One very good reason not to have your email address @gmail.com, if you are using it for your business, is that a LOT of businesses, wholesale vendors, even the federal government will not accept an @gmail.com address because of the large number of frauds associated with free email accounts (not just gmail, but also hotmail, yahoo mail, etc.) For example, this last tax season the federal govenment would not accept a gmail account for notification of your tax return status when filing electronically.
It is much better from a business standpoint to have your own domain and email sent to your domain. If your MX points at gmail, that's okay. Just don't make your email address me@gmail.com if you want to be taken seriously.
Aubrey de Grey has had only two ideas worth considering IMHO. First he said that longevity should not be a research goal; rather, we should learn to control the rate of aging. And if we can control the rate, perhaps we can learn to reverse aging. The second idea worth considering is specific drugs to break protein cross-linkages. But ideas like finding an agent that will remove all the plaque from your arteries like flooding an iron pipe with caustic soda will leave you with arteries that could blow out like an old rubber tube; so some of his ideas leave a lot to be desired.
Over all, I must admit, the idea of approaching aging as an engineering problem is a refreshing if not always sane point of view.
Breaking into someone's network is a Federal crime, so the FBI is probably the correct place to go. After all, isn't stealing a computer the ultimate network break-in?
Palm's market share shrank about 75% because they are losing out to other OS's, including Microsoft Mobile which grew quite impressively last year. RIM's market share has been pretty constant. Linux is also growing - at least enough to be more than a line on the pie chart now. Android isn't even a blip at the moment and has nothing to do with Palm's problems.
What you ask is very simple to do with a dual DSL router; Hawking Technology makes one that isn't too expensive and easy to set it up (http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=36&FamID=43&ProdID=20). I'm an ISP who provides DSL. DSL depends on the DSLAM and phone line condition. Two phone lines to your house from the same phone company can be VERY different in quality and it is line quality that is most important with DSL. After that, a problem could occur with the providers DSLAM; but if you have two DSL lines, odds are very much against both lines being on the same card in the DSLAM and if you are in a large community, they most likely won't even be on the same DSLAM.
You will be dual NAT'd (only way to do two balanced DSL connections). Bittorrent will work fine in this situation even if one ISP blocks it. However, other P2P programs may be inconsistant since you don't have much control over which port the router will choose on an application basis.
"using SSL on the login page is the only way to ensure that your information is going to a trusted site."
I see your point, but disagree with your conclusion. Having SSL doesn't prevent the login page from being tampered with (it can still be hacked to change the form action), but it could make it harder for phishing schemes to succeed.
"2) Some banks have login forms on un-encrypted pages"
The login page can be un-encrypted as long as the data from the form on that page is encrypted before it is sent over the Internet. Said another way, as long as the form action is "https://mybank.com/etc" there is no problem. The only reason some banks encrypt the login page is to make the customer feel good; it doesn't increase their security one iota.
Maybe besides boning up on economics you might also try law. When you are paying month-to-month, your contract is (guess what?) exactly one month long. The ISP need only change their terms and when they receive your next payment, you have legally agreed to those new terms.
An ISP's cost doesn't change with the time of day; bandwidth used at night costs the same as bandwidth used during the day. The only reason to have different rates is to encourage people to move more of their downloading off the 3:30pm to 1:00am heavy usage period in the hopes of having to buy less total bandwidth. However, P2P runs 24 hours per day, so the difference between day and night isn't as big as you might think and is getting smaller all the time.
"I'm paying $90/month for a dedicated server, 24/7 amazing tech support and 1.2TB bandwidth per month. How is $60/month for no dedicated server, crappy tech support and 40GB/month (0.04TB) any where near a reasonable offer?"
You know, I am an ISP and it really find it weird that such a statement can be rated "Insightful". It just seems to demonstrate a lack of knowledge on the part of the moderator. ISP's generally have lots of unused OUTGOING bandwidth and can sell it cheap because it is cosing them (incrementally) nothing. On the other hand, INCOMING bandwidth costs them dearly.
1 megabit-month = 3600 sec per hr * 24 hrs * 30 days / 8 bits per byte = 324 gigabytes
I pay $20 per megabit-month on an OC-3., so that is a 1600% markup! Well, if the drug companies can do it, why not ISP's:P Actually, networks don't run at full capacity 100% of the time and accounting/billing would become more expensive, so 1600% is an obvious exaggeration.
Senate Bill 215 (Obama is a sponser) would prevent ISP's from interfering with content upload or download except in times of network congestion. This could lead to a 50% reduction in revenues since ISP's charge for uploading content such as webpages. The bill will also force them to buy ever increasing amounts of bandwidth at the same time, raising their expenses at the same time their revenue is decreasing. The bill will likely pass if it emerges from commitee. So IMHO, Time-Warner and other ISP's are testing the most likely economic model left to them should SB 215 pass.
If someone were to break this off as a separate topic, it would be interesting to see if/.ers have a better idea than Time-Warner and other ISP's as to how they should charge to pay the cost of Net Neutrality.
Have you ever joined a very large table to itself - several times? There can be legitimate reasons to do this (such as finding duplicate entries) but it can also bring a server to its knees for several days before producing results - if it doesn't run out of space and crash first. Letting people submit their own SQL queries is just asking for trouble if they don't understand the consequences of what they are asking the server to do. Your IT needs to rule on all queries before allowing them to be submitted, at the very least.
You just don't get it. It isn't the downloading any ISP is objecting to; it is the uploading. ISP's are paid for content distributed from their networks, like websites. It normally pays half the cost of the ISP's connection to the Internet. But now you have cheapo companies (the so called "legal" stuff) and IP theives using P2P programs to distribute their whatever on the ISP's nickel. Yah, ISP's are livid about it. When is anyone on this forum ever going to get it through their thick skulls that it is the "UPLOADING", the "SEEDING", the ISP's are objecting to?
You know, carriers make money on some Internet customers and lose money on others. If you are one of the bandwidth hogs he is losing money on, I dare you to tell him to piss off. He'll probably die laughing.
We have about 5000 users and recieve about 1,200,000 emails a day of which all but about 100,000 are spam. We use IceWarp's mail server which is very heavy in antispam features that you can configure and fine tune. I've found what works best is to have it automatically whitelist anyone our users send email to and then really crankup the spam filtering. If someone talks to a business prospect, they ask if they can send the prospect contact information. If so, that person is now whitelisted and we will receive email from them unmolested. We also have one email address with light antispam filtering (catches about 70% with no false positives) for unsolicited inquires.
Maybe, just maybe, people are not in it for the money.
I admit I love building tools and watching people use them to increase their productivity. Money is definitely not the only reward in life. The builders of Apache, Open Office and many other programs have something to be really proud of even if no one ever knows their names. And for many, that is enough.
If you were to stand in front of Wal-Mart's doors and refused to let customers enter the store, I think you would go to jail. A DoS attack does the same thing.
Last year when the US Supreme Court decided that carrying Internet service on cable didn't make the cable companies telecommunication services under current rules, the FCC decided to "level the playing field" and said that the portion of any service used for broadband Internet would not be classified as a telecommunications service. Many ISP's were afraid at the time that this would give Verizon and others the power to deny ISP's connections to the Internet.
Fearing anti-trust suits, the telcos grandfathered in all current ISPs and still provide them with service, but if you are a new ISP, just try to get a DSL line for a customer - you can't. The telcos do not have to take on new broadband ISP's so they are not (they still have to take on dialups, though).
So cutting off the websites in question no longer falls under common carrier statutes and if the website owner was not a competitior, Verizon was free to deny them service.
The point is that Microsoft is losing out in the world market (including China) to Linux. Microsoft must insure that their commercial programs (Office, MS SQL, etc) run on some version of Linux. Also, by insuring thier software runs on Linux, it may reduce interest in open source projects on competing software (Open Office, MySQL, etc.). Half the driving force for many open source projects is to make Linux as good as Windows by providing the major applications consumers need. Now there will be less reason for those projects.
From what I've been reading, come late 2008, AMD will have one or more GPU's built into their multi-core processors using a new modular technology which allows them to quickly create application targetted processors. One processor for games, another for database servers, still another for scientific applications requiring parallel processing, and so on. This is AMD's much reported "Fusion" technology.
The same thing can happen to you if you have a credit card merchant account (we do) and you can not prove the delivery of goods or services. This is not unique to PayPal. However, the banks do send you written notice and give you more than three days - so I agree, that does suck.
I suppose having a picture of Jesus crucified on your bedroom wall would be considered reason to be expelled if you had a teacher name Jesus Rodrigez. Good grief.
I'm afraid I'm too old. No teacher would have felt threatened by a stupid, childish icon when I was a kid. And, yah, back then the icon would most certainly have been totally cool.
The comment should be marked down to zero for a total lack of insight.
The ISP's business plan is very simple. We take an expensive resource, a connection to the Internet backbone, and share it across multiple users who could not otherwise afford it. It is not speed that costs money; it is the volume of information downloaded. The ISP expects the average account to download 2 GB of data per month and charges based on that expectation. However, movie downloads can raise that to several times 2 GB. So the question is who should pay? It is a simple business reality that you must cover increased costs or close up shop.
What are the alternatives for paying?
(1) You can charge the person downloading the movies.
(2) You can charge all your customers more to pay for the person downloading movies.
(3) You can charge the company selling the movies.
The first has the problem that you don't know in advance who will download movies. The second is a sure way to lose customers. So only the third makes sense - charge the company that's making money from your customers downloading movies.
There is a way to pay that has not been discussed in the Net Neutrality debate. It is similar to how long-distance telephone service is paid. Each company, ISP, backbone provider and Google would pay based on the difference between what they upload and what they download. For example, an ISP's customers usually download four times what they upload, so the backbone provider would pay the ISP since the difference favors the ISP. Google would pay the backbone provider since Google uploads more than they download favoring the backbone provider. The backbone provider would charge more for upload than they pay for download, so the difference would pay for the backbone. In fact, the marginal revenue available to pay for the backbone would be proportional to the volume of information traveling the backbone.
Currently, Google does pay the backbone provider, but the backbone provider doesn't pay the ISP - in fact they charge the ISP. So the simple fact is that Google is only paying for the cost of crossing the backbone providers network, but is not paying for the last mile, the final hop to the consumer. Imagine if the Post Office charged the person receiving a letter as well as the person who sent it. That is the situation we have today with the Internet and it isn't working very well. That's why we are having this debate.
All it means is that IT departments are replacing servers and don't want to buy another copy of Windows. They will simply wipe Linux and replace it with Windows 2000 Server from the old machine.
What, you thought Linux was ready for the back office? Oh, that's sooooo sweet.
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I don't think CAPTCHA's are being machine broken. I've seen ads outsourcing the typing in of CAPTCHA bidding $1 per 1,000. Try looking at http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Data-Entry/Captcha-PROJECT.html to get an idea of what is going on.
One very good reason not to have your email address @gmail.com, if you are using it for your business, is that a LOT of businesses, wholesale vendors, even the federal government will not accept an @gmail.com address because of the large number of frauds associated with free email accounts (not just gmail, but also hotmail, yahoo mail, etc.) For example, this last tax season the federal govenment would not accept a gmail account for notification of your tax return status when filing electronically.
It is much better from a business standpoint to have your own domain and email sent to your domain. If your MX points at gmail, that's okay. Just don't make your email address me@gmail.com if you want to be taken seriously.
Aubrey de Grey has had only two ideas worth considering IMHO. First he said that longevity should not be a research goal; rather, we should learn to control the rate of aging. And if we can control the rate, perhaps we can learn to reverse aging. The second idea worth considering is specific drugs to break protein cross-linkages. But ideas like finding an agent that will remove all the plaque from your arteries like flooding an iron pipe with caustic soda will leave you with arteries that could blow out like an old rubber tube; so some of his ideas leave a lot to be desired.
Over all, I must admit, the idea of approaching aging as an engineering problem is a refreshing if not always sane point of view.
Breaking into someone's network is a Federal crime, so the FBI is probably the correct place to go. After all, isn't stealing a computer the ultimate network break-in?
Palm's market share shrank about 75% because they are losing out to other OS's, including Microsoft Mobile which grew quite impressively last year. RIM's market share has been pretty constant. Linux is also growing - at least enough to be more than a line on the pie chart now. Android isn't even a blip at the moment and has nothing to do with Palm's problems.
What you ask is very simple to do with a dual DSL router; Hawking Technology makes one that isn't too expensive and easy to set it up (http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=36&FamID=43&ProdID=20). I'm an ISP who provides DSL. DSL depends on the DSLAM and phone line condition. Two phone lines to your house from the same phone company can be VERY different in quality and it is line quality that is most important with DSL. After that, a problem could occur with the providers DSLAM; but if you have two DSL lines, odds are very much against both lines being on the same card in the DSLAM and if you are in a large community, they most likely won't even be on the same DSLAM.
You will be dual NAT'd (only way to do two balanced DSL connections). Bittorrent will work fine in this situation even if one ISP blocks it. However, other P2P programs may be inconsistant since you don't have much control over which port the router will choose on an application basis.
I've set these up; believe me, they work.
"using SSL on the login page is the only way to ensure that your information is going to a trusted site."
I see your point, but disagree with your conclusion. Having SSL doesn't prevent the login page from being tampered with (it can still be hacked to change the form action), but it could make it harder for phishing schemes to succeed.
"2) Some banks have login forms on un-encrypted pages"
The login page can be un-encrypted as long as the data from the form on that page is encrypted before it is sent over the Internet. Said another way, as long as the form action is "https://mybank.com/etc" there is no problem. The only reason some banks encrypt the login page is to make the customer feel good; it doesn't increase their security one iota.
"The ISP's have never honored their contracts."
Maybe besides boning up on economics you might also try law. When you are paying month-to-month, your contract is (guess what?) exactly one month long. The ISP need only change their terms and when they receive your next payment, you have legally agreed to those new terms.
An ISP's cost doesn't change with the time of day; bandwidth used at night costs the same as bandwidth used during the day. The only reason to have different rates is to encourage people to move more of their downloading off the 3:30pm to 1:00am heavy usage period in the hopes of having to buy less total bandwidth. However, P2P runs 24 hours per day, so the difference between day and night isn't as big as you might think and is getting smaller all the time.
"I'm paying $90/month for a dedicated server, 24/7 amazing tech support and 1.2TB bandwidth per month. How is $60/month for no dedicated server, crappy tech support and 40GB/month (0.04TB) any where near a reasonable offer?"
You know, I am an ISP and it really find it weird that such a statement can be rated "Insightful". It just seems to demonstrate a lack of knowledge on the part of the moderator. ISP's generally have lots of unused OUTGOING bandwidth and can sell it cheap because it is cosing them (incrementally) nothing. On the other hand, INCOMING bandwidth costs them dearly.
I did a little math:
:P Actually, networks don't run at full capacity 100% of the time and accounting/billing would become more expensive, so 1600% is an obvious exaggeration.
/.ers have a better idea than Time-Warner and other ISP's as to how they should charge to pay the cost of Net Neutrality.
1 megabit-month = 3600 sec per hr * 24 hrs * 30 days / 8 bits per byte = 324 gigabytes
I pay $20 per megabit-month on an OC-3., so that is a 1600% markup! Well, if the drug companies can do it, why not ISP's
Senate Bill 215 (Obama is a sponser) would prevent ISP's from interfering with content upload or download except in times of network congestion. This could lead to a 50% reduction in revenues since ISP's charge for uploading content such as webpages. The bill will also force them to buy ever increasing amounts of bandwidth at the same time, raising their expenses at the same time their revenue is decreasing. The bill will likely pass if it emerges from commitee. So IMHO, Time-Warner and other ISP's are testing the most likely economic model left to them should SB 215 pass.
If someone were to break this off as a separate topic, it would be interesting to see if
Have you ever joined a very large table to itself - several times? There can be legitimate reasons to do this (such as finding duplicate entries) but it can also bring a server to its knees for several days before producing results - if it doesn't run out of space and crash first. Letting people submit their own SQL queries is just asking for trouble if they don't understand the consequences of what they are asking the server to do. Your IT needs to rule on all queries before allowing them to be submitted, at the very least.
You just don't get it. It isn't the downloading any ISP is objecting to; it is the uploading. ISP's are paid for content distributed from their networks, like websites. It normally pays half the cost of the ISP's connection to the Internet. But now you have cheapo companies (the so called "legal" stuff) and IP theives using P2P programs to distribute their whatever on the ISP's nickel. Yah, ISP's are livid about it. When is anyone on this forum ever going to get it through their thick skulls that it is the "UPLOADING", the "SEEDING", the ISP's are objecting to?
You know, carriers make money on some Internet customers and lose money on others. If you are one of the bandwidth hogs he is losing money on, I dare you to tell him to piss off. He'll probably die laughing.
We have about 5000 users and recieve about 1,200,000 emails a day of which all but about 100,000 are spam. We use IceWarp's mail server which is very heavy in antispam features that you can configure and fine tune. I've found what works best is to have it automatically whitelist anyone our users send email to and then really crankup the spam filtering. If someone talks to a business prospect, they ask if they can send the prospect contact information. If so, that person is now whitelisted and we will receive email from them unmolested. We also have one email address with light antispam filtering (catches about 70% with no false positives) for unsolicited inquires.
Maybe, just maybe, people are not in it for the money.
I admit I love building tools and watching people use them to increase their productivity. Money is definitely not the only reward in life. The builders of Apache, Open Office and many other programs have something to be really proud of even if no one ever knows their names. And for many, that is enough.
If you were to stand in front of Wal-Mart's doors and refused to let customers enter the store, I think you would go to jail. A DoS attack does the same thing.
Last year when the US Supreme Court decided that carrying Internet service on cable didn't make the cable companies telecommunication services under current rules, the FCC decided to "level the playing field" and said that the portion of any service used for broadband Internet would not be classified as a telecommunications service. Many ISP's were afraid at the time that this would give Verizon and others the power to deny ISP's connections to the Internet.
Fearing anti-trust suits, the telcos grandfathered in all current ISPs and still provide them with service, but if you are a new ISP, just try to get a DSL line for a customer - you can't. The telcos do not have to take on new broadband ISP's so they are not (they still have to take on dialups, though).
So cutting off the websites in question no longer falls under common carrier statutes and if the website owner was not a competitior, Verizon was free to deny them service.
The point is that Microsoft is losing out in the world market (including China) to Linux. Microsoft must insure that their commercial programs (Office, MS SQL, etc) run on some version of Linux. Also, by insuring thier software runs on Linux, it may reduce interest in open source projects on competing software (Open Office, MySQL, etc.). Half the driving force for many open source projects is to make Linux as good as Windows by providing the major applications consumers need. Now there will be less reason for those projects.
Who knows what these guys have in store for us
From what I've been reading, come late 2008, AMD will have one or more GPU's built into their multi-core processors using a new modular technology which allows them to quickly create application targetted processors. One processor for games, another for database servers, still another for scientific applications requiring parallel processing, and so on. This is AMD's much reported "Fusion" technology.
The same thing can happen to you if you have a credit card merchant account (we do) and you can not prove the delivery of goods or services. This is not unique to PayPal. However, the banks do send you written notice and give you more than three days - so I agree, that does suck.
They aren't frivolous if you win them.
I suppose having a picture of Jesus crucified on your bedroom wall would be considered reason to be expelled if you had a teacher name Jesus Rodrigez. Good grief.
I'm afraid I'm too old. No teacher would have felt threatened by a stupid, childish icon when I was a kid. And, yah, back then the icon would most certainly have been totally cool.
The comment should be marked down to zero for a total lack of insight.
The ISP's business plan is very simple. We take an expensive resource, a connection to the Internet backbone, and share it across multiple users who could not otherwise afford it. It is not speed that costs money; it is the volume of information downloaded. The ISP expects the average account to download 2 GB of data per month and charges based on that expectation. However, movie downloads can raise that to several times 2 GB. So the question is who should pay? It is a simple business reality that you must cover increased costs or close up shop.
What are the alternatives for paying?
(1) You can charge the person downloading the movies.
(2) You can charge all your customers more to pay for the person downloading movies.
(3) You can charge the company selling the movies.
The first has the problem that you don't know in advance who will download movies. The second is a sure way to lose customers. So only the third makes sense - charge the company that's making money from your customers downloading movies.
There is a way to pay that has not been discussed in the Net Neutrality debate. It is similar to how long-distance telephone service is paid. Each company, ISP, backbone provider and Google would pay based on the difference between what they upload and what they download. For example, an ISP's customers usually download four times what they upload, so the backbone provider would pay the ISP since the difference favors the ISP. Google would pay the backbone provider since Google uploads more than they download favoring the backbone provider. The backbone provider would charge more for upload than they pay for download, so the difference would pay for the backbone. In fact, the marginal revenue available to pay for the backbone would be proportional to the volume of information traveling the backbone.
Currently, Google does pay the backbone provider, but the backbone provider doesn't pay the ISP - in fact they charge the ISP. So the simple fact is that Google is only paying for the cost of crossing the backbone providers network, but is not paying for the last mile, the final hop to the consumer. Imagine if the Post Office charged the person receiving a letter as well as the person who sent it. That is the situation we have today with the Internet and it isn't working very well. That's why we are having this debate.
All it means is that IT departments are replacing servers and don't want to buy another copy of Windows. They will simply wipe Linux and replace it with Windows 2000 Server from the old machine.
What, you thought Linux was ready for the back office? Oh, that's sooooo sweet.