But that's simply not true. In your analogy it would be better to say that the truck company sold you a truck that goes 120mph but the road is limited to 45mph, and you're unhappy that you can't use the full capability of the truck at all times, death and destruction bedamned.
They didn't promise you what you thought they did, nor did they sell you it. They sell you a connection "up to 5Mbps" which is true, but they did not anywhere (unless they DID, as some ISPs have) say that you had the right to use it at maximum speed at all times - in fact in most any acceptable use policy/terms of service document you read you will find significant verbiage saying you can't.
If they don't tell you ANY of that in any of their documentation, they are misleading you and your complaint is valid. But I highly doubt that you will find many ISPs that don't have a well-written TOS/AUP document.
ISPs did not deliver bandwidth guarantees, unless you actually have a SIGNED guarantee with a SPECIFIC section saying that the service is DEDICATED to you, you do not have a bandwidth guarantee. You have interpreted things to your benefit, not to the reality. QoS is necessary for many reasons, one of which is that clueless people like you think they have bought a DEDICATED, GUARANTEED service for $45 a month when you can't do a service call for less than $200 apiece, forget about bandwidth.
Newsflash for you: companies need to make profits. All companies.
If it's so easy and profitable to service bandwidth moochers like you, why haven't you started up your own company? And don't tell me you aren't in that category, because your message drips with "poor me, I need unlimited bandwidth or my penis will shrink!"
You have *not* paid for that bandwidth. It is a "best effort" type of bandwidth you pay for, and it is oversold. It has to be. If you are paying less than three figures for 5Mbps then you are not paying for dedicated bandwidth, plain and simple.
I met with these crazy bastards. They really do want to do what they are describing in the article, and what's more, they want the ISPs to pay for it all. Here's what they want:
Access to up to 10% of the ISP's membership at any time with their own GigE (or 10GigE) port which mirrors all data flow that crosses the ISP's network. Yeah, that sounds easy.
Up to seven enforcement agencies including Interpol would have access to that 10% of the membership at any time, all at once if necessary. The ISP would be required to provide that access from remote, possibly meaning that a separate Internet transit grouping faster than the primary ones customers utilize would be required just to ship the data.
Physical access to the ISP's server rooms and network gear at any time by any of the seven agencies.
Full 24/7/365 co-operation and possibly dedicated employees for these tasks, again at the ISP's expense.
And there's more. I asked about 30 questions and in fact was by far the most vocal of the group when it came to the discussion, much to my chagrin. The big players at the table (Bell Canada, Rogers) simply said "this is ridiculous and we'll oppose it to the end," whereas I asked them pointed questions about the whole deal and gave examples of how burdensome the bill could be, especially to a relatively small player. They don't care. Adapt or die.
The cops, as usual, were rubbing their hands in glee. More budget! More cops! Less liberties! Less privacy! Lower quality of life! It's all for the good!
This is simply not true. Bandwidth interconnection points for IP transit cost a *LOT* of money. And the higher the bandwidth you purchase at these points is, the more you will pay. Yes many ISPs do interconnections on their own using fibre but that does not get you out to "the world."
I've heard your line of crap a thousand times and it smells worse every time.
This is such horseshit. Bandwidth is *expensive* when you talk about shipping it all over the Internet. There are so many costs associated with big network connections that it is hard to imagine anyone making money at doing this at all (the minor but clear exception being the big telcos).
Walk through any major network centre and try to count the dollars for the machinery, fibre, and operating labour. The figures are massive. Now factor in the requirement for spares, peering agreements, FIX fees, necessary support contracts from the hardware vendors......free my ass.
What are you talking about? Bandwidth is limited by hardware constraints, line constraints, political restraints, cost restraints, peering restraints, and other reasons. Bandwidth is meaningfully traded by big ISPs, Telcos and governments *every* day.
You're thinking about it wrong here. When you are talking about Internet transit, you are talking about shipping your packets all over the world. Services like that are productized in all corners of the marketplace, and services cost money just like physical products. In the case of Internet transit, you're paying for a certain number of packets per second (often expressed as "bandwidth" allotment in a contract) to pass through a gateway, and usually in a residential service relationship, you are paying for a maximum performance with no set guarantees or dedicated services.
How do people get these concepts so wrong is beyond me.
Uh no, you're wrong. The switching mesh that lets you download pr0n late into the night is already largely at its limits if not completely. There are only so many packets per second that they can switch (route/forward but it's all done by wire speed L7 switch gear now) and the more routes are added in the BGP4 tables, the worse it gets.
Honestly, I guarantee you that until we see *extremely* major changes on the switch hardware side, there isn't much immediate hope that the Internet can scale further. There's much more hope that ISPs can use more localized content, perhaps in a secondary distribution network, to bring the content closer to the consumer.
See the newsgroup can.internet.highspeed. Lots of people with contracts, etc. have been billed for further usage.
Also, 30GB is not a ridiculous cap. If you aren't stealing software, movies, music from the rightful copyright holders (whether you agree it's stealing or not, that's my opinion) then 30GB is more than enough. Very, very few people need more than 30GB of transfers.
Frankly, even at $10 a megabit for bargain-basement bandwidth, unlimited is unworkable. Bell's customer takeup went on a plateau and they wasted no time in moving to a profitable business model from an unprofitable growth phase model.
It's a cycle, you can never "top out" on infrastructure.
This is simply not true. Take a read through various articles re: BGP tables and route/switch fabric limitations facing us today. The very largest switches in a BGP environment (all the Internet backbone systems) have very finite amounts of performance and no path in sight for improving that anytime soon. The best way to deal with it is put the content closer to the customer, but something tells me that it's not going to work out that way in the short term and likely not in the long term.
We are definitely *not* going to see a doubling of performance for switch fabric in the near future. We definitely *could* see a doubling of Internet traffic as a result of IPTV.
This is the kind of thing that is going to strain the Internet's fabric at the seams. Up until now, your typical 1337 torrent freak was pretty uncommon among the general public, so the Internet has coped for the most part. But when the general public starts downloading several gigabytes of video every night, the whole equation will change.
I strongly suspect you will see bit capacities on all ISPs very shortly if they don't have them already. I know Sympatico in Canada was "unlimited" right up until last month when all their DSL circuits went to 5Mbps, and they claimed they would grandfather existing customers with unlimited service - which they turned on within the month.
So... I don't know whether this is a positive or a negative change, but I'm guessing for a lot of peering points and a lot of overloaded switch fabrics, this is a deal breaker.
Actually outside of a small server, it can do great harm. The DNS system is heavily loaded worldwide now... SPF just adds yet another DNS request to each e-mail.
Best of luck to them. Samba implemented SMB before Windows supported it. IBM created SMB, Microsoft took it and added it to Windows with some extensions. At the very worst, they could gripe that the Samba team had reverse-engineered their extensions.
But... Samba is created by an Australian team. DMCA won't reach them. So doing anything about the extensions is impossible. And, Microsoft was forced to document their protocol to the EU commission, which means that there is even documentation for interoperability out there in the public eye.
So in short... no way for Microsoft to stop Samba. Even with their teams of huddled, sweaty lawyers, they're over their head on this one.
[b]Yeah, but MS requires Terminal Services Licenses for the clients. These come with XP but would theoretically need to be purchased from MS if connecting with other clients.[/b]
Nope. I'm not using any Microsoft software on the client. Just need to buy the CAL (which in itself is totally bollocks, IMHO) and you're in. The problem is that M$ also wants to be paid for the client, which is really double dipping.
They could use ICA client as well, but in my experience the ICA client for Linux is pretty particular about the distribution and versions of libraries, whereas you can recompile rdesktop any time you want... and it's in the distributions itself.
We have a single W2K3 system which serves up a couple of legacy apps over RDP (Rdesktop) and integration with Samba, etc. has gone well for us. The standard KDE applications work fine although you do have to choose your distribution, largely because Flash can hang and/or crash Konqueror on a regular basis (blame Flash, not Konq).
The only issue we have run in to is that Windows will only let you log in with RDP so many times before it will blacklist your machine's hostname for not having a genuine MS license. It's a pain but we just more or less randomize the hostname regularly. Good old Micro$oft... they won't even let you administratively remove the blacklisting without delving into the Registry (haven't tried that, but I figure it must be possible). This happens infrequently, by the way, W2k3 will probably accept a good 100 connections before it whines.
Earth to NineNine: they haven't charged for Solaris or Java all along. They are a services and hardware company. If Solaris technologies move to Linux, then Sun has only to be sure that their hardware is the best supported Linux product to make a go of it. This is smart, good business and it's about time Sun figured that out. OpenSolaris won't be closed because for now it's got a lead on SPARC hardware as well as some features which are unique to Sun but over time it is obvious to all but the most clueless that Linux is where the community is putting the majority of effort and one would have to be a complete cluebie not to see that it is not slowing down or conceding defeat on any front.
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But that's simply not true. In your analogy it would be better to say that the truck company sold you a truck that goes 120mph but the road is limited to 45mph, and you're unhappy that you can't use the full capability of the truck at all times, death and destruction bedamned.
They didn't promise you what you thought they did, nor did they sell you it. They sell you a connection "up to 5Mbps" which is true, but they did not anywhere (unless they DID, as some ISPs have) say that you had the right to use it at maximum speed at all times - in fact in most any acceptable use policy/terms of service document you read you will find significant verbiage saying you can't.
If they don't tell you ANY of that in any of their documentation, they are misleading you and your complaint is valid. But I highly doubt that you will find many ISPs that don't have a well-written TOS/AUP document.
ISPs did not deliver bandwidth guarantees, unless you actually have a SIGNED guarantee with a SPECIFIC section saying that the service is DEDICATED to you, you do not have a bandwidth guarantee. You have interpreted things to your benefit, not to the reality. QoS is necessary for many reasons, one of which is that clueless people like you think they have bought a DEDICATED, GUARANTEED service for $45 a month when you can't do a service call for less than $200 apiece, forget about bandwidth.
Newsflash for you: companies need to make profits. All companies.
If it's so easy and profitable to service bandwidth moochers like you, why haven't you started up your own company? And don't tell me you aren't in that category, because your message drips with "poor me, I need unlimited bandwidth or my penis will shrink!"
Sounds good to me. Only, would you honestly pay $50 a megabit per month? That's a very good price for quality IP transit.
I'm curious as to your reaction.
Have you ever considered the possibility that international IP transit is still expensive? No?
MARK PARENT UP PLZ.
You have *not* paid for that bandwidth. It is a "best effort" type of bandwidth you pay for, and it is oversold. It has to be. If you are paying less than three figures for 5Mbps then you are not paying for dedicated bandwidth, plain and simple.
I met with these crazy bastards. They really do want to do what they are describing in the article, and what's more, they want the ISPs to pay for it all. Here's what they want:
Access to up to 10% of the ISP's membership at any time with their own GigE (or 10GigE) port which mirrors all data flow that crosses the ISP's network. Yeah, that sounds easy.
Up to seven enforcement agencies including Interpol would have access to that 10% of the membership at any time, all at once if necessary. The ISP would be required to provide that access from remote, possibly meaning that a separate Internet transit grouping faster than the primary ones customers utilize would be required just to ship the data.
Physical access to the ISP's server rooms and network gear at any time by any of the seven agencies.
Full 24/7/365 co-operation and possibly dedicated employees for these tasks, again at the ISP's expense.
And there's more. I asked about 30 questions and in fact was by far the most vocal of the group when it came to the discussion, much to my chagrin. The big players at the table (Bell Canada, Rogers) simply said "this is ridiculous and we'll oppose it to the end," whereas I asked them pointed questions about the whole deal and gave examples of how burdensome the bill could be, especially to a relatively small player. They don't care. Adapt or die.
The cops, as usual, were rubbing their hands in glee. More budget! More cops! Less liberties! Less privacy! Lower quality of life! It's all for the good!
This is simply not true. Bandwidth interconnection points for IP transit cost a *LOT* of money. And the higher the bandwidth you purchase at these points is, the more you will pay. Yes many ISPs do interconnections on their own using fibre but that does not get you out to "the world."
I've heard your line of crap a thousand times and it smells worse every time.
Bandwidth costs. Period. End of story.
> Except, bandwidth doesn't cost anything.
...free my ass.
This is such horseshit. Bandwidth is *expensive* when you talk about shipping it all over the Internet. There are so many costs associated with big network connections that it is hard to imagine anyone making money at doing this at all (the minor but clear exception being the big telcos).
Walk through any major network centre and try to count the dollars for the machinery, fibre, and operating labour. The figures are massive. Now factor in the requirement for spares, peering agreements, FIX fees, necessary support contracts from the hardware vendors...
What are you talking about? Bandwidth is limited by hardware constraints, line constraints, political restraints, cost restraints, peering restraints, and other reasons. Bandwidth is meaningfully traded by big ISPs, Telcos and governments *every* day.
You're thinking about it wrong here. When you are talking about Internet transit, you are talking about shipping your packets all over the world. Services like that are productized in all corners of the marketplace, and services cost money just like physical products. In the case of Internet transit, you're paying for a certain number of packets per second (often expressed as "bandwidth" allotment in a contract) to pass through a gateway, and usually in a residential service relationship, you are paying for a maximum performance with no set guarantees or dedicated services.
How do people get these concepts so wrong is beyond me.
Because IP space is still being handed out, and usually in smaller pieces now.
Uh no, you're wrong. The switching mesh that lets you download pr0n late into the night is already largely at its limits if not completely. There are only so many packets per second that they can switch (route/forward but it's all done by wire speed L7 switch gear now) and the more routes are added in the BGP4 tables, the worse it gets.
Honestly, I guarantee you that until we see *extremely* major changes on the switch hardware side, there isn't much immediate hope that the Internet can scale further. There's much more hope that ISPs can use more localized content, perhaps in a secondary distribution network, to bring the content closer to the consumer.
See the newsgroup can.internet.highspeed. Lots of people with contracts, etc. have been billed for further usage.
Also, 30GB is not a ridiculous cap. If you aren't stealing software, movies, music from the rightful copyright holders (whether you agree it's stealing or not, that's my opinion) then 30GB is more than enough. Very, very few people need more than 30GB of transfers.
Frankly, even at $10 a megabit for bargain-basement bandwidth, unlimited is unworkable. Bell's customer takeup went on a plateau and they wasted no time in moving to a profitable business model from an unprofitable growth phase model.
Consumer demands will always be fufilled if there is a profitable way to do so.
Yes, but profitable for whom? If the network operators see only costs and Netflix sees only profit, what do you see happening?
It's a cycle, you can never "top out" on infrastructure.
This is simply not true. Take a read through various articles re: BGP tables and route/switch fabric limitations facing us today. The very largest switches in a BGP environment (all the Internet backbone systems) have very finite amounts of performance and no path in sight for improving that anytime soon. The best way to deal with it is put the content closer to the customer, but something tells me that it's not going to work out that way in the short term and likely not in the long term.
We are definitely *not* going to see a doubling of performance for switch fabric in the near future. We definitely *could* see a doubling of Internet traffic as a result of IPTV.
This is the kind of thing that is going to strain the Internet's fabric at the seams. Up until now, your typical 1337 torrent freak was pretty uncommon among the general public, so the Internet has coped for the most part. But when the general public starts downloading several gigabytes of video every night, the whole equation will change.
I strongly suspect you will see bit capacities on all ISPs very shortly if they don't have them already. I know Sympatico in Canada was "unlimited" right up until last month when all their DSL circuits went to 5Mbps, and they claimed they would grandfather existing customers with unlimited service - which they turned on within the month.
So... I don't know whether this is a positive or a negative change, but I'm guessing for a lot of peering points and a lot of overloaded switch fabrics, this is a deal breaker.
Actually outside of a small server, it can do great harm. The DNS system is heavily loaded worldwide now... SPF just adds yet another DNS request to each e-mail.
Best of luck to them. Samba implemented SMB before Windows supported it. IBM created SMB, Microsoft took it and added it to Windows with some extensions. At the very worst, they could gripe that the Samba team had reverse-engineered their extensions.
But... Samba is created by an Australian team. DMCA won't reach them. So doing anything about the extensions is impossible. And, Microsoft was forced to document their protocol to the EU commission, which means that there is even documentation for interoperability out there in the public eye.
So in short... no way for Microsoft to stop Samba. Even with their teams of huddled, sweaty lawyers, they're over their head on this one.
[b]Yeah, but MS requires Terminal Services Licenses for the clients. These come with XP but would theoretically need to be purchased from MS if connecting with other clients.[/b]
Nope. I'm not using any Microsoft software on the client. Just need to buy the CAL (which in itself is totally bollocks, IMHO) and you're in. The problem is that M$ also wants to be paid for the client, which is really double dipping.
They could use ICA client as well, but in my experience the ICA client for Linux is pretty particular about the distribution and versions of libraries, whereas you can recompile rdesktop any time you want... and it's in the distributions itself.
We have a single W2K3 system which serves up a couple of legacy apps over RDP (Rdesktop) and integration with Samba, etc. has gone well for us. The standard KDE applications work fine although you do have to choose your distribution, largely because Flash can hang and/or crash Konqueror on a regular basis (blame Flash, not Konq).
The only issue we have run in to is that Windows will only let you log in with RDP so many times before it will blacklist your machine's hostname for not having a genuine MS license. It's a pain but we just more or less randomize the hostname regularly. Good old Micro$oft... they won't even let you administratively remove the blacklisting without delving into the Registry (haven't tried that, but I figure it must be possible). This happens infrequently, by the way, W2k3 will probably accept a good 100 connections before it whines.
Eclipse? KDevelop? Emacs?
My 15lb schnauzer mini snores like a rock splitter.
You're absolutely right, I chose the wording badly. But in recent years the only charge for Solaris has been for the CD packaging.
Earth to NineNine: they haven't charged for Solaris or Java all along. They are a services and hardware company. If Solaris technologies move to Linux, then Sun has only to be sure that their hardware is the best supported Linux product to make a go of it. This is smart, good business and it's about time Sun figured that out. OpenSolaris won't be closed because for now it's got a lead on SPARC hardware as well as some features which are unique to Sun but over time it is obvious to all but the most clueless that Linux is where the community is putting the majority of effort and one would have to be a complete cluebie not to see that it is not slowing down or conceding defeat on any front.