Ok, first, I'd like to preface this with the fact that data caps are one of the least efficient methods for managing network saturation, and that they are always a blatant cash grab.
That said, it seems clear that, barring FCC regulation, Comcast is going to be rolling out data caps in every market that lacks real competition (nearly all of them). So, my thought is, since this is obviously about protecting their TV business from Netflix et al., (Comcast's streaming services doesn't count against your cap, because of course not), then they should include a "free" Unlimited tier upgrade to every customer who gets their TV package alongside Internet.
It's bullshit because no one "deserves" anything. There's no shadowy overlord dictating that this year Americans have been good little boys and girls and thus deserve a better government as a reward.
We have the government we have because we have the government we have. It is a tautology, and there is no meaning to be drawn from any of it.
Come back when you actually have some ideas on how to make the government better, even slightly. Until then, all you're spouting is defeatism and victim blaming, and I would respectfully ask that you shut the fuck up, as you're part of the problem.
Loading times aren't CPU bound, they're I/O bound. SSDs have made loading times for all but the heaviest of assets nigh instantaneous.
There's very little that a developer can do to shorten loading times other than using fewer game assetd. They could use real-time compression, trading CPU for Memory, but that hasn't been in style since the '80s. Sometimes JIT (Just-In-Time) loading (or procedural generation) of assets can work, spooling up assets soon to be required in the background, but that's a difficult technique, and doesn't work for every type of game. Another technique is just to load all the assets into memory at startup, having an initial long load instead of having smaller incremental loads interrupting play, but obviously that can only work for smaller games.
All in all, hardware is going to solve the problem, not software. Loading screen minigames aren't going to matter, one way or the other.
Well, to be fair, the common naming style for '80s Computer Software was short, descriptive names. It was still a new industry, so there wasn't much confusion. They weren't marketing decisions like "Stream". Even today a fair amount of Linux software follows that paradigm.
True, but for a time it was. I'm sure now that the EFF actually own it they can go ahead and remove it from their blacklist, but expecting that to happen automatically is a bit much, don't you think?
If an email contains a reference to a blacklisted url, that's a valid metric to use in marking the email as potentially dangerous.
False positives happen. It's not the end of the world.
Glad somebody else gets why these zero-rating programs are not pro-consumer.
Data caps are completely arbitrary, with the sole purpose of bilking every last dollar from customers. As I've said elsewhere, lauding T-Mobile for these moves is like thanking someone for only punching you once. Yeah, he could have punched you twice, but that's not really a good deed.
There's a better way to deal with congestion (fairly) if the telcos actually cared. You just need to throttle the heavier users on towers approaching capacity. Bandwidth not used is wasted. There's no reason to place a cap on data transferred when what you're trying to balance is bandwidth.
T-Mobile already has mechanisms in place to throttle certain users. They just need to make it dynamic in response to current load. When load is light, everyone gets full speed without arbitrary caps. When load approaches capacity, those users who have historically added the most load get throttled down.
Solves congestion, no arbitrary caps, and fairly allocates bandwidth between heavy/light users.
Oh, one other thing. The Binge On program lowers the quality of any zero-rated video. So claiming that it's an improvement for customers is rather disingenuous. It's a trade-off, at best. (And only because customers can opt-out.)
Did you just imply that Donald Trump or Ben Carson would be a better president than G.W. Bush? I'm gonna have to disagree there. Bush was a bad president, but he wasn't the worst president we've ever had. Obama hasn't been much better, but at least he's balanced out his aggressive authoritarian overreach with a couple of good initiatives.
Some of the current candidates, though...
Clinton would be Obama, but worse. Jeb would be Dubya, but worse. Trump would probably lose half the country to China in a poker match. Carson is just bit-shit crazy.
I do like Sanders, though. He's an independent, so is less likely to push for the political super-class. He might be a socialist, but Congress is not, so any reforms he could get through would be small, incremental steps. Just because he wants to go 10 miles, and I want to go 5 miles, doesn't preclude us from agreeing on making that first mile.
He's not likely to win the Democratic primary, though. I'm an Independent, and my state has Closed primaries, so I can't do a damn thing about it.
Kinda reminds me of the short-lived X-Files spin-off (lot of hyphens there...) The Lone Gunmen. The first episode was about the US pulling a false flag op, flying commercial planes into the World Trade Center in order to justify a war to increase arms sales and defense contractor profits. This aired in March of 2001.
Except you still miss the point that it doesn't matter what baseline you choose. In your example, YouTube is $65/mo more expensive than baseline before zero-rating, and $65/mo more expensive than baseline after zero-rating.
$65/mo - $65/mo = $0/mo = No change.
The act of implementing the zero-rating does not change the price of a non-zero-rated service, by definition. The only changes in price are to those services which are zero-rated. This is a bad thing, because it gives those services an unfair advantage.
Yeah, there's a reason we got off the gold standard. The reason, though, why some people like the idea of a gold standard or BitCoin is Fiat currency is complicated. Anybody of reasonable intelligence can figure out the economic rules of BitCoin. Understanding all the effects and secondary effects and tertiary effects of Fiat currency takes a degree in macroeconomics. What happens if you introduce 10% more currency into circulation this year? Will it increase spending? Will it raise prices? Will it cause a panic? Hell if I know.
We're creatures of patterns. Simple systems appeal to us.
I think BitCoin was an interesting experiment, but I don't really think it will ever become "mainstream". (And I say that as someone who made ~$1000 during the early days.)
Not trying to defend this decision, but 7 words in German can convey a hell of a lot more information than 7 words in English, thanks to the crazy compound words you'll find in German.
Additionally, say that you do want to compare the cost of zero-rated (say, Netflix) vs capped services (say, Youtube) to an arbitrary baseline of $1000/mo. Focusing only on the data costs, of course.
If you're charged $10/gb (again, arbitrary number, doesn't matter), and both services use 10gb/mo, then, before zero rating:
Netflix - $100/mo - $900/mo cheaper than baseline. YouTube - $100/mo - $900/mo cheaper than baseline.
After Zero-Rating:
Netflix - $0/mo - $1000/mo cheaper than baseline. Decrease of $100/mo relative to baseline. YouTube - $100/mo - $900/mo cheaper than baseline. No change according to baseline.
In summation, it doesn't matter what baseline you choose to compare against, zero-rating one service does not increase the absolute price of another.
Now, if you could stop complaining about completely meaningless semantics for a second, you might actually finish reading my original post to see that I was agreeing with you.
When you're referring to changes in price due to a specific change (e.g., zero rating certain services), then obviously the baseline price is the price at the point in time prior to said changes.
Yes, the "baseline" can be arbitrarily decided, but contextually it's abundantly clear what should be the comparison point.
Not quite. These types of things get lauded even by some net neutrality advocates as "consumer friendly" because the cost of some services is being dropped compared to the existing baseline. This does not, via an absolute measurement, cause other services to cost more. The problems are:
1. Relative costs certainly are changed, putting the ISPs in the position of picking winners and losers. This kind of influence usually results in antitrust actions. 2. ISPs often provide competing services. They certainly should not be allowed to zero-rate their own services. 3. That they are able to zero-rate the most bandwidth intensive services proves that Caps were never about Network Congestion. They have been abusing their market power for years to gouge consumers. This, to me, is the most damning piece. That they've decided to gouge a little less is not something to be applauded.
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TV Revenue
That said, it seems clear that, barring FCC regulation, Comcast is going to be rolling out data caps in every market that lacks real competition (nearly all of them). So, my thought is, since this is obviously about protecting their TV business from Netflix et al., (Comcast's streaming services doesn't count against your cap, because of course not), then they should include a "free" Unlimited tier upgrade to every customer who gets their TV package alongside Internet.
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Re: Re: Failed Test
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Re: Re: Re: Just Deserts
We have the government we have because we have the government we have. It is a tautology, and there is no meaning to be drawn from any of it.
Come back when you actually have some ideas on how to make the government better, even slightly. Until then, all you're spouting is defeatism and victim blaming, and I would respectfully ask that you shut the fuck up, as you're part of the problem.
On the post: Patent For Mini-Games Within Loading Screens Expires; Explosion In Better Game Loading Screens Forecasted
Re:
There's very little that a developer can do to shorten loading times other than using fewer game assetd. They could use real-time compression, trading CPU for Memory, but that hasn't been in style since the '80s. Sometimes JIT (Just-In-Time) loading (or procedural generation) of assets can work, spooling up assets soon to be required in the background, but that's a difficult technique, and doesn't work for every type of game. Another technique is just to load all the assets into memory at startup, having an initial long load instead of having smaller incremental loads interrupting play, but obviously that can only work for smaller games.
All in all, hardware is going to solve the problem, not software. Loading screen minigames aren't going to matter, one way or the other.
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Re: Re: A streaming service named "Stream"!
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Re: Welcome to nanny-net
This is a good thing.
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Re: Re: Actually, they kind of did
If an email contains a reference to a blacklisted url, that's a valid metric to use in marking the email as potentially dangerous.
False positives happen. It's not the end of the world.
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Curing congestion...
Data caps are completely arbitrary, with the sole purpose of bilking every last dollar from customers. As I've said elsewhere, lauding T-Mobile for these moves is like thanking someone for only punching you once. Yeah, he could have punched you twice, but that's not really a good deed.
There's a better way to deal with congestion (fairly) if the telcos actually cared. You just need to throttle the heavier users on towers approaching capacity. Bandwidth not used is wasted. There's no reason to place a cap on data transferred when what you're trying to balance is bandwidth.
T-Mobile already has mechanisms in place to throttle certain users. They just need to make it dynamic in response to current load. When load is light, everyone gets full speed without arbitrary caps. When load approaches capacity, those users who have historically added the most load get throttled down.
Solves congestion, no arbitrary caps, and fairly allocates bandwidth between heavy/light users.
Oh, one other thing. The Binge On program lowers the quality of any zero-rated video. So claiming that it's an improvement for customers is rather disingenuous. It's a trade-off, at best. (And only because customers can opt-out.)
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Re: Re:
Some of the current candidates, though...
Clinton would be Obama, but worse.
Jeb would be Dubya, but worse.
Trump would probably lose half the country to China in a poker match.
Carson is just bit-shit crazy.
I do like Sanders, though. He's an independent, so is less likely to push for the political super-class. He might be a socialist, but Congress is not, so any reforms he could get through would be small, incremental steps. Just because he wants to go 10 miles, and I want to go 5 miles, doesn't preclude us from agreeing on making that first mile.
He's not likely to win the Democratic primary, though. I'm an Independent, and my state has Closed primaries, so I can't do a damn thing about it.
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Re: Madness!
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$65/mo - $65/mo = $0/mo = No change.
The act of implementing the zero-rating does not change the price of a non-zero-rated service, by definition. The only changes in price are to those services which are zero-rated. This is a bad thing, because it gives those services an unfair advantage.
Netflix Data Costs:
Z-2mo (2 months before zero-rating): $35
Z-1mo: $35 (-$0 difference)
Z-0mo: $0 (-$35)
Z+1mo: $0 (-$0)
Z+2mo: $0 (-$0)
YouTube Data Costs:
Z-2mo: $35
Z-1mo: $35 (-$0)
Z-0mo: $35 (-$0)
Z+1mo: $35 (-$0)
Z+2mo: $35 (-$0)
As shown, only the zero-rated service (Netflix) experiences any change in cost. I really don't know how to explain this any clearer.
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Re:
We're creatures of patterns. Simple systems appeal to us.
I think BitCoin was an interesting experiment, but I don't really think it will ever become "mainstream". (And I say that as someone who made ~$1000 during the early days.)
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Compound words
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If you're charged $10/gb (again, arbitrary number, doesn't matter), and both services use 10gb/mo, then, before zero rating:
Netflix - $100/mo - $900/mo cheaper than baseline.
YouTube - $100/mo - $900/mo cheaper than baseline.
After Zero-Rating:
Netflix - $0/mo - $1000/mo cheaper than baseline. Decrease of $100/mo relative to baseline.
YouTube - $100/mo - $900/mo cheaper than baseline. No change according to baseline.
In summation, it doesn't matter what baseline you choose to compare against, zero-rating one service does not increase the absolute price of another.
Now, if you could stop complaining about completely meaningless semantics for a second, you might actually finish reading my original post to see that I was agreeing with you.
**shakes head**
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Yes, the "baseline" can be arbitrarily decided, but contextually it's abundantly clear what should be the comparison point.
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Re:
On the post: T-Mobile Wades Into Net Neutrality Minefield With Plan To Zero Rate Netflix, HBO
Re:
1. Relative costs certainly are changed, putting the ISPs in the position of picking winners and losers. This kind of influence usually results in antitrust actions.
2. ISPs often provide competing services. They certainly should not be allowed to zero-rate their own services.
3. That they are able to zero-rate the most bandwidth intensive services proves that Caps were never about Network Congestion. They have been abusing their market power for years to gouge consumers. This, to me, is the most damning piece. That they've decided to gouge a little less is not something to be applauded.
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Re: Re: Unless it's a hoax...
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