I get 100/100 fibre for about 40 bucks a month in Stockholm. No caps or throttling, either.

Around here it gets to 121â occasionally. An ATM in an enclosure doesn't have much of chance without active cooling.

If it has a sun exposure, expect internal temps of 160-180â. My car gets that hot.

I'm also barely interested in the argument, because I think we're having different arguments.

You say my analogies are bad, and then trot out examples that are *just as wrong*. I mean, what do you think toll roads, gas tax or city congestion charges etc are? Billing to cover road wear.

Finally, you also show your "true colors" in that in your mind, NO Analogy is good enough, so anyone who might regulate a system, or at least the Internet, ought to be pretty well versed in computer networking - which I might add is a specialization inside of IT.

Your argument that billing in a certain way is done commonly has nothing to do with my assertion of an opinion that billing in that way is wrong - specifically I think it's taking advantage specifically of peoples ignorance, and ripping them off. 95% billing is generally used for network interconnects and seems much more fair to me. That's also common, as is flat rate billing. It's common for people to be mugged in cities, doesn't make it right...

I probably haven't been clear enough, but I never intended to excuse ignorance - and I don't see that I've done so, but I know what I meant.

To step back - in the real world - the one we all live in, regulation is generally done by politicians or bureaucrats. Rarely do experts in some field regulate the field, and when they do, there's often conflicts of interest that arise - I'm imagining guilds or systems like the bar and the AMA that basically just regulate to keep out competition.

If you want to change the "real world", you need to communicate with people who aren't in your field in a way that doesn't require them to go take several classes or 5 years of domain experience. Hell, that's the point of this article - that dismissing people because they don't understand the signaling on the cable that forms the ethernet protocol that is then wrapped in an IP packet and routed etc and OSI model etc - that's like the high-school English teacher who complained about people misusing whom or may vs can. It's the complainer who gets dismissed, because frankly - no one cares.

Finally, how about you provide the mythical better analogy? I thought of the mail system, but it's not clear to me that it's better, just that it may get bogged down in details that don't matter depending on the point you're trying to address (in my case, why billing per byte seems to me to be a scam for the user). In no way does addressability per envelope, sorting, etc help illuminate anything about the point that internet throughput is largely determined by second in time capacity, and filling that capacity for a second or a month won't directly increase cost to the vendor for the equipment.

Maybe you thought I was arguing about net neutrality, or filtering attempts, or who knows what, but I was pretty much only trying to give a narrow example about flat rate vs per byte billing, and why caps don't address anything about the ISPs actual costs.

Unfortunately, the US does not have free market capitalism on broadband communications. In most areas it is either monopoly or duopoly

That's what a free market will usually naturally gravitate to. Competition is bad for all competitors, so cartels or monopolies are strong attractors in the system. If you want competition and choice you need market regulation to make it happen.

Ever tried to plug an iPhone into a PC?

Lightning USB connectors only, and you have to install iTunes to do anything like sensible data transfer.

I managed exchange 2007 for 500 users and we had about $14K of hardware, including the replicated Exchange server in the remote data center (but not including the AD servers and the tape backup hardware). We lost the primary site a few times due to power failure, and we had a RAID controller failure in the remote node that brought it down, and we never lost any email or had any significant unscheduled downtime. We did have to restore a few deleted employee mailboxes from backup tape due to a lawsuit, but that wasn't a problem either. It was not trivial to set it up properly, but we paid a consulting company to come in for a day and validate our configuration.

If MS spent $6K per person on hardware, it's because they wanted to, not because they had to, we did it for $33/user in hardware costs.

I left the company as we were setting up the 2010 servers on brand new hardware (virtualized on VMWare, so it's hard to pin down the hardware costs). I'm no fan of Exchange, I think it's too difficult to set up properly and requires more hardware than it should, but when set up properly, it does run well. Paying professional services fees was well worth it to make sure we had it set up correctly.

And if you send a tech, not the local admin, all the numbers change.

Yes we have, if the array is installed in your backup corporate PKI server, in a shielded and locked cage with video, electrostatic, and laser monitoring and alarms. And the keys to the cage are in another state. And it requires EVP approval to deliver the keys to the authorized tech for a flight to the DR site to change a failed drive.

A real world example. You would recognize the name of this corporation in the first three letters. They take their corporate security very seriously, so much so that bumping into the cage earned you a visit from armed security, an escort out, and full debriefing until they were satisfied you would never take the cart with the stuck caster again...

This from an NEC white paper in 2008:

"A recent academic study [1] of 1.5 million HDDs in the NetApp database over a 32 month period found that 8.5% of SATA disks develop silent corruption. Some disk arrays run a background process to verify that the data and RAID parity match, a process which can catch these kinds of errors. However, the study also found that 13% of the errors are missed by the background verification process. When you put those statistics together, you find on average that 1 in 90 SATA drives will experience silent data corruption not caught by the background verification process. So when those data blocks are read, the data returned to the application would be corrupt, but nobody would know. For a RAID-5 (4+P) configuration at 930 GB usable per 1 TB SATA drive, that calculates to an undetected error for every 67 TB of data, or 15 errors for every petabyte of data. If a system were constantly reading all that data at 200 MB/sec, it would encounter an error in less than 100 hours."

Sometimes, I just want to weep.

4 years was my recommendation for disk replacements from about 198 onwards. Some arrays had drives >8 years old, but if failure was not tolerated, 4 years was enough.

Mind you, if the customer specified IDE drives, I warned them that failure was inevitable. SCSI 10K drives, I would still swap but that was for five-nines.

And those stupid IDE RAID cards, well, that's too cheap. We are no longer talking reliable. Let someone else have that business.

It seems that one assumption in the study is predictable or consistent failure rates or timing. This would make sense if the drives were all the same make/model/manufacturing dates, but if not, well, then the model changes and they would be needing more intelligence to deal with unpredictable failure rates and having to spin up cold spares at different rates, predicting failure.

Which all makes a world of sense to me. When I hovered over Raid 5 arrays with cold spares, especially in NetWare servers where 'device deactivated due to non-media defect' errors were not uncommon, I would add spares to save on windshield time to swap them out. Not all customers were comfortable going to the supply locker, grabbing a drive tray, and swapping out the tray with the flashing red light.

(you can't virtualize the actual disks)

Sometimes the data is worth more than the power costs.