• iPhone on Proximus GPRS: 35 kbps (download & upload)
• iPhone on Proximus 3G: 350 kbps (download & upload)
• iPhone via Wifi: 3500 kbps (download – upload is +- 300 kbps)

The real reason is that I wanted to see how fast I would wear out my Proximus data plan (200MB per month). The answer: with GPRS I would need more than 12 hours of continuous downloading, with 3G I could do it in less than 2 hours. So GPRS is pretty safe, it’s also easier on your battery, but you have to live with slow, pre-1996 modem-like performance. The latency – the time it takes to get your first byte after requesting a URL -  is easily 10 to 50 seconds. Not milliseconds, seconds!

As a side note: do not take a time-based data subscription, certainly not with the iPhone. My first post-iPhone Proximus invoice was 800,- euro, which is more than the price of my iPhone! When I contacted them about that, they immediately offered to reimburse it and advised me to switch to a size-based plan. I guess I was not the first one …

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Although it is an interesting way of visualizing things, and I consider Seth a very bright and creative guy, I am bothered by the fact that the graph is neither clear, correct nor complete.

NOT CLEAR

• I have the impression that the horizontal axis of synchronous/asynchronous in the graph is a fuzzy concept. What is it actually? The average time between the creating of the message and the reception thereof? Or between the sending and the receving of a response? Radio is totally synchronous in its transmission but is very one-to-many: you can’t easily react nor are you expected to. I would like an axis with a unit of measure. Is it expressed in time (seconds/hours/days)? Wouldn’t a measure of one-to-one vs one-to-many be a more appropriate axis?
• Also the bandwidth axis is not clearly defined. Is it something like Kbps/Mbps for 1 individual message? Or is it the average size of 1 message? Is is the bandwidth from the point of view of the creator (writing one Tweet of 140 chars every hour) or that of the consumer (getting 20 Tweets a minute from all your Twitter friends)?

NOT CORRECT

• Why are IM (chatting) and SMS (texting) taken as one? They are different in bandwidth (SMS are shorter and take longer to write) and in synchronicity (chatting is a faster medium: you type with a real keyboard).
• How can you put the whole of ‘art’ as one data point? Theatre? Painting? Music?
• Most of all: what is Twitter doing in that ‘hot spot’ on the right bottom? Twitter is low bandwidth, yes, but not lower than texting, and it is maybe fast but still asynchronous, so should certainly be to the left of IM/chat. It seems like Twitter is there because it would be so cool to have it exactly there.

NOT COMPLETE

• podcasts, as it would be nice to see where to put them compared to ‘talk radio’.
• Skype (conf) call with video?
• Fax/Telex/VHS/DVD
• Email can be one-to-one (like chat but more asynchronous) or one-to-many (newsletter, close to talk radio). Are both uses considered the same?

One can’t post a reply on Seth’s blog, and I’d like the graph to mature a bit. I think that with some better definition of axis and data points it will be  a good way to categorize means of communication. And I’m certainly interested to see what it will look like then.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

I know, there are so many ‘funny’ videos you just have to share with your friends. So you send them an email. But for god’s sake, not with a 5MB movie in attachment! For all you know, he/she might not even be able to play that MOV/WMV/XVid movie anyway. Don’t send a movie, send a link!

WHY EMAILING VIDEOS IS BAD

1. Email makes big files bigger
   Binary files (like videos) are encoded, or rather exploded, by your email program (Outlook/Hotmail/Gmail/…) as text-only Base64 MIME attachments. Your 5MB file is transformed into a 6.85MB text file before is sent. Email is a very inefficient way to share videos with several other people.
2. You hurt the recipients
   Your email will have to be downloaded before the recipient can see it. If he is on a slow connection, this might mean 15 minutes of obnoxious delay before he can continue working, start receiving the emails that arrived after your ‘cute puppy’ movie. The movie, if it is not deleted, will add 5 MB of storage to the Inbox. If his Outlook/Exchange quota is 100MB (not uncommon on corporate email systems), you just ate 5% of all the place he has to store contracts, meeting reports and office gossip.
3. You hurt yourself
   By sending a 5MB video, you force your email program to upload a 6.85 MB file to your mail server. If you’re on a basic DSL line, this will easily take up to 10 minutes, during which all your other Internet activity will go very slow. You also add a big chunk to your “Sent Items” folder, bringing you closer to your quota limit.
4. You hurt the Internet
   All those forwarded videos make for a huge amount of unnecessary traffic that eats up bandwidth at ISPs and inspire them to keep prices high. Not that they needed the extra inspiration.
5. It’s force-feeding-video, not video on demand
   You are forcing people to download the whole file before they can decide whether they want to see it now, or ever at all. Youtube and the other sites have a very easy-to-use ‘Send video link’ form that will give the receipient the link, with a screenshot and the description text. Then he/she can decide when, where, how and *IF* to watch the video.
   (Yes, this is less a problem with web-based mail like Gmail or Hotmail)

HOW TO FORWARD A VIDEO LINK

1. public, popular movie
   Don’t think you’re the first one to have seen this movie. Chances are it’s featured on Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, in multiple versions (FR subtitles if that’s what you like), in a format everyone can view, available to send as just a link “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo“. Less that 50 characters for a full 1:14 of hilarious time loss.
2. private, ’secret’ movie
   Even if you have a movie you recorded/made yourself and want to show only to a limited number of people (”OMG, Britney, you were, like, *so* drunk!!“), then upload it yourself to Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo, put a password on it and send link+ password to those recipients. It will be so much easier for everyone to forward that secret video that no one was supposed to see (”788 views just yesterday? How’s that possible?“).

We thank you.

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Met deze actie willen wij een statement maken: stilstand is achteruitgang. De toestand op de Belgische markt dient te veranderen. De gebruikers willen van de datalimieten af, meer concurrentie en betere tarieven voor hun breedband-internet.
Dag van de download

Dit zijn de beste prijzen per GB in Belgie:

En dit zijn de meest frappante gevallen van belachelijke data limieten:

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This is the current response time of a Wordpress blog on Dreamhost:

Wordpress is a database-powered PHP application, so this response time includes the MySQL queries and PHP overhead.

This is the very similar performance of a second blog on another Dreamhost server:


The major improvement you see around Sept 21 is my installation of WP-Cache. In any case, the average response time is now just below 1 second. When I try to factor out the PHP/MySQL influence by measuring the mere download of a static file, the results are:

That is 350ms on average. In the bad days (back in September 2006) this could be above 1 second.

Dreamhost has been busy with a filer migration and network upgrade. Fortunately the results are visible.

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Number of photos per hour

You see here that weekends, Sundays specifically, are the most busy days for uploads. You can see peaks of almost 68.000 pictures an hour (almost 20 pictures a second). Peaks are around 22h CET (or 1 PM PDT – in California). The lowest rates (still around 20.000 photos/hour) are 12h apart: 10h CET (1 AM PDT).
The average inflow of pictures is: 38.400 photos/hour. That is around 10 photos/second, 920.000 photos/day.

Average photo size

And how big are those pictures? I have found a way to estimate average filesize (and maximum, while I’m at it). It’s not perfect, but quite accurate. How? That’s classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to … Anyway: these are the numbers:
On average, a picture uploaded to Flickr is 555.2 KB big. They receive files up to 7.3 MB (what number of megapixels would that be?) and quite a lot of 3MB images. My Canon 350D makes 8 megapixel images (3456 x 2304 pixels) that are between 2 and 4 MB large. But the ones I send to Flickr (after Picasa processing) are typically smaller: 1200 x 800 (300 – 600KB) or 1024 x 683 (200 – 400KB).

Upload bandwidth

What happens if we multiply both numbers?
38.400 pictures/hour x 555,2 KB/pic = 21,3 GB/hour = 5,9MB/sec or 47,3 Mbps. Storagewise, this is 15,3 terabyte/month of new pictures. Thank God storage prices are dropping.

Five years ago, a server with a few hundred gigabytes of storage – one of many needed to handle uploads of member photographs – would have cost Flickr about $250,000. Today, Mr Butterfield says, “you can get a terabyte of storage for about $5,000”. (via ft.com)

Peak bandwidth usage: let’s take 60.000 pictures/hour x 3MB/pic: 180GB/hour = 50 MB/sec or 400 Mbps. This is probably still peanuts compared to their outgoing bandwidth.

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Real HD and HD-ready

HD or ‘high definition’ as defined for screens, projectors and TV, defines 2 resolutions. The smaller one has 720 lines of each 1280 pixels, the bigger one 1080 lines of each 1920 pixels. They can be used with different frame rates: refreshed at 24 fps (a common movie standard) up to 50/60fps (often used for TV). To limit the necessary bandwidth in some cases ‘interlaced scanning’ is used: 1 frame contains all the odd lines, the next only the even lines. This effectively halves the throughput, at the cost of image quality (rapid moving lines appear jagged).
The two most common formats are:

• 720p60: 1280×720, 60 fps progressive scanning, used e.g. in USA-based HDTV broadcasts
• 1080i50 or 1080i60: 1920×1080, 50 or 60 fps interlaced scanning. The higher resolution makes it better for larger screens and movies, but the interlacing has a bad influence on fast moving images (like e.g. sports).

What kind of resolution do we have now? Regular digital TV (SD or ‘Standard Definition’) consists of 480 lines of 720 pixels each. DVD, for instance, allows for 480i and 480p. So, HD delivers at least 3x that resolution.

“HD Ready“, a label that a lot of TVs/screens carry now, just indicates that:

• The minimum native resolution of the display (e.g. LCD, PDP) or display engine (e.g. DLP) is 720 physical lines in wide aspect ratio.
• The display device accepts HD input via Analogue YPbPr1, DVI or HDMI
• HD capable inputs accept the following HD video formats: 1280×720 @ 50 and 60Hz progressive (“720p”), and 1920×1080 @ 50 and 60Hz interlaced (“1080i”)
• The DVI or HDMI input supports content protection (HDCP)

from eicta.org (PDF)

Even if the display can only show 720p, and so must ‘downsample’ an incoming 1080i signal to that lower resolution, it can be called “HD Ready”.

Bandwidth for HD

You might know my interest in bandwidth, so what do these HD standards translate in? I’m not taking any compression into account:

• 720p60: 1280×720 gives 0,92 megapixels per frame. If we take a 24-bit color value per pixel (RGB), this means 2,76 MB data per frame, which multiplied with the 60fps gives 1,3 Gbps or 165 MB/s.
• 1080i60: 1920×1080 means a 2 megapixel frame which translates into 6,2MB per frame. The interlacing cuts the bitrate in half: 6,2MB x 60 / 2 = 1,49 Gbps or 186 MB/s.
• 1080p60 is obviously double the throughput of 1080i: 2,98 Gbps or 373 MB/s

HD-DVD and Blu-ray?

For those hoping for 1080p from HD DVD, don’t hold your breath—Toshiba confirmed that the data is recorded on HD DVD in 1080i, and there are no plans to change that. The players have already been designed for 1080i discs, and it would take a redesign to enable them to handle 1080p discs, even if there were plans to produce them.
from guidetohometheater.com

Blu-Ray already has a Samsung player capable of playing 1080p discs. But at $999 that’s a pricy gamble of the fact that 1) Blu-Ray will not be the Betamax of HD and 2) movies will actually be mastered as 1080p Blu-Ray.

1080p is the best

Sure, 1080p is the best resolution home devices could have these days. There are some issues with that, however:

• almost no sources are capable of delivering 1080p input. HDTV can do 1080i at the best, DVDs give you 480p, Blu-ray doesn’t do it yet, HD-DVD will never have it.
• bandwidth requirements are painful. 1080p generates image data at 3Gbps. We need better compression algorithms than MPEG2 to get that down to manageable bitrates. MPEG4 or JPEG2000 might help.
• would you see the difference between 1080i and 1080p? According CNET only on really big screens (more than 60″) when sitting very close to the screen. Not your everyday situation.

Conclusion

If you want to buy a real HDTV -and you have the budget – go for a 1080i one. Don’t settle for 720p and don’t hold your breath for 1080p.

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1993 @ Ukkel
I arrive at Sopres, one of the larger direct marketing / database management companies in Belgium. Fresh from university (and 1 year of military service), I expect to see RDBMS everywhere and dive into SQL. Imagine my surprise when I see that, yes, there are a lot of Sybase SQLServer databases around, but the bulk of the work is done with something they call ’square files’ (see below). They have built a whole set of tools to work with those and by using them myself, I learn to appreciate the advantanges of the system (speed, mainly) and grow a fairly accurate intuition for things like queries, indexes and outer joins.

Square files

What is a square file – or as we called it in French: “fichier carré“? It is a plain-text file with fixed record length. It looks square (actually: rather rectangular) when you open it in a text editor. E.g. a file XYZ2006.288, containing 20.000 customer records of each 288 bytes, would be exactly 5.760.000 bytes (5,76 MB). If the file was called XYZ2006.customers, each program that processed such a file would look for a ‘descriptor’ file in the same folder customers.d that would not only indicate the record length (288 bytes) but also define the fields within a record (e.g. fullname: 40 bytes, address: 60 bytes, postal code: 4 bytes, …). To make the square file easy editable, the last field could be “LF: 1 byte” that contains a line feed, so that each record is on a new line.
The advantage of this system:

• random access: record #13455 starts at byte 3874753. If you would use a variable-length record (like comma-separated-values/CSV for instance) you would have to count through 13454 linefeeds first.
• human-readable: you could just throw any file into vi or another text-editor and browse through the contents. You could also process contents with standard tools like grep (text-search) or tail (last # lines).
• separate data and metadata: it’s a bit harder to manage, but it’s easier to work with. A data file with 1000 records has a byte count that ends with ‘000′, or something is wrong.
• no (primary) index: the records in a square file have a certain order and if it’s the wrong one, sort them on whatever you want. Working with these files, you quickly understand that a sort is an expensive operation and where you can economize for speed.

The sp-tools

Through the years they has also developed a set of tools to work with square files. They all started with ’sp’, hence the “sp-tools”. I quickly realised they had an alternative for each SQL statement you could make:

• sp-sort: sort a file on certain fields (ascending/descending, number sort, unique records)
• sp-merge: merge two files sorted on the same fields and get a sorted result
• sp-query: select only records that qualify a certain query
• sp-expr: add fields to an existing file and fill them with a expression of existing fields, record number, conitional values …
• …

The most interesting tool was sp-match, that was used to do joins: merge the contents of two files by matching on certain fields. E.g. you have a table of purchases (customer_id, date, amount) and you want to add the postal-code from the customers file: you match on customer_id and get (customer_id,date_amount,postal-code) as output. Using this tool and its variants (sorted/non-sorted match table, inner/outer/left outer) really taught me how joins work, what has to be sorted (indexed), what has to be in memory or on disk, and that is still the basis of my intuitive SQL optimisation skills. We basically did by hand all the stuff that SQL does behind the scenes.

Disk space

We were working on Sun ‘dumb’ workstations and on our servers we had an enormous disk capacity at that time: several GIGABYTES! Hard disk sizes were still measured in megabytes back then. I remember a discussion on whether to buy one ‘huge’ 500MB disk or rather ten 50MB disks, because the last option would be more expensive, but faster (divided over multiple disk controllers).
A typical project required up to 100MB storage space (*gasp*) so all temporary files had to be cleaned up ASAP. That’s why there was a system of max-age suffixes: a file that was called abc.xyz.5t would be automatically deleted after 5 days. “.2t” after 2 days. If you left large files sitting around without .Nt suffix, you got spanked when they detected it in the weekly storage report.
The output of our work would be delivered on floppy disks, if it was smaller than 1.4MB or else on tape. I’m not talking DLT or DAT here, I mean tapes on spindles, the real thing. No email, no USB-sticks, no ZIP-drives, no CD-ROMs. Those were the days.

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What I found interesting in the whole controversy are the astounding numbers that popped up: # videos shown per day, bandwidth usage, bandwidth costs. Get ready for some big numbers:

Meanwhile the site’s bandwidth costs, which increase every time a visitor clicks on a video, may be approaching $1 million a month–much of which goes to provider Limelight Networks.
(…)
Industry observers estimate that YouTube, which is streaming 40 million videos and 200 terabytes of data per day, may be paying between a tenth of a cent and half a cent per minute. Neither YouTube nor Limelight would comment on their pricing.
forbes.com via Standaard Blog

“Terabyte per day”

I remember the days when a “TB/day” unit of bandwidth sounded like science fiction. Estimations of Youtube’s bandwidth go from 25TB/day to the 200TB/day above. Let’s get a feel for that number. 200 terabytes a day adds up to 6 petabyte per month, or 72 petabyte per year. That’s a lot of Libraries of Congress. It’s equivalent to a sustained 9.26 Gbps stream, more than any single Serial-ATA or Fibre Channel can deliver.
If you would build your own distributed network of ’standard’ unmetered 100Mbps caching servers, optimistically delivering 20TB/month at $2000/month, you would need at least 300 servers – or $600K per month. With Streamload, it’s way more expensive: $4400/15TB or $1,76mio per month for Youtube’s 6PB/month. Although I think Youtube would get a better price since they would need 400 Streamload servers.

Videos per day

In Feb 2006 it was only 15 million movies per day, but now the number stands at 40 million. At 2-3 minutes average per video, that’s 100 million minutes per day, or a cumulated 19 years of waisted time per day. There’s probably a GDP loss to be calculated for that too, but that would sound so negative. Amusement has its value.

Limelight

Limelight Networks, YouTube’s content delivery network provider (i.e. the movies come from their servers) reports a monthly income of $4 mio. This means that almost 25% of their income comes from 1 customer. So if Youtube runs through its last $8 mio of funding (around September 2006, say), it will make for a painful quarterly report for Limelight.

Youtube Director

In the mean time, Youtube is trying to create a better connection with original content creators: the free Youtube Director account.

And the best benefit of all? The YouTube Director program is completely, 100% FREE. The only thing we ask? That you be a legitimate, original content creator.

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The raw numbers

BLUEHOST.COM	DREAMHOST.COM
PRICE
$6.95/mon (2 years prepaid)	$7.95/mon (2 years prepaid)
FEATURES
10 GB storage 250GB/mon bandwidth	20 GB storage 1000GB/mon bandwidth
6 domains, 20 subdomains 50 MySQL, 50 Postgres DB 2500 email addresses PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails	unlimited domains unlimited MySQL DBs unlimited email addresses PHP, Ruby on Rails
ONE-CLICK Install
CPanel/Fantastico: Wordpress, pMachine, Nucleus, Drupal, Joomla, PhpNuke, Typo3, phpBB2, OS Commerce, Coppermine, Gallery, PHPList, Advanced Poll, PHProject, SohoLaunch, PhpWiki, PhpAdsNew, WebCalendar, Moodle, …	Home-made: Wordpress, phpBB, Advanced Poll, osCommerce, MediaWiki, Joomla, Gallery, WebCalendar

BLUEHOST GUI
Bluehost has a nice management interface: Cpanel Pro.

Their list of one-click application installs is impressive:

DREAMHOST GUI
The management interface of Dreamhost is an own-developed web application:

The list of one-click installs is more limited but has most best-of-breed applications:

DNS MANAGEMENT
A big difference between the two is the way they handle DNS management.

• Bluehost will expect their DNS servers to be responsible for any domain hosted. Their management web interface will not accept to host a domain that is not controlled by their DNS servers. Believe me, I’ve tried.
• Bluehost does not allow you to just define subdomains in DNS and point them to some external IP address. All your subdomains must be hosted on the same Bluehost server
• Bluehost does not allow you to choose the subfolder for a subdomain: blog.example.com is hosted on /blog. Unfortunately any other domain example.2.com that you have will not be able to get a subdomain blog.example2.com on another subfolder.

CONCLUSION
If your demands are not too high (not something like 10 domains with 150 subdomains), you like a complete and easy web interface and the luxury of being able to install 30+ applications with one click (it’s three actually, but who’s complaining), then take Bluehost, they’re the cheapest.
If you need flexible DNS management, are not afraid of installing programs yourself (FTP and such), need a lot of email, database or bandwidth: Dreamhost is the way to go!

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I see 2 scenario’s:
Scenario 1: first the public

Description

The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PUBLIC zone (e.g. SSID “FREEWIFI”). On one of the wired Ethernet connections (the Linksys has 4 of those) the other router is connected, that serves the PRIVATE zone (e.g. SSID “PROTECTED”). Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.

PRO

* both the Internet and the PUBLIC zone are outside your PRIVATE network, so you can have the same firewall settings for both, and ‘dangerous’ traffic never passes over your INTERNAL network.
* the first router can be configured to prioritize traffic from the fixed ports i.e. the PRIVATE network.

CONTRA

* If the PUBLIC router does not support QoS (Quality of Service) or bandwidth shaping, then a wifi troll can consume all the available bandwidth, and the PRIVATE network is left without anything.
* if the PUBLIC router is broken (or switched off) no one has Internet connection.

Scenario 2: first the private

Description

The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PRIVATE zone. On one of the wired Ethernet connections, the other router is connected, that serves the PUBLIC zone. Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.

PRO

* the PRIVATE network is closer to the bandwidth than the PUBLIC, bandwidth trolls only come second
* the 1st router can be configured to give less priority to the network port that the PUBLIC network is connected to.
* in case of abuse, you can just switch off the 2nd router and your PRIVATE network keeps running

CONTRA

* all traffic goes over the PRIVATE network, so a skilled hacker might try to hack in to that (would be hard with a good firewall, but anything’s possible)

Another scenario might be (if your ISP supports it) to have 2 routers each taking a separate IP address from your ISP and working in parallel (instead of in series). Disadvantage would be that you could not give lower priority to PUBLIC or higher to PRIVATE so you might again be abused by bandwidth trolls.

Next to that, we also need routers that are bandwidth-limit conscious: let’s say that I get 25 GB from my ISP. I might want to configure that once the PUBLIC network has taken 10GB, it is cut off or limited to 256 Kbps. Or I could limit the PUBLIC throughput to 1Mbps (so I have a guaranteed 5Mbps left for INTERNAL use). Or limit streaming and BitTorrent traffic …

So if someone would come up with a double Wifi access point, that serves 2 different and separate Wifi zones (one on channel 6 and one on channel 11, say), with differents security (authentication) settings, that supports traffic shaping, bandwidth limits and abuse detection, and maybe even offers a Wifi VPN like Google was planning to, that would be the ideal router for municipal Wifi. Just glue those Linksys’es together!

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Desktop minimum config

140 Sysmark 2004 SE (in practice higher than Sempron 2800+ or Celeron D335) or PowerPC G5

256 MB RAM, 80GB hard disk

CD-RW, DVD, 100Mbps Ethernet, 4 x USB2.0

15″ display, BE keyboard, IVI mousemat

2 years waranty

Laptop minimum config

115 Sysmark 2004 SE or PowerPC G4

256 MB RAM, 40GB hard disk

CD-RW, DVD, 100Mbps Ethernet, 4 x USB2.0/IEEE 1394

15″ display, BE keyboard, IVI mousemat

2 years waranty

Smartcard reader

Both models should include a chipcard reader that is eID ready.

Software installed

Operation system + browser

Some office suite (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation, database)

Antivirus, anti-spam, anti-spyware, personal firewall

Broadband connection

min 512 Kbps downstream, 128 Kbps upstream, 400MB transfer/month

training

4 hours (using the office suite, browsing, emailing, …)

The price this should go for? 850 euro for the desktop config and 990 euro for the laptop, with all software/services for 1 year included. The government sponsors by paying back the VAT (21%).

LITTLE OPEN-SOURCE
The government’s call for proposal allowed for commercial operating systems (Windows/MacOS) as well as open-source (Linux/Ubuntu). Unfortunately none of the certified partners will offer a non-Windows solution. Microsoft obviously did a strong job selling it’s OS. Partners in the consortia are the obvious broadband duopoly Belgacom/Telenet, with only Mobistar as a challenger, and for the hardware Fujitsu-Siemens and Packard-Bell (no Dell?). There are also 2 smaller players: DIDI Trade (Aartselaar) and SHS Computer (Neuville-enCondroz).

BROADBAND IN BELGIUM

We’re currently number #10 worldwide in broadband penetration: 18,3 subscribers per 100 inhabitants. This promotion should allow us to maybe jump over Sweden and Canada. Iceland, here we come!

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