Aah, the amazing AZERTY keyboard layout, it's a bit wonky but when you've been there for a couple of months QWERTY ends up feeling odd. It's really not that different from QWERTY, it just takes some getting used to.
If you're paying for 768 kbps DSL and you're getting 1.5 Mbps then AT&T have managed to fuck up their DSLAM config since the normal way to put a hard limit on a customer's connection speed is by restricting the sync speed to whatever the customer is paying for.
But isn't it much easier having unique IP addresses for all hosts that are connected to the internet? Using a private address space is one way to "protect" the light bulb hosts but it also introduces a problem in that their addresses are unreachable from the public internet. My preferred solution would IPv6 which some kind of firewall at the "demarcation point" for the internet connection (and just in case you're one of those younglings who think NAT is required for a firewall I'll just say NO).
And no, you shouldn't be paid for 24 hours just because you have responsibilities for 24 hours. The same way your employer doesn't pay for your car to get to work, or your lunch to keep up your strength. Some things are not business expenses even though they are required to do business. Your being "acceptable" is a part of that. As far as what is and is not "acceptable" I leave as a discussion between you and your employer.
Except I'm not being paid to do anything other than work for 40 hours/week, anything beyond that is (at least in my home country) paid overtime and compensation for that is generally 150 - 200 % of regular pay. If you want me to do things for you outside of regular working hours then you pay me for it or stfu.
You have a right to express yourself freely, but your employer has the right (or should) to fire you for any reason. Please him/her and s/he can kindly reward you. But why would you want to do something that you know (or could know) your employer doesn't like?
Yes and no, I have the right to live my life as I see fit and you as an employer are not allowed to just randomly fire me for anything short of not performing my job as laid out in my employment contract. Obviously committing crimes against the employer would also be a valid reason for termination.
Why would I want to do something that my employer doesn't like? Well, let's see here.. Maybe because it's my right to live my life as I very fucking well please without some wannabe-fascist trying to tell me what political organisations I may be a member of, what friends I am allowed have and what is an appropriate time to go home from a party?
That still seems quite limited, although if you're in Australia then I guess it's better than what most people are using...
OTOH, I'm swedish so ADSL2+ Annex M 24/3 Mbps with no transfer limits for USD50 per month is considered kind of expensive. I'm still waiting for my 100/100 ethernet jack though, had it in college through SUNET but I don't live in a student apartment anymore.
Cannon Fodder (and a few games similar to it) was actually a really good game. However, Cannon fodder actually had good levels, those levels in the C&C series are painful to play, as a previous poster pointed out there are almost always booby traps and if you make a single wrong turn you'll have your forces decimated (think: ten riflemen and a commando facing off with two enemy tanks, a gatling gun and a few riflemen). Also, often those maps are designed in such a way that you pretty much need to keep most of your men alive until the end or the remaining troops will get slaughtered when finally reaching the base you've been ordered to sabotage, the bridge you need to destroy or whatever it is you're supposed to do.
The thought of working at the south pole has crossed my mind a few times but every time I've done reseach it seems the main barrier to entry for me has been that I'm european and (at least in the past) most jobs had that lovely "You must be a US citizen to apply" line in the requirements...
So I guess I'll take the chance and ask if anyone here who's not from the US has managed to make it to antarctica without getting a second degree and a PhD in something relevant and if so, how did you do it?
(Which I personally thought was ridiculous considering just about anyone at the time would have associated the term with wrestling before animal conservation.)
American I take it? I always associated it with the World Wildlife Fund as the World Wrestling Federation was just some crap the cable networks would broadcast in the middle of the night because they could get it for cheap...
4- Private vs public network - IP V4 took the assumption that every IP address was ment to be public (the famous end to end networking dogma). The use of NAT and private addresses has been seen as a hack. We now know that private network are here to stay and the example of the SS7 signaling where private network and the way to interconnect them together are normalized provide a clear way. I am not sure that IP V6 learned the lessons.
I really don't think that the idea of every computer having a unique public address as something bad. When I first started my university studies I attended a university where every machine on their network had a public IP address, and this was not a problem as the university also had all the machines firewalled off with different rules depending on what type of machine it was; most Windows boxes could only be pinged from the public internet while most Solaris and the few Linux boxes they had could be accessed using SSH and had a few other services accessible when connecting from certain subnets (such as the off-campus student apartments that were connected to the university but used a commercial ISP's IP addresses).
That said, I'm one of those graybeards who got to experience the "real" internet prior to widespread adoption of NAT and I really miss it, nowadays there are self-proclaimed experts running around saying IPv6 is horribly insecure because it does away with NAT and without NAT you can't have firewalls(!)..
I disagree about the "crappy MDI interface" bit, this is really just an issue with the Windows version, on macs there is no annoying root window and when another application is focused the toolbars disappear showing only the image windows.
Also, you should really explore the full-screen modes available by pressing 'f' while working on a document.
The Maximize button thing seems to be because a lot of windows users have been taught by win9x that you can't really run more than one application at a time, this combined with the fact that most users have been using fairly low-resolution monitors (or running high-end monitors at some insane resolution like 800x600) means most people are used to running everything maximized, and only one app at a time.
And from working in tech support this is something that I've come to hate, even if you tell someone "now, leave that window open and click.." they'll still close the app and then you'll once again have to help them figure out how to start Outlook or IE...
I think you're giving MS-DOS too much credit when it comes to memory management. Basically, it was single-tasking so you could just use whatever memory you wanted to.
Obviously the idea is that you automate the boring jobs and make sure that everyone shares the wealth. You OTOH are still thinking in terms of dollars, profits and shareholders (at least that's how your post reads). I'm not saying there are no problems with the idea but I am saying you have to look beyond what we have right now to understand the appeal of it.
There would probably still be a need for people to help customers in stores, but imagine if they didn't have to stock shelves, clean up in the isles and stay late to help take inventory anymore. Wouldn't that make working in a store a lot more interesting? to just work there to help customers find the items they need instead of spending all your time stocking shelves or standing by a door saying "Welcome to random warehouse-like superstore..."?
Well, the technocratic idea is to give everyone "energy credits" which represent a certain percentage of energy production, the cost of various items and services would then be directly proportional to how much energy is required to supply them.
There are of course problems with greed which is why a society like this won't be likely until we are able to produce goods on such a level that your ability to consume manufactured goods won't be hindered by how well-paid you are but rather by the fact that you are able to afford pretty much everything you want (of course one could argue that there will always be greedy people who insist on trying to own 500 cars and 50 houses just because they can, this is another problem with this utopian dream but I still reserve the right to retain some of my idealism:).
That's true. However, one interesting detail here is that in the past there have been examples of factories planning to automate parts of the production of various products which has resulted in massive protests from workers and local authorities afraid of mass unemployment. The end result of this of course being that the people in charge have been convinced in various ways (tax subsidies etc..) to hold back on automation.
This is probably the biggest problem with moving society to a state of "techno-utopia", that the transition could land a lot of people unemployed and unable to support themselves until the transition is over. I don't have a solution to this problem and until someone comes up with one I suspect we won't be hearing about people buying and selling things using energy credits instead of dollars and euros.:/
I've been waiting for quite some time for industrial use of robots to go beyond stationary machines that weld or cut parts, obviously there are other things that robots are used for today but something like this might actually appeal to a lot of companies that are what you might call "conservative" when it comes to automation.
Because let's be honest, wouldn't we love to live in a world where all almost all menial labour is performed by automated machines with only a handful of skilled experts controlling the machines? I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want. If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore because let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs. What we need to do is get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants.
One problem with this "utopia" (Although Utopia as described in the book wasn't what most people think of when they hear the word) is support functions such as technical support and customer services, people are still going to have problems getting their DSL working and someone will have to help them with that. Oh well, it's a nice dream anyway, a technocratic utopia in which no one is forced to work a boring mundane job unless they want to..
I actually agree that Filevault not working when upgrading is a serious drawback and even more so that the fix requires screwing around in the terminal, but at least there's a way to fix it. When I upgraded an Ubuntu install with encrypted/home,/var and swap a couple of versions back it decided to stop mounting the encrypted partitions, took the better part of a day to get any kind of access to those partitions and I never could get it to mount them again and ended up settling on the trusted backup and reinstall path..
I installed Leopard this morning, at first everything seemed to work but then I made the mistake of running software update and then rebooting resulting in Leopard complaining about my Filevault partition being corrupted.
After about an hour of screwing around I had managed to get access to my files by making a.sparseimage file out of the Filevault file, deleting my account and then recreating the account and granting it admin rights, all of this through single-user mode with apple's wonky terminal apps, but hey. At least it works now!:)
I found a pretty big thread about this on Apple's support forums so it seems I'm not the only one with this problem.
You summed up my feelings on the subject pretty well. If I head to Wikipedia to find information on something, perhaps from an article I know existed a few weeks ago and it's not there then clearly whatever I was looking for should've been there. But certain Wikipedia editors seem to think that only the biggest most important things are worthy of attention, if anything it should be the other way around.
My point is that unlike a regular encyclopedia Wikipedia has the ability to not just contain articles about "important" things (as deemed by the editors) but also about things which a normal encyclopedia would not bother including because it wouldn't fit. So to delete articles just because some random editor decided that the subject of the article wasn't notable enough is just silly and personally I think part of it is that certain people who edit Wikipedia are on a bit of a power trip and enjoy enforcing their own interpretation of the rules.
OTOH, I'm one of those guys who used to sit around and read dictionaries for fun when I was a kid, so I loe having lots and lots of articles to read, especially with hyperlinks, I never know what I'm going to learn when browsing Wikipedia.
Completely blocking an entire protocol isn't QoS, Qos is about giving priority to certain types of traffic that need lower latency or more bandwidth, an example would be VoIP which needs low latency to not become useless.
What Comcast has been doing is outright blocking an entire protocol, sort of like how some ISPs block their users' ability to use SMTP, mostly outbound but in some cases inbound as well. The difference being that there is a good reason to block outbound SMTP, it may be a PITA for those trying to run their own mail server but at least the reason isn't so much direct greed as it is to protect the network at large from zombie machines trying to spam the rest of the net...
Well, I know that Windows 3.x had a file called win.exe which was AFAICR (As Far As I Can Remember) the actual executable. Anyway, I checked my facts and Windows 1.0 required 256 kiB of RAM and a.com executable is limited to a total footprint of 64 kiB (one segment) so that kind of makes it hard for Windows to require more RAM than it can use...
win.com? Are you sure about that? I don't have any real memories of Windows pre-3.x but unless I've completely forgotten about assembly programming.com executables are limited to 64 kiB and I can't really imagine any version of Windows fitting into that, especially not with all the constraints (64 kiB is total size including stack and all that stuff, not just the size of the executable stored on disk). But hey, maybe I'm wrong and I'm sure someone will point out how and why..:)
...God help you if admitted to using NAT or an external firewall.)...
Well, let's say you have a DSL service that comes with a "free" bridged DSL modem, most likely your ISP will refuse to troubleshoot any non-sync-related issues unless you get rid of any NAT routers, hardware firewalls, software firewalls and such since they have to assume you're a moron who just set his firewall to "Block all". You see, 99% of the users who call in about problems like this don't know enough to gain any kind of access to their router, firewall or whatever weird device they've attached and they sure don't know how to troubleshoot based on instructions along the lines of "Now could you give me your router's MAC address?". They need instructions closer to "Click the big Start button, then click Run, now type SEE EM DEE and click Ok. Right, so now do you see a black square with white text? Good, now type...". Since the ISP can't possibly have their first, second or third line support techs trained in the black arts of every consumer router and firewall out there, YOU have to disconnect your equipment.
Now, if a user obviously is able to configure their equipment then fine, let them use a NAT router, but if there's any indication that the router is the problem (this indication may not be visible to you but from the tech's side it may seem like a pretty big possibility sometimes) then the user should be prepared to disconnect this equipment.
What does bother me is how often ISPs technical support people deliberately put their customers in harm's way with instructions such as, "okay, I'll need you to turn off your firewall" or "if you're using a router, be sure to plug your computer directly into the cable modem." With that kind of negligence, they have no right to complain about the support and bandwidth costs of zombied boxes. What's the mean time to infection for an unpatched Windows system nowadays, anyway?
Like I just pointed out, if the user could be trusted to have not completely botched their software/hardware settings then this would be a non-issue, but you can't expect anyone in tech support (or elsewhere really) to be an expert in the buggy and sometimes irrational behaviour of every consumer router, firewall and AV software out there. And since the customer most likely doesn't know what he/she is doing (even if they sometimes try to give that impression, "I'm a network technician, don't talk down to me!" "Ok sir, what's your IP address?" "Where do I find that?") turning off and disconnecting all firewalls, routers and such crap actually gives the tech a chance of analyzing and fixing the problem.
/Mikael
Re:What the hell do you do all day?
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
On the topic of GiS, and I know it's a long shot, is there any chance you'll be able to bring it back in some form? I actually enjoyed having it mixed in with Bill Hick's various performances and other more or less funny material, it's great to have on in the background while coding or just screwing around with stuff. Besides, it was miles better than most of the podcasts that are floating around on the web now..
That was exactly what I thought, didn't actually register until I noticed one day that I was seeing users with 100k+ UIDs, I wasn't too big on registering accounts back then as it seemed every other website demanded registration just to read..
Slashdot Mirror
Aah, the amazing AZERTY keyboard layout, it's a bit wonky but when you've been there for a couple of months QWERTY ends up feeling odd. It's really not that different from QWERTY, it just takes some getting used to.
/Mikael
If you're paying for 768 kbps DSL and you're getting 1.5 Mbps then AT&T have managed to fuck up their DSLAM config since the normal way to put a hard limit on a customer's connection speed is by restricting the sync speed to whatever the customer is paying for.
/Mikael
But isn't it much easier having unique IP addresses for all hosts that are connected to the internet? Using a private address space is one way to "protect" the light bulb hosts but it also introduces a problem in that their addresses are unreachable from the public internet. My preferred solution would IPv6 which some kind of firewall at the "demarcation point" for the internet connection (and just in case you're one of those younglings who think NAT is required for a firewall I'll just say NO).
/Mikael
Except I'm not being paid to do anything other than work for 40 hours/week, anything beyond that is (at least in my home country) paid overtime and compensation for that is generally 150 - 200 % of regular pay. If you want me to do things for you outside of regular working hours then you pay me for it or stfu.
You have a right to express yourself freely, but your employer has the right (or should) to fire you for any reason. Please him/her and s/he can kindly reward you. But why would you want to do something that you know (or could know) your employer doesn't like?Yes and no, I have the right to live my life as I see fit and you as an employer are not allowed to just randomly fire me for anything short of not performing my job as laid out in my employment contract. Obviously committing crimes against the employer would also be a valid reason for termination.
Why would I want to do something that my employer doesn't like? Well, let's see here.. Maybe because it's my right to live my life as I very fucking well please without some wannabe-fascist trying to tell me what political organisations I may be a member of, what friends I am allowed have and what is an appropriate time to go home from a party?
/Mikael
That still seems quite limited, although if you're in Australia then I guess it's better than what most people are using...
OTOH, I'm swedish so ADSL2+ Annex M 24/3 Mbps with no transfer limits for USD50 per month is considered kind of expensive. I'm still waiting for my 100/100 ethernet jack though, had it in college through SUNET but I don't live in a student apartment anymore.
/Mikael
Cannon Fodder (and a few games similar to it) was actually a really good game. However, Cannon fodder actually had good levels, those levels in the C&C series are painful to play, as a previous poster pointed out there are almost always booby traps and if you make a single wrong turn you'll have your forces decimated (think: ten riflemen and a commando facing off with two enemy tanks, a gatling gun and a few riflemen). Also, often those maps are designed in such a way that you pretty much need to keep most of your men alive until the end or the remaining troops will get slaughtered when finally reaching the base you've been ordered to sabotage, the bridge you need to destroy or whatever it is you're supposed to do.
/Mikael
The thought of working at the south pole has crossed my mind a few times but every time I've done reseach it seems the main barrier to entry for me has been that I'm european and (at least in the past) most jobs had that lovely "You must be a US citizen to apply" line in the requirements...
So I guess I'll take the chance and ask if anyone here who's not from the US has managed to make it to antarctica without getting a second degree and a PhD in something relevant and if so, how did you do it?
/Mikael
American I take it? I always associated it with the World Wildlife Fund as the World Wrestling Federation was just some crap the cable networks would broadcast in the middle of the night because they could get it for cheap...
/Mikael
I really don't think that the idea of every computer having a unique public address as something bad. When I first started my university studies I attended a university where every machine on their network had a public IP address, and this was not a problem as the university also had all the machines firewalled off with different rules depending on what type of machine it was; most Windows boxes could only be pinged from the public internet while most Solaris and the few Linux boxes they had could be accessed using SSH and had a few other services accessible when connecting from certain subnets (such as the off-campus student apartments that were connected to the university but used a commercial ISP's IP addresses).
That said, I'm one of those graybeards who got to experience the "real" internet prior to widespread adoption of NAT and I really miss it, nowadays there are self-proclaimed experts running around saying IPv6 is horribly insecure because it does away with NAT and without NAT you can't have firewalls(!)..
/Mikael
I disagree about the "crappy MDI interface" bit, this is really just an issue with the Windows version, on macs there is no annoying root window and when another application is focused the toolbars disappear showing only the image windows.
Also, you should really explore the full-screen modes available by pressing 'f' while working on a document.
/Mikael
The Maximize button thing seems to be because a lot of windows users have been taught by win9x that you can't really run more than one application at a time, this combined with the fact that most users have been using fairly low-resolution monitors (or running high-end monitors at some insane resolution like 800x600) means most people are used to running everything maximized, and only one app at a time.
And from working in tech support this is something that I've come to hate, even if you tell someone "now, leave that window open and click.." they'll still close the app and then you'll once again have to help them figure out how to start Outlook or IE...
/Mikael
I think you're giving MS-DOS too much credit when it comes to memory management. Basically, it was single-tasking so you could just use whatever memory you wanted to.
/Mikael
Obviously the idea is that you automate the boring jobs and make sure that everyone shares the wealth. You OTOH are still thinking in terms of dollars, profits and shareholders (at least that's how your post reads). I'm not saying there are no problems with the idea but I am saying you have to look beyond what we have right now to understand the appeal of it.
There would probably still be a need for people to help customers in stores, but imagine if they didn't have to stock shelves, clean up in the isles and stay late to help take inventory anymore. Wouldn't that make working in a store a lot more interesting? to just work there to help customers find the items they need instead of spending all your time stocking shelves or standing by a door saying "Welcome to random warehouse-like superstore..."?
/Mikael
Well, the technocratic idea is to give everyone "energy credits" which represent a certain percentage of energy production, the cost of various items and services would then be directly proportional to how much energy is required to supply them.
There are of course problems with greed which is why a society like this won't be likely until we are able to produce goods on such a level that your ability to consume manufactured goods won't be hindered by how well-paid you are but rather by the fact that you are able to afford pretty much everything you want (of course one could argue that there will always be greedy people who insist on trying to own 500 cars and 50 houses just because they can, this is another problem with this utopian dream but I still reserve the right to retain some of my idealism :).
/Mikael
That's true. However, one interesting detail here is that in the past there have been examples of factories planning to automate parts of the production of various products which has resulted in massive protests from workers and local authorities afraid of mass unemployment. The end result of this of course being that the people in charge have been convinced in various ways (tax subsidies etc..) to hold back on automation.
This is probably the biggest problem with moving society to a state of "techno-utopia", that the transition could land a lot of people unemployed and unable to support themselves until the transition is over. I don't have a solution to this problem and until someone comes up with one I suspect we won't be hearing about people buying and selling things using energy credits instead of dollars and euros. :/
/Mikael
I've been waiting for quite some time for industrial use of robots to go beyond stationary machines that weld or cut parts, obviously there are other things that robots are used for today but something like this might actually appeal to a lot of companies that are what you might call "conservative" when it comes to automation.
Because let's be honest, wouldn't we love to live in a world where all almost all menial labour is performed by automated machines with only a handful of skilled experts controlling the machines? I wouldn't really mind being one of the experts while freeing up a large portion of the population to do whatever they want. If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore because let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs. What we need to do is get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants.
One problem with this "utopia" (Although Utopia as described in the book wasn't what most people think of when they hear the word) is support functions such as technical support and customer services, people are still going to have problems getting their DSL working and someone will have to help them with that. Oh well, it's a nice dream anyway, a technocratic utopia in which no one is forced to work a boring mundane job unless they want to..
/Mikael (dreamer)
I actually agree that Filevault not working when upgrading is a serious drawback and even more so that the fix requires screwing around in the terminal, but at least there's a way to fix it. When I upgraded an Ubuntu install with encrypted /home, /var and swap a couple of versions back it decided to stop mounting the encrypted partitions, took the better part of a day to get any kind of access to those partitions and I never could get it to mount them again and ended up settling on the trusted backup and reinstall path..
/Mikael
I installed Leopard this morning, at first everything seemed to work but then I made the mistake of running software update and then rebooting resulting in Leopard complaining about my Filevault partition being corrupted.
After about an hour of screwing around I had managed to get access to my files by making a .sparseimage file out of the Filevault file, deleting my account and then recreating the account and granting it admin rights, all of this through single-user mode with apple's wonky terminal apps, but hey. At least it works now! :)
I found a pretty big thread about this on Apple's support forums so it seems I'm not the only one with this problem.
/Mikael
You summed up my feelings on the subject pretty well. If I head to Wikipedia to find information on something, perhaps from an article I know existed a few weeks ago and it's not there then clearly whatever I was looking for should've been there. But certain Wikipedia editors seem to think that only the biggest most important things are worthy of attention, if anything it should be the other way around.
My point is that unlike a regular encyclopedia Wikipedia has the ability to not just contain articles about "important" things (as deemed by the editors) but also about things which a normal encyclopedia would not bother including because it wouldn't fit. So to delete articles just because some random editor decided that the subject of the article wasn't notable enough is just silly and personally I think part of it is that certain people who edit Wikipedia are on a bit of a power trip and enjoy enforcing their own interpretation of the rules.
OTOH, I'm one of those guys who used to sit around and read dictionaries for fun when I was a kid, so I loe having lots and lots of articles to read, especially with hyperlinks, I never know what I'm going to learn when browsing Wikipedia.
/Mikael
Completely blocking an entire protocol isn't QoS, Qos is about giving priority to certain types of traffic that need lower latency or more bandwidth, an example would be VoIP which needs low latency to not become useless.
What Comcast has been doing is outright blocking an entire protocol, sort of like how some ISPs block their users' ability to use SMTP, mostly outbound but in some cases inbound as well. The difference being that there is a good reason to block outbound SMTP, it may be a PITA for those trying to run their own mail server but at least the reason isn't so much direct greed as it is to protect the network at large from zombie machines trying to spam the rest of the net...
/Mikael
Well, I know that Windows 3.x had a file called win.exe which was AFAICR (As Far As I Can Remember) the actual executable. Anyway, I checked my facts and Windows 1.0 required 256 kiB of RAM and a .com executable is limited to a total footprint of 64 kiB (one segment) so that kind of makes it hard for Windows to require more RAM than it can use...
/Mikael
win.com? Are you sure about that? I don't have any real memories of Windows pre-3.x but unless I've completely forgotten about assembly programming .com executables are limited to 64 kiB and I can't really imagine any version of Windows fitting into that, especially not with all the constraints (64 kiB is total size including stack and all that stuff, not just the size of the executable stored on disk). But hey, maybe I'm wrong and I'm sure someone will point out how and why.. :)
/Mikael
Well, let's say you have a DSL service that comes with a "free" bridged DSL modem, most likely your ISP will refuse to troubleshoot any non-sync-related issues unless you get rid of any NAT routers, hardware firewalls, software firewalls and such since they have to assume you're a moron who just set his firewall to "Block all". You see, 99% of the users who call in about problems like this don't know enough to gain any kind of access to their router, firewall or whatever weird device they've attached and they sure don't know how to troubleshoot based on instructions along the lines of "Now could you give me your router's MAC address?". They need instructions closer to "Click the big Start button, then click Run, now type SEE EM DEE and click Ok. Right, so now do you see a black square with white text? Good, now type...". Since the ISP can't possibly have their first, second or third line support techs trained in the black arts of every consumer router and firewall out there, YOU have to disconnect your equipment.
Now, if a user obviously is able to configure their equipment then fine, let them use a NAT router, but if there's any indication that the router is the problem (this indication may not be visible to you but from the tech's side it may seem like a pretty big possibility sometimes) then the user should be prepared to disconnect this equipment.
What does bother me is how often ISPs technical support people deliberately put their customers in harm's way with instructions such as, "okay, I'll need you to turn off your firewall" or "if you're using a router, be sure to plug your computer directly into the cable modem." With that kind of negligence, they have no right to complain about the support and bandwidth costs of zombied boxes. What's the mean time to infection for an unpatched Windows system nowadays, anyway?Like I just pointed out, if the user could be trusted to have not completely botched their software/hardware settings then this would be a non-issue, but you can't expect anyone in tech support (or elsewhere really) to be an expert in the buggy and sometimes irrational behaviour of every consumer router, firewall and AV software out there. And since the customer most likely doesn't know what he/she is doing (even if they sometimes try to give that impression, "I'm a network technician, don't talk down to me!" "Ok sir, what's your IP address?" "Where do I find that?") turning off and disconnecting all firewalls, routers and such crap actually gives the tech a chance of analyzing and fixing the problem.
/Mikael
On the topic of GiS, and I know it's a long shot, is there any chance you'll be able to bring it back in some form? I actually enjoyed having it mixed in with Bill Hick's various performances and other more or less funny material, it's great to have on in the background while coding or just screwing around with stuff. Besides, it was miles better than most of the podcasts that are floating around on the web now..
/Mikael J
That was exactly what I thought, didn't actually register until I noticed one day that I was seeing users with 100k+ UIDs, I wasn't too big on registering accounts back then as it seemed every other website demanded registration just to read..
/Mikael