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Comment To be fair, I'm getting old... (Score 4, Insightful) 35

...but their example screenshots just annoy me. I got a fitness watch for running that has a similar style interface (it's customizable but all the different options seem to be of a similar style) where it just seems to be a jumble of data. When I'm running I don't want to be spending time trying to locate the info on the screen, I want it to be apparent and eye-catching. To me, the new style may be artsy / stylish but my goal is not to spend more time looking at the interface; I just want a tool and I prefer it to be as efficient as possible.

Comment Re:a factor of 241 million? I doubt it. (Score 1) 35

Your calculations are based on traditional bits (state 0 or 1). Qubits have the equivalent of 4 states (00, 01, 10, 11 in bit terms). So the calculation should be 4 ^ 17 = ~17B.

Doing the math it appears that the scaling number they used was ~3.12 / qubit. I'm sure that someone who knows more about quantum computing could give me a good reason why but my speculation would be that it is maybe because there is a certain error rate inherent in quantum computing so that has to be taken into account.

Comment 4K Streaming to Saturate Connection? (Score 1) 42

Trying to test a 20G circuit using 4K streams seems to be a really silly test. I doubt that the streaming providers would exceed 30Mbps for online streams of the World Cup. Even if he was able to somehow get a 4K Blu-ray quality stream (128Mbps) he would need 6+ devices to even exceed a 1Gbps connection, let alone 20Gbps.

Comment Some quick calculations (Score 1) 116

Average bitrate on Netflix for 4k content is ~18mbps (2.25 MBps).

So, you'd need to average ~4 hours 6 minutes of 4k content per day to hit your cap:
1,000,000 megabytes cap / 2.25 MBps / 60 seconds / 60 minutes / 30 day = 4.11 hours / day

Certainly not what I would call easy but doable with multiple people in the household. However, not all the content is 4k so you're probably looking at closer to 6-8 hours / day.

Comment It really is too bad (Score 5, Insightful) 187

Let me start with, crypto as an investment is stupid. But, it really is too bad if it fails. It would be nice to have a replacement for cash that has a similar anonymity to cash.

Look, I'm not looking to do anything illegal or illicit but the situation of today where Visa could conceivably sell my purchase history to Google who would then target advertising to me or be able to provide the number of Snickers bars I ate this past year to health care or insurance providers doesn't sit particularly well with me either. So being able to purchase some groceries, clothes, etc through electronic means but in an anonymous fashion has a certain draw for me.

Comment Blu-ray storage density? (Score 5, Informative) 176

Cool tech if they can make it an actual product but I am getting hung up on their storage density of Blu-ray disks. Since when can a Blu-ray disk store 12 terabits of data per square inch? As far as I am aware the largest disks store 128GB of data on a what my quick back of the envelop calculations show to be around 12 square inches.

Comment Re: OMG (Score 1) 591

It's not quite that simple though.

The problem at hand has to do with peering relationships. Normally what happens between the big Tier 1 providers is that they make agreements to the effect of "I'll take X amount of your traffic and you take Y amount of my traffic and assuming X and Y are pretty close we just call it even". Well, Netflix creates a massive imbalance because they send tons of traffic and don't receive hardly anything. Because they are so large this creates a problem on those peering relationships because they are no longer symmetric.

So, what happens? The consumer side ISP looks at the Netflix ISP and says "Hey, you are sending us 4x the traffic that we are sending you. Either pay up for the difference otherwise we rate limit you". This happened several times with Netflix. The Netflix ISP wouldn't pay up so Netflix got rate limited and Netflix users got pissed.

So, who is at fault here? Kinda hard to say. Probably what should happen is that the Netflix ISP would pay the overage on the asymmetric peering and increase costs back to Netflix.

Now, none of this is really Net Neutrality related. Netflix is really an odd example due to the absolute insane amount of traffic they generate...most companies are not going to be able to change the balance of Tier 1 peering providers in a major way. In general Netflix should be placing equipment on all large ISP's to increase it's own quality of delivery.

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