I also work at a college IT department (ASU), and I too, am affected by a traffic shaping policy--but I wouldn't say it's reasonable.
Basically, they have a packeteer unit, which implements a leaky bucket algorithm over the network. I'm not sure if they also put other restrictions on the network, as I've heard there is only 5 MB/sec allowed on the resnet for any "junk" traffic (see also: anything BUT HTTP, FTP, and IRC). They're quite secretive about their actual algorithms, my theory being that either no one really knows, or those who do know don't want to say because then they might actually have to change an unjust policy.
In any case, the net result isn't that stopping.25% of students from using 97% of the bandwith is the case at all. Nowhere on campus do games work, as they require low latency, and they regularly time out when some students get on and download (higher priority) pr0n or iso's. In effect, no filesharing applications nor any games work on the ethernet. Those games which are more forgiving (MMORPGS, as opposed to FPS), sometimes work very BADLY on the ethernet, with lag in excess of 3 seconds being commonplace.
The claim, is of course, for budgetary reasons. Games (which require little bandwidth), are considered junk traffic because they are not directly educationally related, and have been lumped with filesharing applications (which, if not restricted, can take an incredible amount of bandwidth).
Personally, I think if the administration really wants to do something about the alcohol epidemic on campus (rated #1 for the best party school by Playboy in 2001), as they say they do constantly, I think that the administration should allow for other hobbies other than drinking. After all, boredom is the #1 cause for college-age drinking. It would be easier for an underage student to get alcohol at my school than a connection for internet gaming.
So perhaps the administration of the IT at your college was motivated by reasonable motives, but I do not believe the administation here at mine is reasonable--and I believe my school is probably indicative of many larger campuses. Blocking student computer (and XBOX/PS2) gaming on the ethernet is one of the dumbest things I think a college can do... and that's not even the start of the things they block (SSH, VNC, PcAnywhere, anything but HTTP/FTP/IRC).
I've been reading through the slashdot stories/posts, and I cannot seem to find anywhere what the problem with the new license is. The fact that xfree86.org is down doesn't help either.
Could someome tell me:
a) What is the license change?
b) Why it is so harmful?
Unless you select Reiserfs from the prompts, then the 2.4.21 kernel won't boot, as Reiserfs isn't compiled into the kernel that comes from Knoppix (it's compiled as a module on the Knoppix 3.3 CD)
I have to admit I haven't tried the new 3.3 cd yet... hopefully it works.
* Packages are tested (and compiled on more architectures than I care to imagine), and even unstable is actually usable
Even unstable? My parents use testing... I setup the box, configured everything, and I run apt-get update and upgrade occasionally, and they keep on ticking. Sure, applications crash every once and a while (once every other week or so, mainly mozilla and kmail), but X and debian itself are rock stable... Never had a system or X crash in the last 6 months. In fact, testing mozilla crashes less than IE.
If my computer-illiterate parents can use debian testing for their home desktop, I'm pretty sure many other people can as well.
What this means, is that it will take a faster clock cycle (4GHZ, for instance) to do the same amount of processing as the Northwood core. However, increasing the pipeline should allow Intel engineers to achieve higher clock speeds, as the longest transistor path will likely be shorter (faster switching times).
In essence, Intel is attempting to increase the speed of their CPU's by focusing on increasing the clock speed (P4), while AMD is focusing on increasing the amount of calculations per clock cycle (Hammer).
Of course, there are a lot of more complex tradeoffs that factor in (ie. branch prediction). I highly recommend reading a computer architecture book if you're at all interested. It's really facinating stuff.
It's like drag racing. Drag cars can't drive for more than 1 or 2 miles before they need another tank of gas... plus, many drag cars have top speeds less than street cars. Whatever speed they hit at the end of the 1/4 mile is their top speed, their transmission is geared that way.
Drag racers aren't practical, but they're fun... that's all there is to it.
Actually, the problems are more severe. I wish I had the article detailing the financial situation of Amtrak. Unfortunately, I don't have it around anymore.
Passenger rail is not a profitable business.
Amtrak has 2 types of service:
-NEC (NorthEast Corridor) style service, ferrying people back and forth -Luxury service, with all amenities included.
The first is not profitable. Amtrak pays for all the rail in the NEC, and although it makes money on each individual train, once fixed costs such as rail costs are calculated in, the NEC loses money.
The second is profitable. Because Amtrak charges ~$2k for a bed car and since they rent the rails from freight companies, they can actually make money on the travel across the country.
Unfortunately, the public thinks that the NEC is the profit center and the 'dead rail lines' are the part sucking the profit. The actual situation is reversed.
The problem is that passenger rail is inherently inefficient. Instead of paying constant upkeep for rails, and having to pay all the land taxes to keep those rails going, air travel only has to pay for a select few airports, and then pay for the airplanes flying to and from those airports.
In the United States, the only profitable rail service is intracity passenger and general freight. Touring or luxury travel is only profitable because it uses lines which are maintained for general freight. Unfortunately, Amtrak is not allowed to carry more than 6 freight cars, for fear of competition with freight rail. So to provide nationwide passenger rail, Amtrak is constantly operating in a market which cannot support them.
In addition, freight trains and passenger trains put on the same rails is inherently bad. Since most long-distance rails only have 1 rail line, Amtrak trains must wait to pass freight trains, and head-on trains must divert to allow others to pass. This delays passenger lines, creating headaches for passengers.
This country really needs to decide whether or not it wants to provide rail travel. Rail travel has some benefits over air travel, such as environmental or security benefits. If this country wants rail-travel for these reasons, it needs to provide dedicated-rail, high-speed rail travel for populated areas at a loss of capital. But we must realize that the market does not currently support it, and that no nationwide passenger rail service can be self-supporting.
a) Your hardware is broken b) Your hardware's drivers have bugs in them
I have also had windows BSOD once or twice in my usage because of actual bugs in windows.
I did get BSOD's fairly often, which traced to a memory controller. That of course was fixed with a replacement board, but I still get them.
For instance, until 44.03, Nvidia's drivers had some funky bugs in them for the Geforce DDR and the Geforce FX 4600... on both cards my systems would crash with errors in nv4.dll. The cards are not faulty. I have 3 Geforce DDR's and there is no reason to believe that they are all broken in the same way.
Matter of fact, WinXP BSOD'ed 5 minutes after I finished the install with a nv4.dll problem.
Also, many Dell systems have faulty USB drivers. Plugging in a USB disk can BSOD the entire system.
Now, you may say that this is not Microsoft's fault, but I would argue that it is at least partially their fault. For instance, the Nvidia drivers were WHQL certified. Microsoft stated that they were acceptable drivers for their windows system. I hold them partially responsible for certifying faulty drivers... you know darn well that if Nvidia relies on their drivers getting certified... Microsoft does have power here and I suspect that if they had not certified the drivers Nvidia would have fixed them. The problem is that the WHQL certification team probably has the usual Microsoft quality control standards.
As for faulty memory, you should run memtest86 (www.memtest86.com) It'll let you know right away if your memory (and memory controller) are working correctly, as well as testing the memory interface on the CPU.
For the record, I primarily use Windows. Linux doesn't play many of my online games, such as DAOC. I'm not bashing windows for the sake of bashing windows. I'm just stating that to say that it should never BSOD is incorrect.
So I'm a bit confused.
If I have a cd that I legally own, and it's an original, then I am:
a) permitted to make a backup copy for myself
b) permitted to make a copy and give it to a friend that I know personally
I know that a) is allowed, but is b) allowed, and if b is allowed, then that friend IS prohibited from making a copy and giving it to someone else, correct?
Your argument is false, because you are only considering the short run, not the long run.
You have forgotten economies of scale. For instance, to build one car from scratch would cost millions of dollars, but to build a million cars from scratch costs only a few thousand. This is because the research and development costs, and the work required to tool a factory is shared among all the cars, not just placed upon one. That is why there are a small number of large car companies.
Yes, as demand goes up, so does price (assuming the supply curve is constant). But that's short run economics. In the long run, once all market factors have settled, the price will be lower if there are economies of scale (efficiencies go up with an increase in production), and I would suspect that there are some very large economies of scale for broadband. However, if there are not economies of scale for broadband, then the price would be constant, or rise with an increase in demand over the long run. I do not believe this would be the case (for many factors).
Actually, I would have to say that guns serve two purposes:
1) To kill people. Plain and simple, guns have been used for years as a weapon for killing people. This would be generally considered the "bad" use of guns.
2) For self-defense. Although this is related to #1, it's not the same thing. For instance, many police carry guns on their belt for self-defense. Although guns provide self-defense by allowing #1 to occur, police don't carry guns for the purpose of killing people. They carry guns, and attempt to use them to persuade people to give up while committing crimes, or to stop the other person from attacking them, if necessary.
3) To prevent tyranny. It's no coincidence that Hitler first removed all weapons from the hands of his populace before instituting his laws and racist decrees. Once people could no longer defend themselves, they are easy sheep to slaughter. I know many of you think this could never happen in the US, but the entire known history shows us that it's just a matter of time. All historical governments, given enough time, have devolved into tyrannies. I don't see exactly why the US would be any different than the rest of history.
So I think it's a bit oversimplified to say that guns have only one purpose, and it's not all that helpful. While I'd say that #1 is bad, it provides the existance of purposes 2 and 3 which are very helpful purposes.
It appears that Sony hasn't documented their sound API.
From a post previous by the story submitter: It only runs on the Tungsten at the moment because it requires ARM hardware, and thus far Sony hasn't provided the audio API for the new NX Clies
I would guess that's why it's not ported. If you do know of where the API is documented, you might want to e-mail the submitter;)
radio modems we are using here are speced at an anorexic 2400 baud!
And wait, it gets worse. Two-way radio is the classic half-duplex medium of communication; that is, you are either transmitting--push to talk--or receiving, not both at the same time. This, plus the robust error-checking protocols implemented by the modem hardware itself, means the actual link experience is more on the order of 300 baud.
The way X works is the way X works. If you don't like it you need to be choosy about the kind of application that your box will run.
This is such a typical statement from a large portion of the linux group. It makes me sick.
Let me paraphrase your statement: Linux works the way linux works. If you don't like it, go use something else.
I sincerely hope that you have never complained that:
1) Linux doesn't load most webpages with M$ javascript extensions
2) Linux doesn't have as large of an application base or that
3) Microsoft currently controls the standards through its userbase.
These are things that I DO care about. If we keep telling people "If you don't like it, go use something else", guess what? They will go use something else. And that something else will often be Windoze. And when they go to Windoze, companies have less of an incentive to develop software for Linux.
Linux doesn't define the standards because it doesn't have a dominant userbase, and it doesn't have a dominant userbase because it won't support the standards. (Granted, sometimes unofficial. I KNOW Mozilla supports all the HTML standards... but that's not enough, because IE has DEFINED new M$ standards through it's widespread use)
So the problem isn't whether or not X's copy and paste is better, it's that the large majority of the users know M$ cut and paste, so we need to provide a working M$ cut and paste for consumer-based Linux distros like RH. Sure, keep both types in, I don't care... But support both. Because without a working, standard, windows/mac style cut and paste, there ARE users who won't switch.
So I could really care less which cut and paste is better. We need to support what other people use if we expect them to switch.
Tom's Hardware has a lot of really good harddrive reviews which focus on heat, performance, AND noise.
You should check out their storage review section. It's very good.
Slashdot Mirror
I also work at a college IT department (ASU), and I too, am affected by a traffic shaping policy--but I wouldn't say it's reasonable.
.25% of students from using 97% of the bandwith is the case at all. Nowhere on campus do games work, as they require low latency, and they regularly time out when some students get on and download (higher priority) pr0n or iso's. In effect, no filesharing applications nor any games work on the ethernet. Those games which are more forgiving (MMORPGS, as opposed to FPS), sometimes work very BADLY on the ethernet, with lag in excess of 3 seconds being commonplace.
Basically, they have a packeteer unit, which implements a leaky bucket algorithm over the network. I'm not sure if they also put other restrictions on the network, as I've heard there is only 5 MB/sec allowed on the resnet for any "junk" traffic (see also: anything BUT HTTP, FTP, and IRC). They're quite secretive about their actual algorithms, my theory being that either no one really knows, or those who do know don't want to say because then they might actually have to change an unjust policy.
In any case, the net result isn't that stopping
The claim, is of course, for budgetary reasons. Games (which require little bandwidth), are considered junk traffic because they are not directly educationally related, and have been lumped with filesharing applications (which, if not restricted, can take an incredible amount of bandwidth).
Personally, I think if the administration really wants to do something about the alcohol epidemic on campus (rated #1 for the best party school by Playboy in 2001), as they say they do constantly, I think that the administration should allow for other hobbies other than drinking. After all, boredom is the #1 cause for college-age drinking. It would be easier for an underage student to get alcohol at my school than a connection for internet gaming.
So perhaps the administration of the IT at your college was motivated by reasonable motives, but I do not believe the administation here at mine is reasonable--and I believe my school is probably indicative of many larger campuses. Blocking student computer (and XBOX/PS2) gaming on the ethernet is one of the dumbest things I think a college can do... and that's not even the start of the things they block (SSH, VNC, PcAnywhere, anything but HTTP/FTP/IRC).
You could poison Europa's environment and possibly destroy any life down there!
...With DihydrogenMonoxide!
Think of all the DihydrogenMonoxide that would be released as a result of all this melting! It could be catastrophic!
It doesn't crash in IE for me. What version of IE are you using, and under what windows?
I've been reading through the slashdot stories/posts, and I cannot seem to find anywhere what the problem with the new license is. The fact that xfree86.org is down doesn't help either.
Could someome tell me:
a) What is the license change?
b) Why it is so harmful?
Hi Stan!
:)
I didn't know you had a 3 digit ID. lol nice
Just thought I'd say hi.
Loth
Unless you select Reiserfs from the prompts, then the 2.4.21 kernel won't boot, as Reiserfs isn't compiled into the kernel that comes from Knoppix (it's compiled as a module on the Knoppix 3.3 CD)
I have to admit I haven't tried the new 3.3 cd yet... hopefully it works.
* Packages are tested (and compiled on more architectures than I care to imagine), and even unstable is actually usable
Even unstable? My parents use testing... I setup the box, configured everything, and I run apt-get update and upgrade occasionally, and they keep on ticking. Sure, applications crash every once and a while (once every other week or so, mainly mozilla and kmail), but X and debian itself are rock stable... Never had a system or X crash in the last 6 months. In fact, testing mozilla crashes less than IE.
If my computer-illiterate parents can use debian testing for their home desktop, I'm pretty sure many other people can as well.
It'll most likely be slower per clock cycle.
What this means, is that it will take a faster clock cycle (4GHZ, for instance) to do the same amount of processing as the Northwood core. However, increasing the pipeline should allow Intel engineers to achieve higher clock speeds, as the longest transistor path will likely be shorter (faster switching times).
In essence, Intel is attempting to increase the speed of their CPU's by focusing on increasing the clock speed (P4), while AMD is focusing on increasing the amount of calculations per clock cycle (Hammer).
Of course, there are a lot of more complex tradeoffs that factor in (ie. branch prediction). I highly recommend reading a computer architecture book if you're at all interested. It's really facinating stuff.
Because, It's COOL.
That's what it's all about.
It's like drag racing. Drag cars can't drive for more than 1 or 2 miles before they need another tank of gas... plus, many drag cars have top speeds less than street cars. Whatever speed they hit at the end of the 1/4 mile is their top speed, their transmission is geared that way.
Drag racers aren't practical, but they're fun... that's all there is to it.
Actually, the problems are more severe. I wish I had the article detailing the financial situation of Amtrak. Unfortunately, I don't have it around anymore.
Passenger rail is not a profitable business.
Amtrak has 2 types of service:
-NEC (NorthEast Corridor) style service, ferrying people back and forth
-Luxury service, with all amenities included.
The first is not profitable. Amtrak pays for all the rail in the NEC, and although it makes money on each individual train, once fixed costs such as rail costs are calculated in, the NEC loses money.
The second is profitable. Because Amtrak charges ~$2k for a bed car and since they rent the rails from freight companies, they can actually make money on the travel across the country.
Unfortunately, the public thinks that the NEC is the profit center and the 'dead rail lines' are the part sucking the profit. The actual situation is reversed.
The problem is that passenger rail is inherently inefficient. Instead of paying constant upkeep for rails, and having to pay all the land taxes to keep those rails going, air travel only has to pay for a select few airports, and then pay for the airplanes flying to and from those airports.
In the United States, the only profitable rail service is intracity passenger and general freight. Touring or luxury travel is only profitable because it uses lines which are maintained for general freight. Unfortunately, Amtrak is not allowed to carry more than 6 freight cars, for fear of competition with freight rail. So to provide nationwide passenger rail, Amtrak is constantly operating in a market which cannot support them.
In addition, freight trains and passenger trains put on the same rails is inherently bad. Since most long-distance rails only have 1 rail line, Amtrak trains must wait to pass freight trains, and head-on trains must divert to allow others to pass. This delays passenger lines, creating headaches for passengers.
This country really needs to decide whether or not it wants to provide rail travel. Rail travel has some benefits over air travel, such as environmental or security benefits. If this country wants rail-travel for these reasons, it needs to provide dedicated-rail, high-speed rail travel for populated areas at a loss of capital. But we must realize that the market does not currently support it, and that no nationwide passenger rail service can be self-supporting.
Erm, sorta.
You shouldn't get a BSOD often unless:
a) Your hardware is broken
b) Your hardware's drivers have bugs in them
I have also had windows BSOD once or twice in my usage because of actual bugs in windows.
I did get BSOD's fairly often, which traced to a memory controller. That of course was fixed with a replacement board, but I still get them.
For instance, until 44.03, Nvidia's drivers had some funky bugs in them for the Geforce DDR and the Geforce FX 4600... on both cards my systems would crash with errors in nv4.dll. The cards are not faulty. I have 3 Geforce DDR's and there is no reason to believe that they are all broken in the same way.
Matter of fact, WinXP BSOD'ed 5 minutes after I finished the install with a nv4.dll problem.
Also, many Dell systems have faulty USB drivers. Plugging in a USB disk can BSOD the entire system.
Now, you may say that this is not Microsoft's fault, but I would argue that it is at least partially their fault. For instance, the Nvidia drivers were WHQL certified. Microsoft stated that they were acceptable drivers for their windows system. I hold them partially responsible for certifying faulty drivers... you know darn well that if Nvidia relies on their drivers getting certified... Microsoft does have power here and I suspect that if they had not certified the drivers Nvidia would have fixed them. The problem is that the WHQL certification team probably has the usual Microsoft quality control standards.
As for faulty memory, you should run memtest86 (www.memtest86.com) It'll let you know right away if your memory (and memory controller) are working correctly, as well as testing the memory interface on the CPU.
For the record, I primarily use Windows. Linux doesn't play many of my online games, such as DAOC. I'm not bashing windows for the sake of bashing windows. I'm just stating that to say that it should never BSOD is incorrect.
So I'm a bit confused. If I have a cd that I legally own, and it's an original, then I am: a) permitted to make a backup copy for myself b) permitted to make a copy and give it to a friend that I know personally I know that a) is allowed, but is b) allowed, and if b is allowed, then that friend IS prohibited from making a copy and giving it to someone else, correct?
Unless of course the head examining machine is running sco, in which case it'd be $4194.
Your argument is false, because you are only considering the short run, not the long run. You have forgotten economies of scale. For instance, to build one car from scratch would cost millions of dollars, but to build a million cars from scratch costs only a few thousand. This is because the research and development costs, and the work required to tool a factory is shared among all the cars, not just placed upon one. That is why there are a small number of large car companies. Yes, as demand goes up, so does price (assuming the supply curve is constant). But that's short run economics. In the long run, once all market factors have settled, the price will be lower if there are economies of scale (efficiencies go up with an increase in production), and I would suspect that there are some very large economies of scale for broadband. However, if there are not economies of scale for broadband, then the price would be constant, or rise with an increase in demand over the long run. I do not believe this would be the case (for many factors).
Actually, I would have to say that guns serve two purposes:
1) To kill people. Plain and simple, guns have been used for years as a weapon for killing people. This would be generally considered the "bad" use of guns.
2) For self-defense. Although this is related to #1, it's not the same thing. For instance, many police carry guns on their belt for self-defense. Although guns provide self-defense by allowing #1 to occur, police don't carry guns for the purpose of killing people. They carry guns, and attempt to use them to persuade people to give up while committing crimes, or to stop the other person from attacking them, if necessary.
3) To prevent tyranny. It's no coincidence that Hitler first removed all weapons from the hands of his populace before instituting his laws and racist decrees. Once people could no longer defend themselves, they are easy sheep to slaughter. I know many of you think this could never happen in the US, but the entire known history shows us that it's just a matter of time. All historical governments, given enough time, have devolved into tyrannies. I don't see exactly why the US would be any different than the rest of history.
So I think it's a bit oversimplified to say that guns have only one purpose, and it's not all that helpful. While I'd say that #1 is bad, it provides the existance of purposes 2 and 3 which are very helpful purposes.
Don't worry, I'm sure Slashdot knows how to post a story over and over and over and...
It appears that Sony hasn't documented their sound API.
;)
From a post previous by the story submitter:
It only runs on the Tungsten at the moment because it requires ARM hardware, and thus far Sony hasn't provided the audio API for the new NX Clies
I would guess that's why it's not ported. If you do know of where the API is documented, you might want to e-mail the submitter
No worries - everyone seems too lazy to cut & paste, so my webstats aren't going crazy. Whew :)
Must...resist...urge...to..cut..and..paste...
Kernel32.dll is using too many system resources and must be terminated...
It couldn't be MORE accurate!
Their webservers on their HF connection...
radio modems we are using here are speced at an anorexic 2400 baud!
And wait, it gets worse. Two-way radio is the classic half-duplex medium of communication; that is, you are either transmitting--push to talk--or receiving, not both at the same time. This, plus the robust error-checking protocols implemented by the modem hardware itself, means the actual link experience is more on the order of 300 baud.
This is such a typical statement from a large portion of the linux group. It makes me sick.
Let me paraphrase your statement: Linux works the way linux works. If you don't like it, go use something else.
I sincerely hope that you have never complained that:
1) Linux doesn't load most webpages with M$ javascript extensions
2) Linux doesn't have as large of an application base or that
3) Microsoft currently controls the standards through its userbase.
These are things that I DO care about. If we keep telling people "If you don't like it, go use something else", guess what? They will go use something else. And that something else will often be Windoze. And when they go to Windoze, companies have less of an incentive to develop software for Linux.
Linux doesn't define the standards because it doesn't have a dominant userbase, and it doesn't have a dominant userbase because it won't support the standards. (Granted, sometimes unofficial. I KNOW Mozilla supports all the HTML standards... but that's not enough, because IE has DEFINED new M$ standards through it's widespread use)
So the problem isn't whether or not X's copy and paste is better, it's that the large majority of the users know M$ cut and paste, so we need to provide a working M$ cut and paste for consumer-based Linux distros like RH. Sure, keep both types in, I don't care... But support both. Because without a working, standard, windows/mac style cut and paste, there ARE users who won't switch.
So I could really care less which cut and paste is better. We need to support what other people use if we expect them to switch.
He can sue Yahoo for my personal info that they don't have for all I care...
Tom's Hardware has a lot of really good harddrive reviews which focus on heat, performance, AND noise. You should check out their storage review section. It's very good.
The page cannot be displayed
"We only probe the ports on your computer that you have made public."
Yeah, well, they just got a huge amount of users that decided to probe their public ports, namely, 80.
Looks like they're going slow already...