Interestingly, as a tier-2/regional operator, these cache devices are hard to get because they fill a certain role. We have worked with Netflix to try and get the caching device, and it just doesn't do any good if you have less than 3-4gbps of pure Netflix traffic. It does not work because the caches have to... populate the cache! They do this regularly, and the do it overnight -- but it is an absurd amount of data, especially when there are multiple bitrates. I am told that the cache runs > 1.5gbps to populate, almost nightly. So if you don't push significantly more than that, it is not a cost winner.
As a transit provider/local ISP/bandwidth buyer, 3+gbps is a lot of traffic. We found it mildly more attractive to buy a 10gbps wave to a Netflix-available peering point and peer directly with them than to buy 2+gbps of transit from Level3/Cogent/HE, especially factoring in last mile costs.
Also of note, my own traffic engineering testing shows that Netflix *strongly* prefers Hurricane Electric (as of last fall), then Cogent, then Level3.
There is a really horrible hole between 1gbps and 10gbps of consumption that there isn't a good solution for. Netflix knows about it, but it is a very difficult target to hit -- it may be cheaper to buy transit, or it may not be, but hardware isn't the answer. This same situation exists for all CDNs - limelight, edgecast, akamai, L3.
As usual, peering is the answer. Our customers pay us to bring them Netflix... so we buy a wave and backhaul it hundreds of miles to satisfy them. It'd be ridiculous for me to charge Netflix when my customers are asking for it!
Like most people on/. I carry a phone that has a handy-dandy built-in notes app and a calendar.
I use those tools, and with the aid of categorizing things as (not)?urgent|important (thanks 7 habits!), I do a great job of staying on top of my life -- from learning to play the guitar to today's work deliverables.
Things that are *important* get stuck into my Notes for the day, and added to my to-do-list when I get to a computer. Urgent or time-sensitive things get calendared for a specific time with notes attached immediately.
Another huge thing I do is/routine/. If I water the lawn every morning at 7:00am, I don't ever wonder what I'm doing at that time of day: I'm watering the lawn. Same goes for checking my email -- I do that on a very set schedule so that I can focus on whatever else in the meantime.
I think it was in Memento where it was said that Habits and routine make life livable. Throw in some discipline and you should never forget to buy your girl flowers ever again:D
This is nothing new. Hosted/PBXs have been getting blown up by dedicated/VPS/cloud/whatever for ages now, all attempting to call farawayistan or $asian_country. Drop at the edge, drop at the edge.
Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.
Normally you just download the software and are sort of pleasantly surprised when you find a new feature, or similarly disappointed when there are none. In this case, it actually makes me/want/ to download FF3 and get to having some of those neat widgets.
The opportunities for this kind of technology are limitless. Really - books, notes, travel, magazines, anything can be digitized and made incredibly accessible.
Not to mention there is no doubt that the low power nature of it makes it ready for solar power, making it an incredible communication tool in non-power friendly places, like say deserts or jungle for military use. The fact that it's flexible makes it able to handle harsh environments - simply roll it up, stick it in a tube and keep on going. Computer on top of Everest, anyone?
Really, this is an incredible breakthrough and deserves plenty of attention; I'm not sure the market is ready for it yet, but this kind of technology will absolutely become a part of our day-to-day lives in short order.
As a network guy myself, I find that I am very much behind the scenes, as compared to the general programmer. I did a stint at a medium-sized business and the programmers were always way higher on the list than the network folks.
I think the main reason is that the newtork-engineer-to-employee ratio is WAY higher than the programmer-to-employee ratio. For example, a non-IT oriented SMB with 500 employees that has it's internal programming may have 5-10 programmers, whereas they *may* have 2 network engineers, if that. They'll have a handful of IT support people, 8-12 sysadmins, a decent amount of programmers, but very, very few network engineers -- assuming that they don't outsource that part.
I know that some of the larger companies here in Colorado have exactly one network engineer, and maybe 1-2 hands-on network people. Because it is really a niche job, you have to be really good at what you do to make it anywhere.
I think the difference is that with the Government CAN take your money without marketing. When your opinion has little effect on whether or not someone can do something, and then even less effect on what happens to that money once it's gone, apathy reigns.
Yes, I know that voting is the method to change those two things, but a lot of people see it as an 8000lbs gorilla that can and will do whatever the heck it wants.
WOW, all I can say is that it's a shame... there is nothing like books when it comes to learning; it's not easy to highlight, markup and take notes on a public computer or a loaned out laptop.
For shame, UT - a bad start onto a dangerous slippery slope.
I own and operate a cybercafe on the side. By "operate" I mean I'm there one or two nights a week. It makes a decent amount of side income, but I am unsure if my own full-time business is/was worth the work.
I think if I was doing something that was just partial-time, more "on demand", such as being an electrician or plumber, I'd be a lot happier. Those jobs come along as they come along, time is allotted as required, and that's it. With a full time business, it's a LOT more scheduled time and responsibility.
In my experience - which is a lot, considering that I own a cybercafe and am involved in one of the largest LAN events in America (everlan.net) - hardware and software companies are loathe to sponsor or advertise in cybercafes, and are -MUCH- more likely to invest in large, media-garnering LAN events like Quakecon/CPL/EverLAN/etc.
You have to realize that when a person is paying $3/hr to play a game at a cafe, what they/aren't/ doing is spending $55 on xyz's latest title, and they/aren't/ buying the hottest newest $500 video card. That pisses off the megacorps a lot, and hence, they really have very little to do with cybercafes besides trying to bend them over with insane licensing fees.
It took MONTHS of negotiation to get wholesale pricing on ATI video cards, and even longer to get five, yes, five free processors from AMD -- at the cost that all of our promo banners and ads have their name on them, our store is littered with their names, and we still had to purchase TONS of their gear to get anything free.
And don't get me started on how horrible publishers are at working with cybercafes. iGames is a large step in the right direction by providing a unified front for cybercafes nation (world) wide; in my experience the only company that didn't try to rape us is id games - $500/title and 5% of any revenue generated by the game over $50,000/yr.
Keep in mind that the Steam CyberCafe setup costs $10 per PC, per month. Blizzards games are $3k per year for up to 20 machines, and linear from there. Almost every publishing house has horrifically expensive licensing fees for cafes.
$30k a month for just steam/counter-strike,the world's most popular game, will add up quickly, especially when they make you pay in three-month increments.
I own a cybercafe in colorado, and I'll tell you from first hand experience that the gaming community, although incredibly loyal and a ton of fun, cannot financially support such a behemoth.
300 Stations? I know there is one place in NY (??) that has something like that, and the only reason they are in business is because they/Don't/ cater to gamers, but instead to the joesixpacks.
Sure, the coasts are a lot more populated and have a higher per-capita of hardcore gamers who will pay to play, but with only ~20 stations, it will take them a -long- time to break out of the red incurred by the initial investment. We've been open for 14 months now, and we're still paying off our $1200 PCs, and we're the most popular gaming center in town! We charge $3/hr for members, and $4/hr for walk-ins, and we get by with very modest paychecks. We would surely be unable to stay open if our *screens* costed $1k apeice, not to mention the $2k+ alienware boxes they have, even at $5/hr.
I personally seriously doubt that this is ever going to happen. I've had relations with Usurf before and I have nothing positive to say about their management or their tech staff -- the vast majority of which is outsourced to other companies.
Usurf was recently delisted from NASDAQ because they didn't meet the minimum listing requirements. Their stock was near worthless, and is now traded over the counter. Usurf is also currently in receivership to Pipeline Networks, a Colorado ISP they "purchased" and never paid for. There is a _long_ list of local Colorado Springs companies that have been burned by them.
I like the grand aspirations, but I have serious doubts about their ability to produce.
If it didn't start out with 6 pages of "blah blah blah, journalism sucks, people suck, society sucks, blah blah blah, rise above social norms, do your own thing, blah blah blah".
It's really not that big of an issue, as bandwidth doesn't cost us much money. What we tried to eliminate was JoeSixPack turning on his laptop and instantly getting free service, and then us not knowing about it. Additionally, it keeps track of each user independently while leveraging all of our existing ISP resources.
Our solution simply makes our service unusable unless you A) login or B) do a lot of work. No network is impenetrable, but we're wagering that 99% of people will go with A) getting a login instead of spending hours B) hacking our network.
*That* is why we're not going hogwild with IPSec tunnels, or pptp, or anything of the sort - sure, we anticipate it, but instead of making it hard on us and our customers, we instead anticipated losing some service to miscreants.
Yes, unbelievably more expensive. If somebody wants to spoof a user (which they have to do to get online), then they can get up to 256kbps. If we oversell our t1 6 to 1, that makes for 36 slots. You take one with your hack. Worst case, you actually take up 1/6th of the bandwidth, costing us right around $60. Then you utilize about $6 of upstream bandwidth. So *worst* case, Mr. Hacker costs us $66 if he goes at it for a *whole month*.
That's less than 1 day's pay for a tech support guy. Backend operating service and support costs *way* more than the resources that user actually consumes.
We're not too concerned if somebody hops on for free occasionally - if it happens too often and people find out about it, the bad rap costs *a lot* more than any stolen service.
Actually, that is not true. What *did* happen is that it was written in vi, and that is not web friendly. I tried 'ing everything, and that did not work. So I did a find replace on \r\n and changed it to \r\n, resulting in
at the beginning of every line.
And I used "arial", which is a standard web font.
And yes, I used Photoshop 5 on windows to make the pics.
We partner with a local HotSpot provider called Unwired Access (http://www.unwiredaccess.net) that does this, and this is how it works:
The *nix machine by default denies all traffic and null routes everything, except for clients going to the login page. JoeSixPack fires up his machine, leases an IP from the *nix machine. He fires up his browser, and the *nix machine automatically forwards all HTTP requests to the local login-portal. JoeSixPack signs in, the *nix machine authenticates, then pokes holes in the firewall for that client and starts up timers and whatnot. As soon as JoeSixPack signs off, the *nix machine closes the firewall holes.
You could use SSL forms and authentciation and such, but tying all that into RADIUS auth/accounting would require some custom programming, but this setup also has a lot of room for abuse as there is no per-packet encryption, no tunneling, nada.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, as a tier-2/regional operator, these cache devices are hard to get because they fill a certain role. We have worked with Netflix to try and get the caching device, and it just doesn't do any good if you have less than 3-4gbps of pure Netflix traffic. It does not work because the caches have to ... populate the cache! They do this regularly, and the do it overnight -- but it is an absurd amount of data, especially when there are multiple bitrates. I am told that the cache runs > 1.5gbps to populate, almost nightly. So if you don't push significantly more than that, it is not a cost winner.
As a transit provider/local ISP/bandwidth buyer, 3+gbps is a lot of traffic. We found it mildly more attractive to buy a 10gbps wave to a Netflix-available peering point and peer directly with them than to buy 2+gbps of transit from Level3/Cogent/HE, especially factoring in last mile costs.
Also of note, my own traffic engineering testing shows that Netflix *strongly* prefers Hurricane Electric (as of last fall), then Cogent, then Level3.
There is a really horrible hole between 1gbps and 10gbps of consumption that there isn't a good solution for. Netflix knows about it, but it is a very difficult target to hit -- it may be cheaper to buy transit, or it may not be, but hardware isn't the answer. This same situation exists for all CDNs - limelight, edgecast, akamai, L3.
As usual, peering is the answer. Our customers pay us to bring them Netflix ... so we buy a wave and backhaul it hundreds of miles to satisfy them. It'd be ridiculous for me to charge Netflix when my customers are asking for it!
This. Pilot G2 ultrafine (.38) are fantastic! Very narrow tip, tough, gel ink so no blobbing, instant drying. Very nice.
Like most people on /. I carry a phone that has a handy-dandy built-in notes app and a calendar.
I use those tools, and with the aid of categorizing things as (not)?urgent|important (thanks 7 habits!), I do a great job of staying on top of my life -- from learning to play the guitar to today's work deliverables.
Things that are *important* get stuck into my Notes for the day, and added to my to-do-list when I get to a computer. Urgent or time-sensitive things get calendared for a specific time with notes attached immediately.
Another huge thing I do is /routine/. If I water the lawn every morning at 7:00am, I don't ever wonder what I'm doing at that time of day: I'm watering the lawn. Same goes for checking my email -- I do that on a very set schedule so that I can focus on whatever else in the meantime.
I think it was in Memento where it was said that Habits and routine make life livable. Throw in some discipline and you should never forget to buy your girl flowers ever again :D
This is nothing new. Hosted/PBXs have been getting blown up by dedicated/VPS/cloud/whatever for ages now, all attempting to call farawayistan or $asian_country. Drop at the edge, drop at the edge.
RK
Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.
/want/ to download FF3 and get to having some of those neat widgets.
Normally you just download the software and are sort of pleasantly surprised when you find a new feature, or similarly disappointed when there are none. In this case, it actually makes me
Indeed, all of my traceroutes from all over end terminating via Savvis, and that makes me cry.
I don't post on slashdot much, but this had me shooting coffee out of my nose this morning. Thanks for the laugh :)
The opportunities for this kind of technology are limitless. Really - books, notes, travel, magazines, anything can be digitized and made incredibly accessible.
Not to mention there is no doubt that the low power nature of it makes it ready for solar power, making it an incredible communication tool in non-power friendly places, like say deserts or jungle for military use. The fact that it's flexible makes it able to handle harsh environments - simply roll it up, stick it in a tube and keep on going. Computer on top of Everest, anyone?
Really, this is an incredible breakthrough and deserves plenty of attention; I'm not sure the market is ready for it yet, but this kind of technology will absolutely become a part of our day-to-day lives in short order.
As a network guy myself, I find that I am very much behind the scenes, as compared to the general programmer. I did a stint at a medium-sized business and the programmers were always way higher on the list than the network folks.
I think the main reason is that the newtork-engineer-to-employee ratio is WAY higher than the programmer-to-employee ratio. For example, a non-IT oriented SMB with 500 employees that has it's internal programming may have 5-10 programmers, whereas they *may* have 2 network engineers, if that. They'll have a handful of IT support people, 8-12 sysadmins, a decent amount of programmers, but very, very few network engineers -- assuming that they don't outsource that part.
I know that some of the larger companies here in Colorado have exactly one network engineer, and maybe 1-2 hands-on network people. Because it is really a niche job, you have to be really good at what you do to make it anywhere.
I think the difference is that with the Government CAN take your money without marketing. When your opinion has little effect on whether or not someone can do something, and then even less effect on what happens to that money once it's gone, apathy reigns.
Yes, I know that voting is the method to change those two things, but a lot of people see it as an 8000lbs gorilla that can and will do whatever the heck it wants.
WOW, all I can say is that it's a shame ... there is nothing like books when it comes to learning; it's not easy to highlight, markup and take notes on a public computer or a loaned out laptop.
For shame, UT - a bad start onto a dangerous slippery slope.
I own and operate a cybercafe on the side. By "operate" I mean I'm there one or two nights a week. It makes a decent amount of side income, but I am unsure if my own full-time business is/was worth the work.
I think if I was doing something that was just partial-time, more "on demand", such as being an electrician or plumber, I'd be a lot happier. Those jobs come along as they come along, time is allotted as required, and that's it. With a full time business, it's a LOT more scheduled time and responsibility.
randal
Uh, I own a cybercafe, thanks. Licensing is outrageously expensive.
Sure, you can get copies of windows and such for cheap, but the game publishers dole out slack very sparingly.
In my experience - which is a lot, considering that I own a cybercafe and am involved in one of the largest LAN events in America (everlan.net) - hardware and software companies are loathe to sponsor or advertise in cybercafes, and are -MUCH- more likely to invest in large, media-garnering LAN events like Quakecon/CPL/EverLAN/etc.
/aren't/ doing is spending $55 on xyz's latest title, and they /aren't/ buying the hottest newest $500 video card. That pisses off the megacorps a lot, and hence, they really have very little to do with cybercafes besides trying to bend them over with insane licensing fees.
You have to realize that when a person is paying $3/hr to play a game at a cafe, what they
It took MONTHS of negotiation to get wholesale pricing on ATI video cards, and even longer to get five, yes, five free processors from AMD -- at the cost that all of our promo banners and ads have their name on them, our store is littered with their names, and we still had to purchase TONS of their gear to get anything free.
And don't get me started on how horrible publishers are at working with cybercafes. iGames is a large step in the right direction by providing a unified front for cybercafes nation (world) wide; in my experience the only company that didn't try to rape us is id games - $500/title and 5% of any revenue generated by the game over $50,000/yr.
randal
Keep in mind that the Steam CyberCafe setup costs $10 per PC, per month. Blizzards games are $3k per year for up to 20 machines, and linear from there. Almost every publishing house has horrifically expensive licensing fees for cafes.
$30k a month for just steam/counter-strike,the world's most popular game, will add up quickly, especially when they make you pay in three-month increments.
randal
I own a cybercafe in colorado, and I'll tell you from first hand experience that the gaming community, although incredibly loyal and a ton of fun, cannot financially support such a behemoth.
/Don't/ cater to gamers, but instead to the joesixpacks.
300 Stations? I know there is one place in NY (??) that has something like that, and the only reason they are in business is because they
Sure, the coasts are a lot more populated and have a higher per-capita of hardcore gamers who will pay to play, but with only ~20 stations, it will take them a -long- time to break out of the red incurred by the initial investment. We've been open for 14 months now, and we're still paying off our $1200 PCs, and we're the most popular gaming center in town! We charge $3/hr for members, and $4/hr for walk-ins, and we get by with very modest paychecks. We would surely be unable to stay open if our *screens* costed $1k apeice, not to mention the $2k+ alienware boxes they have, even at $5/hr.
It's a great idea, but man. Good luck guys.
I personally seriously doubt that this is ever going to happen. I've had relations with Usurf before and I have nothing positive to say about their management or their tech staff -- the vast majority of which is outsourced to other companies.
Usurf was recently delisted from NASDAQ because they didn't meet the minimum listing requirements. Their stock was near worthless, and is now traded over the counter. Usurf is also currently in receivership to Pipeline Networks, a Colorado ISP they "purchased" and never paid for. There is a _long_ list of local Colorado Springs companies that have been burned by them.
I like the grand aspirations, but I have serious doubts about their ability to produce.
Receivership Link
Recent (horrible) financials
Bleak 10QSB filing
I just put this on my postfix mail server ... works fine: /subject:.*sexual(ly)?.*explicit.*/i REJECT Porn SPAM
Is it just me or does it sound like michael has an issue with Verisign? ;-)
If it didn't start out with 6 pages of "blah blah blah, journalism sucks, people suck, society sucks, blah blah blah, rise above social norms, do your own thing, blah blah blah".
A little to self-righteous and meandering for me.
randal
It's really not that big of an issue, as bandwidth doesn't cost us much money. What we tried to eliminate was JoeSixPack turning on his laptop and instantly getting free service, and then us not knowing about it. Additionally, it keeps track of each user independently while leveraging all of our existing ISP resources.
Our solution simply makes our service unusable unless you A) login or B) do a lot of work. No network is impenetrable, but we're wagering that 99% of people will go with A) getting a login instead of spending hours B) hacking our network.
*That* is why we're not going hogwild with IPSec tunnels, or pptp, or anything of the sort - sure, we anticipate it, but instead of making it hard on us and our customers, we instead anticipated losing some service to miscreants.
randal
Yes, unbelievably more expensive. If somebody wants to spoof a user (which they have to do to get online), then they can get up to 256kbps. If we oversell our t1 6 to 1, that makes for 36 slots. You take one with your hack. Worst case, you actually take up 1/6th of the bandwidth, costing us right around $60. Then you utilize about $6 of upstream bandwidth. So *worst* case, Mr. Hacker costs us $66 if he goes at it for a *whole month*.
That's less than 1 day's pay for a tech support guy. Backend operating service and support costs *way* more than the resources that user actually consumes.
We're not too concerned if somebody hops on for free occasionally - if it happens too often and people find out about it, the bad rap costs *a lot* more than any stolen service.
randal
meh, that is ...
\r\n changed to < br>\r\n
Actually, that is not true. What *did* happen is that it was written in vi, and that is not web friendly. I tried 'ing everything, and that did not work. So I did a find replace on \r\n and changed it to
\r\n, resulting in
at the beginning of every line.
And I used "arial", which is a standard web font.
And yes, I used Photoshop 5 on windows to make the pics.
randal
We partner with a local HotSpot provider called Unwired Access (http://www.unwiredaccess.net) that does this, and this is how it works:
The *nix machine by default denies all traffic and null routes everything, except for clients going to the login page. JoeSixPack fires up his machine, leases an IP from the *nix machine. He fires up his browser, and the *nix machine automatically forwards all HTTP requests to the local login-portal. JoeSixPack signs in, the *nix machine authenticates, then pokes holes in the firewall for that client and starts up timers and whatnot. As soon as JoeSixPack signs off, the *nix machine closes the firewall holes.
You could use SSL forms and authentciation and such, but tying all that into RADIUS auth/accounting would require some custom programming, but this setup also has a lot of room for abuse as there is no per-packet encryption, no tunneling, nada.
randal