You have here a very small ISP with only 400 customers. They are 70/1 oversubscribed and they want most of their customers to be happy with the service.
A few things to consider, not all customers are worth keeping. If keeping customer A costs you customers B & C, then you are much better off getting rid of customer A. Heavy downloaders do not have a right to use the network in a way that negatively affects other customers or the business that provides the service. The business is not morally obligate to provide anything but what they contract says they will provide. And, 70:1 oversubscription is not so bad. I once worked for a major TLA telecom company who regularly allocated 8Kbps of backbone for each DSL line.
The key is to provide all customers a consistent user experience and to provide all customers what they pay for. If the heavy downloaders do not pay more they have no right to use more. And, lets make this clear, just because you let customers use more than their fair share in the past is not a reason to allow them to continue their antisocial behavior. You made a mistake, a seriously immoral mistake, by allowing the bad behavior in the first case. You are now morally obligate to correct the problem.
Ok, so how many customers do you plan to support before you upgrade the backbone? Is it the 400 you currently have or the 1,000 that your boss dreams about? Pick a number, call it planned for customers or PFC for short. Each customer is paying for 1/PFC worth of the backbone. And that is exactly what they should get. IMHO it would be reasonable and moral to throttle everyone to (1/PFC)*(available bandwidth) worth of bandwidth.
there are other considerations. At some times of the day there are very few people using the net and at other times there are a large number using it. Take the average number of users by hour, call it AUBY, add 50% to it, and allocate bandwidth so that each user gets (available bandwidth)/(1.5 * AUBY).. The 50% is to cover variance in the number of users and to provide for growth in the number of users. You want to be able to add customers and deal with busy times without seriously interfering with the customer experience. Now, don't impose throttling on a connection until it exceeds 75% of its allocation. When it hits the limit start throttling to keep the connections total usage below its limit.
Doing it that way will give all users the same experience. Web surfers and folks who make the occasional big download with see a fast and consistent service. Heavy downloaders can still do heavy downloads. They will notice that their download speed varies with the time of day. They will still get their fair share, but they will not affect the other customers. Your business will be able to add new customers without harming the experience of existing customers and you will have fair warning of when you need to increase backbone bandwidth.
If I read the original question correctly you feel that throttling heavy users may be immoral. That is not the case. By allowing the heavy users to hurt performance for the rest of your customers your business is the one taking the immoral action.
What they are doing is called blackmail, and it is also an attempt to enslave you. Yeah, being forced to work for someone against your will is *slavery*.
Grab every bit of documentation you have and take it to a *lawyer*.
You do not want to talk to HR until you get a lawyer. You want your lawyer with you from now on every time you talk to any one in management.
Why are engineers and scientists such cowards? If a manager tried that tactic on a lawyer or an MBA they would *own* the company in a couple of weeks.
Get a Lawyer.
I am not a lawyer, but I have learned when to call one.
I have a wireless LAN based on equipment supplied by Roadrunner. Works OK.
BUT! I have a lot of metal in my house. Between heating ducts and the steel trusses holding up the second floor wifi doesn't work well between floors and doesn't always work room to room.
I have 6 of the AirLink power line Ethernet boxes. I bought them on sale at Fry's for no more than $30 each. I didn't buy them all at once. I bought one pair and then bought another one and then another one over a period of several years
I have one behind my living room couch feeding two laptops and a printer. I have two of them in my bedroom. I have one in the garage. One more next to a server in my office, And, I have one next to the Roadrunner box that feeds the whole network.
As I write this I am copying all my photos from my wife's PC to my PC. The system monitor says I am getting 899 KiB/s (using Ubuntu 9.4 alpha 4). The boxes are only rated for 83 Mbps.
On a laptop in the living room I can usually get better than 50 Mbps over the power line and 1 to 4 Mbps over wireless.
These things are great.
So, why didn't I just run cat 5? Good question. I have a fairly modern air tight home. The walls are filled with injected foam. I have watched techs from both AT&T and Roadrunner go slowly nuts trying to find a void they can pull a wire through. I tried putting up cat 5 along the corners and under the rugs but the result was really really ugly.
And, yes, I have used the 100 foot extension cord I use for my lawn mower to connect a laptop to both power and my network and use it to surf from my back yard.
In the evening I can often see a dozen wifi networks from my living room couch. The interference is fierce. Often my wifi network (sitting upstairs from the couch) is the 3rd or 4th down list of signal strength. That is, I can get a better connection through my neighbors wifi than from my own. Well, I could if they weren't all secured:-).
So, I think Ethernet over powerline beats wifi all to hell for home and small office applications. Low cost, zero set up time, high speed. Usable anywhere there is a wall socket. Can't beat it.
Thank you for your reasoned and reasonable reply. After reading your reply I understand why you would call my characterization a "large leap" and I feel you deserve a clarification.
It is my observation that/. readers are curious education oriented people. Those readers who do not have college degrees are likely to be on track to get college degrees and many of us have graduate degrees or are on track to get them. That makes us a fairly unique bunch of people right there. Only about 20 to 25 percent of the population graduates from college in the US.
If you are in college or a college graduate there is very good chance that one or both of you parents were college graduates. In my case I'm a third generation grad school graduate on my mother's side and second generation on my father's side. My kids will be 4th generation college graduates.
People like me (and I suspect you) are part of a small subculture in the US. I will bet that your mother has some post high school education and is probably a college graduate. People like me (us?) grow up in a culture of education and intellectual curiosity. We tend to live in neighborhoods full of people like us and even in cities that attract people like us. And, like most people we grow up thinking the world is just like out backyard and the people in the world are a like us. When we run into people that are not like use we tend to treat them as some sort of freak anomaly.
Well, although my father went to grad school and married into an intellectual family his brothers were mostly underground coal miners. I grew up with a foot in both cultures.
Unlike my family, most of my students are the first people in their family history to get post high school education. In many cases they are the first generation to graduate from high school. Their families have no tradition of intellectual achievement and they come from cultures that appear to disdain curiosity. Most of them are in my class because of economic hardship. They see it as a way to make more money and nothing else.
Notice that I said most, that does not mean all. It just means the majority.
I hope that clarifies what I said. And I hope it helps you understand the difference between you and your family and the rest of the population. There are many distinct cultures in the US. These cultures are *not* tied to ethnicity so much as they are tied to economic and social class. The digital divide is real, wide and deep.
BTW, I *do* talk to them about alternatives to MS Office, I recommend OpenOffice.org in every class. But, the students can buy the student edition of MS Office for ~$23 dollars and so there is not much incentive to get OO.o. OTOH, I usually have at least on student each section who is using OO.o and asks to be allowed to continue to use it. I, of course, accommodate them and ask them to tell the class why they prefer OO.o.
I also teach one lecture that about computer security and the dangers of not practicing safe computing. In that class I do talk about the flaws in Windows and the other operating systems. But, I do it in terms of the cost to small businesses that many of my students want to start, not in any kind of technical terms. I base the lecture around the experience the students have reported back to me about delayed or lost pay checks due to viruses on their employer's computers.
Oh, you mean folks like me who dropped MS years ago and never looked back? Yeah, rode the Debian train and then made the switch to Ubuntu and never looked back. And, yeah, when I started telling my neighbors that I didn't have their problems and that I couldn't help them with the current version of Windows because I don't use it at home...
Well, then they found some other poor sucker.
I do miss the beer. I used to tell my neighbors that the cost of fixing their machine is a six pack of Sam Adams. I like beer.
Politically they are a mixed bag ranging from your typical white supremacist Republicans to your yellow dog Democrats. And, they are all ethnicities as well as football players.
Obsessive compulsive disorder makes life very hard. I understand that because I know people with varying levels of the disorder. So, I'm saying this with nothing but concern for you. Please, get help. The combination of drug treatment and cognitive therapy can help you overcome the disorder.
In my heart I am still a software developer, a hardcore IT guy and a Linux advocate... In 30 years I worked for 5 start ups blah blah blah. Lots of hardcore techy cred if I want to pull it.
But, now days I make most of my income as a teacher and I make most of that teaching money teaching basic computer literacy and MS Office to people on the wrong side of the digital divide. These are not stupid people, they are not old people, most are under 25 but some are as old as 65. All are high school graduates and some have college degrees. They just don't know much about how to use a computer. They never learned and they don't care about anything but getting their job done.
I dare say that they represent a fairly large percentage of todays population.
You know what? While most of them (not all) have heard of Microsoft, they have no strong opinion of the company one way or the the other. To them windows are something that you open when you want fresh air and for some weird reason is also what makes using a computer hard or easy (depends on the person). If they know the difference between XP and Vista it is because they learned a little about using a computer with XP and then bought a computer with Vista and they are pissed because the it is different from the one they learn on. (OTOH, there is a small percentage who stumbled upon Vista and love it.)
They don't buy any thing from MS. What they have from MS came on the computer. In most cases the only software they ever buy are games and mostly they buy games for their consoles. They down load games for PCs because they can, and as one student so bluntly put it "How can it be illegal when it is so easy?"
What I am trying to say is that for the people I teach Microsoft is like the road they drive to work. They only notice it when there is a problem with it. When there is a problem, they don't blame MS, if anything they blame the company who made the computer. From their point of view rebooting windows is just like driving around a chuckhole or getting stuck in traffic. It happens, shit happens, the live with it. They don't even think about the possibility that it shouldn't happen, because it has always happened.
They do not have an opinion about MS. They don't see MS. They don't buy from MS.
Microsoft has become like the air in a big city, you only complain about it when you can see it. And, Microsoft has taken great care to make sure they are not seen, they are just there, like transparent but polluted air.
Out side of IT and the small number of IT enthusiasts in the world, nobody has an opinion about MS.
They have been convicted of crimes against the public, I.E, abuse of monopoly power, on pretty much ever continent except Antarctica. If that isn't a criminal organization, what is?
I've worked for some wonderful managers and some terrible managers and I have managed a team of programmers. I love programming, I dislike managing, but I will do it if I must... (BTW, I have always gotten excellent ratings as a manager and as a programmer.)
The manager has a lot of jobs. Perhaps the most important is communicating. Nobody over the age of 12 should ever be expected to accept "because I said so" as reason.
The manager must make sure the programmers understand why they are working on the projects they are working on. They must explain the business needs for what they are doing. Programmers will achieve amazing things if they understand why they are important. But, only if they honestly believe they understand the risks and will participate in the reward.
The worst thing you can do is lie. If you have told me something and it turns out not to be true I will find out why it is not true. If it is untrue because of things out of your control changed, then OK. So long as you tell *when* they change. But, let me catch you just once in a lie and you will never be trusted again. Fact is, you will have lost your group. Programmers value honesty and we tend to see things in black and white. This goes back to communication, keep us informed. Make sure we know when and why things have changed. If I find out (as I have in the past) that a schedule was changed so a VP could get an extra $500,000 bonus, don't expect that schedule to be met unless you are willing to spread an extra %500,000 in bonuses around the group.
The manager must be seen as someone who clears the trail. The manager must foresee problems and clear them before the programmers are slowed down by them. In the cases that the manager can not clear the trail in advance then the manager must take action as soon as possible. It is your job to provide the resources I need to get a job done. When the MTBF of the build server is less than the mean time to complete a build, you better fix it. I might be willing, once, to waste an evening or a week end because you didn't provide the facilities needed to do the job. I won't do it twice.
Don't play games with schedules. If I sign off on the schedule I will work as many hours as I must to meet that schedule. If you write the schedule with no input from me I have no reason the pay any attention to it. If your schedule can only be met by my working evenings and weekends, expect to negotiate with me over how much you are going to pay me for that time. You want me to work more than 40 hours/week most weeks with the *occasional* 50+ hour week you better plan on paying by the hour and yes, I expect time and a half for over time. The law might say I am an exempt employee who is not entitled to overtime pay, guess what, fuck that law. I don't work for free.
OTOH, require status reports, I always hated writing the things and I hated reading them. But, how else do I know what you are doing? As a manager I have a schedule to manage. I have to know what milestones have been met and which are being delayed. No matter who wrote the schedule it is there to make sure that the resources allocated to the project are sufficient for the project. If the schedule can not be met then the resources have to be adjusted and if that means the cost of the project exceeds the value of the project the project must be changed or terminated. I've never found a way to manage a project except to measure progress against a schedule.
Require status reports, I like to see a weekly plan turned in Monday morning. This is the plan for the week and doesn't need to be more than 4 or 5 lines long. Just a list of milestones you are working toward, reminders to the manager of up coming resource needs, and anything that is slowing you down. On Friday afternoon, I want another version of the same report telling me which milestones you met and what kept you from meeting the rest of them. OF course, you have to be willing to stay late on Friday to read both sets of reports. But, hey you are a manager, that is part of th
I get your implication that maybe I'm just not a good employee. If it were just me I would accept that suggestion as a possibility. Trouble is that there are literally hundreds of thousands of us out here. We aren't all assholes. Looking at history I see that this has happened to *every* generation of technical people since at least WWII. It is a repeating pattern, nothing new at all.
And, then there is the fact that I have no trouble getting teaching jobs. I can manage a class room and get along with my current management who are all at least 20 years younger than I am. My students are happy with me, my management thinks I do a good job.
So, how come I am qualified to teach programming, but not to *do* programming.
That the companies that are complaining about the poor training that new students are getting are not willing to hire older programmers who got exactly the kind training Bjarne is pushing for. Yeah, got exactly what he wants to put back into schools today, then we have tested it and developed it over decades of developing and shipping products. And there are hundreds of thousands of us out of work in the US.
I've taught programming classes and have had the experience of having companies call asking for the names of students who did well in my classes. I have also had the experience of trying to apply for those jobs. I have told the companies that I will work for an entry level salary and since they trust me to do the training and evaluation of the students you would think was qualified...
The best response was to be ignored, the worst was being laughed at.
But, I have founded my own company, and I am doing it again right now. The trouble is that the founder is the one who winds up making 10 cents an hour while paying his employees real salaries.
You want to find the owner of a start up company? He is the guy sweeping the floor and cleaning the toilets.
You see, she is very good and very flexible. Most of the people she worked with in the defense industry are now selling shoes or insurance. (The guy I bought my first life insurance policy from was a design engineer on Apollo.) Look up the history of the 401(k) and you will find it was created after years of lobbying by the engineering societies. This isn't new. It has been going on for generations.
My son is studying accounting. You can get a job with a 2 year degree, get a better job with a 4 year degree, and do even better with a masters. Accounting has a certification system that is government regulated and respected everywhere.
My daughter is studying psychology... oh well. OTOH, she has always managed to make as much money as she wanted no matter what her age and education. I am in awe of her.
BTW, I encouraged (insisted) that my kids do their first 2 years at a junior college to save money while they checked out different fields. They both went through 3 or 4 majors before picking what they liked.
Expecting someone to pick a life long career at age 18 is insane.
My wife and I have been married for 31 years. We met in college. She was a civil engineering major, I was a computer science major. She later changed her major to mechanical engineering when she learned that ME's are more widely employable than CEs. When we met she was a freshman and I was a senior.
I went on to get a masters degree, she took the classes for a master degree but spent the time she would have spent on a thesis getting ready for, and passing, the P.E. exam. She has had her stamp for a long time.
We are both now in out fifties. She gets calls several times a year offering her jobs. Some in the private sector, some in the public sector. People value her decades of experience. People look up to MEs with decades of experience and a professional certification.
I was laid off for the last time on my 49th birthday and have not been able to find a technical job since. It is hard to find a company that will believe that I actually have the experience I have. I can't tell you how many times I have had an interview where I have been challenged on my experience and even though I can prove every bit of it people just don't believe it. And, don't get me started on certification for computer people, compared to getting a PE certification in the computer world isn't even a bad joke. It is mostly just a con.
I went back to school and "retrained" as a teacher and I am now certified to teach CS in public schools and I work part time teaching people how to use a mouse. I haven't been able to find a full time teaching job because their aren't many of those and the competition for them is fierce. You see, I live in Austin, Texas and for about 10 years this is where IBM transfered entire divisions before they laid them off. There are literally thousands of people my age with my qualifications wandering around down here (we used to have a morning walking club just for laid of 50+ software developers) and they all did the work of getting certified to teach in the Texas public schools. I got the job I had when the lady who had it before me got a full time teaching job. My application had been on file for more than a year. I moved from a job that was even more part time to one that is almost half time. A major step up!
When my wife graduated from high school she took the ACT. She compared her ACT scores to the average ACT scores of different majors and the average starting salary in those majors. Engineering had the highest starting salary and most closely matched here ACT scores. I went into computer science after taking a class in it and falling in love with it.
I have come to learn that I am pretty typical of a guy who goes into computer science. Most of us do it because we really really like it. Some do it for the money but those guys don't stay in it for long. I have also come to learn that my wife is pretty typical of women who go into technical subjects. They do it because it is a good way to make a living and you can do some really interesting stuff too.
Now, lets see some of the differences between being a "software engineer" and a real engineer. My wife has been laid off once, I have been laid off twice. Until I turned 49 (I'm now 56) I made 20% to 40% more than she did. She now makes 250% more than I do. I have done thousands of hours of involuntary unpaid overtime. She has always either been paid for, or received comp time for, all the overtime she has ever done. And, while it is common for programmers to be told to get something done by Tuesday or else, that has never happened to her. Working conditions that are normal for programmers are practically unheard of for engineers.
Women tend to be more practical than men when it comes to picking a career. Being more practical they will google for information about salaries, work hours, working conditions and so on, *before* picking a major. If you want to have a job for the rest of your life, and work 40 hours per week most of the time, and be respected at work and in the community, you do not study computer science. At least
Of course, I have some self proclaimed Christian relatives who will tell you that all gambling is owned, sponsored, controlled and for the sole benefit of the great evil one, Satan himself. They believe that fighting gambling is the same as fighting Satan. The same folks support Israel because they think that the founding of Israel signals the end times and the second coming of Jesus Christ. At least I don't have any snake handlers in the family (and we don't mention great great granddaddy the religious zealot who lead the murder of all those folks from Missouri and don't you think the movie sucked?)
If you are one of those, then you probably think that there is something wrong with gambling, all that support of Satan and demons and such... So, those folks think that blocking gambling is a good thing. Oh, BTW, those folks are thick on the ground in Kentucky, they vote, and they have guns. And, they know how to use both of them.
OT comment, I've had several encounters with Brits who are totally befuddled by the US. They think that since we split off from them we should be like them. They forget that all the nut cases in all of Europe (and elsewhere) have been coming here for the last 500 years and that only a little bit of the US was ever part of the UK. Basically I have come to the conclusion that the Brits I have met are as clueless about the real US as most Americans are about the UK.
BTW, I personally, am descended from a long line of religious extremists who left England in the 1600s and so I feel I have personal knowledge of how their minds work (or don't depending on your point of view.) In other words, if you try to understand Kentucky by the standards of the UK you are as nuts as a Kentuckian would be to judge the UK by the standards of Kentucky.
Oh well, everyone seems to make the mistake of thinking that everyone is like them and everyplace is like their hometown. They aren't.
As a wise man once said, the only thing wrong with France is that they killed all their aristocrats and the only thing wrong with the UK is that they didn't.
Of course, that was all said from the point of view of a Buddhist from Texas. Take it for what its worth
One of my many ex brothers-in-law is an MBA. 30 years ago I was talking to him over beer about *exactly* the same problem that this article is about. No respect. No compensation for work done. No upward path in the company...
His response? Yeah, in business school they teach us that engineers are stupid. If you were a business major you would know what to do. When the boss says "do it" the correct response is "what's in it for me?" And if they don't answer with what you want you don't do the extra work.
Work 75 hours a week for a fixed salary? He thought that was just too cool. He loved the idea of getting nearly two peoples worth of work for the cost of one. So what if it ruins your health. They are planning to get rid of you before your bad health starts to raise their costs.
So... about a month later my boss told our group we were going on mandatory 60 hour weeks and we would be required to work Saturdays. Don't like it? To bad. In an open meeting I asked why I should do it. He said if you don't you'll be fired. I said "OK." If you fire all of us you won't get the project done. The rest of the staff caught on to the fact that we had the power. A couple of hours later we were told we would get 50% extra pay for working 50% extra hours.
Sounds great... I was fired within a month of the end of the project.
I learned the lesson. Management loves screwing employees. They get off on it the same we techies get off on learning and making things work. The techies have the real power and the managers know it. They love the fact that we won't use our power. If you want to be treated well by management you have to organize and be willing to shut the company down.
You want to be treated fairly? Quit your bitchin' and organize. Of course, we're so tough and love that libertarian fighter jock image so we don't organize... And the managers laugh and laugh and laugh at us all the way to the bank. And we keep being treated like the idiots we are.
When I was a technical director in the game business my manager called his business plan "burning babies". You hire an out of school power fool and work them until they can't take it any more. Then they quit. You don't even have to fire them.
I am very glad to see this software available. It is about damn time.
OTOH, I have to say the way this is being done pisses me off no end. First off, why only 32 bit? I have 64 bit computers so no codecs for me...
But, that is OK... After seeing the prices I lost interest. I was flat assed shocked at the price. The total cost for DVD play back and a complete set of media codecs is $90 US. $50 just for the DVD player. I can buy a complete stand alone DVD player for under $30. How is $50 reasonable? $90 is just a few bucks less than the upgrade price for Vista. It is a long way toward the full price of Vista.
One must wonder why the price of a set of codecs for Ubuntu is nearly the same as the price of an entire OS from Microsoft? A quick google search shows that the royalty rates for these codecs is measured in cents per user per codec. Looks to me like a reasonable rate for these codecs is more like $9 than $90 dollars. Who is ripping off Canonical?
I actually trust Canonical... I run Ubuntu on all my computers. So, I have to believe that they see this as the only reasonable solution to the problem. But, instead of pushing a set of **gossly** over priced commercial software packages why don't they just sell the "illegal" packages for the royalty rate plus a few bucks to support cleaning them up?
Why only look at the factors mentioned by the authors? Does the combined gravity of the sun, moon, and oh say Jupiter, correlate better than the sun alone? What about the speed of the Earth around the galaxy? That varies on a yearly not so?
No, I am not suggesting that these are the real factors to look at, I am just saying that all the discussion is centered around the ideas of the authors without any one suggesting something else. don't let the original authors imagination limit our imaginations.
I also own the.com version of my name. In my case my last name is the name of a company that does about $100 million a year and has had a trademark on my name and a few versions of it for over a 100 years.
I can tell you for a fact that companies that are serious about getting your domain name do not send you a polite email asking to buy it. They have their agent or lawyer send a registered letter and follow up with a phone call.
Most likely the guy who contacted you won't pay you enough to make it worth the hassle of changing your email address. But, speaking as someone who has turned down offers ranging from a couple of shirts (no, I am not making that up, they were very nice wool shirts...) to $20,000 for my domain name and as someone who has been threatened with being sued over my ownership and use of the domain name 6 times over the last 12 years here are a few things to think about.
1) It is your name. (The web cred for being first-name @ last-name . com is incredible.)
2) It will only become more valuable with time.
3) Don't fall into the nice guy trap. You are not doing this guy a favor, he doesn't give a shit about you. This is no different than if someone walked up and offered to buy your truck. (That has happened to me too.) You have something he wants, but you want it too. You do not have to share.
4) Research the company. What does D&B say about them? How much can they afford to spend? How much is the domain really worth to them?
5) Never never never tell them what you will sell it for. No matter what price you mention they will make a lower counter offer and will never (well... almost never) pay what you ask. More importantly, they will pay *no more* than what they *think* it is worth to them. If you quote a price that price will be the maximum they will pay. If they quote the first price that price will be the minimum they will pay.
6) If the sale is contingent on your getting a.us domain then make sure you have that domain before you finish the deal. My dear friends went out and grabbed all the names I might want as an alternate domain just so they could use them as bargaining chips.
7) If they make an offer get a lawyer. Do not reply to an offer until you have a lawyer. BTW, a *good* intellectual property lawyer is not cheap The first one I tried to talk to wanted a $30,000 retainer. So, I had to go with a not very good lawyer... BTW, you should note that the cost of a *good* lawyer started out $10,000 higher than anyone ever offered for the name.
My best advice is to send back a polite email asking what he is offering. When the reply turns out to be less than $100 you can laugh, tell the guy to blow you, and at least know you had the fun of getting a personal question posted on/.
Oh yeah... in the end I still own the name and I am in the hole a few thousand for legal bills. I am pretty happy about that. They could have sued (even though they would have lost) and bankrupted me with the legal fees of winning the suit.
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You have here a very small ISP with only 400 customers. They are 70/1 oversubscribed and they want most of their customers to be happy with the service.
A few things to consider, not all customers are worth keeping. If keeping customer A costs you customers B & C, then you are much better off getting rid of customer A. Heavy downloaders do not have a right to use the network in a way that negatively affects other customers or the business that provides the service. The business is not morally obligate to provide anything but what they contract says they will provide. And, 70:1 oversubscription is not so bad. I once worked for a major TLA telecom company who regularly allocated 8Kbps of backbone for each DSL line.
The key is to provide all customers a consistent user experience and to provide all customers what they pay for. If the heavy downloaders do not pay more they have no right to use more. And, lets make this clear, just because you let customers use more than their fair share in the past is not a reason to allow them to continue their antisocial behavior. You made a mistake, a seriously immoral mistake, by allowing the bad behavior in the first case. You are now morally obligate to correct the problem.
Ok, so how many customers do you plan to support before you upgrade the backbone? Is it the 400 you currently have or the 1,000 that your boss dreams about? Pick a number, call it planned for customers or PFC for short. Each customer is paying for 1/PFC worth of the backbone. And that is exactly what they should get. IMHO it would be reasonable and moral to throttle everyone to (1/PFC)*(available bandwidth) worth of bandwidth.
there are other considerations. At some times of the day there are very few people using the net and at other times there are a large number using it. Take the average number of users by hour, call it AUBY, add 50% to it, and allocate bandwidth so that each user gets (available bandwidth)/(1.5 * AUBY).. The 50% is to cover variance in the number of users and to provide for growth in the number of users. You want to be able to add customers and deal with busy times without seriously interfering with the customer experience. Now, don't impose throttling on a connection until it exceeds 75% of its allocation. When it hits the limit start throttling to keep the connections total usage below its limit.
Doing it that way will give all users the same experience. Web surfers and folks who make the occasional big download with see a fast and consistent service. Heavy downloaders can still do heavy downloads. They will notice that their download speed varies with the time of day. They will still get their fair share, but they will not affect the other customers. Your business will be able to add new customers without harming the experience of existing customers and you will have fair warning of when you need to increase backbone bandwidth.
If I read the original question correctly you feel that throttling heavy users may be immoral. That is not the case. By allowing the heavy users to hurt performance for the rest of your customers your business is the one taking the immoral action.
Stonewolf
What they are doing is called blackmail, and it is also an attempt to enslave you. Yeah, being forced to work for someone against your will is *slavery*.
Grab every bit of documentation you have and take it to a *lawyer*.
You do not want to talk to HR until you get a lawyer. You want your lawyer with you from now on every time you talk to any one in management.
Why are engineers and scientists such cowards? If a manager tried that tactic on a lawyer or an MBA they would *own* the company in a couple of weeks.
Get a Lawyer.
I am not a lawyer, but I have learned when to call one.
Stonewolf
I have a wireless LAN based on equipment supplied by Roadrunner. Works OK.
BUT! I have a lot of metal in my house. Between heating ducts and the steel trusses holding up the second floor wifi doesn't work well between floors and doesn't always work room to room.
I have 6 of the AirLink power line Ethernet boxes. I bought them on sale at Fry's for no more than $30 each. I didn't buy them all at once. I bought one pair and then bought another one and then another one over a period of several years
I have one behind my living room couch feeding two laptops and a printer. I have two of them in my bedroom. I have one in the garage. One more next to a server in my office, And, I have one next to the Roadrunner box that feeds the whole network.
As I write this I am copying all my photos from my wife's PC to my PC. The system monitor says I am getting 899 KiB/s (using Ubuntu 9.4 alpha 4). The boxes are only rated for 83 Mbps.
On a laptop in the living room I can usually get better than 50 Mbps over the power line and 1 to 4 Mbps over wireless.
These things are great.
So, why didn't I just run cat 5? Good question. I have a fairly modern air tight home. The walls are filled with injected foam. I have watched techs from both AT&T and Roadrunner go slowly nuts trying to find a void they can pull a wire through. I tried putting up cat 5 along the corners and under the rugs but the result was really really ugly.
And, yes, I have used the 100 foot extension cord I use for my lawn mower to connect a laptop to both power and my network and use it to surf from my back yard.
In the evening I can often see a dozen wifi networks from my living room couch. The interference is fierce. Often my wifi network (sitting upstairs from the couch) is the 3rd or 4th down list of signal strength. That is, I can get a better connection through my neighbors wifi than from my own. Well, I could if they weren't all secured :-).
So, I think Ethernet over powerline beats wifi all to hell for home and small office applications. Low cost, zero set up time, high speed. Usable anywhere there is a wall socket. Can't beat it.
Stonewolf
Thank you for your reasoned and reasonable reply. After reading your reply I understand why you would call my characterization a "large leap" and I feel you deserve a clarification.
It is my observation that /. readers are curious education oriented people. Those readers who do not have college degrees are likely to be on track to get college degrees and many of us have graduate degrees or are on track to get them. That makes us a fairly unique bunch of people right there. Only about 20 to 25 percent of the population graduates from college in the US.
If you are in college or a college graduate there is very good chance that one or both of you parents were college graduates. In my case I'm a third generation grad school graduate on my mother's side and second generation on my father's side. My kids will be 4th generation college graduates.
People like me (and I suspect you) are part of a small subculture in the US. I will bet that your mother has some post high school education and is probably a college graduate. People like me (us?) grow up in a culture of education and intellectual curiosity. We tend to live in neighborhoods full of people like us and even in cities that attract people like us. And, like most people we grow up thinking the world is just like out backyard and the people in the world are a like us. When we run into people that are not like use we tend to treat them as some sort of freak anomaly.
Well, although my father went to grad school and married into an intellectual family his brothers were mostly underground coal miners. I grew up with a foot in both cultures.
Unlike my family, most of my students are the first people in their family history to get post high school education. In many cases they are the first generation to graduate from high school. Their families have no tradition of intellectual achievement and they come from cultures that appear to disdain curiosity. Most of them are in my class because of economic hardship. They see it as a way to make more money and nothing else.
Notice that I said most, that does not mean all. It just means the majority.
I hope that clarifies what I said. And I hope it helps you understand the difference between you and your family and the rest of the population. There are many distinct cultures in the US. These cultures are *not* tied to ethnicity so much as they are tied to economic and social class. The digital divide is real, wide and deep.
BTW, I *do* talk to them about alternatives to MS Office, I recommend OpenOffice.org in every class. But, the students can buy the student edition of MS Office for ~$23 dollars and so there is not much incentive to get OO.o. OTOH, I usually have at least on student each section who is using OO.o and asks to be allowed to continue to use it. I, of course, accommodate them and ask them to tell the class why they prefer OO.o.
I also teach one lecture that about computer security and the dangers of not practicing safe computing. In that class I do talk about the flaws in Windows and the other operating systems. But, I do it in terms of the cost to small businesses that many of my students want to start, not in any kind of technical terms. I base the lecture around the experience the students have reported back to me about delayed or lost pay checks due to viruses on their employer's computers.
Stonewolf
Oh, you mean folks like me who dropped MS years ago and never looked back? Yeah, rode the Debian train and then made the switch to Ubuntu and never looked back. And, yeah, when I started telling my neighbors that I didn't have their problems and that I couldn't help them with the current version of Windows because I don't use it at home...
Well, then they found some other poor sucker.
I do miss the beer. I used to tell my neighbors that the cost of fixing their machine is a six pack of Sam Adams. I like beer.
Stonewolf.
Erm.. No.
Politically they are a mixed bag ranging from your typical white supremacist Republicans to your yellow dog Democrats. And, they are all ethnicities as well as football players.
Stonewolf
Obsessive compulsive disorder makes life very hard. I understand that because I know people with varying levels of the disorder. So, I'm saying this with nothing but concern for you. Please, get help. The combination of drug treatment and cognitive therapy can help you overcome the disorder.
Please get help,
Stonewolf
If they were users I would loan them to you. I mean, seriously, I feel your pain. But, they are students, not users.
Stonewolf
In my heart I am still a software developer, a hardcore IT guy and a Linux advocate... In 30 years I worked for 5 start ups blah blah blah. Lots of hardcore techy cred if I want to pull it.
But, now days I make most of my income as a teacher and I make most of that teaching money teaching basic computer literacy and MS Office to people on the wrong side of the digital divide. These are not stupid people, they are not old people, most are under 25 but some are as old as 65. All are high school graduates and some have college degrees. They just don't know much about how to use a computer. They never learned and they don't care about anything but getting their job done.
I dare say that they represent a fairly large percentage of todays population.
You know what? While most of them (not all) have heard of Microsoft, they have no strong opinion of the company one way or the the other. To them windows are something that you open when you want fresh air and for some weird reason is also what makes using a computer hard or easy (depends on the person). If they know the difference between XP and Vista it is because they learned a little about using a computer with XP and then bought a computer with Vista and they are pissed because the it is different from the one they learn on. (OTOH, there is a small percentage who stumbled upon Vista and love it.)
They don't buy any thing from MS. What they have from MS came on the computer. In most cases the only software they ever buy are games and mostly they buy games for their consoles. They down load games for PCs because they can, and as one student so bluntly put it "How can it be illegal when it is so easy?"
What I am trying to say is that for the people I teach Microsoft is like the road they drive to work. They only notice it when there is a problem with it. When there is a problem, they don't blame MS, if anything they blame the company who made the computer. From their point of view rebooting windows is just like driving around a chuckhole or getting stuck in traffic. It happens, shit happens, the live with it. They don't even think about the possibility that it shouldn't happen, because it has always happened.
They do not have an opinion about MS. They don't see MS. They don't buy from MS.
Microsoft has become like the air in a big city, you only complain about it when you can see it. And, Microsoft has taken great care to make sure they are not seen, they are just there, like transparent but polluted air.
Out side of IT and the small number of IT enthusiasts in the world, nobody has an opinion about MS.
Stonewolf
The sad thing is that you can laugh at it. You value your rights so little that you give them away.
They have been convicted of crimes against the public, I.E, abuse of monopoly power, on pretty much ever continent except Antarctica. If that isn't a criminal organization, what is?
I have already contacted the DNC about this and filed a complaint under their Civil Rights heading. http://www.democrats.org/contact.html
I asked them what they were thinking when the chose to support a convicted criminal organization (MS) over the freedom loving people of the US.
Email them *now*
Stonewolf
I've worked for some wonderful managers and some terrible managers and I have managed a team of programmers. I love programming, I dislike managing, but I will do it if I must... (BTW, I have always gotten excellent ratings as a manager and as a programmer.)
The manager has a lot of jobs. Perhaps the most important is communicating. Nobody over the age of 12 should ever be expected to accept "because I said so" as reason.
The manager must make sure the programmers understand why they are working on the projects they are working on. They must explain the business needs for what they are doing. Programmers will achieve amazing things if they understand why they are important. But, only if they honestly believe they understand the risks and will participate in the reward.
The worst thing you can do is lie. If you have told me something and it turns out not to be true I will find out why it is not true. If it is untrue because of things out of your control changed, then OK. So long as you tell *when* they change. But, let me catch you just once in a lie and you will never be trusted again. Fact is, you will have lost your group. Programmers value honesty and we tend to see things in black and white. This goes back to communication, keep us informed. Make sure we know when and why things have changed. If I find out (as I have in the past) that a schedule was changed so a VP could get an extra $500,000 bonus, don't expect that schedule to be met unless you are willing to spread an extra %500,000 in bonuses around the group.
The manager must be seen as someone who clears the trail. The manager must foresee problems and clear them before the programmers are slowed down by them. In the cases that the manager can not clear the trail in advance then the manager must take action as soon as possible. It is your job to provide the resources I need to get a job done. When the MTBF of the build server is less than the mean time to complete a build, you better fix it. I might be willing, once, to waste an evening or a week end because you didn't provide the facilities needed to do the job. I won't do it twice.
Don't play games with schedules. If I sign off on the schedule I will work as many hours as I must to meet that schedule. If you write the schedule with no input from me I have no reason the pay any attention to it. If your schedule can only be met by my working evenings and weekends, expect to negotiate with me over how much you are going to pay me for that time. You want me to work more than 40 hours/week most weeks with the *occasional* 50+ hour week you better plan on paying by the hour and yes, I expect time and a half for over time. The law might say I am an exempt employee who is not entitled to overtime pay, guess what, fuck that law. I don't work for free.
OTOH, require status reports, I always hated writing the things and I hated reading them. But, how else do I know what you are doing? As a manager I have a schedule to manage. I have to know what milestones have been met and which are being delayed. No matter who wrote the schedule it is there to make sure that the resources allocated to the project are sufficient for the project. If the schedule can not be met then the resources have to be adjusted and if that means the cost of the project exceeds the value of the project the project must be changed or terminated. I've never found a way to manage a project except to measure progress against a schedule.
Require status reports, I like to see a weekly plan turned in Monday morning. This is the plan for the week and doesn't need to be more than 4 or 5 lines long. Just a list of milestones you are working toward, reminders to the manager of up coming resource needs, and anything that is slowing you down. On Friday afternoon, I want another version of the same report telling me which milestones you met and what kept you from meeting the rest of them. OF course, you have to be willing to stay late on Friday to read both sets of reports. But, hey you are a manager, that is part of th
I get your implication that maybe I'm just not a good employee. If it were just me I would accept that suggestion as a possibility. Trouble is that there are literally hundreds of thousands of us out here. We aren't all assholes. Looking at history I see that this has happened to *every* generation of technical people since at least WWII. It is a repeating pattern, nothing new at all.
And, then there is the fact that I have no trouble getting teaching jobs. I can manage a class room and get along with my current management who are all at least 20 years younger than I am. My students are happy with me, my management thinks I do a good job.
So, how come I am qualified to teach programming, but not to *do* programming.
Stonewolf
That the companies that are complaining about the poor training that new students are getting are not willing to hire older programmers who got exactly the kind training Bjarne is pushing for. Yeah, got exactly what he wants to put back into schools today, then we have tested it and developed it over decades of developing and shipping products. And there are hundreds of thousands of us out of work in the US.
I've taught programming classes and have had the experience of having companies call asking for the names of students who did well in my classes. I have also had the experience of trying to apply for those jobs. I have told the companies that I will work for an entry level salary and since they trust me to do the training and evaluation of the students you would think was qualified...
The best response was to be ignored, the worst was being laughed at.
Fuck 'em all,
Stonewolf
My bet is that you haven't ever done that...
But, I have founded my own company, and I am doing it again right now. The trouble is that the founder is the one who winds up making 10 cents an hour while paying his employees real salaries.
You want to find the owner of a start up company? He is the guy sweeping the floor and cleaning the toilets.
Stonewolf
My wife was lucky...
You see, she is very good and very flexible. Most of the people she worked with in the defense industry are now selling shoes or insurance. (The guy I bought my first life insurance policy from was a design engineer on Apollo.) Look up the history of the 401(k) and you will find it was created after years of lobbying by the engineering societies. This isn't new. It has been going on for generations.
My son is studying accounting. You can get a job with a 2 year degree, get a better job with a 4 year degree, and do even better with a masters. Accounting has a certification system that is government regulated and respected everywhere.
My daughter is studying psychology... oh well. OTOH, she has always managed to make as much money as she wanted no matter what her age and education. I am in awe of her.
BTW, I encouraged (insisted) that my kids do their first 2 years at a junior college to save money while they checked out different fields. They both went through 3 or 4 majors before picking what they liked.
Expecting someone to pick a life long career at age 18 is insane.
Stonewolf
My wife and I have been married for 31 years. We met in college. She was a civil engineering major, I was a computer science major. She later changed her major to mechanical engineering when she learned that ME's are more widely employable than CEs. When we met she was a freshman and I was a senior.
I went on to get a masters degree, she took the classes for a master degree but spent the time she would have spent on a thesis getting ready for, and passing, the P.E. exam. She has had her stamp for a long time.
We are both now in out fifties. She gets calls several times a year offering her jobs. Some in the private sector, some in the public sector. People value her decades of experience. People look up to MEs with decades of experience and a professional certification.
I was laid off for the last time on my 49th birthday and have not been able to find a technical job since. It is hard to find a company that will believe that I actually have the experience I have. I can't tell you how many times I have had an interview where I have been challenged on my experience and even though I can prove every bit of it people just don't believe it. And, don't get me started on certification for computer people, compared to getting a PE certification in the computer world isn't even a bad joke. It is mostly just a con.
I went back to school and "retrained" as a teacher and I am now certified to teach CS in public schools and I work part time teaching people how to use a mouse. I haven't been able to find a full time teaching job because their aren't many of those and the competition for them is fierce. You see, I live in Austin, Texas and for about 10 years this is where IBM transfered entire divisions before they laid them off. There are literally thousands of people my age with my qualifications wandering around down here (we used to have a morning walking club just for laid of 50+ software developers) and they all did the work of getting certified to teach in the Texas public schools. I got the job I had when the lady who had it before me got a full time teaching job. My application had been on file for more than a year. I moved from a job that was even more part time to one that is almost half time. A major step up!
When my wife graduated from high school she took the ACT. She compared her ACT scores to the average ACT scores of different majors and the average starting salary in those majors. Engineering had the highest starting salary and most closely matched here ACT scores. I went into computer science after taking a class in it and falling in love with it.
I have come to learn that I am pretty typical of a guy who goes into computer science. Most of us do it because we really really like it. Some do it for the money but those guys don't stay in it for long. I have also come to learn that my wife is pretty typical of women who go into technical subjects. They do it because it is a good way to make a living and you can do some really interesting stuff too.
Now, lets see some of the differences between being a "software engineer" and a real engineer. My wife has been laid off once, I have been laid off twice. Until I turned 49 (I'm now 56) I made 20% to 40% more than she did. She now makes 250% more than I do. I have done thousands of hours of involuntary unpaid overtime. She has always either been paid for, or received comp time for, all the overtime she has ever done. And, while it is common for programmers to be told to get something done by Tuesday or else, that has never happened to her. Working conditions that are normal for programmers are practically unheard of for engineers.
Women tend to be more practical than men when it comes to picking a career. Being more practical they will google for information about salaries, work hours, working conditions and so on, *before* picking a major. If you want to have a job for the rest of your life, and work 40 hours per week most of the time, and be respected at work and in the community, you do not study computer science. At least
Nothing at all as far as I can see...
Of course, I have some self proclaimed Christian relatives who will tell you that all gambling is owned, sponsored, controlled and for the sole benefit of the great evil one, Satan himself. They believe that fighting gambling is the same as fighting Satan. The same folks support Israel because they think that the founding of Israel signals the end times and the second coming of Jesus Christ. At least I don't have any snake handlers in the family (and we don't mention great great granddaddy the religious zealot who lead the murder of all those folks from Missouri and don't you think the movie sucked?)
If you are one of those, then you probably think that there is something wrong with gambling, all that support of Satan and demons and such... So, those folks think that blocking gambling is a good thing. Oh, BTW, those folks are thick on the ground in Kentucky, they vote, and they have guns. And, they know how to use both of them.
OT comment, I've had several encounters with Brits who are totally befuddled by the US. They think that since we split off from them we should be like them. They forget that all the nut cases in all of Europe (and elsewhere) have been coming here for the last 500 years and that only a little bit of the US was ever part of the UK. Basically I have come to the conclusion that the Brits I have met are as clueless about the real US as most Americans are about the UK.
BTW, I personally, am descended from a long line of religious extremists who left England in the 1600s and so I feel I have personal knowledge of how their minds work (or don't depending on your point of view.) In other words, if you try to understand Kentucky by the standards of the UK you are as nuts as a Kentuckian would be to judge the UK by the standards of Kentucky.
Oh well, everyone seems to make the mistake of thinking that everyone is like them and everyplace is like their hometown. They aren't.
As a wise man once said, the only thing wrong with France is that they killed all their aristocrats and the only thing wrong with the UK is that they didn't.
Of course, that was all said from the point of view of a Buddhist from Texas. Take it for what its worth
Stonewolf
Wow... I always liked New Mexico. Maybe time to look for a job over there.
Stonewolf
One of my many ex brothers-in-law is an MBA. 30 years ago I was talking to him over beer about *exactly* the same problem that this article is about. No respect. No compensation for work done. No upward path in the company...
His response? Yeah, in business school they teach us that engineers are stupid. If you were a business major you would know what to do. When the boss says "do it" the correct response is "what's in it for me?" And if they don't answer with what you want you don't do the extra work.
Work 75 hours a week for a fixed salary? He thought that was just too cool. He loved the idea of getting nearly two peoples worth of work for the cost of one. So what if it ruins your health. They are planning to get rid of you before your bad health starts to raise their costs.
So... about a month later my boss told our group we were going on mandatory 60 hour weeks and we would be required to work Saturdays. Don't like it? To bad. In an open meeting I asked why I should do it. He said if you don't you'll be fired. I said "OK." If you fire all of us you won't get the project done. The rest of the staff caught on to the fact that we had the power. A couple of hours later we were told we would get 50% extra pay for working 50% extra hours.
Sounds great... I was fired within a month of the end of the project.
I learned the lesson. Management loves screwing employees. They get off on it the same we techies get off on learning and making things work. The techies have the real power and the managers know it. They love the fact that we won't use our power. If you want to be treated well by management you have to organize and be willing to shut the company down.
You want to be treated fairly? Quit your bitchin' and organize. Of course, we're so tough and love that libertarian fighter jock image so we don't organize... And the managers laugh and laugh and laugh at us all the way to the bank. And we keep being treated like the idiots we are.
When I was a technical director in the game business my manager called his business plan "burning babies". You hire an out of school power fool and work them until they can't take it any more. Then they quit. You don't even have to fire them.
Stonewolf
I am very glad to see this software available. It is about damn time.
OTOH, I have to say the way this is being done pisses me off no end. First off, why only 32 bit? I have 64 bit computers so no codecs for me...
But, that is OK... After seeing the prices I lost interest. I was flat assed shocked at the price. The total cost for DVD play back and a complete set of media codecs is $90 US. $50 just for the DVD player. I can buy a complete stand alone DVD player for under $30. How is $50 reasonable? $90 is just a few bucks less than the upgrade price for Vista. It is a long way toward the full price of Vista.
One must wonder why the price of a set of codecs for Ubuntu is nearly the same as the price of an entire OS from Microsoft? A quick google search shows that the royalty rates for these codecs is measured in cents per user per codec. Looks to me like a reasonable rate for these codecs is more like $9 than $90 dollars. Who is ripping off Canonical?
I actually trust Canonical... I run Ubuntu on all my computers. So, I have to believe that they see this as the only reasonable solution to the problem. But, instead of pushing a set of **gossly** over priced commercial software packages why don't they just sell the "illegal" packages for the royalty rate plus a few bucks to support cleaning them up?
What am I missing here?
Stonewolf
Why only look at the factors mentioned by the authors? Does the combined gravity of the sun, moon, and oh say Jupiter, correlate better than the sun alone? What about the speed of the Earth around the galaxy? That varies on a yearly not so?
No, I am not suggesting that these are the real factors to look at, I am just saying that all the discussion is centered around the ideas of the authors without any one suggesting something else. don't let the original authors imagination limit our imaginations.
Stonewolf
I also own the .com version of my name. In my case my last name is the name of a company that does about $100 million a year and has had a trademark on my name and a few versions of it for over a 100 years.
I can tell you for a fact that companies that are serious about getting your domain name do not send you a polite email asking to buy it. They have their agent or lawyer send a registered letter and follow up with a phone call.
Most likely the guy who contacted you won't pay you enough to make it worth the hassle of changing your email address. But, speaking as someone who has turned down offers ranging from a couple of shirts (no, I am not making that up, they were very nice wool shirts...) to $20,000 for my domain name and as someone who has been threatened with being sued over my ownership and use of the domain name 6 times over the last 12 years here are a few things to think about.
1) It is your name. (The web cred for being first-name @ last-name . com is incredible.)
2) It will only become more valuable with time.
3) Don't fall into the nice guy trap. You are not doing this guy a favor, he doesn't give a shit about you. This is no different than if someone walked up and offered to buy your truck. (That has happened to me too.) You have something he wants, but you want it too. You do not have to share.
4) Research the company. What does D&B say about them? How much can they afford to spend? How much is the domain really worth to them?
5) Never never never tell them what you will sell it for. No matter what price you mention they will make a lower counter offer and will never (well... almost never) pay what you ask. More importantly, they will pay *no more* than what they *think* it is worth to them. If you quote a price that price will be the maximum they will pay. If they quote the first price that price will be the minimum they will pay.
6) If the sale is contingent on your getting a .us domain then make sure you have that domain before you finish the deal. My dear friends went out and grabbed all the names I might want as an alternate domain just so they could use them as bargaining chips.
7) If they make an offer get a lawyer. Do not reply to an offer until you have a lawyer. BTW, a *good* intellectual property lawyer is not cheap The first one I tried to talk to wanted a $30,000 retainer. So, I had to go with a not very good lawyer... BTW, you should note that the cost of a *good* lawyer started out $10,000 higher than anyone ever offered for the name.
My best advice is to send back a polite email asking what he is offering. When the reply turns out to be less than $100 you can laugh, tell the guy to blow you, and at least know you had the fun of getting a personal question posted on /.
Oh yeah... in the end I still own the name and I am in the hole a few thousand for legal bills. I am pretty happy about that. They could have sued (even though they would have lost) and bankrupted me with the legal fees of winning the suit.
Stonewolf
Need I say more?
Stonewolf