I remember seeing that statement somewhere else (I think it was ArsTechnica.com [arstechnica.com]), and I can't help but wonder how the FCC thinks that will help consumers if the Internet backbones and servers don't also get improved?
There's plenty of private business case to upgrade individual firms servers as need increases; the part where there is limited incentive is "second-mile" and "last-mile" connections to rural areas, which is why those are the target of the plan.
Anyhow, what I've noticed is that, sometimes I get faster download/upload speeds, but with a lot of servers, I'm not coming anywhere close to fully utilizing the available bandwidth on my connection, because somewhere in the connection (whether it's the server, or some link in-between, I really don't know for sure), something is bandwidth-limited.
Yes, and even when everyone has 100Mbps connections, you won't always have the full bandwidth of the machine at the other end dedicated to your connection alone.
OTOH, you will be able to interact with more servers for more complex tasks over the same home connection.
It seems to me that any governmental push to increase the speed of service for 100 Million households requires that not only do you upgrade the 'last mile' connection, but there needs to be a focus on getting the backbones and servers on faster connections too.
If more users are hitting a for-profit businesses servers, the business case for shelling out the money to upgrade the servers and their internet connection is easy.
Also, since ISPs typically give you a very small fraction of the upload speed compared to your download speed (Coming Soon! 100Mbps Ultra-Broadband Internet!* [fine print: upload speeds of 6Mbps]), users can't really even provide content to *each other* at anywhere close to that rate.
RTF Plan: The target is 100 million homes with "affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second." So the plan targets having end users with an upload speed that is not a small fraction of the 100 Mbps target actual download speed. So users would be able to use much (though not all) of their capacity in even in single connection, home user to home user scenarios.
What's so special about 100Mbps?
The same thing that's special about 100 million households. That is: nothing inherent; it just provides a specific, concrete goal.
Having lived in and visited countries with largely state-run telecom industry and then come home to the USA, I think it should be painfully obvious to all that government does not do a good job at running telecommunications.
There is more to an argument than stating a conclusion after claiming a rather dubious grounds for authority.
And I'm going to punch the next person that tells me "Broadband is a right". The hell it is. It is a good, a service that must be paid for, same as healthcare.
Elections are a service that must be paid for, as well, that doesn't mean that voting isn't a right. But nice false dichotomy, there.
A "right" is something that society decides all people are entitled to. Often, there are costs associated with providing it.
Those are good acts but still unconstitutional (per Bill of Rights 9 and 10). The U.S. Constitution should be amended to specifically grant Congress said power to regulate the air and water's clarity.
Insofar as dirty water and dirty air move from one state to the next, Congress has explicit power to regulate under the interstate commerce clause. Insofar as it is impractical to regulate interstate movement of dirty air and dirty water without regulating the intrastate production of such, Congress has explicit power under the "necessary and proper" clause. (Both of Article I, Section 8.)
I’m going to have to get savvier about HTML5-based applications, because a lot of smart people think the future’s there, that the “native app” notion will soon seem quaint.
App Script runs on the server side. Sure, the combination of URL Fetch and XML services let you do things generally similar to what you can do with AJAX in the browser, except on the server, not necessarily tied back to a single origin, and with an API integrating with Google Spreadsheets, Sites, Contacts, and Calendar, and Mail, among other services.
They certainly aren't offering all of these services out of the goodness of their corporate heart (if there is such a thing). Therefore, there must be some deeper motives at play.
While there is a free version, Google Apps tied to private domains are a commercial offering. The free version builds a user (and, now with App Script, developer) community with familiarity with the commercial product. Having users familiar with the product and developers targeting both are tools to reduce barriers to corporate acceptance.
Similarly, other "free" offerings from Google do one or more of the following: 1. Provide an advertising venue (advertising being Google's principle revenue stream), or 2. Build a user/developer community for a for-pay service (or serve as a limited demo) 3. Create pressure on other vendors of certain classes of product (e.g., Chrome with web browsers) to implement features that Google wants to be widely implemented so that they can be leveraged by its other offerings.
There are APIs to retrieve URLs and parse XML. So you should be able to pull content from other sites into Google docs. Output is probably more difficult.
Since the URL fetch service supports the HTTP methods POST, PUT, and DELETE as well as GET, output is not much more difficult than input.
I was thinking more along the lines of a system that would allow me to write code that interacted with the HTML and Javascript in web pages, so that I could just write my own bridges between websites and not have to wait around for the owners to cooperate.
Well, if its XHTML from web pages, you can use the URLFetch service plus the XML service in App Script to do some of that, though App Script, with its run-manually approach, isn't really ideal for most situations where you'd want to build a bridge between different web services. For that, you want to build a an app that can poll & feed different sites autonomously -- which you can do with Google App Engine already.
The same as the market for books printed in color.
Normal mass market books are plain black and white
Sure, mass market novels tend to be black and white; technical books fairly often use color (and more often do in electronic formats where there is no substantial difference in production costs associated with that choice.) Graphic novels, tabletop RPG manuals, cookbooks, craft books, etc., all frequently use color.
Textbooks cost the same, or more, for electronic instead of printed versions, and you cannot write in the margins, so there isn't going to be a large demand by students.
Many electronic formats support annotations, so this is simply false.
Comic book readers aren't likely to spend an extra $400, which would probably be better spent on 200 or so more comics that could eventually be resold by some ancester.
Its probably a bad idea, in general, to consider the price of a reader as competing with the price of content. Mostly, it should be viewed against the cost of storage and transportation for dead-tree media: an ereader doesn't replace printed books, it replaces bookshelves to hold them and backpacks to carry them; ebooks replace printed books.
They put out a new license agreement a couple months ago that doesn't restrict voipoc.
So GoogleVoice will be available someday?
Since Google Voice doesn't do VOIP to the client (whether the client is a desktop or a phone), not restricting VOIP over the cellular network has no impact on Google Voice.
And I'm guessing that Google has pretty much given up on getting a native iPhone app, and their iPhone Web App does just about everything a native app would do.
Academia is not the only profession that provides job satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment. Guess what, 99.9% of the world's population lives a happy life without ever publishing anything.
I kind of have to dismiss out of hand any claim that requires accepting, sans evidence, that "99.9% of the world's population lives a happy life", much less that plus other stuff piled on top of it.
Given all of the link ins between the w3C and the corporations, maybe it is times to abolish it and start with a new standards body.
The links between W3C and the corporations that actually implement technology used on the web are one of the things that make it useful as a standards body.
If the major vendors weren't involved in the standards body, it would be an academic exercise with no impact on the real world.
"What these people real need is a stable government and economic growth", and population control.
Economic growth and stable governments providing strong social safety nets are population control. Not of the mandatory, authoritarian kind, but there the one thing that has consistently led to declining family sizes in human history, because they are the things that stop people from investing in creating children as a form of old-age support.
If you're a poor peasant living in some place where they don't even have toilets, can you really afford bags to poo in? Chances are food and fuel are more important to you.
If you are a subsistence farmer -- as poor peasants tend to be -- a device that lets you turn otherwise-dangerous human waste into safe fertilizer is, in a sense, food. Or at least, a tool that directly contributes to your supply of food.
There's more to this story than is being told, and instead, they're focusing on how they came back online rather than why they went offline in the first place.
That's because they are focussing on what went wrong. Power losses, including ones that take down the whole data center, are accepted risks and part of the reason they have a redundant data centers and failover procedures.
The failure wasn't that they had a partial loss at a datacenter. The failure was that the impact of that loss wasn't mitigated properly by the systems that were supposed to be in place to do that.
Whether and to what extent legal precedent is binding and, as such, "law" depends on the legal system; there are some legal systems in which it is not, and some in which, in specific circumstances, it is. The latter is true of the UK and many former British colonies, including, e.g., the USA, Canada, Australia, among others.
Judges and lawyers who follow precedent are lazy, spineless fucks.
Judges who follow precedent that is binding on them are doing their job.
Lawyers who fail to recognize and cite applicable precedent are doing poor service to their client, and are potentially, in extreme cases, liable for malpractice.
The structure that can withstand a flood has existed for a lot longer than submersible warships - it's called a "hill". If you don't have one conveniently nearby to use you can even build an artificial one.
An "artificial hill" intended to protect an area from floods is usually called a "levee", and while certainly extremely useful for their intended purpose, they aren't exactly an ironclad guarantee. So having contingency plans for the case where they fail isn't a bad idea.
Google fails to address what caused the outage (beyond that the power went out).
This is false. Google details at some length the causes of the customer-facing outage. The power going out is an early problem, but its not a particular important issue because that's an accepted risk in their plans. The failure was in the fact that the procedures that are intended to prevent a power loss at a data centre from producing a customer-affecting outage had inadequate coverage of partial losses of power, and on top of that were not executed properly (in part due to inadequate training on the procedures, in part because of outdated and incomplete documentation of the procedures.)
Google has redundant data centers for a reason -- so that anything that causes one to go down doesn't effect operations that rely on them. Its not a "failure" if a data center goes down due to one of the risks accepted in the design of the individual data center. It only becomes a failure if the redundancy doesn't work as intended. The reasons for that failure -- and Google's plans on dealing with them -- are addressed, at some length, in the published post mortem.
Any data center worth it's weight in dirt, must have UPS devices sufficient to power all servers plus all network and infrastructure equipment, as well as the HVAC systems too, for a minimum of at least 2 full hours on batteries, in case the backup generators have difficulty in getting started up and online.
Google's setup appears to rely on the fact that they have redundant data centers, so failover to another data center addresses this problem. The problem here, as identified in their post-mortem, is that for training and other reasons, the fail over wasn't handled correctly.
Since there are sources of data center failure that having UPS + Generator backup won't help with at all, for something like this redundant data centers are essential whether or not you use UPS + Generator backup. Once you have redundant data centers, this problem should be solvable with failover. So, I think Google's general approach was reasonable from the start, as are their plans (detailed in the post-mortem) to address the failure by addressing the training and other issues which prevented failover plans from being properly executed.
But, should they? If a developer doesn't want to use PhysX, they shouldn't. If they're doing it purely for money, then chances are that it's damaging to the industry. Sure physics acceleration is cool for certain types of games, racing games and FPS, but the problem is that developers shouldn't be paid to use technology that isn't helpful for creating quality games.
The payment could just mitigate the risk associated with bearing the extra cost of adding PhysX to a game when not all of the market can utilize it and there is limited experience with it in the developer community. That doesn't mean its bad for the industry, or bad for the quality of the game.
Especially if it causes games to be less enjoyable on other hardware platforms. I could see a real problem with this in terms of anti-trust actions.
Really? Can you point to any provision of anti-trust law that this would violate?
There are millions who don't know the difference, other than price.
And plenty of us that do. Personally, all other things being equal, I'd prefer an SSD on a netbook, but all other things aren't equal.
IMO, though, a netbook is more defined by having a clamshell form factor, being ultraportable (a combination of screen size of about 12" or less, being thinner than most laptops, and low weight) and having battery life for 6+ hours of continuous operation than by the particular technology used to acheive those goals.
As a business do they really care about over-saturating a brand if they can get rich doing it?
A business with a long-term strategy might.
The management of most publicly traded companies has a pretty strong incentive to seek the maximum short-term return, even at the expensive of what otherwise might be more valuable long-term assets, since its very common for active direct investors manage their own long-term interests by trying to make sure their money is always in the place with the best short-term prospects, and moving it out if that doesn't seem to be the case.
Yes, but 80% is where they're *starting*. I'm asking if that's where they're going to *end* it.
They're going to end it at the point where both of the following occur frequently enough to make the legal strategy a net cost: 1) Intimidation fails, the target issues counter-notices, and a court battle ensues, and 2) The court rules that the use is fair use.
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty of private business case to upgrade individual firms servers as need increases; the part where there is limited incentive is "second-mile" and "last-mile" connections to rural areas, which is why those are the target of the plan.
Yes, and even when everyone has 100Mbps connections, you won't always have the full bandwidth of the machine at the other end dedicated to your connection alone.
OTOH, you will be able to interact with more servers for more complex tasks over the same home connection.
If more users are hitting a for-profit businesses servers, the business case for shelling out the money to upgrade the servers and their internet connection is easy.
RTF Plan: The target is 100 million homes with "affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second." So the plan targets having end users with an upload speed that is not a small fraction of the 100 Mbps target actual download speed. So users would be able to use much (though not all) of their capacity in even in single connection, home user to home user scenarios.
The same thing that's special about 100 million households. That is: nothing inherent; it just provides a specific, concrete goal.
There is more to an argument than stating a conclusion after claiming a rather dubious grounds for authority.
Elections are a service that must be paid for, as well, that doesn't mean that voting isn't a right. But nice false dichotomy, there.
A "right" is something that society decides all people are entitled to. Often, there are costs associated with providing it.
Insofar as dirty water and dirty air move from one state to the next, Congress has explicit power to regulate under the interstate commerce clause. Insofar as it is impractical to regulate interstate movement of dirty air and dirty water without regulating the intrastate production of such, Congress has explicit power under the "necessary and proper" clause. (Both of Article I, Section 8.)
RTFA. He does discuss HTML5.
I’m going to have to get savvier about HTML5-based applications, because a lot of smart people think the future’s there, that the “native app” notion will soon seem quaint.
App Script runs on the server side. Sure, the combination of URL Fetch and XML services let you do things generally similar to what you can do with AJAX in the browser, except on the server, not necessarily tied back to a single origin, and with an API integrating with Google Spreadsheets, Sites, Contacts, and Calendar, and Mail, among other services.
While there is a free version, Google Apps tied to private domains are a commercial offering. The free version builds a user (and, now with App Script, developer) community with familiarity with the commercial product. Having users familiar with the product and developers targeting both are tools to reduce barriers to corporate acceptance.
Similarly, other "free" offerings from Google do one or more of the following:
1. Provide an advertising venue (advertising being Google's principle revenue stream), or
2. Build a user/developer community for a for-pay service (or serve as a limited demo)
3. Create pressure on other vendors of certain classes of product (e.g., Chrome with web browsers) to implement features that Google wants to be widely implemented so that they can be leveraged by its other offerings.
None of these motives are particularly hidden.
Since the URL fetch service supports the HTTP methods POST, PUT, and DELETE as well as GET, output is not much more difficult than input.
Well, if its XHTML from web pages, you can use the URLFetch service plus the XML service in App Script to do some of that, though App Script, with its run-manually approach, isn't really ideal for most situations where you'd want to build a bridge between different web services. For that, you want to build a an app that can poll & feed different sites autonomously -- which you can do with Google App Engine already.
The same as the market for books printed in color.
Sure, mass market novels tend to be black and white; technical books fairly often use color (and more often do in electronic formats where there is no substantial difference in production costs associated with that choice.) Graphic novels, tabletop RPG manuals, cookbooks, craft books, etc., all frequently use color.
Many electronic formats support annotations, so this is simply false.
Its probably a bad idea, in general, to consider the price of a reader as competing with the price of content. Mostly, it should be viewed against the cost of storage and transportation for dead-tree media: an ereader doesn't replace printed books, it replaces bookshelves to hold them and backpacks to carry them; ebooks replace printed books.
Since Google Voice doesn't do VOIP to the client (whether the client is a desktop or a phone), not restricting VOIP over the cellular network has no impact on Google Voice.
And I'm guessing that Google has pretty much given up on getting a native iPhone app, and their iPhone Web App does just about everything a native app would do.
I kind of have to dismiss out of hand any claim that requires accepting, sans evidence, that "99.9% of the world's population lives a happy life", much less that plus other stuff piled on top of it.
The links between W3C and the corporations that actually implement technology used on the web are one of the things that make it useful as a standards body.
If the major vendors weren't involved in the standards body, it would be an academic exercise with no impact on the real world.
Use the money available due to the economic growth resulting from the reduced drag from sanitation problems to buy more.
Economic growth and stable governments providing strong social safety nets are population control. Not of the mandatory, authoritarian kind, but there the one thing that has consistently led to declining family sizes in human history, because they are the things that stop people from investing in creating children as a form of old-age support.
If you are a subsistence farmer -- as poor peasants tend to be -- a device that lets you turn otherwise-dangerous human waste into safe fertilizer is, in a sense, food. Or at least, a tool that directly contributes to your supply of food.
That's because they are focussing on what went wrong. Power losses, including ones that take down the whole data center, are accepted risks and part of the reason they have a redundant data centers and failover procedures.
The failure wasn't that they had a partial loss at a datacenter. The failure was that the impact of that loss wasn't mitigated properly by the systems that were supposed to be in place to do that.
Yes, there is.
Whether and to what extent legal precedent is binding and, as such, "law" depends on the legal system; there are some legal systems in which it is not, and some in which, in specific circumstances, it is. The latter is true of the UK and many former British colonies, including, e.g., the USA, Canada, Australia, among others.
Judges who follow precedent that is binding on them are doing their job.
Lawyers who fail to recognize and cite applicable precedent are doing poor service to their client, and are potentially, in extreme cases, liable for malpractice.
I suspect not, since the feature hasn't been implemented yet.
An "artificial hill" intended to protect an area from floods is usually called a "levee", and while certainly extremely useful for their intended purpose, they aren't exactly an ironclad guarantee. So having contingency plans for the case where they fail isn't a bad idea.
This is false. Google details at some length the causes of the customer-facing outage. The power going out is an early problem, but its not a particular important issue because that's an accepted risk in their plans. The failure was in the fact that the procedures that are intended to prevent a power loss at a data centre from producing a customer-affecting outage had inadequate coverage of partial losses of power, and on top of that were not executed properly (in part due to inadequate training on the procedures, in part because of outdated and incomplete documentation of the procedures.)
Google has redundant data centers for a reason -- so that anything that causes one to go down doesn't effect operations that rely on them. Its not a "failure" if a data center goes down due to one of the risks accepted in the design of the individual data center. It only becomes a failure if the redundancy doesn't work as intended. The reasons for that failure -- and Google's plans on dealing with them -- are addressed, at some length, in the published post mortem.
Google's setup appears to rely on the fact that they have redundant data centers, so failover to another data center addresses this problem. The problem here, as identified in their post-mortem, is that for training and other reasons, the fail over wasn't handled correctly.
Since there are sources of data center failure that having UPS + Generator backup won't help with at all, for something like this redundant data centers are essential whether or not you use UPS + Generator backup. Once you have redundant data centers, this problem should be solvable with failover. So, I think Google's general approach was reasonable from the start, as are their plans (detailed in the post-mortem) to address the failure by addressing the training and other issues which prevented failover plans from being properly executed.
The payment could just mitigate the risk associated with bearing the extra cost of adding PhysX to a game when not all of the market can utilize it and there is limited experience with it in the developer community. That doesn't mean its bad for the industry, or bad for the quality of the game.
Really? Can you point to any provision of anti-trust law that this would violate?
And plenty of us that do. Personally, all other things being equal, I'd prefer an SSD on a netbook, but all other things aren't equal.
IMO, though, a netbook is more defined by having a clamshell form factor, being ultraportable (a combination of screen size of about 12" or less, being thinner than most laptops, and low weight) and having battery life for 6+ hours of continuous operation than by the particular technology used to acheive those goals.
A business with a long-term strategy might.
The management of most publicly traded companies has a pretty strong incentive to seek the maximum short-term return, even at the expensive of what otherwise might be more valuable long-term assets, since its very common for active direct investors manage their own long-term interests by trying to make sure their money is always in the place with the best short-term prospects, and moving it out if that doesn't seem to be the case.
They're going to end it at the point where both of the following occur frequently enough to make the legal strategy a net cost:
1) Intimidation fails, the target issues counter-notices, and a court battle ensues, and
2) The court rules that the use is fair use.