Slashdot Mirror

tarp asks: "I'm moving to the City of Manassas, Virginia, where ZPlug offers BPL (Broadband over Power Lines). The city was the first in the nation to offer BPL as an alternative to DSL or Cable. They claim a 300 to 500 kilobit per second connection speed, and rock-solid performance since the only downtime would be when the power grid goes down. BPL is also rolling out in other locations, despite campaigns by amateur radio enthusiasts to stop it due to interference. Anyway, have any of you used BPL, and is it something I should try rather than getting a DSL or Cable connection?"

Toliman writes: "The former national Telecommunications company in Australia, Telstra, announced changes to their flat-rate cable and ADSL Freedom plan yesterday. The following email was sent to all users on the cable and ADSL residential plans -- restricting data download to three gigabytes per month with additional downloading attracting a hefty 35-cent fee per megabyte ($AU). Usage after that 3 gigabyte allowance is limited to the internal network if the customer does not choose to pay the fees for excess traffic." Read on for more.

"Slashdot readers in Australia will remember that Telstra's last pricing plan change was to charge per megabyte of traffic, including email and local network traffic, including paying the costs of receiving spam or unwanted data. During the rollout of optus @home's cable network, telstra implemented a flat-rate 'freedom' plan, offering a capped speed of 512kbit/128kbit with unlimited downloads suject to a flexible AUP, in order to compete with Optus's Network. Now the AUP has been changed to limit usage down to 3GB per month, reducing ADSL and cable users to the speed of a 28.8k modem.

Since the contract includes a reference to the AUP, the new limit is enforceable without express consent, and takes effect next month for all telstra 'Freedom' users. ZDNET australia, broadband.org.au, whirlpool.net.au, ausforums all have links to various stories, even a petition for Telstra to change their minds on this. As of this article, there are 4,300 users on the petition already quite angry, and more who are fed up with Telstra exploiting their monopoly of the internet bandwidth in Australia.

While some are calling this a purge of network 'abusers,' more rational users are asking for reasonable limits to be set up, if the old 'Freedom' plan cannot be reinstated."

It's been a busy week for Napster and Gnutella... mbell sent us an MSNBC story on Gnutella which gets a lot of stuff right, but spends more time proclaiming that it's all about kiddie porn to really give the point fair time. the geek noted a wired bit about a San Diego ISP banning Napster from their clients: this is because it's a "Server", not because it's controversial software tho, but it's at least nice to know your ISP is watching what you do. The thing that bothers me most is that accounts were threatened even tho they weren't exceeding bandwidth quotas. Seems harsh. And finally NeoMage pointed out that the once amazing (face it, Kill 'm All and Master of Puppets are amazing albums) Metallica has become the first 'big name' band to sue Napster for copyright violations against the artists' music.

NeoMage writes "Rainbow Technologies have created a PCI card that will improve secure web site performance by up to 90%. Looks like they are doing for the crypto market what 3D cards did for the gaming market, offloading crypto calculations to a dedicated processor. " This sounds quite useful. On many servers, doing calculations for things like SSL can be the most consuming task. It's listed as being compatible with Linux, too...

Dark Fiber writes "The AGE newspaper has a big article (great big 3 page spread) on Linux that is very interesting. Lotta questions, Lotta answers." One of the better mainstream articles- it gets distributions right, covers the GNU/Linux connection, and more.

Hal-kun writes "Remember way back when Sierra adventure games were 160x200 with only 16 colors. Remeber how cool they were? Games like the original Leasure Suit Larry and Space Quest one? Well, Entropy is now writing a free Sierra AGI Interpreter for dos and a Linux port is in the works. Linux X11 Screen shots: Kings Quest 2 Outside the Castle Leisure Suit Larry Larry in the bar Space Quest 1 Title Screen Space Quest 1 Ulence Flats Bar Space Quest 2 Title Screen" God I loved those games.

Hal-kun writes "Remember way back when Sierra adventure games were 160x200 with only 16 colors. Remeber how cool they were? Games like the original Leasure Suit Larry and Space Quest one? Well, Entropy is now writing a free Sierra AGI Interpreter for dos and a Linux port is in the works. Linux X11 Screen shots: Kings Quest 2 Outside the Castle Leisure Suit Larry Larry in the bar Space Quest 1 Title Screen Space Quest 1 Ulence Flats Bar Space Quest 2 Title Screen" God I loved those games.

Hal-kun writes "Remember way back when Sierra adventure games were 160x200 with only 16 colors. Remeber how cool they were? Games like the original Leasure Suit Larry and Space Quest one? Well, Entropy is now writing a free Sierra AGI Interpreter for dos and a Linux port is in the works. Linux X11 Screen shots: Kings Quest 2 Outside the Castle Leisure Suit Larry Larry in the bar Space Quest 1 Title Screen Space Quest 1 Ulence Flats Bar Space Quest 2 Title Screen" God I loved those games.

Hal-kun writes "Remember way back when Sierra adventure games were 160x200 with only 16 colors. Remeber how cool they were? Games like the original Leasure Suit Larry and Space Quest one? Well, Entropy is now writing a free Sierra AGI Interpreter for dos and a Linux port is in the works. Linux X11 Screen shots: Kings Quest 2 Outside the Castle Leisure Suit Larry Larry in the bar Space Quest 1 Title Screen Space Quest 1 Ulence Flats Bar Space Quest 2 Title Screen" God I loved those games.

Hal-kun writes "Remember way back when Sierra adventure games were 160x200 with only 16 colors. Remeber how cool they were? Games like the original Leasure Suit Larry and Space Quest one? Well, Entropy is now writing a free Sierra AGI Interpreter for dos and a Linux port is in the works. Linux X11 Screen shots: Kings Quest 2 Outside the Castle Leisure Suit Larry Larry in the bar Space Quest 1 Title Screen Space Quest 1 Ulence Flats Bar Space Quest 2 Title Screen" God I loved those games.

Hal-kun writes "Remember way back when Sierra adventure games were 160x200 with only 16 colors. Remeber how cool they were? Games like the original Leasure Suit Larry and Space Quest one? Well, Entropy is now writing a free Sierra AGI Interpreter for dos and a Linux port is in the works. Linux X11 Screen shots: Kings Quest 2 Outside the Castle Leisure Suit Larry Larry in the bar Space Quest 1 Title Screen Space Quest 1 Ulence Flats Bar Space Quest 2 Title Screen" God I loved those games.