I'm not sure if this is the best thing to do, but I decided to just make disk images of my CD's, and store them on an external HDD. Then I use iTunes to rip them to 192Kbps AAC format for my iPods. I figured out that I could fit about 400 CDs, more or less, along with the ripped files, on a 250GB drive.
The disk image files themselves are made with Roxio Toast in Digidesign's Sound Designer II format. Yes, it's proprietary software and a proprietary format, but the likelihood that this format will be readable for a long time to come is high. And if it isn't, I can always remount the images and convert to another format.
I'm pretty sure that when I originally started doing this, I tried it with Apple Disk Utility, and had unsatisfactory results (though of course, I can't remember why).
I think it's important to get an image of the CDs as they actually shipped. If someone an suggest a more open method of doing the same thing, I'd appreciate it. The only reason I'm doing it this way is because it was easy for me to get started. I got to about 150 or so CDs, starting with my newest albums, before I realized that most of the rest of the older stuff I didn't care so much about, anyway. My CD collection isn't very large as it is, so I'm not especially worried.
I don't ditch the CDs. I do this so they can be stored and I don't have to handle them so they won't get damaged. Now if only I could do this as easily with DVDs!
As an aside, I've come across your posts many times now, and I've been wondering why you chose your sig. I'm willing to concede that Kerry may have actually said such a thing. I'm also willing to bet that as a highly decorated veteran officer who actually served in Vietnam, that John Kerry knows quite a bit more about warfighting than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or you and I.
Is your sig an attempt to mock John Kerry, or President Bush?
I happen to agree with Kerry's quote. We *do* need more troops in Iraq, if we have any intention of actually accomplishing anything positive there. Unfortunately, not only is this a rather unpopular stance, it's also true that a "surge" of only 21,000 or so more troops isn't going to do the job. What we need is to go back to the original recommendations of people like Gen. Eric Shinseki, and send an additional 500,000 or more troops. Not that this will ensure success, but it's the only chance we have to make this all work out, unless we're going to take the standpoint that the situation is unsalvageable, and try to work it out by paying reparations.
We may have had no moral authority to invade Iraq, but we sure as Hell have a moral responsibility now to clean up after our mistake, no matter the cost to the United States of America. The only real question is, do we even have the ability to do it anymore?
Why doesn't it occur to *you* that the military has been forced to bottom feed because those of us who are better educated have no desire to get our asses shot off fighting an unjustified and pointless war of aggerssion that is, in any case, poorly supported by the leadership in Washington?
No, it's not the US military that's lousy at that kind of warfare. It's the civilian US politicians and bureaucrats that are lousy at it. The US military has known how to fight that kind of war all the way back to the Revolution and before.
Why is it that it never seems to occur to the people in a position to actually do anything about that what we need is not more high technology for our soldiers, but more good, old-fashioned, well-trained human brain power and muscle power on the ground? Don't get me wrong, there is a place for technology on the battlefield, but it's the people that make it all work.
This was actually discussed quite a bit here on Slashdot back when the Google buyout was announced. The general feeling was that because much of Google's business model and future plans depends so heavily on the eventually outcome of the inevitable lawsuits that sites like YouTube are going to generate, that Google needed to buy YouTube just so they could be a party to those lawsuits, and use their considerable legal and financial resources to try to ensure that they get a favorable ruling.
Oh, no way. I deserve a -10 for this one. No one should ever have to look at this series of posts again, and I can't believe how badly I fscked it up by leaving out a factor of 1024. Makes a huge difference.
Today, I really wish Slashdot had an "edit post" button...
I know, I know. The math thing was obviously a gross error caused by beer and sleep deprivation.
The "T1 as a reference" was really intended to show how silly the whole idea is. Obviously, Comcast doesn't buy their bandwidth from other providers over T1 lines, their costs are much, much lower. I was attempting to exaggerate to prove a point.
The point being, that the costs of data delivery are marginal, so Comcast complaining about the "abuse" caused by 1150 users out of 11.5 million downloading an average of 200-250 GB/mo doesn't really make sense. Of course, nothing I've written here, mistaken or otherwise, takes into account the facts of the cable distribution system, so it *is* possible for one heavy user to impact others in a neighborhood, but if you look at the reality of the network services market, all this really says is that Comcast is trying to make their users pay for their own poor choices in network design.
You are of course, entirely correct, and by my method (discounting the fact that I forgot the "other" 1024 in there), the number I should have reached is 463.485717792 GB/mo.
I stand duly chastized, and request that I now be allowed to go back to bed.
The "abusers" are still only using up 230,000 GB of bandwidth, but they're paying for 9,460,264 GB, and change.
The normal users are paying for 94,589,540,100 GB worth of bandwidth, but only actually using up 22,997,700 GB.
So, Comcast needs to provide a total of 23,227,700 GB of bandwidth every month, which would take about 48 T1's worth of bandwidth.
But the customers are paying for 94,599,000,364 GB of bandwidth, so even if Comcast had to cover the whole kit and kaboodle at a 1:1 ratio, it would take 199,325 or so T1's, and still only cost them about 298,988,612 USD in bandwidth at our bizarrely inflated rate for backbone traffic.
So they'd break even. I think my point is still made.
Ah, I just found the bizarre early morning hour errors in my math. If a T1 line delivers 474,595.2 GB/mo of data and costs 1500 USD/mo, then it actually costs something on the order of.000 003 USD/MB of data.
And that 26 USD/mo actually buys 8226.31679 GB worth of the T1's bandwidth every month, not 86.666 GB. Not sure how that happened, but hey, I should be sleeping...
I used to run an ISP, back in the day. When I became aware that some hosting services providers were capping bandwidth and charging per unit of served data, I started to do a few calculations.
Hmm, let's see. A typical T1 line delivers data at the rate of 1536 Kbps (don't bother about the extra 8Kbps, OK?). So, that's 1536000 / 8 / 1024 ^ -2, or a whopping.1831 GBps, or 10.986 GB/min, or 659.16 GB/hr, or 15819.84 GB/day, or 474,595.2 GB/mo.
That's over 474 Tera-frickin-bytes with a capital B every month. On a single T1.
Now, back in the day (mid 90's), a top-tier provider T1 Internet access port cost, what--say, 1500 USD/mo including the local loop? For the math-inclined but time-challenged, that's about.0003 USD per megabyte of data, no? Three hundreths of a cent for a megabyte. When I realized these figures, it just didn't seem...honorable...to charge users for the piddling little amounts of traffic generated by their servers.
I think the cost structures of a company like Comcast might offer them some economies of scale, but hey, let's be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Comcast has to get all of it's backbone bandwidth from T1's, and they have to pay another provider for it. Let's say that the average Comcast Internet customer pays about 52 USD/mo for the dubious privilege (which is about what they actually charge here in New Jersey, the last time I looked). We'll take that 52 bucks and give up half in administrative overhead. So, our 26 USD/mo buys us 86.666 GB of data each and every month.
Now, Comcast would have us believe that their average user consumes according to the estimates here, about 1% of the data that so-called abusers consume. Comcast admits that these abusers make up approximately.01% of their subscriber base. The estimates tell us that the abuser consumes 200 GB/mo, the average user 2 GB/mo. So, of their stated 11.5 million customers, about (and I'm not actually a statistician, so forgive me, here) 1150 are consuming a total of 230,000 GB/mo, while only paying for a bit less than half of that, or 99665.9 GB/mo. Meanwhile, Comcast is collecting 26 USD/mo from the other 11,498,850 customers, who are paying for a grand total of 996,559,334.1 GB/mo.
So, Comcast's revenues from all of this total 299,000,000 USD/mo when, if those "abusers" were paying for their rightful share, Comcast would be making (and here, let's make the abusers pay triple to cover it all) 299,059,800 USD/mo. Is Comcast really going to whine over a loss of revenue of 59,800 USD/mo over a 300 million dollar a month revenue stream? It would appear so!
Now, what was I saying about the cost of backbone bandwidth? Ah, yes...Comcast, having to provide a total of 996,789,334.1 GB of bandwidth a month, needs to install 2100 T1 lines to cover it all. Let's go nuts here and suggest that Comcast actually needs double that to really cover it. So, Comcast pays out 4200*1500, or 6,300,000 USD/mo to cover their backbone (though, of course, not all the traffic actually leaves Comcast's network).
Ergo, in our hypothetical situation here, Comcast is making 292,700,000 USD/mo from their Internet services, while their users are leaving the backbone network at 50% utilization.
And they're complaining about 1150 users losing them 60 grand a month?
Anyone who knows even the slightest little bit about how the Internet works and is paid for can see how patently ridiculous all of this is. Yes, the numbers I'm using here are widly skewed, but mostly in favor of Comcast. Even if you double the costs and halved the revenue here, Comcast would still be making an fscking/bin/sh load of money, which of course is actually the case. According to what I see on Yahoo! Finance, in the trailing twelve months, Comcast, as a company, made a profit of 2.24 billion USD on revenue of 24.97 billion USD. Are they honestly claiming that they can't make their network perform? Boo fscking hoo. Not all of Comcast is an ISP, but they soon will be. Better string that fiber a bit faster, boys...
Just the other day, a friend told me somebody from Comcast called his house and gave his mother the cock-and-bull story described in the article, though his service has not as yet been terminated. She, of course, had absolutely no clue about what the Comcast people were going on about. The interesting thing is that they actually told my friend not to call the regular customer service people because they wouldn't know what he was talking about. When he told me the story, I assumed it was some sort of social engineering scam...until I read TFA.
I agree with another poster. These calls are more than likely a precursor to legal action by the RIAA or other interested parties. Possibly, it's just a trial balloon for a CYA to indemnify them against same.
Somebody else said a friend of theirs has had five such contacts with Comcast (or their ISP of choice) without any detrimental effects. I say, time to buy your friend some soap-on-a-rope. Even if he doesn't end up in the clink, at least he can use it to lube up his hindquarters for the forthcoming rectal probe.
It would be rather ironic if, 230-some years after the Americans decided they'd had enough of being subjects of Parliament and the King, the people of the United Kingdom were the first to overthrow their modern fascist government. Perhaps it might set an example for the rest of us.
I wonder which government would be easier to tackle, given the severe restrictions of firearms in the UK versus the sheer inertia of the US population? Perhaps it should start with the Republican movement in the UK, by getting rid of the monarchists, the fascists, and the authoritarians, and drawing up a true Constitution. That ought to at least buy you another couple of hundred years of relative freedom.
I think the Revolution may be coming sooner, rather than later. Personally, I'd explore the possibility of moving to the UK, but not as a subject, and not without a guaranteed right to bear arms against a tyrannical government.
Seriously. You have "just over 1000 nodes" to manage. Odds are, the vast majority of those are dynamically assigned (or they should be, so if they aren't, that's your first job). Of the ones that are left, I would venture to guess that the number is much smaller than 1000, and could probably be even smaller than you think given the availability of modern protocols like Zeroconf. After that, you need to consider how often those statically assigned devices are going to change, which is probably not very often at all, if ever.
If you're using DHCP and DDNS like you oughter, the few times you might need to look up one of the dynaically assigned numbers will take a very short period of time.
As an example, one of my clients right now has about 150-200 nodes on the network in two locations, approximately 50% Windows and 50% Mac OS X, with a couple of Linux machines scattered around, mostly for my benefit. Between the two sites, we're using two/16 subnets (because we're in the process of migrating to a completely new AD system and we were running out of easily rememberable addresses in the one/24 we were using). Out of those two/16's, about 18/24's are actually being used. The "0" subnet in each/16 goes to routers, the "1" subnet goes to managable switches and other Layer 2 devices, the "2" subnet goes to servers, the "3" subnet goes to printers, the "4" subnet to the few statically assigned workstations, and the "10" through "13" subnets go to two different DHCP server pools, for redundancy.
All the DHCP and DDNS is handled by Windows Server 2003, simply because Windows is happier if it gets its own way for those purposes in an Active Directory environment, and its a hell of a lot easier than setting up BIND, etc., to do what Windows wants done. Apple's Open Directory doesn't care, as long as the DNS servers are up and properly configured before you configure OD. The second site gets it's DHCP from the local router, because the site only supports about eight users with no server. Microsoft's DDNS server doesn't mind.
The DHCP pools can be looked up at will in one Windows application (or through VNC back to my management station from any of the Macs), so they don't need to be tracked. Even the statically assigned devices which report properly to the DDNS can be looked up at will. The routers, switches, and infrastructure servers don't change, and there's few enough of them (eight or so switches and access points, ten or so servers, and this is overkill to a certain extent--the system we've built could easily handle your 1000 nodes) that anyone can remember them all, even with multiple interfaces. The printers will eventually be moved to dynamic addresses as they are replaced with Zeroconf capable units. In fact, even some of the servers could be moved to the DHCP pool if all their services and clients support Zeroconf. The only serious problem we have is keeping track of which ports are in which VLAN as we migrate from one system to the other, but eventually we'll collapse the VLANs, because they're really not needed. Perhaps you might find VLANs more useful in your larger network, but that's another topic... There's a small possibility we may use VLANs at some point to decrease the size of the broadcast domains, but its not really an issue, yet.
All of this is tracked in spreadsheets, and one of the really neat things about spreadsheets is that they're really easy to convert into databases at some point if that's what you decide to do. It's a simple matter to update them every so often. Sometimes computers aren't the right answer.
I'd like to see a real reference for the allocation rate stated in the article, first of all. Second of all, I'd like to know how many of those supposedly ~170 million addresses being allocated now are actually being highly utilized.
Correction: I meant the "loopback" network problem, not the "link-local" problem, though of course, the "link-local" allocation also takes away from the globally available address space, in its own fashion.
You fail to see how it negates the point, because I wasn't trying to negate the point, as such.
I was observing that Comcast is one of the few entities, as a network services provider, that can make a good argument for public IP address allocations. Most other companies, who in this area are consumers of those services rather than providers, have much less footing for the argument that they should have large allocations of publicly-routable address space.
Considering that such a large portion of the *currently allocated* addresses are grossly underutilized, I have a hard time believing that there is any natural scarcity in the IPv4 space, as opposed to an artifically created scarcity that can be corrected relatively easily, relatively quickly, and relatively inexpensively...at least as compared to the worldwide costs of the migration to IPv6.
As for network consolidation, I think you will find that services such as Comcast's "Triple Play" will only tend to reduce the number of IP addresses actually needed in the wild, not increase that number. There are a finite number of customers in the world, and this will be true for the foreseeable future, even if the actual number of people on the blue marble increases. There are only so many services that can be consumed in a 24-hour day, and therefore a limit on how many individually addressable devices will ever be needed in the world.
True, the sheer size of the IPv6 address space obviates many of the tricks we've used to get around the very bad choices made in the early days of IPv4 as concerns allocation of address space, but at what cost?
At some point you will find that you are running into conflicts with partner companies networks which also use 10.0.x.x. You may find it more fruitful to use some other variant of 10.x.x.x, or some rarely used 172.16.x.x-172.31.x.x backwater.
Of course, this only lessens the odds that you will find conflicts, it doesn't eliminate the problem.
And in any case, wouldn't it be easier to change the home networks of the three directors?
I would also like to mention that we have the capability of reclaiming quite a bit more than "a couple" of Class A networks for more efficient use. Nearly 50% of the IPv4 address space is Class A (you have to preserve 127 in some way, though we may find ways of dealing with the link-local problem as well, and of course network 10 is already set aside). Most of this address space is grossly underutilized, and much of it is reserved for nefarious IANA reasons.
Such large allocations really can't be justified except by the largest of network service providers, and even then, I'm not sure that even a single one of the world's behemoth telecom companies can really fully justify 16 million public addresses--and bear in mind that some companies own *more than one* Class A network, like BBN. Hell, the US Department of Defense probably owns more address space than anyone else on the planet.
Also, how many networks' addressing schemes out there are still laid out using the old rules from the days before zero subnetting worked? There's more to it than just NAT.
Cataclysm? I never used that particular word, but I do see many troubling trends out there that make me wonder how much longer we can expect things like the Internet to exist, not the least of which is Peak Oil, the implications of which will cascade to an extent that most people have difficulty realizing (which is of course, the reason *why* we're in so much trouble).
Ah, but Comcast, in this function is not an end-user of address space, but a network services provider, so it makes much more sense for Comcast to assign publicly-routable numbers to their devices than it would for most other companies who do not provide such services to other users. The same applies to BT.
But...it is unlikely that we will experience such meteoric growth at the level of telecommunications providers. Consolidation of networks will tned to reduce the number of allocations actually necessary for infrastructure purposes.
I recognize that this is a problem. In fact, I think it's really the only significant problem in remaining with private IP addressing.
I don't buy the VoIP argument, though, as mentioned by other posters. I don't believe that any protocol should embed an address in it's data stream, and I think there are much more useful ways of connecting two calling devices than assigning every single handset on the face of the planet a publicly-routable number.
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I'm not sure if this is the best thing to do, but I decided to just make disk images of my CD's, and store them on an external HDD. Then I use iTunes to rip them to 192Kbps AAC format for my iPods. I figured out that I could fit about 400 CDs, more or less, along with the ripped files, on a 250GB drive.
The disk image files themselves are made with Roxio Toast in Digidesign's Sound Designer II format. Yes, it's proprietary software and a proprietary format, but the likelihood that this format will be readable for a long time to come is high. And if it isn't, I can always remount the images and convert to another format.
I'm pretty sure that when I originally started doing this, I tried it with Apple Disk Utility, and had unsatisfactory results (though of course, I can't remember why).
I think it's important to get an image of the CDs as they actually shipped. If someone an suggest a more open method of doing the same thing, I'd appreciate it. The only reason I'm doing it this way is because it was easy for me to get started. I got to about 150 or so CDs, starting with my newest albums, before I realized that most of the rest of the older stuff I didn't care so much about, anyway. My CD collection isn't very large as it is, so I'm not especially worried.
I don't ditch the CDs. I do this so they can be stored and I don't have to handle them so they won't get damaged. Now if only I could do this as easily with DVDs!
As an aside, I've come across your posts many times now, and I've been wondering why you chose your sig. I'm willing to concede that Kerry may have actually said such a thing. I'm also willing to bet that as a highly decorated veteran officer who actually served in Vietnam, that John Kerry knows quite a bit more about warfighting than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or you and I.
Is your sig an attempt to mock John Kerry, or President Bush?
I happen to agree with Kerry's quote. We *do* need more troops in Iraq, if we have any intention of actually accomplishing anything positive there. Unfortunately, not only is this a rather unpopular stance, it's also true that a "surge" of only 21,000 or so more troops isn't going to do the job. What we need is to go back to the original recommendations of people like Gen. Eric Shinseki, and send an additional 500,000 or more troops. Not that this will ensure success, but it's the only chance we have to make this all work out, unless we're going to take the standpoint that the situation is unsalvageable, and try to work it out by paying reparations.
We may have had no moral authority to invade Iraq, but we sure as Hell have a moral responsibility now to clean up after our mistake, no matter the cost to the United States of America. The only real question is, do we even have the ability to do it anymore?
Why doesn't it occur to *you* that the military has been forced to bottom feed because those of us who are better educated have no desire to get our asses shot off fighting an unjustified and pointless war of aggerssion that is, in any case, poorly supported by the leadership in Washington?
No, it's not the US military that's lousy at that kind of warfare. It's the civilian US politicians and bureaucrats that are lousy at it. The US military has known how to fight that kind of war all the way back to the Revolution and before.
Why is it that it never seems to occur to the people in a position to actually do anything about that what we need is not more high technology for our soldiers, but more good, old-fashioned, well-trained human brain power and muscle power on the ground? Don't get me wrong, there is a place for technology on the battlefield, but it's the people that make it all work.
This was actually discussed quite a bit here on Slashdot back when the Google buyout was announced. The general feeling was that because much of Google's business model and future plans depends so heavily on the eventually outcome of the inevitable lawsuits that sites like YouTube are going to generate, that Google needed to buy YouTube just so they could be a party to those lawsuits, and use their considerable legal and financial resources to try to ensure that they get a favorable ruling.
Oh, no way. I deserve a -10 for this one. No one should ever have to look at this series of posts again, and I can't believe how badly I fscked it up by leaving out a factor of 1024. Makes a huge difference.
Today, I really wish Slashdot had an "edit post" button...
I know, I know. The math thing was obviously a gross error caused by beer and sleep deprivation.
The "T1 as a reference" was really intended to show how silly the whole idea is. Obviously, Comcast doesn't buy their bandwidth from other providers over T1 lines, their costs are much, much lower. I was attempting to exaggerate to prove a point.
The point being, that the costs of data delivery are marginal, so Comcast complaining about the "abuse" caused by 1150 users out of 11.5 million downloading an average of 200-250 GB/mo doesn't really make sense. Of course, nothing I've written here, mistaken or otherwise, takes into account the facts of the cable distribution system, so it *is* possible for one heavy user to impact others in a neighborhood, but if you look at the reality of the network services market, all this really says is that Comcast is trying to make their users pay for their own poor choices in network design.
Now you know how I feel ;)
Beer + 5AM post to Slashdot containing math = bad idea.
You are of course, entirely correct, and by my method (discounting the fact that I forgot the "other" 1024 in there), the number I should have reached is 463.485717792 GB/mo.
I stand duly chastized, and request that I now be allowed to go back to bed.
So, to restate...
The "abusers" are still only using up 230,000 GB of bandwidth, but they're paying for 9,460,264 GB, and change.
The normal users are paying for 94,589,540,100 GB worth of bandwidth, but only actually using up 22,997,700 GB.
So, Comcast needs to provide a total of 23,227,700 GB of bandwidth every month, which would take about 48 T1's worth of bandwidth.
But the customers are paying for 94,599,000,364 GB of bandwidth, so even if Comcast had to cover the whole kit and kaboodle at a 1:1 ratio, it would take 199,325 or so T1's, and still only cost them about 298,988,612 USD in bandwidth at our bizarrely inflated rate for backbone traffic.
So they'd break even. I think my point is still made.
Still, I *do* need that sleep...
Ah, I just found the bizarre early morning hour errors in my math. If a T1 line delivers 474,595.2 GB/mo of data and costs 1500 USD/mo, then it actually costs something on the order of .000 003 USD/MB of data.
And that 26 USD/mo actually buys 8226.31679 GB worth of the T1's bandwidth every month, not 86.666 GB. Not sure how that happened, but hey, I should be sleeping...
You still get the idea.
I used to run an ISP, back in the day. When I became aware that some hosting services providers were capping bandwidth and charging per unit of served data, I started to do a few calculations.
.1831 GBps, or 10.986 GB/min, or 659.16 GB/hr, or 15819.84 GB/day, or 474,595.2 GB/mo.
.0003 USD per megabyte of data, no? Three hundreths of a cent for a megabyte. When I realized these figures, it just didn't seem...honorable...to charge users for the piddling little amounts of traffic generated by their servers.
.01% of their subscriber base. The estimates tell us that the abuser consumes 200 GB/mo, the average user 2 GB/mo. So, of their stated 11.5 million customers, about (and I'm not actually a statistician, so forgive me, here) 1150 are consuming a total of 230,000 GB/mo, while only paying for a bit less than half of that, or 99665.9 GB/mo. Meanwhile, Comcast is collecting 26 USD/mo from the other 11,498,850 customers, who are paying for a grand total of 996,559,334.1 GB/mo.
/bin/sh load of money, which of course is actually the case. According to what I see on Yahoo! Finance, in the trailing twelve months, Comcast, as a company, made a profit of 2.24 billion USD on revenue of 24.97 billion USD. Are they honestly claiming that they can't make their network perform? Boo fscking hoo. Not all of Comcast is an ISP, but they soon will be. Better string that fiber a bit faster, boys...
Hmm, let's see. A typical T1 line delivers data at the rate of 1536 Kbps (don't bother about the extra 8Kbps, OK?). So, that's 1536000 / 8 / 1024 ^ -2, or a whopping
That's over 474 Tera-frickin-bytes with a capital B every month. On a single T1.
Now, back in the day (mid 90's), a top-tier provider T1 Internet access port cost, what--say, 1500 USD/mo including the local loop? For the math-inclined but time-challenged, that's about
I think the cost structures of a company like Comcast might offer them some economies of scale, but hey, let's be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Comcast has to get all of it's backbone bandwidth from T1's, and they have to pay another provider for it. Let's say that the average Comcast Internet customer pays about 52 USD/mo for the dubious privilege (which is about what they actually charge here in New Jersey, the last time I looked). We'll take that 52 bucks and give up half in administrative overhead. So, our 26 USD/mo buys us 86.666 GB of data each and every month.
Now, Comcast would have us believe that their average user consumes according to the estimates here, about 1% of the data that so-called abusers consume. Comcast admits that these abusers make up approximately
So, Comcast's revenues from all of this total 299,000,000 USD/mo when, if those "abusers" were paying for their rightful share, Comcast would be making (and here, let's make the abusers pay triple to cover it all) 299,059,800 USD/mo. Is Comcast really going to whine over a loss of revenue of 59,800 USD/mo over a 300 million dollar a month revenue stream? It would appear so!
Now, what was I saying about the cost of backbone bandwidth? Ah, yes...Comcast, having to provide a total of 996,789,334.1 GB of bandwidth a month, needs to install 2100 T1 lines to cover it all. Let's go nuts here and suggest that Comcast actually needs double that to really cover it. So, Comcast pays out 4200*1500, or 6,300,000 USD/mo to cover their backbone (though, of course, not all the traffic actually leaves Comcast's network).
Ergo, in our hypothetical situation here, Comcast is making 292,700,000 USD/mo from their Internet services, while their users are leaving the backbone network at 50% utilization.
And they're complaining about 1150 users losing them 60 grand a month?
Anyone who knows even the slightest little bit about how the Internet works and is paid for can see how patently ridiculous all of this is. Yes, the numbers I'm using here are widly skewed, but mostly in favor of Comcast. Even if you double the costs and halved the revenue here, Comcast would still be making an fscking
Just the other day, a friend told me somebody from Comcast called his house and gave his mother the cock-and-bull story described in the article, though his service has not as yet been terminated. She, of course, had absolutely no clue about what the Comcast people were going on about. The interesting thing is that they actually told my friend not to call the regular customer service people because they wouldn't know what he was talking about. When he told me the story, I assumed it was some sort of social engineering scam...until I read TFA.
I agree with another poster. These calls are more than likely a precursor to legal action by the RIAA or other interested parties. Possibly, it's just a trial balloon for a CYA to indemnify them against same.
Somebody else said a friend of theirs has had five such contacts with Comcast (or their ISP of choice) without any detrimental effects. I say, time to buy your friend some soap-on-a-rope. Even if he doesn't end up in the clink, at least he can use it to lube up his hindquarters for the forthcoming rectal probe.
Do I even need to finish the quote?
It would be rather ironic if, 230-some years after the Americans decided they'd had enough of being subjects of Parliament and the King, the people of the United Kingdom were the first to overthrow their modern fascist government. Perhaps it might set an example for the rest of us.
I wonder which government would be easier to tackle, given the severe restrictions of firearms in the UK versus the sheer inertia of the US population? Perhaps it should start with the Republican movement in the UK, by getting rid of the monarchists, the fascists, and the authoritarians, and drawing up a true Constitution. That ought to at least buy you another couple of hundred years of relative freedom.
I think the Revolution may be coming sooner, rather than later. Personally, I'd explore the possibility of moving to the UK, but not as a subject, and not without a guaranteed right to bear arms against a tyrannical government.
This world is becoming a truly scary place.
I of course forgot to mention the most important point.
The first thing you want to nail down is a consistent convention for naming and numbering. Everything will fall right into place after that.
Seriously. You have "just over 1000 nodes" to manage. Odds are, the vast majority of those are dynamically assigned (or they should be, so if they aren't, that's your first job). Of the ones that are left, I would venture to guess that the number is much smaller than 1000, and could probably be even smaller than you think given the availability of modern protocols like Zeroconf. After that, you need to consider how often those statically assigned devices are going to change, which is probably not very often at all, if ever.
/16 subnets (because we're in the process of migrating to a completely new AD system and we were running out of easily rememberable addresses in the one /24 we were using). Out of those two /16's, about 18 /24's are actually being used. The "0" subnet in each /16 goes to routers, the "1" subnet goes to managable switches and other Layer 2 devices, the "2" subnet goes to servers, the "3" subnet goes to printers, the "4" subnet to the few statically assigned workstations, and the "10" through "13" subnets go to two different DHCP server pools, for redundancy.
If you're using DHCP and DDNS like you oughter, the few times you might need to look up one of the dynaically assigned numbers will take a very short period of time.
As an example, one of my clients right now has about 150-200 nodes on the network in two locations, approximately 50% Windows and 50% Mac OS X, with a couple of Linux machines scattered around, mostly for my benefit. Between the two sites, we're using two
All the DHCP and DDNS is handled by Windows Server 2003, simply because Windows is happier if it gets its own way for those purposes in an Active Directory environment, and its a hell of a lot easier than setting up BIND, etc., to do what Windows wants done. Apple's Open Directory doesn't care, as long as the DNS servers are up and properly configured before you configure OD. The second site gets it's DHCP from the local router, because the site only supports about eight users with no server. Microsoft's DDNS server doesn't mind.
The DHCP pools can be looked up at will in one Windows application (or through VNC back to my management station from any of the Macs), so they don't need to be tracked. Even the statically assigned devices which report properly to the DDNS can be looked up at will. The routers, switches, and infrastructure servers don't change, and there's few enough of them (eight or so switches and access points, ten or so servers, and this is overkill to a certain extent--the system we've built could easily handle your 1000 nodes) that anyone can remember them all, even with multiple interfaces. The printers will eventually be moved to dynamic addresses as they are replaced with Zeroconf capable units. In fact, even some of the servers could be moved to the DHCP pool if all their services and clients support Zeroconf. The only serious problem we have is keeping track of which ports are in which VLAN as we migrate from one system to the other, but eventually we'll collapse the VLANs, because they're really not needed. Perhaps you might find VLANs more useful in your larger network, but that's another topic... There's a small possibility we may use VLANs at some point to decrease the size of the broadcast domains, but its not really an issue, yet.
All of this is tracked in spreadsheets, and one of the really neat things about spreadsheets is that they're really easy to convert into databases at some point if that's what you decide to do. It's a simple matter to update them every so often. Sometimes computers aren't the right answer.
I'd like to see a real reference for the allocation rate stated in the article, first of all. Second of all, I'd like to know how many of those supposedly ~170 million addresses being allocated now are actually being highly utilized.
Correction: I meant the "loopback" network problem, not the "link-local" problem, though of course, the "link-local" allocation also takes away from the globally available address space, in its own fashion.
You fail to see how it negates the point, because I wasn't trying to negate the point, as such.
I was observing that Comcast is one of the few entities, as a network services provider, that can make a good argument for public IP address allocations. Most other companies, who in this area are consumers of those services rather than providers, have much less footing for the argument that they should have large allocations of publicly-routable address space.
Considering that such a large portion of the *currently allocated* addresses are grossly underutilized, I have a hard time believing that there is any natural scarcity in the IPv4 space, as opposed to an artifically created scarcity that can be corrected relatively easily, relatively quickly, and relatively inexpensively...at least as compared to the worldwide costs of the migration to IPv6.
As for network consolidation, I think you will find that services such as Comcast's "Triple Play" will only tend to reduce the number of IP addresses actually needed in the wild, not increase that number. There are a finite number of customers in the world, and this will be true for the foreseeable future, even if the actual number of people on the blue marble increases. There are only so many services that can be consumed in a 24-hour day, and therefore a limit on how many individually addressable devices will ever be needed in the world.
True, the sheer size of the IPv6 address space obviates many of the tricks we've used to get around the very bad choices made in the early days of IPv4 as concerns allocation of address space, but at what cost?
At some point you will find that you are running into conflicts with partner companies networks which also use 10.0.x.x. You may find it more fruitful to use some other variant of 10.x.x.x, or some rarely used 172.16.x.x-172.31.x.x backwater.
Of course, this only lessens the odds that you will find conflicts, it doesn't eliminate the problem.
And in any case, wouldn't it be easier to change the home networks of the three directors?
I would also like to mention that we have the capability of reclaiming quite a bit more than "a couple" of Class A networks for more efficient use. Nearly 50% of the IPv4 address space is Class A (you have to preserve 127 in some way, though we may find ways of dealing with the link-local problem as well, and of course network 10 is already set aside). Most of this address space is grossly underutilized, and much of it is reserved for nefarious IANA reasons.
Such large allocations really can't be justified except by the largest of network service providers, and even then, I'm not sure that even a single one of the world's behemoth telecom companies can really fully justify 16 million public addresses--and bear in mind that some companies own *more than one* Class A network, like BBN. Hell, the US Department of Defense probably owns more address space than anyone else on the planet.
Also, how many networks' addressing schemes out there are still laid out using the old rules from the days before zero subnetting worked? There's more to it than just NAT.
Cataclysm? I never used that particular word, but I do see many troubling trends out there that make me wonder how much longer we can expect things like the Internet to exist, not the least of which is Peak Oil, the implications of which will cascade to an extent that most people have difficulty realizing (which is of course, the reason *why* we're in so much trouble).
But that's a different discussion entirely.
Ah, but Comcast, in this function is not an end-user of address space, but a network services provider, so it makes much more sense for Comcast to assign publicly-routable numbers to their devices than it would for most other companies who do not provide such services to other users. The same applies to BT.
But...it is unlikely that we will experience such meteoric growth at the level of telecommunications providers. Consolidation of networks will tned to reduce the number of allocations actually necessary for infrastructure purposes.
I recognize that this is a problem. In fact, I think it's really the only significant problem in remaining with private IP addressing.
I don't buy the VoIP argument, though, as mentioned by other posters. I don't believe that any protocol should embed an address in it's data stream, and I think there are much more useful ways of connecting two calling devices than assigning every single handset on the face of the planet a publicly-routable number.