In 1886 – The first alternating current power plant in the US was put into regular operation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts
In 1937 – The first woman in space and only woman ever to fly solo in space, Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was born in the Yaroslavl region of Russia.
In 1992 – The first media-hyped computer virus reached fever pitch as the Michelangelo boot sector virus began to affect computers. Worldwide catastrophe did not follow.
In 1975 – The Homebrew Computer Club, held its first meeting in a the garage of Gordon French in Menlo Park, California. 32 people showed up for the first meeting. John Draper, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were some of the more famous members of the club.
In 1981 – Sinclair Research launched the ZX81 in Britain for £69.95 and would go on to sell over 1.5 million units around the world. It was much more successful than it’s predecessor the ZX80.
In 1982 Four days after it’s twin, the second of two Soviet probes to Venus, the Venera 14 landed on the planet. Venera 13 and 14 would continue to send data until 1983.
In 1976 – The first Freon-cooled Cray-1 supercomputer was shipped to Los Alamos Laboratories, in New Mexico at a cost of $19,000,000.
In 2000 – The Sony PlayStation 2 went on sale in Japan.
In 2007 – Election Day was held in Estonia, and for the first time in the world, voters were allowed to vote on the Internet. Approximately 30,000 voters took advantage of electronic voting. Ballots had to be completed three days before election day.
In 1847 – In Ediinburgh, Scotland, an expert vocal physiology and elocution welcomed his newborn son into the world. He was named after his father. Alexander Graham Bell would gon to become synonymous with the telephone.
In 1885 – The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was incorporated in New York State as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone.
In 1966- The BBC announces plans to begin broadcasting television programmes in colour the following year, becoming the first European broadcaster to provide regular colour broadcasts.
AT&T has decided to throttle users of it’s unlimited plans, and the unlimited wireless data plans are disappearing fast in the US.
Yet a recent study indicated that data caps are a crude and unfair tool for relieving congestion. The study recommends “policies honestly implemented to reduce bandwidth usage during peak hours should be based on better understanding of real usage patterns and should only consider customers’ behavior during these hours”
The problem isn’t how many bits people use. There is not a big bucket of bits that the carriers will run out of if everybody uses too much. The flashing lights on the routers don’t cost more to run either if people are moving their bits through the pipes in large numbers.
What is a problem is connection capacity. If too many people are hitting the towers, as I understand it, the towers have a hard time handling the traffic, and you get the poor wireless data service you see in some big cities and at tech conferences.
There’s also the good old fashioned flood of packets that cause increased packet loss as routers get overworked by too much traffic. That’s what makes DDOS attacks work. So there *are* problems, but limiting the amount of data I use at 3 AM when nobody else is using the Internet, doesn’t help the problem.
Throttling may help some because it knocks people into using a slower network with different capacities, but again it’s a brick bat to the head kind of solution. Sure, folks who use lots of data are more likely to be connecting at peak times, but it doesn’t mean they are, and it doesn’t mean they’re the root cause of the problem.
The situation reminds me of any kind of situation where a line or queue forms. Look at bridge tool booths or airport security lines for similar behavior. They can get horribly backed up, but the solution is not to somehow punish or throttle people who drive or fly often.
I suggest that carriers abandon data caps in favor of a ‘fast pass’ model. When the network reaches capacity or congested situation, all regular users get throttled a bit, unless they pay for a higher tier of service. That may sound bad at first, but remember, that right now, all users get throttled anyway in places like San Francisco, and the only option you have is to pay more to use your phone less. What if, instead you had the same service with the same issue you have now, for the same price but no data cap. However, you had the option to pay more per month to get your connection prioritized. You’re not violating net neutrality, because all users are connected, and all traffic is treated equally. You just don’t get throttled.
Of course the fast pass model requires pricing that makes it so that not everybody uses it. You want to avoid the situation you see sometimes on the Bay Bridge where the fastTrack lanes are backed up but the other lanes are not.
It’s possible they might even be able to provide tiers of fastpass where the more you pay the less likely you are to get throttled. And the throttling only happens at peak times. In non-peak hours everyone has full unthrottled access anyway.
I can already imagine some of you screaming why this is a horrible idea, so have at it, respectfully, in the comments. In the end maybe we can figure out some model that is agreeable to most, if not all? Who knows?
In 1908 – Gabriel Lippman proposed using a series of lenses at a picture’s surface instead of opaque barrier lines, allowing three dimensional pictures. He titled his presentation to the French Academy of Sciences “La Photographie Integral”.
In 1983 – CBS Records launches the first major compact disc music marketing campaign, launching 16 titles. CDs had begun sale to the public the previous October in Japan.
In 2010 – The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany rejected legislation requiring electronic communications traffic data retention for a period of 6 months as a violation of the guarantee of the secrecy of correspondence.
In 1896 – Henri Becquerel discovered images of uranium rocks had appeared on a photographic plate without exposure to the sun. He had discovered natural radiation.
In 1995 – Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporate their website Yahoo!
In 2006 – English-language Wikipedia reached its one millionth article, Jordanhill railway station.
In 1860 – Herman Hollerith was born. He would grow up to build the first punched-card tabulating machines as well as found the company that was to become IBM.
In 1880 – The bores which had begun to drill the St. Gotthard Tunnel from Göschenen and Airolo, met midway, linking Switzerland and Italy.
In 1940 – Ernest O. Lawrence delivered his 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics banquet speech in Berkeley, California, instead of the usual Sweden, so he could keep raising funds for his cyclotron research which got him the prize int he first place.
In 1947 – The first closed-circuit broadcast of a surgical operation showed procedures to observers in classrooms at Johns Hopkins University.
In 1954 – The Westinghouse H840CK15 goes on sale in the New York area. It is generally agreed to be the first production receiver using NTSC color offered to the public. Only 30 sets were sold at $1295 a pop.
In 1959 – Discoverer 1 was launched on a Thor-Agena A rocket and became the first man-made object ever put into a polar orbit.
In 1932 – English physicist James Chadwick published a letter on the existence of the neutron, some say giving birth to modern nuclear physics.
In 1891 David Sarnoff was born near Minsk.. He would go on to befriend Marconi and rise to the Presidency of RCA and be integral in founding NBC.
In 1986 – The United States Senate voted to allows its debates to be televised on a trial basis. The trial was successful.