I did say ***sometimes*** and depending on context, this can be anywhere from more than 1/10 of the time while in others, it can be less than 1/1000. It happened to my 2005 tax refund: two months after everybody else I knew had received theirs, I still did not have mine. Called the revenue agency, asked whether or not they issued it, they re-issued the check and I got it a 3-4 business days later. AFAIK, this is the only piece of my mail that got lost.
Given the expenses incurred when applying for rebates, I have made it my policy not to buy into rebated items unless the list price matches the normal list prices of no-rebate stores. Another reason I rarely bother hunting for rebates is that they are often precursors to price reductions and new product introductions. For technology products, I generally consider them as blinking and screaming "End-Of-Life / Discontinued" tags, indicators that I should avoid buying the stuff or at least be particularly wary.
I have applied for rebates only twice ($15 on a $40 DI-524 and $45 on a $100 Audigy 2ZS) and got both back 2-3 months later. In both cases, the counter prices were already lower than other stores and in line with what I considered to be a fair price so I did not care too much whether or not the rebates came back... but I certainly would have made it a point to make it known to as many potential customers as possible if they did not.
Not necessarily. Fibers are usually run in symmetric pairs but if a company does not need symmetric bandwidth and needs more than one OCxxx worth in one direction, they need as little as one fiber per gang in whichever direction they do not need. For example, a server that has lots of upstream requirement (say WindowsUpdate patch servers, linux distro) can get more upstream links in its gang than downstream ones.
Many years ago (around Y2k), I chatted with one of my ISP's supervisors and was told their backbone links were being upgraded from a mix of OC3/OC12-class links with 1:10 up:down link ratio to OC24/OC48-class ones with a 4:1 ratio. I am guessing the ratios must not have changed much since regular accounts caps have maintained 2:1 down:up balance ever since, up from the 4:1 or even 6:1 from before then.
As for the customer link symmetry, the most *DSL and DOCSIS broadband specs have been built with the assumption that the vast majority of intended users want much faster download than upload speeds. For cable, upstream channels have been historically limited to the sub-54MHz band due to inline amplifiers and upstream bypass filters while downstream channels can be peppered across the 100-1000MHz range so there is vastly more downstream capacity than upstream. We will probably have to wait until the death of analog cable TV before we see a DOCSIS spec with extended upstream spectrum. *DSL over plain telephone lines has far less available bandwidth than cable so I am not expecting much from that, I'd rather bet on FTTN + some sort of ruggedized Ethernet-like intermediate link + whatever-to-Ethernet transceiver.
Tell that to network operators who have to get new OCxxx leases connected to meet increased average traffic load and still maintain a minimum acceptable QoS throughout traffic spikes. Most small-medium ISPs do not operate their own backbones so all their links are leased, this is a non-trivial expense that scales with connected capacity. Take the cost of those leases and related expenses, divide by how many GBs/month you can transfer using it and you get a figure in the area of $0.05/GB.
Bandwidth isn't free, bandwidth isn't unlimited but even with my old numbers, ISPs have not much of a reason to whine about ~250GB/month on $70/month packages since they'd still be left with a >$40 margin to cover profits and occasional expenses. My ISP is extra-greedy and decided to put a 100GB/month cap starting in October on that service class... some of my friends are thoroughly pissed, they will almost certainly change ISP and other ISPs will implement caps as "problem customers" start clogging their networks.
Even if you lease a 100Mbps link from some ISP/coloc center, the thing is almost certainly oversubscribed at some point higher in the network. You get higher traffic priority but the reality most likely is that instead of oversubscribing 100:1 like regular accounts, these business-class links are probably oversubscribed around 5:1 - like home users, most business links are typically far from operating at 100%. The same happens at every layer including the backbones. Abolishing oversubscription would cause bandwidth costs to explode - many networks would practically have to be rebuilt from scratch. Also, upgrading networks to provide 100% capacity to everyone at all times would not provide any visible benefits over 10:1 oversubscription for 99% of people but would cost at least 10X as much.
Because you have fiber in your backyard does not mean it is not oversubscribed, it only means you have a potentially very fast highway down to the interstate's traffic jam. As long as ISPs do a decent job managing oversubscription, their customers will not notice.
The real problem is that most ISPs want to maintain as few plans as possible and fit as many customers on each OC48/96/192 they have as possible. ISPs should have premium accounts for heavy users to pass down a larger chunk of operating costs down to them and finance the oversubscription reduction instead of claiming "unlimited" access and then whine about heavy users.
An OC48 lease cost about $30k/month in 2005, that puts it at slightly more than $10/Mbps/month. Add maintenance of backbone terminal equipment at both ends and the line itself, insurance, network equipment and related expenses at the ISP, maintenance of equipment at both ends of the customer line and the line itself, etc. along with miscellaneous expenses like wages, power, accounting, taxes, etc., somewhere around $20/month of any account goes into covering ongoing expenses before factoring in the ~$10/month cost per 1:1 unlimited Mbps. Call tech support and you will pretty much burn their profit margin on your account for the month in half an hour or so.
Oversubscription is a fact of life: Wallmart stores (or any other crowded space) do not have enough exits for everyone to bail out at once.
If an ISP has usage limits, yes, they should be published and Comcast should be the one paying damages to customers it dropped for exceeding this undisclosed limit. If anyone took Comcast to court over this, Comcast would most likely lose... that would be similar to a cop nailing you for speeding but refusing to tell you both what speed you were doing and what the limit was.
At least one local ISP in my area is currently fighting a class-action suit for changing the "unlimited" TOS to a 100GB/month limit even though the original TOS did include a clause about the ISP reserving the right to change the TOS with a 45 days notice. The big issue here is whether or not service providers can reserve the rights to change TOS for current customers. I wonder how this will play out. (Would an hypothetical GPL clause stating that all GPL licenses are automatically upgraded to whatever the newest version is hold up in court? Seems unlikely to me and I am hoping the ISP will lose for the same reasons.)
Most low-cost ($30-40/month) broadband packages in my area have 20-40GB/month limits. Since I am too cheap to pay a $30 premium for 100GB/month packages, I download an extra ~20GB/month by freeloading off my friends and relatives' internet who do not download much - that and free lunches are my compensation for acting as their tech support and lending them hardware.
In any case, the death of cheap "unlimited" broadband is near. If courts rule that ISPs are not allowed to change their TOS (like changing limits), they will adjust the prices to compensate (hello $100+/month) and force most people to switch to packages with explicit limits - courts cannot force prices as long as there are reasonable market circumstances to justify them. The same applies to Comcast it it really wishes to maintain its unlimited facade: price it for the top 5%, create an intermediate package for the 60-90% heavy users, a regular package for the 20-50% masses and a basic package for the bottom 10%, leave the in-between groups to choose between trimming their bandwidth usage, pay up or go away - that's pretty much what I have seen happening with my local ISPs and elsewhere around the globe.
1) initiate a remote reset on the customer's modem 2) when the modem comes back online, sniff out the tracker requests and torrent file hashes as it starts reconnecting 3) visit the tracker and check out the file names identified by captured hashes to see what sort of material is being downloaded based on filenames and the type of site 4) proceed with downloading parts of the files to verify that content matches description
Now you have an IP, a list of files and a few other miscellaneous details that should be sufficient to determine which customer's modem the file was downloaded from and what it is. (Though this may be rather time-consuming if both peer and tracker protocols have been encrypted.)
Oversubscription is what makes it possible for ISPs to offer 10Mbps service under $80. Without it, the same service would cost closer to $200, with $50 of both amounts being the ISP's operating income for the service class. Many ISPs have "reasonable use" clauses in their otherwise "unlimited" service plans and this cap appears to be around 250GB in many cases, which would theoretically allow ISPs to fit roughly 3000 high-bandwidth 250GB/month customers per ~$30k/month OC48. The same OC48 can accommodate little more than 250 wire-burning, non-oversubscribed 10Mbps customers... that would be more than $100/month uplink cost per customer.
Because the top ~5% of customers (ab)uses ~90% of the bandwidth, over-subscription reduces the ISPs' infrastructure costs for typical users by >90%. The recent stories about heavy users getting either kicked off or pushed onto higher-margin business/special service shows that ISPs are starting to push the extra operating costs down to the relevant customers. I have calculated that a fair price for true unlimited access would be ~$150/month: rent for ~1/300th of an OC48 + other operating/service costs and profit.
But none of that quite excuses ISPs from interfering with their customers' traffic unless the customer has specifically requested it.
Re:They have the source code and the architecture
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Antique Voyager Technology
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Oh, and by the way: A modern computer would drain voyagers batteries so fast, they'd be dead in a few hours. Never mind that Dell's on-site technical support service is currently not offered in extra-solar-system locations.
Most people here are talking about upgrading the base station on Earth, not the spacecrafts. As someone else pointed out, most of the reason they are sticking with the old system must be quirky analog/RF components, not the bitstreams themselves - the Voyager base-station antenna is a huge dish array that recovers sub-yoctowatt signals from the probes. The analog/RF front-end needed to filter and amplify this signal before it can be decoded by digital equipment must be a very unique piece of analog kit with decades worth of tweaking and refinement poured into it both before and after the launch.
The digital decoding should be trivial with modern CPUs but the analog parts were most likely tuned to the point of defying modern technology.
The argument was not about using FPGAs in consumer-level devices or not because we, as you said, actually do.
It is just that in consumer electronics, CPLDs and FPGAs are usually there to replace glue-logic and complement the microcontroller/embedded processor's capabilities... like working around bugs. One example of FPGA in consumer equipment is early Radeon SLI: the 'master' board used a Xilinx FPGA to receive pixel data from the slave board and combine it with data from the master to produce the final image sent to VGA/DVI. Matrox's Dual/TripleHead2Go also uses an FPGA to split display data among their 2-3 output ports... or at least they used to - last I heard they were still debating about whether or not they should spin it into an ASIC product.
When FPGAs are used as the core element of consumer devices, it either means the manufacturer is not expecting sales to be sufficient for an ASIC version to break even or that it is testing the market to see if the risk of going ASIC is worth it. Another example is Gigabytes' SATA RAM-drive: another Xilinx Spartan3-based consumer device.
Spartan3 FPGAs can be had for less than $30, which is great for low-volume production of consumer devices. If you look at my three examples, you can see that all three products fit in consumer-level niche markets likely to fall in the sub-million units category. One million units is often where the ASIC becomes cheaper than FPGA - though the bar is slowly rising as FPGAs become cheaper, larger and faster, thereby increasing the breadth of commercially and functionally viable FPGA applications. For intermediate production volumes, Xilinx's EasyPath and structured ASICs/mask-programmable gate arrays provide lower cost and lower risk alternatives to custom ASIC.
On the Virtex side, you are more likely to see those in low-volume ($5k per unit) professional equipment since the smallest and slowest devices are over $200.
In any case, for designers and their customers, having more implementation avenues to fit each price, risk and volume bracket is always a good thing.
All things are relative. IMO, the only thing that exists in FPGAs is a cheapest/smallest/slowest device that will fit a design with the required safety margins and futureproofing headrom. Most of the places I worked at where we used FPGAs were sold to Virtex: XC2V6000, XC2VP70, XC4FX100, XC4LX200 - since they were mostly doing ASIC prototyping, they preferred to spend $2000 extra up-front than have to re-do their $10000 prototype boards because they underestimated the final design's gate count or had to include unexpected extras - such was the case for the project that used XC2V6000s. A supersized hardware simulator is not all lost anyhow since it cuts synthesis time and provides headroom for extra on-chip debugging/monitoring instrumentation.
Agreed, this is certainly on a totally different scale from most sane people's hobby projects.
With the still relatively young V5 slowly replacing the V4, Xilinx will need a new family to break into the 45nm market. Since it is too soon to replace V5 and the S3 is a somewhat old and odd V2P-V4 hybrid, it is about time for a new generation to join the Spartan family. I am expecting to see the S4 family materialize before this time next year, borrowing most of the V5's major architectural changes (LUT6 and PLLs, among other things) with some left-overs from the V2P/V4 (18kbits non-ECC BRAMs with *working* FIFO16s) and other borrowed tweaks from the future V6 (stuff like planned PLL/DCM and IOB improvements). Once that happens, everybody will be able to benefit from LUT6 and PLLs on a budget.
Still, I wouldn't say LUT6 is a "very-high-end" item... but stepping into the "Realm of Virtex" does come at a price.
4-input LUTs are on their way out, the migration towards LUT6 and beyond has begun in the current high-end FPGA families (Virtex5, Stratix II/III) and will most likely enter the volume-oriented ones (Spartan, Cyclone, etc.) soon. Single-LUT 4:1 muxes alone can enable drastic improvements in many designs.
As for FPGAs being cheap, all things are relative. There are ASICs out there for nearly any common application imaginable and these are often well under $50 and are usually designed by people who have extensively studied the specific problem the ASIC is intended to solve. Building an FPGA-based equivalent might cost $50 for the device itself but will most likely require extra external components like RAM or flash and will cost many times that much in R&D and potential patent problems.
FPGAs are great for prototyping, implementing glue logic and low-volume production. We are not seeing many FPGAs in stuff we buy because we buy mass-produced goods for which it is worth taking FPGA designs and re-spinning them into ASICs. Besides, most low-cost FPGAs do not support encrypted bitstreams so anyone could reverse-engineer the firmware and produce clones - not a problem with an ASIC respin.
And then, when you go to court in 2025, a quick chemical analysis would reveal that the content is 10+ years newer than the vessel and the signature ink is from a 2019-2021 production Bic - a conclusion backed by printing watermark analysis revealing that the content was printed by a FooBar 18000 v1.2 with serial number 0918273645 produced in January 2020.
Perfect fraud is becoming more difficult every year.
I read the first couple of pages of the Andersen vs RIAA filing, looks like her lawyer has done a pretty good and interesting job on this one.
This passage might explain why: "In May 2004, for health reasons, Ms Andersen had been forced to leave her position as case manager for the Department of Justice" (p.12)
If I were a RIAA lawyer, I would probably think thrice and most likely decide to forget about about filing a lawsuit based on flawed and illegally acquired evidence against someone who worked for the DoJ. I think it is safe to presume Ms Andersen is acquainted with a number of both actual men in suits, lawsuits and men in suits who deal with lawsuits. The RIAA might really have bitten more than they can chew on this one.... now waiting for the day the RIAA will John Doe someone close to top government officials. It'd be funny if someone hijacked G.W.Bush's residential WiFi and got the RIAA to John Doe him:)
I bought a Compaq laptop ~2.5 years ago that came with... 1) Windows XP Home SP1a install CD - French 2) Windows XP Home SP1a install CD - English 3) Windows XP Critical Updates CD 4,5) Compaq drivers library CDs (x2) 6,7) Extra software CDs (x2) 8,9) more stuff I do not need (MS Money, Norton Antivirus)
No complaints about included recovery discs on my end... the french XP disc was an unexpected extra. Of course, the first thing I did after I got home is wipe out XP Home and install XP Pro since I have never managed to make XP Home's "Simple Network File Sharing" work properly.
Charging 20-40% of a laptop's price for 2-3 years extra warranty is pretty insane - that warranty would have to cover everything including an axe "conveniently" finding its way through the thing for me to consider buying. If the replacement policy covers up to the initial purchase price, that ~$400 insurance could be converted into an EOL upgrade ("planned catastrophe") and be very well worth it. Otherwise, the same $400, can buy a roughly equivalent brand-new laptop featuring the latest in graphics deceleration technology 2-3 years later which will still provide over twice the processing power and other goodies.
But I did buy into an extended warranty once, many years ago, for an 1.2GB Connor HDD. That drive failed at ~18 months old, after Connor got acquired by Quantum (IIRC) so the store replaced it with a 3.2GB Quantum HDD which also failed, at ~14 months old, some time after Quantum sold out to Seagate (IIRC). I was offered a 6.4GB Seagate drive but because the 2.1GB Seagate drive I got to backup the 1.2GB Conner had all the stealthyness of a lawnmower, I asked for a different brand and got a 5.7GB Maxtor that has worked fine all the way to retirement.
Memory is an ability that forgets, mine also likes to shuffle "details" a lot. The important thing is that I should be receiving my cheap Vista Ultimate any day now:)
I am still waiting for my former-Microsoftie friend to bring me my $50 retail Vista Ultimate from Seatle's MS employees' store and I will probably wait until SP1 is out before installing it - I have yet to decide which of my PCs I will be 'sacrificing' to Vista, I will probably end up getting spare HDDs to try it on both my primary laptop and desktop... that would be two consecutive SP1 installs right there, probably more given that new MS OS installs have a long history of blowing up in my face during the first install or two and the first successful install (including service packs and third-party drivers) is often short-lived.
Right now, all of my three current XP installs are over a year old and have been damaged to some extent by left-overs from hardware swaps and uninstalls (one of them also got hit by zlob, it took me nearly a week to successfully clean it up) so I am waiting after SP3 to start a full round of rebuilds... and since I maintain PCs for a couple of friends and family, having SP3 on a CD is quite convenient - my mom's PC is also on my short-list of systems that could use a rebuild.
It would be pretty tough to avoid monopolies in the media industry: very few titles are pushed onto the market by more than one publisher at a time so each publisher has an effective monopoly on the titles it pushes on the shelves... this would be like Paramount buying distribution rights for Sony's titles or vice-versa, not gonna happen. When titles get pushed by more than one publisher it usually means the first publisher's contract has either expired, been cancelled or transferred or the publisher has gone bankrupt or has been bought-out.
In a similar way, Intel has a monopoly on Celeron, Pentium, Xeon and Core CPUs and related in-house chipsets, therefore it can set the prices to whatever it feels like. Since the goal of companies is to maximize profits, this price is a balanced compromise between unitary profit and volume. Unlike the entertainment business though, Intel does have to limit price gouging to avoid customer mass-defection to equivalents from AMD.
Basically, every title (book, CD, DVD, etc.) is its own micro-monopoly. Buying a Spiderman movie is not the same as buying an X-Men or StarTrek one, whatever the prices may be and since each of these titles has a single publisher, the prices we have to pay (for legit copies) are whatever the studios are ask for based on past market response to comparable content. Since no movie can come remotely close to being an exact equivalent of any other, the entertainment industry does not have to compete with substitutes.
Online music download services do change the landscape of the audio world since they allow a-la-carte track transfer and with the average 1-5 good tracks per CD one would otherwise have to buy and $1.50/track DRM-free downloads, it means "fillerized" CDs are now competing with sub-$10 downloads.
HMV is an entertainment media outlet... they sell CD, DVDs, magazines, books, etc.
It is really funny to read about a media outlet slashing prices to counter piracy after so many years of media outlets using piracy as an excuse for inflating prices.
Where many movies can be had for about $20, it is pretty hard to accept so many audio CDs being listed around $25. Knocking 33% off these only brings them back down to a level that seems more natural - though still on the high side.
Right now, music outlets have to compete on convenience, added value and price to generate sales and counter piracy. At ~$20 per disc, CDs look like a pretty bad proposition considering that very few of the tracks on most discs are worth listening to and getting them off iTunes/whatever would cost less than $10. Filler tracks provide practically no value and in the face of a-la-carte DRM-free music download services, the $20 price tags are simply unsustainable.
HMV is simply using piracy as an excuse to hide the real reason behind the price adjustments: the fact that download services currently offer much better value. Being honest and stating this up-front would be like promoting the online competitors.
If you do "cp/dev/mem/", doesn't the kernel expand the disk cache to defer writes and destroy the previous content of free space in the process by replacing it with new - and redundant - cache data? Also, wouldn't dumping RAM to HDD potentially destroy data previously stored in sectors affected by the dump? This means memory dumps would need to be done on virgin HDDs.
Judges should be careful not to issue orders whose literal interpretation makes no sense. RAM is volatile temporary workspace. Much like speech, some of it may be stored elsewhere but the bulk of it is going to disappear moments after the fact or we'd drown in superfluous information.
I worked for a governmental agency for a short while some years ago and the system architects weren't pussy-footing with reliability: mirrored dual-ported Ultra160 storage arrays (~$60k each) with one port plugged to each of two Proliant servers (~$150k each) configured in fail-over. Put an axe through one rack and there's still one fully functional server+array left. These boxes were hosting the department's Netware directory services and file server. IIRC, the RAID controllers themselves cost about $5k extra each.
As for parts' availability, it should not be an issue for another three or so years on that job since the purchase contract included a 10 years parts provisioning guarantee so, should HP run out of replacement parts, they'll have to provide all the upgrades necessary to bring the systems back to production specs at their expense. Given the ludicrous price tags on these things, I certainly wouldn't expect anything less.
But for individuals and small companies, the safest but rather expensive solution (once stuck with hardware RAID) is indeed, unfortunately, to stash spares... only to discover years later that one turned out to be a lemon and the other has gone bad from extended unpowered storage. In desperate times, sending the boards through a local PCB assembly shop's reflow oven can revive some boards - among other things, heat can roll back some of the age-related capacity loss in ceramic capacitors, it also drives moisture out of the components and can restore weakened/intermittent solder joints.
One of my friends worked as a sysadmin for a small company many years ago once asked a budget allowance to upgrade the company's main server from single-disk to RAID5 to avoid losing it should the drive fail. Funny thing is he "discovered" a few months later that the RAID controller itself is also a single-point-of(-catastrophic)-failure: the controller went up in smoke and corrupted the array somewhere in the process. Granted, RAID controllers usually fail more than an order of magnitude less frequently than HDDs but that does not prevent lemons from getting past QA every now and then.
USB does not cause quite as much of a load as Intel's early prediction that MMX would make dedicated 3D accelerators unnecessary would have, should that claim have materialized.
Well, that graphics prediction could still come true but off by ~15 years: with all the SIMD extensions and CPU improvements since then, I read Intel's realtime raytracer is now starting to pull decent 720p framerates on the latest Core2Quad CPUs. The near-future DSP-like tack-ons should also help quite a bit. It is quite possible that by ~2012, "integrated graphics" will be equivalent to AC97-for-Video... little more than DMA + LVDS transceiver.
Perhaps you should stock up on fire extinguishers... they're a little more expensive but a C-class (chemical/metal fires) would have made short work of the power brick fire or pretty much any other household fire. (A-class is usually water-based, sometimes with a foaming agent for wood/paper fires and B-class is typically CO2-based for grease fires. Both of these should be avoided against metallic fires since some burn hot enough to strip oxygen from water and CO2... speaking of batteries, lithium spontaneously ignites in the presence of water.)
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I did say ***sometimes*** and depending on context, this can be anywhere from more than 1/10 of the time while in others, it can be less than 1/1000. It happened to my 2005 tax refund: two months after everybody else I knew had received theirs, I still did not have mine. Called the revenue agency, asked whether or not they issued it, they re-issued the check and I got it a 3-4 business days later. AFAIK, this is the only piece of my mail that got lost.
Mail sometimes gets legitimately lost.
Given the expenses incurred when applying for rebates, I have made it my policy not to buy into rebated items unless the list price matches the normal list prices of no-rebate stores. Another reason I rarely bother hunting for rebates is that they are often precursors to price reductions and new product introductions. For technology products, I generally consider them as blinking and screaming "End-Of-Life / Discontinued" tags, indicators that I should avoid buying the stuff or at least be particularly wary.
I have applied for rebates only twice ($15 on a $40 DI-524 and $45 on a $100 Audigy 2ZS) and got both back 2-3 months later. In both cases, the counter prices were already lower than other stores and in line with what I considered to be a fair price so I did not care too much whether or not the rebates came back... but I certainly would have made it a point to make it known to as many potential customers as possible if they did not.
Not necessarily. Fibers are usually run in symmetric pairs but if a company does not need symmetric bandwidth and needs more than one OCxxx worth in one direction, they need as little as one fiber per gang in whichever direction they do not need. For example, a server that has lots of upstream requirement (say WindowsUpdate patch servers, linux distro) can get more upstream links in its gang than downstream ones.
Many years ago (around Y2k), I chatted with one of my ISP's supervisors and was told their backbone links were being upgraded from a mix of OC3/OC12-class links with 1:10 up:down link ratio to OC24/OC48-class ones with a 4:1 ratio. I am guessing the ratios must not have changed much since regular accounts caps have maintained 2:1 down:up balance ever since, up from the 4:1 or even 6:1 from before then.
As for the customer link symmetry, the most *DSL and DOCSIS broadband specs have been built with the assumption that the vast majority of intended users want much faster download than upload speeds. For cable, upstream channels have been historically limited to the sub-54MHz band due to inline amplifiers and upstream bypass filters while downstream channels can be peppered across the 100-1000MHz range so there is vastly more downstream capacity than upstream. We will probably have to wait until the death of analog cable TV before we see a DOCSIS spec with extended upstream spectrum. *DSL over plain telephone lines has far less available bandwidth than cable so I am not expecting much from that, I'd rather bet on FTTN + some sort of ruggedized Ethernet-like intermediate link + whatever-to-Ethernet transceiver.
Tell that to network operators who have to get new OCxxx leases connected to meet increased average traffic load and still maintain a minimum acceptable QoS throughout traffic spikes. Most small-medium ISPs do not operate their own backbones so all their links are leased, this is a non-trivial expense that scales with connected capacity. Take the cost of those leases and related expenses, divide by how many GBs/month you can transfer using it and you get a figure in the area of $0.05/GB.
Bandwidth isn't free, bandwidth isn't unlimited but even with my old numbers, ISPs have not much of a reason to whine about ~250GB/month on $70/month packages since they'd still be left with a >$40 margin to cover profits and occasional expenses. My ISP is extra-greedy and decided to put a 100GB/month cap starting in October on that service class... some of my friends are thoroughly pissed, they will almost certainly change ISP and other ISPs will implement caps as "problem customers" start clogging their networks.
Even if you lease a 100Mbps link from some ISP/coloc center, the thing is almost certainly oversubscribed at some point higher in the network. You get higher traffic priority but the reality most likely is that instead of oversubscribing 100:1 like regular accounts, these business-class links are probably oversubscribed around 5:1 - like home users, most business links are typically far from operating at 100%. The same happens at every layer including the backbones. Abolishing oversubscription would cause bandwidth costs to explode - many networks would practically have to be rebuilt from scratch. Also, upgrading networks to provide 100% capacity to everyone at all times would not provide any visible benefits over 10:1 oversubscription for 99% of people but would cost at least 10X as much.
Because you have fiber in your backyard does not mean it is not oversubscribed, it only means you have a potentially very fast highway down to the interstate's traffic jam. As long as ISPs do a decent job managing oversubscription, their customers will not notice.
The real problem is that most ISPs want to maintain as few plans as possible and fit as many customers on each OC48/96/192 they have as possible. ISPs should have premium accounts for heavy users to pass down a larger chunk of operating costs down to them and finance the oversubscription reduction instead of claiming "unlimited" access and then whine about heavy users.
An OC48 lease cost about $30k/month in 2005, that puts it at slightly more than $10/Mbps/month. Add maintenance of backbone terminal equipment at both ends and the line itself, insurance, network equipment and related expenses at the ISP, maintenance of equipment at both ends of the customer line and the line itself, etc. along with miscellaneous expenses like wages, power, accounting, taxes, etc., somewhere around $20/month of any account goes into covering ongoing expenses before factoring in the ~$10/month cost per 1:1 unlimited Mbps. Call tech support and you will pretty much burn their profit margin on your account for the month in half an hour or so.
Oversubscription is a fact of life: Wallmart stores (or any other crowded space) do not have enough exits for everyone to bail out at once.
If an ISP has usage limits, yes, they should be published and Comcast should be the one paying damages to customers it dropped for exceeding this undisclosed limit. If anyone took Comcast to court over this, Comcast would most likely lose... that would be similar to a cop nailing you for speeding but refusing to tell you both what speed you were doing and what the limit was.
At least one local ISP in my area is currently fighting a class-action suit for changing the "unlimited" TOS to a 100GB/month limit even though the original TOS did include a clause about the ISP reserving the right to change the TOS with a 45 days notice. The big issue here is whether or not service providers can reserve the rights to change TOS for current customers. I wonder how this will play out. (Would an hypothetical GPL clause stating that all GPL licenses are automatically upgraded to whatever the newest version is hold up in court? Seems unlikely to me and I am hoping the ISP will lose for the same reasons.)
Most low-cost ($30-40/month) broadband packages in my area have 20-40GB/month limits. Since I am too cheap to pay a $30 premium for 100GB/month packages, I download an extra ~20GB/month by freeloading off my friends and relatives' internet who do not download much - that and free lunches are my compensation for acting as their tech support and lending them hardware.
In any case, the death of cheap "unlimited" broadband is near. If courts rule that ISPs are not allowed to change their TOS (like changing limits), they will adjust the prices to compensate (hello $100+/month) and force most people to switch to packages with explicit limits - courts cannot force prices as long as there are reasonable market circumstances to justify them. The same applies to Comcast it it really wishes to maintain its unlimited facade: price it for the top 5%, create an intermediate package for the 60-90% heavy users, a regular package for the 20-50% masses and a basic package for the bottom 10%, leave the in-between groups to choose between trimming their bandwidth usage, pay up or go away - that's pretty much what I have seen happening with my local ISPs and elsewhere around the globe.
1) initiate a remote reset on the customer's modem
2) when the modem comes back online, sniff out the tracker requests and torrent file hashes as it starts reconnecting
3) visit the tracker and check out the file names identified by captured hashes to see what sort of material is being downloaded based on filenames and the type of site
4) proceed with downloading parts of the files to verify that content matches description
Now you have an IP, a list of files and a few other miscellaneous details that should be sufficient to determine which customer's modem the file was downloaded from and what it is. (Though this may be rather time-consuming if both peer and tracker protocols have been encrypted.)
This is slashdot, believe it!
Oversubscription is what makes it possible for ISPs to offer 10Mbps service under $80. Without it, the same service would cost closer to $200, with $50 of both amounts being the ISP's operating income for the service class. Many ISPs have "reasonable use" clauses in their otherwise "unlimited" service plans and this cap appears to be around 250GB in many cases, which would theoretically allow ISPs to fit roughly 3000 high-bandwidth 250GB/month customers per ~$30k/month OC48. The same OC48 can accommodate little more than 250 wire-burning, non-oversubscribed 10Mbps customers... that would be more than $100/month uplink cost per customer.
Because the top ~5% of customers (ab)uses ~90% of the bandwidth, over-subscription reduces the ISPs' infrastructure costs for typical users by >90%. The recent stories about heavy users getting either kicked off or pushed onto higher-margin business/special service shows that ISPs are starting to push the extra operating costs down to the relevant customers. I have calculated that a fair price for true unlimited access would be ~$150/month: rent for ~1/300th of an OC48 + other operating/service costs and profit.
But none of that quite excuses ISPs from interfering with their customers' traffic unless the customer has specifically requested it.
Most people here are talking about upgrading the base station on Earth, not the spacecrafts. As someone else pointed out, most of the reason they are sticking with the old system must be quirky analog/RF components, not the bitstreams themselves - the Voyager base-station antenna is a huge dish array that recovers sub-yoctowatt signals from the probes. The analog/RF front-end needed to filter and amplify this signal before it can be decoded by digital equipment must be a very unique piece of analog kit with decades worth of tweaking and refinement poured into it both before and after the launch.
The digital decoding should be trivial with modern CPUs but the analog parts were most likely tuned to the point of defying modern technology.
The argument was not about using FPGAs in consumer-level devices or not because we, as you said, actually do.
It is just that in consumer electronics, CPLDs and FPGAs are usually there to replace glue-logic and complement the microcontroller/embedded processor's capabilities... like working around bugs. One example of FPGA in consumer equipment is early Radeon SLI: the 'master' board used a Xilinx FPGA to receive pixel data from the slave board and combine it with data from the master to produce the final image sent to VGA/DVI. Matrox's Dual/TripleHead2Go also uses an FPGA to split display data among their 2-3 output ports... or at least they used to - last I heard they were still debating about whether or not they should spin it into an ASIC product.
When FPGAs are used as the core element of consumer devices, it either means the manufacturer is not expecting sales to be sufficient for an ASIC version to break even or that it is testing the market to see if the risk of going ASIC is worth it. Another example is Gigabytes' SATA RAM-drive: another Xilinx Spartan3-based consumer device.
Spartan3 FPGAs can be had for less than $30, which is great for low-volume production of consumer devices. If you look at my three examples, you can see that all three products fit in consumer-level niche markets likely to fall in the sub-million units category. One million units is often where the ASIC becomes cheaper than FPGA - though the bar is slowly rising as FPGAs become cheaper, larger and faster, thereby increasing the breadth of commercially and functionally viable FPGA applications. For intermediate production volumes, Xilinx's EasyPath and structured ASICs/mask-programmable gate arrays provide lower cost and lower risk alternatives to custom ASIC.
On the Virtex side, you are more likely to see those in low-volume ($5k per unit) professional equipment since the smallest and slowest devices are over $200.
In any case, for designers and their customers, having more implementation avenues to fit each price, risk and volume bracket is always a good thing.
All things are relative. IMO, the only thing that exists in FPGAs is a cheapest/smallest/slowest device that will fit a design with the required safety margins and futureproofing headrom. Most of the places I worked at where we used FPGAs were sold to Virtex: XC2V6000, XC2VP70, XC4FX100, XC4LX200 - since they were mostly doing ASIC prototyping, they preferred to spend $2000 extra up-front than have to re-do their $10000 prototype boards because they underestimated the final design's gate count or had to include unexpected extras - such was the case for the project that used XC2V6000s. A supersized hardware simulator is not all lost anyhow since it cuts synthesis time and provides headroom for extra on-chip debugging/monitoring instrumentation.
Agreed, this is certainly on a totally different scale from most sane people's hobby projects.
With the still relatively young V5 slowly replacing the V4, Xilinx will need a new family to break into the 45nm market. Since it is too soon to replace V5 and the S3 is a somewhat old and odd V2P-V4 hybrid, it is about time for a new generation to join the Spartan family. I am expecting to see the S4 family materialize before this time next year, borrowing most of the V5's major architectural changes (LUT6 and PLLs, among other things) with some left-overs from the V2P/V4 (18kbits non-ECC BRAMs with *working* FIFO16s) and other borrowed tweaks from the future V6 (stuff like planned PLL/DCM and IOB improvements). Once that happens, everybody will be able to benefit from LUT6 and PLLs on a budget.
Still, I wouldn't say LUT6 is a "very-high-end" item... but stepping into the "Realm of Virtex" does come at a price.
4-input LUTs are on their way out, the migration towards LUT6 and beyond has begun in the current high-end FPGA families (Virtex5, Stratix II/III) and will most likely enter the volume-oriented ones (Spartan, Cyclone, etc.) soon. Single-LUT 4:1 muxes alone can enable drastic improvements in many designs.
As for FPGAs being cheap, all things are relative. There are ASICs out there for nearly any common application imaginable and these are often well under $50 and are usually designed by people who have extensively studied the specific problem the ASIC is intended to solve. Building an FPGA-based equivalent might cost $50 for the device itself but will most likely require extra external components like RAM or flash and will cost many times that much in R&D and potential patent problems.
FPGAs are great for prototyping, implementing glue logic and low-volume production. We are not seeing many FPGAs in stuff we buy because we buy mass-produced goods for which it is worth taking FPGA designs and re-spinning them into ASICs. Besides, most low-cost FPGAs do not support encrypted bitstreams so anyone could reverse-engineer the firmware and produce clones - not a problem with an ASIC respin.
And then, when you go to court in 2025, a quick chemical analysis would reveal that the content is 10+ years newer than the vessel and the signature ink is from a 2019-2021 production Bic - a conclusion backed by printing watermark analysis revealing that the content was printed by a FooBar 18000 v1.2 with serial number 0918273645 produced in January 2020.
Perfect fraud is becoming more difficult every year.
I read the first couple of pages of the Andersen vs RIAA filing, looks like her lawyer has done a pretty good and interesting job on this one.
... now waiting for the day the RIAA will John Doe someone close to top government officials. It'd be funny if someone hijacked G.W.Bush's residential WiFi and got the RIAA to John Doe him :)
This passage might explain why: "In May 2004, for health reasons, Ms Andersen had been forced to leave her position as case manager for the Department of Justice" (p.12)
If I were a RIAA lawyer, I would probably think thrice and most likely decide to forget about about filing a lawsuit based on flawed and illegally acquired evidence against someone who worked for the DoJ. I think it is safe to presume Ms Andersen is acquainted with a number of both actual men in suits, lawsuits and men in suits who deal with lawsuits. The RIAA might really have bitten more than they can chew on this one.
I bought a Compaq laptop ~2.5 years ago that came with...
1) Windows XP Home SP1a install CD - French
2) Windows XP Home SP1a install CD - English
3) Windows XP Critical Updates CD
4,5) Compaq drivers library CDs (x2)
6,7) Extra software CDs (x2)
8,9) more stuff I do not need (MS Money, Norton Antivirus)
No complaints about included recovery discs on my end... the french XP disc was an unexpected extra.
Of course, the first thing I did after I got home is wipe out XP Home and install XP Pro since I have never managed to make XP Home's "Simple Network File Sharing" work properly.
Hahahaha... absolutely.
Charging 20-40% of a laptop's price for 2-3 years extra warranty is pretty insane - that warranty would have to cover everything including an axe "conveniently" finding its way through the thing for me to consider buying. If the replacement policy covers up to the initial purchase price, that ~$400 insurance could be converted into an EOL upgrade ("planned catastrophe") and be very well worth it. Otherwise, the same $400, can buy a roughly equivalent brand-new laptop featuring the latest in graphics deceleration technology 2-3 years later which will still provide over twice the processing power and other goodies.
But I did buy into an extended warranty once, many years ago, for an 1.2GB Connor HDD. That drive failed at ~18 months old, after Connor got acquired by Quantum (IIRC) so the store replaced it with a 3.2GB Quantum HDD which also failed, at ~14 months old, some time after Quantum sold out to Seagate (IIRC). I was offered a 6.4GB Seagate drive but because the 2.1GB Seagate drive I got to backup the 1.2GB Conner had all the stealthyness of a lawnmower, I asked for a different brand and got a 5.7GB Maxtor that has worked fine all the way to retirement.
Memory is an ability that forgets, mine also likes to shuffle "details" a lot. The important thing is that I should be receiving my cheap Vista Ultimate any day now :)
I am still waiting for my former-Microsoftie friend to bring me my $50 retail Vista Ultimate from Seatle's MS employees' store and I will probably wait until SP1 is out before installing it - I have yet to decide which of my PCs I will be 'sacrificing' to Vista, I will probably end up getting spare HDDs to try it on both my primary laptop and desktop... that would be two consecutive SP1 installs right there, probably more given that new MS OS installs have a long history of blowing up in my face during the first install or two and the first successful install (including service packs and third-party drivers) is often short-lived.
Right now, all of my three current XP installs are over a year old and have been damaged to some extent by left-overs from hardware swaps and uninstalls (one of them also got hit by zlob, it took me nearly a week to successfully clean it up) so I am waiting after SP3 to start a full round of rebuilds... and since I maintain PCs for a couple of friends and family, having SP3 on a CD is quite convenient - my mom's PC is also on my short-list of systems that could use a rebuild.
It would be pretty tough to avoid monopolies in the media industry: very few titles are pushed onto the market by more than one publisher at a time so each publisher has an effective monopoly on the titles it pushes on the shelves... this would be like Paramount buying distribution rights for Sony's titles or vice-versa, not gonna happen. When titles get pushed by more than one publisher it usually means the first publisher's contract has either expired, been cancelled or transferred or the publisher has gone bankrupt or has been bought-out.
In a similar way, Intel has a monopoly on Celeron, Pentium, Xeon and Core CPUs and related in-house chipsets, therefore it can set the prices to whatever it feels like. Since the goal of companies is to maximize profits, this price is a balanced compromise between unitary profit and volume. Unlike the entertainment business though, Intel does have to limit price gouging to avoid customer mass-defection to equivalents from AMD.
Basically, every title (book, CD, DVD, etc.) is its own micro-monopoly. Buying a Spiderman movie is not the same as buying an X-Men or StarTrek one, whatever the prices may be and since each of these titles has a single publisher, the prices we have to pay (for legit copies) are whatever the studios are ask for based on past market response to comparable content. Since no movie can come remotely close to being an exact equivalent of any other, the entertainment industry does not have to compete with substitutes.
Online music download services do change the landscape of the audio world since they allow a-la-carte track transfer and with the average 1-5 good tracks per CD one would otherwise have to buy and $1.50/track DRM-free downloads, it means "fillerized" CDs are now competing with sub-$10 downloads.
HMV is an entertainment media outlet... they sell CD, DVDs, magazines, books, etc.
It is really funny to read about a media outlet slashing prices to counter piracy after so many years of media outlets using piracy as an excuse for inflating prices.
Where many movies can be had for about $20, it is pretty hard to accept so many audio CDs being listed around $25. Knocking 33% off these only brings them back down to a level that seems more natural - though still on the high side.
Right now, music outlets have to compete on convenience, added value and price to generate sales and counter piracy. At ~$20 per disc, CDs look like a pretty bad proposition considering that very few of the tracks on most discs are worth listening to and getting them off iTunes/whatever would cost less than $10. Filler tracks provide practically no value and in the face of a-la-carte DRM-free music download services, the $20 price tags are simply unsustainable.
HMV is simply using piracy as an excuse to hide the real reason behind the price adjustments: the fact that download services currently offer much better value. Being honest and stating this up-front would be like promoting the online competitors.
If you do "cp /dev/mem /", doesn't the kernel expand the disk cache to defer writes and destroy the previous content of free space in the process by replacing it with new - and redundant - cache data? Also, wouldn't dumping RAM to HDD potentially destroy data previously stored in sectors affected by the dump? This means memory dumps would need to be done on virgin HDDs.
Judges should be careful not to issue orders whose literal interpretation makes no sense. RAM is volatile temporary workspace. Much like speech, some of it may be stored elsewhere but the bulk of it is going to disappear moments after the fact or we'd drown in superfluous information.
I worked for a governmental agency for a short while some years ago and the system architects weren't pussy-footing with reliability: mirrored dual-ported Ultra160 storage arrays (~$60k each) with one port plugged to each of two Proliant servers (~$150k each) configured in fail-over. Put an axe through one rack and there's still one fully functional server+array left. These boxes were hosting the department's Netware directory services and file server. IIRC, the RAID controllers themselves cost about $5k extra each.
As for parts' availability, it should not be an issue for another three or so years on that job since the purchase contract included a 10 years parts provisioning guarantee so, should HP run out of replacement parts, they'll have to provide all the upgrades necessary to bring the systems back to production specs at their expense. Given the ludicrous price tags on these things, I certainly wouldn't expect anything less.
But for individuals and small companies, the safest but rather expensive solution (once stuck with hardware RAID) is indeed, unfortunately, to stash spares... only to discover years later that one turned out to be a lemon and the other has gone bad from extended unpowered storage. In desperate times, sending the boards through a local PCB assembly shop's reflow oven can revive some boards - among other things, heat can roll back some of the age-related capacity loss in ceramic capacitors, it also drives moisture out of the components and can restore weakened/intermittent solder joints.
One of my friends worked as a sysadmin for a small company many years ago once asked a budget allowance to upgrade the company's main server from single-disk to RAID5 to avoid losing it should the drive fail. Funny thing is he "discovered" a few months later that the RAID controller itself is also a single-point-of(-catastrophic)-failure: the controller went up in smoke and corrupted the array somewhere in the process. Granted, RAID controllers usually fail more than an order of magnitude less frequently than HDDs but that does not prevent lemons from getting past QA every now and then.
USB does not cause quite as much of a load as Intel's early prediction that MMX would make dedicated 3D accelerators unnecessary would have, should that claim have materialized.
Well, that graphics prediction could still come true but off by ~15 years: with all the SIMD extensions and CPU improvements since then, I read Intel's realtime raytracer is now starting to pull decent 720p framerates on the latest Core2Quad CPUs. The near-future DSP-like tack-ons should also help quite a bit. It is quite possible that by ~2012, "integrated graphics" will be equivalent to AC97-for-Video... little more than DMA + LVDS transceiver.
Perhaps you should stock up on fire extinguishers... they're a little more expensive but a C-class (chemical/metal fires) would have made short work of the power brick fire or pretty much any other household fire. (A-class is usually water-based, sometimes with a foaming agent for wood/paper fires and B-class is typically CO2-based for grease fires. Both of these should be avoided against metallic fires since some burn hot enough to strip oxygen from water and CO2... speaking of batteries, lithium spontaneously ignites in the presence of water.)