There are different degrees of deregulation. For example, how about something along the lines of how different DSL providers use the same local loops
Only when the owners of those local loops allow that, and what you have in the USA now was the result of now defunt regulation. Compare this to Europe where regulation has been used to force unbundling of the local loop in many places. Where you are able to pick from a few DSL providers in some parts of the USA if you are lucky, in places that implemented such local loop unbundling being able to pick one of many DSL providers is the norm.
This is a very good example of how regulation can actually create a free market instead of hinder it.
, extended to cable companies, and without the sabotage problems that happened between a telco and its client ISPs. Further, things like WiMAX could allow even more local competition.
Advocating independent alternatives over regulation to promote competition sounds right to me, but as things are now, there are parties in the market that are very keen on creating artificial barriers to entry, and can do so due to being in control over important parts of the infrastructure. Demanding that they do offer this infrastructure on a non discriminatory base to everyone is quite logical when you realize that that infrastructure has been payed mostly from tax money.
It was not a free market for some historical reasons. Regulation as it was used in the beginning was required but has caused new problems over time due to lack of a free market. Dealing with that requires changes to that regulation to deal with the problem. Just dropping regulation alltogether is not gonna change the monopolized market into a free one magically.
The Net is not a giant network providing free, unlimited access to free speech and communication.
Technically you are correct, but the Internet works where others have failed because it acts like being such a network for all practical purposes.
Worse yet, bandwidth is limited
But already being payed for by both sides (content providers as well as consumers)
so strategic choices must be made sooner or later by both providers and clients.
- Consumers have little choice - This is not about being able to charge your own customers, this is about being able to charge someone elses customers for something that 'someone else' is already paying you for.
For example, I would expect Apple Corp. to have to pay my ISP if they want to deliver to me promotional videos in QuickTime format, which they obviously charge their clients for
You seem to look at the Internet as a one way content delivery system similar to TV. It is not.
1. If this puts the bandwidth hogs into a higher price tier, so be it.
A 'bandwidth' hog already pays more to their ISP, which in turn pays more to whomever they have peering with. On the other side the users needing more already pay more as well. The extra bandwidth is already being payed for on both sides.
2. Will this really allow the telcos to blackmail internet company X? I would imagine, say, Google already pays an enormous amount of money for their multiple OC-3*2^zillion links. Couldn't they go to a different ISP?
No, because their users can still be at an ISP that hinders Google unless Google pays them off.
3. If this made general Internet access suck it could (here's to hoping) force deregulation of transmission lines.
I suggest you go take a look at the wire mess in the typical Asian city to see what such deregulation does. You REALLY don't want what that results in.
but aren't we talking about making a bad situation worse by adding more gov't regulation to try to "correct" a problem created by goverment regulation?
Maybe so. That older regulation was required for solving some issues however. To name a few:
- Getting a phone connection to every american even when that wasn't always commerically viable - Ensuring that roads don't become covered by a big maze of cables
There are some more, but I think you get the picture.
So, to slightly restate what you said..
The existing regulation was required but is causing a problem. Shouldn't we look at dealing with that?
"The regulatory regime envisioned by Net neutrality mandates would also open the door to a great deal of potential "gaming" of the regulatory system and allow firms to use the regulatory system to hobble competitors. Worse yet, it would encourage more FCC regulation of the Internet and broadband markets in general."
You see, the Cato institute quite repeats Libertarian rethoric there, but to make an argument they'll have to well, actually argue their case. Just to name 2 major issues with the little bit you quoted from them:
- gaming the regulatory system? Please explain - allow the regulatory system to hobble competitors? Explain how they don't do that now and how this amandment would have made any change?
Is it just me, or are a lot of people asking the government to regulate our businesses?
Free market is a market free from anti-competitive influences. Too bad removing certain anti-competitive influences requires regulation, which leads to the conclusion that a free market most likely cannot exist without regulation. I know this is contrary to beliefs held by certain libertatians, but it is quite supported by evidence all around the planet and throughout history.
Easy solution, throw all trafic through TOR http://tor.eff.org/, and make sure the exit points are in europe.
Well.. TOR is going to be very efficient.. (its nice in concept for sure)
Besides, ISPs in Europe want the same thing, being able to charge popular content providers.
The consequence of this idea:
You have popular content? now you need to figure out all the thousands of ISPs around the world, figure out which ones happen to be used by your viewers, and judge if their number is high enough to pay off that particular ISP.
I'm still amazed that people don't see at first glance already why this is an entirely stupid idea.
The house of representatives has proven yet again to understand shit about technology and fair laws and could be bought again by big business to implement whatever they desired.
It is time those in the house start thinking about whom they represent, and maybe those being represented should get a clue and not vote on such idiots.
So please let me explain the ugly truth: this is an all or nothing game. Either the copyright lords are going to control how we use information, or they aren't. Sorry charlie, there is no nice way out there is no happy middle ground. Get used to it, wake up and smell the hummis, pull your head out, quit being stupid! All or nothing. Sony, the RIAA, and MPAA seem to understand this perfectly well, their actions are obvious, they plan on it, they act on it, they clearly understand it, so why don't we?
Your observation about it being an all or nothing game is correct, but I don't think you are correct in your conclusion.
First of all, abolishing copyright will do nothing to remove the desire for distributors to have complete and infinite control over distribution and preferably also use. This is because copyright is merely the means by which this control is currently achieved.
Second, copyright based on the constitution of the USA can only exist if you recognize that the 'public' is in ultimate control over any copyrighted works, else the whole concept of granting temporary exclusive rights to the creator makes no sense (you may be able to grant rights over something over which you have no control on paper, but your lack of control makes that a completely pointless thing to do), so if copyright has to be, then the question over who has ultimate control over created works is already answered.
At any rate, the article was (unsurprisingly) lacking in detail, and failed to make any argument for the alternative that was proposed (or for or against copyright in general). It merely points at one of the problems and an obvious solution to it. The implication of what the article says is that 'initially, copyright as it was in the 1700s was good, so lets change back to how it was back then'. Of course that ignores that circumstances have changed substantially. I, just like Lessig it seems, believe that a limited term, limited scope copyright can actually work and advance science and arts. Additionally, I also believe that copyright should always go to the actual creator(s) and be non-transferable. On top of that, I believe anyone who wants to have something protected by copyright, will have to ensure that the work will be available in unencumbered form after expiration of that copyright, if things like drm or other forms of access control are permitted at all.
Do you also knock on people's doors and then run away?
No (tho at some point in my life I did try.. and I would be surprised if you can honestly say you never did), but if they leave their door open with a 'Welcome' sign over it, I might walk in and take a look.
While it is a fun experiment, it is really not news at all.
I have to make a 5 1/2 hours trip by train about twice a month, and for a while one of my ways to waste some time was bugging people who have bluetooth enabled phones...
My 'toolset' ?
A Palm m505 equipped with a bluetooth sdcard.
Typically, just walking through the train from one end to another would get me some tens of phones and a laptop here and there.
Often you can't pair with devices you find, but many of them don't really require pairing for getting data from them, and besides, pairing requests allow for sending text messages, and a 'yes' is an instinctive reply whenever people get bugged by popups.. also on a phone.. Even if that doesn't work, you can still bug people and even make use of their phone difficult... (great when you can find the phone of that extremely loudly talking person)
This was some 3 years ago, and it was well documented back then already.
I spend time on some of the freebsd irc channels out there to help people, and I usually try to help them finding out how to solve their problem instead of just giving a simple direct answer, but in the end both can become very tiresome to do, esp when answering basicly the same questions over and over. I think that is part of why many people on those channels don't even bother trying to help unless you show clearly that you are not asking for the easy way out (why do you expect me to spend the efford on helping you while you didn't spend the efford on trying to find/read/try things). I just disconnect when I feel like that and return a few days or at times weeks later.. While I appreciate the enthousiasm on the #linux channels, the questions there drive me to disconnect in hours if not minutes usually:)
I don't know, but I find that just like on slashdot, many users hate to RTFM/RTFD, so there is a good chance it is just laziness, not a real lack of documentation that drives new users to post on the mailing lists (or in this case such a lack of linux documentation that converts to OpenBSD post with out realizing the documentation is all pretty and easy).
Definitely.. but that just makes me wonder... they have to read the answer either way.. Why also use someone elses time....
Look at any Linux IRC channel for proof postitive in real time. Many questions can be self answered in less time with man than it takes to wait for a response on IRC
Whereas on many a FreeBSD channel the nicest response you can expect is being told what exactly you should read for finding the answer... getting flamed is not impossible at all..
, but people will sit and wait for someone to answer. Though, maybe there is a learning curve that makes using documentation or man pages daunting or difficult for new users.
I think there are at least 2 things causing this..
1. Many people seem to want the shortest way to something that at least works, and then customize it to their needs afterwards instead of 'building something to spec'.
2. The 'just tell me how to do it' part could be lazyness, but I rather regard it as an attempt to optimize the result of the efford being spent (to its ultimate consequence, full result without efford).
Once you know where to find the answers (or how to use a search engine well....) the best result for efford is often to go look for answers yourself, but the first is not something you'd expect from a new user, and the later is something many people seem to have trouble with..
I'm however afraid this two tiered internet idea might be rather appealing to the big media however. The internet is rather disruptive technology for those who depend on their control over the distribution channel. It will be interesting to see if for them good journalism (and a chance on grabbing some public from the competition) overcomes such a longer term strategic goal.
The big media are often owned by people and conglomorates who aren't primarely interested in news, rather, they are usually interested in their profits today and in the near future as well as the continuity of the 'empire'. There are enough journalists who are interested in making good news still, and those 2 sides conflict at least at times. Who comes out on top isn't usually clear from the start I believe. At any rate, this becomming a big 'what if' kind of discussion.. interesting to speculate about and see who was right later of course..
Anyway.. I hope that one way or another it doesn't get that far either due to regulation (which I believe in for things that should be governed on behalf of the 'people') or as you believe by market force. I see how both could work.
and if their actions do anything that impacts their bottom line, it opens a whole new can of worms for them.
Definitely, but the question is if that will happen. I definitely hope that it will be the result if any of them tries, but I'm not so sure.
A majority of the internet users is technically ignorant, at least for as far as networking is concerned. Unless they are being informed about what is happening, they most likely won't notice enough of the downsides soon enough to have an escape because if it seems to work for one ISP, many more will follow, and those who won't will be more expensive (you get *REAL* internet with us.. lessee how well that sells outside geek circles)
The "copyright should be returned to the original 14 year period just like the framers of the constitution intended it"
It looks to me like they really intended the 'limited time' part of what is in the constitution to be 'limited'. 14 years was then the term that was set, but it wasn't put into the constitution for a reason.
That the term can change due to different circumstances and insights is not the problem I think, but ignoring the explicit purpose of having a limited term copyright is a real problem I believe.
Quite interesting from a historical perspective, but the most recent bits of that information are just under a decade old. The difficult to exploit race condition earlier this year is the first serious security issue in a long time.
but I don't see why anyone would use Sendmail these days when alternatives like Postfix, Qmail, and Exim are available.
Well, I could give you a few reasons..
- much better mail filter (milter) support. Better because of having a nicely standarized api, having many tools available that use it, and being extremely complete in what it can do - you can change virtually every aspect of sendmail's behavior with its config file, including many things where you'd have to build postfix for example with alternative flags or have to patch the code.
But in the end, your question is akin to asking 'why would anyone use emacs when there is vi'...
Yes, postfix (and qmail and exim) is a more to the point mailer (vi is a more to the point editor), whereas sendmail is more like a swiss army knife for mail handling (emacs is more a swiss army knife for editing and many more things).. As with emacs, you can get sendmail to do things for you that you should never be wanting from an mta..
Of course if your PHP site is seeing the sort of traffic levels that require an optimzer
You see, you want an optimizer for quite another reason then the amount of traffic you get.
Simply put, it makes running the website less resource intensive, which means that you can host it at a lower cost. You can afford a lot more complexity with the same amount of resources, so you can offer more/better functionality, your web hosting will interfer less with other services on the same physical machine etc etc. Assuming that amount of traffic is what generates the desire for an optimizer is not wrong or such, but it is by far not the only, and in many cases not the most compelling reason.
I have made a lot of use of eAccelerator (and before that turk-mmc) to get a somewhat more complicated site to run on a small server. This is hobby and if I couldn't run it like that, I wouldn't run it, instead of spend money on either a bigger machine or a commercial optimizer.
it's very likely you will in fact want the support that comes with Zend Platform - not to mention the integration and debugging features with Zend Studio. (I have no relationship with Zend other than being a happy customer).
If you are running some commercial service with PHP, you most likely want that, yes.
They can do whatever they want since they own the wires
You'd think so at first glance, but they gave up that right in exchange for common carrier status. They can definitely not filter or discourage the use of certain sources of information without giving up on that status first, which will make them responsible for what travels over their network.
Slashdot effect can be countered by buying enough infrastructure on the hosting side. If you do not have enough resources to handle the number of visitors, that is your problem.
And what is it that Akamai's customers are paying for anyway?
They are paying for a nice solution for above mentioned problem.
This has nothing to do whatsoever with ISPs wanting a share in the proffits of succesfull content providers by artificially slowing them down if they don't pay up.
What those ISPs should realize is that those content providers are the reason why they have customers to begin with, and in fact should be paying providers of the content that is popular among their users.
Slashdot Mirror
There are different degrees of deregulation. For example, how about something along the lines of how different DSL providers use the same local loops
Only when the owners of those local loops allow that, and what you have in the USA now was the result of now defunt regulation. Compare this to Europe where regulation has been used to force unbundling of the local loop in many places. Where you are able to pick from a few DSL providers in some parts of the USA if you are lucky, in places that implemented such local loop unbundling being able to pick one of many DSL providers is the norm.
This is a very good example of how regulation can actually create a free market instead of hinder it.
, extended to cable companies, and without the sabotage problems that happened between a telco and its client ISPs. Further, things like WiMAX could allow even more local competition.
Advocating independent alternatives over regulation to promote competition sounds right to me, but as things are now, there are parties in the market that are very keen on creating artificial barriers to entry, and can do so due to being in control over important parts of the infrastructure. Demanding that they do offer this infrastructure on a non discriminatory base to everyone is quite logical when you realize that that infrastructure has been payed mostly from tax money.
It was not a free market for some historical reasons. Regulation as it was used in the beginning was required but has caused new problems over time due to lack of a free market. Dealing with that requires changes to that regulation to deal with the problem. Just dropping regulation alltogether is not gonna change the monopolized market into a free one magically.
The Net is not a giant network providing free, unlimited access to free speech and communication.
Technically you are correct, but the Internet works where others have failed because it acts like being such a network for all practical purposes.
Worse yet, bandwidth is limited
But already being payed for by both sides (content providers as well as consumers)
so strategic choices must be made sooner or later by both providers and clients.
- Consumers have little choice
- This is not about being able to charge your own customers, this is about being able to charge someone elses customers for something that 'someone else' is already paying you for.
For example, I would expect Apple Corp. to have to pay my ISP if they want to deliver to me promotional videos in QuickTime format, which they obviously charge their clients for
You seem to look at the Internet as a one way content delivery system similar to TV. It is not.
1. If this puts the bandwidth hogs into a higher price tier, so be it.
A 'bandwidth' hog already pays more to their ISP, which in turn pays more to whomever they have peering with. On the other side the users needing more already pay more as well. The extra bandwidth is already being payed for on both sides.
2. Will this really allow the telcos to blackmail internet company X? I would imagine, say, Google already pays an enormous amount of money for their multiple OC-3*2^zillion links. Couldn't they go to a different ISP?
No, because their users can still be at an ISP that hinders Google unless Google pays them off.
3. If this made general Internet access suck it could (here's to hoping) force deregulation of transmission lines.
I suggest you go take a look at the wire mess in the typical Asian city to see what such deregulation does. You REALLY don't want what that results in.
Its too bad this was posted anonymously, it deserves to be seen because you make some good points there.
but aren't we talking about making a bad situation worse by adding more gov't regulation to try to "correct" a problem created by goverment regulation?
Maybe so. That older regulation was required for solving some issues however. To name a few:
- Getting a phone connection to every american even when that wasn't always commerically viable
- Ensuring that roads don't become covered by a big maze of cables
There are some more, but I think you get the picture.
So, to slightly restate what you said..
The existing regulation was required but is causing a problem. Shouldn't we look at dealing with that?
You are absolutely correct! Free markets work best... free
You are confused about what 'free market' means.
A free market is free from anti-competitive influences, not 'free' as in everyone can always do whatever they want.
A free market almost always requires a certain level of regulation to keep out specific anti-competitive influences.
"The regulatory regime envisioned by Net neutrality mandates would also open the door to a great deal of potential "gaming" of the regulatory system and allow firms to use the regulatory system to hobble competitors. Worse yet, it would encourage more FCC regulation of the Internet and broadband markets in general."
You see, the Cato institute quite repeats Libertarian rethoric there, but to make an argument they'll have to well, actually argue their case.
Just to name 2 major issues with the little bit you quoted from them:
- gaming the regulatory system? Please explain
- allow the regulatory system to hobble competitors? Explain how they don't do that now and how this amandment would have made any change?
Is it just me, or are a lot of people asking the government to regulate our businesses?
Free market is a market free from anti-competitive influences. Too bad removing certain anti-competitive influences requires regulation, which leads to the conclusion that a free market most likely cannot exist without regulation. I know this is contrary to beliefs held by certain libertatians, but it is quite supported by evidence all around the planet and throughout history.
Easy solution, throw all trafic through TOR http://tor.eff.org/, and make sure the exit points are in europe.
Well.. TOR is going to be very efficient.. (its nice in concept for sure)
Besides, ISPs in Europe want the same thing, being able to charge popular content providers.
The consequence of this idea:
You have popular content? now you need to figure out all the thousands of ISPs around the world, figure out which ones happen to be used by your viewers, and judge if their number is high enough to pay off that particular ISP.
I'm still amazed that people don't see at first glance already why this is an entirely stupid idea.
The house of representatives has proven yet again to understand shit about technology and fair laws and could be bought again by big business to implement whatever they desired.
It is time those in the house start thinking about whom they represent, and maybe those being represented should get a clue and not vote on such idiots.
So please let me explain the ugly truth: this is an all or nothing game. Either the copyright lords are going to control how we use information, or they aren't. Sorry charlie, there is no nice way out there is no happy middle ground. Get used to it, wake up and smell the hummis, pull your head out, quit being stupid! All or nothing. Sony, the RIAA, and MPAA seem to understand this perfectly well, their actions are obvious, they plan on it, they act on it, they clearly understand it, so why don't we?
Your observation about it being an all or nothing game is correct, but I don't think you are correct in your conclusion.
First of all, abolishing copyright will do nothing to remove the desire for distributors to have complete and infinite control over distribution and preferably also use. This is because copyright is merely the means by which this control is currently achieved.
Second, copyright based on the constitution of the USA can only exist if you recognize that the 'public' is in ultimate control over any copyrighted works, else the whole concept of granting temporary exclusive rights to the creator makes no sense (you may be able to grant rights over something over which you have no control on paper, but your lack of control makes that a completely pointless thing to do), so if copyright has to be, then the question over who has ultimate control over created works is already answered.
At any rate, the article was (unsurprisingly) lacking in detail, and failed to make any argument for the alternative that was proposed (or for or against copyright in general). It merely points at one of the problems and an obvious solution to it. The implication of what the article says is that 'initially, copyright as it was in the 1700s was good, so lets change back to how it was back then'. Of course that ignores that circumstances have changed substantially. I, just like Lessig it seems, believe that a limited term, limited scope copyright can actually work and advance science and arts. Additionally, I also believe that copyright should always go to the actual creator(s) and be non-transferable. On top of that, I believe anyone who wants to have something protected by copyright, will have to ensure that the work will be available in unencumbered form after expiration of that copyright, if things like drm or other forms of access control are permitted at all.
Do you also knock on people's doors and then run away?
No (tho at some point in my life I did try.. and I would be surprised if you can honestly say you never did), but if they leave their door open with a 'Welcome' sign over it, I might walk in and take a look.
Simply turning off bluetooth alltogether unless you are actually using it may also do some nice things for talk/standby time btw.
While it is a fun experiment, it is really not news at all.
I have to make a 5 1/2 hours trip by train about twice a month, and for a while one of my ways to waste some time was bugging people who have bluetooth enabled phones...
My 'toolset' ?
A Palm m505 equipped with a bluetooth sdcard.
Typically, just walking through the train from one end to another would get me some tens of phones and a laptop here and there.
Often you can't pair with devices you find, but many of them don't really require pairing for getting data from them, and besides, pairing requests allow for sending text messages, and a 'yes' is an instinctive reply whenever people get bugged by popups.. also on a phone.. Even if that doesn't work, you can still bug people and even make use of their phone difficult... (great when you can find the phone of that extremely loudly talking person)
This was some 3 years ago, and it was well documented back then already.
Definitely.
:)
A slightly related 'rant'..
I spend time on some of the freebsd irc channels out there to help people, and I usually try to help them finding out how to solve their problem instead of just giving a simple direct answer, but in the end both can become very tiresome to do, esp when answering basicly the same questions over and over. I think that is part of why many people on those channels don't even bother trying to help unless you show clearly that you are not asking for the easy way out (why do you expect me to spend the efford on helping you while you didn't spend the efford on trying to find/read/try things). I just disconnect when I feel like that and return a few days or at times weeks later.. While I appreciate the enthousiasm on the #linux channels, the questions there drive me to disconnect in hours if not minutes usually
I don't know, but I find that just like on slashdot, many users hate to RTFM/RTFD, so there is a good chance it is just laziness, not a real lack of documentation that drives new users to post on the mailing lists (or in this case such a lack of linux documentation that converts to OpenBSD post with out realizing the documentation is all pretty and easy).
Definitely.. but that just makes me wonder... they have to read the answer either way.. Why also use someone elses time....
Look at any Linux IRC channel for proof postitive in real time. Many questions can be self answered in less time with man than it takes to wait for a response on IRC
Whereas on many a FreeBSD channel the nicest response you can expect is being told what exactly you should read for finding the answer... getting flamed is not impossible at all..
, but people will sit and wait for someone to answer. Though, maybe there is a learning curve that makes using documentation or man pages daunting or difficult for new users.
I think there are at least 2 things causing this..
1. Many people seem to want the shortest way to something that at least works, and then customize it to their needs afterwards instead of 'building something to spec'.
2. The 'just tell me how to do it' part could be lazyness, but I rather regard it as an attempt to optimize the result of the efford being spent (to its ultimate consequence, full result without efford).
Once you know where to find the answers (or how to use a search engine well....) the best result for efford is often to go look for answers yourself, but the first is not something you'd expect from a new user, and the later is something many people seem to have trouble with..
I've heard of this phenomenon. I think they call it "lobbying".
In most parts of the world this is better known as 'corruption'.
I'm however afraid this two tiered internet idea might be rather appealing to the big media however. The internet is rather disruptive technology for those who depend on their control over the distribution channel. It will be interesting to see if for them good journalism (and a chance on grabbing some public from the competition) overcomes such a longer term strategic goal.
The big media are often owned by people and conglomorates who aren't primarely interested in news, rather, they are usually interested in their profits today and in the near future as well as the continuity of the 'empire'. There are enough journalists who are interested in making good news still, and those 2 sides conflict at least at times. Who comes out on top isn't usually clear from the start I believe. At any rate, this becomming a big 'what if' kind of discussion.. interesting to speculate about and see who was right later of course..
Anyway.. I hope that one way or another it doesn't get that far either due to regulation (which I believe in for things that should be governed on behalf of the 'people') or as you believe by market force. I see how both could work.
and if their actions do anything that impacts their bottom line, it opens a whole new can of worms for them.
Definitely, but the question is if that will happen. I definitely hope that it will be the result if any of them tries, but I'm not so sure.
A majority of the internet users is technically ignorant, at least for as far as networking is concerned. Unless they are being informed about what is happening, they most likely won't notice enough of the downsides soon enough to have an escape because if it seems to work for one ISP, many more will follow, and those who won't will be more expensive (you get *REAL* internet with us.. lessee how well that sells outside geek circles)
The "copyright should be returned to the original 14 year period just like the framers of the constitution intended it"
It looks to me like they really intended the 'limited time' part of what is in the constitution to be 'limited'. 14 years was then the term that was set, but it wasn't put into the constitution for a reason.
That the term can change due to different circumstances and insights is not the problem I think, but ignoring the explicit purpose of having a limited term copyright is a real problem I believe.
Quite interesting from a historical perspective, but the most recent bits of that information are just under a decade old. The difficult to exploit race condition earlier this year is the first serious security issue in a long time.
Well, how many widely used MTAs are written by somebody that put in a backdoor? Sendmail wizard (WIZ) backdoor allows anonymous remote root access
And was reported on in 1993 and back then it concerned 'very old versions' only.
Doesn't make it good in any way, but it also dates back to a time when the Internet was an entirely different place still.
I'm personally a Postfix fan,
I like postfix as well..
but I don't see why anyone would use Sendmail these days when alternatives like Postfix, Qmail, and Exim are available.
Well, I could give you a few reasons..
- much better mail filter (milter) support. Better because of having a nicely standarized api, having many tools available that use it, and being extremely complete in what it can do
- you can change virtually every aspect of sendmail's behavior with its config file, including many things where you'd have to build postfix for example with alternative flags or have to patch the code.
But in the end, your question is akin to asking 'why would anyone use emacs when there is vi'...
Yes, postfix (and qmail and exim) is a more to the point mailer (vi is a more to the point editor), whereas sendmail is more like a swiss army knife for mail handling (emacs is more a swiss army knife for editing and many more things).. As with emacs, you can get sendmail to do things for you that you should never be wanting from an mta..
Of course if your PHP site is seeing the sort of traffic levels that require an optimzer
You see, you want an optimizer for quite another reason then the amount of traffic you get.
Simply put, it makes running the website less resource intensive, which means that you can host it at a lower cost. You can afford a lot more complexity with the same amount of resources, so you can offer more/better functionality, your web hosting will interfer less with other services on the same physical machine etc etc. Assuming that amount of traffic is what generates the desire for an optimizer is not wrong or such, but it is by far not the only, and in many cases not the most compelling reason.
I have made a lot of use of eAccelerator (and before that turk-mmc) to get a somewhat more complicated site to run on a small server. This is hobby and if I couldn't run it like that, I wouldn't run it, instead of spend money on either a bigger machine or a commercial optimizer.
it's very likely you will in fact want the support that comes with Zend Platform - not to mention the integration and debugging features with Zend Studio. (I have no relationship with Zend other than being a happy customer).
If you are running some commercial service with PHP, you most likely want that, yes.
They can do whatever they want since they own the wires
You'd think so at first glance, but they gave up that right in exchange for common carrier status. They can definitely not filter or discourage the use of certain sources of information without giving up on that status first, which will make them responsible for what travels over their network.
ever heard of the Slashdot Effect?
Slashdot effect can be countered by buying enough infrastructure on the hosting side. If you do not have enough resources to handle the number of visitors, that is your problem.
And what is it that Akamai's customers are paying for anyway?
They are paying for a nice solution for above mentioned problem.
This has nothing to do whatsoever with ISPs wanting a share in the proffits of succesfull content providers by artificially slowing them down if they don't pay up.
What those ISPs should realize is that those content providers are the reason why they have customers to begin with, and in fact should be paying providers of the content that is popular among their users.