Back in 2008, CUDA and friends were too bleeding edge for the applications I was working on, plus - a standard desktop PC had acceptable performance, so why kill yourself with exotica? Since then, I haven't had any applications where CUDA would have been practical, well, o.k., I did work with a group that did video processing who _should_ have been using CUDA, but they were having enough trouble keeping their stuff stable on ordinary servers.
And, that 22 signal application, probably would be a major pain to port into CUDA, even today - it was a port out of Fortran into C++, and some of the Fortran code did some fairly exotic stuff - not found in your normal signal processing toolkit (written, validated, and used by statisticians...)
All depends on the app. In 2008 I was doing some signal processing work that would have easily parallelized out to 22 cores, and probably get partial benefit up to 80+ cores - nature of the source data (22 time series signals going through similar processing chains, the chains themselves might not get use out of more than 4-8 cores, but there are 22 of these things, so....)
Lots of video processing work can be trivially split up by frame, so if you don't mind a couple seconds of processing delay, you can grab 80 frames and throw them one to a core... Other video processing work wants to go sequentially frame by frame, and would have to gather these results to chew on them.
Most MonteCarlos I've seen do benefit from multiple runs to improve accuracy - not to insult a very important area of computational methods, but the whole idea of MC simulation seems an extravagant use of compute resources just to get a statistical prediction of an unknown quantity. In nuclear medicine, ok, fine, you are actually simulating physical particles that have reliable statistically modeled behaviors, but Blackman-Scholes pricing? That's sociology, and I have a hard time believing that the market can't flip over and start obeying a completely different (and unknown) set of models if the players change, whether by world events (war, natural disaster, religious upheaval), or the personal life circumstances of large players (Buffet, Gates, Ellison, Koch and Walton attend a party and all get dosed with LSD...)
Agreed - cooling is the issue, and moving to smaller feature sizes (22nm, 14nm, 5!?!nm) is improving thermal efficiency, while simultaneously shrinking packages, making things like the Cedar Trail Compute Stick a possibility. People who really need 1000 core machines are getting them today, smaller, cheaper, and lower power than ever - if there were a market, you could shoehorn about 50 of your 4GHz cores into a "Full Size Tower" case that wasn't at all unusual (size-wise) 20 years ago - dissipating ~1000W out of a single case would be "extreme" but not exotic yet.
We've been moving sideways for 10 years. In the 20 years before that, clock speeds were doubling every year or two. For the last 10, we've moved from a norm of single cores to a norm of 4 (or 2 + "Hyperthreads"), rotating hard drives to SSD, and specialized architectures to support HD video, but clock speed has been basically stagnant while the processors are getting fatter, more parallel, and not just in core count.
10 years ago, Intel was hinting at a massively parallel future (80 core processor rumored in development at the time), they've been slow to deliver on that in terms of core count, but are making progress on other fronts - especially helping single cores perform faster without a faster clock.
Do problems really have to scale up to consume the available compute power?
Big CPU suckers like Monte Carlo and HiDef video processing are near trivial to parallelize, while most "normal" compute tasks are sub-millisecond on a single 2GHz thread, especially with FPU and other specialized instructions.
Granted, as camera prices fall, I want to have real-time intelligent video processing on an array of 20 cameras, but, can you spot the parallel opportunity there?
Gotta love the deaf hypocrite Rush... I think it says a lot about his remaining audience that they're sticking with him now that those facts are out (as if there was any doubt of them before they became public.)
So, basic census data goes pretty far already - do you not think that certain agencies haven't augmented the census database to include resident aliens, and even tourists, including whatever fields may be of interest - up to and beyond security camera images of the individuals at places of interest?
So, why do we think there's not a database on EVERYONE that includes a religious affiliation field, already, starting with the first US census in 1790?
Thank you very much, capable engineers who have developed our product. Sadly, unless you have skills in sales and marketing, we simply cannot afford you at this time.
Sincerely,
The management team who should have seen this coming but is acting surprised.
When you spend Billions, stuff happens. One thing that came out of Star Wars was new buildings on University campuses, mostly devoted to Physics and Engineering. After those buildings were built in the 1980s, lots of theoretical research was done in the 1990s. And in the 2010s we actually have field deployable, military rail guns that are pretty damn impressive. Kinetic weapons so powerful that they don't need explosives. Are any orbiting the earth as part of an ICBM defense system? I would hope that if they are, we are capable of keeping that a secret.
I'll be happy when my camera has enough gigapixels of resolution and terrabytes of storage that I can shoot 120fps lossless video through a fisheye lens and turn around and capture the equivalent of a 1000mm telephoto image on a 35mm film camera from anywhere in the lens view.
Until then, (all else like noise, light sensitivity, color balance, etc. being equal) more pixels is better. My first digital camera had 320x240 resolution and could only shoot decently in full sunlight, but don't get the sun or a strong reflection in the frame unless you want the green stripe effect. I truly hope that camera technology hasn't reached a plateau in 2015, just because digital is already better than film is no reason to stop improving (and film was improving right up until digital ate its breakfast, lunch and dinner.)
So, if you really want to shoot RAW and process it, now you just have to be savvy enough to know how to doctor the metadata (which, simply knowing that metadata in your photos exists + Google should be a short exercise to teach yourself.)
Question out of curiosity: Do Reuters et.al. accept formats like.PNG?
Roads and highways are pretty good in the U.S. it's part of what made our economy strong in the last 70 years.
We are talking about ISPs not roads. But if you do want to use roads as an analogy, they are massively misallocated in the US, with highways in places like the Bay Area perpetually congested, and other highways woefully underutilized. The way highways and roads are funded leads to people settling in faraway places and shifting the burden of paying for their roads to other taxpayers. The fact that roads and highways used to be of fairly nice quality doesn't mean the money was well spent. And we can't even pay for maintaining this poorly conceived highway system anymore because there is no solid business model behind it.
That "inefficient" road system, concieved of out of pinko Communism, is a big part of what sets the US apart from China and India - we have a reasonably even level of development - sure there are local variations, but we all have decent transport connectivity, clean water and sanitary sewers, telephone and now internet service. It's an inefficient system, some areas are overutilized while others are hardly used at all, but all areas have some reasonable level of service that gives them the opportunity to develop - not a mandate to, but the possibility.
If you let Arkansas "develop normally" without federally funded roads, utilities, etc., mandated by law and delivered at a net loss, it would be one awesome wildlife park today. Most of the desert southwest would still be uninhabitable and inaccessible by today's standards, and, from an environmental standpoint, that might have been preferable - but if you're just talking economics, building some under-utilized roads pulls geographic areas up into the modern standards of living and makes them "part of" the country.
As to: we can't afford the roads we have, I don't know where you live, but in Florida there seems to be no shortage of road construction projects, widening, resurfacing, and generally updating all over the place. If we really couldn't afford them, I guess all those construction workers would be busy doing something more important instead.
Nothing necessitates 8 year to launch schedule except a tight program budget stretched out over time. There are decent Jupiter launch windows every 2 years or so:
And how about we determine how many votes people get based on the stake and interest they actually have in the outcome? Oh, right: we call that process of voting a "free market" and the votes "dollars".
And we're back to the "free market solves all," except that without regulation, the free market gives you Rockerfellers, Carnegies, and AT&T, and they served everyone so well.
Just because the US market doesn't cater to your personal preferences for content doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it. And, no, I don't think it "would be nice", I like the market the way it is, because I've seen the alternatives, and they are worse.
Just because the alternatives you have seen are worse doesn't mean there aren't better alternatives to what we have.
on top of rates that are already some of the highest in the world for marginal broadband
I've subscribed to broadband in several countries. In comparison, US broadband is pretty good. It's nominally a bit more expensive than in some other countries, but that's because it's subsidized there; you pay for it through taxes. Conditions, choice of plans, and service in the US are generally better than elsewhere in my experience.
Roads and highways are pretty good in the U.S. - it's part of what made our economy strong in the last 70 years.
I don't believe that all regulation leads to petulant price gouging, when there are competitors in the market. I do believe that living in fear (amongst the electorate) of being "smacked back" by every person or company in power whenever they catch an unpleasant break from the regulators (legislators, and by proxy: voters) is what keeps the Republican party in power - it's been my most disappointing disillusionment growing up in the "land of the free, home of the brave."
"Flat tax" has a grass-roots kind of appeal, and I support a lot of its tenents - put the accountants out of work, please, and simplify tax law to a point where it's easily understood and complied with. I don't particularly believe in higher, or lower taxes - simplify while remaining revenue neutral. But, on the flip side, taking 22.4% out of everyone, regardless of their level of wealth, is another kind of insanity, hard to say if it's worse than the Kafkaesque pile of laws, rules, regulations, forms, guidance documents, case law and consultant opinions that amount to our taxation system today, but a perfectly flat tax certainly lacks any semblance of "fair."
Wouldn't it be nice if we, as consumers, could somehow influence the market to provide a more "flat tax" tariff on us for the services they provide? Seems to be going in the opposite direction rather quickly, though.
I would think that a truly competitive market would include several one-stop shopping providers, perhaps WalMart and K-Mart and Target - subtly different, but basically bringing you all the same stuff with a little different spin on the marketing.
But Walmart, K-Mart, and Target are not one-stop shopping. For most people, they have maybe 80% of what they need, and for the rest they go somewhere else. And between them, they may have 95% of what people need, and for the rest they still need to go somewhere else. Basically, it's the same situation as with online video, except that there isn't a subscription involved.
See, I was happy when Blockbuster had 80% of what I cared about, Netflix DVD had 80% of what I cared about, and the corner 0.99 VCR rental had 40% of what I cared about, covering 95% between them.
Now, Hulu has 10% of what I care about, Netflix streaming has 20% of what I care about, Redbox carries 15% - 50% of which is overlapped with the first two, the other local rental shops are out of business (and not missed), and Netflix DVD has gone down the tubes. I was already pissed with Netflix DVD back in the "good old days" because of its subscription model - it was "great value" on the months I flogged it, but averaged over long periods of time, I was ending up paying $10 a piece for DVD rentals because there are times I just don't care (and those are just the times that I want to log in, suspend my account, and generally have something else to screw with over a matter of $0.30 a day - NOT.)
What I call the current entertainment mess is subscription lock-in fragmentation, wherein you have to buy not one, but several all subscriptions that each simultaneously give you more and less than you want
But the individual subscriptions are dirt-cheap. And if some of them make special deals with your ISP, they get even cheaper.
You must like your ISP more than I like mine - in my neighborhood we actually have a choice: AT&T DSL - barely useable when it works, but with AT&T's craptacular service it only works properly half the time, or Comcast's Xfinity - with a new promotional rate every 6 months and more crap to manage... they can't just let you pay $50/month for broadband and be done with it, no, broadband by itself is $70 a month, but let us give you a $30, 40 or 50 a month bundle including a bunch of other services you don't want / won't use, then at the end of the period jack you back up to $90, 100 or 130 a month. So, with them it's a $240 a year premium to not have to manage their BS, on top of rates that are already some of the highest in the world for marginal broadband - at least their service is better than AT&T, it only took me 7 months to get a faulty (out whenever it rains) line replaced, plus another 6 to get the replacement cable buried.
In some respects, this is a "golden age" of entertainment - media is more convenient to access, as you say "dirt cheap" - if you play the games and manage the bloodsuckers along the way, with more selection and higher quality production than ever before. In other respects, movie popcorn costs more per ounce than restaurant served filet minion, movie ticket prices have inflated faster than virtually any other thing that existed 40 years ago, and if you don't manage your subscription costs carefully, you can spend $200 a month or more rather easily. I guess without all that money flowing in, we'd have fewer great movies coming out... I'm most bummed out that I don't have the free time to enjoy half of what's out there, but people keep trying to get me to pay for all of it just to get the little pieces I do want.
I see T-Mobile getting into bed with Netflix, and just feels like one more "pay for it all, we know most of you won't use it" cafeteria plan that is a killer deal for the morbidly obese. They say it's "free," can I take a pass on this wonderful thing and get my rates reduced instead?
I don't see that one-stop shopping precludes competition, I would think that a truly competitive market would include several one-stop shopping providers, perhaps WalMart and K-Mart and Target - subtly different, but basically bringing you all the same stuff with a little different spin on the marketing.
What I call the current entertainment mess is subscription lock-in fragmentation, wherein you have to buy not one, but several all subscriptions that each simultaneously give you more and less than you want, all for a price that you're loathe to pay twice per month (one to each provider), let alone the three or four times you would have to pay it to get an approximation of "one stop shopping."
At least it hasn't devolved to Sony Playstation style "entertainment" where you get to spend 30 minutes every time you turn the damn thing on just waiting for updates to load, with another forced acceptance of their latest TOS update, unless, you know, you'd rather not have any of the online features of your online console work anymore. That is certainly one way to burn time. Another is in the decoding of who has what and what are their free / ad supported / subscription plans. Bitching about it, deep in a thread that few will ever see is another way to burn time - but it is good practice in presentation of the problem.
The criterion catalog is big, but very old. Back in the day, Netflix DVD selection closely paralleled Blockbuster retail rental selection - and they were both a superset of what was available on any given cable premium channel, release dates might have varied by a month or two from one to the other, but the deeper (5-20 year old) catalogs were very extensive. Streaming seems to have finally killed off the retail rental category, so we haven't had anything in the last few years to compare streaming to. Redbox will pop up with one or two interesting new titles a month, but nowhere near the 80%+ coverage of theater releases within 6 months to a year that Blockbuster and old-time Netflix DVD had.
Markets change, I miss the days when you could become aware of a title through whatever channel and have a better than even chance of getting ahold of it at the first retail outlet you went looking for it, maybe not on release day, but usually within less than a year.
Obligatory hat tip to the black/back channels of the internet, I assume they still offer free bootleg copies of basically everything if you take the time to hunt it down - personally, I'd rather pay $0.99, or even $3, and get it without hassle (and, going to a retail outlet _is_ a hassle), but I feel like those options are mostly gone, replaced by subscription models from near-monopoly providers (Pandora, I'm pointing at you now) who raise prices and change terms with no fear of losing subscribers to the competition, because there basically isn't any competition. Netflix still has the premium cable channels to deal with, and it's starting to fight them on their own turf (original content, etc.) Too bad they dropped the "long tail catalog" selection advantage they used to have.
If there were paid charging stations all over the place, available for a broad market of vehicles, and Tesla cut an exclusive deal with the stations that they would be free only for Tesla customers - that's approaching a problem, but not quite because cost of the Tesla effectively makes cost of charging noise in the equation.
I used to rent Netflix DVDs - selection in the DVD rental world was MUCH better than streaming has ever been, and it's only about the cost licensing and willingness to pay for it.
This is closer to: gasoline is being rationed, you can only get 5 gallons a month, but if you buy this car your gas is free. Oh, and if you weren't sure already, let's spell out that the oil companies and the car manufacturer are in bed together.
Again, hard to get worked up over entertainment - and you're right about WiFi, depending on lifestyle. Right now, I only stream Netflix to my phone over WiFi - but I do travel once in awhile, and I could stream it 4G when I'm away from home, but never have because of my 3G/month bandwidth cap.
I wonder if this capless thing will apply to me since I have a Nexus 5 (no T-Mobile special-ware on it)?
Slashdot Mirror
Back in 2008, CUDA and friends were too bleeding edge for the applications I was working on, plus - a standard desktop PC had acceptable performance, so why kill yourself with exotica? Since then, I haven't had any applications where CUDA would have been practical, well, o.k., I did work with a group that did video processing who _should_ have been using CUDA, but they were having enough trouble keeping their stuff stable on ordinary servers.
And, that 22 signal application, probably would be a major pain to port into CUDA, even today - it was a port out of Fortran into C++, and some of the Fortran code did some fairly exotic stuff - not found in your normal signal processing toolkit (written, validated, and used by statisticians...)
All depends on the app. In 2008 I was doing some signal processing work that would have easily parallelized out to 22 cores, and probably get partial benefit up to 80+ cores - nature of the source data (22 time series signals going through similar processing chains, the chains themselves might not get use out of more than 4-8 cores, but there are 22 of these things, so....)
Lots of video processing work can be trivially split up by frame, so if you don't mind a couple seconds of processing delay, you can grab 80 frames and throw them one to a core... Other video processing work wants to go sequentially frame by frame, and would have to gather these results to chew on them.
Most MonteCarlos I've seen do benefit from multiple runs to improve accuracy - not to insult a very important area of computational methods, but the whole idea of MC simulation seems an extravagant use of compute resources just to get a statistical prediction of an unknown quantity. In nuclear medicine, ok, fine, you are actually simulating physical particles that have reliable statistically modeled behaviors, but Blackman-Scholes pricing? That's sociology, and I have a hard time believing that the market can't flip over and start obeying a completely different (and unknown) set of models if the players change, whether by world events (war, natural disaster, religious upheaval), or the personal life circumstances of large players (Buffet, Gates, Ellison, Koch and Walton attend a party and all get dosed with LSD...)
Agreed - cooling is the issue, and moving to smaller feature sizes (22nm, 14nm, 5!?!nm) is improving thermal efficiency, while simultaneously shrinking packages, making things like the Cedar Trail Compute Stick a possibility. People who really need 1000 core machines are getting them today, smaller, cheaper, and lower power than ever - if there were a market, you could shoehorn about 50 of your 4GHz cores into a "Full Size Tower" case that wasn't at all unusual (size-wise) 20 years ago - dissipating ~1000W out of a single case would be "extreme" but not exotic yet.
We've been moving sideways for 10 years. In the 20 years before that, clock speeds were doubling every year or two. For the last 10, we've moved from a norm of single cores to a norm of 4 (or 2 + "Hyperthreads"), rotating hard drives to SSD, and specialized architectures to support HD video, but clock speed has been basically stagnant while the processors are getting fatter, more parallel, and not just in core count.
10 years ago, Intel was hinting at a massively parallel future (80 core processor rumored in development at the time), they've been slow to deliver on that in terms of core count, but are making progress on other fronts - especially helping single cores perform faster without a faster clock.
Do problems really have to scale up to consume the available compute power?
Big CPU suckers like Monte Carlo and HiDef video processing are near trivial to parallelize, while most "normal" compute tasks are sub-millisecond on a single 2GHz thread, especially with FPU and other specialized instructions.
Granted, as camera prices fall, I want to have real-time intelligent video processing on an array of 20 cameras, but, can you spot the parallel opportunity there?
Gotta love the deaf hypocrite Rush... I think it says a lot about his remaining audience that they're sticking with him now that those facts are out (as if there was any doubt of them before they became public.)
So, basic census data goes pretty far already - do you not think that certain agencies haven't augmented the census database to include resident aliens, and even tourists, including whatever fields may be of interest - up to and beyond security camera images of the individuals at places of interest?
So, why do we think there's not a database on EVERYONE that includes a religious affiliation field, already, starting with the first US census in 1790?
Thank you very much, capable engineers who have developed our product. Sadly, unless you have skills in sales and marketing, we simply cannot afford you at this time.
Sincerely,
The management team who should have seen this coming but is acting surprised.
When you spend Billions, stuff happens. One thing that came out of Star Wars was new buildings on University campuses, mostly devoted to Physics and Engineering. After those buildings were built in the 1980s, lots of theoretical research was done in the 1990s. And in the 2010s we actually have field deployable, military rail guns that are pretty damn impressive. Kinetic weapons so powerful that they don't need explosives. Are any orbiting the earth as part of an ICBM defense system? I would hope that if they are, we are capable of keeping that a secret.
Sounds like a good element for a comic book story: actually using Red Mercury against the alien invaders...
I'll be happy when my camera has enough gigapixels of resolution and terrabytes of storage that I can shoot 120fps lossless video through a fisheye lens and turn around and capture the equivalent of a 1000mm telephoto image on a 35mm film camera from anywhere in the lens view.
Until then, (all else like noise, light sensitivity, color balance, etc. being equal) more pixels is better. My first digital camera had 320x240 resolution and could only shoot decently in full sunlight, but don't get the sun or a strong reflection in the frame unless you want the green stripe effect. I truly hope that camera technology hasn't reached a plateau in 2015, just because digital is already better than film is no reason to stop improving (and film was improving right up until digital ate its breakfast, lunch and dinner.)
So, if you really want to shoot RAW and process it, now you just have to be savvy enough to know how to doctor the metadata (which, simply knowing that metadata in your photos exists + Google should be a short exercise to teach yourself.)
Question out of curiosity: Do Reuters et.al. accept formats like .PNG?
We are talking about ISPs not roads. But if you do want to use roads as an analogy, they are massively misallocated in the US, with highways in places like the Bay Area perpetually congested, and other highways woefully underutilized. The way highways and roads are funded leads to people settling in faraway places and shifting the burden of paying for their roads to other taxpayers. The fact that roads and highways used to be of fairly nice quality doesn't mean the money was well spent. And we can't even pay for maintaining this poorly conceived highway system anymore because there is no solid business model behind it.
That "inefficient" road system, concieved of out of pinko Communism, is a big part of what sets the US apart from China and India - we have a reasonably even level of development - sure there are local variations, but we all have decent transport connectivity, clean water and sanitary sewers, telephone and now internet service. It's an inefficient system, some areas are overutilized while others are hardly used at all, but all areas have some reasonable level of service that gives them the opportunity to develop - not a mandate to, but the possibility.
If you let Arkansas "develop normally" without federally funded roads, utilities, etc., mandated by law and delivered at a net loss, it would be one awesome wildlife park today. Most of the desert southwest would still be uninhabitable and inaccessible by today's standards, and, from an environmental standpoint, that might have been preferable - but if you're just talking economics, building some under-utilized roads pulls geographic areas up into the modern standards of living and makes them "part of" the country.
As to: we can't afford the roads we have, I don't know where you live, but in Florida there seems to be no shortage of road construction projects, widening, resurfacing, and generally updating all over the place. If we really couldn't afford them, I guess all those construction workers would be busy doing something more important instead.
Nothing necessitates 8 year to launch schedule except a tight program budget stretched out over time. There are decent Jupiter launch windows every 2 years or so:
http://clowder.net/hop/railroa...
And how about we determine how many votes people get based on the stake and interest they actually have in the outcome? Oh, right: we call that process of voting a "free market" and the votes "dollars".
And we're back to the "free market solves all," except that without regulation, the free market gives you Rockerfellers, Carnegies, and AT&T, and they served everyone so well.
Just because the US market doesn't cater to your personal preferences for content doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it. And, no, I don't think it "would be nice", I like the market the way it is, because I've seen the alternatives, and they are worse.
Just because the alternatives you have seen are worse doesn't mean there aren't better alternatives to what we have.
Times change, technology changes.
I've subscribed to broadband in several countries. In comparison, US broadband is pretty good. It's nominally a bit more expensive than in some other countries, but that's because it's subsidized there; you pay for it through taxes. Conditions, choice of plans, and service in the US are generally better than elsewhere in my experience.
Roads and highways are pretty good in the U.S. - it's part of what made our economy strong in the last 70 years.
I don't believe that all regulation leads to petulant price gouging, when there are competitors in the market. I do believe that living in fear (amongst the electorate) of being "smacked back" by every person or company in power whenever they catch an unpleasant break from the regulators (legislators, and by proxy: voters) is what keeps the Republican party in power - it's been my most disappointing disillusionment growing up in the "land of the free, home of the brave."
"Flat tax" has a grass-roots kind of appeal, and I support a lot of its tenents - put the accountants out of work, please, and simplify tax law to a point where it's easily understood and complied with. I don't particularly believe in higher, or lower taxes - simplify while remaining revenue neutral. But, on the flip side, taking 22.4% out of everyone, regardless of their level of wealth, is another kind of insanity, hard to say if it's worse than the Kafkaesque pile of laws, rules, regulations, forms, guidance documents, case law and consultant opinions that amount to our taxation system today, but a perfectly flat tax certainly lacks any semblance of "fair."
Wouldn't it be nice if we, as consumers, could somehow influence the market to provide a more "flat tax" tariff on us for the services they provide? Seems to be going in the opposite direction rather quickly, though.
But Walmart, K-Mart, and Target are not one-stop shopping. For most people, they have maybe 80% of what they need, and for the rest they go somewhere else. And between them, they may have 95% of what people need, and for the rest they still need to go somewhere else. Basically, it's the same situation as with online video, except that there isn't a subscription involved.
See, I was happy when Blockbuster had 80% of what I cared about, Netflix DVD had 80% of what I cared about, and the corner 0.99 VCR rental had 40% of what I cared about, covering 95% between them.
Now, Hulu has 10% of what I care about, Netflix streaming has 20% of what I care about, Redbox carries 15% - 50% of which is overlapped with the first two, the other local rental shops are out of business (and not missed), and Netflix DVD has gone down the tubes. I was already pissed with Netflix DVD back in the "good old days" because of its subscription model - it was "great value" on the months I flogged it, but averaged over long periods of time, I was ending up paying $10 a piece for DVD rentals because there are times I just don't care (and those are just the times that I want to log in, suspend my account, and generally have something else to screw with over a matter of $0.30 a day - NOT.)
But the individual subscriptions are dirt-cheap. And if some of them make special deals with your ISP, they get even cheaper.
You must like your ISP more than I like mine - in my neighborhood we actually have a choice: AT&T DSL - barely useable when it works, but with AT&T's craptacular service it only works properly half the time, or Comcast's Xfinity - with a new promotional rate every 6 months and more crap to manage... they can't just let you pay $50/month for broadband and be done with it, no, broadband by itself is $70 a month, but let us give you a $30, 40 or 50 a month bundle including a bunch of other services you don't want / won't use, then at the end of the period jack you back up to $90, 100 or 130 a month. So, with them it's a $240 a year premium to not have to manage their BS, on top of rates that are already some of the highest in the world for marginal broadband - at least their service is better than AT&T, it only took me 7 months to get a faulty (out whenever it rains) line replaced, plus another 6 to get the replacement cable buried.
In some respects, this is a "golden age" of entertainment - media is more convenient to access, as you say "dirt cheap" - if you play the games and manage the bloodsuckers along the way, with more selection and higher quality production than ever before. In other respects, movie popcorn costs more per ounce than restaurant served filet minion, movie ticket prices have inflated faster than virtually any other thing that existed 40 years ago, and if you don't manage your subscription costs carefully, you can spend $200 a month or more rather easily. I guess without all that money flowing in, we'd have fewer great movies coming out... I'm most bummed out that I don't have the free time to enjoy half of what's out there, but people keep trying to get me to pay for all of it just to get the little pieces I do want.
I see T-Mobile getting into bed with Netflix, and just feels like one more "pay for it all, we know most of you won't use it" cafeteria plan that is a killer deal for the morbidly obese. They say it's "free," can I take a pass on this wonderful thing and get my rates reduced instead?
I don't see that one-stop shopping precludes competition, I would think that a truly competitive market would include several one-stop shopping providers, perhaps WalMart and K-Mart and Target - subtly different, but basically bringing you all the same stuff with a little different spin on the marketing.
What I call the current entertainment mess is subscription lock-in fragmentation, wherein you have to buy not one, but several all subscriptions that each simultaneously give you more and less than you want, all for a price that you're loathe to pay twice per month (one to each provider), let alone the three or four times you would have to pay it to get an approximation of "one stop shopping."
At least it hasn't devolved to Sony Playstation style "entertainment" where you get to spend 30 minutes every time you turn the damn thing on just waiting for updates to load, with another forced acceptance of their latest TOS update, unless, you know, you'd rather not have any of the online features of your online console work anymore. That is certainly one way to burn time. Another is in the decoding of who has what and what are their free / ad supported / subscription plans. Bitching about it, deep in a thread that few will ever see is another way to burn time - but it is good practice in presentation of the problem.
The criterion catalog is big, but very old. Back in the day, Netflix DVD selection closely paralleled Blockbuster retail rental selection - and they were both a superset of what was available on any given cable premium channel, release dates might have varied by a month or two from one to the other, but the deeper (5-20 year old) catalogs were very extensive. Streaming seems to have finally killed off the retail rental category, so we haven't had anything in the last few years to compare streaming to. Redbox will pop up with one or two interesting new titles a month, but nowhere near the 80%+ coverage of theater releases within 6 months to a year that Blockbuster and old-time Netflix DVD had.
Markets change, I miss the days when you could become aware of a title through whatever channel and have a better than even chance of getting ahold of it at the first retail outlet you went looking for it, maybe not on release day, but usually within less than a year.
Obligatory hat tip to the black/back channels of the internet, I assume they still offer free bootleg copies of basically everything if you take the time to hunt it down - personally, I'd rather pay $0.99, or even $3, and get it without hassle (and, going to a retail outlet _is_ a hassle), but I feel like those options are mostly gone, replaced by subscription models from near-monopoly providers (Pandora, I'm pointing at you now) who raise prices and change terms with no fear of losing subscribers to the competition, because there basically isn't any competition. Netflix still has the premium cable channels to deal with, and it's starting to fight them on their own turf (original content, etc.) Too bad they dropped the "long tail catalog" selection advantage they used to have.
If there were paid charging stations all over the place, available for a broad market of vehicles, and Tesla cut an exclusive deal with the stations that they would be free only for Tesla customers - that's approaching a problem, but not quite because cost of the Tesla effectively makes cost of charging noise in the equation.
I used to rent Netflix DVDs - selection in the DVD rental world was MUCH better than streaming has ever been, and it's only about the cost licensing and willingness to pay for it.
This is closer to: gasoline is being rationed, you can only get 5 gallons a month, but if you buy this car your gas is free. Oh, and if you weren't sure already, let's spell out that the oil companies and the car manufacturer are in bed together.
Again, hard to get worked up over entertainment - and you're right about WiFi, depending on lifestyle. Right now, I only stream Netflix to my phone over WiFi - but I do travel once in awhile, and I could stream it 4G when I'm away from home, but never have because of my 3G/month bandwidth cap.
I wonder if this capless thing will apply to me since I have a Nexus 5 (no T-Mobile special-ware on it)?