It's cheap, because bandwidth is all a game of numbers/averages. They have a potential 800,000 customers - that's close to US$2M/mo revenue. That's a healthy mark-up over cost although their bandwidth isn't their only cost, infrastructure and support would also add considerably to their monthly expenses.
Keep it in perspective too. A gig sounds a lot, it's not. Feeding only 1,000 customers guarantees them only 1Mbps each. Make that 10,000, they're only guaranteed 100kbps each. Of course, they'd only get such "low" speeds if every customer was simultaneously hoovering off the bandwidth - which never happens - so the "burst" rate would always be good. Not sure where you get the idea that they'd need to offer a CIR of 50Mbps to every customer...
Look at it another way. If they hook up all 800,000 customers they can only "guarantee" them 1.2 BITS per second each, yet it works...
All you need is the blade from an old fan, a toothpick, and a 2mm drill.
1. Drill a hole in the drive directly above the platters 2. With some superglue on the end of the toothpick, insert it in the hole so that it sticks to the spindle 3. Glue the blade to the other end of the toothpick.
Now you see, no need for a fan. As long as your drive's running, the fan blade you just installed will be spinning at 5400 (or whatever rpm) your drive is.
Breaking the furst rule of engagement, don't feed the flamebait, but...
Perhaps that's why you'll only ever dream of being an ISP with 5.1M customers (SBC), because you don't have the wit to figure out that you have to start with one. Then 10. Then 1000.
Last I checked, Yahoo weren't an ISP and Netzero don't even make the top 20. You forgot to mention AOL @ 22M.
Do you think every ISP in the world employs 10,000 staff?
The doom of the "mom&pop" ISPs has been predicted for years, yet there are still (very vague estimate) around 10,000 ISPs in the US alone, accounting for the "other" 60% of the subscribers not accounted for by the top 25 or so.
Interesting perspective, but someone who wants to roll it out to 1000 systems at a time is hardly your "typical" user either?
I can see and appreciate why you'd want all the tools necessary to make that easier.
As others have already pointed out too, I like the "shopping basket" style of download too, something they should seriously consider implementing...
When I was an ISP we used to roll out customised IE using the IEAK, wondering if there's anything like that for Mozilla/Firefox that would do the job for you.
Failing that, there are a number of tools for mass rollout deployments such as you suggest (which you're probably already considerably more aware of than me if you're working in a 1,000 user environment) so I'm not sure I see what the problem is, aren't you already using such tools?
Would you prefer a 50Mb download, with 45Mb of stuff you don't ever need or use, or a 4Mb download where you can optionally add bits you want
Not everybody wants "chrome" (or themes), Flash, etc etc.
Personally I love the lean approach, with the ability to add and tweak stuff that I want over the bloated, switch off all the crap you don't want approach...
"The teenager, who is now 19 and living in Los Angeles, waited two years to bring legal action because it was "a very confusing and painful time for her," her lawyer Olivier Taillieu told the Los Angeles Times.
Apparently she was so confused she's forgotten her age either now, or at the time of the "incident"
Just another lawyer looking for a big damages win... Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Isn't this story just a logical extension of this, and this? Why is this a surprise to anyone?
With all the recent activity with municipalities scrambling to provide wifi in their cities here, and here amongst others.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, imho. As more and more cities jump on the "municipal wifi" bandwagon, censorship will closely follow once the authorities have control of your Internet.
Why oh why do the RIAA go on and on like a broken record...
In the early 70's, I would tune into radio Luxemburg on the "radiogram" and record stuff on the reel to reel... Then - *shock horror* I'd go out and buy singles and lp's of some of the stuff I liked. I got a cassette tape recorder too when I was a kid, and even back then they were whining on about how these new fangled devices would kill the music industry.
And sure, I borrowed LPs from friends and recorded them - so I guess I've been a "pirate" since I was a kid.
But you know what? I'd still go out and spend my pocket money on singles and lp's.
The tune that plays over and over again from the RIAA, whining on about how the artists are suffering, frankly I've been hearing it since I was knee-high and It's played out.
The artists should take the RIAA's funding and put it into something useful - like perhaps some research on how they can distribute their material and have people download it *legally* - but then I guess the fact that this would cut out too many of the music industry middlemen who are leeching 95% of the revenues and put the RIAA's CEO (what's he on now, still US$1M a year) out of work...
It seems MS are determined to have XP users disabled from using raw sockets - in itself not such a bad idea for 99.9% of XP users but those of you who avoided SP2 (or disabled firewall/ICS atfer installing it to get round this problem) please note - it's back! and there's no known way do disable it (yet).
2. If they had any smarts at all, they'd still allow the client access to a whitelist of sites - windowsupdate, symantec, etc, as well as allowing them access to their own web/ftp sites to download fixes. If they don't, they're only doing a half-ass job of helping to fix the problem.
We've been doing this since the late 90's, what's "news" here?
Customers get contacted in several ways, including personally by telephone. If they don't clean their open proxy/smtp relay/virus/worm after that, they get cut off. There'd be a lot less worms and spam around if all ISPs acted this responsibly, what a shame it's taken these guys until now to catch on.
That the headline (snicker) and the overall boggle nature of the story distracts from the issue that only a few have commented on, the abuse of children...
Given that the survey was carried out by telephone, doesn't it stand to reason that someone who accepts an unsolicited call from a canvasser/surveyor/telemarketer would also be less inclined to be bothered by spam?
>Yes, I can imagine AIRPLANES haven't yet falled ever to give as information about that.
Do you think the terrorists planned to devastate Lockerbie? Falling airplanes have proven nothing about the predictability of something falling from a great height landing where it shouldn't - nothing except that it could which we knew already.
So it's at sea? Oh well, sorry. My mistake. There's NO CHANCE it could land on a hapless ship unloading the next cargo. Nor could it possibly land on base of the thing where the crew were working...
Let's face it, you like the female Starbuck because she kicks ass... how popular would Alias be... or a Stargate without a Sam. Sci-Fi have taken one of the ingredients of a tried & tested recipe, and cast it just right...
At least, much of the scientific research being done on this thing is based on some tangible technology and fact... but puleeeze...
Catastrophe. Yes Bad Things can happen. The amount of damage done is less than might be expected.
IS less? So this has been tested, has it?
I'll tell you what I'd expect. I'd expect if something went wrong and a "load" plummeted to earth from 5km up it would be pretty difficult to predict what sort of damage it would do... There's one of many possible catastrophes we'd like to hear whay you'd expect the damage to be
Terrorism. The thing is less a target than might be expected.
Again, IS less? This fact comes from where? A poll of known terrorists, or off the top of your head?
Yes, I know... people were executed for suggesting that the world wasn't flat, etc etc... but please - if you want a rational discussion on this thing pushing "facts" like these at us is hardly likely to sway any opinion.
I think this "Anonymous Coward" dude's a Cylon.
Think about it... he's all over the place... I mean everywhere... and he keeps us confused by taking up contrary positions even with himself... My God I've seen entire threads where he argues with himself...
Personally I think he's a pear short of a fruit bowl...
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Keep it in perspective too. A gig sounds a lot, it's not. Feeding only 1,000 customers guarantees them only 1Mbps each. Make that 10,000, they're only guaranteed 100kbps each. Of course, they'd only get such "low" speeds if every customer was simultaneously hoovering off the bandwidth - which never happens - so the "burst" rate would always be good. Not sure where you get the idea that they'd need to offer a CIR of 50Mbps to every customer...
Look at it another way. If they hook up all 800,000 customers they can only "guarantee" them 1.2 BITS per second each, yet it works...
with windowsupdate.microsoft.com
All you need is the blade from an old fan, a toothpick, and a 2mm drill.
1. Drill a hole in the drive directly above the platters
2. With some superglue on the end of the toothpick, insert it in the hole so that it sticks to the spindle
3. Glue the blade to the other end of the toothpick.
Now you see, no need for a fan. As long as your drive's running, the fan blade you just installed will be spinning at 5400 (or whatever rpm) your drive is.
Much cheaper than $0.10.
Perhaps that's why you'll only ever dream of being an ISP with 5.1M customers (SBC), because you don't have the wit to figure out that you have to start with one. Then 10. Then 1000.
Last I checked, Yahoo weren't an ISP and Netzero don't even make the top 20. You forgot to mention AOL @ 22M.
Do you think every ISP in the world employs 10,000 staff?
The doom of the "mom&pop" ISPs has been predicted for years, yet there are still (very vague estimate) around 10,000 ISPs in the US alone, accounting for the "other" 60% of the subscribers not accounted for by the top 25 or so.
"Greetings, people of earth. We are.....
Hold on...
Where the fuck did that asteroid come from it wasn't on any of our....&^%&^%(...no carrier"
I can see and appreciate why you'd want all the tools necessary to make that easier.
As others have already pointed out too, I like the "shopping basket" style of download too, something they should seriously consider implementing...
When I was an ISP we used to roll out customised IE using the IEAK, wondering if there's anything like that for Mozilla/Firefox that would do the job for you.
Failing that, there are a number of tools for mass rollout deployments such as you suggest (which you're probably already considerably more aware of than me if you're working in a 1,000 user environment) so I'm not sure I see what the problem is, aren't you already using such tools?
Why is this a "downside"?
Would you prefer a 50Mb download, with 45Mb of stuff you don't ever need or use, or a 4Mb download where you can optionally add bits you want
Not everybody wants "chrome" (or themes), Flash, etc etc.
Personally I love the lean approach, with the ability to add and tweak stuff that I want over the bloated, switch off all the crap you don't want approach...
Makes borders somewhat obsolete...
Apparently she was so confused she's forgotten her age either now, or at the time of the "incident"
Just another lawyer looking for a big damages win... Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Why is this a surprise to anyone?
With all the recent activity with municipalities scrambling to provide wifi in their cities here, and here amongst others.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, imho. As more and more cities jump on the "municipal wifi" bandwagon, censorship will closely follow once the authorities have control of your Internet.
Ummm... that's the 3 "real" channels... :-P
I can see it now... 140,000 "reality TV" channels of some Gerry Springer type's home lives, and 3 real channels...
What'll be affected are some of the security tools, e.g. nmap (patch already released) Some Rants about raw sockets here.
And sure, I borrowed LPs from friends and recorded them - so I guess I've been a "pirate" since I was a kid.
But you know what? I'd still go out and spend my pocket money on singles and lp's. The tune that plays over and over again from the RIAA, whining on about how the artists are suffering, frankly I've been hearing it since I was knee-high and It's played out.
The artists should take the RIAA's funding and put it into something useful - like perhaps some research on how they can distribute their material and have people download it *legally* - but then I guess the fact that this would cut out too many of the music industry middlemen who are leeching 95% of the revenues and put the RIAA's CEO (what's he on now, still US$1M a year) out of work...
It seems MS are determined to have XP users disabled from using raw sockets - in itself not such a bad idea for 99.9% of XP users but those of you who avoided SP2 (or disabled firewall/ICS atfer installing it to get round this problem) please note - it's back! and there's no known way do disable it (yet).
2. If they had any smarts at all, they'd still allow the client access to a whitelist of sites - windowsupdate, symantec, etc, as well as allowing them access to their own web/ftp sites to download fixes. If they don't, they're only doing a half-ass job of helping to fix the problem.
We've been doing this since the late 90's, what's "news" here? Customers get contacted in several ways, including personally by telephone. If they don't clean their open proxy/smtp relay/virus/worm after that, they get cut off. There'd be a lot less worms and spam around if all ISPs acted this responsibly, what a shame it's taken these guys until now to catch on.
Mit? Students?
That the headline (snicker) and the overall boggle nature of the story distracts from the issue that only a few have commented on, the abuse of children...
Given that the survey was carried out by telephone, doesn't it stand to reason that someone who accepts an unsolicited call from a canvasser/surveyor/telemarketer would also be less inclined to be bothered by spam?
Do you think the terrorists planned to devastate Lockerbie? Falling airplanes have proven nothing about the predictability of something falling from a great height landing where it shouldn't - nothing except that it could which we knew already.
So it's at sea? Oh well, sorry. My mistake. There's NO CHANCE it could land on a hapless ship unloading the next cargo. Nor could it possibly land on base of the thing where the crew were working...
...Nods...
Let's face it, you like the female Starbuck because she kicks ass... how popular would Alias be... or a Stargate without a Sam. Sci-Fi have taken one of the ingredients of a tried & tested recipe, and cast it just right...Catastrophe. Yes Bad Things can happen. The amount of damage done is less than might be expected.
IS less? So this has been tested, has it?
I'll tell you what I'd expect. I'd expect if something went wrong and a "load" plummeted to earth from 5km up it would be pretty difficult to predict what sort of damage it would do... There's one of many possible catastrophes we'd like to hear whay you'd expect the damage to be
Terrorism. The thing is less a target than might be expected.
Again, IS less? This fact comes from where? A poll of known terrorists, or off the top of your head?
Yes, I know... people were executed for suggesting that the world wasn't flat, etc etc... but please - if you want a rational discussion on this thing pushing "facts" like these at us is hardly likely to sway any opinion.
I think this "Anonymous Coward" dude's a Cylon. Think about it... he's all over the place... I mean everywhere... and he keeps us confused by taking up contrary positions even with himself... My God I've seen entire threads where he argues with himself... Personally I think he's a pear short of a fruit bowl...
How long's a piece of string?