In the late 80's, early 90's, the government (signed by George Bush Sr) decided that Freon, being hazardous to the enviroment, was going to be federally controlled to the extent that a) the auto makers had to come up with an alternate refrigerant for cars and b) current Freon supplies would be tightly controlled and no longer for sale for the general public to install themselves.
The result?
Freon which cost 3.00 at any auto supply shop was removed from the shelves. Freon had to be installed by a licenced technician. The cost of a recharge at an auto shop went from 7.50 where I live, to 35.00 in one day. Technicians were still free to buy it and a healthy black market ensued for the product.
Cars with the updated refrigerant were not available for some years (the car I bought in 1994 did not come equipped with it).
To have your old car upgraded to a safer unit, was the cost of a new unit 600.00 to 1000.00.
It is 100 degrees on summer days where I live. I went a whole summer being unable to afford 35.00 to fix my then truck. Nor could I ever afford a new unit.
Fortunately, I ended up in different circumstances. But what of all the people who were forced to suffer due to this shortsighted policy?
It works the same way. You can spit out all the rhetoric about "greedy companies" and conspiracy theories about bribes and whatnot, but the fact remains: All too often, the best laid plans of enviromentalists and politicians affects those with the smallest voices.
And telling someone on minimum wage who files a 1040EZ form, "Look, we will give you a tax credit for the Bluebook value of your 78 Ford pickup!" is like handing a drowning man a donut.
All I am saying is for the ivory tower enviromentalists to realize that we are talking about people down here who have to work, feed their children and live. Figure out an alternative that respects these people who have no voice in this society.
"We need a way to show the oil companies that we're fed up of lining their pockets with cash."
And we are fed up with them paying their employees and paying those taxes. Pesky jerks.
Find a solution that will not result in hundreds of thousands of people being laid off. Find a way that will not result in the economies of several countries being tossed down the toilet which will further result in war, unrest and more people suffering not to mention economic problems for the rest of the world.
Find a solution that when implemented, will be as cost affective as what it replaced. For instance, don't force everyone to buy a new car which costs two and a half times more than a gasoline powered device and then force them to use a fuel that costs several dollars a gallon and have that same device and fuel get the same mileage as their previous gasoline-powered device.
These are just a few of the problems that enviromentalists and politicians usually don't address: What affect will this have on the working person in this country? Using the excuse "Well, it may cost you more, but we know what is best for you", will result in insurrection when deployed in this scale.
Big (anything = corporations/government/etc) doing anything that may bother SlashDot but that also has a certain ironic angle that SlashDotters can stand around and look smug and say "See! Once again Big (Fill in Blank) has done it again!"
It does not matter if it is offtopic, relevant or even interesting. Just that it has that certain, ironic twist to it and allows like-minded participants to scream their standard answers.
Standard answers posted below for those who left theirs at home
1) Pure corporate greed! 2) Lars sucks! 3) Pure corporate BS! 4) Mod this up! 5) I would like to see a Beowulf cluster of these 6) Who cares? 7) Off topic 8} Where's Jon Katz? 9) Republicans 10) Democrats
Maybe some of you have not worked at an ISP, but ISP's keeping logs is very important, if only to combat SPAM and other forms of abuse.
These logs should include:
* Radius logs - username, port, and time, (Caller ID or npanxx info if you can get it), and IP assignment.
* SMTP logs - SMTP ID. Actual copies of emails would require too much space than available to any ISP.
* NNTP logs - again ID information only (NNTP post ID, date, time, etc).
* Accounting logs as relevant to specific devices - for instance, shell and web servers which allow for telnet/ssh access, ftp servers, etc. This is not spying, this is good system administration.
* DNS - knowing about those lame delegations is a big help. Especially when your customers routinely register domain names with your name servers as authoritative but fail to alert you!
* Most important, accounting logs for root level commands as executed by the system's administrators. This can be a sore spot with some admins, but logging into a machine as root or su'ing immediately to root after login does not present accurate data as to what the admins are doing on a box. Using sudo or one of the other packages and maintaining an adherence policy to its' use should be expected. (Yes, yes there are ways around it..).
Most of these things are standard practices for any of you who have worked for an ISP. I could care less what people were doing online unless they were violating our TOS/AUP and generated complaints. At that point, we needed to know who was doing what in order to fufill our contractual obligations to all of our customers.
I collect software and giveaways from ISP's, especially Win 3.1 software, tshirts, ads, old magazine articles, etc.
My facination is on the number of ISP's that emerged in the past five years and how many of them disappeared, especially the high-profile, nationally advertised companies - gnn, pipeline, etc.
I would like to see some of their archived sites from 1996 for different ISP's, their service offerings, pricing.
Call me wierd, but I find it facinating. When do we get access?
1993 - Overnight, 5000 ISP's, webhosting companies and online shopping malls spring up all with the word "Cyber" in their names - cybermall.com, cybernet.net, etc.
1993 - Dr. Gelertner is injured by bomb. Out of the picture for some time. Cannot use a computer, visit the Internet or read Wired. Instead, he watches "I Love Lucy" and "Good Times" reruns.
2000 - Gelertner back. Writes manifesto. Uses the word cyber 400 times in a paragraph thinking he is cutting edge. Next manifesto subjects:
* how bad is Windows 3.1. * when is the new version of Procomm coming out? * "I just read a book called 'Snowcrash'. Here is a review". * "10 things I like aboutOS/2" * RFC2213666 - Why pay for Internet Access? Get paid to surf cyberspace!
The amount of time spent by these kids online is amazing. Either rooting, downloading, playing games or chatting it up, they spend hours online doing nothing else. Where are their parents?
I think this is part of the misconception brought about by some of our more esteemed members of society; that a child constantly in front of a computer is preparing for the New Internet Age of IT Jobs or some other mantra. More rubbish than not if young people are only playing games, engaging in IRC or downloading exploits.
Having see firthand what happens when they get caught, I don't think these people realize the implications of their efforts. There is some belief out there that "hax0rs", after they do some high-profile breakins and DOS attacks, are hired to well-paying security jobs. *In most cases* it is quite the opposite.
Once upon a time ago, there was more diversity in radio programming. Why? Because it was a new medium, there were fewer restrictions and programmers were trying to find an audience. Because of that, you had a variety of programs and diverse personalities that reflected America and its' growing pains.
Then there was television. Again, TV station owners, producers and directors tried anything to get people to first buy one of those boxes and then turn the darn thing on. Strange, live programming was the only thing available and on air personalities regularly reminded viewers that the technology was new and who knew what would happen.
Both mediums began that way and both mediums were eventually formulated for maximum audience penetration and ratings. Both mediums were eventually controlled by singular entities determined to controll a "stall" of outlets which would giveway to the media companies we have today. FCC rules have been relaxed to allow for this centralized control.
The result is a handful of media companies whose products strangely resemble each other. Their news offerings duplicate opinions rather than factual information gathering. Their programming runs industry trends (gameshows or westerns for instance) rather than innovative product offerings.
This same thing will eventually happen to many Internet information sources as the cost of technology, marketing in a crowded market and talent to run and attract an audience requires capital beyond the average startup company. Online media outlets with suffucient name recognition and subscriber lists will be acquired by ever larger growning companies, some in existance and some new. Then the previous experience of radio and television will be repeated.
Too bad, you should really contact your representatives and say in the next election.. oh wait, you are too young to vote.
Maybe you can tell them you will vote with your tax dollars.. oh wait, you don't pay taxes.
Maybe you can threaten to cancel service. That's it. And to make sure, you can call your credit card company and.. oh wait, you are too young to have a credit card.
Hmm.. put it up there with drinking, being drafted, getting married, driving and all of those other little things kids get bent about until they are old enough to do them legally and then it does'nt seem to matter that much.
Sure sounds like the lot of us agree - this is a needless lawsuit brought on by some schmuck vs. deep pockets.
So, how do we change it? How do we enact real tort reform in this country? How do we put a cap on punitive damages vs. real damages?
This is not the fault of the lawyers or the plaintives but the system. How do we change it?
Slashdotters living outside of the States: What do your respective home governments do about this? Do they allow silly lawsuits over errant packets and spilled coffee? Are there caps in place?
They had a similar story to this on geekpress last week or so.
Although, many of these pre-movie stories are just that, stories, according to this review I read, there will be some fight scenes of epic proportions.
1) There will be a fight between 10,000 Jedis and 20,000 bad guys which results in several Jedi's being killed.
2) Yoda and Mace will be in the fight. Yoda apparently carries not one but two short lightsabers and uses them like nunchucks. Several members of the Jedi leadership will die in this battle.
3) Episode 2 deals primarily with the Clone Wars and the birth of the Empire. Introduced are Boba Fett and his gang, Grand Moff Tarkin, a new Dark Lord of Sith menace who starts leading Anakin down the dark path and ends with the Star Destroyers being built to "bring peace" to the galaxy.
And you know what's even funnier? These big companies that come waltzing in with "I am from Andercooper Consulting. We will pay you the grand sum of 45,000.00 per year. No stock, no options, no matching 401k plan, but hey, you get to be on the company softball team, get to participate in team building exercises every morning and we only charge.25 for coffee from the machine."
Companies like this rarely get IT/CSE grads. They get Troy and Chad who were business majors and then send them to some internal MCSE classes and then send them out to the field to make statements about 'synergy' and 'ERP dynamics'.
Meanwhile, you stand in the hallway and watch a couple of guys with last names for first names wearing the prerequisite dark suit with banded collar shirt marching about the office yakking about the how well the stock did and how they are both partners and are planning to take their girlfriends (not their wives!) to St, Maarten next week and the most they know how to do is click on MS Exploder and spread viruses with Outlook.
Yeah buddy, that's not for me. Give me a startup with 50 or fewer employees, stock options, a good business plan and a preference for Unix, Linux and Macs and one NT machine we all use to read that bizarre.rtf file sent to us by a client or vendor none of us can read.
At least here in the States, large companies actually deal with more annoyances than the individual or even the small business has to deal with.
For instance, they often times have to hire, promote and train often times based upon color or sex rather than skills.
They have to pay the lionshare of taxes in the US - [which they pass on to us no doubt]
They have to comply with often time, arcane rules for ergonomics and safety set for them by a department with nothing better to do. [Nothing funnier than seeing the local Bell rep in a hard hat in our equipment room. Look out for those falling bits!]
They have to, without question, deal with and support unions.
It takes an act of Congress, literally, for them to do business outside of our borders.
Apply all of these restrictions in some form to your life and you can understand why some companies are so.. difficult.
For a short time a few years ago when everyone was running around putting blue ribbons on their websites, WorldCom purchased and held 60% of the Internet transit traffic in their little hands. (MCI, UUNet, ANS, someone else I am sure).
Fortunately, InternetMCI was sold off to C&W - that of course is subject to your experiences as a customer of C&W.
If this deal included WCom hanging onto Sprint Link and other Internet holdings, I would oppose it simply because of the "pay for transit" deal UUNet did after it was purchased by WCom. Sure, from a routing standpoint it made sense, but you don't break deals, Mr. Sidgemore. [Jonathan Sidgemore - now there's a piece of work. Do a little look up on him sometime. Scary]
Since it is only wireless WCom wants, which it does not have, let 'em have it. I think the Justice Dept. is feeling a little cocky after their successes with MS and Elian.
I read that early this morning (about 4AM). Look at that guy. Pretty scary, especially that closeup photo. What a loon.
I think I would have been tipped off when he started dropping names like the CIA, the Saudi Royal family and whatnot. "Hi there, I live in my Hyundai, but I used to work for the CIA and now I have developed a new product and I would love to get you on the ground floor.." Bzzzt! Nut Alarm!
Who has worked for someone like this before? You know, the cult leader type who makes proclaimations, expects undying devotion from his staff, regularly promotes and fires arbitrarily and so on? I worked for someone like this for awhile. He used to get depressed and sulk whenever he suspected people did not like or trust him. Then he would suddenly get happy and start screwing people over; cutting back their salary, reading their email, finding reasons to fire people, etc.
I don't think it has anything to do with "The New Economy" or "The Internet" but rather the timeless wisdom of P.T. Barnum. Pretty good research by The Standard, I wish all news articles were that good.
Also, I don't think he did anything wrong. All he did, both in Tennesee and California, is take advantage of people's insatiable greed and their suceptibility for quick buck schemes. He should get paid for teaching people how to avoid conmen.
I think that is why a number of US registrars got out of the US hierarchy "business". I know of two organizations that were handling.us hierarchys for two states that handed the role off to other entities.
The admins that were in charge of maintaining these hierarchies simply did not have the time to do it.
And if you have ever dealt with the folks at ISI.EDU before, than you can tell they don't really have the time either (if they still do it, I have not done dns in a while).
Then there is the problem with.us registration being free. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
"so the 100mbit line my college put in from the school to its observatory to do remote astronomy really isn't necessary, even though a single video/control feed saturates the line?"
That does not sound like WAN traffic to the Internet at large, but rather an internal network issue - sounds like it doesn't even go out to the Internet.
"Doh! Of course, I suppose our connections to cerfNet and to Caltech probably aren't necessary, either, I mean, how many students do research projects for JPL and NASA involving -=enormous=- data transfers?"
I have no idea, I don't know where you go to school, what people study, etc. That kind of answers my question though, "What goes on in colleges today that requires so much bandwidth?" If students are having to spend so much time online (off campus), then maybe the campus should close?"
"Put in a firewall and then spend $5 million on a MS Exchange Server array..Especially since it will cost an additional $500,000/year to maintain, with periodical $2million upgrades every couple of years."
Ye gods! I wish I had that contract! So much money! I setup a multi-site, order and maitenance system on a set of 10 Sun 4500's, with a half dozen EMC's, running Sun OS 2.6 and Oracle and spent a fraction of that amount. Sounds like your schools Purchasing Department is getting fleeced.
"Try uploading the data from your protein research projects.." "Try collaborating with other members of the human genome project (to use a keyword of the day"
Wow, alot of people do that at your school? Where do you go to school?
"try handling 5000 people downloading the Lord of the Rings trailer," "watching the Phantom Menace trailer over and over and over again"
You are a ringer. You must go to Geek U. Is this normal for most colleges?
Other persons here are taking issue with the statement "2 T1's for 3600 students" - The concensus here is that is not enough bandwidth.
The complaint is not about the internal network, but the WAN link not being robust enough.
My question again: What goes on in college today that determines the need for relative student bandwidth? Are there that many projects, papers, etc being completed and researched outside of the campus by so many students it requires a large amount of bandwidth?
Slashdot Mirror
Here is an example of my point:
In the late 80's, early 90's, the government (signed by George Bush Sr) decided that Freon, being hazardous to the enviroment, was going to be federally controlled to the extent that a) the auto makers had to come up with an alternate refrigerant for cars and b) current Freon supplies would be tightly controlled and no longer for sale for the general public to install themselves.
The result?
Freon which cost 3.00 at any auto supply shop was removed from the shelves.
Freon had to be installed by a licenced technician.
The cost of a recharge at an auto shop went from 7.50 where I live, to 35.00 in one day.
Technicians were still free to buy it and a healthy black market ensued for the product.
Cars with the updated refrigerant were not available for some years (the car I bought in 1994 did not come equipped with it).
To have your old car upgraded to a safer unit, was the cost of a new unit 600.00 to 1000.00.
It is 100 degrees on summer days where I live. I went a whole summer being unable to afford 35.00 to fix my then truck. Nor could I ever afford a new unit.
Fortunately, I ended up in different circumstances. But what of all the people who were forced to suffer due to this shortsighted policy?
It works the same way. You can spit out all the rhetoric about "greedy companies" and conspiracy theories about bribes and whatnot, but the fact remains: All too often, the best laid plans of enviromentalists and politicians affects those with the smallest voices.
And telling someone on minimum wage who files a 1040EZ form, "Look, we will give you a tax credit for the Bluebook value of your 78 Ford pickup!" is like handing a drowning man a donut.
All I am saying is for the ivory tower enviromentalists to realize that we are talking about people down here who have to work, feed their children and live. Figure out an alternative that respects these people who have no voice in this society.
"We need a way to show the oil companies that we're fed up of lining their pockets with cash."
And we are fed up with them paying their employees and paying those taxes. Pesky jerks.
Find a solution that will not result in hundreds of thousands of people being laid off. Find a way that will not result in the economies of several countries being tossed down the toilet which will further result in war, unrest and more people suffering not to mention economic problems for the rest of the world.
Find a solution that when implemented, will be as cost affective as what it replaced. For instance, don't force everyone to buy a new car which costs two and a half times more than a gasoline powered device and then force them to use a fuel that costs several dollars a gallon and have that same device and fuel get the same mileage as their previous gasoline-powered device.
These are just a few of the problems that enviromentalists and politicians usually don't address: What affect will this have on the working person in this country? Using the excuse "Well, it may cost you more, but we know what is best for you", will result in insurrection when deployed in this scale.
"I would have focused on liberal gun ownership"
Most liberals don't own guns! Don't you read the papers?
You all missed the point:
This story had good SlashDot irony.
Big (anything = corporations/government/etc) doing anything that may bother SlashDot but that also has a certain ironic angle that SlashDotters can stand around and look smug and say "See! Once again Big (Fill in Blank) has done it again!"
It does not matter if it is offtopic, relevant or even interesting. Just that it has that certain, ironic twist to it and allows like-minded participants to scream their standard answers.
Standard answers posted below for those who left theirs at home
1) Pure corporate greed!
2) Lars sucks!
3) Pure corporate BS!
4) Mod this up!
5) I would like to see a Beowulf cluster of these
6) Who cares?
7) Off topic
8} Where's Jon Katz?
9) Republicans
10) Democrats
"In 1991, on a 486/66"
Was that even possible? Sounds more like 1993. But what do I know?
Yep, but Mr. ISP can check the headers of the suspected email, compare it with his SMTP logs and radius logs of Alledged Perp and go from there.
What course of action the ISP takes is subjective. However, most abusers go quietly or make up some wildly outrageous story that nobody believes.
Maybe some of you have not worked at an ISP, but ISP's keeping logs is very important, if only to combat SPAM and other forms of abuse.
These logs should include:
* Radius logs - username, port, and time, (Caller ID or npanxx info if you can get it), and IP assignment.
* SMTP logs - SMTP ID. Actual copies of emails would require too much space than available to any ISP.
* NNTP logs - again ID information only (NNTP post ID, date, time, etc).
* Accounting logs as relevant to specific devices - for instance, shell and web servers which allow for telnet/ssh access, ftp servers, etc. This is not spying, this is good system administration.
* DNS - knowing about those lame delegations is a big help. Especially when your customers routinely register domain names with your name servers as authoritative but fail to alert you!
* Most important, accounting logs for root level commands as executed by the system's administrators. This can be a sore spot with some admins, but logging into a machine as root or su'ing immediately to root after login does not present accurate data as to what the admins are doing on a box. Using sudo or one of the other packages and maintaining an adherence policy to its' use should be expected. (Yes, yes there are ways around it..).
Most of these things are standard practices for any of you who have worked for an ISP. I could care less what people were doing online unless they were violating our TOS/AUP and generated complaints. At that point, we needed to know who was doing what in order to fufill our contractual obligations to all of our customers.
I collect software and giveaways from ISP's, especially Win 3.1 software, tshirts, ads, old magazine articles, etc.
My facination is on the number of ISP's that emerged in the past five years and how many of them disappeared, especially the high-profile, nationally advertised companies - gnn, pipeline, etc.
I would like to see some of their archived sites from 1996 for different ISP's, their service offerings, pricing.
Call me wierd, but I find it facinating. When do we get access?
Timeline:
1991 - Dr. G. publishes first manifesto.
1992 - Commercialization of the internet allowed.
1993 - Overnight, 5000 ISP's, webhosting companies and online shopping malls spring up all with the word "Cyber" in their names - cybermall.com, cybernet.net, etc.
1993 - Dr. Gelertner is injured by bomb. Out of the picture for some time. Cannot use a computer, visit the Internet or read Wired. Instead, he watches "I Love Lucy" and "Good Times" reruns.
2000 - Gelertner back. Writes manifesto. Uses the word cyber 400 times in a paragraph thinking he is cutting edge. Next manifesto subjects:
* how bad is Windows 3.1.
* when is the new version of Procomm coming out?
* "I just read a book called 'Snowcrash'. Here is a review".
* "10 things I like aboutOS/2"
* RFC2213666 - Why pay for Internet Access? Get paid to surf cyberspace!
The amount of time spent by these kids online is amazing. Either rooting, downloading, playing games or chatting it up, they spend hours online doing nothing else. Where are their parents?
I think this is part of the misconception brought about by some of our more esteemed members of society; that a child constantly in front of a computer is preparing for the New Internet Age of IT Jobs or some other mantra. More rubbish than not if young people are only playing games, engaging in IRC or downloading exploits.
Having see firthand what happens when they get caught, I don't think these people realize the implications of their efforts. There is some belief out there that "hax0rs", after they do some high-profile breakins and DOS attacks, are hired to well-paying security jobs. *In most cases* it is quite the opposite.
Criminal records follow you throughout your life.
Once upon a time ago, there was more diversity in radio programming. Why? Because it was a new medium, there were fewer restrictions and programmers were trying to find an audience. Because of that, you had a variety of programs and diverse personalities that reflected America and its' growing pains.
Then there was television. Again, TV station owners, producers and directors tried anything to get people to first buy one of those boxes and then turn the darn thing on. Strange, live programming was the only thing available and on air personalities regularly reminded viewers that the technology was new and who knew what would happen.
Both mediums began that way and both mediums were eventually formulated for maximum audience penetration and ratings. Both mediums were eventually controlled by singular entities determined to controll a "stall" of outlets which would giveway to the media companies we have today. FCC rules have been relaxed to allow for this centralized control.
The result is a handful of media companies whose products strangely resemble each other. Their news offerings duplicate opinions rather than factual information gathering. Their programming runs industry trends (gameshows or westerns for instance) rather than innovative product offerings.
This same thing will eventually happen to many Internet information sources as the cost of technology, marketing in a crowded market and talent to run and attract an audience requires capital beyond the average startup company.
Online media outlets with suffucient name recognition and subscriber lists will be acquired by ever larger growning companies, some in existance and some new. Then the previous experience of radio and television will be repeated.
Wonderful.
Too bad, you should really contact your representatives and say in the next election.. oh wait, you are too young to vote.
Maybe you can tell them you will vote with your tax dollars.. oh wait, you don't pay taxes.
Maybe you can threaten to cancel service. That's it. And to make sure, you can call your credit card company and.. oh wait, you are too young to have a credit card.
Hmm.. put it up there with drinking, being drafted, getting married, driving and all of those other little things kids get bent about until they are old enough to do them legally and then it does'nt seem to matter that much.
Of course, that led to the Wrath of Khan. One of the side effects of genetic improvements is bad chest implants and hair weaves.
Genetic subjects also cannot defeat the might of James T. Kirk.
Soon, we will be able to buy genetic code on priceline.com by naming our own price.
I am exited at the prospect.
Sure sounds like the lot of us agree - this is a needless lawsuit brought on by some schmuck vs. deep pockets.
So, how do we change it? How do we enact real tort reform in this country? How do we put a cap on punitive damages vs. real damages?
This is not the fault of the lawyers or the plaintives but the system. How do we change it?
Slashdotters living outside of the States: What do your respective home governments do about this? Do they allow silly lawsuits over errant packets and spilled coffee? Are there caps in place?
Hate the NT server, hate the Flash 4 garbage, hate not seeing what kind of car they put this in.
Skip the bs and show me how to turn my pickup into an O.S.S. - Open Source Sled.
They had a similar story to this on geekpress last week or so.
Although, many of these pre-movie stories are just that, stories, according to this review I read, there will be some fight scenes of epic proportions.
1) There will be a fight between 10,000 Jedis and 20,000 bad guys which results in several Jedi's being killed.
2) Yoda and Mace will be in the fight. Yoda apparently carries not one but two short lightsabers and uses them like nunchucks. Several members of the Jedi leadership will die in this battle.
3) Episode 2 deals primarily with the Clone Wars and the birth of the Empire. Introduced are Boba Fett and his gang, Grand Moff Tarkin, a new Dark Lord of Sith menace who starts leading Anakin down the dark path and ends with the Star Destroyers being built to "bring peace" to the galaxy.
And you know what's even funnier? These big companies that come waltzing in with "I am from Andercooper Consulting. We will pay you the grand sum of 45,000.00 per year. No stock, no options, no matching 401k plan, but hey, you get to be on the company softball team, get to participate in team building exercises every morning and we only charge .25 for coffee from the machine."
.rtf file sent to us by a client or vendor none of us can read.
Companies like this rarely get IT/CSE grads. They get Troy and Chad who were business majors and then send them to some internal MCSE classes and then send them out to the field to make statements about 'synergy' and 'ERP dynamics'.
Meanwhile, you stand in the hallway and watch a couple of guys with last names for first names wearing the prerequisite dark suit with banded collar shirt marching about the office yakking about the how well the stock did and how they are both partners and are planning to take their girlfriends (not their wives!) to St, Maarten next week and the most they know how to do is click on MS Exploder and spread viruses with Outlook.
Yeah buddy, that's not for me. Give me a startup with 50 or fewer employees, stock options, a good business plan and a preference for Unix, Linux and Macs and one NT machine we all use to read that bizarre
So what do you suggest? A world body which sets rules for conduct and behavior for all companies worldwide?
Embellish.
Yes and no.
At least here in the States, large companies actually deal with more annoyances than the individual or even the small business has to deal with.
For instance, they often times have to hire, promote and train often times based upon color or sex rather than skills.
They have to pay the lionshare of taxes in the US - [which they pass on to us no doubt]
They have to comply with often time, arcane rules for ergonomics and safety set for them by a department with nothing better to do. [Nothing funnier than seeing the local Bell rep in a hard hat in our equipment room. Look out for those falling bits!]
They have to, without question, deal with and support unions.
It takes an act of Congress, literally, for them to do business outside of our borders.
Apply all of these restrictions in some form to your life and you can understand why some companies are so.. difficult.
For a short time a few years ago when everyone was running around putting blue ribbons on their websites, WorldCom purchased and held 60% of the Internet transit traffic in their little hands.
(MCI, UUNet, ANS, someone else I am sure).
Fortunately, InternetMCI was sold off to C&W - that of course is subject to your experiences as a customer of C&W.
If this deal included WCom hanging onto Sprint Link and other Internet holdings, I would oppose it simply because of the "pay for transit" deal UUNet did after it was purchased by WCom. Sure, from a routing standpoint it made sense, but you don't break deals, Mr. Sidgemore. [Jonathan Sidgemore - now there's a piece of work. Do a little look up on him sometime. Scary]
Since it is only wireless WCom wants, which it does not have, let 'em have it. I think the Justice Dept. is feeling a little cocky after their successes with MS and Elian.
That's funny you should mention Jobs because the guy I worked for was a big Jobs fan. He wanted his title not to be President, but Chief Visionary.
I read that early this morning (about 4AM). Look at that guy. Pretty scary, especially that closeup photo. What a loon.
I think I would have been tipped off when he started dropping names like the CIA, the Saudi Royal family and whatnot. "Hi there, I live in my Hyundai, but I used to work for the CIA and now I have developed a new product and I would love to get you on the ground floor.." Bzzzt! Nut Alarm!
Who has worked for someone like this before? You know, the cult leader type who makes proclaimations, expects undying devotion from his staff, regularly promotes and fires arbitrarily and so on? I worked for someone like this for awhile. He used to get depressed and sulk whenever he suspected people did not like or trust him. Then he would suddenly get happy and start screwing people over; cutting back their salary, reading their email, finding reasons to fire people, etc.
I don't think it has anything to do with "The New Economy" or "The Internet" but rather the timeless wisdom of P.T. Barnum. Pretty good research by The Standard, I wish all news articles were that good.
Also, I don't think he did anything wrong. All he did, both in Tennesee and California, is take advantage of people's insatiable greed and their suceptibility for quick buck schemes. He should get paid for teaching people how to avoid conmen.
I think that is why a number of US registrars got out of the US hierarchy "business". I know of two organizations that were handling .us hierarchys for two states that handed the role off to other entities.
.us registration being free. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
The admins that were in charge of maintaining these hierarchies simply did not have the time to do it.
And if you have ever dealt with the folks at ISI.EDU before, than you can tell they don't really have the time either (if they still do it, I have not done dns in a while).
Then there is the problem with
"so the 100mbit line my college put in from the school to its observatory to do remote astronomy really isn't necessary, even though a single video/control feed saturates the line?"
That does not sound like WAN traffic to the Internet at large, but rather an internal network issue - sounds like it doesn't even go out to the Internet.
"Doh! Of course, I suppose our connections to cerfNet and to Caltech probably aren't necessary, either, I mean, how many students do research projects for JPL and NASA involving -=enormous=- data transfers?"
I have no idea, I don't know where you go to school, what people study, etc. That kind of answers my question though, "What goes on in colleges today that requires so much bandwidth?" If students are having to spend so much time online (off campus), then maybe the campus should close?"
"Put in a firewall and then spend $5 million on a MS Exchange Server array..Especially since it will cost an additional $500,000/year to maintain, with periodical $2million upgrades every couple of years."
Ye gods! I wish I had that contract! So much money! I setup a multi-site, order and maitenance system on a set of 10 Sun 4500's, with a half dozen EMC's, running Sun OS 2.6 and Oracle and spent a fraction of that amount. Sounds like your schools Purchasing Department is getting fleeced.
"Try uploading the data from your protein research projects.."
"Try collaborating with other members of the human genome project (to use a keyword of the day"
Wow, alot of people do that at your school? Where do you go to school?
"try handling 5000 people downloading the Lord of the Rings trailer,"
"watching the Phantom Menace trailer over and over and over again"
You are a ringer. You must go to Geek U. Is this normal for most colleges?
Again, my point.
Other persons here are taking issue with the statement "2 T1's for 3600 students" - The concensus here is that is not enough bandwidth.
The complaint is not about the internal network, but the WAN link not being robust enough.
My question again: What goes on in college today that determines the need for relative student bandwidth? Are there that many projects, papers, etc being completed and researched outside of the campus by so many students it requires a large amount of bandwidth?
Thanks