For what it's worth that wasn't an option with the laptop I bought. The copy was OEM so Microsoft wouldn't take it back and the manufacturer wouldn't take it back either. Granted, that was XP so the policy may have changed for Vista. I queried multiple vendors and none of them had any return plan for copies of Windows.
while this sounds like a "good idea" it's probably not.
#1 - alot of the time the ip address listed on the whois info is for the networking technical contact, in teeny weenie organizations this might be the same as the sysadmin, but often it's not. And in the end you'll end up wasting a bunch of people's time trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about and who to route your message to.
#2 - most oranizations small enough to be an exception to #1 probably don't have sysadmins and will be doubly confused.
If you really want to report spam (which... well don't get me started) then I'd suggest using the abuse contact of the originating domain. They're much more likely to know what the hell you're talking about and much more likely to get it fixed.
>> A local ISP has to buy service from one or more of the Tier 1/2s. Oddly enough, purchasing an OC-192 (that's that 10 Gbps pipe) isn't exactly cheap.
> Ok, so then the upstream providers are ripping off the downstream providers, and they're passing that rip off on to us. At some point, the "backbone" is just a > bunch of providers with peering arrangements (e.g. routers connected by wires) and there's just no WAY it actually costs significantly more than $60/month to route > a measly 3 Mb/s, unless the routers cost somwhere in the $10,000,000 range. If so, holy shit. I know how routers are designed - I'm sure I could design something > more cost effective than that. Maybe I need to open up my own router business.
It's pretty clear that you are making assumptions here.
A brand spanking new router capable of doing wire-speed OC-192 (10Gig) is going to run you ~1.2Million USD (without any actual cards in it), you need 1 of these at each backbone POP, you also need fiber optics running between these POPs which cost a signifigant amount of money to buy the fiber, get the permits, pay the people and actually put in the ground and then maintain. Oh you also need the cards to drive the router, so add another 100k for redundant routing engines, and 20 or 30k for the OC-192 interface cards. A router that could call itself a core router in this day and age is not going to cost less than a 1.5 - 1.75 million dollars each unless you are google and are buying them in lots of 500.
If you have this you can call yourself a network, but no one is going to use you because you're not fault tolerant, so you need to double the equipment and fiber outlay to provide redundancy, you also need to pay the various Internet Exchanges for colo space so you can peer with other networks, since it's no good having a network that can't get to the internet. You also need to factor in ILEC and CLEC charges when trying to hook up customers.
I think there's thousands of people that would **LOVE** to see someone design a router that can take multiple OC-192 connections, and handle the ~200k routes that make up the internet's BGP table and make decisions on them fast enough (at that speed you're looking at hundreds of thousands of packets per second to have to route) to not introduce more than a millisecond or so of latency in the connection AND be fault-tolerant, supportable and standards compliant.
If you think you're thinking big enough about the internet, you are almost guaranteed to be dead wrong.
Disclaimer: I work for a CLEC who is also a broadband ISP and Tier1/2 backbone provider. I am also one of the Security / Abuse guys and bitter often.
> Again, why doesn't Canada seem to have this problem?
I don't live in Canada, nor do I use any Canadian ISP, so I will ignore this bait.
> Crippling my ISP? How about using the contracted bandwidth that I paid for...
I would be fantastically suprised if you actually had any document that you and your ISP agreed to that stated you paid for a specific bandwidth unless you didn't have a standard residential account. All residential Internet service I have ever seen advertized is sold as up to the quoted speed with aboslutly no guarantees of any service level. If you want a SLA, guaranteed uptime, bandwidth, etc most ISPs are happy to sell you this service, if your local CLEC, or cableco won't offer it I'm sure you can find someone who will be happy to run the T1 / T3 / DS3 / OCx line to your house for the right price, contracts and guarantees included.
It will NOT be $40, or $50 a month.
> The feasibility is there, the gumption and the desire to provide this level of service is not. It does not make the telecoms more money, therefore they will not > do it.
The belief that DSL makes the telemcomms an appreciable amount of money is laughable to those who have seen the balance sheets; It is a GIANT loss leader, sometimes taking years to actually generate revenue on lines. Internet access is more of a value added service than anything for most telecommunications providers, at least in the residental markets where customers expect everything for nothing. Doubly so if you have people abusing the network (And I don't mean using BitTorrent occasionally). And I don't know why you think that ISPs all have multi-petabit backbones but I can pretty much guarantee you that if everyone "used their contracted bandwith" as you put it, the entire Internet would grind to a halt.
Disclaimer: I work for a CLEC that is also a Broadband ISP in the US. I also have the unfortunate position of being one of the Security / Abuse adminstrators and am highly bitter.
...is there really a need for this? I keep a roll or two of the regular stuff in my car in case something falls off and I need to re-affix it, but do I really need to carry this stuff around like a condom? (obligatory geek remark: not that most of slashdot's readers need condoms, mind you, but still.)
Slackware, and gentoo if you emerge the vanilla kernel sources come to mind, and you're always free to ftp/rsync/http/whatever your own copy of the tarball, make it, and install it. Chances are it will work. Maybe not 100% depending how much the distro changed the code, but it will probably work.
better yet, get the digest format, dell is nice enough to host 2 versions, 1 ~100k digest (I get like 6 a day) and 1 daily digest. Much easier to deal with than the 600+ e-mails a day.
I just hope none of the Russians leave anything important onboard. I think it'd suck to get home and think "now...where are my car ke...oh..crap... NOO!!! DON'T DROP MIR! NOOO!!"
I work at an arcade and I know for a fact that most arcade monitors are capable of 640x480@16bpp with no modifications. The boards take R,G,B, Hsync and Vsync just like a home pc monitor. You should beable to put a PC in and hook it up without much trouble. Just beware of the High Voltages. I almost zotted myself swapping out a monitor board once.
happy hacking!
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth that wasn't an option with the laptop I bought. The copy was OEM so Microsoft wouldn't take it back and the manufacturer wouldn't take it back either. Granted, that was XP so the policy may have changed for Vista. I queried multiple vendors and none of them had any return plan for copies of Windows.
while this sounds like a "good idea" it's probably not.
#1 - alot of the time the ip address listed on the whois info is for the networking technical contact, in teeny weenie organizations this might be the same as the sysadmin, but often it's not. And in the end you'll end up wasting a bunch
of people's time trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about and who to route your message to.
#2 - most oranizations small enough to be an exception to #1 probably don't have sysadmins and will be doubly confused.
If you really want to report spam (which... well don't get me started) then I'd suggest using the abuse contact of the
originating domain. They're much more likely to know what the hell you're talking about and much more likely to get it
fixed.
--mernisse
(abuse@ for a major nationwide ISP)
>> A local ISP has to buy service from one or more of the Tier 1/2s. Oddly enough, purchasing an OC-192 (that's that 10 Gbps pipe) isn't exactly cheap.
> Ok, so then the upstream providers are ripping off the downstream providers, and they're passing that rip off on to us. At some point, the "backbone" is just a
> bunch of providers with peering arrangements (e.g. routers connected by wires) and there's just no WAY it actually costs significantly more than $60/month to route
> a measly 3 Mb/s, unless the routers cost somwhere in the $10,000,000 range. If so, holy shit. I know how routers are designed - I'm sure I could design something
> more cost effective than that. Maybe I need to open up my own router business.
It's pretty clear that you are making assumptions here.
A brand spanking new router capable of doing wire-speed OC-192 (10Gig) is going to run you ~1.2Million USD (without any actual cards in it), you need 1 of these at each backbone POP, you also need fiber optics running between these POPs which cost a signifigant amount of money to buy the fiber, get the permits, pay the people and actually put in the ground and then maintain. Oh you also need the cards to drive the router, so add another 100k for redundant routing engines, and 20 or 30k for the OC-192 interface cards. A router that could call itself a core router in this day and age is not going to cost less than a 1.5 - 1.75 million dollars each unless you are google and are buying them in lots of 500.
If you have this you can call yourself a network, but no one is going to use you because you're not fault tolerant, so you need to double the equipment and fiber outlay to provide redundancy, you also need to pay the various Internet Exchanges for colo space so you can peer with other networks, since it's no good having a network that can't get to the internet. You also need to factor in ILEC and CLEC charges when trying to hook up customers.
I think there's thousands of people that would **LOVE** to see someone design a router that can take multiple OC-192 connections, and handle the ~200k routes that make up the internet's BGP table and make decisions on them fast enough (at that speed you're looking at hundreds of thousands of packets per second to have to route) to not introduce more than a millisecond or so of latency in the connection AND be fault-tolerant, supportable and standards compliant.
If you think you're thinking big enough about the internet, you are almost guaranteed to be dead wrong.
Disclaimer: I work for a CLEC who is also a broadband ISP and Tier1/2 backbone provider. I am also one of the Security / Abuse guys and bitter often.
> Again, why doesn't Canada seem to have this problem?
I don't live in Canada, nor do I use any Canadian ISP, so I will ignore this bait.
> Crippling my ISP? How about using the contracted bandwidth that I paid for...
I would be fantastically suprised if you actually had any document that you and your ISP agreed to that stated you paid for a specific bandwidth unless you didn't have a standard residential account. All residential Internet service I have ever seen advertized is sold as up to the quoted speed with aboslutly no guarantees of any service level. If you want a SLA, guaranteed uptime, bandwidth, etc most ISPs are happy to sell you this service, if your local CLEC, or cableco won't offer it I'm sure you can find someone who will be happy to run the T1 / T3 / DS3 / OCx line to your house for the right price, contracts and guarantees included.
It will NOT be $40, or $50 a month.
> The feasibility is there, the gumption and the desire to provide this level of service is not. It does not make the telecoms more money, therefore they will not > do it.
The belief that DSL makes the telemcomms an appreciable amount of money is laughable to those who have seen the balance sheets; It is a GIANT loss leader, sometimes taking years to actually generate revenue on lines. Internet access is more of a value added service than anything for most telecommunications providers, at least in the residental markets where customers expect everything for nothing. Doubly so if you have people abusing the network (And I don't mean using BitTorrent occasionally). And I don't know why you think that ISPs all have multi-petabit backbones but I can pretty much guarantee you that if everyone "used their contracted bandwith" as you put it, the entire Internet would grind to a halt.
Disclaimer: I work for a CLEC that is also a Broadband ISP in the US. I also have the unfortunate position of being one of the Security / Abuse adminstrators and am highly bitter.
...is there really a need for this? I keep a roll or two of the regular stuff in my car in case something falls off and I need to re-affix it, but do I really need to carry this stuff around like a condom? (obligatory geek remark: not that most of slashdot's readers need condoms, mind you, but still.)
Slackware, and gentoo if you emerge the vanilla kernel sources come to mind, and you're always free to ftp/rsync/http/whatever your own copy of the tarball, make it, and install it. Chances are it will work. Maybe not 100% depending how much the distro changed the code, but it will probably work.
better yet, get the digest format, dell is nice enough to host 2 versions, 1 ~100k digest (I get like 6 a day) and 1 daily digest. Much easier to deal with than the 600+ e-mails a day.
lists.us.dell.com should do ya right.
I just hope none of the Russians leave anything important onboard. I think it'd suck to get home and think "now...where are my car ke...oh..crap... NOO!!! DON'T DROP MIR! NOOO!!"
I work at an arcade and I know for a fact that most arcade monitors are capable of 640x480@16bpp with no modifications. The boards take R,G,B, Hsync and Vsync just like a home pc monitor. You should beable to put a PC in and hook it up without much trouble. Just beware of the High Voltages. I almost zotted myself swapping out a monitor board once. happy hacking!