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Restrictions That @Home Places on Their Customers?
David Hansen asks: "I want to see what problems other Slashdot users have had with @Home restricting their service. We all know that they block the SMB ports, and probably for good reason. But did you know that they won't let you access certain other machines on the @Home network? And why don't they mention any of this in their acceptable use policy? My mother and father are both @Home subscribers in the same city (different subnets). I have Linux boxes acting as firewalls in both places which cannot ping or otherwise contact each other. I can ping them both from an outside location. I discovered this and the SMB thing the hard way. What else doesn't @Home want us to do? Do other ISPs do this also? BTW, I can reach @Home users who are in other cities." I've noticed that ISPs have been filtering lots of ports in the event that users will put up servers. Do you feel that ISPs should make a list of ports that they filter available to their customers?
I am in Australia, and the broadband providers here have even more restrictions. You can only connect two other machines via NAT, no servers, etc. Why can't we have a internet service that says "here's your IP number, here's 1.5 mb/s down and 0.5 mb/s up, do whatever you want with it". Somehow I don't think that is going to happen. What we need is a totally free and noncommercial internetwork for the people. You would just share the costs. 10 or 15 100BaseT cables along the streets. I have heard of some small towns doing this. Anyone got the URLS? David Findlay nedz@bigpond.com
The single biggest restriction: transfer rate caps. 1.5-2 years ago, my transfer rates peaked at 10Mb in / 5Mb out; these days it's usually 1-2Mb in / .012Mb out. The worst part is that that 12KB cap is a hard limit; while the only server I ever ran (back when they allowed you to I had my personal web and email servers) probably transfered 5MB per day, I used to really like the ability to transfer large (10-100MB) files between home and work.
They've thrown away the huge lead over the DSL providers they used to have in San Diego; on the bad days the service feels worse than ISDN. I'd switch if anyone else offered service in my area.
Amazingly, they even enforce that 12KB/s cap on outbound transfers for business accounts. Pay them $300/month for a connection and you can get *twice* the performance of your old modem.
I'm just amazed nobody has realized that arbitrary restrictions annoy people. My mail or web server probably use several orders of magnitude less traffic than a single person playing something like Quake online.
Rather than whining about people running MP3/porn/warez servers and annoying all of the people who weren't abusing things, they could just set a daily or monthly transfer limit beyond which you'd need to switch to a different service plan. That's the really amazing thing - there's no way to remove the cap or get it set higher short of switching to another ISP. You'd think they would be interested in a way to get people to pay more for service they can easily deliver.
Curious - your upload cap must have been grandfathered in. They won't sell a 40KB/s service at any price; the best they offer is 24KB/s on a business place which is absurdly over-priced (~$500/mo IIRC).
(You can barely browse acceptably with more than a few computers at such low speeds and one of the selling points to the business plans is that you can run servers!)
That's exactly what happened here. >1MB/s in / 500KB/s out in the first year (I signed up within the first 2 months), dropping to 200KB/s in / 12KB/s out for 2 years so far.
...the phone company putting a payphone in your house. You can make all the outgoing calls you want, but you can't receive calls.
And yes, bandwidth really does cost ISP's real money. As much as I would hate to be a business paying 300+ a month, I would hate even more not having a choice than to pay 150 a month for my DSL connection just so everyone had the same privleges, and not having the option for a lower level, consumer account.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Let me explain this with a metaphor : car sales. Say you have an old treacherous Toyota salesman with two brands of cars on his lot. One is the economy model, it's a V4 engine and no extras. The other is the luxury model, which is a V4 engine with gold-plated spark plugs and automatic everything. It's the same crap with better spark plugs that give you a 4% increase in raw horsepower (which will equate to cleaner gas consumption that might register on high-end monitoring gear). However the luxury model costs twice as much as the economy model.
Haven't you ever seen an Acura Integra? It's just a Prelude. Same whiny little engine with half the cylinders missing and pointed the wrong way in the engine bay.
Or a Camry masquerading as a Lexus. Or a Maxima masquerading as an Infiniti.
Or, my personal favorite and mercifully discontinued, a Cavalier masquerading as a Cadillac (Cimarron).
Remember the good old days when there actually was a difference between the el-cheapo model and the real thing? When a 1971 Valiant and a 1971 New Yorker shared an alternator, a starter motor, and that was about it? (Having said that, I love both those cars; my Valiant's *grill* would trash anything on the road today, and that's without even pulling the 4,900lb 21-foot-long 7.2L V8-powered New Yorker Brougham out of the garage. Acuras, beware: or else I'll stuff your silly little car in my trunk.)
Then, I pause for a second, and think forward to the 1980s. The K-car masquerading as a New Yorker. My big-block 440 cubic inch V8 trembles, stumbing away momentarily from its normal silky-quiet power and smoothness as the thought crosses my mind. The bad karma surrounding the 1980s New Yorker has forever tainted the memory of the world's largest non-limousine passenger car.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I ran into the same problem when I used to have @home. My friend and I (both on @home) couldn't ping each other's PC's. A quick traceroute revealed it to be a routing error in @home's network. I tried calling tech support, but got lots of confused idiots trying to tell me to change my proxy settings, re-install Windows, etc.
It might not be an even @home plot against peer-to-peer sharing, it might just be plain old-fashioned incompetence!!!
BTW, I now use Sprint BroadBand direct (wireless). I'm getting much better speed and reliability than I had with @home for about the same price!
@home has issues with too many wannabe hackers, so they lock down alot of things....unfortunately, when a hacker that is originating from an @home account is reported, they completely ignore it.. I usually get max 200kbytes downstream..... don't do anything as far as upstream.... also my NNTP downstream NEVER surpasses 80kbytes a sec.... might be a new cap in my area....
Absolutely. That is a definite FWD advantage.
Your disposable cars are that way because they're uni-bodies, not front-drive.Oh yeah, monocoque construction makes a car a lot tougher and more expensive to repir.
But so does front wheel drive.
If you hit another vehicle, for example, your engine, transmission and differential are all involved. Not to mention the usual basics like radiator, steering, etc. Because the drivetrain is crammed into a tiny space rather than spread out under the car, it's a lot harder to fix.
Further, because most of these front wheel drive cars use MacPherson strut suspensions - which are simple, compact and cheap but have little room for adjustment after a collision - you generally end up with a damaged car that can't be made to track properly without welding in new inner fenders and strut towers. Most rear wheel drive unibodies (and full-frame cars) use double-A arm front suspensions, which are a lot bulkier but have more linear movement in all planes as well as being a lot more serviceable after damage. Instead of attempting to change a bent strut tower, you generally end up changing a bent upper control arm.
It's very difficult to get the necessary energy absorption for crashworthiness with a body-on-frame.Rest assured, I'm well familiar with unibodies. Consider that three of my vehicles (my 1974 Valiant, my 1971 New Yorker and my 1980 Chevette) are unibody.
As for vehicle safety, what you say is true. But I prefer to avoid hitting things. If I've had even one beer, I don't get behind the wheel (but I'd be legal to 4). While I own a cellphone, that is never turned on in the car or truck. Never. My stereo is never cranked up loud enough to prevent me from hearing the rest of the traffic around me, my vehicles are always in top mechanical shape, and I always concentrate fully on the task at hand. And if I'm feeling sleepy, even if I'm only ten miles from home, I'll pull over, flip down or across the seats, and take a nap.
My driving record? Flawless. Ten years, no accidents or moving violations. And yet I drive a long way to work every day, taking a freeway that is second busiest in the world (after only the Santa Monica Freeway) and have for a number of years. And, this despite the fact that I've been known to shred my rear tires into clouds of smoke every now and then.
So, what if someone cuts me off?
Nice thing about a vehicle that won't buckle - surrounded by a sea of vehicles that will buckle - is that if some jackass in a Prelude cuts me off and I hit him, I'll win. He'll absorb my impact. I'm sure he'd do body damage to my truck, but I doubt he'd do much structural damage. Even if he did, I'd fix it in an afternoon with a hyrdaulic ram to straighten the frame back, my MIG welder to gusset it if there was any sign of fatigue, and then a quick tweak of the eccentric bolts on my upper control arms that set my camber and caster.
Unibody is stiffer than a frame; this gives better drivability.Depends on the frame. Compared to an I-channel or C-channel body on frame, for sure. But most of the finest luxury cars today retain a body on frame, using a box-section frame. The penalty? Gas mileage.
The benefits of a full frame, which kept them around for so long? The structural members are fractional inch steel plate stampings, not thin sheet measured in gauge. Less corrosion. Less metal fatigue. And the structural integrity of the car is more dependant on sheer quantities of steel, rather than the shape imparted into the metal by a stamping press.
Tangible benefits? You see a lot more 20-year-old Caprice Classics, Ford LTDs and other full-frame vehicles driving around than you see of 20-year-old Fairmonts. Easier to fix, too. And it makes sense to make a car last. The environmental cost of making a car is a lot more than the gains of replacing it at half of its average lifespan with one that is only incrementally cleaner and more fuel efficient. So it makes sense to take good care of a good, solid car, keep it well-tuned, and maintain it.
Other benefits? Cost to the manufacturer. One basic frame can be readily adapted to serve a large number of vehicles. Chevy S-10 and Astrovan shared a frame, for example. Easy to redesign a car based on slapping new body panels onto the existing rolling frame.
It's nearly impossible to get rid of squeaks unless the whole car is welded together. Again, this means unibody.Or good body-to-frame mounts.
It's even more difficult to get rid of road noise with a unibody's welded structural members carrying every vibration to the passenger compartment. Don't you get sick of listening to your wheel bearings when you're on the highway? Body to frame mounts damp that.
Not to burst your bubble, but judging from your past posts your opinions are set in concrete and facts are nearly irrelevant to you anyway.Ahhh, yes, I know who this is: it's the self-proclaimed automobile expert speaking from the depths of his many hours spent watching Shadetree Mechanic. Afraid to post from your user account? Can't afford the karma of an off-topic debate? I can.
Listen, I was wrenching on cars 15 years ago as a kid. I've worked on everything from Tercels to (once) a Testarossa. My roommate and best friend of 11 years works at probably the world's foremost professional automotive restoration shop.
While I'm neither a professional mechanic nor am I an automotive engineer (but I am an SAE member, go figure...), I know that you're neither one of those things. I've written columns in automotive magazines from Car Craft to Car and Driver. You, sir, are simply someone who spells better than most, perhaps could manage to change a fanbelt by the side of the road, and has been incensed when I insulted your idea of a fine automobile.
Unless you can actually come up with solid facts - not those refutable by any freshman level high school automotive class - I think you really should sit back and not comment, lest you continue to display your ignorance and short-sightedness.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Anyone with any experience in engines knows that 200 horsepower at 6000 RPM implies 175 foot-pounds of torque. In other words, either you are the sloppiest so-called engineer on the face of the earth, or you're a troll.
Horsepower is torque measured over time.
The measure of time, in this case, is RPMs.
You do the math, brainiac.
And there's more than one way to measure horsepower. I suggest you avoid the glossy ads in the car magazines: to look impressive, those are generally in *brake* horsepower.
Serious calculations of engine power are always done in torque at a specific RPM or kW of output energy; horsepower is way too vague. And if you have to use horsepower, use SAE Net. It's a lot less vague.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
RoadRunner in Austin, TX has a "no public server" policy. You can run a server, as long as it's password protected. I have had an ftp server running for months, but it doesn't allow anonymous access. I have not received any complaints from RR. I also run an SMTP server, but it only allows access from internal PC's. Plus, my firewall blocks all unused ports.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Crankshaft power into a brake is power, period
No, that's not where the automotive measure of "brake horsepower" is from.
That's the measured or calculated force required to stall the engine. Essentially, the reciprocal of all the output power of the engine as well as the inertia of the rotating/reciprocating mass.
Sorry, *you're* wrong, and I'm done debating with you, I've got better things to do. Like driving worn-out valve guides out of a cylinder head.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I do know that they scan a lot of ports. They look for FTP a lot, NNTP even more than that.
I think their reasoning is that, since they don't guarantee you all of the bandwidth you can get, you can't take advantage of that. Of course the real reason is so they can sell anther service called @Business or some crap.