Ever heard of an AUP? I would think that especially on/., it would be pretty obvious that an ISP does *not* ensure that they have enough bandwidth for every single one of their customers to max out their connections all the time. And another fact is that while a lot of P2P users are represented on a site like Slashdot, the vast majority of our customers are still sipmly just browsing the web and doing the occasional "non-P2P" download.
In any case, my suggestion as a sysadmin at an ISP would be to simply use common sense. Yeah our marketing guys may put up some absurd advertisements and claims... but you're not stupid are you? You realize bandwidth is finite. I don't necessarily have a problem with P2P itself, but download your file and close your client when it's through instead of leaving your machine blasting traffic 24x7.
If our customers begin complaining about not getting their advertised speeds, we are of course going to look at buying more bandwidth ourselves. But if we see that 75% of our bandwidth is being used up by a small group of P2P'ers you better believe we're going to shape those customers down or ask them to go elsewhere.
Most ISP's use some sort of Radius server to authenticate and to assign an IP address/services to a customer as they connect. We probably have Radius logs a year or more back just because they don't take up a lot of space and are very useful for tracking down the responsible users for spam complaints or a myriad of other purposes.
Actually I was recruited (somewhat) heavily by MS for a Linux admin job at a company they had just acquired. They needed a year or so to migrate everything to Windows and required an admin for all the servers in the meantime. They told me they'd train me in all their Microsoft voodoo if I'd come and work for them...
It almost sounded appealing. Probably good pay and decent on the resume. In the end it just didn't feel right though. Maybe a mistake? I still don't regret it though.
I don't understand how simply being able to explain how something works is an argument against intelligent design.
If anything, scientists "figuring this out" shows how complex the whole thing is and simply highlights how unlikely something like this would have been able to develop purely by chance.
Re:No defence...and no control either
on
Requiem for Usenet
·
· Score: 1
...and also offers no opportunity for centralised authority to be exercised. Web forums simply cannot offer the same protection.
Which is why Usenet is slowly fading. Still some useful groups out there, certainly the more niche ones which are left alone, but I've found myself resorting to your "evil" controlled forums and mailing lists and IRC channels for assistance and discussion.
Complete freedom and anarchy is fun to beat your chest about, but in reality just doesn't scale. Too many bad apples out there.
I don't see how your rant even applies in this situation.
Do any of us even know the actual details of what's going on here? The article doesn't mention much about the "officer" in question.
If the student was slandering him and violating a student agreement he signed before enrolling, there is absolutely no reason he should not be expelled.
Now if he was thrown into jail for this, we might have a free speech issue on our hands.
Please people, take off the Anti-USA glsses for once. Free speech is alive and well in this country and will be for a loooooooong time.
The problem is there is NO NEED for additional language. Any violations of the Geneva convention (assuming guilty before convicted here of course as the media does) are jumped upon by our media and dealt with sternly by the military brass.
An additional bill on the subject is a waste of time and money and simply adds fuel to the completely ridiculous comparisons of the United States to USSR/WW2 Germany by all the wackos out there.
Once you get a license, you used to keep it until you were 65 (which sucks now that I dont have one...I always wanted to get pulled over at age 65 with a license that had my picture at age 25), now I think it only lasts 10 years.
Wonder when they changed this. I moved from Cali to Arizona a couple years ago (now back in Cali) and was tickled pink when they handed me a new AZ drivers license good til like 2045 just for showing them my valid Cali drivers license.:-)
When I moved back to California, the DMV here made me hand it over:(
Still haven't had to take any written tests for renewals since I was 16 (now 27).
That made me think: what a perfect example of just how fucking useless as a society we've become. We can't even bring ourselves to do the right thing when it's only JUST as convenient as doing the wrong thing. And that's not even considered odd. Even sadder.
For your average person, when doing the "right" thing involves spending $12k more for a hybrid vs a Honda with nearly as good fuel efficiency (or a diesel of some sort), then the "right" thing isn't necessarily the "right" decision.
If you can afford to throw away that kind of money, more power to you. For now it's not practical. I have no doubt these things will improve and someday they'll become more people's first option. Of course, making them not look like roller skates would be a good first step.:-)
Re:Why should you.. or anyone care?: Slave Mentali
on
Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 1
If you've got a 35-hour workweek, 6 weeks of paid vacation every year, free healthcare, free schooling through Bachelor's-level for your kids, and a guaranteed old-age pension.... would you give it all up so you could live in a country that had a slightly higher GDP????
Exactly. You wouldn't. And this will be the ultimate downfall of socialism. People will continue voting themselves more and more benefits. Eventually it can't be paid for. It's already starting to happen in Germany, and I'm guessing it'll eventually happen here in the U.S. too.
Sure there are people who stay productive and thrive in a socialist system, but there are far too many who abuse and take advantage of it. GDP may be irrelevant, but I'll take keeping control of as much of my $$ as possible over paying the government to take care of my ever whim.
We're a small ISP (under 10k customers) and have successfully launched VoIP using only open source products -- Asterisk, SER, etc.
Obviously there are some expenses involved, and you need someone who can set up the software; but nothing preventing smaller companies from giving it a go.
So you think NASA should get 1% of our yearly budget? Our space program is by far the best-funded and most successful in the world. Throwing more money at NASA isn't going to make a huge difference at this point. Maybe reevaluating how their internal budget is currently set up would make some sense...
Not to mention that who knows where the US would be if it weren't for our top-flight/well-funded Military. We'd probably all be German or Soviet citizens.:-)
Actually what you really want to use is CentOS. WBEL development seemed to stagnate and its updates came out much slower.
We tend to use CentOS in dev environments and RHES in "live" environments although there's not much of a difference between the two except that the suits feel better about things if they spend some money.
A-ha! Our credit card processor -- Authorize.Net also went down hard yesterday. I did a quick tracroute just now and see that they're also located at Internap.
Those SuperScans sure rock don't they? I'm still using my 19" 751 that I bought in 1997. Made it through four years of college (lotsa soda spills) and at least four interstate moves! It's not quite as clear as the LCD's out there these days, but I can't justify replacing it until it breaks and the thing just keeps on ticking.:)
The difference is that in China, leaders who do not represent the people make these sort of decisions. In the USA, it is our elected leaders who represent us who do so.
I'm more than happy to see useless sites such as the ones you mentioned be shut down. If you disagree, vote for someone else.
The benefits of a degree will pan out later. I've found the skills and thinking process I learned by getting a CS degree have been very helpful and helped set me apart from those who simply picked up things on their own. But you're right, experience is a huge factor in getting a job. Most interviews I went to simply checked to see that I had a degree then moved on to the experience.
My advice to college students? Be sure to have a job or get a good internship during the summer. Potential employers asked me lots of questions about the internship I did.
Once you get the job, the CS skills will not seem quite so useless.
Obviously this isn't a big help to you now, but I think it's good advice for others worried about their degrees being all for naught.
One thing I don't understand... I repeatedly see mention of dust on the solar panals as being a hurdle to the longevity of these rovers. Wouldn't it have been easy to have a "wiper" of some sort on each panel that would clear the dust off from time to time?
Just because a person is a nutcase doesn't mean that all their ideas are to be instantly dismissed.
No, but focus on the people who make the points sanely, rather than giving legitimacy to horrible behavior simply because the person's ideas are "valid".
Huh? How the heck has history shown we're an untrustworthy keeper of these things? The fact that we used two to avert an extremely costly and bloody land invasion of the Japanese home island?
I don't seem to recall us using them on our own people or at the drop of a hat even when things turned for the worse in Vietnam.
I *do* recall the simple existence of them preventing war with the USSR and in the end, being partly responsible for the fall of that country when it couldn't keep up...
Slashdot Mirror
And why would we want to spend our tax money to spy on people who have nothing to hide? Shouldn't we be after the terrorists instead?
Um, that's what's happening.
Ever heard of an AUP? I would think that especially on /., it would be pretty obvious that an ISP does *not* ensure that they have enough bandwidth for every single one of their customers to max out their connections all the time. And another fact is that while a lot of P2P users are represented on a site like Slashdot, the vast majority of our customers are still sipmly just browsing the web and doing the occasional "non-P2P" download.
In any case, my suggestion as a sysadmin at an ISP would be to simply use common sense. Yeah our marketing guys may put up some absurd advertisements and claims... but you're not stupid are you? You realize bandwidth is finite. I don't necessarily have a problem with P2P itself, but download your file and close your client when it's through instead of leaving your machine blasting traffic 24x7.
If our customers begin complaining about not getting their advertised speeds, we are of course going to look at buying more bandwidth ourselves. But if we see that 75% of our bandwidth is being used up by a small group of P2P'ers you better believe we're going to shape those customers down or ask them to go elsewhere.
Most ISP's use some sort of Radius server to authenticate and to assign an IP address/services to a customer as they connect. We probably have Radius logs a year or more back just because they don't take up a lot of space and are very useful for tracking down the responsible users for spam complaints or a myriad of other purposes.
Rand McNally is going to be pissed!
Actually I was recruited (somewhat) heavily by MS for a Linux admin job at a company they had just acquired. They needed a year or so to migrate everything to Windows and required an admin for all the servers in the meantime. They told me they'd train me in all their Microsoft voodoo if I'd come and work for them...
It almost sounded appealing. Probably good pay and decent on the resume. In the end it just didn't feel right though. Maybe a mistake? I still don't regret it though.
I don't understand how simply being able to explain how something works is an argument against intelligent design.
If anything, scientists "figuring this out" shows how complex the whole thing is and simply highlights how unlikely something like this would have been able to develop purely by chance.
...and also offers no opportunity for centralised authority to be exercised. Web forums simply cannot offer the same protection.
Which is why Usenet is slowly fading. Still some useful groups out there, certainly the more niche ones which are left alone, but I've found myself resorting to your "evil" controlled forums and mailing lists and IRC channels for assistance and discussion.
Complete freedom and anarchy is fun to beat your chest about, but in reality just doesn't scale. Too many bad apples out there.
Absurd.
I don't see how your rant even applies in this situation.
Do any of us even know the actual details of what's going on here? The article doesn't mention much about the "officer" in question.
If the student was slandering him and violating a student agreement he signed before enrolling, there is absolutely no reason he should not be expelled.
Now if he was thrown into jail for this, we might have a free speech issue on our hands.
Please people, take off the Anti-USA glsses for once. Free speech is alive and well in this country and will be for a loooooooong time.
The problem is there is NO NEED for additional language. Any violations of the Geneva convention (assuming guilty before convicted here of course as the media does) are jumped upon by our media and dealt with sternly by the military brass.
An additional bill on the subject is a waste of time and money and simply adds fuel to the completely ridiculous comparisons of the United States to USSR/WW2 Germany by all the wackos out there.
There is NOTHING to fix here.
Once you get a license, you used to keep it until you were 65 (which sucks now that I dont have one...I always wanted to get pulled over at age 65 with a license that had my picture at age 25), now I think it only lasts 10 years.
:-)
:(
Wonder when they changed this. I moved from Cali to Arizona a couple years ago (now back in Cali) and was tickled pink when they handed me a new AZ drivers license good til like 2045 just for showing them my valid Cali drivers license.
When I moved back to California, the DMV here made me hand it over
Still haven't had to take any written tests for renewals since I was 16 (now 27).
That made me think: what a perfect example of just how fucking useless as a society we've become. We can't even bring ourselves to do the right thing when it's only JUST as convenient as doing the wrong thing. And that's not even considered odd. Even sadder.
:-)
For your average person, when doing the "right" thing involves spending $12k more for a hybrid vs a Honda with nearly as good fuel efficiency (or a diesel of some sort), then the "right" thing isn't necessarily the "right" decision.
If you can afford to throw away that kind of money, more power to you. For now it's not practical. I have no doubt these things will improve and someday they'll become more people's first option. Of course, making them not look like roller skates would be a good first step.
If you've got a 35-hour workweek, 6 weeks of paid vacation every year, free healthcare, free schooling through Bachelor's-level for your kids, and a guaranteed old-age pension.... would you give it all up so you could live in a country that had a slightly higher GDP????
Exactly. You wouldn't. And this will be the ultimate downfall of socialism. People will continue voting themselves more and more benefits. Eventually it can't be paid for. It's already starting to happen in Germany, and I'm guessing it'll eventually happen here in the U.S. too.
Sure there are people who stay productive and thrive in a socialist system, but there are far too many who abuse and take advantage of it. GDP may be irrelevant, but I'll take keeping control of as much of my $$ as possible over paying the government to take care of my ever whim.
Seriously, it should be either *AA or ??AA. **AA is completely reduntant...
No kidding. [A-Z]{2}AA would be the obvious way to shortcut this. Sheesh!
Completely untrue.
We're a small ISP (under 10k customers) and have successfully launched VoIP using only open source products -- Asterisk, SER, etc.
Obviously there are some expenses involved, and you need someone who can set up the software; but nothing preventing smaller companies from giving it a go.
So you think NASA should get 1% of our yearly budget? Our space program is by far the best-funded and most successful in the world. Throwing more money at NASA isn't going to make a huge difference at this point. Maybe reevaluating how their internal budget is currently set up would make some sense...
:-)
Not to mention that who knows where the US would be if it weren't for our top-flight/well-funded Military. We'd probably all be German or Soviet citizens.
Actually what you really want to use is CentOS. WBEL development seemed to stagnate and its updates came out much slower.
We tend to use CentOS in dev environments and RHES in "live" environments although there's not much of a difference between the two except that the suits feel better about things if they spend some money.
A-ha! Our credit card processor -- Authorize.Net also went down hard yesterday. I did a quick tracroute just now and see that they're also located at Internap.
:)
Whoops
Those SuperScans sure rock don't they? I'm still using my 19" 751 that I bought in 1997. Made it through four years of college (lotsa soda spills) and at least four interstate moves! It's not quite as clear as the LCD's out there these days, but I can't justify replacing it until it breaks and the thing just keeps on ticking. :)
The difference is that in China, leaders who do not represent the people make these sort of decisions. In the USA, it is our elected leaders who represent us who do so.
I'm more than happy to see useless sites such as the ones you mentioned be shut down. If you disagree, vote for someone else.
Don't know that they have that option in China.
The benefits of a degree will pan out later. I've found the skills and thinking process I learned by getting a CS degree have been very helpful and helped set me apart from those who simply picked up things on their own. But you're right, experience is a huge factor in getting a job. Most interviews I went to simply checked to see that I had a degree then moved on to the experience.
My advice to college students? Be sure to have a job or get a good internship during the summer. Potential employers asked me lots of questions about the internship I did.
Once you get the job, the CS skills will not seem quite so useless.
Obviously this isn't a big help to you now, but I think it's good advice for others worried about their degrees being all for naught.
Drive overlay program is how we used to deal with this sort of issue.
One thing I don't understand... I repeatedly see mention of dust on the solar panals as being a hurdle to the longevity of these rovers. Wouldn't it have been easy to have a "wiper" of some sort on each panel that would clear the dust off from time to time?
Our norwegian, super-enthusiastic astrophysiologist, Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, really made my day.
:-)
Did anyone else expect a short skit by Monty Python to follow this sentence??
Just because a person is a nutcase doesn't mean that all their ideas are to be instantly dismissed.
No, but focus on the people who make the points sanely, rather than giving legitimacy to horrible behavior simply because the person's ideas are "valid".
Huh? How the heck has history shown we're an untrustworthy keeper of these things? The fact that we used two to avert an extremely costly and bloody land invasion of the Japanese home island?
I don't seem to recall us using them on our own people or at the drop of a hat even when things turned for the worse in Vietnam.
I *do* recall the simple existence of them preventing war with the USSR and in the end, being partly responsible for the fall of that country when it couldn't keep up...
Sheesh...