I know Google is traditionally very stingy when it comes to adding elements to their interfaces, but this seems important enough to dedicate at least a small portion of screen real estate to it on every YouTube video page. It would certainly have more of an impact than a report that 99% of users will never see.
It doesn't have to be a big deal - maybe just a "cellphone bars"-like icon, linked to further info and net neutrality content.
They are doing it. If you have a slow connection and the video start to buffer a lot, there is a banner that appear right under the video linking to the video quality report. I saw it yesterday
Good. We need to Name-n-Shame these ISP's into doing good by their customers.
There was an interesting interview with Comcast CEO the other day where he said, "[We] don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated.”
But then he attempted to shift the blame to content providers:
"Roberts followed up this statement by saying that Comcast is mostly hated because 'it’s the company consumers have to deal with when other companies raise their prices.'"
They generally offer better pricing for faster speeds with less BS, ie no monitoring, ad injections, throttling, etc.
You will have to look for ones in your area, but they are there. Usually each major city will have a few. Rural areas will tend to have more WISP's (wireless isp's) that are also small and all about their customers.
The recourse is to call your Senator and Congressman and demand they force big ISP's to lease fiber/copper to smaller companies, much like phone-line providers are required to lease their copper to other companies. This will help spur competition, which means everyone wins.
I don't know what you mean by "major city," but I look in Milwaukee every six months or so. There simply aren't any "independent ISPs" here with remotely comparable speeds or prices.
Hi! I'm one of the four (that I know of) independent ISPs that serve Milwaukee and the surrounding areas with a combination of WISP, Fiber, and Copper technologies. We all suck at advertising and rely on referrals.
In the Milwaukee market we all focus on business users (and generally ones that need symmetric or high-upload service and would be looking at a fiber build) or MDU applications because... For the past several years we've seen a consumer preference for absolute lowest cost over quality or available bandwidth. At the extreme end we still have users on wholesaled ILEC DSL on provisioned for 768k download that just don't care enough to upgrade or switch because they like the sub $20 price. It's ILEC controlled so I can't just upgrade them out of the goodness of my heart either.
The participants list for our little Internet Exchange is somewhat workable as a directory of area independent ISPs although some of us are datacenter operators or as far away as Racine or Madison: http://www.mkeix.net/
This is my experience as well, just across the pond from you (West Michigan).
Home users demand the world for $19.99 a month and no contract. Therefore, they get terrible Comcast / TWC / ATT (essentially, they get what they asked for).
There are a lot of people trying to run the "independent ISP" gauntlet, all over the US. (And I'm biased, as I am one of them). But those consumer prices usually only work if you offer bad/slow service, have a complete monopoly, or have government subsidy.
Since most Independents don't have or won't do most of those, they have to focus on business, as those are (usually) the only people who care enough to put actual money into service.
I haven't been in the access game for a long time, but I honestly don't know how you could sell to even smart "prosumers" these days.
I would love to get a ~50mbps line to my home, from a reliable local ISP with clue. I'd pay around $150/mo for such service, and I'm not one of those guys that runs stuff maxed out 24x7.
There just are no options where I live for that amount of bandwidth other than Comcast. So instead I have my primary comcast line ($120/mo) which is 150/20, and a backup DSL line from USWest/Qwest/Centurylink/whatever they are calling themselves today. I believe that one is 20/2, but it sucks so bad (seriously no 1500 MTU still? sigh.) I rarely use it even for failover anymore. LTE is faster.
There are a two main reasons that I see, technical and business.
Generally speaking, multipoint access technologies (including cell & fixed wireless/wimax, DOCSIS, and multi-user fiber such as GPON) have a fixed amount of spectrum/timeslots to allocate for transfers. Transfer timeslots are allocated primarily for downlink (I use 75% down) because the vast majority of user traffic is download so it just makes sense to allocate that way.
On the business side it is one way to segment your customer base between business/pro users and residential users because residential users don't care and businesses are less price-sensitive. When they need more upload they are often willing to pay for dedicated symmetric connections such as TDM circuits or ethernet over fiber (the industry term is "Active Ethernet"). In theory these circuits cost more to provide because the last mile isn't shared with other users.
I think Ray uses "upload" as shorthand for something more complex.
Say over the course of 10 years you replaced 1 of the millions of cortical columns in your neocortex every minute or so with a functionally equivalent computer chip. You would never stop being you. Your consciousness would never be interrupted. You would simply become something greater.
This is already happening in a very limited way with the various brain implants used to treat Parkinson's, hearing impairment, blindness, strokes, head injuries, etc.:
This has the same issues of defining the 'self' that we already do -- namely that none of the cells in your body are the same as the cells that made you up ten years ago. Maybe we're all imperceptibly becoming someone else all the time...
I picture 'self' as a surfer riding a wave. If you could suddenly and instantaneously replace every molecule in the wave without getting the velocity exactly right, the experience changes. History is altered, a fork of you.
I've always wanted to use one, but the fact that very few domain hack startups have taken off keeps me away.
last.fm and del.icio.us are the best examples I can come up with of successful startups with domain hacks, and I don't think del.icio.us was ever a huge hit outside of the tech world. Plus they both ended up buying/switching to the dot coms anyway.
"The worst aspect of the continuing pace of game development that we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases. If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often. And that was id’s mantra for so long: 'It’ll be done when it’s done.' And I recant from that. I no longer think that is the appropriate way to build games. I mean, time matters, and as years go by—if it’s done when it’s done and you’re talking a month or two, fine. But if it’s a year or two, you need to be making a different game."
This is what ultimately did 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever in.
There was a lot of overlap between Apogee Software (later, 3D Realms) and id Software in the early days. The mantra of 3D Realms was, during Nuke Forever, that the game will be done when it's done.
That mantra works great at a small scale. But when AAA titles go from Duke3d to Halo/CoD within the span of one development iteration, you're screwed. The cost of keeping up was, I suspect, just too great for a company the size of 3D Realms to keep up. Even id Software was diminishing, post-Quake 3.
Companies like Blizzard and EA have the resources to pump out WoW expansion #9, or Madden 2035 or whatever. For better or worse (my opinion, usually worse) the industry has become more like Hollywood blockbusters. The whole world hears about when GTA 5 comes out and makes billions of dollars the first week, or whatever. As a result, we're just going to get what Hollywood gives us in movies: sequel after sequel.
This is somewhat unrelated, but what's the general consensus on the security of EC2 for very sensitive computation?
For example, I have a client who has some algorithms and data that are potentially quite valuable. EC2 and other AWS services would be a huge help with their project, but is there any way measures could be taken to ensure that no one - even Amazon employees - can get to their code and data?
Edit: devicenull makes some good points - I guess I had the CIA's $600 million AWS contract in my head when asking my question.
There's no need to wonder about these things. Check out the AWS Security Center at http://aws.amazon.com/security/ to get the facts. At that address you will find a very detailed (39 page) Security White Paper.
No. You don't control the execution environment, so if it's really that valuable it can't be trusted.
After all, you cannot stop someone from taking a full snapshot of the VM and grabbing all the information. Encryption is no help here, as the VM ultimately needs to store the key in memory.
If it's really that valuable (lot's of companies seem to overestimate how much people would want to steal their data), then it really should never leave hardware under their control.
I have never heard anyone complain about a company taking infosec too seriously, let alone lots of companies.
Dude, my bank/email-host/health-insurer is teh suk. They overestimate the value of data confidentiality. I hope this does not become a new trend. I expect the companies that I deal with to play fast and loose with the data they control. Encrypting Data at rest? C'mon bro, if the data is so important why is it just sitting there with nobody using it.
Users complain all the time about being required to change their password every week to something unmemorable because of crazy complexity requirements.
That's all about regulatory risk, SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, etc. Let's be honest it is a "complaint" about a password policy, at best a means to an end. Unless you read that as a complaint about the motivation, because I did not.
I can't stand this the "Security is a tradeoff with usability" line. It is not. When you lock the airplane lavatory door and the light turns on what is the tradeoff? As far as I am concerned Acme Bank's website is unusable if anyone can login as me. How usable are your funds if anyone can transfer them out of your control?
