Everything takes on a diffrent meaning, depending on how you refer to it. The tone of voice, body language. These all give great meaning to what's being said. What happens when you take that away, and only have the words? It becomes a bloody mess.

This is the internet as of today. Text is the primary way for people to communicate, voice is coming into the known, but won't be mainstream for quite some time to come. Though with the advent of brawdband internet access such as DSL, and cable modems the time will come. But, first we need to get everybody hooked up in such a manor.

It's easy to do now, but thier is a much deeper problem here. General bandwith. You can't really stick that many DSL users on a T1, they will saturate it quickly. Tier 3 DSL is not quite, but close to the speed of a T1 line. In real life, 4 of them can hose your T1 line.

How fast is a T1? 1.5 megs per second max. 1.2 is more likely to happen due to network latency. Though I've never been able to suck more than 300kps though one of them. Granted I was sharing it with hundreds/thousands of other people.

From the point of view of an ISP this is a very touchy subject. T1 Lines cost quite a bit, but you have to have enough bandwith. Dialup users take so little they are a joke. 5kps *1.2mps comes out to 240 active users at any given time.

That's in a perfect world. But, since the world is rarely perfect you stick 500 users on a T1. You make more $$$, and they don't notice at all. Half the time users spend online is ilde time. It's pretty safe to rely on bursting...to a point.

The other thing to think about is how much time users actualy spend online. Most would be happy with a 60 hour a month plan. You can't rely on this though. Peak times are when problems start. Evenings, everybody and thier brother decides to get on. Your modem pools fill up, and your link to the rest of the world gets bogged down.

You need 75% of your bandwith for those times. During low usage times (2:00am-5:00am) your great bandwith goes mostly unused, wasted. No way around it though.

Another problem with this has to do not with you, but your upstream provider. Sure, they will sell you all the T1's you want, but they quite often over sell also. When you think about how the internet is really layed out, you begin to realize how much it sucks. 90% of the traffice goes through a few major backbones. Past there it's all small timers. If one of those major backbones goes down, you have a shit storm on your hands. Traffice has to be routed through these lesser routes, and it does so slowly. Those lesser routes congest easily. But, it does work.

If the packets travel takes too long it basicly dies. It would be more harmfull to the network if they lived forever. They also die if they have to jump through too many systems. This is another reason why traffic becomes so horrid when one of the major backbones goes out. Your data takes one hop too many, and just dies off. Granted if you know what your doing, you can change this...but don't.

A question that has to be asked. How many modems in a pool? An ideal ratio would be 1-1, but this will never happen. At 20$ a month average per user you would be in the hole instantly. Lets say a phone line is 100$ a month. That forces you to have at least 5 users to a modem just to break even. But, that's not enough. 15-20 brings in more income, but the users suffer. 15 is probably the best number IMHO.

Not everybody is online at the same time, so you can also rely on bursting here. Then, most people only spend an hour or so online each day, if that. They may have unlimited usage plans, but almost never do they take you up on it.

When they do, you have a problem on your hand. That one user is costing you 4 times more than he's paying you each month. This is why most ISPs imploy some sort of idle disconect. 5-10 minuits is pretty standard. This allows the user to use the network, but if they try to abuse it by just leaving thier machines conected *POP*, problem solved.

Many users have found ways around this though. Set thier email client to check for new mail every 2 min or so. Run a "ping bot", a program that does nothing but generate just enough traffic to keep the user from being idle. Thier is also some software that acts like a ping bot, ICQ is one of the worst. Since it constantly check with the main server to see if anybody on the users list has come online, or left. Evil.

It will be a long time till the supply meets the true demand. Streaming audio, and video are also a big part of the problem. Though, as of late a program called "Napster" has been causing all sorts of havoc on the network. The company that runs it will be taken down by the .gov shortly. Due to this, everybody and thier brother is using the server as much as possible just in case it stops working tommorow.

Thousands uppon thousands of users throwing 3-8 megabyte files around constantly is the real problem. It overloads the backbones, and hurts each, and every ISP. The modem users don't notice nearly as much as a person who has DSL, or cable. Hehe, modem users are usto slow speeds anyway :)

Now, that was highly unexpected. I'm sitting here trying to sober up before heading home, yet I write about something totaly off the wall. I hope it's coherent ;) Oh, and if your curious I'm not talking about my ISP, just the whole ISP racket in general. Hehe, I like having my account :)

Today at work was almost pure hell, or at least the first six hours. Call after call of old ladys with thier broken old assed macs. While they weren't anything unusual, they where hard. I so dislike having to teach somebody to use a mouse. Espicaly over the phone...

Then thier was this one girl who didn't know left from right. You can imagine the trouble this caused. Or, the guy who decided it was a good idea to close every window when you where almost done with the settings in it. EVERY TIME!

Or the girl who was yelling at me because she owed like 107.90, but she didn't want to pay it. She yelled, and yelled. Then hung up. She's going to collections :)

Another yeller today was quite entertaining. He was having trouble getting his DSL to work. Yep, I ran him through the settings, cool. After that realized that his router wasn't trained up. I went about asking him if he had any filters installed. Yep, then I told him to remove the filter on the line that went into the back of his router. POP, I got a dialtone. He must have had the phone he was on pluged into the back of the router ;) So it goes, but he trained up about 10 seconds later and didn't call me back.

I hooked this other mac girl up with a very old version of eudora. She had an old computer, it seemed fitting. Anyway software written at the time the computer was made tends to run *MUCH* better. Either way, it's still a nice program. I use it myself (the same version), mostly because it only uses half a meg of ram and runs quite fast on my G3.

Thier is a boy sitting at about 3:30 who looks like he's probably the blackest little white boy I've seen in quite a while. Hanging out with his friends who come from a mixed heritage. Quite entertaining. It would probably be better if I could hear what they where so excited about. Heh, mp3s 0wn me.

The memory hasn't shown up yet. Yarg! I'll live till then, but this thing really is slugish after netscape has decided to take up 25 megs of ram. Yesh! It's 'ok' with just netscape, and my ssh client. But god forbid I decide to switch to the finder for a second. As long as I don't run netscape I'm good though. Hmm, maby I should use lynx? I have it installed :)

I should take off before long :( Heh, but I've only been here for like 3 hours! That's nothing. I even had some perverts behind me who wanted to look at my porn. Hmm, they got bored with it in like 5 min. Sad, they must have been real perverts.

What is it with the general fasionation that society has with 'young' girls. They don't actualy have to be all that young, but they have to 'look' it. Picture britney spears, his little princess gets one of her albums that contains music of questionable value/taste. Daddy doesn't mind because the girl on the cover excites him, a perverted combonation of her looks, and her voice. Not to menton the way she presents herself as this total ditz. "Oops, I did it again", nuff said. I've never heard that song before, but I hate it already. I don't need to hear it first. Neither do you.

The music industry is fucked up anyway. They say one thing while thier hands are doing the exact opposite behind your back. Or, quite often right in front of your face. They try to promote a drug free world, but most of thier product makes it look glamorious, and 'cool'. It's not cool, it sucks. How can they do this moraly? Easy, they don't have 'em. No concern other than thier pocketbook. It's a common problem in this country, and apparently nothing to be ashamed with. Or, that's the way it seems. We arn't even going to get into the cost of a CD here...

I have come to the belif that most guys want a dumb girl. It's better for them, gives them power trips. Not to mention she has to take his shit, since she's so pitiful. She knows this, it's been pounded into her head since birth. Thustly she expects to be treated like this. They will also let the guy do anything he wants, since he must know better. Fuck that! This is part of the problem with sexual equality. It doens't exist, and never will. Not unless society on the whole makes some drastic changes. I'm not just talking about the country where you live. I mean everywhere. The conglomeate of it all.

Time to add a new section to my page :)

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