I'm pretty sure that power usage goes up with transistor count as well.
Yes, but it goes up linearly. Speed causes power to go up polynomially. So the transistor count isn't as significant. Plus, the x86 instruction set doesn't contribute that much to the transistor count.
poor lending standards and people living beyond their means (i.e: greed on everyone's part) that got us into this mess?
What if, the only thing that makes the stock markets rise is artificial inflation? If we aren't producing any longer, or innovating any longer, phony credit is the only way to get the US markets to rise. Hence, those in power will do whatever it takes to build another bubble so they can cash-out this time.
which in its most radical version would bar providers from charging different amounts for different kinds of broadband content.
I've had lots of discussions about network neutrality, and no one has ever mentioned this, except to say that they heard it somewhere. That would have nothing to do with network neutrality, and would simply make no sense. Who actually believes this view, and why do they call it network neutrality?
I think this is just a falsehood made-up by telecom companies to confuse people into thinking network neutrality is something it is not.
hugely controversial topics such as net neutrality,
And of course, this is only controversial in Washington. Amongst techies, it's obvious.
Trains only need one driver for potentially hundreds of people. Although it is funny to think that it is possible to make a taxi with no driver, but a train needs a driver even though it runs on a track.
Are you sure? Have you compared a 33Mhz ARM to a 33Mhz x86 chip? Is the performance that different?
There is no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison here, because I don't think anyone makes x86 chips that are as slow as ARM chips. The instruction set doesn't have that much bearing on performance. But power use goes up according to the square of the voltage, and voltage increases when clock speed increases -- so it is all about the megahertz.
Sounds like an interesting extension that I would not want. It appears that the Mozilla foundation has too much money and is making-up crazy features to keep people employed. Give the money to another project that needs it.
This kind of NPL thing is something a web server should do, not a browser.
The problem is that last part you added, which you have no citation for: "due to human activities."
Of course, the reverse problem is that it does not matter if it is due to human activities or not. Humans are the only species on the planet can stop it. Just because it might happen to be a natural planetary cycle, doesn't mean I'm going to sit around and go "meh, it's natural that my species die. I'll just buy a hummer and accept it."
It depends on what you are doing. 5 frames per second is plenty for text editing, but less than 30 sucks for playing a first person shooter. (That might change if motion blur is added)
Our app was pretty small, but I don't know exactly how many windows or controls.... probably on par with your app. But there was TONS of eye candy. We had a 3rd-party design UI elements in expression blend, and export them to us. We had one button in particular that was thousands of lines long, although we only used it once.
We had lots of resource dictionaries with lots of fonts, colors, gradients, etc. Those files were slow to load and slow to edit. The main XAML code for the screens was the worst though - those were the ones where I could count to 5 between keystrokes. They were much faster if you edited them as XML though. I think there was so much inter-dependency between things that basically, in order to render a particular component, it had to parse through the whole dang app. That's my theory at least.
Most of the screens did not work in the XAML previewer. For one thing, isn't supported, which was used in every screen. That was annoying. But even without that, it would layout the screens wrong so you had to edit blindly and rebuild. Maybe blend would have been better but none of the developers really used it. We had a few custom controls, and the IDE would barf on them. You would get dozens of errors in the errors output in the IDE, but the app would run just fine. That was frustrating.
--
A friend of mine worked for a company, and one of the teams there made a simple database viewer app that was basically a great big grid. Since the grid was WPF, every box in it was a control, and so if you loaded a thousand rows with 10 columns, that was 10,000 controls loaded into memory. Performance was unacceptable. And that was including some kind of optimization in the control, where it only instantiated the controls once they came onto the screen. I imagine writing the same control in WinForms, you would not do something so silly. You would paint gridlines and draw text onto a window. But the WPF mindset wouldn't really jive with that - how would you put an image, or a web page, or a dancing 3D bear into a cell in the data grid if you didn't build it upon WPF controls?
VS2010 = WPF? Interesting...
As for control panel, and wordpad -- I thought those were WPF, just looking at the look and feel. I was thinking, what if they try to write Office in it? THAT would be interesting. Writing Visual Studio in it will satisfy me though. I wonder how much RAM it will take. We already got out of memory errors in our app, on machines with 4GB. I'd hate to try to load that app into VS 2010, unless they do major optimizations.
EXACTLY. For those unfamiliar, let me explain why:
AOL = What a non-neutral internet looks like. And it was why AOL died. AOL would partner with different companies, and those companies would provide content to AOL customers. Eventually, AOL couldn't keep up with the vast amount of content on the open internet, so they lost out. Prodigy and CompuServe used the same exact model.
It kinda made sense back before there were standard protocols like HTTP for providing content, and before it was possible to bill users for the content they viewed.
This is the worst-case scenario for a non-neutral internet. Every ISP that "partnered" with ESPN needs to cancel their deals, so that ESPN is forced to play the game the same way as everyone else.
THANK YOU! I just read 50 posts and finally, someone actually replied with a link to a patent.
NOW I understand -- now that I've read the patent. THEY PATENTED AN API?!?!? *smacks forehead* The patent office has gone to hell. An API definition doesn't even begin to pretend to be patentable.
I figured they patented some algorithm inside of the ADO.NET implementation, or something like that. No - they just patented the structure. Holy hell. If I ever become really really rich, I'm going to hire a ninja to go kick the crap out of some people over in the patent office.
Humorously, my name is almost on one such patent. I worked for a company where we made an XML format, and they tried to patent it. After a few rejections they gave up. While I wanted to have my name on a patent, after reading what they were patenting, I am so glad they didn't get it.
You are welcome to disagree: I'm glad you have a successful project. But what is with calling my argument "rubbish" when I cited two personal examples? Does using that term suddenly negate what I said? Only on the internet are people this way, sheesh.
I won't go into links, but there's lots of reasons WPF is very beta-ish. Off the top of my head:
Lots of known memory leaks
10-fold increase in resource usage
10-fold increase in compile times (To the point where, in my last app, typing a single keystroke in a XAML document took about 5 seconds for the character to appear on screen)
Tools that crash multiple times per day (VS 2008, Expression Blend)
Buggy/incomplete tools: Waaaaaaaaaayyy too many things to list here - No real visual editing tool; The only tools available don't support even the common controls built-in.
XML editing in Visual Studio is great. But XAML editing is totally different. There are times we had to rename something to.XML just to get the IDE to load the file.
WPF at this point is kinda like how ASP.NET was in.NET 1.0. ASP.NET was missing lots of stuff, the designer was nearly useless. Sometimes people just edited the HTML in an outside tool just to avoid Visual Studio messing it up. Judging from history, that means we have about 2 versions to go before WPF is as stable as ASP.NET is now.
My biggest fear is not that WPF is buggy now, but that the foundation is so absurdly inefficient that there's no going back. For example, every single property being a dependency property. I can't imagine what would happen if you made an application the size of Microsoft Office using WPF. As things are now, it would probably require gigs of RAM. Something major has to change either in hardware (I guess that is inevitable) or in the basis of WPF, for it to become useful in apps that are any serious size.
Anybody know if MS is going to use it for anything other than things like the control panel, wordpad, and little apps like that? That would increase my confidence in the ability to use it in something bigger.
Of course! But the customer got no say in the "compromise", they got reduced service for the same costs.
No, you already have the reduced service. You can't download at max rate 24/7. The cap just presents itself in a different way - variable service quality, timeouts, hidden QOS and throttling, etc.
That really is the crux of this. You think your service is reduced when the ISP is really telling you accurately what you already had and making an official solution to the problem instead of hiding it.
You seem to assume that in the years to come ISPs will all of a sudden become generous. What are you basing that assumption on?
History. Comcast has increased their bandwidth every year. 3 years ago I could get You seemed almost pleased to have caps, with no real obvious advantage to yourself. The only thing I can conclude is that maybe you profited by it some other way.*shrugs*
No, you are ignoring my reasoning and resorting to ad hominem attacks. It comes down to this: either accept throttling and secret ISP code that drops packets -- or accept a cap. Your choice. I'll take the cap. It's fair, measurable, and network neutral. The only people who lose-out with the caps is the pirates running FTP sites all day.
P.S. As you pointed out, the government only paid for broadband at schools. The government did not pay anyone to give you broadband at your home. The old "the ISPs got government money, so I want infinite bandwidth and no caps" argument isn't reality.
I know the story, but I don't see how it is relevant here. Microsoft could do the same thing to Java, or anything else for that matter. If the only argument is that "Microsoft might strong-arm you out of the market" then nobody else on the planet should write software.
I agree with you about Novell - my hatred for them is the strongest reason I avoid Mono.
You're glad you're getting less from your ISP even though you're paying them the same amount? Very suspicious... I'm kind of surprised that you would take a cap as apposed to Comcast providing what they originally offered.
Except that what they originally offered is physically impossible. So I'm willing to accept a reasonable compromise.
What? Citation needed.
Not sure what you want a citation on. So let me clarify: Home users don't use bandwidth constantly. Businesses do. That's the big difference, and that is why business internet is more expensive. The original poster was saying that business internet was cheaper, but it sounded like you agreed with me that that isn't true. It is only true if you ignore the fact that the business got charged 100k to run the line, or that it was done for free since they would recoup the cost by selling bandwidth. That's definitely the case with a data center.
There needs to be a tier in-between that is reasonable.
Yes, tiers are good. I know that for my area, Comcast has 3 tiers. They probably need to offer tiers for the bandwidth caps too -- but since they say only 1% of the users would be affected by the proposed caps, there's not much point in offering too many tiers just for them. Didn't the article say that the 60MBps tier has no cap? Seems like a pretty good option to me.
--
Overall, you seem to be assuming that 15Mbps with no caps is possible in a residential setting. If that was the case, then I would agree with you on most of these points. Since it is not possible (at least, not now) reasonable caps make sense. Those caps should increase as new bandwidth is rolled out. There is no reason to assume that won't happen, since bandwidth has gone up over the years - so the caps should too.
I agree that ISPs should be upgrading their capacity instead of throttling. And that the arguments that they can't do it are bogus. But caps are still a necessary and reasonable approach to fixing the problem of the 1% who waaay overuse bandwidth. I'd rather see a reasonable cap than having them block my bittorrent.
Also, I don't think that cable companies got money from the government. Maybe telephone companies did, I dunno. I don't think so though -- they don't get public funds -- they just get the monopoly privileges to lay the cables.
Lastly, I'm flattered I now know enough about telecom that you think I work for an ISP. If you really want to know my resume, I'm not hard to find on the 'nets.
I want to know what the mysterious magical patents are that makes Mono somehow more dangerous than Java, or Flash, or any other framework.
What patents does Microsoft have on.NET? What could they do that magically would make already written and deployed.NET apps on Linux require licensing?
Frankly, I think Microsoft has the best possible situation. They can take the high-road by claiming it is an open standard, but drop little hints like "you know... we could patent it..." so that people won't use it. Win-win for them. Oh, and the resulting in-fighting, and waste of developer time putting effort into a project that nobody uses. So make that Win-Win-Win.
C# and.NET are the absolute best set of development tools I've ever seen. I hate to see fearmongering cause us to not use it, and Microsoft gaining the advantage.
I'm on the fence on this one. I coded Java many years ago, and I got sick of it. C# is a better language than Java, and the.NET Framework is better than the Java libraries. Both are standards, both have 3rd-party implementations, both have partial source released.
I develop Windows apps by day, and cross-platform apps by night. So I write.NET apps and compile with Mono for *nix systems. I think if I wanted to use Qt, I'd use Qt with C++ rather than Java. I'd consider Adobe Air as well.
Only Microsoft consultants will tell you that WinForms is dead. I've know developers at 2 organizations that moved from WinForms to WPF, and they hated it. (Caveat: I was at one of them). The app went from using 10MB of RAM to 200MB. It went from a minute to compile to 15 minutes. It went from taking 2 hours to make a change, to taking 2 days.
WPF is powerful, robust, pretty, inefficient, hard to use, and in beta. (Yes, Microsoft says it is not beta, but WPF is still not ready for anything more than experimental use.)
As for Silverlight, since it offers no benefit over Flash, and since even Microsoft Gold Partners have told me that they use Flash unless forced to use Silverlight, I think it will be a non-competitor unless Microsoft starts shipping it with the OS (maybe they do in Vista - if so, then Flash is dead no matter how good it is)
what happens at the end of the month when your heaviest users hit their caps?
This is a general problem whenever you cap something at the end of a period of time. That's why salespeople push harder at the end of the month, or end of the year. Why cops give more tickets, etc.
The solution is to throttle someone based on something like "the total bandwidth over the past 30 days" instead of having a hard cut-off. So for example, if someone is downloading a lot, then their bandwidth slowly goes down. Then if they stop downloading, it slowly goes back up. Mathematically speaking, you can then apply hysteresis so that normal users are unaffected. Winds up something like this:
0-100GB/30 days: 100% speed 100-200/30 days: Linearly throttle down to 50% speed 200-250/30 days: Linearly throttle down to 0% speed
Ultimately, what they did is probably easier to implement in their billing system. And it will discourage blatent overuse of the service. They say it won't affect 99% of the people - so really, they are just trying to smack down the 1%. I don't think they care exactly how "fair" it is to those few.
I for one am glad for the caps. The #1 thing I want is for the terms of service to state the service, not promise infinite speeds and infinite bandwidth. The caps they put in place are completely reasonable.
If you get 250GB/month, then you're actually allowed a constant usage of 0.78mbps, regardless of whether you can burst up to 15mbps (or whatever).
Sounds about right. Were you meaning for this to be a complaint?
So doing the math, you're paying $65 to $90 per megabit/sec!
So what? That metric would only be relevant if you were using bandwidth constantly. Since home users do not do so, then this complaint is moot. If you are using it constantly, then you are doing more than "residential" type stuff. Same thing goes with any infrastructure: power, water, gas, roads -- they are provided residentially at different rates because they assume certain limitations of use. Otherwise, it becomes commercial and you need to move to something else.
At any given datacenter, you can buy (100mbit-burstable) bandwidth at $5 per megabit/sec (price includes renting a server, rack space, power, and cooling).
Fine, but the providers to those data centers don't have to provide service to every house in a neighborhood. They only have to provide it to specific locations, and only those that are profitable to them. Hence, they offer bandwidth at a discount.
If you have a few hundred thousand dollars, they will happily run a line to your house, and provide you with $5 per megabit/sec service.
Unfortunately my government subsidy to Comcast gave Comcast a monopoly...
I can't argue with that paragraph.
I'm angry at telecommunications companies.
The government is to blame for the monopoly situation. So I place my anger there. The telecoms are actually starting to come around (hence the bandwidth caps).
It's not like they turn off the windmills when there is no wind. The ones that cannot be rotated gain no benefit from knowing the direction. And the ones that can be rotated rotate automatically based on the current wind, not in anticipation of a future wind.
Perhaps I should be turning off my solar panels at night, or on cloudy days. (hmm... Actually, there are diodes to do that to prevent the panels from consuming stored energy)
Is there a reason someone would download ActiveX controls from the government? I think I'd rather download one from goatse than from anything ending in.gov of.us.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that power usage goes up with transistor count as well.
Yes, but it goes up linearly. Speed causes power to go up polynomially. So the transistor count isn't as significant. Plus, the x86 instruction set doesn't contribute that much to the transistor count.
poor lending standards and people living beyond their means (i.e: greed on everyone's part) that got us into this mess?
What if, the only thing that makes the stock markets rise is artificial inflation? If we aren't producing any longer, or innovating any longer, phony credit is the only way to get the US markets to rise. Hence, those in power will do whatever it takes to build another bubble so they can cash-out this time.
which in its most radical version would bar providers from charging different amounts for different kinds of broadband content.
I've had lots of discussions about network neutrality, and no one has ever mentioned this, except to say that they heard it somewhere. That would have nothing to do with network neutrality, and would simply make no sense. Who actually believes this view, and why do they call it network neutrality?
I think this is just a falsehood made-up by telecom companies to confuse people into thinking network neutrality is something it is not.
hugely controversial topics such as net neutrality,
And of course, this is only controversial in Washington. Amongst techies, it's obvious.
Trains only need one driver for potentially hundreds of people. Although it is funny to think that it is possible to make a taxi with no driver, but a train needs a driver even though it runs on a track.
Are you sure? Have you compared a 33Mhz ARM to a 33Mhz x86 chip? Is the performance that different?
There is no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison here, because I don't think anyone makes x86 chips that are as slow as ARM chips. The instruction set doesn't have that much bearing on performance. But power use goes up according to the square of the voltage, and voltage increases when clock speed increases -- so it is all about the megahertz.
Sounds like an interesting extension that I would not want. It appears that the Mozilla foundation has too much money and is making-up crazy features to keep people employed. Give the money to another project that needs it.
This kind of NPL thing is something a web server should do, not a browser.
The problem is that last part you added, which you have no citation for: "due to human activities."
Of course, the reverse problem is that it does not matter if it is due to human activities or not. Humans are the only species on the planet can stop it. Just because it might happen to be a natural planetary cycle, doesn't mean I'm going to sit around and go "meh, it's natural that my species die. I'll just buy a hummer and accept it."
To empower individuals to utilize synergistic approaches to achieve goals and exceed expectations. :)
If you type 720 words per minute.
It depends on what you are doing. 5 frames per second is plenty for text editing, but less than 30 sucks for playing a first person shooter. (That might change if motion blur is added)
Our app was pretty small, but I don't know exactly how many windows or controls.... probably on par with your app. But there was TONS of eye candy. We had a 3rd-party design UI elements in expression blend, and export them to us. We had one button in particular that was thousands of lines long, although we only used it once.
We had lots of resource dictionaries with lots of fonts, colors, gradients, etc. Those files were slow to load and slow to edit. The main XAML code for the screens was the worst though - those were the ones where I could count to 5 between keystrokes. They were much faster if you edited them as XML though. I think there was so much inter-dependency between things that basically, in order to render a particular component, it had to parse through the whole dang app. That's my theory at least.
Most of the screens did not work in the XAML previewer. For one thing, isn't supported, which was used in every screen. That was annoying. But even without that, it would layout the screens wrong so you had to edit blindly and rebuild. Maybe blend would have been better but none of the developers really used it. We had a few custom controls, and the IDE would barf on them. You would get dozens of errors in the errors output in the IDE, but the app would run just fine. That was frustrating.
--
A friend of mine worked for a company, and one of the teams there made a simple database viewer app that was basically a great big grid. Since the grid was WPF, every box in it was a control, and so if you loaded a thousand rows with 10 columns, that was 10,000 controls loaded into memory. Performance was unacceptable. And that was including some kind of optimization in the control, where it only instantiated the controls once they came onto the screen. I imagine writing the same control in WinForms, you would not do something so silly. You would paint gridlines and draw text onto a window. But the WPF mindset wouldn't really jive with that - how would you put an image, or a web page, or a dancing 3D bear into a cell in the data grid if you didn't build it upon WPF controls?
VS2010 = WPF? Interesting...
As for control panel, and wordpad -- I thought those were WPF, just looking at the look and feel. I was thinking, what if they try to write Office in it? THAT would be interesting. Writing Visual Studio in it will satisfy me though. I wonder how much RAM it will take. We already got out of memory errors in our app, on machines with 4GB. I'd hate to try to load that app into VS 2010, unless they do major optimizations.
EXACTLY. For those unfamiliar, let me explain why:
AOL = What a non-neutral internet looks like. And it was why AOL died. AOL would partner with different companies, and those companies would provide content to AOL customers. Eventually, AOL couldn't keep up with the vast amount of content on the open internet, so they lost out. Prodigy and CompuServe used the same exact model.
It kinda made sense back before there were standard protocols like HTTP for providing content, and before it was possible to bill users for the content they viewed.
This is the worst-case scenario for a non-neutral internet. Every ISP that "partnered" with ESPN needs to cancel their deals, so that ESPN is forced to play the game the same way as everyone else.
THANK YOU! I just read 50 posts and finally, someone actually replied with a link to a patent.
NOW I understand -- now that I've read the patent. THEY PATENTED AN API?!?!? *smacks forehead* The patent office has gone to hell. An API definition doesn't even begin to pretend to be patentable.
I figured they patented some algorithm inside of the ADO.NET implementation, or something like that. No - they just patented the structure. Holy hell. If I ever become really really rich, I'm going to hire a ninja to go kick the crap out of some people over in the patent office.
Humorously, my name is almost on one such patent. I worked for a company where we made an XML format, and they tried to patent it. After a few rejections they gave up. While I wanted to have my name on a patent, after reading what they were patenting, I am so glad they didn't get it.
Anyway, thanks again.
You are welcome to disagree: I'm glad you have a successful project. But what is with calling my argument "rubbish" when I cited two personal examples? Does using that term suddenly negate what I said? Only on the internet are people this way, sheesh.
I won't go into links, but there's lots of reasons WPF is very beta-ish. Off the top of my head:
(To the point where, in my last app, typing a single keystroke in a XAML document took about 5 seconds for the character to appear on screen)
WPF at this point is kinda like how ASP.NET was in .NET 1.0. ASP.NET was missing lots of stuff, the designer was nearly useless. Sometimes people just edited the HTML in an outside tool just to avoid Visual Studio messing it up. Judging from history, that means we have about 2 versions to go before WPF is as stable as ASP.NET is now.
My biggest fear is not that WPF is buggy now, but that the foundation is so absurdly inefficient that there's no going back. For example, every single property being a dependency property. I can't imagine what would happen if you made an application the size of Microsoft Office using WPF. As things are now, it would probably require gigs of RAM. Something major has to change either in hardware (I guess that is inevitable) or in the basis of WPF, for it to become useful in apps that are any serious size.
Anybody know if MS is going to use it for anything other than things like the control panel, wordpad, and little apps like that? That would increase my confidence in the ability to use it in something bigger.
Of course! But the customer got no say in the "compromise", they got reduced service for the same costs.
No, you already have the reduced service. You can't download at max rate 24/7. The cap just presents itself in a different way - variable service quality, timeouts, hidden QOS and throttling, etc.
That really is the crux of this. You think your service is reduced when the ISP is really telling you accurately what you already had and making an official solution to the problem instead of hiding it.
You seem to assume that in the years to come ISPs will all of a sudden become generous. What are you basing that assumption on?
History. Comcast has increased their bandwidth every year. 3 years ago I could get You seemed almost pleased to have caps, with no real obvious advantage to yourself. The only thing I can conclude is that maybe you profited by it some other way.*shrugs*
No, you are ignoring my reasoning and resorting to ad hominem attacks. It comes down to this: either accept throttling and secret ISP code that drops packets -- or accept a cap. Your choice. I'll take the cap. It's fair, measurable, and network neutral. The only people who lose-out with the caps is the pirates running FTP sites all day.
P.S. As you pointed out, the government only paid for broadband at schools. The government did not pay anyone to give you broadband at your home. The old "the ISPs got government money, so I want infinite bandwidth and no caps" argument isn't reality.
I know the story, but I don't see how it is relevant here. Microsoft could do the same thing to Java, or anything else for that matter. If the only argument is that "Microsoft might strong-arm you out of the market" then nobody else on the planet should write software.
I agree with you about Novell - my hatred for them is the strongest reason I avoid Mono.
You're glad you're getting less from your ISP even though you're paying them the same amount? Very suspicious... I'm kind of surprised that you would take a cap as apposed to Comcast providing what they originally offered.
Except that what they originally offered is physically impossible. So I'm willing to accept a reasonable compromise.
What? Citation needed.
Not sure what you want a citation on. So let me clarify: Home users don't use bandwidth constantly. Businesses do. That's the big difference, and that is why business internet is more expensive. The original poster was saying that business internet was cheaper, but it sounded like you agreed with me that that isn't true. It is only true if you ignore the fact that the business got charged 100k to run the line, or that it was done for free since they would recoup the cost by selling bandwidth. That's definitely the case with a data center.
There needs to be a tier in-between that is reasonable.
Yes, tiers are good. I know that for my area, Comcast has 3 tiers. They probably need to offer tiers for the bandwidth caps too -- but since they say only 1% of the users would be affected by the proposed caps, there's not much point in offering too many tiers just for them. Didn't the article say that the 60MBps tier has no cap? Seems like a pretty good option to me.
--
Overall, you seem to be assuming that 15Mbps with no caps is possible in a residential setting. If that was the case, then I would agree with you on most of these points. Since it is not possible (at least, not now) reasonable caps make sense. Those caps should increase as new bandwidth is rolled out. There is no reason to assume that won't happen, since bandwidth has gone up over the years - so the caps should too.
I agree that ISPs should be upgrading their capacity instead of throttling. And that the arguments that they can't do it are bogus. But caps are still a necessary and reasonable approach to fixing the problem of the 1% who waaay overuse bandwidth. I'd rather see a reasonable cap than having them block my bittorrent.
Also, I don't think that cable companies got money from the government. Maybe telephone companies did, I dunno. I don't think so though -- they don't get public funds -- they just get the monopoly privileges to lay the cables.
Lastly, I'm flattered I now know enough about telecom that you think I work for an ISP. If you really want to know my resume, I'm not hard to find on the 'nets.
I want to know what the mysterious magical patents are that makes Mono somehow more dangerous than Java, or Flash, or any other framework.
What patents does Microsoft have on .NET? What could they do that magically would make already written and deployed .NET apps on Linux require licensing?
Frankly, I think Microsoft has the best possible situation. They can take the high-road by claiming it is an open standard, but drop little hints like "you know... we could patent it..." so that people won't use it. Win-win for them. Oh, and the resulting in-fighting, and waste of developer time putting effort into a project that nobody uses. So make that Win-Win-Win.
C# and .NET are the absolute best set of development tools I've ever seen. I hate to see fearmongering cause us to not use it, and Microsoft gaining the advantage.
It sounds like you afraid of C#, but not the CLR? Why? I thought the CLR and the .NET Framework were what people were afraid of patents on.
I'm on the fence on this one. I coded Java many years ago, and I got sick of it. C# is a better language than Java, and the .NET Framework is better than the Java libraries. Both are standards, both have 3rd-party implementations, both have partial source released.
I develop Windows apps by day, and cross-platform apps by night. So I write .NET apps and compile with Mono for *nix systems. I think if I wanted to use Qt, I'd use Qt with C++ rather than Java. I'd consider Adobe Air as well.
Only Microsoft consultants will tell you that WinForms is dead. I've know developers at 2 organizations that moved from WinForms to WPF, and they hated it. (Caveat: I was at one of them). The app went from using 10MB of RAM to 200MB. It went from a minute to compile to 15 minutes. It went from taking 2 hours to make a change, to taking 2 days.
WPF is powerful, robust, pretty, inefficient, hard to use, and in beta. (Yes, Microsoft says it is not beta, but WPF is still not ready for anything more than experimental use.)
As for Silverlight, since it offers no benefit over Flash, and since even Microsoft Gold Partners have told me that they use Flash unless forced to use Silverlight, I think it will be a non-competitor unless Microsoft starts shipping it with the OS (maybe they do in Vista - if so, then Flash is dead no matter how good it is)
what happens at the end of the month when your heaviest users hit their caps?
This is a general problem whenever you cap something at the end of a period of time. That's why salespeople push harder at the end of the month, or end of the year. Why cops give more tickets, etc.
The solution is to throttle someone based on something like "the total bandwidth over the past 30 days" instead of having a hard cut-off. So for example, if someone is downloading a lot, then their bandwidth slowly goes down. Then if they stop downloading, it slowly goes back up. Mathematically speaking, you can then apply hysteresis so that normal users are unaffected. Winds up something like this:
0-100GB/30 days: 100% speed
100-200/30 days: Linearly throttle down to 50% speed
200-250/30 days: Linearly throttle down to 0% speed
Ultimately, what they did is probably easier to implement in their billing system. And it will discourage blatent overuse of the service. They say it won't affect 99% of the people - so really, they are just trying to smack down the 1%. I don't think they care exactly how "fair" it is to those few.
I for one am glad for the caps. The #1 thing I want is for the terms of service to state the service, not promise infinite speeds and infinite bandwidth. The caps they put in place are completely reasonable.
If you get 250GB/month, then you're actually allowed a constant usage of 0.78mbps, regardless of whether you can burst up to 15mbps (or whatever).
Sounds about right. Were you meaning for this to be a complaint?
So doing the math, you're paying $65 to $90 per megabit/sec!
So what? That metric would only be relevant if you were using bandwidth constantly. Since home users do not do so, then this complaint is moot. If you are using it constantly, then you are doing more than "residential" type stuff. Same thing goes with any infrastructure: power, water, gas, roads -- they are provided residentially at different rates because they assume certain limitations of use. Otherwise, it becomes commercial and you need to move to something else.
At any given datacenter, you can buy (100mbit-burstable) bandwidth at $5 per megabit/sec (price includes renting a server, rack space, power, and cooling).
Fine, but the providers to those data centers don't have to provide service to every house in a neighborhood. They only have to provide it to specific locations, and only those that are profitable to them. Hence, they offer bandwidth at a discount.
If you have a few hundred thousand dollars, they will happily run a line to your house, and provide you with $5 per megabit/sec service.
Unfortunately my government subsidy to Comcast gave Comcast a monopoly...
I can't argue with that paragraph.
I'm angry at telecommunications companies.
The government is to blame for the monopoly situation. So I place my anger there. The telecoms are actually starting to come around (hence the bandwidth caps).
So what will they do with the wind forecast?
It's not like they turn off the windmills when there is no wind. The ones that cannot be rotated gain no benefit from knowing the direction. And the ones that can be rotated rotate automatically based on the current wind, not in anticipation of a future wind.
Perhaps I should be turning off my solar panels at night, or on cloudy days. (hmm... Actually, there are diodes to do that to prevent the panels from consuming stored energy)
Is there a reason someone would download ActiveX controls from the government? I think I'd rather download one from goatse than from anything ending in .gov of .us.