The average household really won't use much bandwidth. I was surprised by this, when my parents got broadband a couple of years ago - even with 4 persons at home (not including me), they used only some 250 MB (download) per month. In fact, they often used more upload than download, because of sending photo's to an online photo printing service.
They do use e-mail and the web really quite a lot (hours a day), also my younger brothers play (online) games all the time, both browser-based and otherwise.
This was a couple of years ago when youtube didn't exist yet; I'd assume the bandwidth usage would be a bit higher now. But unless you start downloading movies (they rent DVD's instead) and lots of music, you don't use a whole lot apparently.
I used to share an apartment with 2 other students; we averaged about 1 GB/day, including lots of messing about with Linux distro's and the like, but obviously not just that.
So I don't know, I'd rather have the 250 GB/month cap than some undefined FUP. It's hardly like 250 GB is a completely unreasonable limit. You will never unconsciously download that much, except perhaps if you're trying to keep up with alt.binaries.* on a daily basis or something.
(The problem is of course that once there is a strictly defined limit, given the usual lack of competition they will keep lowering it unless you are willing to pay more)
Came here to post this, but seriously, if you can't afford $600 for server-room A/C, which is less than the cost of a single server, you might as well stop your business right now.
Tweak the firmware so the hardware issues are less obvious. Drop to edge quicker.
Yes, except that several European countries do not have an Edge network (we went straight from GPRS to UMTS/3G), so people *will* notice if they do that. The issues have been quite widely reported in the Netherlands, also in mainstream news.
I predict more drama bombs if it turns out this is indeed what the update is mostly about...
The IOC are making themselves look pretty scummy by association at the moment. They seem complicit in various pieces of fraud and dodgy dealings, and perfectly willing to help cover everything up.
I'm sorry, I must have missed something. How is this news?
So clearly this is one of those areas where legislation is not going to help.
So how about creating a telephone that only accepts calls from people in your address book (stored on the phone itself)? In addition it might take messages from anyone else and store their number (from caller ID) with the message, so that you can easily add it to the addressbook if you want.
Also you should be able to set it to not accept calls without caller ID at all, period.
Seems to me that if the problem is as bad as some people here make it sound (where I live, it generally isn't so bad), there should be money to be made from such a thing, if it does not already exist...
"The drug itself is not addictive. The effects of the drug are addictive."
Sir, I hate to say this... in fact, I have never said this before because it IS such a cliche, but please believve me when I say, with absolute conviction, that that is the absolute dumbest thing I have ever heard anyone say in my entire life.
Though luck then, because what he's saying is true. Let me clarify. Some drugs are physically addictive (like alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, heroin etc.). So in those cases, the drug itself *is* addictive.
This is not the case with weed, which is only addictive in the sense of habit-forming (psychologically). When you're in the habit of not doing anything useful with your life and smoking a lot of weed every day, then yes, it can be hard to break this habit. But even then, once you decide to stop, there are no or almost no withdrawal symptoms. In those cases where there are, it's typically from nicotine withdrawal (so same effects as when you quit smoking), because most people mix weed & tobacco.
So in that case, it is indeed the effect of the drug that is addictive, and not the drug itself. And this is not the case for every drug, so the statement is quite meaningful really.
Weed is not physically addictive; breaking the habit (psychologically) is a different matter though. As far as I know, there are no (physical) withdrawal symptoms when you stop smoking weed (I'm not speaking from experience, by the way). Much unlike tobacco or alcohol, which are both highly addictive *and* can cause severe withdrawal symptoms.
So yes, I do drink alcohol, mostly during the weekend, and also smoke a cigar every once in a while. Fine with me, and neither do I care when people smoke weed, say, once or twice a month. If that is "drug abuse", then a lot of people are into some serious trouble;)
B) Your friend is slow. I suggest a rolling machine.
A) "Heh". You must be from the US, where smoking the green stuff at all is automatically equivalent to "drug abuse". So here's a newsflash: alcohol and tobacco are drugs too, and highly physically addictive ones at that (much unlike weed), but using those (in moderation) is fine and does not constitute "drug abuse".
B) True;) Though if it took him 15+ minutes then surely he was not very practiced, so see (A) w.r.t. using the stuff in moderation. That's not abuse;)
So what you essentially say is that a criminal, no matter how "trivial" or unrelated to homicide his transgression may be, is by the very fact that he broke a law a potential mass murderer?
I'm not the OP, but rather, I would suggest the lesson to learn here is even worse: every human being is a potential mass murderer.
How do you think it came to be that our ancestors survived instead of others...are you sure this never involved fighting (killing) so that they could stay alive; sometimes, at the "expense" of others?
All animals display similar behavior (fighting for territory, mates, etc.). It's just one of those things that you don't have to like, but that doesn't make them any less true.
Welcome on the internets. It's called trolling, some people enjoy it.
The solution is simple, it's *your* forum, your rules. So either ignore him, reply something along the lines of "so if you know the subject so well why don't you build a better calculator about it" or simply ban the fucker. It's not that hard really.
So this guy was previously paying $11.34 / 3% which is about $375 per month for electricity? I mean, how can one seriously use so much power? My electrical bill (for 2 persons) is about EUR 40-50/month and that includes about 50% in taxes and other bullshit fees (yes yes, europe). So sure, we do not have (nor need) airconditioning here, which will save a lot of power. But still, I have several computers running most of the day, dish washer, washing machine, tumble dryer (those really use a lot of power), fridge, etc., all the usual appliances.
But a $375 electricity bill while you probably pay about half of what I pay per kWh? Wow...just wow.
That sounds like a nice approach, didn't think of that. I highly doubt that this is how most of such experiments are conducted though.
Possibly valgrind could be adapted to keep track of and report these numbers; if it doesn't already, that is (I have not used it recently, it didn't do this when I last used it a few years ago)
As the server is (already!?) down, I didn't yet have a chance to RTFA. So perhaps it is in the article somewhere, but I couldn't help wondering: how did they actually measure memory usage?
I'm asking because, these days, that pretty much amounts to rocket science.
Different operating systems report memory usage differently, even between different versions of the same OS (yes, I'm looking at you, Vista vs. XP). If they used "top" or its equivalent, it matters a lot whether they looked at real usage, virtual memory size (can be huge but that doesn't say anything) or what-have-you. Some OS's cheat quite a bit in what memory is reported as being "free" or "available", as well. Then we get to questions like "does it include the size of shared libraries", if not, is that fair if the libraries are really only used by that one application? Etc. etc.
So I'm not saying memory using doesn't matter (it very much does), it's just hard to measure it exactly. And, any attempts at doing so, should be documented precisely.
Granted, ruby is supposed to do it, but I mean, seriously - are kids these days so spoiled by JavaScript and VB that this kind of error is a surprise and the biggest bug ever?
1. If the interpreter is supposed to do it, except it then turns out it actually doesn't (or doesn't do it correctly), then yes. 2. If the problem occurs in something that is a part of the language itself, or at least part of its standard library/built-in types, or, however you want to define it, if it is in the set of stuff that everyone who has the language installed has installed, and the functionality is used in pretty much any program ever written in the language, then yes.
There's not much you can do when they invoke these shitty tracking services though.
Sure you can, if you are the sysadmin. Just block loading of remote images in emails (I'm sure there must be a policy setting somewhere to do that), and if anyone complains, say it's being used to distribute viruses, used by spammers, phishers etc. (all of which is actually true) and thus it is a necessary security measure.
I did not even *mention* spammers, at all. I said it can be used to phish for valid account names. Spammers are not interested in those. Crackers/corporate spies, however, certainly might be..
Thunderbird defaults to asking when someone asks for a return receipt; I always change the setting to not even ask but simply never to send them. It is nobodies business to know whether, not to mention when I have first opened their e-mail (which is also, by the way, not the same thing as actually reading it).
In addition, you should set your client to never download external images. This should solve about 99% of these "exploits". As far as I can remember, the company mentioned uses a transparent/invisible image on an intentionally slowed down server that feeds the image byte by byte; usually, mail clients disconnect/cancel the download once you click another message.
I can only imagine "preventing" forwarding to work with really retarded mail clients (I think we all know the one I'm talking about).
The very valid reason why mail servers don't always return a message when a mail address does not exist, is because this can be used to phish for existing usernames - when you don't get a bounce message, you know you've probably hit a valid username. (because for most systems, login/username = default mail alias)
Umm... if you could sell them for an average of $10 each, that'd be $1000. Selling them in a big lot saves lots of time & trouble.
Yes, but who is interested in buying a hundred or so old, used harddisks some of which may or may not even work?
It will take you time putting it up on e-bay, or even more if you're going to sell them somewhere else in person. Then there'll be the shipping, people inquiring about particular disks, brands etc., you'll have to check that they actually work or you will have people getting angry at you, you'll want to securely erase them because who knows what might still be on those disks, etc. etc.
So I'd say just pick out the bigger (newer) ones, give them to some charity project that may have the "free" time to invest in it perhaps; or give them away to family members with older computers. Then buy a couple new disks.
Indeed. The correct answer is "throw them all away and buy 10x1TB drives for $1000" or something to that effect. Unless your time really is worthless, that will save you time, trouble and money.
solar power -> through existing electric infrastructure -> to the battery of your electric car/mower/series of tubes
Yes. You forgot about the "in countries where plentifully available (i.e. not where I happen to live) -> through existing electric infrastructure (~25% loss over longer distances) -> to batteries of your car - I don't know the exact conversion ratio here, but I do know charging batteries is a very, very inefficient process.
Also don't forget to factor in the production cost (both in terms of cold hard $$$ as well as cost to the environment) + expected lifespan of solar panels (20-30 years tops?).
I'm not saying it may not be worth it, but solar energy is not exactly without problems either..
Slashdot Mirror
The average household really won't use much bandwidth. I was surprised by this, when my parents got broadband a couple of years ago - even with 4 persons at home (not including me), they used only some 250 MB (download) per month. In fact, they often used more upload than download, because of sending photo's to an online photo printing service.
They do use e-mail and the web really quite a lot (hours a day), also my younger brothers play (online) games all the time, both browser-based and otherwise.
This was a couple of years ago when youtube didn't exist yet; I'd assume the bandwidth usage would be a bit higher now. But unless you start downloading movies (they rent DVD's instead) and lots of music, you don't use a whole lot apparently.
I used to share an apartment with 2 other students; we averaged about 1 GB/day, including lots of messing about with Linux distro's and the like, but obviously not just that.
So I don't know, I'd rather have the 250 GB/month cap than some undefined FUP. It's hardly like 250 GB is a completely unreasonable limit. You will never unconsciously download that much, except perhaps if you're trying to keep up with alt.binaries.* on a daily basis or something.
(The problem is of course that once there is a strictly defined limit, given the usual lack of competition they will keep lowering it unless you are willing to pay more)
Came here to post this, but seriously, if you can't afford $600 for server-room A/C, which is less than the cost of a single server, you might as well stop your business right now.
Yes, except that several European countries do not have an Edge network (we went straight from GPRS to UMTS/3G), so people *will* notice if they do that. The issues have been quite widely reported in the Netherlands, also in mainstream news.
I predict more drama bombs if it turns out this is indeed what the update is mostly about...
I'm sorry, I must have missed something. How is this news?
So clearly this is one of those areas where legislation is not going to help.
So how about creating a telephone that only accepts calls from people in your address book (stored on the phone itself)? In addition it might take messages from anyone else and store their number (from caller ID) with the message, so that you can easily add it to the addressbook if you want.
Also you should be able to set it to not accept calls without caller ID at all, period.
Seems to me that if the problem is as bad as some people here make it sound (where I live, it generally isn't so bad), there should be money to be made from such a thing, if it does not already exist...
Though luck then, because what he's saying is true. Let me clarify. Some drugs are physically addictive (like alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, heroin etc.). So in those cases, the drug itself *is* addictive.
This is not the case with weed, which is only addictive in the sense of habit-forming (psychologically). When you're in the habit of not doing anything useful with your life and smoking a lot of weed every day, then yes, it can be hard to break this habit. But even then, once you decide to stop, there are no or almost no withdrawal symptoms. In those cases where there are, it's typically from nicotine withdrawal (so same effects as when you quit smoking), because most people mix weed & tobacco.
So in that case, it is indeed the effect of the drug that is addictive, and not the drug itself. And this is not the case for every drug, so the statement is quite meaningful really.
Weed is not physically addictive; breaking the habit (psychologically) is a different matter though. As far as I know, there are no (physical) withdrawal symptoms when you stop smoking weed (I'm not speaking from experience, by the way). Much unlike tobacco or alcohol, which are both highly addictive *and* can cause severe withdrawal symptoms.
So yes, I do drink alcohol, mostly during the weekend, and also smoke a cigar every once in a while. Fine with me, and neither do I care when people smoke weed, say, once or twice a month. If that is "drug abuse", then a lot of people are into some serious trouble ;)
(Not to mention caffeine, by the way!)
A) "Heh". You must be from the US, where smoking the green stuff at all is automatically equivalent to "drug abuse". So here's a newsflash: alcohol and tobacco are drugs too, and highly physically addictive ones at that (much unlike weed), but using those (in moderation) is fine and does not constitute "drug abuse".
B) True ;) Though if it took him 15+ minutes then surely he was not very practiced, so see (A) w.r.t. using the stuff in moderation. That's not abuse ;)
Not only does the emperor wear no clothes. In fact, there is no emperor!
Also, the usual slashdot saying "nothing to see here, please move along" seems to apply more than ever.
I'm not the OP, but rather, I would suggest the lesson to learn here is even worse: every human being is a potential mass murderer.
How do you think it came to be that our ancestors survived instead of others...are you sure this never involved fighting (killing) so that they could stay alive; sometimes, at the "expense" of others?
All animals display similar behavior (fighting for territory, mates, etc.). It's just one of those things that you don't have to like, but that doesn't make them any less true.
Welcome on the internets. It's called trolling, some people enjoy it.
The solution is simple, it's *your* forum, your rules. So either ignore him, reply something along the lines of "so if you know the subject so well why don't you build a better calculator about it" or simply ban the fucker. It's not that hard really.
So this guy was previously paying $11.34 / 3% which is about $375 per month for electricity? I mean, how can one seriously use so much power? My electrical bill (for 2 persons) is about EUR 40-50/month and that includes about 50% in taxes and other bullshit fees (yes yes, europe). So sure, we do not have (nor need) airconditioning here, which will save a lot of power. But still, I have several computers running most of the day, dish washer, washing machine, tumble dryer (those really use a lot of power), fridge, etc., all the usual appliances.
But a $375 electricity bill while you probably pay about half of what I pay per kWh? Wow...just wow.
So I guess this is the new "What does it take to get a PC with Linux [pre-installed]", 2008 revision?
Heh. Figures.
See subject (of my post and the article)
That sounds like a nice approach, didn't think of that. I highly doubt that this is how most of such experiments are conducted though.
Possibly valgrind could be adapted to keep track of and report these numbers; if it doesn't already, that is (I have not used it recently, it didn't do this when I last used it a few years ago)
As the server is (already!?) down, I didn't yet have a chance to RTFA. So perhaps it is in the article somewhere, but I couldn't help wondering: how did they actually measure memory usage?
I'm asking because, these days, that pretty much amounts to rocket science.
Different operating systems report memory usage differently, even between different versions of the same OS (yes, I'm looking at you, Vista vs. XP). If they used "top" or its equivalent, it matters a lot whether they looked at real usage, virtual memory size (can be huge but that doesn't say anything) or what-have-you. Some OS's cheat quite a bit in what memory is reported as being "free" or "available", as well. Then we get to questions like "does it include the size of shared libraries", if not, is that fair if the libraries are really only used by that one application? Etc. etc.
So I'm not saying memory using doesn't matter (it very much does), it's just hard to measure it exactly. And, any attempts at doing so, should be documented precisely.
1. If the interpreter is supposed to do it, except it then turns out it actually doesn't (or doesn't do it correctly), then yes.
2. If the problem occurs in something that is a part of the language itself, or at least part of its standard library/built-in types, or, however you want to define it, if it is in the set of stuff that everyone who has the language installed has installed, and the functionality is used in pretty much any program ever written in the language, then yes.
So, yes.
Sure you can, if you are the sysadmin. Just block loading of remote images in emails (I'm sure there must be a policy setting somewhere to do that), and if anyone complains, say it's being used to distribute viruses, used by spammers, phishers etc. (all of which is actually true) and thus it is a necessary security measure.
I did not even *mention* spammers, at all. I said it can be used to phish for valid account names. Spammers are not interested in those. Crackers/corporate spies, however, certainly might be..
Thunderbird defaults to asking when someone asks for a return receipt; I always change the setting to not even ask but simply never to send them. It is nobodies business to know whether, not to mention when I have first opened their e-mail (which is also, by the way, not the same thing as actually reading it).
In addition, you should set your client to never download external images. This should solve about 99% of these "exploits". As far as I can remember, the company mentioned uses a transparent/invisible image on an intentionally slowed down server that feeds the image byte by byte; usually, mail clients disconnect/cancel the download once you click another message.
I can only imagine "preventing" forwarding to work with really retarded mail clients (I think we all know the one I'm talking about).
The very valid reason why mail servers don't always return a message when a mail address does not exist, is because this can be used to phish for existing usernames - when you don't get a bounce message, you know you've probably hit a valid username. (because for most systems, login/username = default mail alias)
Yes, but who is interested in buying a hundred or so old, used harddisks some of which may or may not even work?
It will take you time putting it up on e-bay, or even more if you're going to sell them somewhere else in person. Then there'll be the shipping, people inquiring about particular disks, brands etc., you'll have to check that they actually work or you will have people getting angry at you, you'll want to securely erase them because who knows what might still be on those disks, etc. etc.
So I'd say just pick out the bigger (newer) ones, give them to some charity project that may have the "free" time to invest in it perhaps; or give them away to family members with older computers. Then buy a couple new disks.
Indeed. The correct answer is "throw them all away and buy 10x1TB drives for $1000" or something to that effect. Unless your time really is worthless, that will save you time, trouble and money.
"These are touchy, emotional issues"
No, they are not. There are very rational and well-explained reasons for being against DRM, closed platforms, vendor lock-in and the like.
I'm not even going to repeat them here, because I assume them to be well-known (certainly to the Slashdot audience).
So that's some nice bullshitting and spin doctoring going on there, but no. Really, no.
Of course just when I lose my mod points I see a worthwhile post....please mod parent up because (s)he's making a lot of sense :)
Yes. You forgot about the "in countries where plentifully available (i.e. not where I happen to live) -> through existing electric infrastructure (~25% loss over longer distances) -> to batteries of your car - I don't know the exact conversion ratio here, but I do know charging batteries is a very, very inefficient process.
Also don't forget to factor in the production cost (both in terms of cold hard $$$ as well as cost to the environment) + expected lifespan of solar panels (20-30 years tops?).
I'm not saying it may not be worth it, but solar energy is not exactly without problems either..