If this is a chronic problem, you're better off just getting some cheap host and quickly setting up bind or tinydns to serve the requests. Heck, I ran a DNS server that served about 100 domains off of a P2 350 with 128MB of ram for over 10 years. It's really not CPU intensive. And there's plenty of docs out there for typical setups that you could probably set up your own DNS server in the time it takes you to deal with just one of these provider-caused outages.
Let's face it, blocking off large swathes of the 'net isn't going to help. I've noticed over the past 10 years that there's always some new haven for criminal activity, and I highly doubt that's going to change in the next 10.
I mean, isn't the whole point of having an iPod or whatever so you can listen to music wherever you are? I mean, at that point you could just use pandora or any media server (Mediatomb, playon, tversity, etc, etc), or any of the myriad online streaming radio stations.
Sure, this is cool. But not it's not like the guy hacked a 80GB SSD drive into an old iPod.
I think one thing that people get confused is that Apple really only cares about OSX being installed on Apple hardware.
They really don't care what software you install on your mac. They also don't care if you wipe out OSX and install Windows or Linux on it. Or what browser you run on it (Firefox is #5 on www.apple.com/downloads/ right now, you'd think if they cared, they'd yank it, right?)
While I agree with most of your post, I have to disagree on the location of internet options.
Just some background: I've been running a BBS, and then converted to an ISP since 1998 (I was active on them, but not running my own from 91-98). In doing so, I've HAD to walk people (Mostly retirees) through setting stuff up. Over the phone. Without instructions.
It's always been (In IE) Tools -> Internet options. Since at least IE 4. It's possible it was the same before then. Maybe it wasn't.
However, it's also ALWAYS been in control panel. It still is in Vista and windows 7.
It's never, ever been under File, Edit, View, or Help. If it has, I call the ultimate internet challenge: Pics (The non-modified kind) or it didn't happen.:)
I'll second this. I'm an avid gamer. Between my Wii, Xbox, PS3, and PC I probably have AT LEAST 500 games. Steam alone has ~150, Impulse ~50, disc-based games (and floppy before) make up the rest. I still have some old SNES (I lost my NES and Atari years ago, somehow only my SNES survived to my adulthood).
That said, I pirate games. Alot. As in, I pirated probably at least 1/2 of my steam collection, and just about every other PC game I own. Why? Because the demos honestly suck. One tutorial level and maybe a random campaign mission? Yea, right.
I pirate it, play it through (If I even get that far, most games don't make it past the 2nd-3rd area/mission), maybe do a skirmish or so to see how well the game balance is, and if I liked it, I buy it. Not just "Oh, I see it's on the bargain bin now for $5" buy it, I mean "Oh, this just came out this week, I pirated and liked it, so here's $50-70, good job guys" buy it. They're not only NOT losing sales due to my piracy, they're GAINING sales.
For instance, I pirated this one RTS game a year or so ago, played a couple campaign missions, did a skirmish. I really liked it, and bought it. At the same time, I gave my friends (Who I regularly game with) copies of the game and told them if they liked it, to buy it and we'd all play together. Not only did I manage to convince them to buy the game, but we all also bought the expansions.
Now, I know that there's only anecdotal evidence here, but what I'm saying is that the game company got $350 ($70 each for game + exp * 5) because I pirated the game, rather than $0 if I hadn't. I just wouldn't have really bothered with it unless it really caught my eye somehow, and I definitely wouldn't have talked a few friends into buying copies.
Conversely, this new DRM stuff (Tages, Starforce, etc) is so obnoxious, I just won't even bother pirating the games, because I won't be buying them. I simply don't have enough time to play ALL the games out there, so I really don't mind too much if I miss out on one or two titles - even if I was looking forward to them, as was the case with anno 1404. TAGES? Blah, not even a pirate from me. Sad that I couldn't play it? Sorta. I've looked at videos and it's just a rehash of the previous games. Nothing really new to see here, moving on..:)
I remember doing something similar. I ran from Erudin to Faydwer as an enchanter (As soon as I got the invisibility spell). Man that was awesome. Running past something while invis, and just as I'm pulling away from a giant seeing the spell start to wear off - whew! I also almost got eaten a couple of times as I DID get caught without invis!
I think it was the most fun I'd had in a long time. Sadly, the rest of my EQ experiences didn't cause me to stay, but it's adventures like that - ones we make ourselves despite what the devs planned - that are the best, and most fondly remembered, imo.
If other people see runescape the way I do, they probably see it the way I do. Keep in mine, I played it years ago, so maybe things have changed.
When I first played it years ago, it was kinda cool. But so many things about it annoyed the hell out of me, such as:
1) The players: I always felt like I was just playing with a bunch of immature 11-15 year olds. The chats were always spammed with some immature people, and it was impossible to actually hold an intelligent conversation.
2) The world: The 3/4's overhead pseudo-3d with a very limited view distance caused me to be lost more often than not. Interacting with things wasn't terribly intuitive, and instructions were often vague, incomplete, or apparently wrong.
2b) The world: redux: It might be free to play, but it's not really. You're really gimped as a f2p char, and there's constant roadblocks and such that either make it really difficult or impossible to get places, or do things as a f2p char. One instance I remember off the top of my head is that I was reading a map on how to get somewhere, walking along a path, and encountered a gate. The only purpose for that gate was to cause me to walk around it (about 15 minutes), unless I paid for the game. Otherwise, I'd be able to go through it just fine. I think I quit that day, but there's more...
3) Quests: They were uninspired, badly written and just downright bland. I mean, you couldn't get worse unless you said "QUEST: HARVEST 30 FARFANUGENS, REWARD: 1 ARFANGENTIUM". I mean, really?
There's more, but that's the top three off the top of my head. Not to mention that I didn't feel that their asking price was worth it, I dropped runescape before I put much more time into it. I'm sure it's come a long way, but in the MMO biz, people don't tend to try games they don't like or had a bad experience with again, and they tend to not suggest them to others either.
The real problem with UO's system was that you never really needed to go into town at all. And if you needed to use a bank, you could just go over to Buc's where there are no guards to kill you. So there really was no real penalty for being "evil", except you had to do your banking in an unprotected town. But even then, you could just hand a blue alt a bunch of gold to turn into checks/deeds/etc, so even that could be mitigated.
There really is/was no in-game mechanics to deter someone from being a murderer. There's no real risk.
Even if you weren't red, once you hit a certain point (have your own housing, etc), there is no ooc reason to ever step into town again aside from gathering reagents, and even that could easily be done with a runebook and a blue mage alt to teleport around.
I don't think you could *know* that the addon/expansions are going to be $60 each. However, you *CAN* extrapolate from other highly successful game franchises and what they've done with the DLC/Addons.
Take, for instance, Empire: Total War. It hasn't even been a year, and we've already seen 5 DLC's which add up to about $20, and they're releasing Napoleon: Total War which is set in approximately the same timeframe (18th to early 19th century Europe) for $40.
You've got Half-Life 2 with "episodes" of $20 a pop (Together they about equal the traditional expansion, so $60 there).
I could go on, there's dozens of other titles. Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, Sins, X3, etc. They all released games and then released DLC/Expansions that pretty obviously should've been incorporated into the main package, but were intentionally held out to be used as DLC (Empire:TW, Oblivion stand out here).
So, I think as gamers we're within our rights to feel jaded and distrustful of developers and publishers for trying to shove DLC/Expansions down our throats by purposefully releasing incomplete games.
I can only think of one or two of those utilities which do not come with a standard, fully-functional linux distro or BSD flavor. Why on earth do you carry around a folder containing common utilities?
Just looking at the list, grep, ls, cat, cp?! Really? You've used a *nix dist in the past 15 years that didn't come with cp, grep, cat or ls?
I do the same, but mine doesn't contain ubiquitous utilities.
Does your agreement with them specify a CIR or a MIR?
You see, when you are willing to pay for these things, you will get these things. When you aren't, you get to share resources with other people. Imagine that, pooling resources so everyone can share something a little better than you could have on your own without any help.
That's really the gist of what residential ISPs are about: Pooling resources so people can share a higher bandwidth connection than any one of them could buy individually.
56k modems did exist back in 1996, as two different standards: K56Flex and X2. It wasn't until later that v.90 spec united both standards into one universal 56k standard.
Sure it is. It's a double-negative meaning "regarding". Sort of like ((-1 * 1) * -1), which ends up being 1. Just most people don't understand the concept of multi-negative words actually being positive instead of extra-negative.
Is this just a problem with FVWM? I know I've been doing it for years in both FreeBSD and Linux. I've done it with FreeBSD running Windowmaker as early as 2002-2003, iirc. And I've done it on Linux with KDE and Gnome.
I've done it with Matrox, ATI, and Nvidia cards. I guess I'm not really sure what the submitter is talking about, because it works for me just as he's asking for without any special hardware.
In fact, in linux running Ubuntu, this was the default configuration as I recall, and I've actually got this working on the Ubuntu 9.10 right here.
Residential connections usually have either NO CIR or a very very low CIR.
What people who are trying to download 10 DVD's a day are doing is NOT typical use, and it does impact not just their local ISP, but the remote end as well as the whole internet, really.
As a small ISP myself, I don't care if my commercial customer who has the foresight to know they want to use more bandwidth, and buy a higher CIR from me use what they paid for. I have a problem with people paying $30 a month for a residential connection with no/low CIR and expecting me to give them the equivilant of a 100% CIR on the advertised speed.
It just doesn't work that way. If that's what you want, go buy your own 10MB line from Level3, Qwest, etc. I'm sure the $300+ you're going to be paying will give you an even greater feeling of entitlement. And, hey. People will still care that you're doing illegal things with your connection, by the way. I get letters all the time (And the occasional Subpeona from some law enforcement of another) about p2p users. Unless, of course, you're trying to say you like saturating consumer-level circuits by hosting massive amounts of F/OSS torrents?
Well, another small ISP here. Couple of things. First off, customers are NOT paying for what's called a CIR. So, of course the service is "oversold". Every service provider industry is "oversold". Landlines, Cell Phones, Car Mechanics, TV Repairmen, Satellite TV, even Tech Support. You think there's one guy in India sitting there waiting for you to call about your Dell? No, of course not. By definition, service providers HAVE to oversell to survive.
Secondly, it's really not about just one person doing something like this as a small ISP. Yes, one person doing such can have a seriously negative impact on the rest of the users, but it's when you get multiple people doing it that really compounds the problem. One torrent user generally isn't too much of a problem. Get two or three with high connection limits, and up/down set to unlimited, and you have a serious problem on your hands.
Finally, equipment is expensive, commercial connections are expensive. If you don't believe me, go price out some comparable commercial internet connections from Cogent, Level3, any of the baby bells (Verizon, Qwest, AT&T/Cingular, etc), and you'll see that you'll easily be paying 10x more than what a cable/FiOS user is going to pay for a residential connection. There's a reason, and it's up in the first point.
You're misreading the contract between you and the ISP. It's unlimited in that it's not metered. They're not going to charge you any more for downloading 20GB as 100GB. But, it's not unlimited in the Download at max speed 24/7 unlimited.
What you want is what's called a CIR/MIR (Committed Information Rate, or Minimum Information Rate). Those are usually offered with commercial connectivity contracts after some form of negotiation. Residential connections DO NOT usually have a CIR. Thus, they are cheap.
Go read your agreement you signed with your ISP if you don't believe me.
It would be better if the laws were changed to say that any businesses which may possibly cause pollution must be held liable both on the corporate entity level and the officers and management personally held responsible.
It could be instituted similar to how contractors must be bonded and insured. Maybe the bond amount is based on the amount of damage that is expected to be caused assuming all safe, legal precautions are taken.
But I think something along those lines is going to be the only way to hold these entities liable. Hold the people behind them personally responsible and you'll see that they'll make every effort they possibly can to do what they do safely.
As for them outsourcing toxic industrial jobs - so? If they care that little for the people, or the environment, I personally wouldn't want them anywhere near me. Let them go pollute someplace else and get the irresponsible government over there to clean it up instead.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is a chronic problem, you're better off just getting some cheap host and quickly setting up bind or tinydns to serve the requests. Heck, I ran a DNS server that served about 100 domains off of a P2 350 with 128MB of ram for over 10 years. It's really not CPU intensive. And there's plenty of docs out there for typical setups that you could probably set up your own DNS server in the time it takes you to deal with just one of these provider-caused outages.
Let's face it, blocking off large swathes of the 'net isn't going to help. I've noticed over the past 10 years that there's always some new haven for criminal activity, and I highly doubt that's going to change in the next 10.
I mean, isn't the whole point of having an iPod or whatever so you can listen to music wherever you are? I mean, at that point you could just use pandora or any media server (Mediatomb, playon, tversity, etc, etc), or any of the myriad online streaming radio stations.
Sure, this is cool. But not it's not like the guy hacked a 80GB SSD drive into an old iPod.
The PS3 and Wii do the same thing. Four lights which indicate what player you are.
I think one thing that people get confused is that Apple really only cares about OSX being installed on Apple hardware.
They really don't care what software you install on your mac. They also don't care if you wipe out OSX and install Windows or Linux on it. Or what browser you run on it (Firefox is #5 on www.apple.com/downloads/ right now, you'd think if they cared, they'd yank it, right?)
While I agree with most of your post, I have to disagree on the location of internet options.
Just some background: I've been running a BBS, and then converted to an ISP since 1998 (I was active on them, but not running my own from 91-98). In doing so, I've HAD to walk people (Mostly retirees) through setting stuff up. Over the phone. Without instructions.
It's always been (In IE) Tools -> Internet options. Since at least IE 4. It's possible it was the same before then. Maybe it wasn't.
However, it's also ALWAYS been in control panel. It still is in Vista and windows 7.
It's never, ever been under File, Edit, View, or Help. If it has, I call the ultimate internet challenge: Pics (The non-modified kind) or it didn't happen. :)
I'll second this. I'm an avid gamer. Between my Wii, Xbox, PS3, and PC I probably have AT LEAST 500 games. Steam alone has ~150, Impulse ~50, disc-based games (and floppy before) make up the rest. I still have some old SNES (I lost my NES and Atari years ago, somehow only my SNES survived to my adulthood).
That said, I pirate games. Alot. As in, I pirated probably at least 1/2 of my steam collection, and just about every other PC game I own. Why? Because the demos honestly suck. One tutorial level and maybe a random campaign mission? Yea, right.
I pirate it, play it through (If I even get that far, most games don't make it past the 2nd-3rd area/mission), maybe do a skirmish or so to see how well the game balance is, and if I liked it, I buy it. Not just "Oh, I see it's on the bargain bin now for $5" buy it, I mean "Oh, this just came out this week, I pirated and liked it, so here's $50-70, good job guys" buy it. They're not only NOT losing sales due to my piracy, they're GAINING sales.
For instance, I pirated this one RTS game a year or so ago, played a couple campaign missions, did a skirmish. I really liked it, and bought it. At the same time, I gave my friends (Who I regularly game with) copies of the game and told them if they liked it, to buy it and we'd all play together. Not only did I manage to convince them to buy the game, but we all also bought the expansions.
Now, I know that there's only anecdotal evidence here, but what I'm saying is that the game company got $350 ($70 each for game + exp * 5) because I pirated the game, rather than $0 if I hadn't. I just wouldn't have really bothered with it unless it really caught my eye somehow, and I definitely wouldn't have talked a few friends into buying copies.
Conversely, this new DRM stuff (Tages, Starforce, etc) is so obnoxious, I just won't even bother pirating the games, because I won't be buying them. I simply don't have enough time to play ALL the games out there, so I really don't mind too much if I miss out on one or two titles - even if I was looking forward to them, as was the case with anno 1404. TAGES? Blah, not even a pirate from me. Sad that I couldn't play it? Sorta. I've looked at videos and it's just a rehash of the previous games. Nothing really new to see here, moving on.. :)
Actually, 405: Evil Method Not Allowed
He probably got one of these: Anus Laptops
I've heard they're a pain in the ass to configure.
Dessert, of course. Or, well. A second processor!
Ah, cool. I remember reading your comic, along with a few others. Bonedude and platedude come to mind, and a few others.. some jester guy? Hrm.
Anyways, the satire always made the problems with the game seem funny and more bearable.
At this point I haven't played in years, and I doubt I ever will again.
I remember doing something similar. I ran from Erudin to Faydwer as an enchanter (As soon as I got the invisibility spell). Man that was awesome. Running past something while invis, and just as I'm pulling away from a giant seeing the spell start to wear off - whew! I also almost got eaten a couple of times as I DID get caught without invis!
I think it was the most fun I'd had in a long time. Sadly, the rest of my EQ experiences didn't cause me to stay, but it's adventures like that - ones we make ourselves despite what the devs planned - that are the best, and most fondly remembered, imo.
If other people see runescape the way I do, they probably see it the way I do. Keep in mine, I played it years ago, so maybe things have changed.
When I first played it years ago, it was kinda cool. But so many things about it annoyed the hell out of me, such as:
1) The players: I always felt like I was just playing with a bunch of immature 11-15 year olds. The chats were always spammed with some immature people, and it was impossible to actually hold an intelligent conversation.
2) The world: The 3/4's overhead pseudo-3d with a very limited view distance caused me to be lost more often than not. Interacting with things wasn't terribly intuitive, and instructions were often vague, incomplete, or apparently wrong.
2b) The world: redux: It might be free to play, but it's not really. You're really gimped as a f2p char, and there's constant roadblocks and such that either make it really difficult or impossible to get places, or do things as a f2p char. One instance I remember off the top of my head is that I was reading a map on how to get somewhere, walking along a path, and encountered a gate. The only purpose for that gate was to cause me to walk around it (about 15 minutes), unless I paid for the game. Otherwise, I'd be able to go through it just fine. I think I quit that day, but there's more...
3) Quests: They were uninspired, badly written and just downright bland. I mean, you couldn't get worse unless you said "QUEST: HARVEST 30 FARFANUGENS, REWARD: 1 ARFANGENTIUM". I mean, really?
There's more, but that's the top three off the top of my head. Not to mention that I didn't feel that their asking price was worth it, I dropped runescape before I put much more time into it. I'm sure it's come a long way, but in the MMO biz, people don't tend to try games they don't like or had a bad experience with again, and they tend to not suggest them to others either.
Interesting post. What was the comic you wrote? I remember reading quite a few UO based comics back in the day. ;)
The real problem with UO's system was that you never really needed to go into town at all. And if you needed to use a bank, you could just go over to Buc's where there are no guards to kill you. So there really was no real penalty for being "evil", except you had to do your banking in an unprotected town. But even then, you could just hand a blue alt a bunch of gold to turn into checks/deeds/etc, so even that could be mitigated.
There really is/was no in-game mechanics to deter someone from being a murderer. There's no real risk.
Even if you weren't red, once you hit a certain point (have your own housing, etc), there is no ooc reason to ever step into town again aside from gathering reagents, and even that could easily be done with a runebook and a blue mage alt to teleport around.
Chilly
Also fp
I don't think you could *know* that the addon/expansions are going to be $60 each. However, you *CAN* extrapolate from other highly successful game franchises and what they've done with the DLC/Addons.
Take, for instance, Empire: Total War. It hasn't even been a year, and we've already seen 5 DLC's which add up to about $20, and they're releasing Napoleon: Total War which is set in approximately the same timeframe (18th to early 19th century Europe) for $40.
You've got Half-Life 2 with "episodes" of $20 a pop (Together they about equal the traditional expansion, so $60 there).
I could go on, there's dozens of other titles. Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, Sins, X3, etc. They all released games and then released DLC/Expansions that pretty obviously should've been incorporated into the main package, but were intentionally held out to be used as DLC (Empire:TW, Oblivion stand out here).
So, I think as gamers we're within our rights to feel jaded and distrustful of developers and publishers for trying to shove DLC/Expansions down our throats by purposefully releasing incomplete games.
Don't even get me started on DRM.. Bah.
I can only think of one or two of those utilities which do not come with a standard, fully-functional linux distro or BSD flavor. Why on earth do you carry around a folder containing common utilities?
Just looking at the list, grep, ls, cat, cp?! Really? You've used a *nix dist in the past 15 years that didn't come with cp, grep, cat or ls?
I do the same, but mine doesn't contain ubiquitous utilities.
Does your agreement with them specify a CIR or a MIR?
You see, when you are willing to pay for these things, you will get these things. When you aren't, you get to share resources with other people. Imagine that, pooling resources so everyone can share something a little better than you could have on your own without any help.
That's really the gist of what residential ISPs are about: Pooling resources so people can share a higher bandwidth connection than any one of them could buy individually.
56k modems did exist back in 1996, as two different standards: K56Flex and X2. It wasn't until later that v.90 spec united both standards into one universal 56k standard.
Sure it is. It's a double-negative meaning "regarding". Sort of like ((-1 * 1) * -1), which ends up being 1. Just most people don't understand the concept of multi-negative words actually being positive instead of extra-negative.
Is this just a problem with FVWM? I know I've been doing it for years in both FreeBSD and Linux. I've done it with FreeBSD running Windowmaker as early as 2002-2003, iirc. And I've done it on Linux with KDE and Gnome.
I've done it with Matrox, ATI, and Nvidia cards. I guess I'm not really sure what the submitter is talking about, because it works for me just as he's asking for without any special hardware.
In fact, in linux running Ubuntu, this was the default configuration as I recall, and I've actually got this working on the Ubuntu 9.10 right here.
Residential connections usually have either NO CIR or a very very low CIR.
What people who are trying to download 10 DVD's a day are doing is NOT typical use, and it does impact not just their local ISP, but the remote end as well as the whole internet, really.
As a small ISP myself, I don't care if my commercial customer who has the foresight to know they want to use more bandwidth, and buy a higher CIR from me use what they paid for. I have a problem with people paying $30 a month for a residential connection with no/low CIR and expecting me to give them the equivilant of a 100% CIR on the advertised speed.
It just doesn't work that way. If that's what you want, go buy your own 10MB line from Level3, Qwest, etc. I'm sure the $300+ you're going to be paying will give you an even greater feeling of entitlement. And, hey. People will still care that you're doing illegal things with your connection, by the way. I get letters all the time (And the occasional Subpeona from some law enforcement of another) about p2p users. Unless, of course, you're trying to say you like saturating consumer-level circuits by hosting massive amounts of F/OSS torrents?
Well, another small ISP here. Couple of things. First off, customers are NOT paying for what's called a CIR. So, of course the service is "oversold". Every service provider industry is "oversold". Landlines, Cell Phones, Car Mechanics, TV Repairmen, Satellite TV, even Tech Support. You think there's one guy in India sitting there waiting for you to call about your Dell? No, of course not. By definition, service providers HAVE to oversell to survive.
Secondly, it's really not about just one person doing something like this as a small ISP. Yes, one person doing such can have a seriously negative impact on the rest of the users, but it's when you get multiple people doing it that really compounds the problem. One torrent user generally isn't too much of a problem. Get two or three with high connection limits, and up/down set to unlimited, and you have a serious problem on your hands.
Finally, equipment is expensive, commercial connections are expensive. If you don't believe me, go price out some comparable commercial internet connections from Cogent, Level3, any of the baby bells (Verizon, Qwest, AT&T/Cingular, etc), and you'll see that you'll easily be paying 10x more than what a cable/FiOS user is going to pay for a residential connection. There's a reason, and it's up in the first point.
You're misreading the contract between you and the ISP. It's unlimited in that it's not metered. They're not going to charge you any more for downloading 20GB as 100GB. But, it's not unlimited in the Download at max speed 24/7 unlimited.
What you want is what's called a CIR/MIR (Committed Information Rate, or Minimum Information Rate). Those are usually offered with commercial connectivity contracts after some form of negotiation. Residential connections DO NOT usually have a CIR. Thus, they are cheap.
Go read your agreement you signed with your ISP if you don't believe me.
It would be better if the laws were changed to say that any businesses which may possibly cause pollution must be held liable both on the corporate entity level and the officers and management personally held responsible.
It could be instituted similar to how contractors must be bonded and insured. Maybe the bond amount is based on the amount of damage that is expected to be caused assuming all safe, legal precautions are taken.
But I think something along those lines is going to be the only way to hold these entities liable. Hold the people behind them personally responsible and you'll see that they'll make every effort they possibly can to do what they do safely.
As for them outsourcing toxic industrial jobs - so? If they care that little for the people, or the environment, I personally wouldn't want them anywhere near me. Let them go pollute someplace else and get the irresponsible government over there to clean it up instead.