Thing is, you can't rely on the client-side only for business. RIM's Enterprise Server (or whatever the name) is a huge part of their success I think. There are of course workarounds (like using the Web Outlook Access API) but it's not as effective as push and other things their server do. You can manage the phones remotely, blacklist them in case of theft, etc... Don't get me wrong, I would love Android becoming the reference OS for business phone users, but I don't see anyone able to compete against RIM at the moment.
RIM's core market are business users. This market is safe. They are only trying to expand it to the general public, and for that you need apps. I guess it takes longer to fix your whole API than just throw a VM in.
Big companies (read: banks and similar) don't use internet, they use MPLS-VPN over private, carrier networks. I don't think they'd turn those off, at least not at the same time as Internet. But even if they did that, people in the US have access to much higher technologies than in Egypt, so people would start hacking satellite data links within hours. Or use long-range radio, etc..
It would be a bigger problem for e-commerces of course, such as Amazon, Dell or E-Bay.
I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone, but I actually prefer Ballmer's way than Gates'. At least now they are starting to open their formats, contribute to open source (jQuery for instance), even allow the Mono Project to live even if it can potentially pull customers away from IIS, etc... Their core products are not too good, but in my opinion they are moving into the right direction. I'm not saying they are not evil or anything, please note, just trying to put some fairness in the comments.
All that you say is fine and true. However I disagree on one point. It's fine to let the "basic" users do whatever they want in one click. But me, as a "power" user, I want the ability to go beyond that. This is the one and only problem of Apple. I mean, seriously, why does Jobs care if I manage my iPod with Winamp instead of iTune? I buy my MP3s on Qobuz anyway because they sell music encoded at a higher bitrate. That's not anywhere near "power using" the device or trying to hack it. I just find Winamp superior to iTune (my choice) and want to use it.
As of today, the fastest fiber NICs run at 100 Gbps (not a typo). I'm pretty sure the big Network Equipment Manufacturers (Cisco, Juniper, Broadcom et al.) are investing more than £7.2M in R&D to develop this too, so I'm kind of mixed. Also, most Carriers and ISP core networks still run on aggregated 10 Gbps, sometimes 40 Gbps, and none (as far as I know) run at 100 Gbps. So the "capacity crunch" they talk about is mostly due to a lack of investment from the companies...
It's really only in the US I think. Nobody in Europe will contest (except the occasional, marginal and fortunately exceptionally rare nutjob) the teaching of evolution. Maybe it's because Public Schools are actually good in Europe, and many countries are officially agnostic, so it's a moot point ; whereas in the US there are much more private schools that have to tread carefully not to alienate their customers.. err.. student's parents?
Well then you might want to buy vinyls then because those are the only perfect reproductions of the recording. As soon as it becomes digital, there's an analog -> digital conversion, and there's loss. Probably not enough loss for most people to care, but still.
20/1 Mbps sounds like DSL 2. This is fiber which is a more reliable transport medium because it's much less impacted by typical impairments (road work, noise on the line, rusty copper pairs, etc...). A better comparison would be the 50 Mbps/10 Mbps you get in Paris, with Fiber, for 50€.
I travel to Israel for business on a regular basis. They don't joke around with security in this country as you can imagine. There are between 3 and 5 security checkpoints in between the entrance of the airport and the plane. Yet it doesn't take longer than the one security check we have in Western countries. They don't use scanners, they simply ask random questions. Apparently, using this method is very effective to detect people who are up to something.
Of course the luggages still go through X-Ray, and you have to go through metal detectors. But they don't ask you to remove your shoes, belt and watches.
I guess my point is their security seems to be more about efficiency and actual effectiveness than just playing around with high tech toys that are there just to make the public feel safer.
I don't have the source handy, so you'll have to trust my anonymous internet comment, but the "no mod/dedicated server for MW2" policy was decided by Jason West and Vince Zampella, the founders who left first.
Your argument doesn't fit in the scope of what you quoted. I explicitly said "please the gamers, and you will make money." Then you go about explaining ten different ways a game can fail. Pleasing the gamers means producing good games, avoiding exactly what you described in the process.
I'm completely with you. Unfortunately video games are not about fun and, well, video games any more. They are about making money, and most of the time that means low innovation/risk taking. Which is sad, because video games should not be about pleasing shareholders, but pleasing gamers. If you please the gamers, you will mechanically make money. But probably not in the 5 to 15% year-to-year growth that investors are asking in our capitalist world.
Microsoft will probably use this for his Content Provider customers who use Media Room (their Multicast/Unicast architecture, which is actually pretty good technically, although it's unfortunately plagued by DRM's). After DRM'd RTSP (Unicast), DRM'd Live programs (Multicast), it only makes sense to start (DRM'd) P2P. What will probably happen is when you buy a VoD movie, not only will be streamed to your Set Top Box, but also saved on there (typically, Unicast packets are discarded as soon as they have been used) for a few days or weeks. So when another customer wants to rent the movie, you will seed to him. This should provide a huge boost in download speed (as we all know), and the Content Provider won't need as many File/Streaming servers as before.
Service Providers will, however, have to increase their Core Network capacity because Bittorent is notoriously known for eating a lot of bandwidth (that's its very purpose). I guess the costs of upgrading the network capacity is less than maintaining a huge number of streaming servers, somebody would have to run the numbers, and I'm sure Microsoft did. It would be actually pretty cool to be able to save your whole collection of movies on your STB or Media Center (most of the later already have Bittorent clients), and download them again at will - a bit like Steam. This P2P thing should give some ideas to Valve (maybe they already do this, I haven't checked).
Of course all of this raises the question: If your Service Provider uses the bandwidth you rent from them to save themselves some money, will they sell/rent the movies for less? My money is on "No, because they will use this to increase their margins". But that's another discussion. In any case, all of this is technically very interesting, it's just a bit sad that it has to be plagued with DRM, most likely proprietary DRM that will require a Microsoft-approved STB.
You hire Professional Services from a lab/test equipment manufacturer (Spirent, Ixia, BPS) or dedicated testing companies (EANTC or others). Most of them will accept to work during the night, so you need to get a "maintenance" window where they can inject traffic. I do that all the time, from the testers side. It's stupid to do, by the way, because you should always test *before* production.
But that's really dangerous and the best way is still to test in the "lab". A lab can be a temporary rack where you put test equipment you rent for a few days. Those test equipments can emulate very complex network topologies, so even if you have only, say, one firewall you need to test, you don't need the rest of the network devices in your lab (although it would be better, of course, but it's not mandatory). Most of the companies have at least one spare unit for their network equipments, to quickly replace them if they were to fail, so you could use that one for testing a new configuration before committing it to production. Again, not ideal, but definitively better than not testing. A nice blog to read about the importance of testing is Spirent's.
The TCP Setup Rate (new TCP connections/second) and Concurrent TCP connections are actually two very important metrics that can kill your network, and therefore your network-dependant application. Those are very CPU intensive for both the network devices and (even more) servers. You don't need 20,000 client machines from a class B subnet to kill that. If you have 2,000 connections per second and your firewall, SLB, reverse proxy, server or whatever can handle only 1,000 with a reasonable response time, you are in trouble because then it doesn't matter if you use PHP or C++ (layer 7), because you network is the cause of the issue. This is why there are testing companies (Spirent, Ixia, Agilent and others) that exist. They first test the network layers, then move up the layers and test directly against the servers. You'd be surprised to see how many times the bottleneck come from the network - either because of cheap hardware, poor design or configuration errors.
You are correct until the last paragraph. H.264, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 all use MPEG2-TS (Transport Stream) and the effect of data loss are therefore identical because they all use I, P and B frames to store the encoded data.
Also the only way to measure video quality is MOS (for perceived quality, ie: the quality of the picture) and MDI (for transport quality, ie: the impact of the transport on the quality - jitter, latency and packet loss are the most important factors). You can have a perfect MDI (no loss of quality due to the transport layer) but shitty MOS because of a poor codec.
But what if I want to load my PC with videos and watch them offline? What if I want to type some code in *my* favorite IDE? To me this OS looks nice in concept, but is really more like a glorified smartphone. One that can make only VoIP calls, I might add; which is fine by me, but not with any Mobile Operators - all of them block VoIP protocols on their networks. So even if in a few years SPs start offering affordable subscriptions with acceptable monthly transfer volume (read: unlimited), they might still block VoIP protocols because they want you to use your phone and charge your extra for it. One can hope that this will be a game changer for the market, but I don't see this happening before at least 5 years.
Hell, you guys in North America still sometimes have a monthly transfer volume cap on your freaking DSL or cable subscription plans.
The real question is not why games cost $60, it's why they cost the same price digitally than retail. I wonder what their rationale is for that, and that sure ain't the bandwidth price.
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If it means I can use the service again, being based outside of the US, then I'm all for it.
Thing is, you can't rely on the client-side only for business. RIM's Enterprise Server (or whatever the name) is a huge part of their success I think. There are of course workarounds (like using the Web Outlook Access API) but it's not as effective as push and other things their server do. You can manage the phones remotely, blacklist them in case of theft, etc... Don't get me wrong, I would love Android becoming the reference OS for business phone users, but I don't see anyone able to compete against RIM at the moment.
RIM's core market are business users. This market is safe. They are only trying to expand it to the general public, and for that you need apps. I guess it takes longer to fix your whole API than just throw a VM in.
Big companies (read: banks and similar) don't use internet, they use MPLS-VPN over private, carrier networks. I don't think they'd turn those off, at least not at the same time as Internet. But even if they did that, people in the US have access to much higher technologies than in Egypt, so people would start hacking satellite data links within hours. Or use long-range radio, etc.. It would be a bigger problem for e-commerces of course, such as Amazon, Dell or E-Bay.
I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone, but I actually prefer Ballmer's way than Gates'. At least now they are starting to open their formats, contribute to open source (jQuery for instance), even allow the Mono Project to live even if it can potentially pull customers away from IIS, etc... Their core products are not too good, but in my opinion they are moving into the right direction. I'm not saying they are not evil or anything, please note, just trying to put some fairness in the comments.
All that you say is fine and true. However I disagree on one point. It's fine to let the "basic" users do whatever they want in one click. But me, as a "power" user, I want the ability to go beyond that. This is the one and only problem of Apple. I mean, seriously, why does Jobs care if I manage my iPod with Winamp instead of iTune? I buy my MP3s on Qobuz anyway because they sell music encoded at a higher bitrate. That's not anywhere near "power using" the device or trying to hack it. I just find Winamp superior to iTune (my choice) and want to use it.
So what, because he's ill now it's forbidden to discuss his actions of the past as a CEO? Illness is some kind of immunity?
As of today, the fastest fiber NICs run at 100 Gbps (not a typo). I'm pretty sure the big Network Equipment Manufacturers (Cisco, Juniper, Broadcom et al.) are investing more than £7.2M in R&D to develop this too, so I'm kind of mixed. Also, most Carriers and ISP core networks still run on aggregated 10 Gbps, sometimes 40 Gbps, and none (as far as I know) run at 100 Gbps. So the "capacity crunch" they talk about is mostly due to a lack of investment from the companies...
It's really only in the US I think. Nobody in Europe will contest (except the occasional, marginal and fortunately exceptionally rare nutjob) the teaching of evolution. Maybe it's because Public Schools are actually good in Europe, and many countries are officially agnostic, so it's a moot point ; whereas in the US there are much more private schools that have to tread carefully not to alienate their customers.. err.. student's parents?
Well then you might want to buy vinyls then because those are the only perfect reproductions of the recording. As soon as it becomes digital, there's an analog -> digital conversion, and there's loss. Probably not enough loss for most people to care, but still.
20/1 Mbps sounds like DSL 2. This is fiber which is a more reliable transport medium because it's much less impacted by typical impairments (road work, noise on the line, rusty copper pairs, etc...). A better comparison would be the 50 Mbps/10 Mbps you get in Paris, with Fiber, for 50€.
I travel to Israel for business on a regular basis. They don't joke around with security in this country as you can imagine. There are between 3 and 5 security checkpoints in between the entrance of the airport and the plane. Yet it doesn't take longer than the one security check we have in Western countries. They don't use scanners, they simply ask random questions. Apparently, using this method is very effective to detect people who are up to something. Of course the luggages still go through X-Ray, and you have to go through metal detectors. But they don't ask you to remove your shoes, belt and watches. I guess my point is their security seems to be more about efficiency and actual effectiveness than just playing around with high tech toys that are there just to make the public feel safer.
How did the Republicans pillaged the economy? This is not a rhetorical question, I'd like to know more (not US resident).
If you own an A8, I don't think the "exorbitant data rates" for cellular access to Internet is a problem for you.
Clearly, they meant to use the boobylab.biz domain but misspelt it.
I don't have the source handy, so you'll have to trust my anonymous internet comment, but the "no mod/dedicated server for MW2" policy was decided by Jason West and Vince Zampella, the founders who left first.
Your argument doesn't fit in the scope of what you quoted. I explicitly said "please the gamers, and you will make money." Then you go about explaining ten different ways a game can fail. Pleasing the gamers means producing good games, avoiding exactly what you described in the process.
I'm completely with you. Unfortunately video games are not about fun and, well, video games any more. They are about making money, and most of the time that means low innovation/risk taking. Which is sad, because video games should not be about pleasing shareholders, but pleasing gamers. If you please the gamers, you will mechanically make money. But probably not in the 5 to 15% year-to-year growth that investors are asking in our capitalist world.
Microsoft will probably use this for his Content Provider customers who use Media Room (their Multicast/Unicast architecture, which is actually pretty good technically, although it's unfortunately plagued by DRM's). After DRM'd RTSP (Unicast), DRM'd Live programs (Multicast), it only makes sense to start (DRM'd) P2P. What will probably happen is when you buy a VoD movie, not only will be streamed to your Set Top Box, but also saved on there (typically, Unicast packets are discarded as soon as they have been used) for a few days or weeks. So when another customer wants to rent the movie, you will seed to him. This should provide a huge boost in download speed (as we all know), and the Content Provider won't need as many File/Streaming servers as before.
Service Providers will, however, have to increase their Core Network capacity because Bittorent is notoriously known for eating a lot of bandwidth (that's its very purpose). I guess the costs of upgrading the network capacity is less than maintaining a huge number of streaming servers, somebody would have to run the numbers, and I'm sure Microsoft did. It would be actually pretty cool to be able to save your whole collection of movies on your STB or Media Center (most of the later already have Bittorent clients), and download them again at will - a bit like Steam. This P2P thing should give some ideas to Valve (maybe they already do this, I haven't checked).
Of course all of this raises the question: If your Service Provider uses the bandwidth you rent from them to save themselves some money, will they sell/rent the movies for less? My money is on "No, because they will use this to increase their margins". But that's another discussion. In any case, all of this is technically very interesting, it's just a bit sad that it has to be plagued with DRM, most likely proprietary DRM that will require a Microsoft-approved STB.
You hire Professional Services from a lab/test equipment manufacturer (Spirent, Ixia, BPS) or dedicated testing companies (EANTC or others). Most of them will accept to work during the night, so you need to get a "maintenance" window where they can inject traffic. I do that all the time, from the testers side. It's stupid to do, by the way, because you should always test *before* production.
But that's really dangerous and the best way is still to test in the "lab". A lab can be a temporary rack where you put test equipment you rent for a few days. Those test equipments can emulate very complex network topologies, so even if you have only, say, one firewall you need to test, you don't need the rest of the network devices in your lab (although it would be better, of course, but it's not mandatory). Most of the companies have at least one spare unit for their network equipments, to quickly replace them if they were to fail, so you could use that one for testing a new configuration before committing it to production. Again, not ideal, but definitively better than not testing. A nice blog to read about the importance of testing is Spirent's.
The TCP Setup Rate (new TCP connections/second) and Concurrent TCP connections are actually two very important metrics that can kill your network, and therefore your network-dependant application. Those are very CPU intensive for both the network devices and (even more) servers. You don't need 20,000 client machines from a class B subnet to kill that. If you have 2,000 connections per second and your firewall, SLB, reverse proxy, server or whatever can handle only 1,000 with a reasonable response time, you are in trouble because then it doesn't matter if you use PHP or C++ (layer 7), because you network is the cause of the issue. This is why there are testing companies (Spirent, Ixia, Agilent and others) that exist. They first test the network layers, then move up the layers and test directly against the servers. You'd be surprised to see how many times the bottleneck come from the network - either because of cheap hardware, poor design or configuration errors.
You are correct until the last paragraph. H.264, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 all use MPEG2-TS (Transport Stream) and the effect of data loss are therefore identical because they all use I, P and B frames to store the encoded data.
Also the only way to measure video quality is MOS (for perceived quality, ie: the quality of the picture) and MDI (for transport quality, ie: the impact of the transport on the quality - jitter, latency and packet loss are the most important factors). You can have a perfect MDI (no loss of quality due to the transport layer) but shitty MOS because of a poor codec.
But what if I want to load my PC with videos and watch them offline? What if I want to type some code in *my* favorite IDE? To me this OS looks nice in concept, but is really more like a glorified smartphone. One that can make only VoIP calls, I might add; which is fine by me, but not with any Mobile Operators - all of them block VoIP protocols on their networks. So even if in a few years SPs start offering affordable subscriptions with acceptable monthly transfer volume (read: unlimited), they might still block VoIP protocols because they want you to use your phone and charge your extra for it. One can hope that this will be a game changer for the market, but I don't see this happening before at least 5 years. Hell, you guys in North America still sometimes have a monthly transfer volume cap on your freaking DSL or cable subscription plans.
The real question is not why games cost $60, it's why they cost the same price digitally than retail. I wonder what their rationale is for that, and that sure ain't the bandwidth price.
Which can be bypassed by directly using the IP addresses? Those are the ones you want to blacklist.