Your post grossly misrepresents what the costs of circuits actually are.
My post didn't pretend to represent anything about the cost of circuits, or the cost of electricity, though it is predictable that so many so quickly start jerking their knees. It was a simple humorous comparison with the "utility" model that the congressman compared against.
In his case he talked about doctors (an odd group to portray as downtrodden...) who want to work at home but find the throughput costs prohibitive, to which you could say that I'd like to arc weld a submarine at home but find the electricity prices prohibitive, not to mention the various raw materials, so won't someone think of the poor submarine DIYers?
A connection is capable of handling X amount of data. It costs the same for the connection to move 0 bytes/second or max it out, the cost to run it does not change
Ugh. Another guy who needs to start an ISP.
Your connection from your cable modem to the local headend indeed costs them nothing whether it's transmitting or not. But guess what -- and you touched on this -- they oversell.
They have to oversell, or you'd be paying the $400 per month that we're paying to have a backup T1 line (that's 1/6th the speed of a cable modem, btw).
Your understanding of electricity could use some help. You aren't billed based on amps, you are billed on kilowatt hours.
Errrr...are you being serious?
I was referring to the peak draw of a given electric drop, which I think is clear to most every intelligent reader. My cable modem is 10Mbps, which would be comparable to the electricity drop.
Once the infrastructure is in place for an ISP
Boy, that's a pretty magically convenient way to think of it -- just imagine that the infrastructure magically appears for the peak demands of everyone saturating their pipes, and then there's "no additional cost". Brilliant.
I don't have to pay by the minute to watch cable TV. Why should internet service be any different?
So we're comparing with cable TV now?
Well aside from the fact that it is largely unidirectional multicasting -- you DO pay to watching those VoD shows -- with cable you pay for the breadth of the available multicasting you can even view.
So given this purportedly favourable situation, I take it you would be good with the idea of signing up for the Google/YouTube/Yahoo package, or maybe you want the Facebook/Twitter/Digg combo?
If the electric company advertised their service as "unlimited" then your argument would make some sense.
I'm not trying to make that argument. I just find the comparison with utilities to be ill-advised and spurious.
However, if you'd like to engage in that argument, when is the last time you saw an internet connection advertised as unlimited? When that terminology first came out, it was relative to services like AOL where you had X hours per month, and the unlimited as related to the always-connected element of the service. Yet even ten years ago most services added a little asterisk there disclaiming that you didn't have unlimited throughput.
Except that switching to a per-byte type of plan would mean that their highest usage customers would pay through the nose while the majority of customers pay a few bucks a month for the bandwidth for their email.
They'll always make money. Again to use the utility comparison, given that it's right there in the summary, if I use zero water and zero electricity, I still pay a pretty good fee to both utility cos for various base hookup/customer fees.
The summary grossly misrepresents what the congressman is proposing.
This bill doesn't "ban ISP caps". It simply says that ISPs will start to become regulated in the same way that phone companies, for instance, are, so that a given ISP would have to put in a submission to raise their rates, explaining why they need to do so, etc.
Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
I never understood the motivation in spending more for the speed of an SSD drive when a bunch of RAID drives can perform at multiples faster than a single drive. Plus you get the added disk space and redundancy built in
You would need a massive magnetic disk array to match the I/O performance of a modern SSD like the Intel X25-E.
And I/Os are what really matters, because a storage system spends most of its life satisfying small distributed requests, not reading GBs sequentially. This is why sequential throughput comparisons are so incredibly misleading, when the only time such performance comes into play is when you copy one massive conveniently defragmented file from one drive to another.
It would be foolhardy to claim that one or the other reigned supreme in all circumstances. For a file/media server, for instance, magnetic disks are almost certainly more than adequate, and the space is the principal value of the drive. For a database server, or even for most workstations, though, I/O speed is a much greater return.
SSDs are going to completely change the landscape of many enterprise systems, and for something like a netbook (where price isn't the focus), they seem like a no-brainer.
Doesn't anyone else see this for what it obviously is: a way for Microsoft to steal market share from Nintendo?
Wow, so you're telling us they're being competitive? Thanks for the brilliant insight.
Sony and Microsoft battled it out over pixel pushing, while Nintendo actually innovated (something Microsoft talks about a lot but never does) and built something new that people really liked -- something that actually got non-gamers onto the scene
And they kept being non-gamers after they shelved their Wii. I have a Wii -- I bought it when it first came. I have a Wii fit. I have a bunch of the games. I have three young children, perfectly in the demographic.
The console sucks. It is grossly overrated by people who bought it and stuffed it away, then making it their mission to present it as the second coming.
Then I bought an XBox 360 which cost me $100 less and is 100x the unit, and have been enjoying non-gimmicky, deep games since. Of course it did lack some of the family games, but is moving quickly in that direction, so it's becoming a unit that the whole family loves.
So now they're trying to build "Wii without the Wiimote." This is a "meeee toooo" play, which is Microsoft's usual way of doing business. YAWN.
This is nothing like the Wiimote, and the idea that the Wii has some sort of hold over the idea of physically interactive games...holy shit, you need to tone down the Wii-fanaticism. Guess what -- this has been the goal in games for decades, and certainly didn't suddenly come into existence the moment the Wii came out.
I don't know what the deal is but the learning curve seems really easy yet once you get there there is no way to differentiate between the 98 percentile player and the 99 percentile player
The 98th and 99th???
My 4 year old daughter bowled strike after strike after strike in Wii bowling, while my father-in-law -- a long-time bowler -- over-thought it and was trying to over-skill it, gutterballing endlessly.
It is hard to master the Wii-mote because it is an inaccurate measurement device, which is why the vast majority of the games keep it to broad, coarse movements.
The problem with controllers like this is the risk that they become gimmicky. Just look at virtually every port of games from other consoles to the Wii -- subtract most of the gameplace, downgrade the graphics, but add in a lot of hand shaking and call it gold.
While we're giving subjective impressions, I'll go against the grain and say that I think the Wii is grossly overrated.
Many of the games are a mile wide but one inch deep, and most seem more like technology demos than actually games. The Wiimote is interesting and is a good start, but there's a general feeling that it is more accurate and capable than it really is (if you're really trying to do special twists and flares in Wii Bowling, you're significantly over-estimating the device's capabilities). Mariocart is interesting, but only really comes into its own in multiplayer, but there you find that the 480 lines of resolution of the Wii is grossly ill equipped to handle two onscreen players at once.
And for buying a terribly dated bit of hardware, you're still paying a price comparable to or exceeding some of the vastly more capable competitors, which just can't be excused.
Wiis everywhere sit doing nothing, while their owners try to justify it by remembering that hour of fun they had on the first day playing Wii Sports, before putting it away until the next big thing. Now they just need to find somewhere to store that wii Fit board.
Why not ask the parents of Tori Stafford whether an unobtrusive system could have been useful to them.Google if you want to know the backstory.
That has been a story that has torn at me for since April 8th, which you can see by following through to my homepage. I haven't posted anything since because everything else just seems so superficial now, and my mind has been focused on technology for the safety and security of children.
A case like Victoria Stafford obviously victimizes the family more than anyone, but it also victimizes a whole community and beyond. The tragedy has hit many quite hard.
I was not surprised by the tone of most of the replies that I've seen regarding this submission. Whenever children and their safety comes up, the dominate positions tend to be the "cool" parent who relies upon denial to ensure that everything turns out okay, and the adolescent/early adult who is releasing pent up issues they have with their own parents.
You're talking about being an American traveling to Canada, and how it was harder to enter Canada than to return to the US. This surprises you how? It's generally quite a bit easier to return to your own country than to enter another.
This thread was about the US demanding fingerprints to leave, which is just extraordinary, and is a stop in the very wrong direction. Add that to the "Constitution Free" zones that encompass a good percentage of the US population...the US is truly looking very much like the propaganda we saw about the USSR during the 80s.
You have no fucking idea why people play MMOs, do you?
No.
Going into a world where they don't have to work hard to achieve what they want. Where they can be anyone they want without the effort it requires in real life.
It seems that a lot of MMO (what does that stand for, anyways? I used to, way back in the mid-2000s, stand for Massively Multiplayer Online...which leaves it seeming really silly by itself) players put a tremendous amount of work and effort into their game. I would say that the primary reason I never really got into MMORPGs -- and I'm a pretty driven, successful person -- is that jesus they seemed like a lot of work.
Sure, but then they'll be hooked on griefing people. Really it is more addictive than the games themselves.
Though why does this story smell like an ad? The single link is to some weirdo largely unknown game, under the context that it's so good that someone is hooked and needs to be broken free. My Spammy-Senses are tingling.
Work exam material into the game and you have double good!
Really, though, wouldn't it be great if games like World of Warcraft turned into actually practical learning experiences, instead of simply forcing you to learn a lot of completely irrelevant info? Of course I haven't played a MMO(RPG) since a brief stint with Ultimate Online, so maybe kids nowadays really are studying their double-slit experiment results to level up their Quantum Photon Physics skill.
yes it is instant - i'm not sure exactly how they are doing it at the moment but basicly the boxes work in tandom to sync move on a per cycle basis.. meaning not a single cpu cycle is lost..
There probably are scenarios where there is a delay while it tries to figure out if indeed the other participant is down. However the OP's question -- instant -- was best responded to by the quantum processing response, because "instant" is in the mind of the assessor, and one woman's instant is another man's forever.
While this feature is heavily focused on, it has to be incredibly demanding on communication and computational resources. As you mentioned, it isn't your standard "do the macro-same thing" approach, but instead is literally by CPU cycle, so I have to imagine that it is only appropriate for a very small subset of problems.
This is certainly true of most servers, but is it true of virtualised servers in really big data centres? I would have thought that sizing, evening of load, etc. would mean that there would be some level of constant use.
Outside of low-end web hosting, virtualization is still generally in its infancy (though I expect products like vSphere 4 to change things considerably).
And even in cases were multiple servers are virtualized onto one set of hardware, the candidates for virtualization tend to be extremely low utilization, so you end up with a box using a lot of memory and storage, but still averaging out at an incredibly low CPU load.
Data centers will often outsource whatever "idle machine time" they have to various institutions, at least if they have any sense.
I think you just imagined that.
Very, very, very, very (x4) few data centers do anything of the sort. And the truth is that the vast majority of servers spend the vast majority of their time waiting for something to do.
You mean to tell me that there is someone in the world who not only actually believed that DNF would be finished someday, but they believe it so strongly that they were willing to invest $12 million into it?!?!?
They paid that money 9 years ago. Yeah, most people believed the game might be someday finished 9 years ago. Even 7 years ago it was "soon". 5 years ago it was "gotta be sometime in the next couple of years". 3 years ago it was "are they actually still working on it?"
My approach is more storing my external HD (marked as mine) in my locked office cabinet. Gives me some offsite option in the case that my house burns down, one half of my city was nuked, etc.
Plenty of people anticipated this, but nobody has given a shit enough about it to do anything substantial.
It's always about fighting for a piece of the budget pie. It's unlikely that GPS will degrade, though really the world community should be paying a piece of the cost for it (maybe that's why the US constantly withholds their UN payment -- it's an advance on GPS).
Back on the GPS Ranch, meanwhile, the EU is busy putting its own superior system in place, in part because they don't want to be dependent upon our system
The GPS first started getting deployed in, what, 1978? Is it a surprise that someone starting at zero 30 years later could make a better system?
And anyways -- GPS seems to work pretty frickin' amazingly well.
And yeah, Europe wants their own because the US retains SA rights on GPS, with the ability to encrypt or degrade GPS in areas of the globe by switching a toggle. No kidding people don't like that, but don't pretend that it's because the leaches are morally superior or something.
I think having a normally off, seldom used mirror of my 3TB of data the best backup solution I can muster.
This is my family data approach as well: Backing up to attached storage at regular intervals, then bringing in in to my workplace so it's physically separate.
Remember kids if it isn't backed up to an off-line copy then it isn't backed up.
How do services like SunGard fit into that equation? With that service, you backup over the internet to their array of servers.
This guy had a couple of serious backup strategy problems. First that he backed up to a system that was just as vulnerable (versus backing up to a system that was hardened and configured as purely a backup push destination). Second that he had no alternate (not even an occasional alternate push to another online service, even just an FTP destination).
The story sounds almost difficult to believe. Though just as easily it could have turned out as "we were hacked and went to our tape media to find it was unreadable!" (very common), or "we were hacked and the hacker screwed with our backup daemon such that it just overwrote our rotation of tapes with garbage, and then the bomb imploded"
I read Slashdot infrequently, but virtually every story I open, there you are. I of course notice you given that you long ago marked me as a foe (I believe it was because you were copulating with a blu-ray player and I questioned your boy->electronics love)
Slashdot Mirror
My post didn't pretend to represent anything about the cost of circuits, or the cost of electricity, though it is predictable that so many so quickly start jerking their knees. It was a simple humorous comparison with the "utility" model that the congressman compared against.
In his case he talked about doctors (an odd group to portray as downtrodden...) who want to work at home but find the throughput costs prohibitive, to which you could say that I'd like to arc weld a submarine at home but find the electricity prices prohibitive, not to mention the various raw materials, so won't someone think of the poor submarine DIYers?
Ugh. Another guy who needs to start an ISP.
Your connection from your cable modem to the local headend indeed costs them nothing whether it's transmitting or not. But guess what -- and you touched on this -- they oversell.
They have to oversell, or you'd be paying the $400 per month that we're paying to have a backup T1 line (that's 1/6th the speed of a cable modem, btw).
Errrr...are you being serious?
I was referring to the peak draw of a given electric drop, which I think is clear to most every intelligent reader. My cable modem is 10Mbps, which would be comparable to the electricity drop.
Boy, that's a pretty magically convenient way to think of it -- just imagine that the infrastructure magically appears for the peak demands of everyone saturating their pipes, and then there's "no additional cost". Brilliant.
You should start an ISP.
So we're comparing with cable TV now?
Well aside from the fact that it is largely unidirectional multicasting -- you DO pay to watching those VoD shows -- with cable you pay for the breadth of the available multicasting you can even view.
So given this purportedly favourable situation, I take it you would be good with the idea of signing up for the Google/YouTube/Yahoo package, or maybe you want the Facebook/Twitter/Digg combo?
I'm not trying to make that argument. I just find the comparison with utilities to be ill-advised and spurious.
However, if you'd like to engage in that argument, when is the last time you saw an internet connection advertised as unlimited? When that terminology first came out, it was relative to services like AOL where you had X hours per month, and the unlimited as related to the always-connected element of the service. Yet even ten years ago most services added a little asterisk there disclaiming that you didn't have unlimited throughput.
They'll always make money. Again to use the utility comparison, given that it's right there in the summary, if I use zero water and zero electricity, I still pay a pretty good fee to both utility cos for various base hookup/customer fees.
The summary grossly misrepresents what the congressman is proposing.
This bill doesn't "ban ISP caps". It simply says that ISPs will start to become regulated in the same way that phone companies, for instance, are, so that a given ISP would have to put in a submission to raise their rates, explaining why they need to do so, etc.
Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
You would need a massive magnetic disk array to match the I/O performance of a modern SSD like the Intel X25-E.
And I/Os are what really matters, because a storage system spends most of its life satisfying small distributed requests, not reading GBs sequentially. This is why sequential throughput comparisons are so incredibly misleading, when the only time such performance comes into play is when you copy one massive conveniently defragmented file from one drive to another.
It would be foolhardy to claim that one or the other reigned supreme in all circumstances. For a file/media server, for instance, magnetic disks are almost certainly more than adequate, and the space is the principal value of the drive. For a database server, or even for most workstations, though, I/O speed is a much greater return.
SSDs are going to completely change the landscape of many enterprise systems, and for something like a netbook (where price isn't the focus), they seem like a no-brainer.
There have been a startling number of stories directly or peripherally about the Wii.
Wow, so you're telling us they're being competitive? Thanks for the brilliant insight.
And they kept being non-gamers after they shelved their Wii. I have a Wii -- I bought it when it first came. I have a Wii fit. I have a bunch of the games. I have three young children, perfectly in the demographic.
The console sucks. It is grossly overrated by people who bought it and stuffed it away, then making it their mission to present it as the second coming.
Then I bought an XBox 360 which cost me $100 less and is 100x the unit, and have been enjoying non-gimmicky, deep games since. Of course it did lack some of the family games, but is moving quickly in that direction, so it's becoming a unit that the whole family loves.
This is nothing like the Wiimote, and the idea that the Wii has some sort of hold over the idea of physically interactive games...holy shit, you need to tone down the Wii-fanaticism. Guess what -- this has been the goal in games for decades, and certainly didn't suddenly come into existence the moment the Wii came out.
The 98th and 99th???
My 4 year old daughter bowled strike after strike after strike in Wii bowling, while my father-in-law -- a long-time bowler -- over-thought it and was trying to over-skill it, gutterballing endlessly.
It is hard to master the Wii-mote because it is an inaccurate measurement device, which is why the vast majority of the games keep it to broad, coarse movements.
The problem with controllers like this is the risk that they become gimmicky. Just look at virtually every port of games from other consoles to the Wii -- subtract most of the gameplace, downgrade the graphics, but add in a lot of hand shaking and call it gold.
While we're giving subjective impressions, I'll go against the grain and say that I think the Wii is grossly overrated.
Many of the games are a mile wide but one inch deep, and most seem more like technology demos than actually games. The Wiimote is interesting and is a good start, but there's a general feeling that it is more accurate and capable than it really is (if you're really trying to do special twists and flares in Wii Bowling, you're significantly over-estimating the device's capabilities). Mariocart is interesting, but only really comes into its own in multiplayer, but there you find that the 480 lines of resolution of the Wii is grossly ill equipped to handle two onscreen players at once.
And for buying a terribly dated bit of hardware, you're still paying a price comparable to or exceeding some of the vastly more capable competitors, which just can't be excused.
Wiis everywhere sit doing nothing, while their owners try to justify it by remembering that hour of fun they had on the first day playing Wii Sports, before putting it away until the next big thing. Now they just need to find somewhere to store that wii Fit board.
That has been a story that has torn at me for since April 8th, which you can see by following through to my homepage. I haven't posted anything since because everything else just seems so superficial now, and my mind has been focused on technology for the safety and security of children.
A case like Victoria Stafford obviously victimizes the family more than anyone, but it also victimizes a whole community and beyond. The tragedy has hit many quite hard.
I was not surprised by the tone of most of the replies that I've seen regarding this submission. Whenever children and their safety comes up, the dominate positions tend to be the "cool" parent who relies upon denial to ensure that everything turns out okay, and the adolescent/early adult who is releasing pent up issues they have with their own parents.
You're talking about being an American traveling to Canada, and how it was harder to enter Canada than to return to the US. This surprises you how? It's generally quite a bit easier to return to your own country than to enter another.
This thread was about the US demanding fingerprints to leave, which is just extraordinary, and is a stop in the very wrong direction. Add that to the "Constitution Free" zones that encompass a good percentage of the US population...the US is truly looking very much like the propaganda we saw about the USSR during the 80s.
No.
It seems that a lot of MMO (what does that stand for, anyways? I used to, way back in the mid-2000s, stand for Massively Multiplayer Online...which leaves it seeming really silly by itself) players put a tremendous amount of work and effort into their game. I would say that the primary reason I never really got into MMORPGs -- and I'm a pretty driven, successful person -- is that jesus they seemed like a lot of work.
Sure, but then they'll be hooked on griefing people. Really it is more addictive than the games themselves.
Though why does this story smell like an ad? The single link is to some weirdo largely unknown game, under the context that it's so good that someone is hooked and needs to be broken free. My Spammy-Senses are tingling.
Work exam material into the game and you have double good!
Really, though, wouldn't it be great if games like World of Warcraft turned into actually practical learning experiences, instead of simply forcing you to learn a lot of completely irrelevant info? Of course I haven't played a MMO(RPG) since a brief stint with Ultimate Online, so maybe kids nowadays really are studying their double-slit experiment results to level up their Quantum Photon Physics skill.
There probably are scenarios where there is a delay while it tries to figure out if indeed the other participant is down. However the OP's question -- instant -- was best responded to by the quantum processing response, because "instant" is in the mind of the assessor, and one woman's instant is another man's forever.
While this feature is heavily focused on, it has to be incredibly demanding on communication and computational resources. As you mentioned, it isn't your standard "do the macro-same thing" approach, but instead is literally by CPU cycle, so I have to imagine that it is only appropriate for a very small subset of problems.
Outside of low-end web hosting, virtualization is still generally in its infancy (though I expect products like vSphere 4 to change things considerably).
And even in cases were multiple servers are virtualized onto one set of hardware, the candidates for virtualization tend to be extremely low utilization, so you end up with a box using a lot of memory and storage, but still averaging out at an incredibly low CPU load.
I think you just imagined that.
Very, very, very, very (x4) few data centers do anything of the sort. And the truth is that the vast majority of servers spend the vast majority of their time waiting for something to do.
They paid that money 9 years ago. Yeah, most people believed the game might be someday finished 9 years ago. Even 7 years ago it was "soon". 5 years ago it was "gotta be sometime in the next couple of years". 3 years ago it was "are they actually still working on it?"
True, that, and it's a very good point.
My approach is more storing my external HD (marked as mine) in my locked office cabinet. Gives me some offsite option in the case that my house burns down, one half of my city was nuked, etc.
It's always about fighting for a piece of the budget pie. It's unlikely that GPS will degrade, though really the world community should be paying a piece of the cost for it (maybe that's why the US constantly withholds their UN payment -- it's an advance on GPS).
The GPS first started getting deployed in, what, 1978? Is it a surprise that someone starting at zero 30 years later could make a better system?
And anyways -- GPS seems to work pretty frickin' amazingly well.
And yeah, Europe wants their own because the US retains SA rights on GPS, with the ability to encrypt or degrade GPS in areas of the globe by switching a toggle. No kidding people don't like that, but don't pretend that it's because the leaches are morally superior or something.
This is my family data approach as well: Backing up to attached storage at regular intervals, then bringing in in to my workplace so it's physically separate.
How do services like SunGard fit into that equation? With that service, you backup over the internet to their array of servers.
This guy had a couple of serious backup strategy problems. First that he backed up to a system that was just as vulnerable (versus backing up to a system that was hardened and configured as purely a backup push destination). Second that he had no alternate (not even an occasional alternate push to another online service, even just an FTP destination).
The story sounds almost difficult to believe. Though just as easily it could have turned out as "we were hacked and went to our tape media to find it was unreadable!" (very common), or "we were hacked and the hacker screwed with our backup daemon such that it just overwrote our rotation of tapes with garbage, and then the bomb imploded"
My god....do you live on Slashdot?
I read Slashdot infrequently, but virtually every story I open, there you are. I of course notice you given that you long ago marked me as a foe (I believe it was because you were copulating with a blu-ray player and I questioned your boy->electronics love)