Netflix neutrality

In the net neutrality debate, a rarely mentioned aspect is the widespread practice amongst ISPs of over-subscribing bandwidth. Before streaming video became readily available and popular, this was viable, even reasonable, since few users managed to actually saturate their links for extended periods of time. Now that customers are suddenly demanding to get what they were sold, the ISPs find that they simply cannot provide this while keeping current prices. Continue reading

Church of JPEG

Some time has passed since I last wrote about the antics of the IJG, purveyor of the well-known JPEG image manipulation library. With the major Linux distributions as well as the Firefox and Chrome browsers having switched to the libjpeg-turbo fork, there has been little reason to pay attention to the IJG. Nevertheless, I decided to have a look at what they’ve been doing the last few years, and I was not disappointed. Continue reading