Nortel is being broken up and sold off to various other companies. So far chunks have gone to Avaya, Ciena, Ericsson, and GENBAND, and probably others as well.
It's not clear to me how this is any better than specing normal machines with a decent power supply. Anything rated at "Gold 80 Plus" will convert to DC with 80-90% efficiency depending on the power draw.
Is this just a matter of replacing old inefficient noisy machines with newer efficient (and thus quieter) ones?
Most people don't know or care much about the space industry, and the geeky types think it's cool. Due to a good TV miniseries I suspect most people know about the Avro Arrow than about the current contributions to space exploration and industry.
Your choice is to vote in someone that will regulate the industry. We have the same problem in Canada...in most places there's one cable company and one phone company and they don't really compete against each other in any meaningful way--they both offer similar options and similar caps.
It's not entirely surprising that they would treat internal network traffic differently. U-Verse traffic travels on AT&T's internal network. Anything going to or coming from the internet at large needs to go through their pipes to the outside world.
Incidentally, I was recently at a presentation by Shaw Cable in Canada, and apparently streaming data (netflix, youtube, etc.) is currently only 15% of their network traffic, with 45% being peer to peer (all sorts, including vpn, skype, etc.) and 36% being web/email. They also said that they have seen a 60% increase in overall traffic since July 2010, and it's spread more or less proportionally across all data types.
I lived in what was then Zaire for three years back in the late 80s. Flew in a significant number of small planes using visual sight rules, maps, compass, etc. Had some close calls when the weather socked in over a dirt airstrip right before we got there, but for the most part it worked just fine.
All these systems should have a decent local clock to fall back on. Calibrate a local clock based using gps, and they'll be able to go for a long time before degrading significantly.
None of the cpus were designed specifically for gaming consoles, they were more adaptations of general purpose devices. They all have powerpc instructions sets.
What the OP is talking about is fully custom chips with instruction sets optimized for gaming.
The reality is that the cost of designing a current generation cpu/gpu is so high that they can't afford to do full-custom anymore. Almost everyone pulls something off the shelf and tweaks it slightly.
Why get a space heater....if a 40 watt bulb works, then just stick in a suitable resistor instead and be done with it. Alternately, repurpose an old thermostat and use it to control the space heater.
The typical response is people can just barely tell that there is a difference between bitrates, but they are unable to accurately pick the HIGHER bitrate one.
Depends on the bitrate and the music in question. There was one Enya album (yeah, yeah) where the harp notes were just mangled by the compression artifacts in the 128kbps MP3 that I heard.
as long as the per-GB charges are reasonable, I have no problem with charging by the GB. However, up here in Canada the big ISPs want to charge 1-2 dollars/GB once you go over the monthly allocation. That's simply insane.
The most fair pricing model for me as an end-user is a regulated utility style. The company charges a flat rate per month for the privilege of being connected, and a per-GB charge for data. Both fees are regulated by the government to allow a reasonable amount of profit without raping the end-user.
There's nothing wrong with usage-based billing, as long as they're regulated in terms of how much they can charge.
I'd love to see a $20 flat rate monthly fee for admin and infrastructure costs, then 10 cents/GB for bandwidth. This maps naturally to the real costs of the ISP, and would tie their profits directly to bandwidth consumption so it would provide an incentive for them to give consumers the highest possible connection rates in order to drive up bandwidth usage.
Ideally the bandwidth cost should be tied to a cost-plus-reasonable-profit calculation, so that as bandwidth costs drop (which they have been doing) the rates charged to consumers would also drop.
An additional benefit to this pricing model is that the ISPs would have a natural incentive to provide you with the fastest possible connectivity in order to let you use more bandwidth more easily.
Also, the bandwidth rate should be tied to the actual cost of bandwidth such that the rate drops as the wholesale cost drops. (Otherwise you know they'll keep charging 10cents/GB when the true cost is 0.1 cents/GB.)
Actually, I'd rather imagine a third situation--utility style billing. Charge me $30/month for administration and local infrastructure costs, and 10 cents/GB for bandwidth.
In this environment, the ISP is encouraged to give you the fastest possible net connection so that you use up as much bandwidth as possible.
"an old Pentium could easily handle enough traffic to saturate the link"
An old Pentium barely has the PCI bus bandwidth to saturate a 1Gig link, let alone do layer 4 analysis, firewalling, connection tracking, etc. And just how much memory do you have on that old Pentium for state tables?
Netflix is paying for the bandwidth on their end, so it's not like they're getting anything for free. The issue is that all of the sudden people want to stream massive amounts of information and it's breaking all the assumptions that went into oversubscription ratios.
The answer is for ISPs to be honest about what they provide. If there's a monthly cap, say so.
That said, it would be good for netflix users to be able to pick a speed and have it stay there rather than sucking up all available bandwidth.
The bill as written would allow the ISP to prioritize your traffic if you opt in for that.
If you prefer not to have them do it, you can always prioritize your own outgoing traffic before it gets sent to the ISP--this generally has the effect of prioritizing incoming traffic to some extent as well.
If you're paying for 768k, you should be able to get that any time of day or night to any website that can also provide that speed.
The biggest laugh in this whole net neutrality is the premise that ISPs have sold a customer a service that they can not provide.
There is really no technical reason to conflate instantaneous speed and total data transfer. For instance, I currently have an "up to" 15Mbps connection with a 100GB/month cap. This seems fairly clear...I can get instantaneous speeds of up to 15Mbps, but I'm limited to an monthly average speed of roughly 300kbps. Is this a 300kbps connection? Not really, since any individual download runs at up to 15Mbps (and yes, I can hit that at times). The cap is listed right up front in their specs for the subscription, so they're selling me exactly what they advertise.
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Nortel is being broken up and sold off to various other companies. So far chunks have gone to Avaya, Ciena, Ericsson, and GENBAND, and probably others as well.
It's not clear to me how this is any better than specing normal machines with a decent power supply. Anything rated at "Gold 80 Plus" will convert to DC with 80-90% efficiency depending on the power draw.
Is this just a matter of replacing old inefficient noisy machines with newer efficient (and thus quieter) ones?
The fact that you don't like the selection doesn't mean that you have the right to break the contract.
If you want tethering, but don't want to pay what the contract says, the only ethical thing to do is *not tether*.
Most people don't know or care much about the space industry, and the geeky types think it's cool. Due to a good TV miniseries I suspect most people know about the Avro Arrow than about the current contributions to space exploration and industry.
"We just don't have a choice."
Your choice is to vote in someone that will regulate the industry. We have the same problem in Canada...in most places there's one cable company and one phone company and they don't really compete against each other in any meaningful way--they both offer similar options and similar caps.
But it's not likely that it will be.
It's not entirely surprising that they would treat internal network traffic differently. U-Verse traffic travels on AT&T's internal network. Anything going to or coming from the internet at large needs to go through their pipes to the outside world.
Incidentally, I was recently at a presentation by Shaw Cable in Canada, and apparently streaming data (netflix, youtube, etc.) is currently only 15% of their network traffic, with 45% being peer to peer (all sorts, including vpn, skype, etc.) and 36% being web/email. They also said that they have seen a 60% increase in overall traffic since July 2010, and it's spread more or less proportionally across all data types.
GPS is used because it's a simple way to get a stratum 0 clock. Would you rather put an atomic clock on every cell tower?
just as you thought
I lived in what was then Zaire for three years back in the late 80s. Flew in a significant number of small planes using visual sight rules, maps, compass, etc. Had some close calls when the weather socked in over a dirt airstrip right before we got there, but for the most part it worked just fine.
All these systems should have a decent local clock to fall back on. Calibrate a local clock based using gps, and they'll be able to go for a long time before degrading significantly.
None of the cpus were designed specifically for gaming consoles, they were more adaptations of general purpose devices. They all have powerpc instructions sets.
What the OP is talking about is fully custom chips with instruction sets optimized for gaming.
The reality is that the cost of designing a current generation cpu/gpu is so high that they can't afford to do full-custom anymore. Almost everyone pulls something off the shelf and tweaks it slightly.
Sure it is. If there's any ambiguity, it's likely because you're trying to game the system.
There are very few cases where there is any real doubt whether the spirit of the GPL applies.
Why get a space heater....if a 40 watt bulb works, then just stick in a suitable resistor instead and be done with it. Alternately, repurpose an old thermostat and use it to control the space heater.
The typical response is people can just barely tell that there is a difference between bitrates, but they are unable to accurately pick the HIGHER bitrate one.
Depends on the bitrate and the music in question. There was one Enya album (yeah, yeah) where the harp notes were just mangled by the compression artifacts in the 128kbps MP3 that I heard.
Linus has said, "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'"
as long as the per-GB charges are reasonable, I have no problem with charging by the GB. However, up here in Canada the big ISPs want to charge 1-2 dollars/GB once you go over the monthly allocation. That's simply insane.
The most fair pricing model for me as an end-user is a regulated utility style. The company charges a flat rate per month for the privilege of being connected, and a per-GB charge for data. Both fees are regulated by the government to allow a reasonable amount of profit without raping the end-user.
There's nothing wrong with usage-based billing, as long as they're regulated in terms of how much they can charge.
I'd love to see a $20 flat rate monthly fee for admin and infrastructure costs, then 10 cents/GB for bandwidth. This maps naturally to the real costs of the ISP, and would tie their profits directly to bandwidth consumption so it would provide an incentive for them to give consumers the highest possible connection rates in order to drive up bandwidth usage.
Ideally the bandwidth cost should be tied to a cost-plus-reasonable-profit calculation, so that as bandwidth costs drop (which they have been doing) the rates charged to consumers would also drop.
I'd be happy with 10 cents/GB flat rate.
An additional benefit to this pricing model is that the ISPs would have a natural incentive to provide you with the fastest possible connectivity in order to let you use more bandwidth more easily.
Also, the bandwidth rate should be tied to the actual cost of bandwidth such that the rate drops as the wholesale cost drops. (Otherwise you know they'll keep charging 10cents/GB when the true cost is 0.1 cents/GB.)
"Imagine these two situations:"
Actually, I'd rather imagine a third situation--utility style billing. Charge me $30/month for administration and local infrastructure costs, and 10 cents/GB for bandwidth.
In this environment, the ISP is encouraged to give you the fastest possible net connection so that you use up as much bandwidth as possible.
"an old Pentium could easily handle enough traffic to saturate the link"
An old Pentium barely has the PCI bus bandwidth to saturate a 1Gig link, let alone do layer 4 analysis, firewalling, connection tracking, etc. And just how much memory do you have on that old Pentium for state tables?
Netflix is paying for the bandwidth on their end, so it's not like they're getting anything for free. The issue is that all of the sudden people want to stream massive amounts of information and it's breaking all the assumptions that went into oversubscription ratios.
The answer is for ISPs to be honest about what they provide. If there's a monthly cap, say so.
That said, it would be good for netflix users to be able to pick a speed and have it stay there rather than sucking up all available bandwidth.
I'm actually okay with giving burst speed and caps...it's pretty easy to transform this to constant bandwidth.
The bill as written would allow the ISP to prioritize your traffic if you opt in for that.
If you prefer not to have them do it, you can always prioritize your own outgoing traffic before it gets sent to the ISP--this generally has the effect of prioritizing incoming traffic to some extent as well.
If you're paying for 768k, you should be able to get that any time of day or night to any website that can also provide that speed.
The biggest laugh in this whole net neutrality is the premise that ISPs have sold a customer a service that they can not provide.
There is really no technical reason to conflate instantaneous speed and total data transfer. For instance, I currently have an "up to" 15Mbps connection with a 100GB/month cap. This seems fairly clear...I can get instantaneous speeds of up to 15Mbps, but I'm limited to an monthly average speed of roughly 300kbps. Is this a 300kbps connection? Not really, since any individual download runs at up to 15Mbps (and yes, I can hit that at times). The cap is listed right up front in their specs for the subscription, so they're selling me exactly what they advertise.