The sale of the actual pipes is already regulated. Just because BellSouth (for example) sells a company a T1 to an Internet provider doesn't mean they actually control the traffic flowing through that pipe. Don't send the traffic through a BellSouth Internet connection and BellSouth has no control over it.
What next: a law to prevent Wal-Mart from putting the more expensive single-bottle Cokes next to the checkout registers (especially when Coke pays them extra or credits them some to put Coke there instead of Pepsi)?
Free speech is protected on public property. You have no right to come on my property and say anything; I can tell you to leave (and if you persist I can have you arrested). If some companies want to do something to their network that will probably cause them to lose customers, why should the government prevent it? The Internet is made up of a large number of companies; if a few choose to shoot themselves in the foot, the rest will pick up the slack.
I'm no Microsoft fan (don't run Windows anywhere I can help it), but they don't have a monopoly. Otherwise Apple would be out of business and Linux/FreeBSD/etc. would not be gaining market share.
The telcos cannot control the Internet themselves. They sell raw point-to-point pipes to a large number of other companies that then run Internet traffic outside of the telco control (the PTP pipes are already regulated so the telcos can't affect the flow of traffic across them). These other companies connect to each other at public and private peering points; if some telcos persist with the multi-tier plans, the other companies can route right around them.
You presume all Internet traffic passes through the legacy telcos. That is not true, and if some companies decide to implement multi-tier service, others won't and can route around the trouble-makers.
Try installing XP (retail CD version) on a system with only an SATA hard drive. You have to have a floppy drive and disk, copy a driver to the disk, and hit F6 during the initial start-up to load the driver.
First of all, more and more computers don't have floppy drives, yet that is the only way to load drivers during install (at least the only obvious way). Second, if you don't have _another_ computer that you can write this floppy with, you are out of luck. Third, you have to watch for the brief "hit F6" message at the bottom of the screen (although I guess it is better than NT 4 which IIRC didn't display the message at all).
Meanwhile, sticking a Fedora Core DVD in the system worked with no problems (this was over a year ago, so FC 3 IIRC).
A DSL link is a point to point link only to the DSLAM; from there it is typically on an ATM network. BellSouth's BroadBand Gateway product allows PPPoE customers to have sessions to different providers simultaneously on a single DSL circuit, although I don't know if anyone supports it in the real world, and I'm not really sure how it can even be ordered (the BBG docs describe it however).
Because once you kill off competition, it is very difficult (and often essentially impossible) to re-establish it. That means once the government controls the public Internet access, they can do anything: intentional things like monitor and/or limit access to certain sites ("think of the children") and apathetic things like letting quality of service go down over time.
Why do people think that it is great to "compete" with a government-granted monopoly (telcos) with a government-built monopoly? How do you think the telcos got to the level they are at now? A private company (e.g. a real ISP) has enough problems trying to compete with the telcos. There's no way they can compete with taxpayer-funded networks as well.
On my Thinkpad (which says IBM on top but Lenovo on the bottom), there's no DVI; I think it is on the docking station (the port shows up in the hardware config). However, the notebook has no parallel port (again I think it is on the docking station); the notebook has no ports on the back except for power and one USB. While most of the case is black, it does have a titanium lid (or at least that is what they called it and it is metal). And of course, it runs Linux.
There are a number of things wrong with that article (Sendmail Switch was largely a non-event AFAIK; the original sendmail was the "big moment"). However, Linux being the first (at least first major) fully Open Source system is probably correct.
At the time Linux was started, the BSD code base was still tied up in the AT&T lawsuit. Some parts had to be removed from distribution, leaving an incomplete system. The various BSD based projects had to rewrite some bits to fill in the removed stuff to get a working OS. IIRC Linus has said that if that hadn't been the case (or if GNU Hurd had really come about as planned), he never would have started his own kernel project.
Early Linux distributions pulled in a good bit of GNU, BSD, and X/MIT licensed code and integrated it (at least to some extent). Nobody else had really pulled all the various bits together (and GNU and BSD didn't have a functioning kernel at that point).
Re:Don't take medical advice from me...
on
Preventing RSI?
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. I keep my keyboard about 6-8" from the edge of my desk; the point where my arms rest on the desk edge is then just below the elbow. I've been using computers this way for about 15 years now (the last 10 as an ISP system/network admin/developer/etc.) without any RSI problems.
You should end up with the plane of your palm in line with your forearm. I pivot my hands from side to side when reaching to the edge keys, but my palms stay flat WRT my forearms. This keeps the wrist from bending up and down (that motion is a problem).
The problem with all the gel-filled wrist rests is that they encourage you to rest your wrist on them. The last thing you want to do is to put pressure on the wrist; that is what causes problems. The solution is not to make it easier to put pressure on the wrists, the solution is to change your posture so you don't put any pressure on them at all.
Also, the "natural" keyboards are crap. I've been using old IBM "Model M" keyboards (the clicky kind) for most of that time. Another good thing about the old IBM keyboards is that the labels on the keys are applied right; I wore the letters off several keyboards before I found affordable IBM keyboards (I've worn the texture off several IBM keys but the labels are still solid).
At the same time, nobody else is charging these fees, and respecting QoS for VoIP packets isn't going to cost Shaw anything, so why should the consumer pay for such a service int he first place?
Others are talking about charging fees like this. Also, QoS _does_ cost money. Even in a mythical "bandwidth is free" and "everything is connected with $BIGPIPEs" ISP, it would be nice to honor QoS to reduce jitter for VoIP, and that costs the ISP money. Some equipment can't handle it and has to be replaced (for it to be worthwhile, every piece of equipment in the ISP's network must handle the QoS). There may need to be mechanisms in place to watch for abuse (so someone doesn't start running games or P2P apps with QoS bits set because they think it'll gain an extra millisecond); that would add more overhead and possibly more equipment.
Bzzt. Tesla held the patent on AC and licensed it to Westinghouse (and eventually abandoned the patent to help AC by reducing costs). Tesla worked for Westinghouse. Edison promoted DC and founded his own power company, Edison Electric (now part of ConEd).
Yes. Looking at the back end of the orbiter, the SSMEs are the three largest engines. Above them, on either side of the tail, are the two OMS engines. Then there are small RCS nozzles in various places around the nose and tail of the orbiter (IIRC there are 38 primary and 6 secondary RCS engines).
The SSMEs get you to orbit, the OMS change orbits and get you out of orbit, and the RCS point you where you want to look.
Nope, you are wrong. SSMEs are lit on the pad six seconds before liftoff. They burn for about 9 minutes and then shut down for the rest of the flight. The SSMEs are fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen stored in the big orange external tank, which is discarded right after SSME shutdown (so the rest of the flight there isn't any fuel for the SSMEs). The next time an SSME would be lit is after removal from the orbiter, refit, and either at a test facility or at another launch.
Orbital maneuvering is done using the (wait for it) Orbital Maneuvering System, or OMS, engines. These are the two smaller "pods" on either side of the tail above the 3 SSMEs. The OMS (as well as the smaller RCS used for attitude control) engines use hypergolic fuels, nitrogen tetroxide and monomethylhydrazine.
The SSME is higher efficiency in terms of thrust vs. mass. However, that isn't the only measure to be considered. Each SSME costs a lot more to build, because they were designed to be reused (IIRC the current plan is to not reuse the new vehicle's engines). The SSME is throttleable, but if that is not needed, it is an added complexity and expense. The J-2 was designed to be throw-away.
Also, there are some questions about the SSME for the new vehicle. The SSME would be used in upper stages that are lit in-flight. The SSME has only ever been lit sitting still, on the ground, at sea-level atmospheric pressure and temperature. The J-2 was used on upper stages of the Saturn V, so it is proven in that capacity.
NASA did't arrange for a "special" satellite feed; it was the same NASA TV feed they send out today (now on different sats but the same basic feed). Being in a "NASA town", we've had NASA TV on the cable just about as long as it has been available. I was home sick from school that day and Mom and I watched the launch live on NASA TV (we'd started out on CNN but got tired of the chatter). I still remember how I felt when it happened, how much of an understatment the NASA commentator made when he said "obviously a major malfunction", etc.
The video replays of Challenger have a bigger impact on me than those of Columbia, probably because I saw it happen live. I can't see the Challenger video without immediately feeling what I felt that day.
I would say dialup is less secure on average. Most cable/DSL setups end up using a router doing NAT, so inbound connections never make it to the computer (although NAT is not a magic bullet to make you secure either). Dialup almost always uses a modem directly attached, so the computer is directly connected to the Internet.
I handle the abuse mailbox at the ISP I work for, and we get a lot more complaints about dialup customers infected with worm/viruses than we do about DSL customers.
Remember, when going hiking in the woods, always carry a piece of fiber optic cable. That way, if you get lost, you can throw it on the ground. A backhoe will be along shortly to cut the fiber and you can follow it back to civilization.
Try again. For service providers, CEFv6/dCEFv6 only showed up in 12.2S on the 7500. That has only recently really been considered stable, and I've read real world reports that IPv6 still has problems on the 7500.
OS and software updates are easy; people updates operating systems and other software all the time.
Infrastructure updates are hard. Routers last a long time. Cisco's dependence on CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding, aka Customer Enragement Feature) and hardware forwarding means that routers that can forward tons of IPv4 traffic can't handle a little IPv6 traffic (for example, the widely used 7500 series). Telling the boss that you need to spend $300,000 to replace one router (that oh by the way works just fine except for a feature nobody is asking for) doesn't go over well, especially when you have more than one router.
One of the widest used dialup concentrators is the Ascend/Lucent MAX and MAX TNT series. I believe UUNet used to use these for example (I don't know what they use now but I haven't heard of them changing); a lot of "national" ISPs resold UUNet dialup ports. TNTs have no IPv6 support at all even in the latest software updates (again, IIRC it is a hardware limitation). A lot of people still use dialup, especially when on the road; it is shrinking, so it is extra hard to spend big $$ replacing hardware that is operating just fine, but it isn't going to go away any time soon.
I work for a relatively small ISP, but we'd have to spend millions of dollars to support IPv6 across our network. AFAIK no customers are asking for IPv6; one friend asked informally if we had any plans and I said no and he went on to other questions.
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The sale of the actual pipes is already regulated. Just because BellSouth (for example) sells a company a T1 to an Internet provider doesn't mean they actually control the traffic flowing through that pipe. Don't send the traffic through a BellSouth Internet connection and BellSouth has no control over it.
What next: a law to prevent Wal-Mart from putting the more expensive single-bottle Cokes next to the checkout registers (especially when Coke pays them extra or credits them some to put Coke there instead of Pepsi)?
Free speech is protected on public property. You have no right to come on my property and say anything; I can tell you to leave (and if you persist I can have you arrested). If some companies want to do something to their network that will probably cause them to lose customers, why should the government prevent it? The Internet is made up of a large number of companies; if a few choose to shoot themselves in the foot, the rest will pick up the slack.
I'm no Microsoft fan (don't run Windows anywhere I can help it), but they don't have a monopoly. Otherwise Apple would be out of business and Linux/FreeBSD/etc. would not be gaining market share.
The telcos cannot control the Internet themselves. They sell raw point-to-point pipes to a large number of other companies that then run Internet traffic outside of the telco control (the PTP pipes are already regulated so the telcos can't affect the flow of traffic across them). These other companies connect to each other at public and private peering points; if some telcos persist with the multi-tier plans, the other companies can route right around them.
You presume all Internet traffic passes through the legacy telcos. That is not true, and if some companies decide to implement multi-tier service, others won't and can route around the trouble-makers.
If it is fraud (read the terms and conditions), then prosecute under existing fraud laws. No new laws needed.
Government legislated control of Internet traffic management is the exact opposite of most any definition of "free".
Try installing XP (retail CD version) on a system with only an SATA hard
drive. You have to have a floppy drive and disk, copy a driver to the
disk, and hit F6 during the initial start-up to load the driver.
First of all, more and more computers don't have floppy drives, yet that
is the only way to load drivers during install (at least the only
obvious way). Second, if you don't have _another_ computer that you can
write this floppy with, you are out of luck. Third, you have to watch
for the brief "hit F6" message at the bottom of the screen (although I
guess it is better than NT 4 which IIRC didn't display the message at
all).
Meanwhile, sticking a Fedora Core DVD in the system worked with no
problems (this was over a year ago, so FC 3 IIRC).
A DSL link is a point to point link only to the DSLAM; from there it is typically on an ATM network. BellSouth's BroadBand Gateway product allows PPPoE customers to have sessions to different providers simultaneously on a single DSL circuit, although I don't know if anyone supports it in the real world, and I'm not really sure how it can even be ordered (the BBG docs describe it however).
Because once you kill off competition, it is very difficult (and often essentially impossible) to re-establish it. That means once the government controls the public Internet access, they can do anything: intentional things like monitor and/or limit access to certain sites ("think of the children") and apathetic things like letting quality of service go down over time.
Why do people think that it is great to "compete" with a government-granted monopoly (telcos) with a government-built monopoly? How do you think the telcos got to the level they are at now? A private company (e.g. a real ISP) has enough problems trying to compete with the telcos. There's no way they can compete with taxpayer-funded networks as well.
On my Thinkpad (which says IBM on top but Lenovo on the bottom), there's no DVI; I think it is on the docking station (the port shows up in the hardware config). However, the notebook has no parallel port (again I think it is on the docking station); the notebook has no ports on the back except for power and one USB. While most of the case is black, it does have a titanium lid (or at least that is what they called it and it is metal). And of course, it runs Linux.
There are a number of things wrong with that article (Sendmail Switch was largely a non-event AFAIK; the original sendmail was the "big moment"). However, Linux being the first (at least first major) fully Open Source system is probably correct.
At the time Linux was started, the BSD code base was still tied up in the AT&T lawsuit. Some parts had to be removed from distribution, leaving an incomplete system. The various BSD based projects had to rewrite some bits to fill in the removed stuff to get a working OS. IIRC Linus has said that if that hadn't been the case (or if GNU Hurd had really come about as planned), he never would have started his own kernel project.
Early Linux distributions pulled in a good bit of GNU, BSD, and X/MIT licensed code and integrated it (at least to some extent). Nobody else had really pulled all the various bits together (and GNU and BSD didn't have a functioning kernel at that point).
Exactly. I keep my keyboard about 6-8" from the edge of my desk; the point where my arms rest on the desk edge is then just below the elbow. I've been using computers this way for about 15 years now (the last 10 as an ISP system/network admin/developer/etc.) without any RSI problems.
You should end up with the plane of your palm in line with your forearm. I pivot my hands from side to side when reaching to the edge keys, but my palms stay flat WRT my forearms. This keeps the wrist from bending up and down (that motion is a problem).
The problem with all the gel-filled wrist rests is that they encourage you to rest your wrist on them. The last thing you want to do is to put pressure on the wrist; that is what causes problems. The solution is not to make it easier to put pressure on the wrists, the solution is to change your posture so you don't put any pressure on them at all.
Also, the "natural" keyboards are crap. I've been using old IBM "Model M" keyboards (the clicky kind) for most of that time. Another good thing about the old IBM keyboards is that the labels on the keys are applied right; I wore the letters off several keyboards before I found affordable IBM keyboards (I've worn the texture off several IBM keys but the labels are still solid).
Others are talking about charging fees like this. Also, QoS _does_ cost money. Even in a mythical "bandwidth is free" and "everything is connected with $BIGPIPEs" ISP, it would be nice to honor QoS to reduce jitter for VoIP, and that costs the ISP money. Some equipment can't handle it and has to be replaced (for it to be worthwhile, every piece of equipment in the ISP's network must handle the QoS). There may need to be mechanisms in place to watch for abuse (so someone doesn't start running games or P2P apps with QoS bits set because they think it'll gain an extra millisecond); that would add more overhead and possibly more equipment.
Bzzt. Tesla held the patent on AC and licensed it to Westinghouse (and eventually abandoned the patent to help AC by reducing costs). Tesla worked for Westinghouse. Edison promoted DC and founded his own power company, Edison Electric (now part of ConEd).
Yes. Looking at the back end of the orbiter, the SSMEs are the three largest engines. Above them, on either side of the tail, are the two OMS engines. Then there are small RCS nozzles in various places around the nose and tail of the orbiter (IIRC there are 38 primary and 6 secondary RCS engines).
The SSMEs get you to orbit, the OMS change orbits and get you out of orbit, and the RCS point you where you want to look.
Nope, you are wrong. SSMEs are lit on the pad six seconds before liftoff. They burn for about 9 minutes and then shut down for the rest of the flight. The SSMEs are fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen stored in the big orange external tank, which is discarded right after SSME shutdown (so the rest of the flight there isn't any fuel for the SSMEs). The next time an SSME would be lit is after removal from the orbiter, refit, and either at a test facility or at another launch.
Orbital maneuvering is done using the (wait for it) Orbital Maneuvering System, or OMS, engines. These are the two smaller "pods" on either side of the tail above the 3 SSMEs. The OMS (as well as the smaller RCS used for attitude control) engines use hypergolic fuels, nitrogen tetroxide and monomethylhydrazine.
The SSME is higher efficiency in terms of thrust vs. mass. However, that isn't the only measure to be considered. Each SSME costs a lot more to build, because they were designed to be reused (IIRC the current plan is to not reuse the new vehicle's engines). The SSME is throttleable, but if that is not needed, it is an added complexity and expense. The J-2 was designed to be throw-away.
Also, there are some questions about the SSME for the new vehicle. The SSME would be used in upper stages that are lit in-flight. The SSME has only ever been lit sitting still, on the ground, at sea-level atmospheric pressure and temperature. The J-2 was used on upper stages of the Saturn V, so it is proven in that capacity.
NASA did't arrange for a "special" satellite feed; it was the same NASA
TV feed they send out today (now on different sats but the same basic
feed). Being in a "NASA town", we've had NASA TV on the cable just
about as long as it has been available. I was home sick from school
that day and Mom and I watched the launch live on NASA TV (we'd started
out on CNN but got tired of the chatter). I still remember how I felt
when it happened, how much of an understatment the NASA commentator made
when he said "obviously a major malfunction", etc.
The video replays of Challenger have a bigger impact on me than those of
Columbia, probably because I saw it happen live. I can't see the
Challenger video without immediately feeling what I felt that day.
I would say dialup is less secure on average. Most cable/DSL setups end up using a router doing NAT, so inbound connections never make it to the computer (although NAT is not a magic bullet to make you secure either). Dialup almost always uses a modem directly attached, so the computer is directly connected to the Internet.
I handle the abuse mailbox at the ISP I work for, and we get a lot more complaints about dialup customers infected with worm/viruses than we do about DSL customers.
Remember, when going hiking in the woods, always carry a piece of fiber optic cable. That way, if you get lost, you can throw it on the ground. A backhoe will be along shortly to cut the fiber and you can follow it back to civilization.
You've got that backwards. CentOS takes the RHEL SRPMS released by Red Hat, rebuilds the binaries, and reassembles them into a distribution.
Try again. For service providers, CEFv6/dCEFv6 only showed up in 12.2S on the 7500. That has only recently really been considered stable, and I've read real world reports that IPv6 still has problems on the 7500.
OS and software updates are easy; people updates operating systems and other software all the time.
Infrastructure updates are hard. Routers last a long time. Cisco's dependence on CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding, aka Customer Enragement Feature) and hardware forwarding means that routers that can forward tons of IPv4 traffic can't handle a little IPv6 traffic (for example, the widely used 7500 series). Telling the boss that you need to spend $300,000 to replace one router (that oh by the way works just fine except for a feature nobody is asking for) doesn't go over well, especially when you have more than one router.
One of the widest used dialup concentrators is the Ascend/Lucent MAX and MAX TNT series. I believe UUNet used to use these for example (I don't know what they use now but I haven't heard of them changing); a lot of "national" ISPs resold UUNet dialup ports. TNTs have no IPv6 support at all even in the latest software updates (again, IIRC it is a hardware limitation). A lot of people still use dialup, especially when on the road; it is shrinking, so it is extra hard to spend big $$ replacing hardware that is operating just fine, but it isn't going to go away any time soon.
I work for a relatively small ISP, but we'd have to spend millions of dollars to support IPv6 across our network. AFAIK no customers are asking for IPv6; one friend asked informally if we had any plans and I said no and he went on to other questions.