set of optional features such as caller-id and voicemail. They offer unlimited use of that application within, well, limits, including geographical toll boundries and pay-per-use products such as directory assistance and three-way calling.
IP networks offer an ever-expanding variety of access, limited only by the contractual terms of service that each customer agrees to at the time of purchase. In practice, those terms are most often loosely enforced, if at all, and usually only in response to some operational problem caused by a violation. New network applications are developed and widely adopted as time passes.
If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other.
Actually, telephony capacity is engineered to some threshold of dropped calls per 100 at the network's "busy hour". This threshold is either dictated by regulatory bodies or is left to the telco. Either way, few--if any--telcos build to "zero drops per 100 at busy hour".
Telephony networks are a smidge easier to engineer from a capacity perspective because there's fewer variables to address. A PSTN/TDM phone call takes a discrete unit of bandwidth per call, either 56K or 64K depending on the underlying transport technology. The only variables are start time and duration. Erlang modeling, based on queue theory, addresses this quite well; it isolates start time by normalizing duration to 3600 seconds/call and provides useful, realistic measurements.
IP networks, though, have difficult to model traffic flows with packets of varying size, varying latency from node to node--and from packet to packet within the flow all transmitted at different start times and with different durations. This is only exacerbated by the variety of applications on the network. Variables are nearly impossible to isolate (practically) and capacity planning is more reliant on utilization trend analysis rather than proactive modeling.
As an example, the network I help operate sells ISP service over DSL lines provided by a local carrier. We have a meager 300 or so customers that have DSL products that range from 384K down to 3M down. Let's normalize all of them to 1M to make the math straightforward. We pay our upstream providers about $30/M each month for connectivity. So you would have me pay ($30/M x 300M)==$9000 per month to support those customers. That's more than I currently charge agreggated across the whole group for DSL service.
Now, in reality, what is the actual average utilization for those 300 customers? Three megabits per second on average for the whole group. And that's just the amount on the direct circuit from the local carrier--not the amount from those customers that use my upstreams. Around 14% of their traffic goes to other customers on my network, so only 2.6M or so actually goes upstream. That's around $75/M monthly on average for upstream. Now I can afford to charge what I do, and still provide email, personal webpages, news, DNS, etc, plus staff 3 tiers of support. BTW, peak utilization for these customers doesn't exceed 5M 99.999% of the time.
Also in reality, I also have thousands of T1 (1.5 Mbps), dozens of DS3 (45 Mbps), six OC3 (155 Mbps) customers and 14 GigE (1000 Mbps) customers. My peak daily upstream utilization is around 800 Mbps for all customers combined. It's never spiked above 924 Mbps, including DoS attacks.
I price and operate my services according to that reality, not magic or fantasy. If you feel that means I lack common sense, then I submit that common sense...isn't.
Perhaps because the content available on the internet is different than in books in a few meaningful ways. Most non-web content is realtime or near realtime interpersonal communication (like VoIP, IRC or email). Most web content, including archives, only dates back to the mid-1990s at best. That's very different from books that journal history, the human condition, or creative fiction over many centuries.
Or perhaps because as a medium, the internet is still too immature to displace a medium that has existed for several millennia. Give it a few centuries, then maybe the substitution will make sense.
TV is still more ubiquitous than net access and I would not say, "A room without TV is like a body without a soul," either.
I think this sort of 'research' is done with little insight into what they are researching.
I think this sort of comment is made with little insight into what is being discussed. This sort of "intuitive" interpretation of the value of data collection and analysis is, if anything, a hinder_ence_ to finding the truth.
IMO what they have found may simply show that...
Give me empirical or logical, or even anecdotal evidence to support your opinion. Otherwise it's not worth bits on the wire.
or maybe they interpret their results wrongly; I would say that using the internet is likely to widen your horizon
Again, this appears to be an example of intuitive thinking that has little to no value--and can be damaging--*unless* it is supported by facts at hand. If you are unable or unwilling to provide supporting evidence, no one should give your speculation any credence.
after spent three entire days sitting in front of a computer while we were at a beach house on the Maine coast (and not swimming, surfing, kayaking, or spending any time enjoying the outdoors).
Point taken. But having spent many childhood summers living in a Maine cottage so close to the Atlantic that high tide storms sprayed ocean water on our living room window, I must ask: Did *you* try swimming or surfing in that water?
It's beyond frigid and not altogether safe without a drysuit. As a child I could wade in and out of it for hours on end, but I only dove in once--the first week of the first summer--and got such a screaming "ice cream" headache that I almost passed out. My folks wouldn't even wade in up to their ankles.
Anyway, to your point I agree that it's very, very unfortunate that the boy didn't take advantage of the wonderful place he was visiting. When I lived there we didn't have a computer, or even a TV, and I'm a better person for it. I sketched scenery & maritime scenes, read hundreds of books, spent countless hours exploring rocky shores and playing at the beach, picked blueberries, visited landmarks and--more pointedly--made many actual friends with other local kids. Memories of that part of my life come back with vivid clarity nearly three decades later.
When BBSs were alive I think the social interaction they provided was of a higher calibur...
Now this sounds like an old geezer cliche akin to, "I remember walking up hill in both directs to get to school.";^)
My guess is that things are what you make them, and if you make a point of using some site or whatever to facilitate quality social interactions, then that's what you'll have. OTOH, if your goal is just to grow a buddy list and get on as many other's buddy lists as possible, that that's what will happen.
For Comcast's email blocking to be an issue, at least one involved party must use Comcast service. Any business done via that service is subject to contracted service terms; blocking done within those terms can not be "business interference".
B. Comcast charges money for delivering email. Charging for a service and not providing it is a tort.
Again, the contracted service comes with terms governing its usage and limits. As long as Comcast's behavior is not contradictory to those terms, they are providing the purchased service, regardless of their customers' perception of their behavior.
[ C, D, and E]
Okay...sure.
F. This affects people who are not Comcast customers and who never came near a Comcast TOS.
Wrong. Non-Comcast netizens have Comcast's TOS applied on ingress into the Comcast network, because that inbound traffic is destined for a Comcast customer who is bound by those terms.
But it can't be a freedom of speech thing, because Comcast is not a government entity.
They can't limit your *right* to associate with others. As an email service provider they can and apparently do limit your *ability* to associate with others specifically via the email service you *voluntarily* purchase from them.
Note that this is different than them limiting your ability to associate via the internet service you get from them, as you could use hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc. via your broadband connection and exchange email with whomever *those* services are not currently blocking.
The final straw for me, was a packet loss issue that continued for almost 3 months with probably 20 hours spent on the phone with various people in tech support. Comcast refused to take any ownership of the issue. I finally dumped them for dsl. It may be slower but at least it is reliable and cheap.
I'm probably reading between the wrong lines here, but if you had chronic packet loss over cable but your DSL is still "slower" than cable was, then perhaps you were better off with a bit of packet loss. However, "cheap" is its own motivator.:)
Heck, for two years after Comcast bought out ATT BI my net address from Comcast resolved to "maggard.ne.attbi.net".
Why would you ever care?
(so much for an easy VPN address!)
You don't have to rely on your ISP for an easy VPN address. You can have multiple forward DNS names bound to a single IP address, and there are plenty of free dynamic DNS services available that let you control your own "vanity" subdomain (ie. magaard.dyndns.net etc.) I use one for all my VPN and SSH connections. Works great. If your broadband router has built-in dynamic DNS hooks, like mine does, then it triggers DNS updates whenever your cable/DSL provider changes your dynamic IP.
In the meantime the next time Comcasts license comes up in this town I'll be there recounting my stories with them, the outtages, blocked ports, the service people who never show up, the email problems, their own spam, etc.
If you have trouble finding knowledgable Comcast staff who understand your complaints, and they're your service provider, what makes you think your city council members will have the faintest clue what you're ranting about? Save your energy and summarize it to, "Their service and customer service are both unacceptable." And then watch as they wave some cash and their license is renewwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I didn't know they had the power to force Sony to reprint CD's!
Intentionally obtuse is still obtuse.
As you well know, insurance, at least conceptually, offers you financial compensation for your lost property for the purpose of replacing that property.
You can use your insurance check to buy whatever you please, including CDs, iTMS downloads, a new kitty or...
If what you lost is not replaceable--for whatever reason--then that's unfortunate, but welcome to life my friend. There's many of us in the boat, but we'll slide down to make room for another sad soul.
What if your house burns to the ground with CD"s inside? Who is supposed to replace them?
Er, Allstate? It's called Homeowner's or Renter's insurance. Look into it.
I know. It's a hassle. But it's how your dad replaced his CDs, and he liked it that way.
I haven't bothered to confirm that it's still using HTTP to interact with Logitech servers--as I suspect--but the Harmony OS X Client that I downloaded several weeks ago is a also fully stand-alone package not requiring a separate browser session.
So far I've been very impressed. Prior to this version, I was having a heap of trouble with both OS X and XP SP2 clients not working properly.
Now I've got exactly zero problems and zero complaints. I love my 688.
Your list is incomplete:
3. Spamhaus only connection to the US is US companies utilize the service. And ICANN/IANA, the US-based corporation(s) that control the roots of the legitimate Internet domain name services and all IP address allocations/assignments.
But I suppose the missing connection isn't relavent to the topic at hand here, eh?
I actually hope a Republican DOESN'T win in 2008 so we can have a 4 year reprieve from the incessant bitching...
I hope a Republican doesn't win in 2008 too. For different, less petty reasons.
(I didn't vote for Bush.)
Perhaps if your votes were more congruent with your apparent political sensibilities you would find this incessant disclaimer less necessary. I'm sure it's nearly as tiresome to type as it is for us to read.
Would you be defending this situation in the exact same manner as you just did if it the Republican and Democratic tables in this situation were turned?
How does this bear on the factual basis behind the defense of or attack on Maryland's voting process?
Does it make it more likely that the governer is behaving reasonably, and with honorable intentions? No. Does it make it less likely that the Democratic opponents of his actions are behaving unreasonably or in a nefarious manner? No.
As a matter of plain logic, your question--splattered across lo' these many posts--does not move us any closer to the objective truth of this matter. So then what--beyond personal interest, I wonder--is your motive for persistently pursuing this ad hominem track?
In several other posts, I note that you disclaim a personal bias of your own, though the content of your posts isn't well aligned with the disclaimers. Can you explain that?
If this were a Democratic governor wanting to get rid of e-voting and Republicans fighting it, ask yourself: would a post like the parent really be modded up?
I think the modding of your own posts in this thread weaken your underlying assertions.
I'm not critiquing the quality of your posts, nor the modding. I'm just pointing out that your posts lambasting--good word BTW--Slashdot's alledged Democratic bias have fared pretty well, considering.
Yup, and if they don't do it this way, they'll find another way to suppress turnout.
[list]
Nice list. So is your point that since cheating has 31 flavors we should not ban chocolate? Is having other ways to do bad things a good reason not to stop one way of doing a bad thing? I guess I miss the logic.
Building a system that can compete on cost/mtbf
In my Cisco experience, that is _highly_ platform, IOS and purpose dependent. On one hand, I've had several Cisco boxes at the "high" end ($XXX,XXX.XX), several at the low end ($xxxx.xx) and several in between that have stayed up for years. On the other hand, I've had other Ciscos in each of those same price points enter death spirals as often as daily.
One 7206VXR I had to reboot every three days to stave off a spewing CEF memory leak. The ESR platform is a flat out nightmare when certain features are in play.
It really matters which features you use, on what platforms, and in what combinations. Especially the combinations.
Corporations are vastly inefficient organisations which get nothing really worthwhile done
Could you, at your convenience, provide me contact information for the presumably unincorporated manufacturers of all the hardware, including chips, boards, and display and user-interface technology that you use to operate and/or develop free software? I'm interested.
If it's not too much additional bother, please provide additional information on the unincorporated manufacturers of your furniture, appliances, stereo, TV, clothing and automobile.
Thanks in advance!
Over the years I've played many a WWII flight sim that's put me in the seat of planes from both sides of the conflict.
So we may not match violence to computer games and vice versa but google ads (or whatever broker Slashdot uses today) surely do
Or perhaps ads are simply targeted within each Slashdot news section?
This is absolutely the wrong incident for anti-machine-voting people to be harping on, because it's so easily dismissed by the manufacturers. "Well, when the biggest problem you can find with our machine is that someone forgot to bring it's paper stock" ... doesn't make the argument against voting machines sound terribly strong.
I agree. It's an unfortunate example. However, I believe the strong argument would be, "If the machine's are so trivially crippled by human error, then why use them when other machines are not?
I too am considering a small business aimed at home/soho network setup & maintenance, rather than a PC helpdesk play.
One concern I have not seen addressed is how to cover liability for going into someone else's home/business and mucking about with their hardware and other property-based liabilities. I've noted plenty of the "be sure to back up their files" type suggestions, but is there any insurance or bonding specific advice that someone may offer?
Also, are there any good strategies out there for establishing vendor (eg. Linksys etc.) wholesaler relationships if you're a small fry? Their (and others) reseller criteria online doesn't look promising...
It's not about the percentage of people who use one or the other. It's about who benefits from flaws in the machines, and the relative risk of exploiting those flaws.
Who may benefit from flaws in ATMs? The manufacturer, the institution operating the machine, and the end-user. However, the damage done by any consumer distrust of ATMs outweighs the institutional profits gained by operational savings and service fees. For the manufacturer, any institutional distrust of their products just means more sales for competitors. Plus, the risk of being charged with criminally prosecutable banking fraud is high enough to ensure that few people (consumers, banks, etc) will try to game the system. Banking transactions are heavily audited as a matter of course.
Who may benefit from flaws or exploits in voting machines? Whoever is in office, or wants to get into office. Oh, and the manufacturers may find that assisting the folks who will pass beneficial laws is quite worthwhile. Voters already distrust the body politic, so there's little risk there. And elections may be, well, "selectively" audited depending on who the audit benefits most.
And you missed mine that the modern PSTN networks and the Internet are both fundamentally the same: packet switching networks...the 1960s called...Most modern...ATM or VoIP...leisure suits...1980s.
To say that the traditional time-division multiplexed (TDM) circuit-switched PSTN is globally extinct or nearly so is completely wrong. But I really, really wish you were right--since packets are my bread & butter. At this time, of course, there are limited areas of telecom where packet-switching is getting traction, but most POTS dialtone providers (from major RBOC/ILECs to small independents) will not adopt next-gen tech until IP softswitches offer all the same Class 5 features their current switches do. Right now that's not the case.
The telco arm of my employer had the packet-switching vision early on, so we do quite a bit in the small-medium business & healthcare business with an IP Centrex product. We've been at it about five years, and we have had to push the technology and harrass vendors to fix serious flaws every step along the way. Frequently, there's missing or unstable functinoality in our industry-leading softswitches, and our "as bulletproof as anyone can be" IP architecture still fails more than our TDM network.
The technology is just not mature enough yet to displace tradional switches in most PSTN applications. Despite making as serious a softswitch play as any other regional carrier in the US or Canada, our IP voice traffic is hundreds of thousands of minutes each month compared to our TDM voice traffic at several millions of minutes each month. We exchange minutes with all sorts of carriers including AT&T, MCI, SPRINT (Embarq) and the small fries too.
Asian and European markets may be better off with greenfield installs and state-subsidized(1) rebuilds, but to say that TDM is currently a third world technology is woefully inaccurate. In fact, quite a few US and Canadian telcos are still operating TDM switches that don't support "*" features or caller-id. SS7, the out-of-band signaling method that supports those features, among others, was ratified by the ITU in 1981. Talk about leisure suits.
(1) And being far, far from Libertarian, I wish all levels of our Gov't took a more visionary stance on infrastructure.
in both cases the measurement is drastically simplified when one uses the maximum transfer unit and only concerns himself with peak capacity which is really the only thing that matters in this discussion
You're mixing measurements. The MTU of a pipe is measured in bits, not bits over time. I think you mean maximum bandwidth, as in "bits per second".
And if you're arguing that the way either traditional TDM or "modern" packet-switched PSTN networks are capacity engineered is that the "network-side" max capacity is always equal-to or greater-than the "subscriber-side" max capacity, then you're wrong either way.
The old PSTN and emerging PSTN both have many more subscriber lines than interswitch capacity. They get away with that by using the tried-and-true Erlang modeling that you've disregarded several times now. Just like a well-administered survey sample population maps well to larger populations, the Erlang model gives an accurate picture of how much capacity one must have in order to avoid busy-signals. I sit across the aisle from people who do this for a living.
There is no similar mathematical model for pure IP networks. I wish there was--or more pointedly I wish I had the horsepower to create one. My job would be easier and my career would be much better for it.
I fail to see how are you are planning to accomplish this when 300 x 5Mb/s = 1500Mb/s and your uptsream is mere 800MB/s, not counting your "thousands" of T1s, OC3s and what not also competing for this bandwith.
Well, for one thing, you're confusing several measures there. The 1500 Mbps measure would be the maximum *possible* bandwidth for 300 customers iff each one had a 5Mbps DSL service--which they actu
First, if you want to have a discussion where we share information that may help both of us understand each other's perspective a bit, then let's do that. If you just want to get your hard-on berating someone and volleying snarky insults that serve no useful purpose, then you probably should find someone who actually gives some fraction of a fuck what you personally think of them. I'm not that guy.
Second, you missed my point, that the PSTN is a very limited access network in every way *except* that it's usually available for use 24/7, but that the internet is a very open network that allows end-users a great depth and breadth of access and flexibility to create and run all sorts of applications--and is also mostly available 24/7. It is precisely this difference that you're either blind to or ignoring that makes the PSTN so much more straightforward relative to managing capacity.
Third, the PSTN is *not* packet-switched. It's circuit switched. That means for each call a complete end-to-end circuit is built upon connection that stays up for the duration, and then is torn down. That circuit is either 56K or 64K depending on transport segments. It does *not* matter a tinker's damn whether there's complete silence in both directions or if there's a constant din of chatter. The circuit size, bandwidth required, and network resources consumed never, ever changes during a call. This includes faxes and data modem calls, too BTW.
Fourth, rather than meaning "dick", Erlangs are still the ubiquitous method by which PSTN network capacity is engineered, and again faxes and modems are just normal calls from the PSTN perspective. Systemically, they both look and act exactly like a call to Mom on Mother's Day.
Fifth, to all your rants about promises and advertising, I can speak for the network I operate and say that customers are free to fill their connections with whatever traffic they want in either direction, and if they fill it completely I'm happy to sell them and support a larger connection. On the backend, there is no congestion internal to my network and no congestion to peers and upstreams. I fail to see the problem in this picture.
think traditional telephone companies.
Okay...
They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network.
Hardly. They offer very limited access to the telephone network--you can make and receive phone calls with a limited finite set of optional features such as caller-id and voicemail. They offer unlimited use of that application within, well, limits, including geographical toll boundries and pay-per-use products such as directory assistance and three-way calling.
IP networks offer an ever-expanding variety of access, limited only by the contractual terms of service that each customer agrees to at the time of purchase. In practice, those terms are most often loosely enforced, if at all, and usually only in response to some operational problem caused by a violation. New network applications are developed and widely adopted as time passes.
If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other.
Actually, telephony capacity is engineered to some threshold of dropped calls per 100 at the network's "busy hour". This threshold is either dictated by regulatory bodies or is left to the telco. Either way, few--if any--telcos build to "zero drops per 100 at busy hour".
Telephony networks are a smidge easier to engineer from a capacity perspective because there's fewer variables to address. A PSTN/TDM phone call takes a discrete unit of bandwidth per call, either 56K or 64K depending on the underlying transport technology. The only variables are start time and duration. Erlang modeling, based on queue theory, addresses this quite well; it isolates start time by normalizing duration to 3600 seconds/call and provides useful, realistic measurements.
IP networks, though, have difficult to model traffic flows with packets of varying size, varying latency from node to node--and from packet to packet within the flow all transmitted at different start times and with different durations. This is only exacerbated by the variety of applications on the network. Variables are nearly impossible to isolate (practically) and capacity planning is more reliant on utilization trend analysis rather than proactive modeling.
As an example, the network I help operate sells ISP service over DSL lines provided by a local carrier. We have a meager 300 or so customers that have DSL products that range from 384K down to 3M down. Let's normalize all of them to 1M to make the math straightforward. We pay our upstream providers about $30/M each month for connectivity. So you would have me pay ($30/M x 300M)==$9000 per month to support those customers. That's more than I currently charge agreggated across the whole group for DSL service.
Now, in reality, what is the actual average utilization for those 300 customers? Three megabits per second on average for the whole group. And that's just the amount on the direct circuit from the local carrier--not the amount from those customers that use my upstreams. Around 14% of their traffic goes to other customers on my network, so only 2.6M or so actually goes upstream. That's around $75/M monthly on average for upstream. Now I can afford to charge what I do, and still provide email, personal webpages, news, DNS, etc, plus staff 3 tiers of support. BTW, peak utilization for these customers doesn't exceed 5M 99.999% of the time.
Also in reality, I also have thousands of T1 (1.5 Mbps), dozens of DS3 (45 Mbps), six OC3 (155 Mbps) customers and 14 GigE (1000 Mbps) customers. My peak daily upstream utilization is around 800 Mbps for all customers combined. It's never spiked above 924 Mbps, including DoS attacks.
I price and operate my services according to that reality, not magic or fantasy. If you feel that means I lack common sense, then I submit that common sense...isn't.
Perhaps because the content available on the internet is different than in books in a few meaningful ways. Most non-web content is realtime or near realtime interpersonal communication (like VoIP, IRC or email). Most web content, including archives, only dates back to the mid-1990s at best. That's very different from books that journal history, the human condition, or creative fiction over many centuries.
Or perhaps because as a medium, the internet is still too immature to displace a medium that has existed for several millennia. Give it a few centuries, then maybe the substitution will make sense.
TV is still more ubiquitous than net access and I would not say, "A room without TV is like a body without a soul," either.
I think this sort of 'research' is done with little insight into what they are researching.
I think this sort of comment is made with little insight into what is being discussed. This sort of "intuitive" interpretation of the value of data collection and analysis is, if anything, a hinder_ence_ to finding the truth.
IMO what they have found may simply show that...
Give me empirical or logical, or even anecdotal evidence to support your opinion. Otherwise it's not worth bits on the wire.
or maybe they interpret their results wrongly; I would say that using the internet is likely to widen your horizon
Again, this appears to be an example of intuitive thinking that has little to no value--and can be damaging--*unless* it is supported by facts at hand. If you are unable or unwilling to provide supporting evidence, no one should give your speculation any credence.
after spent three entire days sitting in front of a computer while we were at a beach house on the Maine coast (and not swimming, surfing, kayaking, or spending any time enjoying the outdoors).
;^)
Point taken. But having spent many childhood summers living in a Maine cottage so close to the Atlantic that high tide storms sprayed ocean water on our living room window, I must ask: Did *you* try swimming or surfing in that water?
It's beyond frigid and not altogether safe without a drysuit. As a child I could wade in and out of it for hours on end, but I only dove in once--the first week of the first summer--and got such a screaming "ice cream" headache that I almost passed out. My folks wouldn't even wade in up to their ankles.
Anyway, to your point I agree that it's very, very unfortunate that the boy didn't take advantage of the wonderful place he was visiting. When I lived there we didn't have a computer, or even a TV, and I'm a better person for it. I sketched scenery & maritime scenes, read hundreds of books, spent countless hours exploring rocky shores and playing at the beach, picked blueberries, visited landmarks and--more pointedly--made many actual friends with other local kids. Memories of that part of my life come back with vivid clarity nearly three decades later.
When BBSs were alive I think the social interaction they provided was of a higher calibur...
Now this sounds like an old geezer cliche akin to, "I remember walking up hill in both directs to get to school."
My guess is that things are what you make them, and if you make a point of using some site or whatever to facilitate quality social interactions, then that's what you'll have. OTOH, if your goal is just to grow a buddy list and get on as many other's buddy lists as possible, that that's what will happen.
A. Business interference is a tort.
For Comcast's email blocking to be an issue, at least one involved party must use Comcast service. Any business done via that service is subject to contracted service terms; blocking done within those terms can not be "business interference".
B. Comcast charges money for delivering email. Charging for a service and not providing it is a tort.
Again, the contracted service comes with terms governing its usage and limits. As long as Comcast's behavior is not contradictory to those terms, they are providing the purchased service, regardless of their customers' perception of their behavior.
[ C, D, and E]
Okay...sure.
F. This affects people who are not Comcast customers and who never came near a Comcast TOS.
Wrong. Non-Comcast netizens have Comcast's TOS applied on ingress into the Comcast network, because that inbound traffic is destined for a Comcast customer who is bound by those terms.
But it can't be a freedom of speech thing, because Comcast is not a government entity.
They can't limit your *right* to associate with others. As an email service provider they can and apparently do limit your *ability* to associate with others specifically via the email service you *voluntarily* purchase from them.
Note that this is different than them limiting your ability to associate via the internet service you get from them, as you could use hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc. via your broadband connection and exchange email with whomever *those* services are not currently blocking.
The final straw for me, was a packet loss issue that continued for almost 3 months with probably 20 hours spent on the phone with various people in tech support. Comcast refused to take any ownership of the issue. I finally dumped them for dsl. It may be slower but at least it is reliable and cheap.
:)
I'm probably reading between the wrong lines here, but if you had chronic packet loss over cable but your DSL is still "slower" than cable was, then perhaps you were better off with a bit of packet loss. However, "cheap" is its own motivator.
Heck, for two years after Comcast bought out ATT BI my net address from Comcast resolved to "maggard.ne.attbi.net".
Why would you ever care?
(so much for an easy VPN address!)
You don't have to rely on your ISP for an easy VPN address. You can have multiple forward DNS names bound to a single IP address, and there are plenty of free dynamic DNS services available that let you control your own "vanity" subdomain (ie. magaard.dyndns.net etc.) I use one for all my VPN and SSH connections. Works great. If your broadband router has built-in dynamic DNS hooks, like mine does, then it triggers DNS updates whenever your cable/DSL provider changes your dynamic IP.
In the meantime the next time Comcasts license comes up in this town I'll be there recounting my stories with them, the outtages, blocked ports, the service people who never show up, the email problems, their own spam, etc.
If you have trouble finding knowledgable Comcast staff who understand your complaints, and they're your service provider, what makes you think your city council members will have the faintest clue what you're ranting about? Save your energy and summarize it to, "Their service and customer service are both unacceptable." And then watch as they wave some cash and their license is renewwed.