Well, I have seen that several states have talked about doing something like this, including Oregon and California. And in the cases where I have read about this they were looking at this as an addition the existing gasoline tax, not a replacement. And if you don't collect a lot of data and make assumptions about what the vehicles do to the roads, you end up treating all vehicles the same. Suddenly a Hummer is paying the same to use the road as a Toyota Tercel.
I attempted to sign up for a test program that the University of Iowa was launching last year, but did not get picked. I was not a fan of this sort of thing but I was curious and wanted to know what data they would be collecting and how it might be used. I know that the stories I had seen talked about how they wanted to have billing based not only on the number of miles driven but the time of day and where they were driven. So, you might pay less on a rural highway than a congested city street. You would pay more for travel in the city at rush hours than after hours. (I think of this when I see the IBM commercial where they talk about a system of fees or something that helped a city reduce congestion.)
Nonetheless, it is intrusive, but then so might be the smart grid and other technologies. I guess we should just get used to not having our privacy.
It is one of the things that they have talked about in the studies of this technology. They will be able to charge differently for driving in different locations. Charges could vary by the demands of some types of roads. That could be bad for people that live in rural areas without much traffic since they could decide that they will charge them more for that road use.
I do think that lawnmowers and chainsaws probably don't impact the overall numbers too much though in most places.
I agree. And it disables the incentive that the gas tax gives and it treats all mileage the same. In other words, if I'm driving a big heavy vehicle that wears the roads more than a smaller lighter vehicle, I pay the same. A tractor-trailer rig pays the same per mile as a Prius? I do understand it from the perspective of alternative fuel vehicles that are/will not pay the gas tax. We need to find alternative funding, but I don't like this solution.
This reminds me of a story from Network World a few years ago (maybe 9 or 10) which talked about how Stanford University had a Class A and several class B networks and re-addressed themselves into the B's and gave the A back. In the same article the network administrator for MIT (I believe it was) said that they didn't see there was being an IP shortage and was not considering giving any of the class A network that they have back to ARIN. I worked for a place at one point that had three Class B networks and some class C networks and we could have very easily existed in on class B since we were using under 20,000 IPs, but nobody was interested in trying to rework things to give any back. At the end of the day, I think more emphasis should have been given to migration planning for IPV6 and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
I agree that 2 x DSL is probably not as good as DSL and Cable or some other alternative. If it is a line problem or a DSLAM issue, you'll likely lose both links.
There are routers out there that will take two or more WAN inputs. I have owned two different Linksys models that do that and they work okay. You can do load balancing or failover with the ones that I have had. The load balancing is essentially session based, so if you were doing a big download, you wouldn't get the speed of both lines, just the one that was handling that session. But for a lot of things you do use both links.
Are many of these companies the same ones to which the governments of the U.S. have given tax breaks, rate hikes and other incentives totalling billions of dollars over the last 12 years or so to build a high speed infrastructure. An infrastructure that, at the consumer end at least, does not exist in most places. And so now they are telling the FCC that if the give the service that people expect when they buy Internet access, it will require more expenses and this will lead to further rate increases. Color me shocked! I think they have already had far more immunity than they deserve and they need to start giving their customers the services that they already have been paying for over a decade.
But to quote Dennis Miller, "That's just my opinion and I could be wrong."
I seem to remember this subject coming up on Slashdot before. It was to be expected, right? It was written into the more recent laws, at the behest of our telco buddies, that new technology infrastructure would be exempt from the old rules for sharing. (They argued that it wouldn't be built if they knew that it would have to be shared on a cost plus basis with competitors.) And if you can save money and make it harder on the competition while at the same time get your customers to push for your new fiber service, what corporation wouldn't do that? The assumption has to be that they can roll FIOS fast enough that they don't end up with massive failures in copper lines before the cutover.
And I'm still wondering when consumers will start asking the knuckleheads we send to Washington to represent us why we have allowed the telcos to rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits over the last 10 years or so, supposedly to pay for this new infrastructure, and we still don't have much of it. And they still are milking us for even more money on the way there too. It is totally infuriating to me and I used to work in the telco world.
It is interesting that I did a search on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and was taken to a nice PDF document from the Rio conference that does not, so far as I could see, in Article 3 or anywhere else in the document, specify that 1990 is to be used as the base of measuremnt. It does mention that there are targets to reduce emissions to 1990 levels or lower, but I did not see a specific identification of 1990 as the jointly agreed upon base year of reference.
In point of fact, I think that they do encourage self-flagellation. There are options out there and yet people choose to use MS products, so they choose to put themselves in that position of abuse.
And that remindes me, I need to go run Windows Update, there are patches awaiting.
Right, but wasn't this reported a while back and the statement was made that MS had earlier argued in court that they should be allowed to count all of the individual copies sold overseas for deductions on their taxes. And now they are arguing the other side for the purposes of the AT&T patent infringement case. I just think that they should have to choose a side for the argument. If they claim for the purposes of US tax accounting that all of the copies sold originate here, then that holds for the AT&T case. If they are willing to give up the additional deductions and pay the back taxes and penalties, then they can have this ruling. They just shouldn't be able to have both.
But then I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television.
In reference to this and an earlier comment about there not having been mentioned (or remembered) the R-squared value for the CO2 to temperature graph, it is important to remind people that the R-squared value shows us correlation, not cause and effect. It indicated how much the two lines move together. If you have graphs of X and Y and they have a high R-squared value, then with a proper theory (and X moving in advance of Y by some margin), you can make an argument that X causes Y. By itself, a high value of R-squared doesn't tell anyone much beyond the degree to which the things appear to move together. And I don't know if anyone has done significant work to determine if the proxies used to get time and CO2 measurements are sufficient clear of one another. The temperature proxies for some of the ice bores is the level of deuterium present, but I don't recall ever seeing someone saying that higher or lower deuterium levels were responsible the temperature. The argument is that there is a strong relationship observed between the surface temperature and the snow deuterium content.
Right! This has always been my concern with some levels of competitive telecommunications. The people that compete will go for the high return markets and take the customers there while leaving the incumbent carrier, who is obligated to provide services in most cases, with more and more of the lower return areas. I grew up in a rural area and have worked for several telecom companies and have watched this sort of thing many times.
But, when the CLEC I worked for at one time was doing a hybrid/fiber-coax build around 10 years ago, I remember a city official bemoaning the fact that they hadn't nailed us for a whole litany of free services as part of the franchise agreement. All I could think was, "If the existing carriers have this agreement, fine but otherwise why should I be burdened." And our build was targetted initially to the lower middle-class areas because of higher density and returns for the investment. The franchise agreement did require that we cover all of the city with more than 10 homes per mile within five years. But since we were doing phone service, we would have been taking customers from Qwest and never going near the smaller towns or rural areas that they were supporting around us. So eventually, I had to think that phone service to rural areas would have to be cross-company subsidized or would just become incredibly expensive.
On a more positive note, a friend just IM'd me that SureWest Communications in Sacramento is now offering 50Mbps broadband service which would be a nice thing to have. Hopefully they don't figure out how to apply their usage caps.
The phone company in my old home town has had VDSL service with switch digital video for several years, but they are in a market where nobody would likely ever come and try to compete beyond the cable company. The two towns they serve have about 8,500 people, so it is nice to see them marching forward with technology.
I guess in the end it often seems like you need a well regulated monopoly or a publicly owned infrastructure because there are places where pure capitalism doesn't always work well.
I guess if one takes the word of the Apple spec sheet for the Apple TV box, it plays:
H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): Up to 5 Mbps, Progressive Main Profile (CAVLC) with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps, 960 by 540 pixels at 30 fps)
iTunes Store purchased video: 320 by 240 pixels or 640 by 480 pixels
MPEG-4: Up to 3 Mbps, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 720 by 432 pixels at 30 fps)
So, it isn't quite as limited as so seem to say that it is. I'm willing to take a look, but I'm happy streaming to my Buffalo LinkTheatre and am looking forward to trying out the Galaxy Metal Gear 3500IPTV box when it gets here. I may try out the Apple TV just because I own a Mac and I like to tinker with such things, but at this point I wouldn't described myself as excited about it. I don't see it giving me much that I don't get with my Elgato EyeHome unit, except for the iTunes content access and the EyeHome has other nice features. (I wonder why Elgate quit selling it.)
But that's just my $0.00 worth. (Yeah, it's free and worth every penny.)
I think that there is general agreement that the planet has undergone numerous significant temperature shifts over the its life. And on the topic of global warming or a global climate change, I'm not sure that there is that much dissent. I think the question is really whether or not the current upswing in temperatures is the result of something that humans are doing or something else. It strikes me as somewhat odd that the planet can undergo a number of changes over time and yet this one must be our fault. I think that is part of the problem in the discussion, can we talk about other possible causes and is there a way to know what is causing this with a high degree of certainty. Computer models are only as good as the data that they use and the assumptions on which they are built. Since we have evidence of increasing CO2 levels and warmer average temperature, a model trying to fit those things with an assumption about CO2 causing the temperature to rise, will tend to show higher temperatures as we inject more CO2 into the atmosphere. And it would seem that models with the most extreme outcomes would be the ones to garner the most coverage in the press since saying that not much is going to happen isn't very newsworthy.
A good part of my academic career was focused in statistics and it is pretty common for people to see two events moving in concert and attribute a cause and effect relationship to them, whether or not one exists. I even did support of mathematical and statistical software at one university and we were under direction to not correct obviously flawed research by professors and graduate students. (Maybe that was meant to be caught in the peer review process.) A and B happening in relative concert doesn't mean that A causes B. Perhaps C causes A and B. Recently there have been articles about warming on Mars and the melting of its polar caps. While one might try to attribute this to the effect of humankind since we do have technology there, it seems that a common outside influence is more likely if both are happening.
Hopefully people can keep a somewhat open mind about the whole topic and work toward better understanding of the issues.
I work in an IT shop for a moderate sized company and our VP has told the people under him that have those things that he expects responses to e-mails within a couple of hours 24x7. And he has chewed out my boss, who currently doesn't have a device like that, for not responding to e-mails when he was on vacation. The problem here is that the VP lives with that thing attached to him and does e-mail while on vacation, so he expect that from pretty much everyone else. Seems like a good recipe for burning out a lot of good employees.
I don't want to vote Republican or Democrat, only to find out later I totally disagree with something a candidate stands for.
Well, if that is the way one should decide where not to give your vote, virtually nobody would ever vote, since I cannot imagine that anyone is in 100% agreement with the views of any candidate. I cannot envision a candidate where at some point I'm probably not going to think they are on the wrong side of the issue. In fact, it is annoying how often that happens with all of the people I have ever given my vote. At the end of the day, you have to try to pick the best of the available candidates and sometimes I think that voting for the lesser of two (or more) evils is the way we try to nudge the future candidates choices. So far, that strategy isn't working to well. As for completely uninformed voters, it is a mixed bag at best. And as someone else has said, uniformed is in the eyes of the beholder. I'm sure plenty of people feel informed when they are really not so much.
And I have to wonder on what we are running 1920x1200 resolution? I just upgraded to a 24" LCD and am running 1920x1200 on all desktop systems via that display. I run 1600x1200 on the 15" display of my ThinkPad and it is fine. If you translate the pixel density of this display, you get 1920x1200 on a 17" widescreen display (like the Apple MacBook Pro 17"). So, 24" makes that quite a lot larger. Personally, I would buy a MB Pro today if they could do 1920x1200 on the 17" display. But then people always seem to tell me that they don't understand how I can read my display, so maybe I am not the norm. (Certainly not THE Norm.)
I think that some of this comes from the 'bellheads' and the fact that in the long distance business they always got paid for originating or terminating access, on top of the payment for your monthly 'local service'. I keep getting the feeling that they want to apply that sort of a model to the Internet. What they need to do is get their heads around the fact that this is more like selling me a data pipe and they are excluded from what is going on inside of it. If they want more than the monthly DSL or cable modem fees, then they need to come up with a plan for delivering better content and doing it more efficiently than Google or Apple or whomever. If they can do that, they can make the extra money that they want. Unfortunately, I think that they know that the nature of their companies makes doing that nearly impossible, so they are forced to try to legislate their way into the other money stream. It doesn't help that many politicians do not realize that there are quite of few people out there with only one or two viable options for broadband, so if this happens some people won't have the choice to opt out.
The other option that I see for them is to create another product. Sell their customers a completely 'net neutral' service and offer another service that has their enhancements. If they can make that product enough better, people will choose it over the neutral product and they'll get their extra revenue. The hard part would be for them to not cripple the neutral service to make their alternative look worth having.
But that's just my $0.02 worth on it. (Payment accepted via PayPal!)
I would agree with this. I remember getting a preview over a year before NT came out and yet when we got to NT 4.0, we still didn't have all the stuff that promised for NT 3.1. But at least they were still promising most of it to us. Somehow I think there were a couple of items that still were promised but not fulfilled when we got to Windows 2000. (I'll have to see if I can find my NT preview kit again sometime, I know that it is still around somewhere.) So, I think about believing it all when I can actually see it running, and perhaps not even then.
Public peering points are fine, but some of this may go back to what Johna Till Johnson wrote about in this weeks issue of Network World. She says that the major backbone providers lose money on providing the Intenet backbone links and that the pricing model for this is in need of change. That may be some of what is driving Level 3 in this scenario, since they do carry substantial backbone Internet traffic. Peering points don't really address this since they generally provide a way for more regional people to interconnect and to connect to the backbone providers, but if you build an peering point and none of the big providers come, who carries stuff to the rest of the world? Most of the non-tier 1 providers don't have the pipes to carry that level of traffic. I've seen smaller peering setups built and they generally only serve to provide better access between the local providers, which does have its benefits.
And with the U.N. wanting to take a more active role in the Internet, maybe they need to start trying to manage such things. If it is a utility now, like phone service, maybe we need to do more to regulate how those relationships happen, since I'm sure that if Level 3 decided not to terminate calls from Sprint, someone at the FCC would be on it pretty quickly.
I believe that both John Dvorak and I agree with you on this. There are probably a lot of reasons, control at or near the top of the list, why the record companies don't like the success of the iTunes Music Store. They are just trying to find a reason to pull the plug and be able (with a semi-straight face) say that it was Apple's fault. They will say, we wanted to let you have some songs for less money, but Apple kept that from you. Sure, give us $0.29 songs for the ones that nobody really downloads anyhow to justify charging us $1.79 or $1.99 or more for the 'popular' songs. In the end, it gets them more money and returns more control to the record companies.
I think that we should just shorten this form DUM CD's to just 'digitally unusable discs' or DUDs.
I know that if I know that a CD that I'm looking to purchase has DRM that is going to cause me problems in its enjoyment then I'm not going to buy it. End of story. Hopefully if enough people do that, the message gets through, although we all know that the response will be that sales are falling because of piracy. The recording industry will likely be hard pressed to ever admit that there are other factors in the drop in sales. But then they will likely shovel enough money into the pockets of willing politicians that they will be able to legislate some horrid 'solution'.
I think reading is just so important and yet we have gotten away from the importance of reading, writing and grammar. We just accept anything as valid communications very often. I taught two semesters of remedial algebra while I was in graduate school and that was a frightening experience. Close behind was teaching geometry to budding elementary school teachers. In the algebra classes, the single biggest thing that I saw with the students that cared enough to try to get help was that their reading skills were terrible. And not being able to read well was imparing their ability to learn other things. But, if you spent the time and worked with them to help them read and understand the material, they were very bright kids and could do the work. These kids had just gotten passed on through schools and then were in this program as a last ditch effort to try to keep them out of jail. (This is how the program director described it to me.)
I think the self esteem thing is important but I think that if you are just passing everyone on, then you aren't giving that to anyone. If kids have to work to get through, then they really end up with some value from it. I know that in grad school I got moved from one section of a statistics class to one with a much tougher instructor. (A German professor that nobody seemed to like.) His comments about how dumb American students were motivated me to work hard and I aced the class and learned a ton. But it was real work and I always appreciated that part of it.
Life can be hard and kids need to figure some of that out in school maybe.
Well, the one thing that does make sense in that strategy is that they would potentially be on a common hardware DRM platform with the Wintel market and that has huge advantages if the play is to get into broader media distribution. If it isn't that, then I really don't get why they would go that way. And if you wanted to change CPUs, why not AMD?
Well, I think that it works like this: You get your consumer electronics made overseas and a few thousand people are displaced but millions save money. So, we feel like we came out ahead. Then you move another area of production overseas and it happens again and we feel like we came out ahead. But, if you keep this up long enough, and you aren't adding new higher-end production to our economy, eventually you turn around and see that there aren't very many decent paying jobs left here.
On the other hand, you can protect the jobs here and that will just start trade wars with other countries. Plus, it impacts everyone by raising the cost of consumer goods. We deal with the fact that not only are wages lower in many parts of the world, but so are many of the other cost of doing business. Protecting jobs in this country would likely tend to raise costs further since it would likely discourage competition for those parts of the marketplace.
And it is a problem that things are changing so much more quickly now than in the past and that requires that people be ready to shift their career more often. When cars took over from horses, blacksmiths were becoming obsolete but it took a long time and some of them transitioned into auto repair. Now, things are changing much more rapidly and the changes can be more radical.
It is a thorny problem to be sure and like most things in life, there isn't a clear good choice since it is all about trading one problem for another. I believe that one of the biggest problems in this country is the we tend to focus far to much on the short term impact of things and not make decisions based on the long run.
Just my $0.00 worth. (It's the Internet so it has to be free, right?)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I have seen that several states have talked about doing something like this, including Oregon and California. And in the cases where I have read about this they were looking at this as an addition the existing gasoline tax, not a replacement. And if you don't collect a lot of data and make assumptions about what the vehicles do to the roads, you end up treating all vehicles the same. Suddenly a Hummer is paying the same to use the road as a Toyota Tercel.
I attempted to sign up for a test program that the University of Iowa was launching last year, but did not get picked. I was not a fan of this sort of thing but I was curious and wanted to know what data they would be collecting and how it might be used. I know that the stories I had seen talked about how they wanted to have billing based not only on the number of miles driven but the time of day and where they were driven. So, you might pay less on a rural highway than a congested city street. You would pay more for travel in the city at rush hours than after hours. (I think of this when I see the IBM commercial where they talk about a system of fees or something that helped a city reduce congestion.)
Nonetheless, it is intrusive, but then so might be the smart grid and other technologies. I guess we should just get used to not having our privacy.
It is one of the things that they have talked about in the studies of this technology. They will be able to charge differently for driving in different locations. Charges could vary by the demands of some types of roads. That could be bad for people that live in rural areas without much traffic since they could decide that they will charge them more for that road use. I do think that lawnmowers and chainsaws probably don't impact the overall numbers too much though in most places.
I agree. And it disables the incentive that the gas tax gives and it treats all mileage the same. In other words, if I'm driving a big heavy vehicle that wears the roads more than a smaller lighter vehicle, I pay the same. A tractor-trailer rig pays the same per mile as a Prius? I do understand it from the perspective of alternative fuel vehicles that are/will not pay the gas tax. We need to find alternative funding, but I don't like this solution.
This reminds me of a story from Network World a few years ago (maybe 9 or 10) which talked about how Stanford University had a Class A and several class B networks and re-addressed themselves into the B's and gave the A back. In the same article the network administrator for MIT (I believe it was) said that they didn't see there was being an IP shortage and was not considering giving any of the class A network that they have back to ARIN. I worked for a place at one point that had three Class B networks and some class C networks and we could have very easily existed in on class B since we were using under 20,000 IPs, but nobody was interested in trying to rework things to give any back. At the end of the day, I think more emphasis should have been given to migration planning for IPV6 and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
There are routers out there that will take two or more WAN inputs. I have owned two different Linksys models that do that and they work okay. You can do load balancing or failover with the ones that I have had. The load balancing is essentially session based, so if you were doing a big download, you wouldn't get the speed of both lines, just the one that was handling that session. But for a lot of things you do use both links.
Here are the ones that I have owned:
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1123638171618&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=7161822279B08
and
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1123638171675&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=7167522279B09
The top one is about $150 and supports VPN as well. I've seen similar boxes from other vendors and you can do this with Linux/BSD as well.
Are many of these companies the same ones to which the governments of the U.S. have given tax breaks, rate hikes and other incentives totalling billions of dollars over the last 12 years or so to build a high speed infrastructure. An infrastructure that, at the consumer end at least, does not exist in most places. And so now they are telling the FCC that if the give the service that people expect when they buy Internet access, it will require more expenses and this will lead to further rate increases. Color me shocked! I think they have already had far more immunity than they deserve and they need to start giving their customers the services that they already have been paying for over a decade.
But to quote Dennis Miller, "That's just my opinion and I could be wrong."
I seem to remember this subject coming up on Slashdot before. It was to be expected, right? It was written into the more recent laws, at the behest of our telco buddies, that new technology infrastructure would be exempt from the old rules for sharing. (They argued that it wouldn't be built if they knew that it would have to be shared on a cost plus basis with competitors.) And if you can save money and make it harder on the competition while at the same time get your customers to push for your new fiber service, what corporation wouldn't do that? The assumption has to be that they can roll FIOS fast enough that they don't end up with massive failures in copper lines before the cutover.
And I'm still wondering when consumers will start asking the knuckleheads we send to Washington to represent us why we have allowed the telcos to rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits over the last 10 years or so, supposedly to pay for this new infrastructure, and we still don't have much of it. And they still are milking us for even more money on the way there too. It is totally infuriating to me and I used to work in the telco world.
It is interesting that I did a search on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and was taken to a nice PDF document from the Rio conference that does not, so far as I could see, in Article 3 or anywhere else in the document, specify that 1990 is to be used as the base of measuremnt. It does mention that there are targets to reduce emissions to 1990 levels or lower, but I did not see a specific identification of 1990 as the jointly agreed upon base year of reference.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
So, who knows from that. With so many axes to grind out there, I'm surprised we have any trees left in the world.
In point of fact, I think that they do encourage self-flagellation. There are options out there and yet people choose to use MS products, so they choose to put themselves in that position of abuse.
And that remindes me, I need to go run Windows Update, there are patches awaiting.
Right, but wasn't this reported a while back and the statement was made that MS had earlier argued in court that they should be allowed to count all of the individual copies sold overseas for deductions on their taxes. And now they are arguing the other side for the purposes of the AT&T patent infringement case. I just think that they should have to choose a side for the argument. If they claim for the purposes of US tax accounting that all of the copies sold originate here, then that holds for the AT&T case. If they are willing to give up the additional deductions and pay the back taxes and penalties, then they can have this ruling. They just shouldn't be able to have both.
But then I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television.
In reference to this and an earlier comment about there not having been mentioned (or remembered) the R-squared value for the CO2 to temperature graph, it is important to remind people that the R-squared value shows us correlation, not cause and effect. It indicated how much the two lines move together. If you have graphs of X and Y and they have a high R-squared value, then with a proper theory (and X moving in advance of Y by some margin), you can make an argument that X causes Y. By itself, a high value of R-squared doesn't tell anyone much beyond the degree to which the things appear to move together. And I don't know if anyone has done significant work to determine if the proxies used to get time and CO2 measurements are sufficient clear of one another. The temperature proxies for some of the ice bores is the level of deuterium present, but I don't recall ever seeing someone saying that higher or lower deuterium levels were responsible the temperature. The argument is that there is a strong relationship observed between the surface temperature and the snow deuterium content.
Right! This has always been my concern with some levels of competitive telecommunications. The people that compete will go for the high return markets and take the customers there while leaving the incumbent carrier, who is obligated to provide services in most cases, with more and more of the lower return areas. I grew up in a rural area and have worked for several telecom companies and have watched this sort of thing many times.
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But, when the CLEC I worked for at one time was doing a hybrid/fiber-coax build around 10 years ago, I remember a city official bemoaning the fact that they hadn't nailed us for a whole litany of free services as part of the franchise agreement. All I could think was, "If the existing carriers have this agreement, fine but otherwise why should I be burdened." And our build was targetted initially to the lower middle-class areas because of higher density and returns for the investment. The franchise agreement did require that we cover all of the city with more than 10 homes per mile within five years. But since we were doing phone service, we would have been taking customers from Qwest and never going near the smaller towns or rural areas that they were supporting around us. So eventually, I had to think that phone service to rural areas would have to be cross-company subsidized or would just become incredibly expensive.
On a more positive note, a friend just IM'd me that SureWest Communications in Sacramento is now offering 50Mbps broadband service which would be a nice thing to have. Hopefully they don't figure out how to apply their usage caps.
http://cbs13.com/topstories/local_story_079001010
The phone company in my old home town has had VDSL service with switch digital video for several years, but they are in a market where nobody would likely ever come and try to compete beyond the cable company. The two towns they serve have about 8,500 people, so it is nice to see them marching forward with technology. I guess in the end it often seems like you need a well regulated monopoly or a publicly owned infrastructure because there are places where pure capitalism doesn't always work well.
I guess if one takes the word of the Apple spec sheet for the Apple TV box, it plays:
H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): Up to 5 Mbps, Progressive Main Profile (CAVLC) with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps, 960 by 540 pixels at 30 fps)
iTunes Store purchased video: 320 by 240 pixels or 640 by 480 pixels
MPEG-4: Up to 3 Mbps, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 720 by 432 pixels at 30 fps)
So, it isn't quite as limited as so seem to say that it is. I'm willing to take a look, but I'm happy streaming to my Buffalo LinkTheatre and am looking forward to trying out the Galaxy Metal Gear 3500IPTV box when it gets here. I may try out the Apple TV just because I own a Mac and I like to tinker with such things, but at this point I wouldn't described myself as excited about it. I don't see it giving me much that I don't get with my Elgato EyeHome unit, except for the iTunes content access and the EyeHome has other nice features. (I wonder why Elgate quit selling it.)
But that's just my $0.00 worth. (Yeah, it's free and worth every penny.)
I think that there is general agreement that the planet has undergone numerous significant temperature shifts over the its life. And on the topic of global warming or a global climate change, I'm not sure that there is that much dissent. I think the question is really whether or not the current upswing in temperatures is the result of something that humans are doing or something else. It strikes me as somewhat odd that the planet can undergo a number of changes over time and yet this one must be our fault. I think that is part of the problem in the discussion, can we talk about other possible causes and is there a way to know what is causing this with a high degree of certainty. Computer models are only as good as the data that they use and the assumptions on which they are built. Since we have evidence of increasing CO2 levels and warmer average temperature, a model trying to fit those things with an assumption about CO2 causing the temperature to rise, will tend to show higher temperatures as we inject more CO2 into the atmosphere. And it would seem that models with the most extreme outcomes would be the ones to garner the most coverage in the press since saying that not much is going to happen isn't very newsworthy.
A good part of my academic career was focused in statistics and it is pretty common for people to see two events moving in concert and attribute a cause and effect relationship to them, whether or not one exists. I even did support of mathematical and statistical software at one university and we were under direction to not correct obviously flawed research by professors and graduate students. (Maybe that was meant to be caught in the peer review process.) A and B happening in relative concert doesn't mean that A causes B. Perhaps C causes A and B. Recently there have been articles about warming on Mars and the melting of its polar caps. While one might try to attribute this to the effect of humankind since we do have technology there, it seems that a common outside influence is more likely if both are happening.
Hopefully people can keep a somewhat open mind about the whole topic and work toward better understanding of the issues.
I work in an IT shop for a moderate sized company and our VP has told the people under him that have those things that he expects responses to e-mails within a couple of hours 24x7. And he has chewed out my boss, who currently doesn't have a device like that, for not responding to e-mails when he was on vacation. The problem here is that the VP lives with that thing attached to him and does e-mail while on vacation, so he expect that from pretty much everyone else. Seems like a good recipe for burning out a lot of good employees.
Well, if that is the way one should decide where not to give your vote, virtually nobody would ever vote, since I cannot imagine that anyone is in 100% agreement with the views of any candidate. I cannot envision a candidate where at some point I'm probably not going to think they are on the wrong side of the issue. In fact, it is annoying how often that happens with all of the people I have ever given my vote. At the end of the day, you have to try to pick the best of the available candidates and sometimes I think that voting for the lesser of two (or more) evils is the way we try to nudge the future candidates choices. So far, that strategy isn't working to well. As for completely uninformed voters, it is a mixed bag at best. And as someone else has said, uniformed is in the eyes of the beholder. I'm sure plenty of people feel informed when they are really not so much.
And I have to wonder on what we are running 1920x1200 resolution? I just upgraded to a 24" LCD and am running 1920x1200 on all desktop systems via that display. I run 1600x1200 on the 15" display of my ThinkPad and it is fine. If you translate the pixel density of this display, you get 1920x1200 on a 17" widescreen display (like the Apple MacBook Pro 17"). So, 24" makes that quite a lot larger. Personally, I would buy a MB Pro today if they could do 1920x1200 on the 17" display. But then people always seem to tell me that they don't understand how I can read my display, so maybe I am not the norm. (Certainly not THE Norm.)
I think that some of this comes from the 'bellheads' and the fact that in the long distance business they always got paid for originating or terminating access, on top of the payment for your monthly 'local service'. I keep getting the feeling that they want to apply that sort of a model to the Internet. What they need to do is get their heads around the fact that this is more like selling me a data pipe and they are excluded from what is going on inside of it. If they want more than the monthly DSL or cable modem fees, then they need to come up with a plan for delivering better content and doing it more efficiently than Google or Apple or whomever. If they can do that, they can make the extra money that they want. Unfortunately, I think that they know that the nature of their companies makes doing that nearly impossible, so they are forced to try to legislate their way into the other money stream. It doesn't help that many politicians do not realize that there are quite of few people out there with only one or two viable options for broadband, so if this happens some people won't have the choice to opt out.
The other option that I see for them is to create another product. Sell their customers a completely 'net neutral' service and offer another service that has their enhancements. If they can make that product enough better, people will choose it over the neutral product and they'll get their extra revenue. The hard part would be for them to not cripple the neutral service to make their alternative look worth having.
But that's just my $0.02 worth on it.
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I would agree with this. I remember getting a preview over a year before NT came out and yet when we got to NT 4.0, we still didn't have all the stuff that promised for NT 3.1. But at least they were still promising most of it to us. Somehow I think there were a couple of items that still were promised but not fulfilled when we got to Windows 2000. (I'll have to see if I can find my NT preview kit again sometime, I know that it is still around somewhere.) So, I think about believing it all when I can actually see it running, and perhaps not even then.
Public peering points are fine, but some of this may go back to what Johna Till Johnson wrote about in this weeks issue of Network World. She says that the major backbone providers lose money on providing the Intenet backbone links and that the pricing model for this is in need of change. That may be some of what is driving Level 3 in this scenario, since they do carry substantial backbone Internet traffic. Peering points don't really address this since they generally provide a way for more regional people to interconnect and to connect to the backbone providers, but if you build an peering point and none of the big providers come, who carries stuff to the rest of the world? Most of the non-tier 1 providers don't have the pipes to carry that level of traffic. I've seen smaller peering setups built and they generally only serve to provide better access between the local providers, which does have its benefits.
And with the U.N. wanting to take a more active role in the Internet, maybe they need to start trying to manage such things. If it is a utility now, like phone service, maybe we need to do more to regulate how those relationships happen, since I'm sure that if Level 3 decided not to terminate calls from Sprint, someone at the FCC would be on it pretty quickly.
I believe that both John Dvorak and I agree with you on this. There are probably a lot of reasons, control at or near the top of the list, why the record companies don't like the success of the iTunes Music Store. They are just trying to find a reason to pull the plug and be able (with a semi-straight face) say that it was Apple's fault. They will say, we wanted to let you have some songs for less money, but Apple kept that from you. Sure, give us $0.29 songs for the ones that nobody really downloads anyhow to justify charging us $1.79 or $1.99 or more for the 'popular' songs. In the end, it gets them more money and returns more control to the record companies.
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For Dvoraks comments: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1862166,00.a
I think that we should just shorten this form DUM CD's to just 'digitally unusable discs' or DUDs.
I know that if I know that a CD that I'm looking to purchase has DRM that is going to cause me problems in its enjoyment then I'm not going to buy it. End of story. Hopefully if enough people do that, the message gets through, although we all know that the response will be that sales are falling because of piracy. The recording industry will likely be hard pressed to ever admit that there are other factors in the drop in sales. But then they will likely shovel enough money into the pockets of willing politicians that they will be able to legislate some horrid 'solution'.
Wow. Nice start.
I think reading is just so important and yet we have gotten away from the importance of reading, writing and grammar. We just accept anything as valid communications very often. I taught two semesters of remedial algebra while I was in graduate school and that was a frightening experience. Close behind was teaching geometry to budding elementary school teachers. In the algebra classes, the single biggest thing that I saw with the students that cared enough to try to get help was that their reading skills were terrible. And not being able to read well was imparing their ability to learn other things. But, if you spent the time and worked with them to help them read and understand the material, they were very bright kids and could do the work. These kids had just gotten passed on through schools and then were in this program as a last ditch effort to try to keep them out of jail. (This is how the program director described it to me.)
I think the self esteem thing is important but I think that if you are just passing everyone on, then you aren't giving that to anyone. If kids have to work to get through, then they really end up with some value from it. I know that in grad school I got moved from one section of a statistics class to one with a much tougher instructor. (A German professor that nobody seemed to like.) His comments about how dumb American students were motivated me to work hard and I aced the class and learned a ton. But it was real work and I always appreciated that part of it.
Life can be hard and kids need to figure some of that out in school maybe.
Well, the one thing that does make sense in that strategy is that they would potentially be on a common hardware DRM platform with the Wintel market and that has huge advantages if the play is to get into broader media distribution. If it isn't that, then I really don't get why they would go that way. And if you wanted to change CPUs, why not AMD?
Well, I think that it works like this: You get your consumer electronics made overseas and a few thousand people are displaced but millions save money. So, we feel like we came out ahead. Then you move another area of production overseas and it happens again and we feel like we came out ahead. But, if you keep this up long enough, and you aren't adding new higher-end production to our economy, eventually you turn around and see that there aren't very many decent paying jobs left here.
On the other hand, you can protect the jobs here and that will just start trade wars with other countries. Plus, it impacts everyone by raising the cost of consumer goods. We deal with the fact that not only are wages lower in many parts of the world, but so are many of the other cost of doing business. Protecting jobs in this country would likely tend to raise costs further since it would likely discourage competition for those parts of the marketplace.
And it is a problem that things are changing so much more quickly now than in the past and that requires that people be ready to shift their career more often. When cars took over from horses, blacksmiths were becoming obsolete but it took a long time and some of them transitioned into auto repair. Now, things are changing much more rapidly and the changes can be more radical.
It is a thorny problem to be sure and like most things in life, there isn't a clear good choice since it is all about trading one problem for another. I believe that one of the biggest problems in this country is the we tend to focus far to much on the short term impact of things and not make decisions based on the long run.
Just my $0.00 worth. (It's the Internet so it has to be free, right?)