This is great news for rental tenants and others who can't make the numbers work on a solar system. South Australians can register their interest at http://ourenergyplan.sa.gov.au/virtual-power-plant
The privelidge of dunking Linus was auctioned off at Dinner the night before. Linus offered to do the dunking in speedos if the price went over $2500. Rusty Russell helped the bidding by promising to do the dunking in a g-string (thong) if the bidding didn't go over $1500.
Tim Hockin was instrumental in making a mockery of the auction process and having most of the crowd chip in $A50 each to meet the price. This resulted in conference organiser Michael Davies throwing the balls that hit the target and activated the dunking!
ZDNet also reported on the auctions:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39115706,00.htm
We just bought a 7513, it was over 90kg, and required 2 big guys just to move it (at least it has decent carry handles) and 4 people to put in a rack.
Never before have I experienced fear of the thought that a router might fall on top of me. I pity the engineer who had to get this on and off a plane by themselves!
Are all of these anonymous posts coming from Redmond? Someone is trying really hard to spread FUD about FreeBSD.
I recently shifted a 200Gb web cache array from FreeBSD to Debian/2.4 on the basis of popular opinion about linux-vs-BSD performance, and I've been dissapointed with the results. VM stability definately affects quality and long-term performance.
if they can afford to give you 1.5mbs down why only 15k up
If broadband companies cap upload speeds, it gives them buckets of available bandwidth to use for their web hosting departments, which means they can effectively use the same bandwidth twice.
They've got to subsidise ridiculously cheap prices somehow.
So what is it? Do your cellphones kick ass or do they suck? Or are you saying that your cellphones suck but are still better than those in the US?
Both.
Someone was suggesting that mobile phone use was higher in Australia than elsewhere because of bad landlines, which is not true.
The Mobile phone systems available are excellent where there is coverage (most metro areas and towns) but nonexistant outside those areas.
I've traveled around in Australia - and I'm not talking 1980s, I'm talking 2000s and your local telephone system sucks. I was pretty much stuck with a cellphone if I wanted to make any phone calls
Unless you're in the deep outback this sounds very uncommon, I'd be interested to know where you had that experience.. except for some new housing developments where they skimp on copper and multiplex lines..
And yes, my opinions are based on fact - as observed by me as well as by my acquaintances. Australia's problem is because of the size of the country and the low population density, it is hard to deploy land lines all over the country. Cellphones are a much better solution.
What are you basing this on? Did you make those facts up?
In the 80's Australia had the world's most advanced phone system. Even today there is better coverage with copper lines than there is with mobile phones. Cell phones (actually we got rid of cells years ago, its all GSM and some CDMA now) aren't a solution at all in most parts of the country, specifically because of the low population density.
Australians like Mobile phones because they're convenient, and they work well because that's what we've come to expect from our phone system. There used to even be advertising on Australian TV where an aussie Tourist in the US finds the mobile phone system there so appalling when compared to home.
Robert Elz was a little strict on DNS in the early days, but where I work we always get.org.au registrations done within weeks.. he's just friendlier to people who've been a part of the net for years, and do things properly.
It should also be pointed out that Robert Elz was one of the first to connect Australia to the Internet, that's WHY he's in charge of.au
Here's one of his famous usenet postings about the DNS:
1. Thou SHALT NOT send DNS information to the Lord God Kre's
personal mailbox, lest the Wrath of the Lord Kre be kindled
and wax hot against thee.
2. Thou shalt format thy request in a mysterious format known
unto none save the holiest priesthood of the order of DNS, that
thy days may be long in the domain that the Lord Kre hath given thee.
3. If thy requests be incorrectly seconded or ill formatted,
thou shalt NOT be added to the root AU domain but shalt be forever
cast out of the named boot into the outer darkness where there is great
weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
4. Thine entries must be DNS walkable, or naught shall be delegated.
5. Thou shalt wait in vain for a reply. Ever.
6. If the Lord deigneth to reply at all, it is because thou art incredibly
stupid, dullwitted, blind and slow of understanding, and comprehendeth
not such simple DNS concepts; therefore shall He quote thee large
inscriptions of the Holy DNS Bible, so that thy mailbox runneth over.
7. If not large inscriptions of the Holy DNS Bible, then large inscriptions
of the sacred RFC tomes.
8. Thou shalt not complain about the Lord's ineffable doings or Commandments
in news; "My Ways are not your ways, neither are My Thoughts your
thoughts" saith the Lord Kre, and He shall pour out the vials of His scorn
upon thine head from on High in the sight of all the multitudes.
I work for the Australian ISP that's providing ISDN dialups for these guys while they test out here.
Apparently they can actually control the plane via this internet connection, which is scary stuff. It's also been said that they chose an ordinary ISP so that their data would not be travelling across the Australian defence force network (they're staying at the RAAF base near Adelaide), read into that what you will.
Just because a company uses Linux doesn't make them good people.
Did anyone else join the generous Google Affiliates program, and then be disqualified and accused of fraud (resulting in non-payment of commission)?
I work at an ISP that put the google search form on the front page, which resulted in customers doing around 25000 searches for which Google promised $0.02 each.
It would have been much more polite to say "we ran out of money" instead of claiming they were being cheated and not paying up. Then they refuse to answer queries on how they arrived at this conclusion, even though we wanted to continue to promote Google for free.
These are known as rapid-prototyping tools. You take a 3d CAD model , and run it through some software that turns it into layers.
The output is more for looking at than using for anything, but it's still pretty cool how detailed it can be.
It's down for a reason.
on
IT Olympics
·
· Score: 1
dude these guys (the ones that are hosting itolympics.COM) have a 500k link , I work for the company that provides their bandwidth and they are erroring big time:-)
Actually, they have a >1Mb link and a 256K link for that particular web server.
The domain owner has not paid for hosting yet, so the domain isn't up.. odd that slashdot linked to it.
Also odd that no-one else at the company you work for could figure out what was going wrong when a tech support call was placed, yet you're here telling us about the problem without doing anything to fix it. Talking about errors on your customer's links in a public forum is the sort of thing that gets people sued.
Re:US leads and the world follows
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
The problem with this is that having laws in place which everyone routinely breaks, provides yet another way in which the government can harass citizens if it so chooses. That's what regularly happens in the U.S., anyway; I don't know about Australia, and I'm sure it hasn't happened yet with something as new as the censorware law.
The Australian Government chooses to do that with it's tax law, by having such a complex system that one can easily find laws that contradict each other. That way, if they really want to get you, they can.
Countries rarely have anything to do with the Internet and what traffic passes through them.
The Internet is built on commercial arrangemements between ISP's and other Internet Networks, which have nothing to do with whether one country wants to transit another's data. There is no political decision made to route data to the US or not, it's about companies remaining competitive and building better networks than the other guys.
Over here in.au, the government is more determined to destroy the Internet than have anything to do with running it.
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them from claiming credit for anything on the Internet that might get them votes. I imagine that other countries aren't much different.
Gigabit networking isn't much more than a gimmick in most servers, the PCI bus is limited to 132Mb/s, and in lower end stuff the same bus will be shared with the SCSI card that is trying to receive or send the same amount of data.
Any protocol that relies on TCP is going to dissapoint further, as the smallest latency will introduce some sort of rate-limiting effect. Big bandwidth is about multiple streams at once, not about how fast you can download.. leave speeds above 100Mbps to routers and switches for now.
What if this had been a formating virii? Talk about large scale data loss.
Virii that destroy their host do not have very good chances of propogating, it's a natural selection thing.
The same as Ebola really.. since it kills the host, it doesn't have a very good chance of passing itself onto a new host. A computer virus is no different.
Much the same as MS Software, mediocrity is a survival characteristic.
LSA inc have a laser system that not only does up to 155Mbps, it also runs over distances of up to 15km using special liquid crystal lenses. At around $70K, it's not cheap, but is a lot easier than running fibre over an urban area of that distance.
Spare a thought for those who supported the 3d card industry right at its beginning by buying a 3dBlaster of Diamond Edge3d.
The Edge3D came with 4Mb of Vram and Nvidia's NV1 chip that could do some fantastic graphics, including curved surfaces. The support was terrible, and many problems were never addressed. This is the same chip that was in the Sega Saturn systems.
Video Card refused to work with most Dos games. a special driver was required just to use standard VGA.
Complicated install routine to prevent windows from crashing
DirectX drivers never available
OpenGL Drivers never available
No NT or Win98 support (I hear that XFree86 works tho!)
Only games with hi res/framerate were the *4* titles that were coded for the card (and only worked with a sega joystick..)
10 fps was the best framerate for Quake on a P150.
Diamond and Nvidia kept promising new drivers to fix bugs, but none ever eventuated.
A whole bunch of sound and joystick related problems also.
The Card was very expensive, yet as soon as the Voodoo was released you couldn't give them away
This is why you'll find some gamers out there who will never touch an Nvidia product again.
You have obviously never been on one end of a satellite link:-)
I'm on the end of a 1 meg satellite link right now, between the US and Australiam with RTT's of around 460ms. We can definately use this whole connection with multiple streams, but latency prevents the downloads from coming in at faster than 20Kbytes/second. I'm curious to know what sort of equipment and service you're using to get these sorts of results.
Again, the problem is Ping times.. you have a Killer Bandwith with a HORRID ping time... it's 10 times worse than running a Retzal line.
Latency doesn't just affect interactive applications like games and VoIP. TCP uses the latency of packets to determine its window size, and hence the download speed. This is the part of TCP that sends data to your modem at 56Kbps instead of forcing it on you at the full available bandwidth where you can't receive it anyway
With a 400ms RTT (what we see on geosynchronous satellites here) you're looking at a maximum stream speed of 20Kb/s.
So while you might have 2 megs of bandwidth, it's still no killer. You're lucky to see 150Kbps of it at a time unless you're downloading multiple files simultaneously.
Tuvulu's claim to fame is a maximum height above sea level of something like 5 metres. If Global Warming is a reality, these guys are the first to go. If this happens, is the.tv domain still valid?
Slashdot Mirror
This is great news for rental tenants and others who can't make the numbers work on a solar system. South Australians can register their interest at http://ourenergyplan.sa.gov.au/virtual-power-plant
It depends which part of Australia.
l ass=0&type=res&pre=500&cost=40&speed=2048&upspeed= 0&ip=1&conntype=1&conntype=4&conntype=5&rt=1&dd=1& sort=1
You can get a 24 Megabit service for as little as $AU29.95 per month in Adelaide.
http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc-plan.cfm?state=sa&c
Consider the effects of peer pressure, and ask yourself what will happen to children who DON'T get to see RotS.
Tim Hockin was instrumental in making a mockery of the auction process and having most of the crowd chip in $A50 each to meet the price. This resulted in conference organiser Michael Davies throwing the balls that hit the target and activated the dunking!
ZDNet also reported on the auctions:3 ,39115706,00.htm
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,200006173
We just bought a 7513, it was over 90kg, and required 2 big guys just to move it (at least it has decent carry handles) and 4 people to put in a rack.
Never before have I experienced fear of the thought that a router might fall on top of me. I pity the engineer who had to get this on and off a plane by themselves!
This is trivial on a Cisco router using CEF;
Just add:
ip verify unicast reverse-path
to customer-facing interfaces.
Are all of these anonymous posts coming from Redmond? Someone is trying really hard to spread FUD about FreeBSD.
I recently shifted a 200Gb web cache array from FreeBSD to Debian/2.4 on the basis of popular opinion about linux-vs-BSD performance, and I've been dissapointed with the results. VM stability definately affects quality and long-term performance.
If broadband companies cap upload speeds, it gives them buckets of available bandwidth to use for their web hosting departments, which means they can effectively use the same bandwidth twice.
They've got to subsidise ridiculously cheap prices somehow.
Both.
Someone was suggesting that mobile phone use was higher in Australia than elsewhere because of bad landlines, which is not true.
The Mobile phone systems available are excellent where there is coverage (most metro areas and towns) but nonexistant outside those areas.
I've traveled around in Australia - and I'm not talking 1980s, I'm talking 2000s and your local telephone system sucks. I was pretty much stuck with a cellphone if I wanted to make any phone calls
Unless you're in the deep outback this sounds very uncommon, I'd be interested to know where you had that experience .. except for some new housing developments where they skimp on copper and multiplex lines..
What are you basing this on? Did you make those facts up?
In the 80's Australia had the world's most advanced phone system. Even today there is better coverage with copper lines than there is with mobile phones. Cell phones (actually we got rid of cells years ago, its all GSM and some CDMA now) aren't a solution at all in most parts of the country, specifically because of the low population density.
Australians like Mobile phones because they're convenient, and they work well because that's what we've come to expect from our phone system. There used to even be advertising on Australian TV where an aussie Tourist in the US finds the mobile phone system there so appalling when compared to home.
It should also be pointed out that Robert Elz was one of the first to connect Australia to the Internet, that's WHY he's in charge of
Here's one of his famous usenet postings about the DNS:
Apparently they can actually control the plane via this internet connection, which is scary stuff. It's also been said that they chose an ordinary ISP so that their data would not be travelling across the Australian defence force network (they're staying at the RAAF base near Adelaide), read into that what you will.
Did anyone else join the generous Google Affiliates program, and then be disqualified and accused of fraud (resulting in non-payment of commission)?
I work at an ISP that put the google search form on the front page, which resulted in customers doing around 25000 searches for which Google promised $0.02 each.
It would have been much more polite to say "we ran out of money" instead of claiming they were being cheated and not paying up. Then they refuse to answer queries on how they arrived at this conclusion, even though we wanted to continue to promote Google for free.
The output is more for looking at than using for anything, but it's still pretty cool how detailed it can be.
Actually, they have a >1Mb link and a 256K link for that particular web server.
The domain owner has not paid for hosting yet, so the domain isn't up .. odd that slashdot linked to it.
Also odd that no-one else at the company you work for could figure out what was going wrong when a tech support call was placed, yet you're here telling us about the problem without doing anything to fix it. Talking about errors on your customer's links in a public forum is the sort of thing that gets people sued.
The Australian Government chooses to do that with it's tax law, by having such a complex system that one can easily find laws that contradict each other. That way, if they really want to get you, they can.
The Internet is built on commercial arrangemements between ISP's and other Internet Networks, which have nothing to do with whether one country wants to transit another's data. There is no political decision made to route data to the US or not, it's about companies remaining competitive and building better networks than the other guys.
Over here in .au, the government is more determined to destroy the Internet than have anything to do with running it.
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them from claiming credit for anything on the Internet that might get them votes. I imagine that other countries aren't much different.
Any protocol that relies on TCP is going to dissapoint further, as the smallest latency will introduce some sort of rate-limiting effect. Big bandwidth is about multiple streams at once, not about how fast you can download .. leave speeds above 100Mbps to routers and switches for now.
Virii that destroy their host do not have very good chances of propogating, it's a natural selection thing.
The same as Ebola really .. since it kills the host, it doesn't have a very good chance of passing itself onto a new host. A computer virus is no different.
Much the same as MS Software, mediocrity is a survival characteristic.
Then rebooting or turning off would be just like the end of a movie. :)
LSA inc have a laser system that not only does up to 155Mbps, it also runs over distances of up to 15km using special liquid crystal lenses. At around $70K, it's not cheap, but is a lot easier than running fibre over an urban area of that distance.
The Edge3D came with 4Mb of Vram and Nvidia's NV1 chip that could do some fantastic graphics, including curved surfaces. The support was terrible, and many problems were never addressed. This is the same chip that was in the Sega Saturn systems.
Video Card refused to work with most Dos games. a special driver was required just to use standard VGA.
Complicated install routine to prevent windows from crashing
DirectX drivers never available
OpenGL Drivers never available
No NT or Win98 support (I hear that XFree86 works tho!)
Only games with hi res/framerate were the *4* titles that were coded for the card (and only worked with a sega joystick..)
10 fps was the best framerate for Quake on a P150.
Diamond and Nvidia kept promising new drivers to fix bugs, but none ever eventuated.
A whole bunch of sound and joystick related problems also.
The Card was very expensive, yet as soon as the Voodoo was released you couldn't give them away
This is why you'll find some gamers out there who will never touch an Nvidia product again.
I'm on the end of a 1 meg satellite link right now, between the US and Australiam with RTT's of around 460ms. We can definately use this whole connection with multiple streams, but latency prevents the downloads from coming in at faster than 20Kbytes/second.
I'm curious to know what sort of equipment and service you're using to get these sorts of results.
Latency doesn't just affect interactive applications like games and VoIP. TCP uses the latency of packets to determine its window size, and hence the download speed. This is the part of TCP that sends data to your modem at 56Kbps instead of forcing it on you at the full available bandwidth where you can't receive it anyway
With a 400ms RTT (what we see on geosynchronous satellites here) you're looking at a maximum stream speed of 20Kb/s.
So while you might have 2 megs of bandwidth, it's still no killer. You're lucky to see 150Kbps of it at a time unless you're downloading multiple files simultaneously.
Tuvulu's claim to fame is a maximum height above sea level of something like 5 metres. .tv domain still valid?
If Global Warming is a reality, these guys are the first to go.
If this happens, is the