Assuming that the top 1% of users is using 50% of the bandwidth, and by eliminating that top 1% of users from the customer base the other 99% would get their bandwidth doubled and their pings halved - would you agree when Comcast's business solution?
No but if they actually published the cap and provided a way to pay for additional bandwidth if more was needed then that would be fine. In order to make an informed decision a customer needs to know what the ISP is actually offering. The idea of having a mystry cap that potentially kicks in whenever a sysadmin is having a bad hair day is good for anyone.
Lose the tinfoil hat, Sparky. Home broadband is dirt cheap for what you get.
Agreed. I'm actually surprised that the smaller ISPs (those that arn't part of a telco and have to purchace their own Tx or OCx links) even stay in business serving dsl customers.
It's subsidized by business accounts much like telephone service.
Do you have ANY evidence for this part or you post? Unlike residential phone service residential DSL and Cable broadband are NOT services that the telcos are required to provide so why whould they bother if they wern't making a profit?
Personally I'd rather them use bandwidth throttling for P2P apps rather than dictating a certain amount of usage over the course of a month.
Well, I'd much rather them leave my connection un-throttled and simply charge $/bit just like water, electricity etc. If I want a particular app throttled I'll do it my self thanks. If they want to use a model where I pay 39.95 for 10GB and 49.95 for 40GB with a charge of $1/GB for going over or something similar that would be fine. What's not fine is having some sort of secret cap so noone can know what is expected of them. Comcast really should look at Direcways FAP and learn from it. Direcway used to have a mistry cap that would throttle your bandwidth down to around 56k if you exceeded a certain amount of usage and would lift the cap if you didn't use the service for a while. This pissed off lots of people because noone could tell you how much was too much and enforcement seemed to vary quite a bit from customer to customer. They still have a similar policy but at least now they publish their policy so a savy user can tell if they are likely to have a problem.
I think you're probably right but I'm a little concerned that this would discoruage small ISPs and especially WISPs. These are the folks that are actually trying to provide services in the underserved areas that the USF is supposed to help but most of them are small 1-5 geek operations and you know how geeks are about paperwork:) An alternative, if the USF really is important to the well being of the country, would be to take it from the general fund. We'd still end up paying about the same but this would at least get rid of one layer of taxation.
I suspect this has more to do with retaining customers already "file sharing" and avoiding bad PR than it does to be protecting customer privacy.
You may be right but I'm not so sure. File sharing customers are not particularly attractive customers for an ISP. Sure they're willing to come up with the money for a basic broadband connection but but they also tend to use far more bandwidth than normal customers (maybe 10-100x as much) and bandwidth still isn't that cheap.
Is it because Bill Gates is involved, or did (almost) everybody here decide to trade in their aspiration for freedom and pursuit of happiness for this pitiful whining about how there ought to be some law to stop these "rich bastards" from buying faster cars than most of us here can afford.
No, what pisses many of us off is that BECAUSE they were rich a few folks were able to get their own personal law passed. The flip side is that (as you suggested) it shouldn't TAKE millions of dollars to get a perfectly reasonable change of law passed.
It would make a lot more sense for crash-test/emission laws to impose an additional tax on non-compliant cars.
So if you're rich you can ignore the law that everyone else has to live by, I don't see that as an improvement or even necessary in this case. The purpose of these DOT regs is mostly to protect consumers from being tricked into buying unsafe vehicles so it would seem to me that for low volume cars all that is necessary is to make sure the customer is aware of it's status (have them sign a form saying that the car hasn't been certified and may kill them).
I believe the federal tax deduction is $2k which translates into a few hundred $ of actual cash in your pocket (depending on your tax situation). If saving money is what you're after then a gas or diesel powered economy car is a better deal. There is nothing wrong with buying a cool gadget but that's what these are at this point for most people.
Anyone remember "Iraq will be a cakewalk", want to compare today's, "We knew Iraq would not be easy"...
It was the press that was saying the Iraq invasion would be easy, not the administration.
And:
While the Bush's may have stolen the last election, I'm more ashamed that it was so easy for him to actually win support of 48% of eligible voters who showed up at the polls, than less than half a million Democrats his brother illegaly removed from the rolls and a few hundred voting machines he rigged to swallow bad ballots in black districts and to spit out for revote in conservative white districts.
Can you point to any evidence that the above actually happened in any significant numbers or was any sort of coordinated effort? I know there were many rumors and accusations at the time of the election but I havn't seen any reliable followup or actual evidence.
I've personally worked on Compaq desktops that use nothing but heatsinks for P200MMX and even PII-233. I'm pretty sure that there were even some sub-1GHz PIII desktops from major vendors that used passive cooling.
Only for a really loose definition of "passive cooling". Most of these have a huge heatsink mounted right next to or under a large case or psu fan.
With P2P you really don't know what you're getting. You may think you're downloading The Lion King but you may end up with Debbie Does Dallas.
Sure, and you can choose to delete things you don't like. If that's not good enough for you then you can choose not to download things from sources you don't trust. BTW more than a few web sites have misleading names too.
On the web, sites are required by law to warn users before they can enter an adult site. Those that don't comply can be thrown in jail and/or fined.
Sure in theory if they happen to be in the US or a country with similar laws. In practice a lot of them show some pretty nasty stuff right on their front pages.
P2P has NO SUCH MECHANISM to warn users about what they may actually be getting. Since the sharers have NO MEANS AVAILABLE to warn users what they're sharing then it's reasonable that the app itself must.
Of course they have a means of warning users what they are sharing, it's called the file name. Rember that noone is forcing you to use p2p networks and noone is suggesting you let your kids use them unattended.
Re:Patent protection?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
Lack of training might be a problem, but I'd like to see some kind of statistics backing up this claim.
I don't have any stats but I've seen the way some people treat guns and that's enough for me. As just one example I've run into several people that believe it's ok to point a gun at friends/family members if they think it isn't loaded. I've seen others let their kids play with guns using the same reasoning. I don't know how many people actually get killed from these antics but some would have to.
And the IE cumulitive(sp) update at least. Last week I had an XP laptop that needed 40-80MB of updates, at least 3 reboots and a bunch of searching the manufacturers web site for an updated audio driver since the current one didn't work with SP1. That's about a million times more work than updating a Debian box of similar age.
How naive. It's really simple. IBM is trying to rake in a few billion selling software they don't have to pay for. I don't know what's giving you a warm fuzzy feeling. It's not charity. They're not "supporting the community", they're simply saving tens of millions on software development by letting gullible, naive college kids work for free.
Great rant but it's a fact that IBM has (and continues to) contributed to numerous OSS projects. They may be getting even more than they give but that's the great thing about OSS, almost everyone gets more than they give. It never fails to amaze me how well IBM seems to "get" Linux on a gut level that others (Sun, Corel, etc) never seem to manage. In addition their open support of Linux makes it much easier for those of us in IT to promote Linux and other OSS solutions in areas where they make sense.
Company cleverly circumvents GPL to have its software development subsidized. No source code to community.
What makes you think that any new features or bug fixes or new features they add to the Linux kernel, GCC or whatever won't go back to the community? Tivo did this so why would Sony refuse and risk gettine sued?
Also your arguements apply to probably 90% of the people who currently use Linux on PCs. IMHO every person or company that uses Linux is a reason for our law makers NOT do anything that would make OSS unworkable.
for anyone saying that, give it a try. I doubt it will last past the novelty phase, and will NOT pass the girlfriend test... It simply is way too cumbersome to be a usable solution.
You havn't tried MythTV. Setting it up can certainly be a pain but the end result is VERY usable.
No, many Windows updates require that you reboot before installing any other update.
Re:Patent protection?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
You would be guessing wrong at least in Canada. Guns that end up killing people tend to be stolen, illegally stored, or owned by people who shouldn't have a gun.
Few deaths result from responsible gun owners.
Unfortunately demonstrating "responsibility" isn't a requirement for gun ownership, at least in the US (maybe it's better in Canada). I for one would love to see gun ownership be tied to passing some sort of training course covering both safety and the legal aspects of what you can/cannot do with your gun.
I suspect that this is one of those cases where statistics can be spun to support both sides of the gun control debate. Consider that in the US:
"In most murders involving handguns the handgun is illegal" is probably true.
"most gun deaths involve an illegal firearm" may well still be false.
The reason is that many gun deaths are due either to accidents or legal shootings.
No, the distinction between them is pivotal to Wine. Under an "open source" license, transgaming can base their product on Wine, enhance it, and sell the modified version without sharing their improvements. Under a "free software" license, transgaming would have to open their enhancements back to Wine.
Your confused. Even RMS agrees that the BSD licence (and similar) qualify as "Free Software" even though it's not his prefered licnese. The ONLY difference between OSS and FS is the ideals/priorities of the folks promoting the terms. In the case of Wine they just switched from one FS license to another (or if you like from one OSS license to another) arguably more restrictive one.
Notice how they don't say "for running Lotus Notes," or "for running Windows applications." They only talk about MS Office.
Sure because the majority of Windows users feel (rightly or not) that MS Office is a must have for them. Even a lot of people running MS Works or Word Perfect THINK they are running MS Office.
Or if they hacked the calls, why hasn't Microsoft sued CodeWeavers under the DMCA
On what grounds? Unless MS has started encrypting their Office CDs I don't see what legal leg they'd have to stand on.
What argument did CodeWeavers use to convince people to LGPL the Wine source? They used the envy-based "we don't want others to profit from our work" argument.
Or put another way, "We're going to pay developers to improve Wine and contribute that work back and we'd like some assurances that our competitors will have to play by the same rules". Personally I think of the GPL as just putting down in writing what would otherwise be common courtesy.
Does this help Linux and hurt Microsoft? No . . . quite the opposite, in fact. Microsoft wants Linux users running MS Office, because that keeps them locked in to Microsoft file formats while Microsoft prepares the.Net version of Office.
The people buying Crossover Office are already locked into MS file formats. If having Crossover available means that that's the only MS product they are locked into then I'd consider that a major improvement. Maybe once they see the incredible amount of high quality Free Software available on their Linux boxes they will re-evaluate just how much MS products are really worth.
ts a good plan, and I'm glad they are competition for CodeWeavers, I dont like CodeWeavers, they are a very greedy destructive company and they remind me alot of SCO in how they act sometimes.
Doesn't it keep people from quickly adopting a different and open application that runs natively?
Lets say we have 2 users, A & B and both would like to move to an Open Source operating system such as Linux however:
A: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is able to run it perfectly under Wine so they they switch to Linux and open source for everything but that 1 app. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Linux support and are investigating open source applications.
B: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is NOT able to run under Wine so they they keep using Windows. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Windows support and are ignoring open source applications because they have no experience with them.
Which one of these users do you think is adding to the demand for OSS software in general and Linux in particular?
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming that the top 1% of users is using 50% of the bandwidth, and by eliminating that top 1% of users from the customer base the other 99% would get their bandwidth doubled and their pings halved - would you agree when Comcast's business solution?
No but if they actually published the cap and provided a way to pay for additional bandwidth if more was needed then that would be fine. In order to make an informed decision a customer needs to know what the ISP is actually offering. The idea of having a mystry cap that potentially kicks in whenever a sysadmin is having a bad hair day is good for anyone.
Lose the tinfoil hat, Sparky. Home broadband is dirt cheap for what you get.
Agreed. I'm actually surprised that the smaller ISPs (those that arn't part of a telco and have to purchace their own Tx or OCx links) even stay in business serving dsl customers.
It's subsidized by business accounts much like telephone service.
Do you have ANY evidence for this part or you post? Unlike residential phone service residential DSL and Cable broadband are NOT services that the telcos are required to provide so why whould they bother if they wern't making a profit?
Personally I'd rather them use bandwidth throttling for P2P apps rather than dictating a certain amount of usage over the course of a month.
Well, I'd much rather them leave my connection un-throttled and simply charge $/bit just like water, electricity etc. If I want a particular app throttled I'll do it my self thanks. If they want to use a model where I pay 39.95 for 10GB and 49.95 for 40GB with a charge of $1/GB for going over or something similar that would be fine. What's not fine is having some sort of secret cap so noone can know what is expected of them. Comcast really should look at Direcways FAP and learn from it. Direcway used to have a mistry cap that would throttle your bandwidth down to around 56k if you exceeded a certain amount of usage and would lift the cap if you didn't use the service for a while. This pissed off lots of people because noone could tell you how much was too much and enforcement seemed to vary quite a bit from customer to customer. They still have a similar policy but at least now they publish their policy so a savy user can tell if they are likely to have a problem.
For the most part, people can only watch one channel at a time
And more importantly the cost to the cable co. doesn't change even if you have 10 tvs all tuned to different channels 24/7.
I think you're probably right but I'm a little concerned that this would discoruage small ISPs and especially WISPs. These are the folks that are actually trying to provide services in the underserved areas that the USF is supposed to help but most of them are small 1-5 geek operations and you know how geeks are about paperwork :) An alternative, if the USF really is important to the well being of the country, would be to take it from the general fund. We'd still end up paying about the same but this would at least get rid of one layer of taxation.
I suspect this has more to do with retaining customers already "file sharing" and avoiding bad PR than it does to be protecting customer privacy.
You may be right but I'm not so sure. File sharing customers are not particularly attractive customers for an ISP. Sure they're willing to come up with the money for a basic broadband connection but but they also tend to use far more bandwidth than normal customers (maybe 10-100x as much) and bandwidth still isn't that cheap.
Is it because Bill Gates is involved, or did (almost) everybody here
decide to trade in their aspiration for freedom and pursuit of happiness
for this pitiful whining about how there ought to be some law to stop
these "rich bastards" from buying faster cars than most of us here can
afford.
No, what pisses many of us off is that BECAUSE they were rich a few folks were able to get their own personal law passed. The flip side is that (as you suggested) it shouldn't TAKE millions of dollars to get a perfectly reasonable change of law passed.
It would make a lot more sense for crash-test/emission laws to impose an
additional tax on non-compliant cars.
So if you're rich you can ignore the law that everyone else has to live by, I don't see that as an improvement or even necessary in this case. The purpose of these DOT regs is mostly to protect consumers from being tricked into buying unsafe vehicles so it would seem to me that for low volume cars all that is necessary is to make sure the customer is aware of it's status (have them sign a form saying that the car hasn't been certified and may kill them).
For most users, even those who understand how and why to use PGP for their email, it's just too much of a hassle.
Agreed, although encrypting email is easy teaching the recipient to decrypt it can be a challenge.
No. Don't vote Independent; Green; Libertarian. That will only weaken the one party left that can help STOP this madness!
Yes, voting for the guy you figure is "slightly" less of an ass has gotten us so far already how could it fail us now?
I believe the federal tax deduction is $2k which translates into a few hundred $ of actual cash in your pocket (depending on your tax situation). If saving money is what you're after then a gas or diesel powered economy car is a better deal. There is nothing wrong with buying a cool gadget but that's what these are at this point for most people.
The difference between an ideologue and a pragmatist is just how far ahead you look.
for example, the photo accompanying John C. Dvorak's column became a featureless blob.
Doesn't sound lossless at all to me.
Have you ever seen Dvorak?
I agree with a lot of your post except:
Anyone remember "Iraq will be a cakewalk", want to compare today's, "We knew Iraq would not be easy"...
It was the press that was saying the Iraq invasion would be easy, not the administration.
And:
While the Bush's may have stolen the last election, I'm more ashamed that it was so easy for him to actually win support of 48% of eligible voters who showed up at the polls, than less than half a million Democrats his brother illegaly removed from the rolls and a few hundred voting machines he rigged to swallow bad ballots in black districts and to spit out for revote in conservative white districts.
Can you point to any evidence that the above actually happened in any significant numbers or was any sort of coordinated effort? I know there were many rumors and accusations at the time of the election but I havn't seen any reliable followup or actual evidence.
I've personally worked on Compaq desktops that use nothing but heatsinks for P200MMX and even PII-233. I'm pretty sure that there were even some sub-1GHz PIII desktops from major vendors that used passive cooling.
Only for a really loose definition of "passive cooling". Most of these have a huge heatsink mounted right next to or under a large case or psu fan.
With P2P you really don't know what you're getting. You may think you're downloading The Lion King but you may end up with Debbie Does Dallas.
Sure, and you can choose to delete things you don't like. If that's not good enough for you then you can choose not to download things from sources you don't trust. BTW more than a few web sites have misleading names too.
On the web, sites are required by law to warn users before they can enter an adult site. Those that don't comply can be thrown in jail and/or fined.
Sure in theory if they happen to be in the US or a country with similar laws. In practice a lot of them show some pretty nasty stuff right on their front pages.
P2P has NO SUCH MECHANISM to warn users about what they may actually be getting. Since the sharers have NO MEANS AVAILABLE to warn users what they're sharing then it's reasonable that the app itself must.
Of course they have a means of warning users what they are sharing, it's called the file name. Rember that noone is forcing you to use p2p networks and noone is suggesting you let your kids use them unattended.
Lack of training might be a problem, but I'd like to see some kind of statistics backing up this claim.
I don't have any stats but I've seen the way some people treat guns and that's enough for me. As just one example I've run into several people that believe it's ok to point a gun at friends/family members if they think it isn't loaded. I've seen others let their kids play with guns using the same reasoning. I don't know how many people actually get killed from these antics but some would have to.
And the IE cumulitive(sp) update at least. Last week I had an XP laptop that needed 40-80MB of updates, at least 3 reboots and a bunch of searching the manufacturers web site for an updated audio driver since the current one didn't work with SP1. That's about a million times more work than updating a Debian box of similar age.
How naive. It's really simple. IBM is trying to rake in a few billion selling software they don't have to pay for. I don't know what's giving you a warm fuzzy feeling. It's not charity. They're not "supporting the community", they're simply saving tens of millions on software development by letting gullible, naive college kids work for free.
Great rant but it's a fact that IBM has (and continues to) contributed to numerous OSS projects. They may be getting even more than they give but that's the great thing about OSS, almost everyone gets more than they give. It never fails to amaze me how well IBM seems to "get" Linux on a gut level that others (Sun, Corel, etc) never seem to manage. In addition their open support of Linux makes it much easier for those of us in IT to promote Linux and other OSS solutions in areas where they make sense.
Company cleverly circumvents GPL to have its software development subsidized. No source code to community.
What makes you think that any new features or bug fixes or new features they add to the Linux kernel, GCC or whatever won't go back to the community? Tivo did this so why would Sony refuse and risk gettine sued?
Also your arguements apply to probably 90% of the people who currently use Linux on PCs. IMHO every person or company that uses Linux is a reason for our law makers NOT do anything that would make OSS unworkable.
for anyone saying that, give it a try. I doubt it will last past the novelty phase, and will NOT pass the girlfriend test... It simply is way too cumbersome to be a usable solution.
You havn't tried MythTV. Setting it up can certainly be a pain but the end result is VERY usable.
Window? 4 patches 3 reboots.. yuck
Erm - that would be four patches - one reboot.
No, many Windows updates require that you reboot before installing any other update.
You would be guessing wrong at least in Canada.
Guns that end up killing people tend to be stolen, illegally stored, or owned by people who shouldn't have a gun.
Few deaths result from responsible gun owners.
Unfortunately demonstrating "responsibility" isn't a requirement for gun ownership, at least in the US (maybe it's better in Canada). I for one would love to see gun ownership be tied to passing some sort of training course covering both safety and the legal aspects of what you can/cannot do with your gun.
I suspect that this is one of those cases where statistics can be spun to support both sides of the gun control debate. Consider that in the US:
"In most murders involving handguns the handgun is illegal" is probably true.
"most gun deaths involve an illegal firearm" may well still be false.
The reason is that many gun deaths are due either to accidents or legal shootings.
No, the distinction between them is pivotal to Wine. Under an "open source" license, transgaming can base their product on Wine, enhance it, and sell the modified version without sharing their improvements. Under a "free software" license, transgaming would have to open their enhancements back to Wine.
Your confused. Even RMS agrees that the BSD licence (and similar) qualify as "Free Software" even though it's not his prefered licnese. The ONLY difference between OSS and FS is the ideals/priorities of the folks promoting the terms. In the case of Wine they just switched from one FS license to another (or if you like from one OSS license to another) arguably more restrictive one.
Notice how they don't say "for running Lotus Notes," or "for running Windows applications." They only talk about MS Office.
.Net version of Office.
Sure because the majority of Windows users feel (rightly or not) that MS Office is a must have for them. Even a lot of people running MS Works or Word Perfect THINK they are running MS Office.
Or if they hacked the calls, why hasn't Microsoft sued CodeWeavers under the DMCA
On what grounds? Unless MS has started encrypting their Office CDs I don't see what legal leg they'd have to stand on.
What argument did CodeWeavers use to convince people to LGPL the Wine source? They used the envy-based "we don't want others to profit from our work" argument.
Or put another way, "We're going to pay developers to improve Wine and contribute that work back and we'd like some assurances that our competitors will have to play by the same rules". Personally I think of the GPL as just putting down in writing what would otherwise be common courtesy.
Does this help Linux and hurt Microsoft? No . . . quite the opposite, in fact. Microsoft wants Linux users running MS Office, because that keeps them locked in to Microsoft file formats while Microsoft prepares the
The people buying Crossover Office are already locked into MS file formats. If having Crossover available means that that's the only MS product they are locked into then I'd consider that a major improvement. Maybe once they see the incredible amount of high quality Free Software available on their Linux boxes they will re-evaluate just how much MS products are really worth.
ts a good plan, and I'm glad they are competition for CodeWeavers, I dont like CodeWeavers, they are a very greedy destructive company and they remind me alot of SCO in how they act sometimes.
What makes you say that?
Doesn't it keep people from quickly adopting a different and open application that runs natively?
Lets say we have 2 users, A & B and both would like to move to an Open Source operating system such as Linux however:
A: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is able to run it perfectly under Wine so they they switch to Linux and open source for everything but that 1 app. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Linux support and are investigating open source applications.
B: Has 1 Win app that they MUST be able to run for one reason or another and is NOT able to run under Wine so they they keep using Windows. When it comes time to acquire new hardware or apps. they are asking hardware and software venders for Windows support and are ignoring open source applications because they have no experience with them.
Which one of these users do you think is adding to the demand for OSS software in general and Linux in particular?