So much for games on a family PC/console. With multiple kids in the house, each likes to have his own save file. Now, only one will be able to play. I really hope players will avoid titles like these, to send a financial message to the game-makers.
Perhaps they should have taken the time to survey companies (or to review published data), so they might realize just how many enterprises have adopted FireFox. While I understand their position, they're cutting off the enterprise customers that helped increase the FF browser-share.
So, Orion's BO is now so strong they can see it with a telescope. Pretty cool. He'd better watch out how high he holds that arm, otherwise he's going to blow out that shoulder joint.
I don't know how long you've had your eddress, but if you've only had it a short time, it's possible that the previous owner had a BioWare user account.
Either that, or someone who didn't want to use their own contact information used your eddress to register. I don't know why they'd bother, but, oh well.
While not directly related to Android, the findings should have been expected. Everyone wanted to compete with iDevices. Android seemed to offer the flexibility that would been needed in the kernel and the OS, so it was a no-brainer: Android to emulate or even surpass the features of various iDevices. Going to the makers, however, they needed to produce devices that could compete roughly toe-to-toe on price, or, even better, offer a better value than iAnything. Thus, the race to cheap began.
Only time and retrospect will tell us whether it was rushed engineering, poor component quality, or a combination of factors, but device makers wanted to get to market fast and they wanted to get to market cheap. Overall, that's one area where Apple has held a steady keel--they've resisted pressure to drop their prices, and doing so has let them execute greater control over the quality. They're not problem free, by any means, but they simply have a tighter grip on the hardware side which makes things on the software side so much smoother.
In some ways, it reminds me of the early days of the PC clone market. You could get components everywhere, but often the quality was a mixed bag, and it even continued as newer technologies emerged. I'm sure many here remember dealing with sound cards, optical drives, and other componnents that claimed to be (then) cutting-edge technologies, but which were severly hampered by lousy chipsets and other signposts from the race to cheap. The good news is that the markets will shake out the makers (device and componnent level) who can't produce quality devices. Hopefully, however, that shakeout won't take too long, or take down too many formerly key players in the process.
I'm no made-of-money type guy, but every once in a while I get a crazy idea to save for something seemingly rediculous. The Tesla Roadster was just the type of product that catches my interest. Sure, in reality it is highly unlikely that I ever would have saved enough to buy one in the next 10 years, but such goals do prompt some of us to save. Oh, well. Now I'll just need to find some other crazy toy to convince me to put away all my pennies (and dollars).
I grew up in Illinois. Outside the capital, Springfield, they built a massive multi-lane highway--it must have been nearly eight lanes in each direction. When we would drive on that stretch, it seemed so odd, because there were so few cars. They massively overbuilt that stretch of road. The result? No traffic jams. While it's been years since I've been in that area, I've heard from other folks who have traveled there and they report the same thing--no traffic jams to this day.
Cerf's idea is like that stretch of road. Overbuild capacity to the point where even unimagined usage would not overwhelm it. Network utilization patterns do change when massive amounts of throughput are available. If you've ever been stuck in rush hour traffic, can you imagine what would happen if every highway suddenly had 12 additional lanes going each way, and each car could travel safely and automatically at 200 mph? Rush hour as we know it would largely disappear. If there was less congestion, more people would certainly opt to travel that way, but if the system is built large enough to begin with (and since data traffic is not subject to the same type of human intervention--braking--that leads to most on-the-road slowdowns), the extra speed and capacity would make the absorption of that traffic almost unnoticable.
Devices change over time as well. If the expectation is that entire films get downloaded, then device makers (at least, the smart ones) will start panning their system configurations for such changes. By the time Cerf's vision becomes reality, I doubt there will be very many people still using a Wii to stream movies.
As to the fear of piracy from a single file, that can be largely mitigated (though no technology is hack-proof) by developing a system tying the file to a session ID, or some other means of expiring the file.
Because today's "bandwidth hogs" (as you label them) are just the harbingers of tomorrow's average user base. Online video has caught on. It is moving more and more into the mainstream. Set top boxes are no longer the realm of geekdom, and even TV sets are coming with Internet connections and streaming features built in.
There will always be some who are ahead of the curve, but the rest are not far behind.
Satellite services a highly sensitive to changes in the weather and, at high latitudes, snow cover. My brother has satellite services, and he loses the signal every time it rains harder than a sprinkle. If he gets too much snow/ice during the winter, there's no signal either. Such high-speed download options are great for some, but not for all. Unfortunately, most areas that rely on satellite services do so because cable providers don't have cable anywhere near them.
Now, I don't know what it is like in other areas of the country, but telecoms and other carriers have been laying fiber around the upper midwest every year for the past five or more years. They are laying in trenches along every major Interstate and highway, and they've recently started burrying lines in smaller towns (like mine, with a population just over 2,000). The problem is getting a connection to those fiber trunks--still prohibitively expensive in the outlying area. In time, however, the fiber backbone should reach most communities along major trunk roads. Then the problem will be the type of technology the local ISPs use to connect homes to that backbone.
On services like Netflix, during prime usage hours (late evenings), films might need to buffer more than once, or Netflix will automatically adjust the quality of the stream to compensate for network congestion. Sure, my eyesight isn't quite what it used to be, but seening things a bit out of focus or pixelated because the streaming speed dropped is very annoying. So, suggesting that the average user wouldn't want or benefit from such a change is simply (imo) out of touch with reality.
Besides, if content is streaming, then the user's local Internet connection (a typical choke point) is tied up with higher throughput utilization for a longer time. In a household with more than one computer, streaming a video can making browsing or doing anything else online a real pain for the duration of the film. In such situations, I'd find it much preferable to have a temporary slowdown of 15-30 seconds, rather than suffer through two hours of sluggish connections on my PC while the kids are watching a movie.
Increasing available bandwidth != increasing the food supply to fight hunger. Increasing the amount of available content is like increasing the food supply to fight hunger--without a means of distribution, that food won't reach those who need or want it.
Increasing bandwidth is like improving the food distribution infrastructure. There's already more than enough content out there for everyone (just like there's already enough foods, though people create new recipies every day), but things get bottled up trying to get that content to the end users. Cerf's idea is spot on, but like most great ideas, implementation will be thousands of times harder than talking about it.
Not necessarily true. Services might have kill bits for downloaded content, to prevent you from doing what you describe (dowloading title after title after title), or they might build in time limits. Amazon does this with their instant rental service. The movie you download is available for viewing for 48 hours. After that, you need to download it again.
Your assessment is too simplistic. Yes, it may take 10 seconds longer to start your movie, but you would never be interrupted so a movie could buffer again. Also, you'd be pulling data almost constantly while the movie continues to buffer ahead (unless the service proceeds to stream the entire film once you start watching), utilizing bandwidth for a longer period of time. Also, if your movie streaming service is like those I've used (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Amazon), if you want to jump forward or back to another part of the movie, you'd need to wait again. If the entire file is already on your device, there's no wait for buffering if you want to hop around, or watch a scene again and again so you can memorize the dialog.
Sony recently was hacked. Millions of accounts were leaked. If they were using Bitcoins then the addresses people donated to would be known to the attacker. Not my private keys which enable said attacker to spend my cash.
And hackers found a way to steal gobs of bitcoins in recent days. So, those bitcoin holders didn't get to spend their cash.
They would have been better off staying as a Magic the Gathering exchange. I finished entering my collection into Deckbox.org last night and found I'm sitting on a fair penny of MTG cards. If I can sell a handful of cards for even half what they've gone for recently, I'll be able to support some of my other habits and diversions for a few months.
As much as many don't like the idea of a standing military (the money, the wars, the deaths, the moral questions), this is just one fine example of how we all often benefit from what they're doing. Sure, it may take some time to reach non-military medical facilities and common practice, but it is nice to know that they do invest in things other than technologies that kill.
In the Madison area, if I remember correctly, many of the neighboring communities had local calling packs that included the Madison area. Once you got further out--Spring Green, Gotham, Muscoda, Richland Center, Boaz, Viola, Readstown, et.al.--you calling inter-LATA. Same area code, but a huge difference in the per-minute cost.
I live in rural Minnesota now, and the same thing still applies to inter-LATA calls--they are still more expensive than long distance. That's why I'm glad our cellular carrier doesn't care whether calls are local or long distanace. Any time we need to dial inter-LATA or long distance, we use our cell phones.
I lived in Wisconsin in the early 1990s. The problem we had was that the big Internet service providers/communities/BBS services were only providing dial up numbers in the major cities. If you lived in the outlying areas, you got nailed with inter-LATA calling fees that priced calls higher than long-distance calls. I remember when groups in and around the Richland County area got together--the communities, the utility cooperatives, and the local two-year University of Wisconsin campus--to help bring local Internet access to the area. There were those at the time who complained that such groups shouldn't be providing services that should be provided in the free market, but the problem was that the free market providers didn't want to provide service there because it was just too costly for them.
Such networks were a boon to local businesses and consumers alike, allowing many to have Internet service who otherwise would not have had it.
You may not be filtering it, but I suspect someone is (e.g., your ISP).
I manage our company's mail server. We're a small company (only around 80 employees), and there are three published email address (even though I've advised using feedback forms rather than email addresses). Our mail server is blocking tens of thousands of messages a day, and that's after setting up firewall rules to block almost everything coming in from APNIC (save for New Zealand) and parts of Africa. I've reviewed the logs: much of the junk that is trying to come in seems to be in the form of brute force attacks trying to find valid email accounts. The company has always used one standard format for how it puts together its email names, so when I see things trying to come in using combinations of letters and numbers in the user ID, I know it's a brute force attack.
In the past, I've gone the disposable eddress route, but it just hasn't been worth it anymore. Spam filters, even at places like Hotmail, are catching more and more of the crap (either deleting it outright or dumping it into a suitable junk mail folder), and I can set up rules to automatically delete anything semi-legit or legit that I don't want to see (when the unsubscribe link or method never seemed to work, or when I didn't care to try to figure out my password to some old service).
If you have no spam, consider yourself lucky. As for the rest of us, we'll manage.
Slashdot Mirror
So much for games on a family PC/console. With multiple kids in the house, each likes to have his own save file. Now, only one will be able to play. I really hope players will avoid titles like these, to send a financial message to the game-makers.
Perhaps they should have taken the time to survey companies (or to review published data), so they might realize just how many enterprises have adopted FireFox. While I understand their position, they're cutting off the enterprise customers that helped increase the FF browser-share.
lol
So, Orion's BO is now so strong they can see it with a telescope. Pretty cool. He'd better watch out how high he holds that arm, otherwise he's going to blow out that shoulder joint.
I don't know how long you've had your eddress, but if you've only had it a short time, it's possible that the previous owner had a BioWare user account.
Either that, or someone who didn't want to use their own contact information used your eddress to register. I don't know why they'd bother, but, oh well.
While not directly related to Android, the findings should have been expected. Everyone wanted to compete with iDevices. Android seemed to offer the flexibility that would been needed in the kernel and the OS, so it was a no-brainer: Android to emulate or even surpass the features of various iDevices. Going to the makers, however, they needed to produce devices that could compete roughly toe-to-toe on price, or, even better, offer a better value than iAnything. Thus, the race to cheap began.
Only time and retrospect will tell us whether it was rushed engineering, poor component quality, or a combination of factors, but device makers wanted to get to market fast and they wanted to get to market cheap. Overall, that's one area where Apple has held a steady keel--they've resisted pressure to drop their prices, and doing so has let them execute greater control over the quality. They're not problem free, by any means, but they simply have a tighter grip on the hardware side which makes things on the software side so much smoother.
In some ways, it reminds me of the early days of the PC clone market. You could get components everywhere, but often the quality was a mixed bag, and it even continued as newer technologies emerged. I'm sure many here remember dealing with sound cards, optical drives, and other componnents that claimed to be (then) cutting-edge technologies, but which were severly hampered by lousy chipsets and other signposts from the race to cheap. The good news is that the markets will shake out the makers (device and componnent level) who can't produce quality devices. Hopefully, however, that shakeout won't take too long, or take down too many formerly key players in the process.
I'm no made-of-money type guy, but every once in a while I get a crazy idea to save for something seemingly rediculous. The Tesla Roadster was just the type of product that catches my interest. Sure, in reality it is highly unlikely that I ever would have saved enough to buy one in the next 10 years, but such goals do prompt some of us to save. Oh, well. Now I'll just need to find some other crazy toy to convince me to put away all my pennies (and dollars).
I grew up in Illinois. Outside the capital, Springfield, they built a massive multi-lane highway--it must have been nearly eight lanes in each direction. When we would drive on that stretch, it seemed so odd, because there were so few cars. They massively overbuilt that stretch of road. The result? No traffic jams. While it's been years since I've been in that area, I've heard from other folks who have traveled there and they report the same thing--no traffic jams to this day.
Cerf's idea is like that stretch of road. Overbuild capacity to the point where even unimagined usage would not overwhelm it. Network utilization patterns do change when massive amounts of throughput are available. If you've ever been stuck in rush hour traffic, can you imagine what would happen if every highway suddenly had 12 additional lanes going each way, and each car could travel safely and automatically at 200 mph? Rush hour as we know it would largely disappear. If there was less congestion, more people would certainly opt to travel that way, but if the system is built large enough to begin with (and since data traffic is not subject to the same type of human intervention--braking--that leads to most on-the-road slowdowns), the extra speed and capacity would make the absorption of that traffic almost unnoticable.
Devices change over time as well. If the expectation is that entire films get downloaded, then device makers (at least, the smart ones) will start panning their system configurations for such changes. By the time Cerf's vision becomes reality, I doubt there will be very many people still using a Wii to stream movies.
As to the fear of piracy from a single file, that can be largely mitigated (though no technology is hack-proof) by developing a system tying the file to a session ID, or some other means of expiring the file.
Because today's "bandwidth hogs" (as you label them) are just the harbingers of tomorrow's average user base. Online video has caught on. It is moving more and more into the mainstream. Set top boxes are no longer the realm of geekdom, and even TV sets are coming with Internet connections and streaming features built in.
There will always be some who are ahead of the curve, but the rest are not far behind.
Satellite services a highly sensitive to changes in the weather and, at high latitudes, snow cover. My brother has satellite services, and he loses the signal every time it rains harder than a sprinkle. If he gets too much snow/ice during the winter, there's no signal either. Such high-speed download options are great for some, but not for all. Unfortunately, most areas that rely on satellite services do so because cable providers don't have cable anywhere near them.
Now, I don't know what it is like in other areas of the country, but telecoms and other carriers have been laying fiber around the upper midwest every year for the past five or more years. They are laying in trenches along every major Interstate and highway, and they've recently started burrying lines in smaller towns (like mine, with a population just over 2,000). The problem is getting a connection to those fiber trunks--still prohibitively expensive in the outlying area. In time, however, the fiber backbone should reach most communities along major trunk roads. Then the problem will be the type of technology the local ISPs use to connect homes to that backbone.
On services like Netflix, during prime usage hours (late evenings), films might need to buffer more than once, or Netflix will automatically adjust the quality of the stream to compensate for network congestion. Sure, my eyesight isn't quite what it used to be, but seening things a bit out of focus or pixelated because the streaming speed dropped is very annoying. So, suggesting that the average user wouldn't want or benefit from such a change is simply (imo) out of touch with reality.
Besides, if content is streaming, then the user's local Internet connection (a typical choke point) is tied up with higher throughput utilization for a longer time. In a household with more than one computer, streaming a video can making browsing or doing anything else online a real pain for the duration of the film. In such situations, I'd find it much preferable to have a temporary slowdown of 15-30 seconds, rather than suffer through two hours of sluggish connections on my PC while the kids are watching a movie.
Increasing available bandwidth != increasing the food supply to fight hunger. Increasing the amount of available content is like increasing the food supply to fight hunger--without a means of distribution, that food won't reach those who need or want it.
Increasing bandwidth is like improving the food distribution infrastructure. There's already more than enough content out there for everyone (just like there's already enough foods, though people create new recipies every day), but things get bottled up trying to get that content to the end users. Cerf's idea is spot on, but like most great ideas, implementation will be thousands of times harder than talking about it.
Not necessarily true. Services might have kill bits for downloaded content, to prevent you from doing what you describe (dowloading title after title after title), or they might build in time limits. Amazon does this with their instant rental service. The movie you download is available for viewing for 48 hours. After that, you need to download it again.
Your assessment is too simplistic. Yes, it may take 10 seconds longer to start your movie, but you would never be interrupted so a movie could buffer again. Also, you'd be pulling data almost constantly while the movie continues to buffer ahead (unless the service proceeds to stream the entire film once you start watching), utilizing bandwidth for a longer period of time. Also, if your movie streaming service is like those I've used (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Amazon), if you want to jump forward or back to another part of the movie, you'd need to wait again. If the entire file is already on your device, there's no wait for buffering if you want to hop around, or watch a scene again and again so you can memorize the dialog.
And hackers found a way to steal gobs of bitcoins in recent days. So, those bitcoin holders didn't get to spend their cash.
As if the news coverage hasn't been enough to start the burning and scattering?
They would have been better off staying as a Magic the Gathering exchange. I finished entering my collection into Deckbox.org last night and found I'm sitting on a fair penny of MTG cards. If I can sell a handful of cards for even half what they've gone for recently, I'll be able to support some of my other habits and diversions for a few months.
As much as many don't like the idea of a standing military (the money, the wars, the deaths, the moral questions), this is just one fine example of how we all often benefit from what they're doing. Sure, it may take some time to reach non-military medical facilities and common practice, but it is nice to know that they do invest in things other than technologies that kill.
...until things settle down, and then I can visit a Lybian army surplus store. Guess what, kids? Santa got you some extreme Power Wheels this year!
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!
In the Madison area, if I remember correctly, many of the neighboring communities had local calling packs that included the Madison area. Once you got further out--Spring Green, Gotham, Muscoda, Richland Center, Boaz, Viola, Readstown, et.al.--you calling inter-LATA. Same area code, but a huge difference in the per-minute cost.
I live in rural Minnesota now, and the same thing still applies to inter-LATA calls--they are still more expensive than long distance. That's why I'm glad our cellular carrier doesn't care whether calls are local or long distanace. Any time we need to dial inter-LATA or long distance, we use our cell phones.
I lived in Wisconsin in the early 1990s. The problem we had was that the big Internet service providers/communities/BBS services were only providing dial up numbers in the major cities. If you lived in the outlying areas, you got nailed with inter-LATA calling fees that priced calls higher than long-distance calls. I remember when groups in and around the Richland County area got together--the communities, the utility cooperatives, and the local two-year University of Wisconsin campus--to help bring local Internet access to the area. There were those at the time who complained that such groups shouldn't be providing services that should be provided in the free market, but the problem was that the free market providers didn't want to provide service there because it was just too costly for them.
Such networks were a boon to local businesses and consumers alike, allowing many to have Internet service who otherwise would not have had it.
It's the audio component of the phone-based video that seems to be the sticking point. Most in-store surveillance setups are video only.
You may not be filtering it, but I suspect someone is (e.g., your ISP).
I manage our company's mail server. We're a small company (only around 80 employees), and there are three published email address (even though I've advised using feedback forms rather than email addresses). Our mail server is blocking tens of thousands of messages a day, and that's after setting up firewall rules to block almost everything coming in from APNIC (save for New Zealand) and parts of Africa. I've reviewed the logs: much of the junk that is trying to come in seems to be in the form of brute force attacks trying to find valid email accounts. The company has always used one standard format for how it puts together its email names, so when I see things trying to come in using combinations of letters and numbers in the user ID, I know it's a brute force attack.
In the past, I've gone the disposable eddress route, but it just hasn't been worth it anymore. Spam filters, even at places like Hotmail, are catching more and more of the crap (either deleting it outright or dumping it into a suitable junk mail folder), and I can set up rules to automatically delete anything semi-legit or legit that I don't want to see (when the unsubscribe link or method never seemed to work, or when I didn't care to try to figure out my password to some old service).
If you have no spam, consider yourself lucky. As for the rest of us, we'll manage.