In my opinion, the amount of money that was raised was a pittance compared to the true value of the spectrum.
I don't mind at all that microwave ovens have some spectrum, and I'm glad that it's a nice narrow band. I just wish that there was more spectrum that wasn't such a noisy mess. Perhaps your radios work fine, but microwave interference is a very common problem.
What I want is a nice wide band in some valuable spectrum - high enough frequency for high bit rates, low enough to get through moderate obstacles - that isn't trampled to death. I want it to be a band wide enough that we can have gizmos galore without them constantly contending for spectrum - as it is I just barely have enough to keep my AP from conflicting with my neighbors'. With a band ten times wider, it'd be a non-issue.
The FCC was bought, sold, and paid for long ago. That's why the vast majority of our spectrum 'belongs' to megacorps, and only the thinnest little slivers are given back to us.
Can you imagine how much more useful WiFi would be if we had more than 3 non-conflicting channels that are completely trampled by microwave ovens? (OK, so there's also the 5GHz band, but I mean a nice big block, all in one clean band.) Cordless phones wouldn't conflict, wireless in-house TV distribution would have happened long ago, and more. Imagine if there was a decently sized band of relatively long-wavelength (sub-GHz), spectrum available that allowed a couple watts total / a few tens EIRP in a narrow beam. We could very easily set up private point to point links everywhere, instead of just barely getting them to work as it is now.
Or standards... The rest of the world uses DVB. The US gets ATSC, which is a mess of patents. Same deal with HD radio.
I'm not the least surprised that the FCC isn't protecting your interests, and is doing everything that keeps huge corporations in control of communications. It's what they do best.
What went wrong? All I've ever had to do is merge my changes in/etc.
I don't run on the bleeding edge, so they've usually had a month or two to work out the upgrade bugs before I upgrade. That might be why it works for me.:)
It sounds an awful lot like you're installing new versions as in-place "upgrades". I've never had that work successfully, starting from RH 6.something or so around 1999.
(emphasis added)
Best practices for RH6 are pretty irrelevant for modern distros. Reliable in-place upgrades were one of the big reasons I jumped ship from RedHat to Debian in the late 90's. With Debian, and it's derivatives like Ubuntu, in-place upgrades actually work, and have done so consistently for me on both desktops and many production servers, for over a decade.
Upgrade your existing install -- avoid that "gotta go configure everything again" feeling!
I originally heard a slightly different version of this story:
I recently asked my friends’ little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?
She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people. Her parents beamed with pride. ‘Wowwhat a worthy goal.’ I told her, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘ Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?
I said, ‘Welcome to the Republican Party.’ Her parents still aren’t speaking to me.
The sociologist in me finds the subtle change fascinating.
I don't know any of the technical details, but I'm confident that the lords of copyright will make sure you can't accidentally watch your neighbor's programming or vice versa. If history is an indicator, it'll be average-consumer-proof, but still vulnerable to people with a screwdriver, a soldering iron, and a convenient bit of software written by a couple guys who're sick of DRM.
The -1 was just geeky humor. I apologize for coming across as rude.
Drinkypoo's bizarrely agreeing with what I said but in a confrontational tone... He's either misunderstanding and unsociable, or more likely just a troll.
1) They spin far too fast, so you have to have a transmission to slow that down. 2) they don't like to slow down too much, so you have to have some means to clutch them so starting from a stop won't stall them.
-1, Wrong. In a turboshaft engine you have two sets of turbines. N1 goes to the compressor, and spins very fast (Say, 10,000 idle, 40,000 redline). N2 is the power takeoff, and it's like a torque converter - it works at any speed, all the way down to 0 RPM. If you hold the brakes, spool up N1, and then let go, you'll start with full torque from 0 RPM on N2. You often don't need a multi-ratio transmission at all, because the power delivery is very flat across the N2 RPM range, a lot like electric motors.
There are big efficiency and maintenance advantages by generating electric power directly from N1, but low-N2-RPM performance is one of the major strengths of turboshafts.
I lived on a steady diet of that for years, but now Thunderbird 3 does it better. It meets all of the OP's requirements:
a) Everything's stored as an mbox. Fast conversion utilities abound. b) Performance with my very large set of data is good. c) mbox is as universal as it gets. d) Thunderbird 3 added full-text indexing. I can search GB's in seconds, instead of tens of minutes with grep. e) Thunderbird is on all major platforms. f) see (c).
What hardware you have doesn't matter much. Any run of the mill dual headed desktop will do what I need - a few browser windows, a dozen xterms, and some email up in the corner. Anything else is just for show.
What's really valuable when I'm on point is documentation. I need to know:
What does this server do? What's the procedure to rebuild it? Who built it last time, in case I hit trouble? Who's the business owner? How do I reach them? A cell number would help. What's the escalation path when they're AWOL? Where are the contact numbers for our transit providers? What are their SLAs? Where's a map of our network, in case I have to creatively reroute traffic in ways that OSPF won't? Is it up to date? What services are exposed in the DMZ? Where's the ticket requesting this port be opened? Are there supposed to be 100,000 different IPs connecting here, or just three? Where is the password vault? What's the procedure to update the password vault if I have to change one?
Being able to find these things quickly will make me a much happier sysadmin than any creature comforts, excluding caffeine.
If you want to get into creature comforts in a windowless bunker, make it lighting. I don't want it bright, but it should be well designed to cover the space well. Good warm triphosphor fluorescents with high frequency electronic ballasts are much much nicer than the old cold ones with 120Hz flicker from magnetic ballasts. Color rendering index matters. That makes a good base lighting for the workspace. Then get a few of those industrial HID grow lamps, and have them light a big picture of a forest scene covering an entire wall. Or actually grow plants under them, and don't pay too close attention to what else people plant when you're not looking. Careful not to make it too bright, but the sun-like spectrum will break up the monotony of the fluorescents. Add some bright halogen task lights for when you need to see something well, without having to flood the whole room.
Raise the ceiling as high as you can. Rip out the ceiling tiles. Suspend the lights on cables. Let the ductwork show. Paint it all black. I hate living in a box. Exposing all the HVAC and cabling breaks it up, and I actually like the minimalist industrial aesthetic. If you want a softer look, hang some tapestries up amongst the machinery.
They're rare and expensive for anything more than portable devices, but LED displays certainly do exist, and the contrast is much better than with LCDs.
I will absolutely blame Apple if I botch an upgrade and brick my jailbroken phone. I use apps that Apple won't bless, and it's Apple's fault that I have to jump through these hoops to use my device the way I want.
I am genuinely interested in what these include, particularly the business case or problem you are solving with them.
One from my limited experience: Recursive queries.
Example: Create a tree structure where every node has a reference to its parent. Now try to select all the leaf nodes under a given $node.
Several commercial DBMSes will let you do this directly (eg, CONNECT BY in Oracle). Postgres and MySQL cannot, and you have to create a loop where you select all nodes where parent = $node, then take that $list and select all nodes where there parent = $list; then repeat until you don't get anything back. There are performance penalties for this.
There are otherways to create trees in an RDBMS without a recursion feature, but you'll invariably end up having to either take a performance hit, or make updates significantly more complicated: your application has to update the tree metadata every time a node is added, deleted, or moved, which is just begging for referential integrity errors.
"Those who do not understand TCP/IP are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
Yes, because TCP/IP is the best protocol in the universe for now and forever.
That is not what I said or meant. TCP and IP have had many problems over the years; many of them have been fixed; some will eventually require new protocols (which occasionally happens; we're seeing that now with IPv6 and SCTP).
Those who DO understand TCP/IP, and why it does all the esoteric things it does, have a chance at implementing a better protocol. However, when the GGP was talking about trimming the "cruft", it raised a red flag with a "hasn't read enough RFCs" caption.
What cruft? There may be features you don't yet understand[1], and features you don't need for this purpose[2], but IPv4 is a pretty lean already: 20 bytes for IP + 20 bytes for TCP 3% of a 1500 byte packet; For the cost of having to reimplement all your network hardware and applications to use a proprietary protocol, you're better off buying 3% more bandwidth, even if that means launching more satellites to link up some lonely jungle.
[1] Those who do not understand TCP/IP are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
[2] You need addresses to be 32 bits for more than having enough addresses - there are processing advantages to having them be sizeof(int). Look at a diagram for TCP and IP headers sometime. No field crosses a mod-32 barrier; small fields are cleverly tetrised into chunks that align on mod-16 barriers. See [1].
3,10,S: high bandwidth (map downloads, surveillance photo distribution)
1,15,S: Military administration
0,40,L: Realtime (VoIP, video conferencing)
1,40,M: Interactive (wiki, requisition ticket system UI)
2,20,S: Noninteractive (Software updates for GPS, ticket system backend, CIFS)
2,5,S: Nonmilitary
0,40,L: Realtime (VoIP to family ay home, counterstrike servers, SSH)
1,40,M: Interactive (youtube, porn)
2,20,S: Noninteractive (SMTP, FTP, SCP)
Everything is guaranteed the percentage (relative to peers) given; IE, the queue with SMTP will get 1% (5% * 20%) of bandwidth as a guarnateed minimum (enough to keep connections alive when other things are bursting hard, and eventually deliver email even if higher priorities never relent).
Extra bandwidth is given exclusively to higher priority bands (ie, lower prio numbers): If there are whole bunch of videoconferences going on between officers in bases about non-immediate military needs (prio 1.0), and suddenly 20 drone pilots need realtime video feeds to interactively fly a coordinated airstrike, the pilots get all the bandwidth they need, leaving the videoconferences only 6% (smart codecs will degrade gracefully; fixed bandwidth ones will just have to call back after the airstrike). Similarly, if they need to VoIP about building a bigger mess, your counterstrike game will lag. FTP gets best effort in between your porn page loads (which burst quickly with the medium-size burst; FTP gets a small burst so it's always ready to yield).
The level of detail you get into for the queues depends on how much bandwidth you have, and how much contention there is for it. If there's high contention, more detail helps more. There are also smarter queueing disciplines than HTB, but it's the simplest to describe like this.
Statically reserved bandwidth guarantees per-connection is better for many realtime needs. With RSVP, each drone pilot can reserve a guaranteed 5% slot for their flow, to prevent problems where there was lots of extra bandwidth, and then a lower priority suddenly needs its minimum guarantee, thus screwing up traffic that was flowing before. IE, it's better to tell the pilot from the start that there's not enough bandwidth that can be guaranteed to them, than to have them start flying and then get jitters when a bunch of troops hit push-to-talk, right as their drone was on final approach.
So in short, porn is pretty low on the list, but not the bottom of the stack.:)
Which in reality means the very people you wouldn't want to show the video to will be able to see it.
I'm a responsible driver, and I find it more likely that I'd WANT to have hard evidence when the other guy starts lying about the circumstances of an accident.
Or better yet, when a cop gives you a bullshit ticket. When you're in court, if it's your word versus the cop's, the cop wins. If it's the camera versus the cop, you might have a chance.
Not sure what holds companies back from making the change.
A conservative approach to new technologies, when the old ones work good enough. The need for SLAs and other vendor agreements. Lawyers insisting on data retention policies. The rational or irrational concern of being out of control if something goes wrong.
Google doesn't spy on our email
Actually, Google *does* spy on your email, definitely for advertising, probably for marketing, and possibly they (or individuals with access) are corrupt, but that's not the big privacy concern about Google.
The big problem lawyers have with Gmail is that it keeps a very long term record of everything everyone has said, with no way to enforce a data retention period, or even know how long it'll be before all the copies of your data are really deleted after you've told it to delete them.
Also, if your mail server gets subpoenaed, at least you KNOW it; with Gmail, you won't necessarily ever find out.
And if you think that's only for business criminals who're who're trying to bury the knowledge of how their product was killing people, read this: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
We can add a password to the document or encrypt the content.
Do you have a systematic method in place to a) securely store the encryption keys as long as you need them (you're at the risk of losing all your really important stuff here!), and b) delete them when they're done? Is implementing such a system easier than just running your own mail server?
Your company email passes unencrypted through dozens of relays
Our internal mail doesn't, and external mail to our our business partners is secured with TLS. Only occasional mails to random people are unencrypted. That's significantly less exposure than having every internal mail in the hands of a third party.
So far email backups have been a big waste of time and drive space
All backups are a big waste of time and drive space... Right up until you need them.
What's your business continuity plan if "something bad" happens to Gmail? Scramble around and try to find a way to import your CC'd copies from the other account into whatever your new provider will be, and change the mailservers over? That might be OK (I'd argue not) for a 10 person company, but for a 200+ person company, that'll never fly.
That change freed up a lot of money. We didn't need an Exchange admin and we saved a bundle on license fees.
That's what we say about Postfix.:)
I won't say "Never" to Gmail, but there are certainly solid arguments against it.
They will require a power supply optimized for lower loads to reap maximum benefit.
My home server is a 1.4GHz AMD Athlon, and I don't know how much power the whole setup consumes (it's actually in my parents' garage, as that gives me free remote backups). I wonder if the cost to manufacture a new PC would outweigh the extra power needed to run the old one? (i.e. environmental argument rather than economic one.)
Get a Kill-A-Watt and have fun measuring all the things in your house.:) Or, if you have a multimeter that can measure AC amps, first measure the AC voltage on the line, then plug the red lead into the amp connector, select amps, and put the meter in series with one side of the power cord (please be careful with exposed 110V lines). Amps * Volts = Watts.
Ballpark, standard desktop PCs pull 100-200 watts at idle; that's roughly 100 KW-h per month. It's a win both economically and environmentally, unless the manufacture of electronics is far worse than I know about.
If you have some money to throw at it, here are a few solutions:
THE solution, that completely solves all your problems, is to get a serial video card: http://www.realweasel.com/ It emulates a VGA card, and spews out all the text over a serial port. As long as you never go into graphics mode, it's the whole solution.... But it's kind of expensive.
Second to that: Throw away the desktop motherboard. Buy a whitebox server motherboard (Tyan, SuperMicro, etc), and the BIOS will support serial access.... But it's kind of expensive.
Next option: IP-KVM adapter. There are plenty of these available that plug into a VGA port and the PS2 keyboard port, and will let you control it via VNC or similar. Works great! But it's kind of expensive.
But personally, I think your entire premise is broken:
old P4 that is in fine working order
No, it's not. By pure virtue of being a P4, the performance per watt is miserable by current standards. It's fine if you just want to experiment, but if you want to actually have a server that you're running 24x7, THROW IT AWAY. I know this is hard to accept, but the fact is, you can buy either a low-power ITX motherboard with an Atom processor for around $70, which will do everything you need in a home server in under 20 watts at idle, or buy a current generation MicroATX motherboard + low end Phenom for about $150, which will draw somewhat less power and completely trounce the P4's performance.
What would be nice is if the iPhone automatically detected when 3G was oversubscribed / unusable and automagically failover to EDGE without user intervention.
I got a taste of this at Maker Faire. I wanted the PDF of the schedule, but 3G was completely bombed. Manually failing over to EDGE meant that I could slooooowly download it (it took about 20 minutes).
If all those iphones had failed over to EDGE, all it would have done is resulted in EDGE being useless, too. With a hole that size in the bucket, another drop isn't going to matter.
The purpose is to admit that what they (as a government) did was wrong. It means the new individuals running the government are committing to not repeat previous mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion, the amount of money that was raised was a pittance compared to the true value of the spectrum.
I don't mind at all that microwave ovens have some spectrum, and I'm glad that it's a nice narrow band. I just wish that there was more spectrum that wasn't such a noisy mess. Perhaps your radios work fine, but microwave interference is a very common problem.
What I want is a nice wide band in some valuable spectrum - high enough frequency for high bit rates, low enough to get through moderate obstacles - that isn't trampled to death. I want it to be a band wide enough that we can have gizmos galore without them constantly contending for spectrum - as it is I just barely have enough to keep my AP from conflicting with my neighbors'. With a band ten times wider, it'd be a non-issue.
The FCC was bought, sold, and paid for long ago. That's why the vast majority of our spectrum 'belongs' to megacorps, and only the thinnest little slivers are given back to us.
Can you imagine how much more useful WiFi would be if we had more than 3 non-conflicting channels that are completely trampled by microwave ovens? (OK, so there's also the 5GHz band, but I mean a nice big block, all in one clean band.) Cordless phones wouldn't conflict, wireless in-house TV distribution would have happened long ago, and more. Imagine if there was a decently sized band of relatively long-wavelength (sub-GHz), spectrum available that allowed a couple watts total / a few tens EIRP in a narrow beam. We could very easily set up private point to point links everywhere, instead of just barely getting them to work as it is now.
Or standards... The rest of the world uses DVB. The US gets ATSC, which is a mess of patents. Same deal with HD radio.
I'm not the least surprised that the FCC isn't protecting your interests, and is doing everything that keeps huge corporations in control of communications. It's what they do best.
What went wrong? All I've ever had to do is merge my changes in /etc.
I don't run on the bleeding edge, so they've usually had a month or two to work out the upgrade bugs before I upgrade. That might be why it works for me. :)
It sounds an awful lot like you're installing new versions as in-place "upgrades". I've never had that work successfully, starting from RH 6.something or so around 1999.
(emphasis added)
Best practices for RH6 are pretty irrelevant for modern distros. Reliable in-place upgrades were one of the big reasons I jumped ship from RedHat to Debian in the late 90's. With Debian, and it's derivatives like Ubuntu, in-place upgrades actually work, and have done so consistently for me on both desktops and many production servers, for over a decade.
Upgrade your existing install -- avoid that "gotta go configure everything again" feeling!
Let's patent using a lever to reduce work next!
Actually, I'd pay a lot of money for a patent on a lever that reduces work. Normal levers just reduce *force*. :)
I originally heard a slightly different version of this story:
I recently asked my friends’ little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?
She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people. Her parents beamed with pride. ‘Wowwhat a worthy goal.’ I told her, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘ Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?
I said, ‘Welcome to the Republican Party.’ Her parents still aren’t speaking to me.
The sociologist in me finds the subtle change fascinating.
I don't know any of the technical details, but I'm confident that the lords of copyright will make sure you can't accidentally watch your neighbor's programming or vice versa. If history is an indicator, it'll be average-consumer-proof, but still vulnerable to people with a screwdriver, a soldering iron, and a convenient bit of software written by a couple guys who're sick of DRM.
The -1 was just geeky humor. I apologize for coming across as rude.
Drinkypoo's bizarrely agreeing with what I said but in a confrontational tone... He's either misunderstanding and unsociable, or more likely just a troll.
1) They spin far too fast, so you have to have a transmission to slow that down.
2) they don't like to slow down too much, so you have to have some means to clutch them so starting from a stop won't stall them.
-1, Wrong. In a turboshaft engine you have two sets of turbines. N1 goes to the compressor, and spins very fast (Say, 10,000 idle, 40,000 redline). N2 is the power takeoff, and it's like a torque converter - it works at any speed, all the way down to 0 RPM. If you hold the brakes, spool up N1, and then let go, you'll start with full torque from 0 RPM on N2. You often don't need a multi-ratio transmission at all, because the power delivery is very flat across the N2 RPM range, a lot like electric motors.
There are big efficiency and maintenance advantages by generating electric power directly from N1, but low-N2-RPM performance is one of the major strengths of turboshafts.
grepmail regex mbox1 mbox2 mbox3 > newmbox
mutt -f newmbox
I lived on a steady diet of that for years, but now Thunderbird 3 does it better. It meets all of the OP's requirements:
a) Everything's stored as an mbox. Fast conversion utilities abound.
b) Performance with my very large set of data is good.
c) mbox is as universal as it gets.
d) Thunderbird 3 added full-text indexing. I can search GB's in seconds, instead of tens of minutes with grep.
e) Thunderbird is on all major platforms.
f) see (c).
What hardware you have doesn't matter much. Any run of the mill dual headed desktop will do what I need - a few browser windows, a dozen xterms, and some email up in the corner. Anything else is just for show.
What's really valuable when I'm on point is documentation. I need to know:
What does this server do?
What's the procedure to rebuild it?
Who built it last time, in case I hit trouble?
Who's the business owner?
How do I reach them? A cell number would help.
What's the escalation path when they're AWOL?
Where are the contact numbers for our transit providers?
What are their SLAs?
Where's a map of our network, in case I have to creatively reroute traffic in ways that OSPF won't?
Is it up to date?
What services are exposed in the DMZ?
Where's the ticket requesting this port be opened?
Are there supposed to be 100,000 different IPs connecting here, or just three?
Where is the password vault?
What's the procedure to update the password vault if I have to change one?
Being able to find these things quickly will make me a much happier sysadmin than any creature comforts, excluding caffeine.
If you want to get into creature comforts in a windowless bunker, make it lighting. I don't want it bright, but it should be well designed to cover the space well. Good warm triphosphor fluorescents with high frequency electronic ballasts are much much nicer than the old cold ones with 120Hz flicker from magnetic ballasts. Color rendering index matters. That makes a good base lighting for the workspace. Then get a few of those industrial HID grow lamps, and have them light a big picture of a forest scene covering an entire wall. Or actually grow plants under them, and don't pay too close attention to what else people plant when you're not looking. Careful not to make it too bright, but the sun-like spectrum will break up the monotony of the fluorescents. Add some bright halogen task lights for when you need to see something well, without having to flood the whole room.
Raise the ceiling as high as you can. Rip out the ceiling tiles. Suspend the lights on cables. Let the ductwork show. Paint it all black. I hate living in a box. Exposing all the HVAC and cabling breaks it up, and I actually like the minimalist industrial aesthetic. If you want a softer look, hang some tapestries up amongst the machinery.
-1, Wrong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED
They're rare and expensive for anything more than portable devices, but LED displays certainly do exist, and the contrast is much better than with LCDs.
I will absolutely blame Apple if I botch an upgrade and brick my jailbroken phone. I use apps that Apple won't bless, and it's Apple's fault that I have to jump through these hoops to use my device the way I want.
One from my limited experience: Recursive queries.
Example: Create a tree structure where every node has a reference to its parent. Now try to select all the leaf nodes under a given $node.
Several commercial DBMSes will let you do this directly (eg, CONNECT BY in Oracle). Postgres and MySQL cannot, and you have to create a loop where you select all nodes where parent = $node, then take that $list and select all nodes where there parent = $list; then repeat until you don't get anything back. There are performance penalties for this.
There are other ways to create trees in an RDBMS without a recursion feature, but you'll invariably end up having to either take a performance hit, or make updates significantly more complicated: your application has to update the tree metadata every time a node is added, deleted, or moved, which is just begging for referential integrity errors.
"Those who do not understand TCP/IP are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
Yes, because TCP/IP is the best protocol in the universe for now and forever.
That is not what I said or meant. TCP and IP have had many problems over the years; many of them have been fixed; some will eventually require new protocols (which occasionally happens; we're seeing that now with IPv6 and SCTP).
Those who DO understand TCP/IP, and why it does all the esoteric things it does, have a chance at implementing a better protocol. However, when the GGP was talking about trimming the "cruft", it raised a red flag with a "hasn't read enough RFCs" caption.
Think IPv4 with all of the cruft taken out
What cruft? There may be features you don't yet understand[1], and features you don't need for this purpose[2], but IPv4 is a pretty lean already: 20 bytes for IP + 20 bytes for TCP 3% of a 1500 byte packet; For the cost of having to reimplement all your network hardware and applications to use a proprietary protocol, you're better off buying 3% more bandwidth, even if that means launching more satellites to link up some lonely jungle.
[1] Those who do not understand TCP/IP are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
[2] You need addresses to be 32 bits for more than having enough addresses - there are processing advantages to having them be sizeof(int). Look at a diagram for TCP and IP headers sometime. No field crosses a mod-32 barrier; small fields are cleverly tetrised into chunks that align on mod-16 barriers. See [1].
How does this affect pr0n?
If I were implementing it in HTB, I'd do it like this:
prio,rate(%),burst(S,M,L): desc
Everything is guaranteed the percentage (relative to peers) given; IE, the queue with SMTP will get 1% (5% * 20%) of bandwidth as a guarnateed minimum (enough to keep connections alive when other things are bursting hard, and eventually deliver email even if higher priorities never relent).
Extra bandwidth is given exclusively to higher priority bands (ie, lower prio numbers): If there are whole bunch of videoconferences going on between officers in bases about non-immediate military needs (prio 1.0), and suddenly 20 drone pilots need realtime video feeds to interactively fly a coordinated airstrike, the pilots get all the bandwidth they need, leaving the videoconferences only 6% (smart codecs will degrade gracefully; fixed bandwidth ones will just have to call back after the airstrike). Similarly, if they need to VoIP about building a bigger mess, your counterstrike game will lag. FTP gets best effort in between your porn page loads (which burst quickly with the medium-size burst; FTP gets a small burst so it's always ready to yield).
The level of detail you get into for the queues depends on how much bandwidth you have, and how much contention there is for it. If there's high contention, more detail helps more. There are also smarter queueing disciplines than HTB, but it's the simplest to describe like this.
Statically reserved bandwidth guarantees per-connection is better for many realtime needs. With RSVP, each drone pilot can reserve a guaranteed 5% slot for their flow, to prevent problems where there was lots of extra bandwidth, and then a lower priority suddenly needs its minimum guarantee, thus screwing up traffic that was flowing before. IE, it's better to tell the pilot from the start that there's not enough bandwidth that can be guaranteed to them, than to have them start flying and then get jitters when a bunch of troops hit push-to-talk, right as their drone was on final approach.
So in short, porn is pretty low on the list, but not the bottom of the stack. :)
Which in reality means the very people you wouldn't want to show the video to will be able to see it.
I'm a responsible driver, and I find it more likely that I'd WANT to have hard evidence when the other guy starts lying about the circumstances of an accident.
Or better yet, when a cop gives you a bullshit ticket. When you're in court, if it's your word versus the cop's, the cop wins. If it's the camera versus the cop, you might have a chance.
Not sure what holds companies back from making the change.
A conservative approach to new technologies, when the old ones work good enough. The need for SLAs and other vendor agreements. Lawyers insisting on data retention policies. The rational or irrational concern of being out of control if something goes wrong.
Google doesn't spy on our email
Actually, Google *does* spy on your email, definitely for advertising, probably for marketing, and possibly they (or individuals with access) are corrupt, but that's not the big privacy concern about Google.
The big problem lawyers have with Gmail is that it keeps a very long term record of everything everyone has said, with no way to enforce a data retention period, or even know how long it'll be before all the copies of your data are really deleted after you've told it to delete them.
Also, if your mail server gets subpoenaed, at least you KNOW it; with Gmail, you won't necessarily ever find out.
And if you think that's only for business criminals who're who're trying to bury the knowledge of how their product was killing people, read this: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
We can add a password to the document or encrypt the content.
Do you have a systematic method in place to a) securely store the encryption keys as long as you need them (you're at the risk of losing all your really important stuff here!), and b) delete them when they're done? Is implementing such a system easier than just running your own mail server?
Your company email passes unencrypted through dozens of relays
Our internal mail doesn't, and external mail to our our business partners is secured with TLS. Only occasional mails to random people are unencrypted. That's significantly less exposure than having every internal mail in the hands of a third party.
So far email backups have been a big waste of time and drive space
All backups are a big waste of time and drive space... Right up until you need them.
What's your business continuity plan if "something bad" happens to Gmail? Scramble around and try to find a way to import your CC'd copies from the other account into whatever your new provider will be, and change the mailservers over? That might be OK (I'd argue not) for a 10 person company, but for a 200+ person company, that'll never fly.
That change freed up a lot of money. We didn't need an Exchange admin and we saved a bundle on license fees.
That's what we say about Postfix. :)
I won't say "Never" to Gmail, but there are certainly solid arguments against it.
Interesting thought, I hadn't realised the Atoms were so cheap.
Example 1.
Lower cost, lower performance with a C3.
They will require a power supply optimized for lower loads to reap maximum benefit.
My home server is a 1.4GHz AMD Athlon, and I don't know how much power the whole setup consumes (it's actually in my parents' garage, as that gives me free remote backups). I wonder if the cost to manufacture a new PC would outweigh the extra power needed to run the old one? (i.e. environmental argument rather than economic one.)
Get a Kill-A-Watt and have fun measuring all the things in your house. :) Or, if you have a multimeter that can measure AC amps, first measure the AC voltage on the line, then plug the red lead into the amp connector, select amps, and put the meter in series with one side of the power cord (please be careful with exposed 110V lines). Amps * Volts = Watts.
Ballpark, standard desktop PCs pull 100-200 watts at idle; that's roughly 100 KW-h per month. It's a win both economically and environmentally, unless the manufacture of electronics is far worse than I know about.
If you have some money to throw at it, here are a few solutions:
THE solution, that completely solves all your problems, is to get a serial video card: http://www.realweasel.com/ It emulates a VGA card, and spews out all the text over a serial port. As long as you never go into graphics mode, it's the whole solution.... But it's kind of expensive.
Second to that: Throw away the desktop motherboard. Buy a whitebox server motherboard (Tyan, SuperMicro, etc), and the BIOS will support serial access. ... But it's kind of expensive.
Next option: IP-KVM adapter. There are plenty of these available that plug into a VGA port and the PS2 keyboard port, and will let you control it via VNC or similar. Works great! But it's kind of expensive.
But personally, I think your entire premise is broken:
old P4 that is in fine working order
No, it's not. By pure virtue of being a P4, the performance per watt is miserable by current standards. It's fine if you just want to experiment, but if you want to actually have a server that you're running 24x7, THROW IT AWAY. I know this is hard to accept, but the fact is, you can buy either a low-power ITX motherboard with an Atom processor for around $70, which will do everything you need in a home server in under 20 watts at idle, or buy a current generation MicroATX motherboard + low end Phenom for about $150, which will draw somewhat less power and completely trounce the P4's performance.
After recieving $200M from Congress to "finish the job", they promptly pocketed the money and forgot the rest.
You're off by 3 orders of magnitude: We got ripped off for $200 BILLION.
What would be nice is if the iPhone automatically detected when 3G was oversubscribed / unusable and automagically failover to EDGE without user intervention.
I got a taste of this at Maker Faire. I wanted the PDF of the schedule, but 3G was completely bombed. Manually failing over to EDGE meant that I could slooooowly download it (it took about 20 minutes).
If all those iphones had failed over to EDGE, all it would have done is resulted in EDGE being useless, too. With a hole that size in the bucket, another drop isn't going to matter.
You people modded me funny? It's intended to be serious.
To what purpose?
The purpose is to admit that what they (as a government) did was wrong. It means the new individuals running the government are committing to not repeat previous mistakes.