I just folded my first protein

**cybertron** · 02-27-2012, 11:54 AM

Honestly I don't see much point in having much faster than ~10 meg internet. Nothing I ever download maxes out my 18 meg that I have now, and even when I was on 5 meg it never felt particularly restrictive. I do wish I could get faster upload, but at least they just upgraded me to 3 meg up so it isn't quite as slow as it used to be.

Edit:

Originally Posted by trilarian

STOP SELLING BANDWIDTH YOU DON'T HAVE!

I'm sure they'd be happy to sell you a dedicated line...for about $200 a month.

They really blew it when they went to "unlimited" internet. Now everyone expects that, except that bandwidth doesn't actually work that way. You pay for the bandwidth you use in everything except home internet. So the 2% of users blowing through a terabyte of bandwidth in a month are costing them a fortune, a fortune which is then paid by the rest of us who aren't using massive amounts of bandwidth.

So basically I wish they'd just charge per gigabyte used instead of this stupid flat rate where the low bandwidth users subsidize the high bandwidth users. It would make a whole lot more sense.

Oh, and FWIW, if they didn't have an official cap, they'd have an unofficial cap and that would be worse because you wouldn't know what it is. Every ISP will drop you if you use too much bandwidth, whether they publicize a cap or not.

**trilarian** · 02-27-2012, 12:16 PM

It really depends on each household's situation - mainly how many users (families will be hardest hit). For example, a single movie in HD from Netflix averages 5Mbps to not keep buffering mid-movie or dropping to pixel movie during low spikes (averages 4GB a movie). Another user (kid? wife?) jumps on Youtube and watches some HD clips or wants to watch a different Netflix movie and you need 10Mbps min which if you are capped at 10 (meaning you never quite reach it) you are liable to see hiccups in your movie.

Anything additional gets worse, say a program starts a auto-update, a kid jumps on a MMO, someone grabs a torrent, sibling wants to look at those high res NASA Hubble images, etc. It can add up fast for peak usage. Constant no, put you are paying for no slow downs at peak usage. For a single person, that does not mutlitask many high bandwidth usage programs, ~10Mbps may be fine.

Any heavy users or families that bandwidth cap is a stranglehold, and a total usage cap is absurd. I know before I moved I exceeded 250GB consistently (ISP at the time warned only, which I got the email every month). I might have to start "borrowing" neighbor wi-fi when I hit my cap.

**bs_texas** · 02-27-2012, 12:34 PM

Did I mention I have 56K dial-up!

**trilarian** · 02-27-2012, 12:34 PM

Ninja edit while I was posting...

I don't mind paying more for a high usage account, but they don't advertise or sell it that way. Why have tiered connections that all share the same cap? So you pay more to reach it faster? And it does not cost the ISP that much that they are losing out...

I'm sure there are MANY broadband accounts sold as a 'bundle' where the person checks email, shops at Christmas, and maybe the occasional Youtube link sent from a relative.

They didn't complain about high usage prior to services like Hulu, Netflix, etc. Now that they see many customers dropping cable service and taking the higher capacity broadband only - they know what is happening. $60+ cable bills are being dropped for $7 Netflix ones. Make the cap match the connection speed, and reasonable rate for exceeds and no problem. Say 30Mbps is the highest they can offer:

Code:

5  Mbps 100GB
10 Mbps 200GB
20 Mbps 400GB
30 Mbps Unlimited

As it stands now its disproportionate. DSL has even a lower cap of 150GB, I only get 250GB for being on U-Verse. They also don't charge the overage as a meter, its in chunks of $10 per 50GB. So if you are on DSL with an expected $40 bill, but use 251GB for the month, your bill shoots to $70.

Additionally, downstream is cheap compared to upstream. The excuse the last ISP gave me is they didn't want servers using up the expensive upstream. Fine, separate the two (they already do with much lower up speeds) and put a reasonable cap on that.

/end rant

**trilarian** · 02-27-2012, 12:41 PM

Originally Posted by bs_texas

Did I mention I have 56K dial-up!

Pfft... call me when you are on 1200 baud with the phone placed on the modem.

**bs_texas** · 02-27-2012, 12:53 PM

First time I ever saw a modem was one sorta like that. I think it was 300 baud, or less. It had rubbery cups you pushed the handset into. Well, like the one in the photo does, but it was only as wide as the cups.

The very first digitally transmitted text I ever saw....
I was at friends place and he had set up a communication with another guy. We were patiently waiting to see the magic words appear on the green screen monitor.. and then there it was.. he sent, "Stand back!"

We were in awe at the technology!

**trilarian** · 02-27-2012, 01:00 PM

Ah the good ole days... I never had two computers in the same room until almost college. I do remember dialing into billboards after school on monochromatic screens to chat with other geeky types and play networked text games. Shortly thereafter when I got a whole whopping 8-bit color, I remember a single image slowly loading on my screen, line by line, oh the anticipation of seeing the good parts... LOL

I don't have the child-like wonder anymore, but I do still get the random enjoyment along these lines...

EDIT => AND I'M STILL MAD AT MY SISTER FOR PICKING UP THE PHONE AND KILLING MY CONNECTION!!!!! haha

**trilarian** · 02-27-2012, 02:27 PM

All this talk about Mega-bit connections with caps.... Here is a Giga-bit connection, uncapped. Now that is how to sell bandwidth!

**trilarian** · 03-05-2012, 12:11 PM

Just past my first 1,000,000 milestone!

Still haven't cut the full farm on, its been too warm. I was only running the PS3, but decided to cut on my desktop i7 (seems to fold two at once, or at least every time it turns in it has 2 WU registered). The newest beta is giving out insane points, between 10-20k a pop at about 18-20 hours to process.

Farm and GPUs will probably wait until next fall/winter, but can't complain with 10k-30k PPD off of just one CPU and a PS3.

**bs_texas** · 03-05-2012, 02:28 PM

Originally Posted by trilarian

Just past my first 1,000,000 milestone!

Nice...

I'm down to Zero. All my stuff is in boxes on the floor or somewhere in the postal system. Looking forward to getting fully moved and setup in the new place... uh... as soon as I find a new place!

**techwise** · 03-06-2012, 04:28 PM

Looks like I'm gonna hit 20m today or tomorrow.

bs_texas... I'm glad you had some downtime. I needed it to pull a gap. You were gettin too close. I have a feeling I'm gonna have to make another upgrade once you get going again.

I hope your move is smooth.

Cheers

Mike

**bs_texas** · 03-06-2012, 05:52 PM

Your days are numbered my friend! ...well, until I get my first electric bill!!

As I've mentioned ad nauseam, my main issue has been the great difficulty in being able to upload results. Once I get away from this antiquated dial-up system, that problem will disappear.

Bennie

Edit: Oh, and nice milestone there, 20 Million!! je_fro keeps telling us that it's a good use of idle cycles.

**techwise** · 03-07-2012, 12:56 AM

Honestly I don't see much point in having much faster than ~10 meg internet. Nothing I ever download maxes out my 18 meg that I have now, and even when I was on 5 meg it never felt particularly restrictive.

Yeah, I think that's true for most people. However, I have a house with 4 very connected people in it that have: 3 Macbooks, 2 Thinkpads, 1 workstation, 1 Roku, 2 iPads, 4 cell phones with WiFi, 1 PogoPlug, and 1 Minecraft server that doubles as an offsite office backup server. I make damn good use of my bandwidth. And over the last couple weeks I've seeded almost 350GB of Linux distro torrents too. I aim to get what I pay for

**cybertron** · 03-07-2012, 12:13 PM

Originally Posted by techwise

Yeah, I think that's true for most people. However, I have a house with 4 very connected people in it that have: 3 Macbooks, 2 Thinkpads, 1 workstation, 1 Roku, 2 iPads, 4 cell phones with WiFi, 1 PogoPlug, and 1 Minecraft server that doubles as an offsite office backup server. I make damn good use of my bandwidth. And over the last couple weeks I've seeded almost 350GB of Linux distro torrents too. I aim to get what I pay for

Yeah, torrents can blow through a lot of bandwidth. I have one that was over 40:1 share ratio, which probably explains why my ISP doesn't want to give me more upload bandwidth.

**bs_texas** · 03-28-2012, 11:51 PM

Ranked 240!! Good work, eh? Up from 247 not long ago!

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.c...php?s=&t=36480

Move in date is 30 April. So... I should be back in May!

Thread: I just folded my first protein

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