I live in Rhode Island, where we have the highest national unemployment rate in the U.S., needless to say, we have a -ton- of foreclosures.
We also saw most of our urban houses built between 1900 and 1960, so there's not a lot of PVC pipes around here.
One of my coworkers is looking for a house now that he's established and houses are cheap. He has looked at 25 houses, and only five had pipes in them.
The big problem is that if a house doesn't have any pipes in it, you can't just move in, set up camp, and start fixing it up; you have to outlay a tremendous amount of capital just to have a toilet, sink, bath, and heat. Houses might be 'cheap' here now, but a stripped house is far too pricey to get involved with unless you have gobs of cash to throw around.
Or they could have thrown the power budget out the window and used a nuclear-decay power source, like a lot of satellites do.
Now that -power availability- seems to be the biggest issue with these landers, maybe we can build one with a power source that provides years of solid performance instead of solar panels.
The devices wouldn't even be radioactive by the Mars gets crowded anyway.
Most people are surprised to find that I smoke. I guess sneaking out once or twice during a nine hour day isn't much, but I'm still a smoker. Most coworkers don't know that when I go up to get a coffee, I'm going out to have a smoke on the way back.
Last week my aunt and uncle, who I lived (as a smoker) next door to for five years and see every weekend 'found out' that I smoked.
Also, I have a tendency to brush my teeth and wash my hands after I smoke, that probably helps. And I never smoke inside, because that makes your clothes/pets/house smell.
I agree with your point of view. I live in a state where prostitution is -totally legal-, provided it's not promoted or enforced by management, and done completely indoors.
I live up the street from a place you can get a $60 handjob and $120 sex, and it's legal.
Most residents don't even know that this is the case here, since it's all very quiet and private, but it's a huge industry. We do -not- have a problem with 'streetwalkers' here, though, which is nice.
So long and short, we have legal prostitution, the world hasn't ended, and we have no outdoor streetwalkers or burgeoning women's prisons because of it. Most people don't know about it, and those who find out that it's legal don't usually go off on a rant about having to end it, since things are fine the way they are.
By the way, the state is Rhode Island, and this stuff happens at virtually every 'spa' and almost every strip club here. Come visit!
I have a better idea, let's de-centralize our government and let -federal- issues only cover stuff like National Defense.
It's sick how much of my taxes go from my paycheck direct to Washington D.C., then back to my state. I'd rather pay more state taxes and less federal, and keep the money in my general area.
A side-effect of this is that the burden of legislation and governance would be shifted from 500 or so people in D.C. back to my state legislature, where people are just as scummy, but at least I can access them easily (I can call my state rep and have an appointment with him if I ask nicely enough).
I really don't understand why we're all letting so much money get siphoned to Washington just so we can have our congressmen run around and fight over it.
Or ask if you can remote-in via RDP to a server (or even an XP box) running terminal services. RDesktop is a lot less resource-intensive than running Windows/Outlook in a VM.
Someone in the company has to have a Windows box that can accept incoming connections.
Heck, grab an old dusty PC, toss Windows on it, see if you can put it behind your monitor, then RDP or VNC to it.
It's 2008, I have eleven computers in my cube; people literally do not know where to throw all their Pentium 4s. I just sent an email to our director asking him to clarify what the procedure is for getting rid of all this stuff is, since I virtualize pretty much everything now.
I asked the president of an engineering firm that I work for about this. He ships racks of boxes, each holding DSP boards on backplanes, each backplane has it's own PSU.
When I asked him why he doesn't just have one or two -big- power supplies in the unit, he said that he tried that, but the cost of the non-standard PSU was higher than all the ATX PSUs put together, and then some, and replacing the units when they eventually fail would be tricky, as opposed to just stocking more ATX PSUs.
I agree that it's a good idea, but until there's enough volume of large multi-output PSUs shipping, the cost of manufacture makes the product unworkable (unless you think big-picture and want to spend more up front for power savings over the whole unit's life).
Generally, the people who use the hardware aren't the ones building it, and buyers usually go for the lowest bid.
I don't think you have a full understanding of what you can do with QoS then. There's a way for you to enjoy full bandwidth -and- for the 'copyrighted-media thieves' (and people like me who just want to download legal torrents) to have unhindered access to the 'net at the same time.
The answer is to prioritize 'regular' traffic above P2P. Since Comcast is already -identifying- the P2P streams, all they have to do is make them a lower priority than other traffic, which they should be doing anyway, since it makes the whole medium feel more 'snappy'.
I don't download or share media, since I disagree with it on ethical terms, but I still think Comcast is doing 'a bad thing' by using the method they do to 'manage' P2P.
Comcast has the FCC wrapped around the idea that it's -slowing- P2P traffic, that it's packet-shaping or throttling P2P. I would be totally fine if they just did that, it's their network, and it -should- be prioritizing VoIP, ICMP, interactive services, browsing, and file transfers (in that order) over P2P. What they are doing is -NOT- throttling, QoS, packetshaping, or whatever you want to call it, they are actively mangling the IP protocol to -drop- connections, making P2P actually unusable.
I'm a Cox customer, and they have a Sandvine appliance that does the same thing. I -cannot use bittorrent-. It's not that bittorrent is slow, or that they put it at a lower priority than my neighbor's porno, they -actually prevent it from working at all-.
The documents and PR I've seen from Comcast all seem to indicate that they are 'managing' the traffic, not 'mangling' it and the FCC has responded as if they were QoS'ing P2P.
Either the FCC doesn't understand what's really happening 'on the ground' here, or Comcast itself has a disconnect between Management and Network Management.*
*I worked somewhere once where there was a seriously overzealous network guy who would throttle services and block things at random. He always said he wasn't when I went to the boss and complained, but when I actually got access to the Packetshaper configs, I could see that he was in fact blocking and throttling services, except on his own machines and the boss'. I've been paranoid ever since.
Transmeta tried that. It was slow, expensive, and inconsistent. Also, nobody ever used any other 'instruction sets' besides x86, mostly because that's the most-common-denominator in the computing world.
It sucks, it's not the -best- way to do it, but it's the way the market seems to favor. Just ask Apple, Sun, DEC, and HP.
I actually caught a previous girlfriend cheating once by using a packet sniffer!
I was living with her and things went all wonky (no sex, she started crying all the time, etc.). One day she went to visit her 'friend' who was flying in, he'd only be on a six hour layover and she was going to keep him company. This is no big deal to me, since I would be expected to be able to do the same.
Long story short, I was learning Wireshark at the time, and was already logging all sorts of traffic from common protocols (DHCP, WINS, AIM, etc.) at the gateway just for fun. A week later when I was going over the logs, now with a bit of curiosity since she was acting very -odd- after her return from the airport, I saw that she started an IM session with her best friend as soon as she got back from her visit. The contents included details on some kissing, and a plan to 'stick with this guy until the other guy is heading out again in six months, then leave with him'.
All the 'internet sharing' devices and operating systems (including Windows XP) will fire up a DHCP server on the LAN they're sharing to, that's what internet sharing is, a single device acting as a NAT/RIP gateway for several other machines. DHCP is quite a simple service (too simple if you ask me, given this particular problem), if you -sometimes- get IPs and other times do not, there's probably a contending DHCP server on your LAN that needs to be hunted down and killed. This is netwoking 101. You never plug the 'LAN' side of a NAT device into a LAN that already has a DHCP server, unless you're sure you know what you're doing.
Second, regarding the 'case issues'. There is a case sensitive option (that you -can- flip arbitrarily) in HFS+. There are -case issues- if you're doing some kinds of things (CVS checkouts of source directories with colliding names, etc.), but generally nothing that a little understanding wouldn't fix.
Why on -earth- you would use HFS at all instead of HFS+ is beyond me. That's trying to install Windows on a FAT16 disk. HFS+ has its strong and weak points, but HFS is a dead -dead- dinosaur.
It really sounds like your mac experiences were from the early 10.x days or even the Classic Times of Olde. I've admin'd several OS X (10.3 - 10.5) servers that do printing, file sharing, VPN, directory services, desktop management, web serving, and even Windows Domain Control, and I've never had a problem with anything you're talking about.
That being said, I do prefer Linux, but that's just because it's cheap and it runs on anything.
Sorry, that's not so anymore, nor has it been since the Core 2 came out. The Core 2 come in variants that are stripped-down and cheap, without being super-slow.
I don't have the time to do all the research right now, but Intel has been trouncing AMD in the price/performance category for quite a while, and AMD keeps falling farther and farther behind.
Well Bush's original foreign policy was to 'back out as much as possible from interfering with other countries and let them take care of themselves'. He flipped into 'spread democracy through violence' mode after September 11th.
He did change his views, from 'prudent' to 'boneheaded'.
Same here. I was the Senior Patrol Leader for a troop in the northeast. We would let our scouts stay back at camp if they weren't one of the 'big three' religions that had services at the camp (catholic, protestant, or jewish). We would just sit in a circle in silence and people would occasionally speak their mind about 'bigger things' than the normal everyday discussion. It was really refreshing to hear people say stuff like 'I wish we could all try harder to just be nice to each other, even when we're feeling down.' than 'Billy stole my Jolly Ranchers!'
Then again, our troop had openly gay members in the leadership, and we were the ones who drafted the first petition saying we would leave the national organization if they sought to seek out and exclude gay scouts. That petition was eventually endorsed by our regional council and started the 'don't ask/don't tell' policy we work under, which seems to work just fine.
As a sidenote, our troop also was consistently ahead of the competition in most camp contests, something I attribute to our diversity of interests (yes, we actually won the cake-baking contest, and yes, two of our 'gayest' scouts baked the cake).
They mention that it's mounted to a cold-plate. My guess is that without airflow (these experiments are in sealed canisters, not sure if there's normal air, nitrogen, dry air, or some other medium in there), there's not much opportunity for cooling. The thick bolts and metal might be to conduct as much heat away from the drive as possible.
It might not just be for the drive's sake, it's possible that this experiment was temperature sensitive as well.
The -responsible- thing to do would be to use QoS to make all the P2P streams a lower priority than HTTP.
Instead, they're actively (and randomly) interrupting P2P and causing -all- P2P traffic to fail, even at 4AM.
The sad thing is, I know exactly why this is happening. There's someone (or a group of people) who honestly believe that 'P2P is eating all our bandwidth' and that if they use this blocking method, it'll all be OK.
I worked at a place where the Network Manager would see what sites were 'eating all the bandwidth' and just knock them down to 56Kbits/sec for the whole place. What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use. 'blocking' P2P or 'top-talkers' just makes the experience on a network suck, there are much more effective and subtle ways to manage traffic that quietly make the traffic you want more important than the traffic you don't want interfering.
What you're asking for is a 'microkernel', where every service and driver, including Virtual Memory and I/O are handled by 'servers' which are actually applications running in 'user space' (ring 1).
The problem is that with a 'regular' kernel, you can just pass data from one thing to another quickly and easily, but with a true microkernel, there's a lot of passing of messages between the components that has to be handled by the kernel itself, which incurs a lot of expensive 'context switching' (when the processor switches between user and kernel space) so the latency of pretty much everything is MUCH higher.
Mac OS X and even Windows use a 'hybrid' approach, where there's a microkernel -design-, but the drivers and subsystems are brought into 'ring 0' along with the core components and the message passing is negated.
Everyone -wants- a true microkernel, because they're easy to maintain, super-stable, and very 'sound' from an architectural point-of-view, but the latency has been a huge stumbling block. The x86 architecture is -really bad- with context switches, and that's made microkernels that much less likely.
Personally, I'd be willing to take the hit if there was a reasonably supported microkernel-based system that I could use for day-to-day stuff, but GNU HURD is still getting no love, so I suppose I'll just have to settle for the status quo.
I always thought that this was where 64-bit computing was going to go, a whole 'new' way of looking at disk and RAM, just have the entire disk mapped into the memory address space, and have an intelligent kernel determining the 'temperature' and 'type' of data it was reading so it can make a proper judgment on where to keep it in the address space.
Whoops, didn't mean my first comment (starts with 'wrong') to you, meant it to another comment, but I'm not used to the new layout, so I guess I posted to you.
I'm a Cox customer, and they're using the same methods in my area. After several minutes on Gnutella (any client) or bittorrent (again, any client), my machines keep connected, but the -application- can't communicate -at all- with other hosts. I can close the app and reopen it and get a minute or so of P2P time, but then it's disconnected again.
What Comcast (and Cox) are doing is sniffing the packets (so you can't 'just use port 80', they actually sniff the traffic for P2P data packets),, and injecting packets to cause the machines to 'disconnect' from the P2P network without interfering with other services on the machine.
Now I would -totally- understand if they packet-shaped P2P to hell, I wouldn't mind if my P2P traffic was put on the bottom of the list so that everyone else could browse at top-speed, but that's NOT what they're doing.
I actually have a feeling that this is just a few people at Comcast who don't really understand how to admin a network correctly, and they're using blunt trauma instead of a scalpel because it suits their ego. I worked with an admin once who was at his happiest when he knew users were blocked from stuff, I imagine Comcast has a similar admin somewhere very high up in the chain.
We have the shoulders legalized for travel during rush hour to get into and out of Boston (on I-93s, just before I-95), it only marginally increases bandwidth (which isn't the problem anyway), presents a -huge- safety issue, and prevents most onramps and offramps from being used in a sane or efficient manner.
It -seems- like a good idea, but it quickly devolves to both people in the shoulder -and- the merging onramp slamming on their brakes and/or causing accidents.
The best solution to the problem is to have a law that every car on the highway (at-speed or not) has to leave at least three carlengths of distance between them and the driver in front of them, and that you are not allowed to drive 'next to' another car (either pass or fall behind). It seems counterintuitive, but it would prevent this cascade breakdown, and the roads would be a lot safer, faster, and more efficient.
I build the software images at a high-end boarding school and Vista offers us -nothing- that we don't already have with XP. We already dial the UI back to Windows 2000 (we even turn that down some and disable almost all non-functional eye-candy), we already have normal users restricted so they can't infect or break their own systems, we've got DEP and the firewall turned on and exceptions made, and we have indexing on to make content searches super-speedy. When a user wants to install something, they call and ask and if we're comfy with it we can put them (temporarily and remotely) into a group that can admin machines.
All Vista is to me is an updated kernel with higher memory requirements wrapped in a big headache. Our flagship groupware product has a Linux and OS X version, and we're seeing lots of traction on the Mac side this year, and IT is starting to experiment with Linux desktops. I imagine we'll actually switch to Linux with users remoting into Windows terminal sessions rather than try to make Vista work for us. The entire Desktop group is running Macs right now, hidden behind our mandatory PCs, and I've been hosting several 'servers' on my Linux desktop running VMWare for three years and nobody has noticed.
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I live in Rhode Island, where we have the highest national unemployment rate in the U.S., needless to say, we have a -ton- of foreclosures.
We also saw most of our urban houses built between 1900 and 1960, so there's not a lot of PVC pipes around here.
One of my coworkers is looking for a house now that he's established and houses are cheap. He has looked at 25 houses, and only five had pipes in them.
The big problem is that if a house doesn't have any pipes in it, you can't just move in, set up camp, and start fixing it up; you have to outlay a tremendous amount of capital just to have a toilet, sink, bath, and heat. Houses might be 'cheap' here now, but a stripped house is far too pricey to get involved with unless you have gobs of cash to throw around.
Or they could have thrown the power budget out the window and used a nuclear-decay power source, like a lot of satellites do.
Now that -power availability- seems to be the biggest issue with these landers, maybe we can build one with a power source that provides years of solid performance instead of solar panels.
The devices wouldn't even be radioactive by the Mars gets crowded anyway.
Most people are surprised to find that I smoke. I guess sneaking out once or twice during a nine hour day isn't much, but I'm still a smoker. Most coworkers don't know that when I go up to get a coffee, I'm going out to have a smoke on the way back.
Last week my aunt and uncle, who I lived (as a smoker) next door to for five years and see every weekend 'found out' that I smoked.
Also, I have a tendency to brush my teeth and wash my hands after I smoke, that probably helps. And I never smoke inside, because that makes your clothes/pets/house smell.
I agree with your point of view. I live in a state where prostitution is -totally legal-, provided it's not promoted or enforced by management, and done completely indoors.
I live up the street from a place you can get a $60 handjob and $120 sex, and it's legal.
Most residents don't even know that this is the case here, since it's all very quiet and private, but it's a huge industry. We do -not- have a problem with 'streetwalkers' here, though, which is nice.
So long and short, we have legal prostitution, the world hasn't ended, and we have no outdoor streetwalkers or burgeoning women's prisons because of it. Most people don't know about it, and those who find out that it's legal don't usually go off on a rant about having to end it, since things are fine the way they are.
By the way, the state is Rhode Island, and this stuff happens at virtually every 'spa' and almost every strip club here. Come visit!
I have a better idea, let's de-centralize our government and let -federal- issues only cover stuff like National Defense.
It's sick how much of my taxes go from my paycheck direct to Washington D.C., then back to my state. I'd rather pay more state taxes and less federal, and keep the money in my general area.
A side-effect of this is that the burden of legislation and governance would be shifted from 500 or so people in D.C. back to my state legislature, where people are just as scummy, but at least I can access them easily (I can call my state rep and have an appointment with him if I ask nicely enough).
I really don't understand why we're all letting so much money get siphoned to Washington just so we can have our congressmen run around and fight over it.
In addition to this, there's absolutely no need to use a swap 'partition' when you can use a swap file.
I have 4GB RAM, but I've never -used- more than 200MB of swap, so I have a 1GB swap file in /var/swap
Here's how I made it:
#dd bs=1m if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap count=1024
#mkswap /var/swap
.
Works like a charm, and I can change the size on-the-fly by using #swapon and #swapoff.
Or ask if you can remote-in via RDP to a server (or even an XP box) running terminal services. RDesktop is a lot less resource-intensive than running Windows/Outlook in a VM.
Someone in the company has to have a Windows box that can accept incoming connections.
Heck, grab an old dusty PC, toss Windows on it, see if you can put it behind your monitor, then RDP or VNC to it.
It's 2008, I have eleven computers in my cube; people literally do not know where to throw all their Pentium 4s. I just sent an email to our director asking him to clarify what the procedure is for getting rid of all this stuff is, since I virtualize pretty much everything now.
I asked the president of an engineering firm that I work for about this. He ships racks of boxes, each holding DSP boards on backplanes, each backplane has it's own PSU.
When I asked him why he doesn't just have one or two -big- power supplies in the unit, he said that he tried that, but the cost of the non-standard PSU was higher than all the ATX PSUs put together, and then some, and replacing the units when they eventually fail would be tricky, as opposed to just stocking more ATX PSUs.
I agree that it's a good idea, but until there's enough volume of large multi-output PSUs shipping, the cost of manufacture makes the product unworkable (unless you think big-picture and want to spend more up front for power savings over the whole unit's life).
Generally, the people who use the hardware aren't the ones building it, and buyers usually go for the lowest bid.
I don't think you have a full understanding of what you can do with QoS then. There's a way for you to enjoy full bandwidth -and- for the 'copyrighted-media thieves' (and people like me who just want to download legal torrents) to have unhindered access to the 'net at the same time.
The answer is to prioritize 'regular' traffic above P2P. Since Comcast is already -identifying- the P2P streams, all they have to do is make them a lower priority than other traffic, which they should be doing anyway, since it makes the whole medium feel more 'snappy'.
I don't download or share media, since I disagree with it on ethical terms, but I still think Comcast is doing 'a bad thing' by using the method they do to 'manage' P2P.
This is what I thought of first, too.
Comcast has the FCC wrapped around the idea that it's -slowing- P2P traffic, that it's packet-shaping or throttling P2P. I would be totally fine if they just did that, it's their network, and it -should- be prioritizing VoIP, ICMP, interactive services, browsing, and file transfers (in that order) over P2P. What they are doing is -NOT- throttling, QoS, packetshaping, or whatever you want to call it, they are actively mangling the IP protocol to -drop- connections, making P2P actually unusable.
I'm a Cox customer, and they have a Sandvine appliance that does the same thing. I -cannot use bittorrent-. It's not that bittorrent is slow, or that they put it at a lower priority than my neighbor's porno, they -actually prevent it from working at all-.
The documents and PR I've seen from Comcast all seem to indicate that they are 'managing' the traffic, not 'mangling' it and the FCC has responded as if they were QoS'ing P2P.
Either the FCC doesn't understand what's really happening 'on the ground' here, or Comcast itself has a disconnect between Management and Network Management.*
*I worked somewhere once where there was a seriously overzealous network guy who would throttle services and block things at random. He always said he wasn't when I went to the boss and complained, but when I actually got access to the Packetshaper configs, I could see that he was in fact blocking and throttling services, except on his own machines and the boss'. I've been paranoid ever since.
Transmeta tried that. It was slow, expensive, and inconsistent. Also, nobody ever used any other 'instruction sets' besides x86, mostly because that's the most-common-denominator in the computing world.
It sucks, it's not the -best- way to do it, but it's the way the market seems to favor. Just ask Apple, Sun, DEC, and HP.
I actually caught a previous girlfriend cheating once by using a packet sniffer!
I was living with her and things went all wonky (no sex, she started crying all the time, etc.). One day she went to visit her 'friend' who was flying in, he'd only be on a six hour layover and she was going to keep him company. This is no big deal to me, since I would be expected to be able to do the same.
Long story short, I was learning Wireshark at the time, and was already logging all sorts of traffic from common protocols (DHCP, WINS, AIM, etc.) at the gateway just for fun. A week later when I was going over the logs, now with a bit of curiosity since she was acting very -odd- after her return from the airport, I saw that she started an IM session with her best friend as soon as she got back from her visit. The contents included details on some kissing, and a plan to 'stick with this guy until the other guy is heading out again in six months, then leave with him'.
That relationship ended that night.
OK. I'll start from the beginning.
All the 'internet sharing' devices and operating systems (including Windows XP) will fire up a DHCP server on the LAN they're sharing to, that's what internet sharing is, a single device acting as a NAT/RIP gateway for several other machines. DHCP is quite a simple service (too simple if you ask me, given this particular problem), if you -sometimes- get IPs and other times do not, there's probably a contending DHCP server on your LAN that needs to be hunted down and killed. This is netwoking 101. You never plug the 'LAN' side of a NAT device into a LAN that already has a DHCP server, unless you're sure you know what you're doing.
Second, regarding the 'case issues'. There is a case sensitive option (that you -can- flip arbitrarily) in HFS+. There are -case issues- if you're doing some kinds of things (CVS checkouts of source directories with colliding names, etc.), but generally nothing that a little understanding wouldn't fix.
Why on -earth- you would use HFS at all instead of HFS+ is beyond me. That's trying to install Windows on a FAT16 disk. HFS+ has its strong and weak points, but HFS is a dead -dead- dinosaur.
It really sounds like your mac experiences were from the early 10.x days or even the Classic Times of Olde. I've admin'd several OS X (10.3 - 10.5) servers that do printing, file sharing, VPN, directory services, desktop management, web serving, and even Windows Domain Control, and I've never had a problem with anything you're talking about.
That being said, I do prefer Linux, but that's just because it's cheap and it runs on anything.
Sorry, that's not so anymore, nor has it been since the Core 2 came out. The Core 2 come in variants that are stripped-down and cheap, without being super-slow.
I don't have the time to do all the research right now, but Intel has been trouncing AMD in the price/performance category for quite a while, and AMD keeps falling farther and farther behind.
Well Bush's original foreign policy was to 'back out as much as possible from interfering with other countries and let them take care of themselves'. He flipped into 'spread democracy through violence' mode after September 11th.
He did change his views, from 'prudent' to 'boneheaded'.
Same here. I was the Senior Patrol Leader for a troop in the northeast. We would let our scouts stay back at camp if they weren't one of the 'big three' religions that had services at the camp (catholic, protestant, or jewish). We would just sit in a circle in silence and people would occasionally speak their mind about 'bigger things' than the normal everyday discussion. It was really refreshing to hear people say stuff like 'I wish we could all try harder to just be nice to each other, even when we're feeling down.' than 'Billy stole my Jolly Ranchers!'
Then again, our troop had openly gay members in the leadership, and we were the ones who drafted the first petition saying we would leave the national organization if they sought to seek out and exclude gay scouts. That petition was eventually endorsed by our regional council and started the 'don't ask/don't tell' policy we work under, which seems to work just fine.
As a sidenote, our troop also was consistently ahead of the competition in most camp contests, something I attribute to our diversity of interests (yes, we actually won the cake-baking contest, and yes, two of our 'gayest' scouts baked the cake).
Greetings,
Please tell me where I can get some of this marmalade. I'm thinking I can combine it with a blindfold and obtain the desired result.
-MQ
They mention that it's mounted to a cold-plate. My guess is that without airflow (these experiments are in sealed canisters, not sure if there's normal air, nitrogen, dry air, or some other medium in there), there's not much opportunity for cooling. The thick bolts and metal might be to conduct as much heat away from the drive as possible.
It might not just be for the drive's sake, it's possible that this experiment was temperature sensitive as well.
The -responsible- thing to do would be to use QoS to make all the P2P streams a lower priority than HTTP.
Instead, they're actively (and randomly) interrupting P2P and causing -all- P2P traffic to fail, even at 4AM.
The sad thing is, I know exactly why this is happening. There's someone (or a group of people) who honestly believe that 'P2P is eating all our bandwidth' and that if they use this blocking method, it'll all be OK.
I worked at a place where the Network Manager would see what sites were 'eating all the bandwidth' and just knock them down to 56Kbits/sec for the whole place. What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use. 'blocking' P2P or 'top-talkers' just makes the experience on a network suck, there are much more effective and subtle ways to manage traffic that quietly make the traffic you want more important than the traffic you don't want interfering.
What you're asking for is a 'microkernel', where every service and driver, including Virtual Memory and I/O are handled by 'servers' which are actually applications running in 'user space' (ring 1).
The problem is that with a 'regular' kernel, you can just pass data from one thing to another quickly and easily, but with a true microkernel, there's a lot of passing of messages between the components that has to be handled by the kernel itself, which incurs a lot of expensive 'context switching' (when the processor switches between user and kernel space) so the latency of pretty much everything is MUCH higher.
Mac OS X and even Windows use a 'hybrid' approach, where there's a microkernel -design-, but the drivers and subsystems are brought into 'ring 0' along with the core components and the message passing is negated.
Everyone -wants- a true microkernel, because they're easy to maintain, super-stable, and very 'sound' from an architectural point-of-view, but the latency has been a huge stumbling block. The x86 architecture is -really bad- with context switches, and that's made microkernels that much less likely.
Personally, I'd be willing to take the hit if there was a reasonably supported microkernel-based system that I could use for day-to-day stuff, but GNU HURD is still getting no love, so I suppose I'll just have to settle for the status quo.
I always thought that this was where 64-bit computing was going to go, a whole 'new' way of looking at disk and RAM, just have the entire disk mapped into the memory address space, and have an intelligent kernel determining the 'temperature' and 'type' of data it was reading so it can make a proper judgment on where to keep it in the address space.
Whoops, didn't mean my first comment (starts with 'wrong') to you, meant it to another comment, but I'm not used to the new layout, so I guess I posted to you.
Wrong.
I'm a Cox customer, and they're using the same methods in my area. After several minutes on Gnutella (any client) or bittorrent (again, any client), my machines keep connected, but the -application- can't communicate -at all- with other hosts. I can close the app and reopen it and get a minute or so of P2P time, but then it's disconnected again.
What Comcast (and Cox) are doing is sniffing the packets (so you can't 'just use port 80', they actually sniff the traffic for P2P data packets),, and injecting packets to cause the machines to 'disconnect' from the P2P network without interfering with other services on the machine.
Now I would -totally- understand if they packet-shaped P2P to hell, I wouldn't mind if my P2P traffic was put on the bottom of the list so that everyone else could browse at top-speed, but that's NOT what they're doing.
I actually have a feeling that this is just a few people at Comcast who don't really understand how to admin a network correctly, and they're using blunt trauma instead of a scalpel because it suits their ego. I worked with an admin once who was at his happiest when he knew users were blocked from stuff, I imagine Comcast has a similar admin somewhere very high up in the chain.
We have the shoulders legalized for travel during rush hour to get into and out of Boston (on I-93s, just before I-95), it only marginally increases bandwidth (which isn't the problem anyway), presents a -huge- safety issue, and prevents most onramps and offramps from being used in a sane or efficient manner.
It -seems- like a good idea, but it quickly devolves to both people in the shoulder -and- the merging onramp slamming on their brakes and/or causing accidents.
The best solution to the problem is to have a law that every car on the highway (at-speed or not) has to leave at least three carlengths of distance between them and the driver in front of them, and that you are not allowed to drive 'next to' another car (either pass or fall behind). It seems counterintuitive, but it would prevent this cascade breakdown, and the roads would be a lot safer, faster, and more efficient.
I build the software images at a high-end boarding school and Vista offers us -nothing- that we don't already have with XP. We already dial the UI back to Windows 2000 (we even turn that down some and disable almost all non-functional eye-candy), we already have normal users restricted so they can't infect or break their own systems, we've got DEP and the firewall turned on and exceptions made, and we have indexing on to make content searches super-speedy. When a user wants to install something, they call and ask and if we're comfy with it we can put them (temporarily and remotely) into a group that can admin machines.
All Vista is to me is an updated kernel with higher memory requirements wrapped in a big headache. Our flagship groupware product has a Linux and OS X version, and we're seeing lots of traction on the Mac side this year, and IT is starting to experiment with Linux desktops. I imagine we'll actually switch to Linux with users remoting into Windows terminal sessions rather than try to make Vista work for us. The entire Desktop group is running Macs right now, hidden behind our mandatory PCs, and I've been hosting several 'servers' on my Linux desktop running VMWare for three years and nobody has noticed.