[plug] What are people doing up at this time? [OT]

[Cameron Patrick]

Good morning all,

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 08:47:30AM -0800, Kimberly Shelt wrote:
| List noise raises for me a question about connection cost..
| Are we not, with this new "broadband" buy a product at $size $cost
| and then pay more for what you gobble extra..
| moving back to the byte charged days of years ago ?

Dunno, have never had a byte-charged internet connection.

| 
| Does list noise really cause issues for folks ?

Not for me.  But hey, I'm one of the people helping cause it, and I have
procmail filters that sort out lists and skipping through dull messages
doesn't take too long.  Email seems to take up negligible bandwidth
compared to ordinary web browsing.  For example, my archive of the plug
mailing list (which is the busiest list to which I'm subscribed) from
May 2002 - Jan 2003 is 30mb.  That works out to be roughly 5mb/month;
for most people subscribed to Plug, I'd imagine it'd be a drop in the
bucket (or ocean, depending on which cliché you prefer).

| Today I watched(for the first time) what my general download
| sizes are over a given hourly period.. and I was kinda surpised..
| I don't consider myself to be a "huge" user, but just email and 
| random browsing seemed (in context to timing) to put me well over
| 3G a month.. 
| 
| Is this standard ?.

Maybe.  It's rather more than what I seem to be using:
	http://cp.yi.org:81/~cameron/volume.jpg (2560x960 JPEG, 175kb)
In context - this is an Iinet on-the-Bliink ADSL 256kbit connection with a
2gig quota being shared by a family of five.  We've never come anywhere
near the 2G-in-30-days limit.  

(The red line on the graph is stuff that counts to the quota, the blue
line is WAIX traffic, and the grey line is "off-peak" traffic midnight->7am.
The whole thing was graphed with the aid of an awful lot of iptables
rules, some simple Python code, and Gnuplot.)

On the other hand, I have a friend who has a Telstra Cable connection
with a 3 gig limit and he routinely gets very close to the limit every
month.

| Should I make a poll type thing to investigate this ?
| User usage versus products on the market ?
| (I just love stats :)

(An idea for linmagau? ;))

And now, I think, I shall finally get some sleep.

--CP.