I first saw this on my cable modem(before I started using IPTables to share my connection) Then I noticed it on my network on campus. And as I am the administrator I simply blocked the ports on our firewalls. However I can not imagine what students thought when they saw these messages. As a mater of course we disable NT messaging on our servers and all of our faculty/admin machines because its not needed. However I never tought I would need to block it from the internet. But apparently its become a big problem. I have heard from a number of students that they have received these messages, all in one day. I suppose that it just means I have to make our firewall all that more restrictive; which I hate to do.
The only problem with that is then you will have an abnormally large amount of data going out on what appears to be an HTTPD port. The wonderfull thing about the packetshapers is they also give you nice colorful graphs that show the top 10 users, and you can even break it down farther than that. While this may work you would still have to be very careful about how much bandwidth you are using. I personally keep tabs on our top bandwidth users to make sure they are only using legitimate services. IE we don't allow the students to run FTP or HTTPD servers because our bandwidht is so limited.
This is very widespread. I am the network admin at a small college, most places I talk to have a packetshaper in place to limit bandwidth. We bought ours this summer so we could reopen the P2P networks. Boy am I regetting this. We went from totaly blocked last year to slightly above dialup speeds this year and I have never heard the end of it. Usualy showing people the graph that shows our uplink at 97% 24hrs a day stops people from complaining but not always. What most students don't understand is that bandwidth is limited, very limited, and they are not the only ones using the network. When we have an outage I don't usualy hear from students first its from faculty who cant work on their research. I do applaud them for being so upfront about the bandwidth controls, but I would be interested to hear from their Admins as to how much this has helped their network. I know from my personal experance that it has prevented our network from just grinding to a halt.
Why does it have to be an exclusive thing? The author seems to miss a key point that people can and do own both. I am a die hard gamer, I own modern consoles and I just spent a bit too much (possible?) money on upgrading my pc. People are not jumping ship for one or the other. I do not know of a single person who has "left" computer gaming for consoles. They both have their own unique market. A pc will never do fighting games as well as a console, because its just not as easy to get 4 people around a compter screen playing tekken as it is around a tv in a living room. But by the same token who wants to play an RTS with a 8 button joystick?
It seems to me that there have been only two games of note, halo and Starcraft:Ghost, that seem to have jumped ship for consoles. But lets look at why. Microsoft bought halo to push its console. They purchased it in order to make it their flag ship. Now ghost I am not so sure on as details about the game are still sketchy.
The other reson PC games will survive is the MOD community. Look at Halflife and the Sims, both have been modded beyond belief. Halflife predates the PS2 and is still played quite a bit. Should I even mention Quake1?
By the same token Consoles are not going anywhere either. For simple reasons, they are much less expensive than a PC they are a bit more reliable, no drivers etc. But they are static. The Gamecube/Xbox/PS2 you buy today will be the same as the one you buy tomorrow. This is a double edged sword, yes its easier to develop/optimize, but you are stuck with technology that remains static once you have pushed it to the limits you cant get any more.
But the long and short of it is both platforms are here to stay. And I am personally going to keep playing on both and be happy.
This really isnt that unusual. It may seem harsh but that is pretty standard proceedure for someone breaking the rules. I am the network admin at a small school with very limited bandwidth, and I set pretty strict rules on what is acceptable and what is not. It seems that no matter which way you end up going on the P2P issue you will always get complaints. If you leave it wide open you'll get complaints that nothing else works, or at best its really slow because the P2P networks eat up all your bandwidth (Napster was eatin 96% of ours at one point). If you ban all the P2P networks by threats, like above, or by using technology such as a packetshaper or a firewall, you will end up with many unhappy students. Eitherway its a lose lose situation for you. The best bet is to find some happy medium, which so far as I can find there isnt one. However we are addressing this with our students cooperativly, that way when we make a decision we can be sure we at least have some support.
While their decision to take people off the network for the entire year for using p2p is a bit harsh I do understand why they do it. Bandwidth is not free. Try to put your selves in the sys admins shoes. Its a hard job and banning, and making threats to ban users is not an easy thing to do.
The more I think about this, I would want to opt in with my tivo. Far too often I have watched some of my favorite shows go off the air. Perhaps if a large enough demographic of TiVo users do this, some of the more "geek" (for a lack of a better word) shows like futurama will stay on the air. I would be willing to bet that that audiance is largly the audiance that have TiVos.
My highschool computer club used to get together and play Mech2Mercs, duke3d, and war2 every wed after school, often times with/against our cs teacher. This lasted until the admin found out about it and canceled it with out giving us reason. I think this kind of thing is great, it really got me in to computers because we'd have to fix the problems that were wrong with the machines and all the various problems that would always crop up with dos networking.
Well, of course no one is worried about the kids being able to use it. First of all most kids are more adept to using technology than adults because they have been around it all their lives. and second, if they already knew how to use it what would be the point of learning it?
This system seems to me like it could be extended for other uses, IE catching people who speed. 5mph over, you get fined. Definately seems to me have the possibilies to really invade peoples privacy by knowing when, where, and how fast people were going. But on the other hand this technology could be used to help investigations after accidents. The black box could be used to determine an accurate speed of the vehicals involved.
OH my god they want all of the servers they own to use THEIR auth system! Heaven forbid they should want to put their own product on their FREE servers along with the services you pay for. Stop the presses a company is using its own product! I am not a MS zealot but you know this is just going to far, I mean really how does this matter and why does it cause such an uproar? If you don't want to use Passport don't use the Zone or hotmail or anything else. Its not like that many peoples jobs would require them to use these services, unlike windows, so here is a great chance to vote the only way you can... Simply don't use them.
All excelent points the other thing you could try is to carry a CD with drivers for most major NICs on it and the win9x cab files. I have found that just having the drivers for a few 3com, linksys, netgear ect cards and the cab files reduces the "now where did I put my cds" search time.
I am responsible for all the support for my college along with one other person and our superviser (who really doesnt do that much trouble shooting). Between the two of us in the first two weeks of school we handle connecting about 800 students and troubleshooting probably 1/4th of that along with going to class full time. I can honestly say I have seen some oddball configurations, no I dont mean the ever present RJ11 phone cord in the NIC why doesnt my internet work problems either. I think the worst I have seen has got to be a user who installed her own network card with the help of her mother. I got there and the NIC was showing no link light, her port had been managed up and I checked all the cables. It was only after a few minutes of scratching my head that I decided to open the case (something we are ordianrly not aloud to do because the school is afraid we owuld break something) only to find that the PCI nic was just hanging there in the open, screwed in to the backplane of the case... not connected to any slot. So ofcourse I had to nicely explain to her that the card needed to be placed in to one of the slots in order for it to work. to which she replied "Oh thats why it was so hard to install, we just couldnt figure out how to balance it right to screw it in." Fortunatly this was one of my first experiances and I learned that no matter how strange or funny the problem is its best not to laugh and just keep cool and explain the problem calmly and you will be supprised how many people are truely gratefull to have someone come in and fix their computer with out looking down on them.
Just because a peice of software is up to date does not mean it is foolproof. There are always holes in any system. These holes don't always have to be software related either they can be, and usualy are user related ie someone made a password something stupid that is easy to guess. And really do you want bleeding edge updates, sometimes they are worse, buggie bigger holes ect, than the previous version. And also I would like to know just exactly what and why all the software on my servers are being replaced. I don't want some automated script to just keep getting the latest and greatest(?) patch with out my consent.
Ok great so we now know what causes it... now what can we do to fix it? Personaly I prefer the shampoo bottle on the edge to hold it in, but I want a more scientific approach. I strongly suggest a detailed computer model of all the different shower related items that could be used to hold the thing in place with a full analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each.
But in all seriousness this is cool, I had always asumed it was the cool air rushing in the bottom as the hot air rose out the top.
Over the years slackware has remained the best distro (imho, and I am sure there are many many people who are out there who would just love to get in an argument about it but I wont). Slack brought me in to using linux when a friend handed me the 3.5cds he bought and said I should try it. And its remained stable for me over multiple servers and workstations. There is nothing like being able to get a clean box up and running with slack and X if I have to in under 30 minutes. So Congrats to Patrick and everyone involved in getting the best distro avalible out. Now if my download would only hurry up and finish.
I will greatly miss suck and I am glad to see that slashdot posted on its demise, however i am in agreement with szcx here, the "from the slashdot-vows-to-take-up-slack dept." may be a bit out of line. Considering/. and suck are really 2 very different pages I find it hard to imagine/. picking up the slack for suck.
Daikatana has finaly gone gold. Whats next Duke4? and in related news the weather forcast for hell shows a cooling trend after the sudden 400degree drop in temperature this evening.
This is rediculus, whats next the will start blocking content from sites that link to their competitors? But seriously I wonder if the averaage user has an easly accesable way for them to tell that more than just porn is being blocked. And I mean more than just a list because I am sure that a list of all the sites blocked would be huge, and the few sites that they have blocked because they dont like the content are hard to find. But then again it is censorware and you do get what you pay for...
If this ever actualy happens, you better keep an extra close eye on your "hard drive" come christmas time or you could end up wiht all your data in small pieces under you tree.
If apple can actualy pull this off and make it a viabel product, it looks really cool. But once again I will beleive it when I see it. Handwriting recognition in computers still is poor at best. Who knows maybe this will be the first product for the pc that allows a decent pen input.
It is unlikely that Intel will release a chip with out operating system support for it. It just doesnt make good sences finacialy. Now if Linux is the only one supporting it at the launch, that would definitly give linux a big boost as far as user base. But how long would it last. I cant see Microsoft letting that happen honestly.
Slashdot Mirror
I first saw this on my cable modem(before I started using IPTables to share my connection) Then I noticed it on my network on campus. And as I am the administrator I simply blocked the ports on our firewalls. However I can not imagine what students thought when they saw these messages. As a mater of course we disable NT messaging on our servers and all of our faculty/admin machines because its not needed. However I never tought I would need to block it from the internet. But apparently its become a big problem. I have heard from a number of students that they have received these messages, all in one day. I suppose that it just means I have to make our firewall all that more restrictive; which I hate to do.
The only problem with that is then you will have an abnormally large amount of data going out on what appears to be an HTTPD port. The wonderfull thing about the packetshapers is they also give you nice colorful graphs that show the top 10 users, and you can even break it down farther than that. While this may work you would still have to be very careful about how much bandwidth you are using. I personally keep tabs on our top bandwidth users to make sure they are only using legitimate services. IE we don't allow the students to run FTP or HTTPD servers because our bandwidht is so limited.
This is very widespread. I am the network admin at a small college, most places I talk to have a packetshaper in place to limit bandwidth. We bought ours this summer so we could reopen the P2P networks. Boy am I regetting this. We went from totaly blocked last year to slightly above dialup speeds this year and I have never heard the end of it. Usualy showing people the graph that shows our uplink at 97% 24hrs a day stops people from complaining but not always. What most students don't understand is that bandwidth is limited, very limited, and they are not the only ones using the network. When we have an outage I don't usualy hear from students first its from faculty who cant work on their research. I do applaud them for being so upfront about the bandwidth controls, but I would be interested to hear from their Admins as to how much this has helped their network. I know from my personal experance that it has prevented our network from just grinding to a halt.
Why does it have to be an exclusive thing? The author seems to miss a key point that people can and do own both. I am a die hard gamer, I own modern consoles and I just spent a bit too much (possible?) money on upgrading my pc. People are not jumping ship for one or the other. I do not know of a single person who has "left" computer gaming for consoles. They both have their own unique market. A pc will never do fighting games as well as a console, because its just not as easy to get 4 people around a compter screen playing tekken as it is around a tv in a living room. But by the same token who wants to play an RTS with a 8 button joystick?
It seems to me that there have been only two games of note, halo and Starcraft:Ghost, that seem to have jumped ship for consoles. But lets look at why. Microsoft bought halo to push its console. They purchased it in order to make it their flag ship. Now ghost I am not so sure on as details about the game are still sketchy.
The other reson PC games will survive is the MOD community. Look at Halflife and the Sims, both have been modded beyond belief. Halflife predates the PS2 and is still played quite a bit. Should I even mention Quake1?
By the same token Consoles are not going anywhere either. For simple reasons, they are much less expensive than a PC they are a bit more reliable, no drivers etc. But they are static. The Gamecube/Xbox/PS2 you buy today will be the same as the one you buy tomorrow. This is a double edged sword, yes its easier to develop/optimize, but you are stuck with technology that remains static once you have pushed it to the limits you cant get any more.
But the long and short of it is both platforms are here to stay. And I am personally going to keep playing on both and be happy.
This really isnt that unusual. It may seem harsh but that is pretty standard proceedure for someone breaking the rules. I am the network admin at a small school with very limited bandwidth, and I set pretty strict rules on what is acceptable and what is not. It seems that no matter which way you end up going on the P2P issue you will always get complaints. If you leave it wide open you'll get complaints that nothing else works, or at best its really slow because the P2P networks eat up all your bandwidth (Napster was eatin 96% of ours at one point). If you ban all the P2P networks by threats, like above, or by using technology such as a packetshaper or a firewall, you will end up with many unhappy students. Eitherway its a lose lose situation for you. The best bet is to find some happy medium, which so far as I can find there isnt one. However we are addressing this with our students cooperativly, that way when we make a decision we can be sure we at least have some support.
While their decision to take people off the network for the entire year for using p2p is a bit harsh I do understand why they do it. Bandwidth is not free. Try to put your selves in the sys admins shoes. Its a hard job and banning, and making threats to ban users is not an easy thing to do.
The more I think about this, I would want to opt in with my tivo. Far too often I have watched some of my favorite shows go off the air. Perhaps if a large enough demographic of TiVo users do this, some of the more "geek" (for a lack of a better word) shows like futurama will stay on the air. I would be willing to bet that that audiance is largly the audiance that have TiVos.
My highschool computer club used to get together and play Mech2Mercs, duke3d, and war2 every wed after school, often times with/against our cs teacher. This lasted until the admin found out about it and canceled it with out giving us reason. I think this kind of thing is great, it really got me in to computers because we'd have to fix the problems that were wrong with the machines and all the various problems that would always crop up with dos networking.
Well, of course no one is worried about the kids being able to use it. First of all most kids are more adept to using technology than adults because they have been around it all their lives. and second, if they already knew how to use it what would be the point of learning it?
This system seems to me like it could be extended for other uses, IE catching people who speed. 5mph over, you get fined. Definately seems to me have the possibilies to really invade peoples privacy by knowing when, where, and how fast people were going. But on the other hand this technology could be used to help investigations after accidents. The black box could be used to determine an accurate speed of the vehicals involved.
oh yeah how about a Rev. war game. Don't shoot until you see the pixels of their eyes!
OH my god they want all of the servers they own to use THEIR auth system! Heaven forbid they should want to put their own product on their FREE servers along with the services you pay for. Stop the presses a company is using its own product! I am not a MS zealot but you know this is just going to far, I mean really how does this matter and why does it cause such an uproar? If you don't want to use Passport don't use the Zone or hotmail or anything else. Its not like that many peoples jobs would require them to use these services, unlike windows, so here is a great chance to vote the only way you can... Simply don't use them.
All excelent points the other thing you could try is to carry a CD with drivers for most major NICs on it and the win9x cab files. I have found that just having the drivers for a few 3com, linksys, netgear ect cards and the cab files reduces the "now where did I put my cds" search time.
I am responsible for all the support for my college along with one other person and our superviser (who really doesnt do that much trouble shooting). Between the two of us in the first two weeks of school we handle connecting about 800 students and troubleshooting probably 1/4th of that along with going to class full time. I can honestly say I have seen some oddball configurations, no I dont mean the ever present RJ11 phone cord in the NIC why doesnt my internet work problems either. I think the worst I have seen has got to be a user who installed her own network card with the help of her mother. I got there and the NIC was showing no link light, her port had been managed up and I checked all the cables. It was only after a few minutes of scratching my head that I decided to open the case (something we are ordianrly not aloud to do because the school is afraid we owuld break something) only to find that the PCI nic was just hanging there in the open, screwed in to the backplane of the case... not connected to any slot. So ofcourse I had to nicely explain to her that the card needed to be placed in to one of the slots in order for it to work. to which she replied "Oh thats why it was so hard to install, we just couldnt figure out how to balance it right to screw it in." Fortunatly this was one of my first experiances and I learned that no matter how strange or funny the problem is its best not to laugh and just keep cool and explain the problem calmly and you will be supprised how many people are truely gratefull to have someone come in and fix their computer with out looking down on them.
Just because a peice of software is up to date does not mean it is foolproof. There are always holes in any system. These holes don't always have to be software related either they can be, and usualy are user related ie someone made a password something stupid that is easy to guess. And really do you want bleeding edge updates, sometimes they are worse, buggie bigger holes ect, than the previous version. And also I would like to know just exactly what and why all the software on my servers are being replaced. I don't want some automated script to just keep getting the latest and greatest(?) patch with out my consent.
Ok great so we now know what causes it... now what can we do to fix it? Personaly I prefer the shampoo bottle on the edge to hold it in, but I want a more scientific approach. I strongly suggest a detailed computer model of all the different shower related items that could be used to hold the thing in place with a full analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each.
But in all seriousness this is cool, I had always asumed it was the cool air rushing in the bottom as the hot air rose out the top.
Over the years slackware has remained the best distro (imho, and I am sure there are many many people who are out there who would just love to get in an argument about it but I wont). Slack brought me in to using linux when a friend handed me the 3.5cds he bought and said I should try it. And its remained stable for me over multiple servers and workstations. There is nothing like being able to get a clean box up and running with slack and X if I have to in under 30 minutes. So Congrats to Patrick and everyone involved in getting the best distro avalible out. Now if my download would only hurry up and finish.
I will greatly miss suck and I am glad to see that slashdot posted on its demise, however i am in agreement with szcx here, the "from the slashdot-vows-to-take-up-slack dept." may be a bit out of line. Considering /. and suck are really 2 very different pages I find it hard to imagine /. picking up the slack for suck.
And to suck.com you will be missed.
Daikatana has finaly gone gold. Whats next Duke4?
and in related news the weather forcast for hell shows a cooling trend after the sudden 400degree drop in temperature this evening.
This is rediculus, whats next the will start blocking content from sites that link to their competitors? But seriously I wonder if the averaage user has an easly accesable way for them to tell that more than just porn is being blocked. And I mean more than just a list because I am sure that a list of all the sites blocked would be huge, and the few sites that they have blocked because they dont like the content are hard to find. But then again it is censorware and you do get what you pay for...
If this ever actualy happens, you better keep an extra close eye on your "hard drive" come christmas time or you could end up wiht all your data in small pieces under you tree.
If apple can actualy pull this off and make it a viabel product, it looks really cool. But once again I will beleive it when I see it. Handwriting recognition in computers still is poor at best. Who knows maybe this will be the first product for the pc that allows a decent pen input.
It is unlikely that Intel will release a chip with out operating system support for it. It just doesnt make good sences finacialy. Now if Linux is the only one supporting it at the launch, that would definitly give linux a big boost as far as user base. But how long would it last. I cant see Microsoft letting that happen honestly.
If this is true I just hope its better than Eyes Wide Shut was.