As we in the military, research university, and government spheres move to IPv6 and Internet So Fast It Makes Your Ears Bleed (tm), have you ever considered that perhaps it might be slow for you but not for us?

I mean 1000 Gbps is considered normal here, and some of us are running on faster connections, using less energy total to do the same thing.

We rarely print things anymore, and just because you have slower access to resources, you have to realize it could be because, in the war between Urban America and the rest of the country, Urban America with its more efficient energy usage and lower distances traveled - basically won the war.

My work Pc is slow and has trouble connecting because of the n layers of Corp security whatnot. My home Pc is reasonably fast and always connects quickly.

IT is a lot more than just CPU and the amount of little switches on a die. Yes, those get better and continue to do so, but there are a lot of bottlenecks that are not going away anytime soon. Until these are dealt with, things will stay almost the same in the IT world.

Couple examples:

1: Wireless bandwidth fees. This has gotten worse as time progresses. Two years ago, my T-Mobile CLIQ had unlimited tethering. Now, if I want to transfer 500 gigs of data, I'd have to pay my provider over five digits for that month.

2: Regular bandwidth. A year ago, bandwidth might be throttled on P2P downloads. Now it is metered as well on most ISPs.

3: Backups. The enterprise has the advantage that once they pay for the LTO-5 tape drives, individual cartridges are cheap, rugged, and have a lifetime guarentee. Individuals usually don't have the cash for the drive, so have to deal with hard disks which usually have a year warranty, and there is no consumer level software to handle backups, where it knows where a specific revision of a file is on what volume, be it a primary volume, or a copy saved in a safe deposit box somewhere. The enterprise has NetBackup, TSM, Networker, and other items. So, there is a major issue with making sure data is saved safely for anyone who can't afford to stick an EMC VNX array in their garage.

In the past, tape drives were not just affordable by consumers, and kept up with hard disks, but usually had some decent software that could help find media in case of a disaster. These days, there are not any good consumer level backup utilities, especially ones that can restore bare-metal.

4: Encryption. As grows storage grows the need to protect the data from everything from tapes falling off the pickup truck to hard disk drives getting yanked out of arrays.

Just raw CPU power may help things, but that is more incremental than anything else. Right now, IT is more affected by the BYOD trend than it would be by any CPU revolution. What would stir the pot would be bandwidth increases that don't have corresponding fee hikes. Having the ability to have fiber-channel bandwidth over the WAN fabric on the cheap would revolutionize things.

Its still all you ever needed its just not all you'd ever want.

Yeah, they broke^h^h^h^h^h^h improved the comment system a while ago. In the name of progress, of course.

I'm not even sure where to start other than to say--technology is only ever adopted broadly if it is cost-effective to do so. The printing press wasn't successful because of some incontrovertible march of progress--it was successful because it was cheaper to make books that way than by having monks transcribe them by hand. Yes, that caused more people to read which drove up the demand for books. And I'm sure some jackass back then wrote an article saying that demand for books was accelerating at a rate that we weren't going to be able to afford enough printing presses anymore.

Is that we allow bloat to continue. We should be *demanding* efficiency in code.

There is really no excuse for the sorry state of affairs we are in. My Atari ST from a good 20 years ago boots and runs faster than a current PC, and does just as much.

Which shows it isn't the OS or the hardware, its the networks. i have to wonder if the whole "buffer problem" we've been reading about here is about to hit the tipping point as it seems like everything now has big fat buffers built in and as we know the Internet model simply wasn't designed for having large buffers throw the timing all to hell.

Personally I think it is high time we use an old solution to fix a new problem...bring back the WPA. a lot of our bandwidth problems would disappear if we had nationwide FTTH or at least fiber to the neighborhood. It seems like a great way to put all those sitting at home on unemployment to work and you build it right and just as many bridges built by the WPA in rural areas still work fine so too could a well built fiber network last us for ages. this would also give us the benefits of new businesses springing up to make use of this new resource and finally kill the duopolies that have been hamstringing growth in so many areas of the country because the lines would be open to competition.

I truly believe if we don't do something radical like bring back the WPA we will end up staying on the short bus to the info superhighway because the corps can make more money by throttling and cherry picking than by actually growing their businesses and in our short sighted corp climate the quarterly reports are all that matters. i know that even though my home town has grown by more than a third neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch in a good decade or more. They would rather just add caps and sit on the big wads of money than actually add new customers. If we don't change this situation we are gonna end up being left behind so its high time we put those unemployed to work building us a new broadband infrastructure.

There are limits to what will be demanded, and we have reached them in some areas already. Audio is a good example of this. The storage and bandwidth requirements for good (as in good enough for 99% of the population) audio is now a very small drop in the bucket. How many songs can you fit on a 16 GB micro SD card the size of your fingernail? How many songs can you stream real-time at once on a typical broadband connection? We have surpassed the technical requirements for audio by such a massive margin that it isn't even a consideration when purchasing hardware or bandwidth.

There are limits to video too. These so-called "retina" displays are a good example of the resolution limit of the human eye (we passed the color depth perception limit a good decade ago). The eye cannot discern individual pixels within the normal focal range (by the time you bring it close enough to the eye to make out individual pixels, the eye can no longer keep it in focus). We have a long ways to go to be able to store and stream video at such high resolution. However we will reach it before too long. Then it's a matter of how many hours / days of video do you need to store on how small of a device, and how many video streams do you need at one time over your internet connection.

One day we'll be moving and storing movie-length retina-resolution video with the same flippant ease as MP3s today. When we've reached that point, what would we need more bandwidth and storage for? Not for anything by human consumption - and that is the key factor.

No it's not the networks, it's the morons in charge of the content.

Slashdot should load 10X faster than it does, but the uneducated developers and designers put in a lot of crap that is not needed to add in "pretty" that does not add to the content at all.

So slashdot now takes over 10X in bandwidth and processing power to deliver the same content it did 8 years ago. All so I can gave some web 2.0 crap that does nothing at all.

But it's not just slashdot. ALL websites are bum rushing the add more crap idea. Facebook takes 10X longer to load from 5 years ago, CNN, ESPN, etc.. all of them have went from hiring competent people that understand that adding more data to send to the viewer is bad , to a bunch of morons that use every JS toolkit known to man so I download 40mb of libraries before the page loads. Some JS is useful. Good programmers put in the libraries only what is needed, posers put in the whole damn library. This same trend is on Desktops and phones. android and IOS suffer from this as well.

It is about to hit the wall because low paid low skill developers are what companies hire compared to highly skilled people that will do it right.

It isn't so much that users are expecting more from the apps, but that application vendors bloat their software as time goes on so that newer versions really only run on newer and faster hardware. I won't point fingers too much - there are many offenders here.

And on top of that, the industry is using more Java which is as slow as snot. The attitude seems to be that if it runs slow, then throw some more iron at it.

I remember my first Linux box - i486 at about 90MHz. Those were the days..

This isn't the south.

Stop watching the news media reporting on crime 3 states away and realize that urban violence and murder rates are at historic lows in the cities of America.

> But it's not just slashdot.

No it isn't. If the average visitor isn't impacted the devels don't care. But if the average user were impacte dthey would. Which is the problem with the concept under discussion. The belief that bloat MUST be therefore there being nothing that can be done we are all doomed to spend ourselves into poverty fighting a problem that will never exist.

Because as soon as it becomes a problem, suddenly the average pageview will suddenly be able to shrink in half without impacting usability at all and if that doesn't do it it can cut in half again with minimal impact. And it isn't just webpages, most everything suffers the same bloating. Does a simple little game that was a 50K download on Palm OS really need to be a 1MB app on Android or iOS? Nope. But because users don't care the developers don't care either. And again, if the first part of that statement changes you can bet yer butt the second one will.

Short version: This is a self correcting non-problem.

DDR3-1600 will give you a peak transfer rate of around 13GB/second. You can get higher throughput by interleaving across banks, but the Xeon 7560 (for example) will peak at around [wikipedia.org]15GB/sec [bit-tech.net]

PCIe Gen-3 x8 will deliver around 8GB/second.

The fastest interconnect I've seen on a blade chassis has 10Gbit ports.

Are you sure that "1000 Gbps is considered normal here"?

In many ways I must agree. I have strenuously protested many of the changes made to Slashdot over the last couple of years, which have seemed to add nothing substantial to usability, and instead have added overhead and time, and actually made it MORE difficult to use.

Unfortunately his plan was to turn-off free TV (all channels 25 and up) and turn it over to wireless companies. That's not a solution... at least not as good as Fiber to every home.

It's a fundamentally unworkable solution to the problem. The reason we don't have enough capacity is not because we need more bandwidth. The reason we don't have enough capacity is that we're trying to use one tower every 15-30 miles to provide service to hundreds of thousands of people. If those folks are mostly using it occasionally (as they do with cell phones), it works reasonably well. When they're sitting there for hours on end surfing the Internet at home or work, it breaks down very badly. We're orders of magnitude away from being able to handle that.

Wireless works really well at short distances where each cell is talking to dozens of people (e.g. Wi-Fi). The larger the number of people per cell, the more infeasible it becomes due to interference from other devices, not to mention all the multipath problems inherent in wireless delivery over long distances. Even if you could make the bandwidth ten thousand times wider, we still wouldn't have enough bandwidth to service every man, woman, and child's home Internet needs somewhere like New York or San Francisco using cell towers. It's entirely the wrong solution to to the problem.

Instead, we should be focusing on making VoIP and VPNs roam transparently between cellular services and Wi-Fi, roam transparently between multiple Wi-Fi hot spots, etc. And we should be moving more towards providing free public Wi-Fi services at high densities so that only the last few feet are wireless.

Sorry I didn't elaborate but I have been accused of making posts too long so i try to shorten my responses. what i meant was not ONLY for the WPA to be running FTTH, and as i said even FTTN would be a huge improvement in MANY areas, but there is so much infrastructure that can be made a thousand times better. just look at our roads and bridges, many are from Ike's time. We have also seen there IS a way to build a road so it will really last, just look at the Autobahn, but you have to lay a really solid foundation and build up.

I think we can use a modern WPA to truly transform this country into the vision that many of us were shown as kids in the 60s, with truly modern roads that don't break easily, could have embedded sensors for future driverless cars, bridges replaced with better designs, and of course by building FTTH or FTTN depending on the size of the area to help bring tele-education and telecommute to the masses.

As a final change I would toss this electric car nonsense as the battery tech isn't there yet and instead build a true "people's car" which would be both a 2 door and 4 door model that had a 4 cyl and gets 40MPG for less than $10k. We would then offer a cash for clunkers style program so that all the working poor could trade in those old gas hogs for a much better vehicle for the environment.

with these changes I think we could lick unemployment and modernize our country for the future while at the same time lowering our dependence on gas from overseas and at the same time actually creating jobs for all those out of work. sadly though it requires vision and will, two things our politicians seem to have little to none of ATM.

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.

is it windy on your high horse? Fact is, computers exist to be used - and if the programmer isn't using the hardward to facilitate a pleasurable experience (for the developer or the user, actually, since happy devs eq. bug free programs), they might as well be wasting the consumers time/computer. In short, cycles spent on abstraction are the best spent cycles, because that's what computers are for.

> Considering the assets required to not have the game look like shit at native resolution compared to the low-res Palms, yes.

Oh you 20th Century primitives with your stacks of bitmaps at every possible resolution. Scalable art is where it is at. And it also tends to be smaller than even a single bitmap. But that gets back to my original point, so long as there isn't a price to be paid for being ignorant nobody will bother going to the trouble of changing ways that worked well originally. In the old days throwing a fixed resolution bitmap at the problem was the simple and best solution, and this was adapted to the new problem of multiple resolution displays by simply packing multiple versions of all art because it was the easy fix requiring the least change in thinking. And if it bloats, who cares; yet.