You've apparently never had portage chew up, digest, and shit out/usr/portage before. I have. It's why I don't use Gentoo anymore. Not being able to install, uninstall, or update software is a real pain in the balls. Yes, I could resync/usr/portage, but I shouldn't have to do this.
Conversely, I've never had a problem with installing Slackware packages, and I've never had apt quietly destroy itself, but to be fair to Portage, its destruction of itself was quite loud.
Gentoo is for people that want to boast that they use Gentoo. I was using UNIX back before the X Window System so GET OFF MY LAWN.
Write some software and then you can bitch about how poorly it's packaged.
I used to release open source software. I stopped because of complaints like this. Guess what? I don't have free time to integrate my programs into your distro, and apparently my software isn't popular enough to be integrated into your distro by the people running your distro because it's a business to them and they have to do a cost/benefit analysis. So you have to compile it from source.
Complain to your distro or use Debian, Ubuntu, or Gentoo (which package just about everything). Not me.
Anybody with an axe to grind can accuse Obama of using his personal Blackberry for official business, whether it's true or not. The only way to prove that he isn't using his personal Blackberry for official business would be to submit to a search of all mail sent or received from it. If the president refuses to do this, then he looks guilty. If he allows it, then his personal correspondence is out in the open. Previous presidents didn't want to put the people that they were emailing privately with through this, so they decided not to use email.
This is the same person that flat out accused Microsoft of putting the WMF exploit in Windows purposely so they'd have a way to get into any system. He had to backpeddal quickly from that claim.
Pardon me if I don't trust his judgment or his code.
That's what/opt is for. Vendors make a directory in/opt for their company, and then a subdirectory in their company directory for their product. Clean, simple, and easy to remove.
There is on the TiVo. You can set what channels you receive, and if you don't want to see a channel in the lineup, you can either set the channels you want to see as favorites and show only favorites (if you want the TiVo to try to record suggestions from the channel) or delete the channels from your lineup that you don't want to see (if you don't).
I always switch off the religious channels, the shopping channels, all of the music channels, and set the channels I do watch to favorite status and filter on favorite status in the guide. Therefore, I only see channels that I want to see.
The people approving this system are the same people that think there is lack of evidence for evolution and that carbon dating is junk science so we should just turn to a book that says eating shellfish is sinful and that rain comes from the sphere of water around the earth. Does it surprise you that this misinformed group of morons gets the science dead wrong again and is buying snake oil?
Lion's Commentary on UNIX has a very special place in my heart. First, it's a great commentary that allows the student to teach themselves, dropping just enough information to help them when they get stuck. Second, for the longest time, the only way to get a copy was by sneaking down to the photocopier while everyone was asleep and making a copy that a friend had gotten by sneaking down to the photocopier while everyone was asleep. Third, it's been reissued, so people can truly appreciate it.
<pedantic nitpick>TCP/IP is a P2P protocol. It was designed so that anybody could be a client and anybody could be a server - there were no special addresses that were client-only or server-only. Anything that flows over TCP/IP is using a P2P network, and I would guess that there is plenty of legal content flowing over TCP/IP.</pedantic nitpick>
I agree with everything you've said, but I have a slight pedantic nitpick.
Nintendo of America was the only one to produce cartridges for the North American market (not counting unlicensed games). In Japan, several development houses made their own cartridges, and the Famicom Disk System required only a special floppy drive to publish games. NoA adopted this business strategy because they wanted control over what cartridges were published while still encouraging third-party development houses. They felt that uncontrolled development and publication of sub-par third-party games was a major cause of the Video Game Crash of 1983, and wanted to avoid having a second video game crash.
This hit Konami hard - Nintendo of America's guidelines were to only allow five releases per developer in a calendar year, so in order to publish all of the games that they wanted to market in America, they had to start up an American subsidiary called Ultra Games.
You can still do this with GMail. GMail replaces Bigfoot:
1) Sign up for a GMail account 2) Set the GMail account to automatically forward to whatever email address you want it to go to and to either archive or delete the email after it forwards 3) Email gets forwarded, sans spam, to the provider you're currently using 4) When you decide to change providers, change the email address you're forwarding to. One of the benefits of GMail over Bigfoot is that you can "buffer" email in your GMail account by not having it forwarded. Good if you're testing something in your mail setup or if you're currently between providers.
I understand that Bigfoot just forwarded the email without storing it and that you gave out the @bigfoot.com address. In this case, give out the @gmail.com address and any incoming email will be bounced to your "provider of the week". You are no more tied to Google and GMail than you were to Bigfoot.
GMail lets you forward all mail received to another account, with options to keep copies in your GMail account, archive copies in your GMail account (so they don't appear as new if you sign in to the web interface), or delete copies in your GMail account. They also don't forward spam messages.
It's a great way to have a consistent email account that gets forwarded to a more personal account. Of course, you can also get your GMail with POP or IMAP if that's your desire.
Reducing the line speed wouldn't *work*. I currently have a 10 Mbps connection. If it was reduced to 5, I wouldn't reduce the total amount I download, but each one would take twice as long.
You're missing the point. If the uplink is 100Mbps and your connection speed is 10Mbps, that means 100Mbps/10Mbps = 10 customers can be online and fully utilizing that link. If we reduce your connection speed to 5 Mbps, that means 100Mbps/5Mbps = 20 customers can be online and fully utilizing that link. It doesn't matter that your download takes longer or that you use it twice as long - twice as many people will be able to use the link as before, and presumably some of them won't be maxing our their allotment simultaneously.
It's not about how much you download - it's about how much instantaneous utilization you have. So long as your link is not completely utilized, people can use it without problem. By halving the line speed of all users, you double the number of people that can use the uplink simultaneously, thus providing relief for the local congestion problem.
There is an option you omitted - monthly caps, or charging per Gb.
Because it's a pain in the ass that most consumers would reject flat out. It also stifles innovation by making it too expensive to participate in the network. It also makes it trivial to violate the principles of Net Neutrality. Your ISP starts a video on demand site. They make this video on demand site not count towards your quota, and makes the third party sites competing with them count towards your quota. This promotes unfair competition and is against the spirit of how it's supposed to work on the Internet.
As somebody with a scientific and rational background, where would I go to find out more about the science of climate change? What would be a good scientific (as opposed to pop culture, mass market) introduction to the different aspects of climate change research?
Don't meter then. Sell them a realistic line speed.
My ISP is selling me a line speed. In an ideal world (leaving out the marketing droids), they will be selling me a speed that I can reasonably expect on their already oversold network. They will cap my network connection at this speed such that I can never exceed it, and that's it. That's all that they will need to do.
In the real world, however, the line speed they sell seems to have nothing to do with what their network capacity is. Their line speed seems to do with "having a bigger one than the next guy" to bring in more subscribers even if their network can't handle it. As a result, they oversell a network that already can't realistically cope with their utilization numbers. Instead of looking at utilization and capacity numbers and figuring out what they can realistically support, they make shit up.
This making shit up is biting them in the ass. Hard. The need to do one of two things:
Increase network capacity - we gave them tax breaks to do it, so where are the results and why shouldn't the ISPs have to pay those back taxes with interest if they refuse to do it?
Decrease the line speed of all of their users so that they can cope with the utilization of their network
They've been dragging their feet on the first item because they want to erect tollbooths and speedbumps (destroying network neutrality along the way) so that they become the gatekeepers of the Internet - using public funds to fuel a private agenda, penalizing popular sites because they didn't think of the idea first or because it threatens their business model. They won't do the second because honesty is apparently taboo even if their realistic line speeds are pretty much an open secret (see dslreports.com).
I am saying that, in the case where multiple users have congestion, it is not a problem of user behavior. It is a problem of the ISP not having a wide enough uplink. If the users that are causing the congestion stop using their connection then they are not getting the service that they paid for. The ISP has three options at this point:
Do nothing and let stupid shit like this happen
Use the revenue from their business to increase network capacity
Lower every user's line speed so they can fit more people on the same link
Almost every ISP in the country is selecting the first option and wondering why everybody is pissed at them. Number 2 would probably take away from their stock price (not that it has much further to slide at this point) despite it being the right thing to do, and Number 3, while honest and straightforward, would never fly.
However, everyone in these bittorrent debates pretends that the DSLAM port is the bottleneck. In a highly interconnected environment like a world full of bittorrent and other users, there are many other places for congestion far from the simple consumer-to-ISP policy enforcement point.
I'm not pretending that it doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, as I've said in other posts, this is due to oversold uplink connections and upstream networks not ready for this increase in bandwidth. Bandwidth is being charged for. Somebody is making money. Spend the money on increased network bandwidth at interconnects that are traditional and measurably congested and stop doing stupid shit like cutting off peering because someone looked at you funny.
However, BitTorrent here is a scapegoat - you'd have the same problem with large FTP sites, video archives, or masses and masses of streaming porn. A bottleneck isn't caused by the protocol. The bottleneck is caused by the demand, and demand for a service is independent the protocol it's wrapped in.
So, in other words, people complaining about BitTorrent users overutilizing the network should read their contract, see there's no minimum guarantee of service or line speed, and get stuffed instead of trying to bully other people into using the network in ways that would make life more convenient for them?
The example you gave is not relevant in this case. On a typical DSL or Cable setup, the DSLAM or head-end is configured to limit the line speed of each subscriber. It would be like each port connected to the network connected to the T1 line being limited to 64kb/s. There's simply no way that any one user could saturate the connection in that case. Only if many people used their allotted bandwidth could the T1 uplink become saturated.
So one person cannot "take more" than their allotted portion. They are taking their allotted portion but the uplink to the ISP is saturated. This is not the user's fault. This is the fault of the ISP overselling too much, and there is nothing that the user can do to fix this other than not use what he is paying for.
Sounds like the ISPs should have used the tax incentives we gave them to increase network capacity and reach to, you know, increase network capacity and reach. If they had done that years ago to keep pace with the growth of their network traffic, they wouldn't be in this situation.
But no, of course, it has to be the person who uses their connection's fault.
I pay for a pipe. My ISP should take no interest in the source or destination or type of service connections in this pipe. Anything else is just allowing the system to be used abusively.
It isn't appropriate for legitimate bittorrent users to be driving other TCP off the network.
The only way the BitTorrent use can drive other users off to the network is if the ISP's network is misconfigured or is being overutilized due to too much overselling (you have to have some overselling, not everyone is on 24/7). ISPs that have their shit together will have their network designed to handle expected and future traffic growth such that all of their customers can use what they paid for.
you just want to bully other people out of their bandwidth so you get more
They paid for their bandwidth and I paid for mine. I have a cap on my connection speed; they do as well. The only difference is that their YouTube videos load instantly and my BitTorrent transfer is knee-capped. Who is the bully here?
This isn't the right way for BitTorrent to move forward
What is the right way to move forward? Accept that there are two levels of Internet traffic: "clean, good, wholesome non BitTorrent traffic" and "dirty, evil, corrupting BitTorrent traffic"?
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No. It's likely that they'd illegally use a FLIR camera to look in your house before breaking down the door. Of course, when they get caught, they backpeddle.
Until AT&T and Comcast de-settlement-free-peer any large ISP that doesn't join the gang.
You've apparently never had portage chew up, digest, and shit out /usr/portage before. I have. It's why I don't use Gentoo anymore. Not being able to install, uninstall, or update software is a real pain in the balls. Yes, I could resync /usr/portage, but I shouldn't have to do this.
Conversely, I've never had a problem with installing Slackware packages, and I've never had apt quietly destroy itself, but to be fair to Portage, its destruction of itself was quite loud.
Gentoo is for people that want to boast that they use Gentoo. I was using UNIX back before the X Window System so GET OFF MY LAWN.
Write some software and then you can bitch about how poorly it's packaged.
I used to release open source software. I stopped because of complaints like this. Guess what? I don't have free time to integrate my programs into your distro, and apparently my software isn't popular enough to be integrated into your distro by the people running your distro because it's a business to them and they have to do a cost/benefit analysis. So you have to compile it from source.
Complain to your distro or use Debian, Ubuntu, or Gentoo (which package just about everything). Not me.
Anybody with an axe to grind can accuse Obama of using his personal Blackberry for official business, whether it's true or not. The only way to prove that he isn't using his personal Blackberry for official business would be to submit to a search of all mail sent or received from it. If the president refuses to do this, then he looks guilty. If he allows it, then his personal correspondence is out in the open. Previous presidents didn't want to put the people that they were emailing privately with through this, so they decided not to use email.
A software firewall is a defense, but defense in depth is the way to go.
Take anything that Steve Gibson claims with at least a grain of salt, preferably a whole shaker.
This is the same person that flat out accused Microsoft of putting the WMF exploit in Windows purposely so they'd have a way to get into any system. He had to backpeddal quickly from that claim.
Pardon me if I don't trust his judgment or his code.
And its use only ended after BitMover pulled the free version because someone was reverse engineering it.
Wonder no more...
Not to mention analysis, reaction, and discussion. No court record includes that.
That's what /opt is for. Vendors make a directory in /opt for their company, and then a subdirectory in their company directory for their product. Clean, simple, and easy to remove.
There is on the TiVo. You can set what channels you receive, and if you don't want to see a channel in the lineup, you can either set the channels you want to see as favorites and show only favorites (if you want the TiVo to try to record suggestions from the channel) or delete the channels from your lineup that you don't want to see (if you don't).
I always switch off the religious channels, the shopping channels, all of the music channels, and set the channels I do watch to favorite status and filter on favorite status in the guide. Therefore, I only see channels that I want to see.
The people approving this system are the same people that think there is lack of evidence for evolution and that carbon dating is junk science so we should just turn to a book that says eating shellfish is sinful and that rain comes from the sphere of water around the earth. Does it surprise you that this misinformed group of morons gets the science dead wrong again and is buying snake oil?
Lion's Commentary on UNIX has a very special place in my heart. First, it's a great commentary that allows the student to teach themselves, dropping just enough information to help them when they get stuck. Second, for the longest time, the only way to get a copy was by sneaking down to the photocopier while everyone was asleep and making a copy that a friend had gotten by sneaking down to the photocopier while everyone was asleep. Third, it's been reissued, so people can truly appreciate it.
<pedantic nitpick>TCP/IP is a P2P protocol. It was designed so that anybody could be a client and anybody could be a server - there were no special addresses that were client-only or server-only. Anything that flows over TCP/IP is using a P2P network, and I would guess that there is plenty of legal content flowing over TCP/IP.</pedantic nitpick>
I agree with everything you've said, but I have a slight pedantic nitpick.
Nintendo of America was the only one to produce cartridges for the North American market (not counting unlicensed games). In Japan, several development houses made their own cartridges, and the Famicom Disk System required only a special floppy drive to publish games. NoA adopted this business strategy because they wanted control over what cartridges were published while still encouraging third-party development houses. They felt that uncontrolled development and publication of sub-par third-party games was a major cause of the Video Game Crash of 1983, and wanted to avoid having a second video game crash.
This hit Konami hard - Nintendo of America's guidelines were to only allow five releases per developer in a calendar year, so in order to publish all of the games that they wanted to market in America, they had to start up an American subsidiary called Ultra Games.
You can still do this with GMail. GMail replaces Bigfoot:
1) Sign up for a GMail account
2) Set the GMail account to automatically forward to whatever email address you want it to go to and to either archive or delete the email after it forwards
3) Email gets forwarded, sans spam, to the provider you're currently using
4) When you decide to change providers, change the email address you're forwarding to. One of the benefits of GMail over Bigfoot is that you can "buffer" email in your GMail account by not having it forwarded. Good if you're testing something in your mail setup or if you're currently between providers.
I understand that Bigfoot just forwarded the email without storing it and that you gave out the @bigfoot.com address. In this case, give out the @gmail.com address and any incoming email will be bounced to your "provider of the week". You are no more tied to Google and GMail than you were to Bigfoot.
GMail lets you forward all mail received to another account, with options to keep copies in your GMail account, archive copies in your GMail account (so they don't appear as new if you sign in to the web interface), or delete copies in your GMail account. They also don't forward spam messages.
It's a great way to have a consistent email account that gets forwarded to a more personal account. Of course, you can also get your GMail with POP or IMAP if that's your desire.
Reducing the line speed wouldn't *work*. I currently have a 10 Mbps connection. If it was reduced to 5, I wouldn't reduce the total amount I download, but each one would take twice as long.
You're missing the point. If the uplink is 100Mbps and your connection speed is 10Mbps, that means 100Mbps/10Mbps = 10 customers can be online and fully utilizing that link. If we reduce your connection speed to 5 Mbps, that means 100Mbps/5Mbps = 20 customers can be online and fully utilizing that link. It doesn't matter that your download takes longer or that you use it twice as long - twice as many people will be able to use the link as before, and presumably some of them won't be maxing our their allotment simultaneously.
It's not about how much you download - it's about how much instantaneous utilization you have. So long as your link is not completely utilized, people can use it without problem. By halving the line speed of all users, you double the number of people that can use the uplink simultaneously, thus providing relief for the local congestion problem.
There is an option you omitted - monthly caps, or charging per Gb.
Because it's a pain in the ass that most consumers would reject flat out. It also stifles innovation by making it too expensive to participate in the network. It also makes it trivial to violate the principles of Net Neutrality. Your ISP starts a video on demand site. They make this video on demand site not count towards your quota, and makes the third party sites competing with them count towards your quota. This promotes unfair competition and is against the spirit of how it's supposed to work on the Internet.
As somebody with a scientific and rational background, where would I go to find out more about the science of climate change? What would be a good scientific (as opposed to pop culture, mass market) introduction to the different aspects of climate change research?
Don't meter then. Sell them a realistic line speed.
My ISP is selling me a line speed. In an ideal world (leaving out the marketing droids), they will be selling me a speed that I can reasonably expect on their already oversold network. They will cap my network connection at this speed such that I can never exceed it, and that's it. That's all that they will need to do.
In the real world, however, the line speed they sell seems to have nothing to do with what their network capacity is. Their line speed seems to do with "having a bigger one than the next guy" to bring in more subscribers even if their network can't handle it. As a result, they oversell a network that already can't realistically cope with their utilization numbers. Instead of looking at utilization and capacity numbers and figuring out what they can realistically support, they make shit up.
This making shit up is biting them in the ass. Hard. The need to do one of two things:
They've been dragging their feet on the first item because they want to erect tollbooths and speedbumps (destroying network neutrality along the way) so that they become the gatekeepers of the Internet - using public funds to fuel a private agenda, penalizing popular sites because they didn't think of the idea first or because it threatens their business model. They won't do the second because honesty is apparently taboo even if their realistic line speeds are pretty much an open secret (see dslreports.com).
I am saying that, in the case where multiple users have congestion, it is not a problem of user behavior. It is a problem of the ISP not having a wide enough uplink. If the users that are causing the congestion stop using their connection then they are not getting the service that they paid for. The ISP has three options at this point:
Almost every ISP in the country is selecting the first option and wondering why everybody is pissed at them. Number 2 would probably take away from their stock price (not that it has much further to slide at this point) despite it being the right thing to do, and Number 3, while honest and straightforward, would never fly.
However, everyone in these bittorrent debates pretends that the DSLAM port is the bottleneck. In a highly interconnected environment like a world full of bittorrent and other users, there are many other places for congestion far from the simple consumer-to-ISP policy enforcement point.
I'm not pretending that it doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, as I've said in other posts, this is due to oversold uplink connections and upstream networks not ready for this increase in bandwidth. Bandwidth is being charged for. Somebody is making money. Spend the money on increased network bandwidth at interconnects that are traditional and measurably congested and stop doing stupid shit like cutting off peering because someone looked at you funny.
However, BitTorrent here is a scapegoat - you'd have the same problem with large FTP sites, video archives, or masses and masses of streaming porn. A bottleneck isn't caused by the protocol. The bottleneck is caused by the demand, and demand for a service is independent the protocol it's wrapped in.
So, in other words, people complaining about BitTorrent users overutilizing the network should read their contract, see there's no minimum guarantee of service or line speed, and get stuffed instead of trying to bully other people into using the network in ways that would make life more convenient for them?
The example you gave is not relevant in this case. On a typical DSL or Cable setup, the DSLAM or head-end is configured to limit the line speed of each subscriber. It would be like each port connected to the network connected to the T1 line being limited to 64kb/s. There's simply no way that any one user could saturate the connection in that case. Only if many people used their allotted bandwidth could the T1 uplink become saturated.
So one person cannot "take more" than their allotted portion. They are taking their allotted portion but the uplink to the ISP is saturated. This is not the user's fault. This is the fault of the ISP overselling too much, and there is nothing that the user can do to fix this other than not use what he is paying for.
Sounds like the ISPs should have used the tax incentives we gave them to increase network capacity and reach to, you know, increase network capacity and reach. If they had done that years ago to keep pace with the growth of their network traffic, they wouldn't be in this situation.
But no, of course, it has to be the person who uses their connection's fault.
I pay for a pipe. My ISP should take no interest in the source or destination or type of service connections in this pipe. Anything else is just allowing the system to be used abusively.
It isn't appropriate for legitimate bittorrent users to be driving other TCP off the network.
The only way the BitTorrent use can drive other users off to the network is if the ISP's network is misconfigured or is being overutilized due to too much overselling (you have to have some overselling, not everyone is on 24/7). ISPs that have their shit together will have their network designed to handle expected and future traffic growth such that all of their customers can use what they paid for.
you just want to bully other people out of their bandwidth so you get more
They paid for their bandwidth and I paid for mine. I have a cap on my connection speed; they do as well. The only difference is that their YouTube videos load instantly and my BitTorrent transfer is knee-capped. Who is the bully here?
This isn't the right way for BitTorrent to move forward
What is the right way to move forward? Accept that there are two levels of Internet traffic: "clean, good, wholesome non BitTorrent traffic" and "dirty, evil, corrupting BitTorrent traffic"?