Interesting point about bandwidth growth -vs- usage growth. So long as the demand increases slower than the rate of increase of technology, the ISPs should be okay. But I don't know if I would want to bank my business model on it.
I would love to see some real numbers on this. I'll have to do some searching. Thanks.
I like your idea for standardizing the meaning of unlimited, and basing it on hours of downloading and times makes perfect sense. That would be great.
I see your point about the bandwidth cost, but here is my contention. (I'm not sure how to communicate this without a drawing.) Suppose they size the local subnet bandwidth to a certain amount, and offer you some maximum based on your formula. That's fine. Now, over 3 years everyone goes from using 50% of their cap to 90% of their cap. Soon, the ISP needs to upgrade the bandwidth to the local subnet so they can offer a new service with a higher cap. Unfortunately they are making the same amount of money today as they did 3 years ago. A smart company would have planned ahead for this, and asked "how much do we need to charge customers so that we can bank enough money that in 3 years we can upgrade our infrastructure?" But it is impossible to know future bandwidth costs, or how long before the pipe is saturated. Compare this to the cost-per-gigabyte approach. In the same scenario, as the user approaches that 90% mark the company makes more money which provides the capital needed to pay for the upgrade. Simultaneously, the customer will try to reduce bandwidth to save money. The rules of supply and demand now apply. This same thing happens with electricity -- when electricity rates are fixed (such as happened in several US states for a little while) the customer uses the same amount of electricity when the infrastructure is at 90% capacity as when it was at 50% capacity. This lead to brownouts.
The key difference here is that electricity is billed per usage while bandwidth is billed at a fixed rate. The telecom companies made money with this deceitful "unlimited" practice and now it is coming back to bite them. We are going to have to go through growing pains for a while until this mostly political issue is resolved.
This isn't for everyone, but if you fit the demographic it is truly sweet.
I have never really watched television much. BBSs followed by the Internet have been my entertainment for a long time. When I got married we got cable but never really used it. Then came Dattebayo, then Netflix, then redbox, then hulu and crunchyroll and Windows Media Center... I can't think of anything I want to watch that I can't get online cheaper and more easily.
So just last week I bought an ASRock HTPC to replace my aging silent pc build and it is better than any HTPC I could have made myself. Oddly enough I am finally watching TV again. There is more content, available any time I want, in better quality, for less money. I am thinking of buying one for my semi-computer-illiterate mother-in-law because it is so easy to use, and it will pay for itself in about a year of cable TV. I just need to see if she can stream Jeopardy.
In principle, it should be difficult to overturn a patent. If a patent merely had a 50/50 chance of holding-up in court, then they become nearly worthless. That gives less protection to inventors. The point of issuing the patent is firmly assert that this is an invention.
In practice, the patent office is not doing their job. They are issuing garbage patents and not re-examining them. But is the appropriate solution to take the power away from that office? Are we so sure that the courts and juries are better judges of the validity of a patent?
The patent office should be the most qualified entity for determining the validity of a patent. But that isn't something the courts can address. That is up to Congress who established and administers that office.
<rant> It seems to me that we have many government offices failing to do their jobs. We have monopolies everywhere (oil companies, phone company consolidating, cable companies buying media componies) and the DOJ and FTC are not intervening. Police departments are in constant scandal (I live in Baltimore, so maybe I am biased by our local police.) We have a patent office that issues patents for everything with the word "on the internet" in the summary. We have a DHS who spends millions of dollars on airport bomb-sniffing machines before even testing to see if they work. Congress can't cut more than 1% of the budget even though the interest payments will eclipse our ability to pay it back in the next decade.
I think the legislating and executive branches are failing at administering the country. </rant>
Every safety feature costs money. The question always is "how much does it cost?" That doesn't change when moving to the public sector. There is still a finite amount of money.
Would it be economically viable to overbuild it? Would the taxpayers be willing to pay for it? Would that necessarily even solve the problems? I wonder if it would even have been physically possible to overbuild Fukushima to withstand this assault.
your DVD player cannot display an arbitrary frame rate either.
Can you explain why you say that? What limits them?
Although the DVD format spec limits the officially supported frame rates, there is no technical reason that the player cannot support additional frame rates. Many players support other formats that are more robust, such as VCD, AVI, WMV, etc. People who have computers connected to their TVs also see this benefit.
Taking this discussion a step further, the Blu-ray fixes this problem by allowing a whole lot of different frame rates.
There's no reason to do these conversions any longer. They are a relic from the time when video frame rates were tied to the CRT refresh rate. But today, a movie could be at 27.6348 fps, or 10 x pi fps, or any other arbitrary number. Each frame should be sent to the screen at whatever rate the source video is. The LCD or plasma display would update the frame as it gets data.
Now help me out with projectors since I don't know much about them -- but would would 3:2 pulldown apply there? The frame rate of a projector is the speed at which the film is pulled through. So if you were given a film at 30fps you just pull that film through 25% faster than film at 24fps. Projector back lights turn off while it advances the film, so the back light would also need to flicker 25% faster. But there are already markers on the film to tell the projector to do this so it stays in sync. So I suspect that part would happen automatically.
Or do they make projectors so that they only pull the film through at a fixed rate? That seems dumb.
I hope this takes off. I have always wanted higher FPS in movies, even regular 2D films it just isn't enough. An object will not look like it is in fluid motion unless there is overlap between where it was in the first frame, and where it was in the next frame. At 24fps you can lose this.
The problem is especially visible in action scenes and scenes with high parallax. For example, I have watched scenes that pan horizontally across a wide field. The trees and grass in the foreground look like stop motion because a tall blade of grass is on the left in one frame and in the middle of the next frame. There is nothing to indicate that it moved. They compensate for this by keeping the foreground out of focus so the eye is not drawn to it.
The most recent Iron Man movie suffers from this in the scenes where Black Widow flips over an opponent in sub-second time and there are only a few discrete frames. In one frame she is in front of the opponent and the next she is upside-down above them - there was no motion, she just appeared there. (Some of this could be blamed on over-the-top CG effects that exceeded the budget - it isn't worth the time and money animate/render all those frames.) They compensate for this by constantly changing the camera angle, or by switching in and out of bullet-time.
I bet if people saw 48fps 2D video it would be like seeing HD for the first time. People would probably go "whoa!" and not even realize what was so special about it.
P.S. Another example of this is when an animated feature switches from hand-drawn animation to CG, or overlaps the two. The CG elements are perfectly fluid while the hand-drawn elements are often only a few FPS.)
Happy: Science teachers should most definitely explore controversial topics. All teachers should explore controversial topics. That is a fundamental part of teaching. Sad: Does this mean that prior to this law, a teacher could not discuss a controversial topic? That is frightening!
I don't understand the criticism though:
Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom.
How so? It seems like it would do the opposite by allowing good science without fear of political reprisal.
...protect teachers from discipline if they help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught..."biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." The bill also says that its "shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine."
Because Myriad owned the patents, testing on these two genes could only take place in Myriad’s own labs – meaning that others could not develop tests on those genes, depriving women from alternative (and cheaper) tests...in March 2010, the district court found in the plaintiffs’ favor and invalidated the patents....
I think Algebra I is what most people take in Junior High. Or pre-algebra.
Your statement is evidence of why Algebra II is such a good indicator. If someone hasn't completed it by 12th grade, they probably aren't the brightest bulb in the lot, and they probably aren't college bound. So forcing them to take it earlier just means that whatever other course they missed will become the leading predictor of success.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. Most people assume that tests can never actually tell you anything, and that is flat out wrong. I felt this way until I worked for a company that made some really good tests and I saw the math and science that went into them. Creating a good test isn't just a function of slapping together a bunch of multiple choice questions about the material. A good test requires good psychometrics which is a blend of psychology and statistics that allows you to create a test that measures one's actual ability. That is a test where you can't just teach to the test.
I would love to know if the standardized tests that people complain about are actually as bad as the public thinks. Teachers try to "teach to the test" but does that actually work? If so, on what tests? I know the SAT is not a test you can teach to - it is a test that measures the likelihood of success in college, and to that end the test is amazingly good at it. There is a very strong correlation between people who do well on the SAT and people who do well in college. Despite the complaints about it, the test does exactly what it was supposed to do. If you teach someone to do well on the SAT, you will consequently teach them to do well in college.
You are 100% correct. This is why we don't need fewer tests: we need better tests.
Demanding standardized tests without really knowing what makes for good tests
There is nothing wrong with citizens demanding a standardized test, or legislators passing the laws requiring them. But we cannot expect Citizen A or Senator Z to know what makes a good test any more than they know what makes a good road surface. They don't make the tests or build the roads. But when they mandate that a road should be built we expect the state highway administration to set appropriate guidelines for the road surface. And we should expect school administrators to hire people who design good tests.
The responsibility lies with those school administrators and the teachers. If the teacher is teaching to the test, then they should be complaining that the test is not valid.
The FSF wants all software released under a free software license. So it really isn't news that they want Javascript software released under a free software license.
Let me sum up the article, minus the propaganda: Russia has launched a new satellite that takes infrared pictures of earth. The Russian space agency is using those to produce false color images. They look really cool, and it is a big success.
Unfortunately, the tone of the article is "OMG! Did the Russians do something better than us Americans! It cannot be! But don't worry citizens: the American government can explain it away! Their camera is really only as good as our cameras, but they are post-processing the images to look like they are better! Go red white and blue!"
It makes me think of the Butter Battle Book, by Dr. Seuss. We don't need another cold war, so please I hope they tone down the rhetoric.
Maybe Google can replace the Google van with Google drones that use this technology. Can you imagine seeing a dozen of these flying through your neighborhood?
They should just offer an alternative set of glasses with the same polarization in both lenses. You could probably do this in 15 minutes with 2 pairs of glasses and some tape.
Nevermind, I misread the summary as saying "inside the reactor vessel" but it really says "inside reactor two."
The radiation level at a pool of water in the turbine room of reactor two was measured recently at 1,000 millisieverts per hour. At that level, workers could remain in the area for just 15 minutes, under current exposure guidelines.
Also:
"My recommendation is they should consider establishing a small commission to independently convert the data into comprehensible units of risk for the public so people know what they are dealing with and can take sensible decisions," he added.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point about bandwidth growth -vs- usage growth. So long as the demand increases slower than the rate of increase of technology, the ISPs should be okay. But I don't know if I would want to bank my business model on it.
I would love to see some real numbers on this. I'll have to do some searching. Thanks.
Wow, that is food for thought.
I like your idea for standardizing the meaning of unlimited, and basing it on hours of downloading and times makes perfect sense. That would be great.
I see your point about the bandwidth cost, but here is my contention. (I'm not sure how to communicate this without a drawing.) Suppose they size the local subnet bandwidth to a certain amount, and offer you some maximum based on your formula. That's fine. Now, over 3 years everyone goes from using 50% of their cap to 90% of their cap. Soon, the ISP needs to upgrade the bandwidth to the local subnet so they can offer a new service with a higher cap. Unfortunately they are making the same amount of money today as they did 3 years ago. A smart company would have planned ahead for this, and asked "how much do we need to charge customers so that we can bank enough money that in 3 years we can upgrade our infrastructure?" But it is impossible to know future bandwidth costs, or how long before the pipe is saturated. Compare this to the cost-per-gigabyte approach. In the same scenario, as the user approaches that 90% mark the company makes more money which provides the capital needed to pay for the upgrade. Simultaneously, the customer will try to reduce bandwidth to save money. The rules of supply and demand now apply. This same thing happens with electricity -- when electricity rates are fixed (such as happened in several US states for a little while) the customer uses the same amount of electricity when the infrastructure is at 90% capacity as when it was at 50% capacity. This lead to brownouts.
The key difference here is that electricity is billed per usage while bandwidth is billed at a fixed rate. The telecom companies made money with this deceitful "unlimited" practice and now it is coming back to bite them. We are going to have to go through growing pains for a while until this mostly political issue is resolved.
This isn't for everyone, but if you fit the demographic it is truly sweet.
I have never really watched television much. BBSs followed by the Internet have been my entertainment for a long time. When I got married we got cable but never really used it. Then came Dattebayo, then Netflix, then redbox, then hulu and crunchyroll and Windows Media Center... I can't think of anything I want to watch that I can't get online cheaper and more easily.
So just last week I bought an ASRock HTPC to replace my aging silent pc build and it is better than any HTPC I could have made myself. Oddly enough I am finally watching TV again. There is more content, available any time I want, in better quality, for less money. I am thinking of buying one for my semi-computer-illiterate mother-in-law because it is so easy to use, and it will pay for itself in about a year of cable TV. I just need to see if she can stream Jeopardy.
Buy one:
ASRock Core 100HT-BD2
ASRock ION330 HT-BD
ASRock HTPC list @ newegg
In principle, it should be difficult to overturn a patent. If a patent merely had a 50/50 chance of holding-up in court, then they become nearly worthless. That gives less protection to inventors. The point of issuing the patent is firmly assert that this is an invention.
In practice, the patent office is not doing their job. They are issuing garbage patents and not re-examining them. But is the appropriate solution to take the power away from that office? Are we so sure that the courts and juries are better judges of the validity of a patent?
The patent office should be the most qualified entity for determining the validity of a patent. But that isn't something the courts can address. That is up to Congress who established and administers that office.
<rant>
It seems to me that we have many government offices failing to do their jobs. We have monopolies everywhere (oil companies, phone company consolidating, cable companies buying media componies) and the DOJ and FTC are not intervening. Police departments are in constant scandal (I live in Baltimore, so maybe I am biased by our local police.) We have a patent office that issues patents for everything with the word "on the internet" in the summary. We have a DHS who spends millions of dollars on airport bomb-sniffing machines before even testing to see if they work. Congress can't cut more than 1% of the budget even though the interest payments will eclipse our ability to pay it back in the next decade.
I think the legislating and executive branches are failing at administering the country.
</rant>
We weren't talking about the Video DVD standard.
Every safety feature costs money. The question always is "how much does it cost?" That doesn't change when moving to the public sector. There is still a finite amount of money.
Would it be economically viable to overbuild it? Would the taxpayers be willing to pay for it? Would that necessarily even solve the problems? I wonder if it would even have been physically possible to overbuild Fukushima to withstand this assault.
I have 2 DVD players at home. Both are able to play AVI files I have ranging from 15fps to 60fps.
your DVD player cannot display an arbitrary frame rate either.
Can you explain why you say that? What limits them?
Although the DVD format spec limits the officially supported frame rates, there is no technical reason that the player cannot support additional frame rates. Many players support other formats that are more robust, such as VCD, AVI, WMV, etc. People who have computers connected to their TVs also see this benefit.
Taking this discussion a step further, the Blu-ray fixes this problem by allowing a whole lot of different frame rates.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that the actor actually moved that fast. :-)
What do you mean by "strobing" in this case?
There's no reason to do these conversions any longer. They are a relic from the time when video frame rates were tied to the CRT refresh rate. But today, a movie could be at 27.6348 fps, or 10 x pi fps, or any other arbitrary number. Each frame should be sent to the screen at whatever rate the source video is. The LCD or plasma display would update the frame as it gets data.
Now help me out with projectors since I don't know much about them -- but would would 3:2 pulldown apply there? The frame rate of a projector is the speed at which the film is pulled through. So if you were given a film at 30fps you just pull that film through 25% faster than film at 24fps. Projector back lights turn off while it advances the film, so the back light would also need to flicker 25% faster. But there are already markers on the film to tell the projector to do this so it stays in sync. So I suspect that part would happen automatically.
Or do they make projectors so that they only pull the film through at a fixed rate? That seems dumb.
I hope this takes off. I have always wanted higher FPS in movies, even regular 2D films it just isn't enough. An object will not look like it is in fluid motion unless there is overlap between where it was in the first frame, and where it was in the next frame. At 24fps you can lose this.
The problem is especially visible in action scenes and scenes with high parallax. For example, I have watched scenes that pan horizontally across a wide field. The trees and grass in the foreground look like stop motion because a tall blade of grass is on the left in one frame and in the middle of the next frame. There is nothing to indicate that it moved. They compensate for this by keeping the foreground out of focus so the eye is not drawn to it.
The most recent Iron Man movie suffers from this in the scenes where Black Widow flips over an opponent in sub-second time and there are only a few discrete frames. In one frame she is in front of the opponent and the next she is upside-down above them - there was no motion, she just appeared there. (Some of this could be blamed on over-the-top CG effects that exceeded the budget - it isn't worth the time and money animate/render all those frames.) They compensate for this by constantly changing the camera angle, or by switching in and out of bullet-time.
I bet if people saw 48fps 2D video it would be like seeing HD for the first time. People would probably go "whoa!" and not even realize what was so special about it.
P.S. Another example of this is when an animated feature switches from hand-drawn animation to CG, or overlaps the two. The CG elements are perfectly fluid while the hand-drawn elements are often only a few FPS.)
I tried to click the link, but my employer blocks thoughtcrime.org.
Happy: Science teachers should most definitely explore controversial topics. All teachers should explore controversial topics. That is a fundamental part of teaching.
Sad: Does this mean that prior to this law, a teacher could not discuss a controversial topic? That is frightening!
I don't understand the criticism though:
Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom.
How so? It seems like it would do the opposite by allowing good science without fear of political reprisal.
...protect teachers from discipline if they help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught..."biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." The bill also says that its "shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine."
The EFF is fighting a similar battle over a patent on a gene that increases the risk of breast cancer. Appeals Court Hears Argument in the "Breast Cancer Gene" Case
Because Myriad owned the patents, testing on these two genes could only take place in Myriad’s own labs – meaning that others could not develop tests on those genes, depriving women from alternative (and cheaper) tests...in March 2010, the district court found in the plaintiffs’ favor and invalidated the patents....
Don't most people take Algebra II in Junior High?
I think Algebra I is what most people take in Junior High. Or pre-algebra.
Your statement is evidence of why Algebra II is such a good indicator. If someone hasn't completed it by 12th grade, they probably aren't the brightest bulb in the lot, and they probably aren't college bound. So forcing them to take it earlier just means that whatever other course they missed will become the leading predictor of success.
I'm glad someone pointed this out. Most people assume that tests can never actually tell you anything, and that is flat out wrong. I felt this way until I worked for a company that made some really good tests and I saw the math and science that went into them. Creating a good test isn't just a function of slapping together a bunch of multiple choice questions about the material. A good test requires good psychometrics which is a blend of psychology and statistics that allows you to create a test that measures one's actual ability. That is a test where you can't just teach to the test.
I would love to know if the standardized tests that people complain about are actually as bad as the public thinks. Teachers try to "teach to the test" but does that actually work? If so, on what tests? I know the SAT is not a test you can teach to - it is a test that measures the likelihood of success in college, and to that end the test is amazingly good at it. There is a very strong correlation between people who do well on the SAT and people who do well in college. Despite the complaints about it, the test does exactly what it was supposed to do. If you teach someone to do well on the SAT, you will consequently teach them to do well in college.
You are 100% correct. This is why we don't need fewer tests: we need better tests.
Demanding standardized tests without really knowing what makes for good tests
There is nothing wrong with citizens demanding a standardized test, or legislators passing the laws requiring them. But we cannot expect Citizen A or Senator Z to know what makes a good test any more than they know what makes a good road surface. They don't make the tests or build the roads. But when they mandate that a road should be built we expect the state highway administration to set appropriate guidelines for the road surface. And we should expect school administrators to hire people who design good tests.
The responsibility lies with those school administrators and the teachers. If the teacher is teaching to the test, then they should be complaining that the test is not valid.
The FSF wants all software released under a free software license. So it really isn't news that they want Javascript software released under a free software license.
Let me sum up the article, minus the propaganda: Russia has launched a new satellite that takes infrared pictures of earth. The Russian space agency is using those to produce false color images. They look really cool, and it is a big success.
Unfortunately, the tone of the article is "OMG! Did the Russians do something better than us Americans! It cannot be! But don't worry citizens: the American government can explain it away! Their camera is really only as good as our cameras, but they are post-processing the images to look like they are better! Go red white and blue!"
It makes me think of the Butter Battle Book, by Dr. Seuss. We don't need another cold war, so please I hope they tone down the rhetoric.
For anyone interested, Their privacy policy is here. They have done a good job of explaining what they are doing.
Maybe Google can replace the Google van with Google drones that use this technology. Can you imagine seeing a dozen of these flying through your neighborhood?
They should just offer an alternative set of glasses with the same polarization in both lenses. You could probably do this in 15 minutes with 2 pairs of glasses and some tape.
Nevermind, I misread the summary as saying "inside the reactor vessel" but it really says "inside reactor two."
The radiation level at a pool of water in the turbine room of reactor two was measured recently at 1,000 millisieverts per hour. At that level, workers could remain in the area for just 15 minutes, under current exposure guidelines.
Also:
"My recommendation is they should consider establishing a small commission to independently convert the data into comprehensible units of risk for the public so people know what they are dealing with and can take sensible decisions," he added.
Best recommendation I've heard so far.