Computers for computers' sake, while educational, can be hard to get excited about. Find out what the other clubs are doing, and see if any of them have projects or programs which have need of your skills. Do you have a rocketry club? Maybe they need telemetry; there have been several Linux-based model rocketry setups displayed here on/. as well as around the web. Is there a bicycling or cross-country running group? See if they use GPS, and if they'd like to have a central system to keep track of runs/rides! Perhaps implement a music score archive webserver for the band! Be entrepreneurial. The most fun and useful computer projects have come about to solve problems, even if the problem in question isn't that practical.
A few years ago, Hughes Communications engineers used a lunar orbital slingshot maneuver to recover AsiaSat 1, which had been stranded in an unusable orbit. The insurance consortium that had already paid out for the satellite accepted a salvage deal with Hughes, who had manufactured it in the first place (it was launched on a Proton out of Baikonur). While they were using the designed maneuvering engines, as opposed to the stationkeeping thrusters, they ended up sending the satellite completely out of cislunar space in order to make the save.
...because it sounds like a direct grab from a Space Imaging propagand^H^H^H^Hadvertisement:
...located in the beautiful city of Thornton, Colorado, is a whole other story.... The IKONOS satellite lifted in 1999...Its powerful lens is capable of producing some of the most advanced images ever put in the public eye. Since then, that public has had an opportunity to see some of the most amazing images every produced...And it's the IKONOS satellite, which was contracted, built, and launched by Lockheed, giving us this closer eyeful of the world. "
Note that Lockheed is, in fact, one of the prime recipients of cash for the "Office of total Information Awareness." This perversion of your government might have leavened the copy with some choice quotes from boss "Rear" Admiral Poindexter, to wit:
Movies' exaggerated plots and glitzy special effects have had a major influence on popular culture, even to the point of making the public feel as if the government is really spying on it. The pandering to conspiracy theories and super-agent spy equipment imagery sells tickets...
The problems with this whole scenario (and the whole lot of the 'doom and gloom' information warfare scenarios that the US Government and cronies have been pumping out for the past few years) are legion. Before anyone shoves a pamphlet at me, let me state that I have *worked* for RAND doing analysis and I've *read* the books. Here are, in my opinions, the problems as I see them.
1) Definition. In order to effectively do nasty things to the US using 'information warfare' you need to know what the heck IW is. Guess what: we don't. The US Military has 'Information Operations' but those are mostly modern takes on tactics and strategies that go back at least as far as Sun Tzu, and involve attempting to retain and collect information on the situation while denying the same to the enemy. We keep hearing about how vulnerable stuff on the internet is to tampering. There are horror stories almost weekly about how some hacker almost succeeded in shutting down LA's power, or almost took out an air traffic control node, etc. etc. Which of these is IW? All of them? Some?
2) Scale of Effort. Really, at some point, taking down LA's power grid is a lot more easily done by bribing Enron or by tossing some hand grenades over the fence at a substation than by hacking. Here's a quick exercise. Think of a bad scenario. Now figure out how many separate intrusions would probably be required to cause it, and then figure out how many of them would need to be done simultaneously. Sure, you might be able to get into a lot of the places than can cause harm - but to do so catastrophically and as a surprise attack, you'd need to access a lot of them at the same time. First of all, that means you'd need to set up access in advance (forget the movies, kids, hackers don't 'get into systems' in the space of time it takes to get fellated by John Travolta's hookers). Now, you have to suppose that all of those prior intrusions have not set off alarms, either through intrusion detection or through simple damage and response, so that they'll all work flawlessly when you need them.
3) Differentiation. You need to make sure that the failures you trigger don't just look like reg'lar old failures. Why? Because those actually happen all the time, and there are plans and general states of mind for those. A large portion of the effectiveness of 'InfoWar' as it's thrown around by the press seems to rest on 'shock value' like most traditional military operations. The problem is that instead of trying to cause confusion at a single point (the opposing commander), InfoWar is trying to panic a population's worth of responders (the sysadmins and troubleshooters who maintain the systems under attack). As far as those go, each 'component' failure will have to work hard to look different from things they worry about every day. There's no central authority (other than the stupid departments and agencies the US Gov't is busy setting up) to panic and spread the paralysis panic causes. Note: the root name servers suffered a fairly nasty attack just a while ago. Most internet users didn't notice. I'm sure some pulses were raised at the root server level, but that's a scenario they think about all the time.
4) Connectivity. Think about this carefully. What, precisely, can you get to via the internet, and how would you do it? Let's start at the attacker's end. So you're an Iraqi geek. Well, until the mid-to-late 1990s, you didn't have a single internet connection in the entire damn country; your national web pages were hosted in Jordan, and the U.S. Gov't was assiduously bombing all means of connecting with the outside world. Let's take an easily believable step and say you're a group of Iraqi geeks who've been prepositioned in internet cafes around the world! You're set! You're ready to go! Okay, um, what are you attacking? Again, those 'deep intrusion' hacks we keep reading about (like the recent British arrest) are done by people who have spent enormous amounts of time and effort getting into these systems in the first place, time that you likely don't have if you don't want to get nailed before IW-Day.
Other end. What are you attacking? There are all manner of horror stories about electrical switches and the like connected to the internet. Most of them ignore the fact that many of these examples are connected to the internet for MONITORING purposes and don't in fact accept input. There are, of course, those that do; however, again, they are designed to assume that at some point they'll lose connectivity, and should operate autonomously or manually. Why? Because 'The Internet' breaks alllll on its own more often than it gets attacked.
InfoWar would be a lot more frightening to me if it could be clearly and precisely defined, and done so in a way that CLEARLY explains why and how it would be a) more effective and b) easier than having sleeper agents in twenty-five cities toss hand grenades at telephone switching offices.
http://www.arbustus.com/...they make wood cases and computer systems, as well as periphs (mice, keybds, LCD monitors *DROOL*). They'll even let you pick the wood. They also do PDA veneer and the like. Some of their high-end stuff is quite striking, if out of my price range.:-)
Although it appears to be the same spec, 'SB1394 FireWire' is really just a fairly weak attempt to hijack recognition of the spec and attach it to the 'SoundBlaster' line. From Creative's website:
--What is the purpose of the SB1394 Certification Program? There are differences among IEEE-1394 connectivity relative to performance and overall ease of use. Creative engineers developed the SB1394 Certification Program to ensure optimal performance and usability of SB1394 connectivity for digital entertainment consumers.
--How does SB1394 Certification Program benefit my product? A SB1394-certified device is eligible for joint promotional opportunities, such as in-box cross-promotion, joint soft bundle channel opportunities, e-mail campaigns, on-line exposure, joint presence at selected trade shows, and much more. That is, an SB1394-cetified device has the opportunity to tap into the huge Sound Blaster installed base, leverage the strength of the powerful Sound Blaster brand, and expand market reach in the PC marketplace.
--cut--...in other words, they think it'd be neat if the sheep associate FireWire with them, and they claim that the oh-so-powerful brand recognition of the Creative and SoundBlaster brands will serve as an advantage.
Sigh.
On a more technical note, while it may be handy to have both USB and 1394 on the box, it does involve additional hardware and (most important) additional plugs. I have found through my history of players (Original Nomad Jukebox, 64MB flash player, iPod 5GB) that the common point of failure during daily use has been with the plug integrity itself as well as with the entry of dirt, lint, etc. into the plugs. One of the attractions of the iPod is that it only has two ports - one headphone and one FireWire - and both (along with the only edge-mounted control, the lock switch) share the top edge of the unit. this means that only that one side need be carefully protected from FOD and etc.
The primary advantage of this unit seems to be the ability to create and edit playlists on the machine itself. While this is a nice feature, I can say from my two years with the Nomad Jukebox that the art of UI design is SEVERELY LACKING in Creative's hardware dept. Although one could edit and manupulate lists on that player, it would usually take around 4 or 5 menus to add a single track...
The T1 will terminate in a box (or in a card in the router) called the CSU/DSU (something service unit/data service unit). This is the device that allocates the 24 channels of 64Kbps (mentioned earlier in the thread). If the CSU/DSU is a separate box, you can probably do this from its management interface; otherwise, if it's an integral one that's inside a router or on a card in the router, you'll need to get onto the router's mgmt interface.
First of all, if you have *the whole T1* then you should have control of the CSU/DSU and the router at your end. Accept no substitutes. If the guy is, in fact, splitting a T1's worth of bandwidth off a DS-3 (say) then you should (at the least) have monitoring privileges on the router and DSU, either via web, SNMP, or telnet.
As mentioned earlier, the DSU should show that your connection to the line is using 24 x 64Kbps channels, for a total of 1.544Mb/sec (minus a few k for channel overhead gives you 1536). ALL of those channels should be coming out your end of the CSU/DSU.
If you have control of the router, then you might try (again, as mentioned earlier) ping-flooding the router at the other end of the T1 and checking how many packets/sec get through, then multiplying by your packetsize. That should give you a reasonably close answer.
If the guy isn't bullshitting you, then he should have no problem giving you read access to the SNMP MIB on the router and letting you watch traffic - if you can access this, you can run bandwidth monitors like MRTG.
Good luck.
"Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban
on
Dystopic Novels?
·
· Score: 1
...is one of the best dystopic novels I've read...although, perhaps, it's really 'Post-apocalyptic.' I strongly recommend this book for those who ever think about the mythologies and legends our era would generate after a cataclysmic event.
The Javits center is infamous for its labor union price-jacking. While I'm not sure if this is still true, there were a rash of stories a few years back connecting the Mafia with said labor unions. This is a problem because Javits' rules state that you *cannot* use non-union labor to do *anything* during a show...as in, it's difficult to even move your own stuff around the bldg/floor. Thus, the hours charged to the show organizers are enormous, and the whole thing ends up costing a mint both for organizers and exhibiters. If they can get free space and cheap/free labor for the show in Boston, it might even lower the cost of attendance for users and companies alike. Remember that all of the no-shows at recent Expos have cited costs; this is one of the reasons they did so.
I too live in Boston; I think it's an annoying town. However, it's immensely easier to get to and stay in than NY (easier=cheaper)...the airport is a 10 min subway trip from any downtown hotel, there's fun touristy stuff to do, the city's small enough to wander around on foot, and due to the high student population the town is used to large groups of rowdies showing up in bars.
Heh. It looks nearly *identical* to my Color Classic.
I'm not sure why anyone would want the freestander, given the premium counterspace is getting to be (appliances, anyone?) but the cupboard-hugger doesn't look too bad. As long as it's got a decent browser for recipes, and (ideally) could talk to my TiVo/whatsisname box to show me the Iron Chef shows I recorded...
I have to (ulp) defend Verizon just a bit. I'm in Boston, MA USA and I have to say that Verizon's network is far and away the best of the players in the area for cell coverage, esp. digital. While it's true their phones are usually 1-2 generations back, and they'e not as cheap as other providers, I kept their service for my work phone after comparing it to (as in using for a month) Voicestream (GSM), Sprint PCS, AT&T (miserable), Cingular and Nextel. I've never had a problem with their cell customer support, either. And no, I don't work for them.
Careful...I've used NetApp boxen, and (I'm assuming you're talking about NAS) they just don't have the sand to handle that kind of load reliably. Granted those that I worked with are now ~18 months old, but we had an Oracle update stream hitting one with a bandwidth of less than 15 MB/s and it started dropping NFS connections. If you try this, be careful to use high speed connections and to multiplex onto as many interfaces as possible!
Note that the Metro Shelving line does include pressboard desktop surfaces. I have a desktop surface with a shelf around 6 inches above it; the monitors rest on the shelf, and that way I can have multiple keyboards etc. and just shove them back under the shelf when not in use. I have one of the prepackaged desk systems I've added parts to; I have four computers, a 19" monitor, and a rackmount UPS that has to weigh a metric pantload on the thing. The UPS is on the top, too, above the monitors. Never a problem. If you're doing this for your own office, take the time to get hold of one of their parts catalogs (w/pix) and design something that will actually hold what you (not they) need it to hold! The beauty of this stuff is that it's like Lego; you can pretty much make whatever you want.
I am in the process of building a pyramidal case for an ATX mobo...according to my spec, I need 952 2x4 legos just for the pyramid (it's 23+ levels high, depending on how flat I want the top!) Buying in bulk from www.lego.com, that's like $140 just for the basic 2x4s. To make a space beneath the mobo, for say powersupply, will take more.
I'm exploring alternatives. Hell, buy a couple of the Blue Tubs at $20 each and play around...it's fun!
...typefied by companies like InterNAP, who resell 'priority' access to major backbones for massive ca$h. Essentially, it's *always* been true that those who pay a network get priority over public peers. InterNAP simply pays for traffic on *all* the major backbones and then resells that bandwidth to you. Their 'hook' is that they have a routing system which continuously checks route speeds from all over the net to you, and tries to keep the route as 'fast' and 'short' as possible...so not only can you buy bandwidth from you outward, but from any clients you might have looking for your website *inwards*. This is essentially a more elegant version of what Excite@Home is doing...theirs is a simple B2B version.
I just would like to kick in props to Exodus. I'm in Exodus Boston, and have never been in Exodus Jersey City (JRCY), so ymmv. However, the staff at Exodus Boston has always been extremely professional, and when they haven't been able to do a task they've always told me so right up front to let me make a choice re: what to do next. However, I've never had problems with any of them 'remote keying' my machines for me; they've all been patient, smart and responsive. Also, the Exodus colo service has been *incredibly* reliable. The only complaint I would have is that apparently Exodus has some older peering agreements from when they were 'coming up', which have crappy terms...I know this because I know there are certain peerings which they are contractually forbidden to weight metrics on, even if the peering in question is sucking ass (cough BBNplanet cough). This gets REALLY irritating; however, I'm not sure who to blame this on.:-)
In general, though, I've had nothing but good experiences at Exodus. Well, maybe the time one of their staff backed into my newly-painted Triumph TR6 in the parking lot (Hi T!) but they were honest and promptly came in to tell me and swap insurance, so no foul at all.
-Sierran ...I have no connection w/Exodus save as a customer. I don't even own their stock, dammit all.
Yup, they're one row over and one row down from my cage at Exodus Boston 2. I have to admit I've already done the '...aaaaand, this is/.!' tour. Their cage looks waaaay kewl...lotsa pretty blue LEDs. To those who care, the new servers look like a stack of Quad-Xeons and a whole *wall* of 2U VAlinux boxen which, from (some of)their hotswap bays, are RAID boxes and webservers. Looks awesome. Okay, technically, it's Andover.Net's cage, but hey...anything else eaten by the facility NDA. Oh, and I *do* have a T1 to my cage, so heehee, I"ll be able to get to them in just two or three hops. Happy happy joy joy.
Slashdot Mirror
Computers for computers' sake, while educational, can be hard to get excited about. Find out what the other clubs are doing, and see if any of them have projects or programs which have need of your skills. Do you have a rocketry club? Maybe they need telemetry; there have been several Linux-based model rocketry setups displayed here on /. as well as around the web. Is there a bicycling or cross-country running group? See if they use GPS, and if they'd like to have a central system to keep track of runs/rides! Perhaps implement a music score archive webserver for the band! Be entrepreneurial. The most fun and useful computer projects have come about to solve problems, even if the problem in question isn't that practical.
Reference: Flug-Revue
Note that Lockheed is, in fact, one of the prime recipients of cash for the "Office of total Information Awareness." This perversion of your government might have leavened the copy with some choice quotes from boss "Rear" Admiral Poindexter, to wit:
"Making the public feel like the gov't is really spying on it?" Heaven forfend! I mean, we can't have any pandering to conspiracy theories around these parts, nope nope.
C'mon. If you're going to post ad copy from Space Imaging or disinfo from TIA, that's fine, but at least have the decency to tell us it's such.
The problems with this whole scenario (and the whole lot of the 'doom and gloom' information warfare scenarios that the US Government and cronies have been pumping out for the past few years) are legion. Before anyone shoves a pamphlet at me, let me state that I have *worked* for RAND doing analysis and I've *read* the books. Here are, in my opinions, the problems as I see them.
1) Definition. In order to effectively do nasty things to the US using 'information warfare' you need to know what the heck IW is. Guess what: we don't. The US Military has 'Information Operations' but those are mostly modern takes on tactics and strategies that go back at least as far as Sun Tzu, and involve attempting to retain and collect information on the situation while denying the same to the enemy. We keep hearing about how vulnerable stuff on the internet is to tampering. There are horror stories almost weekly about how some hacker almost succeeded in shutting down LA's power, or almost took out an air traffic control node, etc. etc. Which of these is IW? All of them? Some?
2) Scale of Effort. Really, at some point, taking down LA's power grid is a lot more easily done by bribing Enron or by tossing some hand grenades over the fence at a substation than by hacking. Here's a quick exercise. Think of a bad scenario. Now figure out how many separate intrusions would probably be required to cause it, and then figure out how many of them would need to be done simultaneously. Sure, you might be able to get into a lot of the places than can cause harm - but to do so catastrophically and as a surprise attack, you'd need to access a lot of them at the same time. First of all, that means you'd need to set up access in advance (forget the movies, kids, hackers don't 'get into systems' in the space of time it takes to get fellated by John Travolta's hookers). Now, you have to suppose that all of those prior intrusions have not set off alarms, either through intrusion detection or through simple damage and response, so that they'll all work flawlessly when you need them.
3) Differentiation. You need to make sure that the failures you trigger don't just look like reg'lar old failures. Why? Because those actually happen all the time, and there are plans and general states of mind for those. A large portion of the effectiveness of 'InfoWar' as it's thrown around by the press seems to rest on 'shock value' like most traditional military operations. The problem is that instead of trying to cause confusion at a single point (the opposing commander), InfoWar is trying to panic a population's worth of responders (the sysadmins and troubleshooters who maintain the systems under attack). As far as those go, each 'component' failure will have to work hard to look different from things they worry about every day. There's no central authority (other than the stupid departments and agencies the US Gov't is busy setting up) to panic and spread the paralysis panic causes. Note: the root name servers suffered a fairly nasty attack just a while ago. Most internet users didn't notice. I'm sure some pulses were raised at the root server level, but that's a scenario they think about all the time.
4) Connectivity. Think about this carefully. What, precisely, can you get to via the internet, and how would you do it? Let's start at the attacker's end. So you're an Iraqi geek. Well, until the mid-to-late 1990s, you didn't have a single internet connection in the entire damn country; your national web pages were hosted in Jordan, and the U.S. Gov't was assiduously bombing all means of connecting with the outside world. Let's take an easily believable step and say you're a group of Iraqi geeks who've been prepositioned in internet cafes around the world! You're set! You're ready to go! Okay, um, what are you attacking? Again, those 'deep intrusion' hacks we keep reading about (like the recent British arrest) are done by people who have spent enormous amounts of time and effort getting into these systems in the first place, time that you likely don't have if you don't want to get nailed before IW-Day.
Other end. What are you attacking? There are all manner of horror stories about electrical switches and the like connected to the internet. Most of them ignore the fact that many of these examples are connected to the internet for MONITORING purposes and don't in fact accept input. There are, of course, those that do; however, again, they are designed to assume that at some point they'll lose connectivity, and should operate autonomously or manually. Why? Because 'The Internet' breaks alllll on its own more often than it gets attacked.
InfoWar would be a lot more frightening to me if it could be clearly and precisely defined, and done so in a way that CLEARLY explains why and how it would be a) more effective and b) easier than having sleeper agents in twenty-five cities toss hand grenades at telephone switching offices.
...I've seen them around for a while.
...they make wood cases and computer systems, as well as periphs (mice, keybds, LCD monitors *DROOL*). They'll even let you pick the wood. They also do PDA veneer and the like. Some of their high-end stuff is quite striking, if out of my price range. :-)
http://www.arbustus.com/
Although it appears to be the same spec, 'SB1394 FireWire' is really just a fairly weak attempt to hijack recognition of the spec and attach it to the 'SoundBlaster' line. From Creative's website:
...in other words, they think it'd be neat if the sheep associate FireWire with them, and they claim that the oh-so-powerful brand recognition of the Creative and SoundBlaster brands will serve as an advantage.
--What is the purpose of the SB1394 Certification Program?
There are differences among IEEE-1394 connectivity relative to performance and overall ease of use. Creative engineers developed the SB1394 Certification Program to ensure optimal performance and usability of SB1394 connectivity for digital entertainment consumers.
--How does SB1394 Certification Program benefit my product?
A SB1394-certified device is eligible for joint promotional opportunities, such as in-box cross-promotion, joint soft bundle channel opportunities, e-mail campaigns, on-line exposure, joint presence at selected trade shows, and much more. That is, an SB1394-cetified device has the opportunity to tap into the huge Sound Blaster installed base, leverage the strength of the powerful Sound Blaster brand, and expand market reach in the PC marketplace.
--cut--
Sigh.
On a more technical note, while it may be handy to have both USB and 1394 on the box, it does involve additional hardware and (most important) additional plugs. I have found through my history of players (Original Nomad Jukebox, 64MB flash player, iPod 5GB) that the common point of failure during daily use has been with the plug integrity itself as well as with the entry of dirt, lint, etc. into the plugs. One of the attractions of the iPod is that it only has two ports - one headphone and one FireWire - and both (along with the only edge-mounted control, the lock switch) share the top edge of the unit. this means that only that one side need be carefully protected from FOD and etc.
The primary advantage of this unit seems to be the ability to create and edit playlists on the machine itself. While this is a nice feature, I can say from my two years with the Nomad Jukebox that the art of UI design is SEVERELY LACKING in Creative's hardware dept. Although one could edit and manupulate lists on that player, it would usually take around 4 or 5 menus to add a single track...
First of all, if you have *the whole T1* then you should have control of the CSU/DSU and the router at your end. Accept no substitutes. If the guy is, in fact, splitting a T1's worth of bandwidth off a DS-3 (say) then you should (at the least) have monitoring privileges on the router and DSU, either via web, SNMP, or telnet.
As mentioned earlier, the DSU should show that your connection to the line is using 24 x 64Kbps channels, for a total of 1.544Mb/sec (minus a few k for channel overhead gives you 1536). ALL of those channels should be coming out your end of the CSU/DSU.
If you have control of the router, then you might try (again, as mentioned earlier) ping-flooding the router at the other end of the T1 and checking how many packets/sec get through, then multiplying by your packetsize. That should give you a reasonably close answer.
If the guy isn't bullshitting you, then he should have no problem giving you read access to the SNMP MIB on the router and letting you watch traffic - if you can access this, you can run bandwidth monitors like MRTG.
Good luck.
I too live in Boston; I think it's an annoying town. However, it's immensely easier to get to and stay in than NY (easier=cheaper)...the airport is a 10 min subway trip from any downtown hotel, there's fun touristy stuff to do, the city's small enough to wander around on foot, and due to the high student population the town is used to large groups of rowdies showing up in bars.
Heh. It looks nearly *identical* to my Color Classic.
I'm not sure why anyone would want the freestander, given the premium counterspace is getting to be (appliances, anyone?) but the cupboard-hugger doesn't look too bad. As long as it's got a decent browser for recipes, and (ideally) could talk to my TiVo/whatsisname box to show me the Iron Chef shows I recorded...
I have to (ulp) defend Verizon just a bit. I'm in Boston, MA USA and I have to say that Verizon's network is far and away the best of the players in the area for cell coverage, esp. digital. While it's true their phones are usually 1-2 generations back, and they'e not as cheap as other providers, I kept their service for my work phone after comparing it to (as in using for a month) Voicestream (GSM), Sprint PCS, AT&T (miserable), Cingular and Nextel. I've never had a problem with their cell customer support, either. And no, I don't work for them.
Careful...I've used NetApp boxen, and (I'm assuming you're talking about NAS) they just don't have the sand to handle that kind of load reliably. Granted those that I worked with are now ~18 months old, but we had an Oracle update stream hitting one with a bandwidth of less than 15 MB/s and it started dropping NFS connections. If you try this, be careful to use high speed connections and to multiplex onto as many interfaces as possible!
Note that the Metro Shelving line does include pressboard desktop surfaces. I have a desktop surface with a shelf around 6 inches above it; the monitors rest on the shelf, and that way I can have multiple keyboards etc. and just shove them back under the shelf when not in use. I have one of the prepackaged desk systems I've added parts to; I have four computers, a 19" monitor, and a rackmount UPS that has to weigh a metric pantload on the thing. The UPS is on the top, too, above the monitors. Never a problem. If you're doing this for your own office, take the time to get hold of one of their parts catalogs (w/pix) and design something that will actually hold what you (not they) need it to hold! The beauty of this stuff is that it's like Lego; you can pretty much make whatever you want.
I am in the process of building a pyramidal case for an ATX mobo...according to my spec, I need 952 2x4 legos just for the pyramid (it's 23+ levels high, depending on how flat I want the top!) Buying in bulk from www.lego.com, that's like $140 just for the basic 2x4s. To make a space beneath the mobo, for say powersupply, will take more. I'm exploring alternatives. Hell, buy a couple of the Blue Tubs at $20 each and play around...it's fun!
...typefied by companies like InterNAP, who resell 'priority' access to major backbones for massive ca$h. Essentially, it's *always* been true that those who pay a network get priority over public peers. InterNAP simply pays for traffic on *all* the major backbones and then resells that bandwidth to you. Their 'hook' is that they have a routing system which continuously checks route speeds from all over the net to you, and tries to keep the route as 'fast' and 'short' as possible...so not only can you buy bandwidth from you outward, but from any clients you might have looking for your website *inwards*. This is essentially a more elegant version of what Excite@Home is doing...theirs is a simple B2B version.
In general, though, I've had nothing but good experiences at Exodus. Well, maybe the time one of their staff backed into my newly-painted Triumph TR6 in the parking lot (Hi T!) but they were honest and promptly came in to tell me and swap insurance, so no foul at all.
-Sierran
...I have no connection w/Exodus save as a customer. I don't even own their stock, dammit all.
Yup, they're one row over and one row down from my cage at Exodus Boston 2. I have to admit I've already done the '...aaaaand, this is /.!' tour. Their cage looks waaaay kewl...lotsa pretty blue LEDs. To those who care, the new servers look like a stack of Quad-Xeons and a whole *wall* of 2U VAlinux boxen which, from (some of)their hotswap bays, are RAID boxes and webservers. Looks awesome. Okay, technically, it's Andover.Net's cage, but hey...anything else eaten by the facility NDA. Oh, and I *do* have a T1 to my cage, so heehee, I"ll be able to get to them in just two or three hops. Happy happy joy joy.