QoS is different than Net Neutrality. QoS has to be set up by the sender of the packet and classifies the type of service for the same sender. It could potentially be a direct link between two (or more hosts) and typically the sender pays to set up dedicated bandwidth between end points. The rest of the network still gets the same amount of bandwidth as they had before and gets treated fairly among each other.
Net Neutrality is basically the absence of packet mangling by the providers. Net neutrality implies that when someone asks and pays for QoS priority access, they do not negatively affect other customers. It implies that the providers actually purchase an extra 1Gbps from their peering partners if a customer buys 1Gbps in access.
It also implies that nobody can pay to slow down competing access. If Netflix or Amazon wants a dedicated 1Mbps in my home, that's fine, but I shouldn't have to pay for it (if I want to pay Netflix for it, that's between me and Netflix); if you give up net neutrality, the provider would basically take 1 Mbps out of the 10/15/100Mbps you purchased and sell it (again) to the highest bidder without giving you a discount. So you end up with 9Mbps for the price of 10Mbps and they won't just stop at selling 1Mbps - TWC/Comcast wants to sell the entire bandwidth you already purchased over and over again to the big players and if someone doesn't want to buy priority access, they would get artificially slowed down until they do (see the infamous Netflix vs. Comcast graph)
Same goes for so-called 'volunteers' especially in the religious circles. There are those that get room and board, work for the corporation yet do not get paid a paycheck. And especially for articles on the high-control cults (Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology,...) there are a number of editors that are clearly associated with the corporation reverting every sort of edit unless the information is disseminated from the 'mothership'.
Sure, all the rest of these languages are fancy and some startups are actually using them (when boiled down just ends up between node.js, Scala(Java) and a NoSQL database du jour).
No company uses python outside of scientific use (where it can be very powerful). No company uses Ruby anymore besides the odd legacy app.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, OkCupid... Average startup - PHP, JS, C-variants, HTML, CSS, Java-flavor. It's powerful, plenty of established applications and COTS will generally be a good enough solution for most people. It's foolish to write from the ground up these days in an odd language given the existence of open source solutions for just about anything. And with PHP getting faster and more efficient it scales very well.
I just implemented an open source CRM with a bunch of custom work on a 300MB VPS - Nginx, PHP 5.5 with OpCache, MariaDB, JS, CSS, HTML - can sustain 50MBps of traffic to the CRM without a single drop (3ms response); 2000 complex queries on the CMS per second under 100ms response, I can simply throw more hardware at it if I need more but for a 300-member club, that's plenty.
These contracts are for like 30-100 years of service (no kidding). The providers would have to get 30y worth of monopoly-based income (eg. a city may have 500k customers which they can now charge $60 more per month than if there were competition for 30 years amounts to a contract worth $10B).
You assume actual computer experts are investigating this matter? These are the same people that when presented with non-Windows OS or any type of encryption will be expert witnesses that testify in court that you're a hacker/terrorist and obstructed the investigation.
And if they'll look on the server, they'll find a bunch of binary blobs. This is going to be Exchange after all and probably migrated to Cloud-Exchange so they have no access to the data on the servers.
It really depends on your calculations (yes, I work in academic research). You can get very large, very parallel problems and have enough with 56k modems in between nodes and there are those where 12x Infiniband is not enough. It also depends on the person implementing the system, how well versed they are in the subject matter and cluster programming, the languages they use and whether or not what they write is aware of what is happening where.
The fabric can be relatively cheap actually, 24 port 10Gbps and QDR Infiniband switches can be had sub-5k these days (unless you go Cisco off course) especially in blade systems. All-in-all the hardware for clusters has gotten very, very cheap. Amazon wouldn't be selling it at $5/h if it weren't profitable.
Large research clusters BTW (such as the ones at Fermilab, CERN or your average University) are usually large sets of 2/4/8 core systems, sometimes with a few very large nodes thrown in or these days a set of GPU nodes. 20-core nodes are rare in actual clusters a la Blue Gene/Q
I can get 8 core systems sub $1k. It depends on the type of hardware really which it doesn't specify; 20+ cores in a single machine has been available since at least the turn of the century they always cost an arm and a leg though because of the complexities of integrating that many CPUs in a single machine. A combination of boxes amounting to the same amount of CPU, RAM etc has always been cheaper but also larger and harder to use.
Doesn't really work. Even if you eg. find a quasar that sends out a very specific signal every 100 years, you need to record the noise in order to get the key, at that point your encryption system is vulnerable to replay attacks where someone simply replays the noise in order to unlock the secret.
One system that theoretically would work in such fashion (somewhat) would be to send off a probe with your key and a decryption algorithm into space near the speed of light (otherwise it could be taken over by a 'faster' craft) - make it go (time / 2) light years before it activates the decryption system, then you can send it the message and it should respond with the decrypted message.
The problem is obvious: We have no existing crafts that go that fast and once your message is decrypted, anyone in the general direction it's responding at will receive your message and it's quite expensive to launch a craft just to encrypt a 'drink your ovaltine' - if by that time your encryption method or key hasn't yet been broken by other technological advancement.
In a decent software design project I can't commit a single line of code without anyone noticing that I did so, sometimes (eg. the Linux kernel) requiring multiple sign off. He redesigned the system, he must have sent off the plans to someone to remanufacture the item, in between there nobody notices that there is a major change in specs? It's not like this engineer hand-built every single ignition system and installed it, it's a mechanical part, you can't just change something without restocking on different source parts.
a) There was no change management? b) A single engineer can replace a critical component without anyone ever needing to sign off? c) Not answering an e-mail does not make one culpable, it merely points to a time management problem or not enough time to respond d) Even when an e-mail did not get answered, nobody cared enough to follow up?
These things point to serious managerial issues. Engineers can make mistakes, covering them up and pointing the finger is a managerial issue.
The dude just got $2B richer, the tax code (or any other laws) don't apply to him. If you make >$1M in the US, you simply stop paying taxes because you can invest whatever amount necessary and deduct it to cover your liability.
So who convicted US soldiers or politicians for their participation in US concentration camps? That's right - nobody. History is written by it's victors, the nazi leaders were going to be convicted and hanged by a kangaroo court regardless because they were on the losing end. Had they succeeded and captured Britain and the US, FDR and Churchill would've been convicted and hanged by a kangaroo court as well.
I noticed something similar with US cars. Apparently the gear ratios are set to get the optimal MPG under testing conditions (50 USMPH without AC) which makes the transmission shift down (and thus higher rpm) when you're going 55 with your AC and other accessories on, then switching gears/going into overdrive between 60 and 70mph.
DOCSIS 3.1 from 2008 has 10Gbps/1Gbps links. You don't need to divide that by 100 households, these services are being oversold 1000:1 if not worse already. Also, you only need that to the distribution point, after that it's already mainly fiber. Even fiber services don't necessarily bring FTTH - many are still copper for the short distance to the distribution point.
Plenty of pilots sleep while they're doing an automated flight, they also have laptops or tablets these days for personal use. There have been some reported incidents where pilots were caught doing those things.
500kbps-1.5Mbps is not a whole lot these days. And your 5Mbps connection not being able to maintain it is due to your ISP being up to no good - there is no way you sustained 5Mbps connections to the Netflix servers and had issues. I have 15Mbps and none of my services EVER get interrupted (I maintain several VPS from home and generally have no problems at all)... except Netflix and YouTube cannot maintain even 500kbps.
They provide services for the help desks of said companies as well as other infrastructure systems for them. If you're ever privy to enter one of their colo's you'll see all the Lucent tags on PSTN gear.
You know your iPad/Android devices are already capable of doing that. It's just nobody wants to do that. Tablets have less computing power, longer battery life and are cheap - they'll always be very portable, portable will always have less power than desktop/laptop. I use my iPad for things like the kitchen where I don't want to ruin an expensive laptop, require a water-resistant system without fans, smaller than a laptop yet not so tiny that I have to hold it to read it. Yes, my laptop has about the same battery life as an iPad these days but it's heavier, bulkier, more expensive and more powerful.
Surface tablets are just a rehash of the Microsoft Tablet PC's - they are as expensive yet less powerful than a real laptop and they still run a desktop OS. I don't want to run Office on these devices, it's too tiny for that.
Tablets are made for convenient content consumption such as recipes, the quick e-mail and web pages, not content creation, not a desktop/laptop.
They make money from your monthly subscription fees etc.
The other companies do the same things, TWC, AT&T, Comcast all make money through your monthly internet bill and have been VERY profitable in doing so. The problem is that they want to keep their customers and make MORE money without spending any of their profits on upgrades or peering/colocation.
It's not like TWC/Comcast has to rip out and replace any cabling, the existing infrastructure (yes, copper) works well for speeds up to what Google Fiber is offering and more (100Mbps - 1Gbps). Even at current speeds (1-10Mbps), there is PLENTY of headroom for most people, Netflix doesn't take more than a few hundred kbps per stream. They just don't want to invest in a bigger link to Netflix/YouTube or letting them colocate in their spaces, they think that they can switch their customers who are paying for Internet into connecting to their private network (MSN/AOL style) and if anyone wants to go outside their private network, they should pay extra. And they can do this because they have been granted a monopoly by the government (by splitting up Ma Bell, they no longer needed to be regulated, the FCC has been paid for to not interfere and they have no-compete clauses with each other).
Thankfully there are plenty of startups starting to eat their market share (be it Google, Greenlight,...) because they are offering better service than the incumbents for a heck of a lot cheaper. Now (at least in those areas) they have to start being competitive and suddenly, speeds CAN go up and prices CAN drop; the prices are not tied to actual value, they are tied to what the market will bear and since Internet has become a necessary utility for most people, the market has to bear a lot.
And exactly what is it that the police are supposed to do? Prevent crime? They don't do that, they're largely criminals themselves. Respond to calls? They barely do that. Cops are largely a revenue generating stream for the government - the story says $300k/officer in fines - they largely pay for themselves right now (why do we have a shortage if a cop generates 6 times his salary in fines?). We have local police, county sheriff, state police and several federal and international police forces.
In the US you have local parking enforcement to give parking tickets and tow cars - those won't have a job as you can just let an autonomous car park anywhere it finds an authorized space by itself so those will disappear. Local police do the hassling of some small time criminals and things that don't amount to felonies, they don't actually do anything, giving a fine is hard work for them, a busted taillight is usually what they're after they'll stick around for the most part because they're actually visible and "necessary" to the plebes. County sheriff does the paper work for court proceedings so we kind of need them until the courts can find a better way of serving papers. State police does traffic enforcement, they'll almost completely disappear, beyond giving speeding tickets and going after escaped convicts, they're invisible. Federal goes after the low hanging fruit among the heavy criminals, they're not interested in traffic, they'll stick around because the TV tells us the FBI is necessary and terrr'ists make sure DHS sticks around. International police is the UN of police forces - talks a lot but doesn't actually do anything, they'll stay around because consortiums of countries are funding them.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't the US do the same in Iraq?
QoS is different than Net Neutrality. QoS has to be set up by the sender of the packet and classifies the type of service for the same sender. It could potentially be a direct link between two (or more hosts) and typically the sender pays to set up dedicated bandwidth between end points. The rest of the network still gets the same amount of bandwidth as they had before and gets treated fairly among each other.
Net Neutrality is basically the absence of packet mangling by the providers. Net neutrality implies that when someone asks and pays for QoS priority access, they do not negatively affect other customers. It implies that the providers actually purchase an extra 1Gbps from their peering partners if a customer buys 1Gbps in access.
It also implies that nobody can pay to slow down competing access. If Netflix or Amazon wants a dedicated 1Mbps in my home, that's fine, but I shouldn't have to pay for it (if I want to pay Netflix for it, that's between me and Netflix); if you give up net neutrality, the provider would basically take 1 Mbps out of the 10/15/100Mbps you purchased and sell it (again) to the highest bidder without giving you a discount. So you end up with 9Mbps for the price of 10Mbps and they won't just stop at selling 1Mbps - TWC/Comcast wants to sell the entire bandwidth you already purchased over and over again to the big players and if someone doesn't want to buy priority access, they would get artificially slowed down until they do (see the infamous Netflix vs. Comcast graph)
Same goes for so-called 'volunteers' especially in the religious circles. There are those that get room and board, work for the corporation yet do not get paid a paycheck. And especially for articles on the high-control cults (Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, ...) there are a number of editors that are clearly associated with the corporation reverting every sort of edit unless the information is disseminated from the 'mothership'.
Sure, all the rest of these languages are fancy and some startups are actually using them (when boiled down just ends up between node.js, Scala(Java) and a NoSQL database du jour).
No company uses python outside of scientific use (where it can be very powerful). No company uses Ruby anymore besides the odd legacy app.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, OkCupid ... Average startup - PHP, JS, C-variants, HTML, CSS, Java-flavor. It's powerful, plenty of established applications and COTS will generally be a good enough solution for most people. It's foolish to write from the ground up these days in an odd language given the existence of open source solutions for just about anything. And with PHP getting faster and more efficient it scales very well.
I just implemented an open source CRM with a bunch of custom work on a 300MB VPS - Nginx, PHP 5.5 with OpCache, MariaDB, JS, CSS, HTML - can sustain 50MBps of traffic to the CRM without a single drop (3ms response); 2000 complex queries on the CMS per second under 100ms response, I can simply throw more hardware at it if I need more but for a 300-member club, that's plenty.
These contracts are for like 30-100 years of service (no kidding). The providers would have to get 30y worth of monopoly-based income (eg. a city may have 500k customers which they can now charge $60 more per month than if there were competition for 30 years amounts to a contract worth $10B).
You assume actual computer experts are investigating this matter? These are the same people that when presented with non-Windows OS or any type of encryption will be expert witnesses that testify in court that you're a hacker/terrorist and obstructed the investigation.
And if they'll look on the server, they'll find a bunch of binary blobs. This is going to be Exchange after all and probably migrated to Cloud-Exchange so they have no access to the data on the servers.
It really depends on your calculations (yes, I work in academic research). You can get very large, very parallel problems and have enough with 56k modems in between nodes and there are those where 12x Infiniband is not enough. It also depends on the person implementing the system, how well versed they are in the subject matter and cluster programming, the languages they use and whether or not what they write is aware of what is happening where.
The fabric can be relatively cheap actually, 24 port 10Gbps and QDR Infiniband switches can be had sub-5k these days (unless you go Cisco off course) especially in blade systems. All-in-all the hardware for clusters has gotten very, very cheap. Amazon wouldn't be selling it at $5/h if it weren't profitable.
Large research clusters BTW (such as the ones at Fermilab, CERN or your average University) are usually large sets of 2/4/8 core systems, sometimes with a few very large nodes thrown in or these days a set of GPU nodes. 20-core nodes are rare in actual clusters a la Blue Gene/Q
I can get 8 core systems sub $1k. It depends on the type of hardware really which it doesn't specify; 20+ cores in a single machine has been available since at least the turn of the century they always cost an arm and a leg though because of the complexities of integrating that many CPUs in a single machine. A combination of boxes amounting to the same amount of CPU, RAM etc has always been cheaper but also larger and harder to use.
Doesn't really work. Even if you eg. find a quasar that sends out a very specific signal every 100 years, you need to record the noise in order to get the key, at that point your encryption system is vulnerable to replay attacks where someone simply replays the noise in order to unlock the secret.
One system that theoretically would work in such fashion (somewhat) would be to send off a probe with your key and a decryption algorithm into space near the speed of light (otherwise it could be taken over by a 'faster' craft) - make it go (time / 2) light years before it activates the decryption system, then you can send it the message and it should respond with the decrypted message.
The problem is obvious: We have no existing crafts that go that fast and once your message is decrypted, anyone in the general direction it's responding at will receive your message and it's quite expensive to launch a craft just to encrypt a 'drink your ovaltine' - if by that time your encryption method or key hasn't yet been broken by other technological advancement.
In a decent software design project I can't commit a single line of code without anyone noticing that I did so, sometimes (eg. the Linux kernel) requiring multiple sign off. He redesigned the system, he must have sent off the plans to someone to remanufacture the item, in between there nobody notices that there is a major change in specs? It's not like this engineer hand-built every single ignition system and installed it, it's a mechanical part, you can't just change something without restocking on different source parts.
a) There was no change management?
b) A single engineer can replace a critical component without anyone ever needing to sign off?
c) Not answering an e-mail does not make one culpable, it merely points to a time management problem or not enough time to respond
d) Even when an e-mail did not get answered, nobody cared enough to follow up?
These things point to serious managerial issues. Engineers can make mistakes, covering them up and pointing the finger is a managerial issue.
The dude just got $2B richer, the tax code (or any other laws) don't apply to him. If you make >$1M in the US, you simply stop paying taxes because you can invest whatever amount necessary and deduct it to cover your liability.
Well-written C can be cross-platform compatible. It's all in how you write things (or the libraries you use).
So who convicted US soldiers or politicians for their participation in US concentration camps? That's right - nobody. History is written by it's victors, the nazi leaders were going to be convicted and hanged by a kangaroo court regardless because they were on the losing end. Had they succeeded and captured Britain and the US, FDR and Churchill would've been convicted and hanged by a kangaroo court as well.
Newtonian gravitation was still being taught at my high school less than 20 years ago.
I noticed something similar with US cars. Apparently the gear ratios are set to get the optimal MPG under testing conditions (50 USMPH without AC) which makes the transmission shift down (and thus higher rpm) when you're going 55 with your AC and other accessories on, then switching gears/going into overdrive between 60 and 70mph.
DOCSIS 3.1 from 2008 has 10Gbps/1Gbps links. You don't need to divide that by 100 households, these services are being oversold 1000:1 if not worse already. Also, you only need that to the distribution point, after that it's already mainly fiber. Even fiber services don't necessarily bring FTTH - many are still copper for the short distance to the distribution point.
Plenty of pilots sleep while they're doing an automated flight, they also have laptops or tablets these days for personal use. There have been some reported incidents where pilots were caught doing those things.
500kbps-1.5Mbps is not a whole lot these days. And your 5Mbps connection not being able to maintain it is due to your ISP being up to no good - there is no way you sustained 5Mbps connections to the Netflix servers and had issues. I have 15Mbps and none of my services EVER get interrupted (I maintain several VPS from home and generally have no problems at all)... except Netflix and YouTube cannot maintain even 500kbps.
They provide services for the help desks of said companies as well as other infrastructure systems for them. If you're ever privy to enter one of their colo's you'll see all the Lucent tags on PSTN gear.
http://stopthecap.com/2011/12/...
and the FCC knows about it:
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/docum...
and even in Congress:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
You know your iPad/Android devices are already capable of doing that. It's just nobody wants to do that. Tablets have less computing power, longer battery life and are cheap - they'll always be very portable, portable will always have less power than desktop/laptop. I use my iPad for things like the kitchen where I don't want to ruin an expensive laptop, require a water-resistant system without fans, smaller than a laptop yet not so tiny that I have to hold it to read it. Yes, my laptop has about the same battery life as an iPad these days but it's heavier, bulkier, more expensive and more powerful.
Surface tablets are just a rehash of the Microsoft Tablet PC's - they are as expensive yet less powerful than a real laptop and they still run a desktop OS. I don't want to run Office on these devices, it's too tiny for that.
Tablets are made for convenient content consumption such as recipes, the quick e-mail and web pages, not content creation, not a desktop/laptop.
They make money from your monthly subscription fees etc.
The other companies do the same things, TWC, AT&T, Comcast all make money through your monthly internet bill and have been VERY profitable in doing so. The problem is that they want to keep their customers and make MORE money without spending any of their profits on upgrades or peering/colocation.
It's not like TWC/Comcast has to rip out and replace any cabling, the existing infrastructure (yes, copper) works well for speeds up to what Google Fiber is offering and more (100Mbps - 1Gbps). Even at current speeds (1-10Mbps), there is PLENTY of headroom for most people, Netflix doesn't take more than a few hundred kbps per stream. They just don't want to invest in a bigger link to Netflix/YouTube or letting them colocate in their spaces, they think that they can switch their customers who are paying for Internet into connecting to their private network (MSN/AOL style) and if anyone wants to go outside their private network, they should pay extra. And they can do this because they have been granted a monopoly by the government (by splitting up Ma Bell, they no longer needed to be regulated, the FCC has been paid for to not interfere and they have no-compete clauses with each other).
Thankfully there are plenty of startups starting to eat their market share (be it Google, Greenlight, ...) because they are offering better service than the incumbents for a heck of a lot cheaper. Now (at least in those areas) they have to start being competitive and suddenly, speeds CAN go up and prices CAN drop; the prices are not tied to actual value, they are tied to what the market will bear and since Internet has become a necessary utility for most people, the market has to bear a lot.
And exactly what is it that the police are supposed to do? Prevent crime? They don't do that, they're largely criminals themselves. Respond to calls? They barely do that. Cops are largely a revenue generating stream for the government - the story says $300k/officer in fines - they largely pay for themselves right now (why do we have a shortage if a cop generates 6 times his salary in fines?). We have local police, county sheriff, state police and several federal and international police forces.
In the US you have local parking enforcement to give parking tickets and tow cars - those won't have a job as you can just let an autonomous car park anywhere it finds an authorized space by itself so those will disappear. Local police do the hassling of some small time criminals and things that don't amount to felonies, they don't actually do anything, giving a fine is hard work for them, a busted taillight is usually what they're after they'll stick around for the most part because they're actually visible and "necessary" to the plebes. County sheriff does the paper work for court proceedings so we kind of need them until the courts can find a better way of serving papers. State police does traffic enforcement, they'll almost completely disappear, beyond giving speeding tickets and going after escaped convicts, they're invisible. Federal goes after the low hanging fruit among the heavy criminals, they're not interested in traffic, they'll stick around because the TV tells us the FBI is necessary and terrr'ists make sure DHS sticks around. International police is the UN of police forces - talks a lot but doesn't actually do anything, they'll stay around because consortiums of countries are funding them.