Yeah, WISPS are great aside from the high prices and slow speed. We have a few carriers around here, installation is generally around $150, plus $60/month for a 512/512 or $100 for a 3M/3M.
Not necessarily that expensive. I'm using a WiMax provider as a backup for my sometimes-flaky ADSL connection; it's cheap enough that it's worth it in order to be sure I can get online when I need to. $30/month for 1200/500 with 20GB cap (after which the speed drops to 400kbps down for the rest of the month).
It's been more reliable than I expected, even in heavy rain (which we get frequently).
No, I'm antique enough that I'e learned how things actually work. The TLD's are hardcoded into the default configurations of most DNS servers, as a default, in case you don't have a local upstream DNS server.
I'm afraid you may actually be senile instead.
What's hardcoded into the default configuration of most DNS server software is a list of root servers. These will tell your server how to find the TLDs and thus everything else. The root servers were the first to know about.mobi. Any installation that was running with the default preconfigured list of root servers would have immediately been able to access.mobi.
Pattaya is hardly typical Thailand. It's like going to Las Vegas and drawing conclusions about the USA.
Thailand is a conservative country, but their idea of conservative is different to yours. Furthermore, it's not a rich country, so the prospect of extracting a lot of money from foreign douchebags is able, in some places, to supplant traditionally (and universally) conservative values like keeping the exploitation of women behind closed doors. Hence Pattaya, Patong, Patpong, Nana, etc.
Recently a Thai friend of mine was supposed to go to Patpong Road (in Bangkok) in the evening to make some observations, as an assignment for her postgraduate degree studies. She didn't feel comfortable going on her own, and couldn't find anyone else who was willing to go with her. Most Thais find that stuff as objectionable as anyone else would if it were in their country. They're just good at smiling and pretending it's okay.
I'm fresh out of mod points, but as a frequent extended visitor working in Thailand I'd just like to say that this is easily the most informative and insightful post on the page.
If done correctly, it does improve quality, as measured by everyone except those for whom raw torrent throughput is the sole quantifier thereof.
Fact: There is not enough bandwidth for every user to download at their max bandwidth rate 24/7.
Fact: To provide that much bandwidth, your broadband bill would be a thousand dollars a month.
Fact: Almost nobody is willing to pay that.
Stuck as we are with those constraints, it is inevitable that from time to time, something has to give.
Personally, I'd rather that the most interactive applications (VoIP, etc.) had priority over non-interactive bulk traffic. To me that is a major improvement over the current situation, where I have stuttery calls and jerky SSH sessions because all my neighbours are downloading 8GB HD videos around the clock to add to their fap queues.
If you are going to say that QOS is the same as throttling, then you've discarded a very useful term for the sake of a fantasy of infinite resources.
Then either you've never run a network larger than SSID=Linksys at 192.168.1.0/24, or your employer has infinite funds, or your users have infinite patience.
But my comments on the difficulty and risks of adding TLD's in an established network stands.
I don't think that stands either.
Why should it matter? Who hard-codes a list of all TLDs into anything? If it is syntactically valid, and it resolves, then it should automatically be allowed to work, without anyone having to lift a finger. Are you so antique a geekmeister that you are still stuck in the days of the RFC 952 hosts file?
Less structured than the Peace Corps (much, much less structured) but if you are a bit of a self-starter and have the money to pay for a round-trip ticket to Southeast Asia (about US$1500 from USA), I can hook you up with local human rights organisations in serious need of computer help:
Cleaning up virus-encrusted Windows PCs
Securing wired and wireless networks
Setting up case-tracking databases
Creating and/or fixing websites
Evaluating and repairing hardware
In exchange you get great résumé material, some of the best food you've ever eaten, experience dealing with (extremely) foreign cultures, and the opportunity to spend time with some really lovely and very deserving people.
Need to think this one through a little more. Wiping out Microsoft, Semantec, McAfee, Quicken, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, et al is not likely to improve the economy anytime soon.
It's also not likely to be the outcome of tossing a few bucks at open source projects.
On the other hand, wiping out the need for McAfee probably would be a massive net productivity gain.
I mean who didn't realize housing was in a bubble, besides paid economists with special interests or complete morons? It was blindingly obvious since 2005.
CEPR (the thinktank of which Baker is a co-founder) was stalking the housing bust many years before 2005. His co-conspirator was trying to make a believer out of me back around the turn of the millennium when I lived in DC.
I'm not so sure I agree. When you build a bridge or a dam, you get something tangible that will be with you for 30+ years. Its there, and you can use it until it is demolished or replaced. The Brooklyn bridge, the Hoover Dam, etc have been with us for a very long time.
The roadbed and surfacing on the Brooklyn Bridge have been replaced countless times. It has been reconfigured to deal with a changing balance between road, rail, cycle, and pedestrian traffic. It has been repainted and seen the replacement of untold bolts, cables, struts, stanchions, gimlets, and both left and right phalanges.
In the same way, software is gradually upgraded and remodeled and renovated over the years, but much of the underlying code that powers what we do on our computers today is still more or less verbatim from decades ago.
So I really don't see the difference you're implying.
That's what I was going to say. I was surprised I had to scroll this far down through the responses to find someone else who beat me to it.
As long as there's decent bandwidth, and you have access to it on your own hardware (via wifi or similar), then you can set up a program that re-authenticates from one user's account to the next and shares out the connection to all of your pool members. The more people join, the more time online they all get, so there's a strong incentive for people to do your recruiting for you.
In what port city could you not find a net cafe, coin-op PC, or cafe with wifi hotspot within 10 minutes of getting through customs? I've been to a hundred or more ports, from Hong Kong to Dakar, and this has absolutely never posed a problem for me since at least 10 years ago.
Yuck. Lived in New Haven longer than anyone should and was dragged to both places countless times. The only true pizza is Chicago-style deep dish. That New Haven stuff is almost as disgustingly burned and greasy as the crap they serve in Italy.
Maybe we have different Firefox versions? Here's what Firefox 3.0.5 tells me:
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to 192.116.242.23.
Peer's Certificate has been revoked.
(Error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate)
The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.
Try this link and look at the certificate details.
Looks like it's been revoked now. Firefox won't let me view the page no matter how hard I click, Safari doesn't seem to mind though (other than the host name mismatch).
Each site can create its own certs and register them with, say, mozilla.org, and browsers go there for certs rather than download them rather than from the potentially spoofed site.
Cool, so I manage to compromise mozilla.org and suddenly I can spoof every bank web site on the planet. Wouldn't want to be mozilla.org's security guy.
Posting from Malaysia, here. Some article I just saw claimed we were down 55% of network capacity, though my DSL seems to be working the same as ever.
Being a bit of an internet backwater and having experienced the effects of several major cuts over the past few years, Malaysia might be a good example to illustrate your question.
Our fattest pipes head westward, to the Pacific and onward to the USA. There's also an eastward connection via India and the Middle East to Europe.
When the westward connection is dead, traffic to the USA follows the eastward route to Europe, which quickly gets congested.
When the eastward connection is dead (like now), traffic to Europe follows the westward connection via the USA, which doesn't get so congested but adds considerable latency (see depressing traceroute snippet to Germany below, which I've done just now):
6 202.188.0.11 (202.188.0.11) 13.918 ms 14.804 ms 14.032 ms
7 219.94.9.178 (219.94.9.178) 369.336 ms 295.869 ms 295.631 ms
8 e8-9.cx1.lax1.as3356.gw2.arbinet.net (204.8.22.50) 334.509 ms 296.449 ms 292.072 ms
9 vlan99.csw4.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.20.254) 301.650 ms 300.529 ms 305.384 ms
10 ae-93-93.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.137.45) 299.902 ms 294.792 ms 292.803 ms
11 ae-4.ebr4.washington1.level3.net (4.69.132.82) 363.228 ms 369.106 ms 360.929 ms
12 ae-74-74.csw2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.182) 373.890 ms 360.926 ms 361.199 ms
13 ae-72-72.ebr2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.149) 359.684 ms 359.320 ms 359.477 ms
14 * ae-42-42.ebr2.paris1.level3.net (4.69.137.53) 486.695 ms 463.081 ms
15 ae-2-2.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.69.132.142) 447.053 ms 447.918 ms 448.363 ms
This works because the Malaysian ISPs already have agreements with their peers on the other end of the cables for onward transit.
There are also links to Thailand but these do not include onward transit agreements, so when Malaysia was badly slowed down by the Taiwan cable cut, which didn't really affect Thailand, no traffic was routed north from here (except bilateral communications, such as Malaysians surfing Thai web sites). Some enterprising Malaysians did discover that they could get good global web surfing by using Thai ISPs' proxy servers, but if the general public here tried that, it would have quickly overwhelmed Thailand's comparatively puny links to the rest of the world.
Some Malaysian ISPs do have arrangements to route traffic through our extremely well-connected southern neighbour, Singapore. For large volumes of traffic, however, this is more expensive than going straight out on the international cables that land in Malaysia, so it seems to be reserved as a last-ditch option except for some smaller ISPs that use it as a primary link.
To sum up: Yeah, it works, as long as you have options. If you are a large/wealthy/technophilic country surrounded by small/poor/technophobic neighbours, then you will probably not have many.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily that expensive. I'm using a WiMax provider as a backup for my sometimes-flaky ADSL connection; it's cheap enough that it's worth it in order to be sure I can get online when I need to. $30/month for 1200/500 with 20GB cap (after which the speed drops to 400kbps down for the rest of the month).
It's been more reliable than I expected, even in heavy rain (which we get frequently).
Wales?
I'm afraid you may actually be senile instead.
What's hardcoded into the default configuration of most DNS server software is a list of root servers. These will tell your server how to find the TLDs and thus everything else. The root servers were the first to know about .mobi. Any installation that was running with the default preconfigured list of root servers would have immediately been able to access .mobi.
Pattaya is hardly typical Thailand. It's like going to Las Vegas and drawing conclusions about the USA.
Thailand is a conservative country, but their idea of conservative is different to yours. Furthermore, it's not a rich country, so the prospect of extracting a lot of money from foreign douchebags is able, in some places, to supplant traditionally (and universally) conservative values like keeping the exploitation of women behind closed doors. Hence Pattaya, Patong, Patpong, Nana, etc.
Recently a Thai friend of mine was supposed to go to Patpong Road (in Bangkok) in the evening to make some observations, as an assignment for her postgraduate degree studies. She didn't feel comfortable going on her own, and couldn't find anyone else who was willing to go with her. Most Thais find that stuff as objectionable as anyone else would if it were in their country. They're just good at smiling and pretending it's okay.
I'm fresh out of mod points, but as a frequent extended visitor working in Thailand I'd just like to say that this is easily the most informative and insightful post on the page.
If done correctly, it does improve quality, as measured by everyone except those for whom raw torrent throughput is the sole quantifier thereof.
Fact: There is not enough bandwidth for every user to download at their max bandwidth rate 24/7.
Fact: To provide that much bandwidth, your broadband bill would be a thousand dollars a month.
Fact: Almost nobody is willing to pay that.
Stuck as we are with those constraints, it is inevitable that from time to time, something has to give.
Personally, I'd rather that the most interactive applications (VoIP, etc.) had priority over non-interactive bulk traffic. To me that is a major improvement over the current situation, where I have stuttery calls and jerky SSH sessions because all my neighbours are downloading 8GB HD videos around the clock to add to their fap queues.
If you are going to say that QOS is the same as throttling, then you've discarded a very useful term for the sake of a fantasy of infinite resources.
Then either you've never run a network larger than SSID=Linksys at 192.168.1.0/24, or your employer has infinite funds, or your users have infinite patience.
I don't think that stands either.
Why should it matter? Who hard-codes a list of all TLDs into anything? If it is syntactically valid, and it resolves, then it should automatically be allowed to work, without anyone having to lift a finger. Are you so antique a geekmeister that you are still stuck in the days of the RFC 952 hosts file?
Sounds like QOS to me.
Those are not mutually exclusive categories. It is accredited, it issues bachelor's degrees, it is a college.
Interesting. Which state government runs West Point? How about CUNY?
Or am I missing some clever, subtle trick in your seemingly weird apostrophe placement?
Is that what they called the wheelchair ramp in national parks in the 1960s?
Or contact me.
Less structured than the Peace Corps (much, much less structured) but if you are a bit of a self-starter and have the money to pay for a round-trip ticket to Southeast Asia (about US$1500 from USA), I can hook you up with local human rights organisations in serious need of computer help:
In exchange you get great résumé material, some of the best food you've ever eaten, experience dealing with (extremely) foreign cultures, and the opportunity to spend time with some really lovely and very deserving people.
Post a note here and I will email you.
It's also not likely to be the outcome of tossing a few bucks at open source projects.
On the other hand, wiping out the need for McAfee probably would be a massive net productivity gain.
CEPR (the thinktank of which Baker is a co-founder) was stalking the housing bust many years before 2005. His co-conspirator was trying to make a believer out of me back around the turn of the millennium when I lived in DC.
The roadbed and surfacing on the Brooklyn Bridge have been replaced countless times. It has been reconfigured to deal with a changing balance between road, rail, cycle, and pedestrian traffic. It has been repainted and seen the replacement of untold bolts, cables, struts, stanchions, gimlets, and both left and right phalanges.
In the same way, software is gradually upgraded and remodeled and renovated over the years, but much of the underlying code that powers what we do on our computers today is still more or less verbatim from decades ago.
So I really don't see the difference you're implying.
That's what I was going to say. I was surprised I had to scroll this far down through the responses to find someone else who beat me to it.
As long as there's decent bandwidth, and you have access to it on your own hardware (via wifi or similar), then you can set up a program that re-authenticates from one user's account to the next and shares out the connection to all of your pool members. The more people join, the more time online they all get, so there's a strong incentive for people to do your recruiting for you.
In what port city could you not find a net cafe, coin-op PC, or cafe with wifi hotspot within 10 minutes of getting through customs? I've been to a hundred or more ports, from Hong Kong to Dakar, and this has absolutely never posed a problem for me since at least 10 years ago.
Yuck. Lived in New Haven longer than anyone should and was dragged to both places countless times. The only true pizza is Chicago-style deep dish. That New Haven stuff is almost as disgustingly burned and greasy as the crap they serve in Italy.
Maybe we have different Firefox versions? Here's what Firefox 3.0.5 tells me:
Looks like it's been revoked now. Firefox won't let me view the page no matter how hard I click, Safari doesn't seem to mind though (other than the host name mismatch).
Cool, so I manage to compromise mozilla.org and suddenly I can spoof every bank web site on the planet. Wouldn't want to be mozilla.org's security guy.
Are you in the US? No traffic from Taiwan to you would ordinarily use cables that were just cut; the Pacific route is much faster and cheaper.
P.S. Yes, I know that I mixed up east and west. Maybe I can blame it on being too close to the equator.
Posting from Malaysia, here. Some article I just saw claimed we were down 55% of network capacity, though my DSL seems to be working the same as ever.
Being a bit of an internet backwater and having experienced the effects of several major cuts over the past few years, Malaysia might be a good example to illustrate your question.
Our fattest pipes head westward, to the Pacific and onward to the USA. There's also an eastward connection via India and the Middle East to Europe.
When the westward connection is dead, traffic to the USA follows the eastward route to Europe, which quickly gets congested.
When the eastward connection is dead (like now), traffic to Europe follows the westward connection via the USA, which doesn't get so congested but adds considerable latency (see depressing traceroute snippet to Germany below, which I've done just now):
6 202.188.0.11 (202.188.0.11) 13.918 ms 14.804 ms 14.032 ms
7 219.94.9.178 (219.94.9.178) 369.336 ms 295.869 ms 295.631 ms
8 e8-9.cx1.lax1.as3356.gw2.arbinet.net (204.8.22.50) 334.509 ms 296.449 ms 292.072 ms
9 vlan99.csw4.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.20.254) 301.650 ms 300.529 ms 305.384 ms
10 ae-93-93.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.137.45) 299.902 ms 294.792 ms 292.803 ms
11 ae-4.ebr4.washington1.level3.net (4.69.132.82) 363.228 ms 369.106 ms 360.929 ms
12 ae-74-74.csw2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.182) 373.890 ms 360.926 ms 361.199 ms
13 ae-72-72.ebr2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.149) 359.684 ms 359.320 ms 359.477 ms
14 * ae-42-42.ebr2.paris1.level3.net (4.69.137.53) 486.695 ms 463.081 ms
15 ae-2-2.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.69.132.142) 447.053 ms 447.918 ms 448.363 ms
This works because the Malaysian ISPs already have agreements with their peers on the other end of the cables for onward transit.
There are also links to Thailand but these do not include onward transit agreements, so when Malaysia was badly slowed down by the Taiwan cable cut, which didn't really affect Thailand, no traffic was routed north from here (except bilateral communications, such as Malaysians surfing Thai web sites). Some enterprising Malaysians did discover that they could get good global web surfing by using Thai ISPs' proxy servers, but if the general public here tried that, it would have quickly overwhelmed Thailand's comparatively puny links to the rest of the world.
Some Malaysian ISPs do have arrangements to route traffic through our extremely well-connected southern neighbour, Singapore. For large volumes of traffic, however, this is more expensive than going straight out on the international cables that land in Malaysia, so it seems to be reserved as a last-ditch option except for some smaller ISPs that use it as a primary link.
To sum up: Yeah, it works, as long as you have options. If you are a large/wealthy/technophilic country surrounded by small/poor/technophobic neighbours, then you will probably not have many.