And another thing is that those older modems (say 9600 bps) are probably better at getting your data through crap phone lines. Modern V.34 modems more or less assume the phone system is gonna digitize your signal at the earliest possible opportunity.
Of course, I'm talking out of my rectum here. Does anyone have and hard evidence?
About the lightshow. I wonder, has anyone here on slashdot older than about 25 *NOT* built a light show with their home computer? Seems everyone I've met hooked up a few triacs to a parallel port or something. (I was wierd, I rectified the AC and used thyristors.:)
"ME T00" (This comment brought to you by H4X0RK1D999@AOL.COM) Seriously, please post it somewhere! (Wouldn't it be cool if you could post to slashdot with attachments?)
Hey! That was my first program, too (although I ran it on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum)! You do realise I have a patent on the technology involved ("A New Method For Producing An Unlimited Number Of Consecutive Integers Using A Programmable Electronic Calculation Device")? Ok you owe me 100000$..
For example, we had an incident in November where we attempted to qualify a major name-brand memory supplier under Linux on one of the Intel server motherboards. We expected it to be easy because Intel and the memory manufacturer had already qualified the hardware under NT. Well, Linux is not NT. We could make the memory fail under Linux. In normal operation the error might show up as a system hang once every few weeks. That's unacceptable to us and our customers.
Do you have any special software you use to test the memory in this way? What is the exact method of memory testing? Anything open source?
This would be of great interest to me, and certainly to others too. I've bought duff memory several times in the past and proving (to oneself and the retailer) that it's broken is often very difficult.
Enormous ISPs have enough resources to handle things properly - basically, enough spare cash, which hopefully translates to enough servers, enough bandwidth, enough staff. They're also usually dirt cheap. On the other hand, that very fact that they're so damn cheap means that 90% of their customers are morons. It certainly does make a difference if you're on the same physical server as some college student with tons of pr0n on his site, with the added effect of inviting script kiddies to break into the server. (Of course, if the pr0n is good, and the server disk crashes, your data might be among the first to be recovered:) Customer support usually sucks, after all, too many cooks spoil the broth, esp. if all but one of the cooks don't have a clue what they're doing.
Then there are ISPs consisting of a 486 in someone's bedroom. These people (in general) work their asses off to offer good customer support, you can call their mobile phone at 3am on a Saturday, they are usually very competent, and your virtual server neighbours are a friendly bunch. Who care's if they're a bit more expensive? However, infrastructure costs money and these outfits don't have too much of that.
So, which one to choose? It's a hard question, and one without easy answers. I've found the best bet is someone in between the two: Some company with 4 years experience, 20 staff, refused several takeover bids from Netcom,... basically, not small, not huge.
I'd just like to say this: Certificate Authorities (CAs) *CANNOT* read your encrypted traffic, which seems to be what some people think. All they do is sign your PUBLIC key, the one available to everyone.
it occurs to me that the job of making this kind of predictions might be worse than being a lawyer! Think about it. You're paid insane amounts of money to talk bullshit. So far, same job as some lawyers. But after that, you're then paid even more wads of money to "update" your prediction, which usually means that in the end you end up getting paid for contradicting yourself and proving yourself a bad futurologist! How bad can that be?
Where exactly do these people get their predictions from? The bottom of a coffee cup perhaps, or the configuration of an elephant's latest dung? I think the 5 year thing comes from the communist era.. but 5 year plans came from the time when plans actually took 5 years to implement.
Anyway, what is required (IMHO) is a site that keeps tabs on all predictions ever made by an individual or a group, along with up-to-date information on what predictions came true. Then we could check who really can predict the future and who are just a bunch of morons who run a newspaper. As a side effect, we would know which pundits are actually time travellers in disguise...
Am I really the only one who doesn't use a chair at all? I've got a king size mattress on the floor and lay down on it. It's impossible to get back pain that way and it supports my arms too. The end fits about 5 laptops next to each other; you can also put monitors on the floor next to the mattress. The problem of not enough desk space is gone, too; essentially the whole floor acts as a desk! The thing I like best is that I can get naked and wrap myself in a continental quilt for those late night hacking sessions. It rocks!
I don't understand these guys. If you want your company name to convey power and greatness, call your company Power And Greatness, Inc.. And write me a check for $50000.
Don't believe this! It's misinformation intended to make us complacent, thinking that the NSA will miss our plans to Ussama bin Laden World Trade Center bomb President Clinton American Embassy Iran missile or what ever... they have plenty of capacity and just released this information to trap the smart guys who can see through their plans, cos THEY'RE the really dangerous ones.. oh. oops.
All the big swiss banks as well as the post office bank have had Internet services for a while now, starting with Credit Suisse in 1996 IIRC. Almost everyone does Internet banking here, since often the charges are less. They all use 128 bit SSL, btw, as using anything less would get them into legal trouble. That's how it should be - government forcing you to use high grade encryption rather than banning it! -komet (an englishman in switzerland)
We do this with all our servers (medium-size ISP in Europe) and it works without any problems at all.
Just take a bit of the isolation off the wire of Pin 14 (usually, bit NOT ALWAYS green). There's a GROUND signal on either side of this; take the isolation off that as well. Then solder together and wrap with insulating tape. Works like a charm. The only thing you shouldn't do is tell the mobo to power off; it gets a bit confused then.
This is where pin 14 is: Looking down onto the contacts: (wires on rear) v--(plastic tab) === + + 0 # 0 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
# is pin 14. 0 is ground signal, should be a black wire.
That's not entirely true. Electricity, like data packets, move from A to B via connections. Now if A and B are not connected to each other, but A has a connection to C and D and B also connects to C and D, then you can move the electricity via C or D, where C and D will charge you a certain amount. The situation with bandwidth is exactly the same. Electrcal transmission line owners also have "routers" (those enormous switching stations you see by the road, not made by cisco). Bandwidth brokerage applies to ISPs which are not connected directly to each other. The same applies to electricity. Gas is the same, AFAIK.
Yes, but the difference is that your upstream provider is always the same one. The point of bandwidth brokerage is that you have several upstream providers, each bidding to get your traffic, and you choose where to send each packet based on cost, but also quality of service. You can also offer transit capacity to two ISPs which are connected to you but not to each other. This is of course already done, but usually by way of writing new peering agreements, signing them and returning them by fax, i.e. slow. A bandwidth brokerage would speed this process up and also offer a measure of automatability (no humans involved). And then of course, you can do all the things you can do in real commodity markets: futures, options and all the other derivative thingies that I don't understand a thing about. Anyway, that's my take on bandwidth brokerage. The article might of course be talking about something completely different.:)
With any luck (?), patent office incompetence may prove to be the downfall of the patent system. When the American Public @ Large realise that the patent office does these antics on a regular basis, with any luck someone will decide that patents are a Bad Thing and get rid of them, or at least knock a bit sense into the patent system. Of course, this could be a few centuries down the road...
IMHO, network admins are a completely different bunch of people than stock brokers. Who will do the dealing? Will network admins have to learn to phone with 3 people at once? Or will stock brokers learn about BGP4? Only time will tell...
I get the German version of Network Computing, and for the last few months they've always had some nice words to say about Linux. About every other issue has a picture of Tux in it somewhere. Network Computing is the kind of magazine you can cut articles out of to give to your manager:)
Slashdot Mirror
And another thing is that those older modems (say 9600 bps) are probably better at getting your data through crap phone lines. Modern V.34 modems more or less assume the phone system is gonna digitize your signal at the earliest possible opportunity.
Of course, I'm talking out of my rectum here. Does anyone have and hard evidence?
About the lightshow. I wonder, has anyone here on slashdot older than about 25 *NOT* built a light show with their home computer? Seems everyone I've met hooked up a few triacs to a parallel port or something. (I was wierd, I rectified the AC and used thyristors. :)
"ME T00"
(This comment brought to you by H4X0RK1D999@AOL.COM)
Seriously, please post it somewhere!
(Wouldn't it be cool if you could post to slashdot with attachments?)
Hey! That was my first program, too (although I ran it on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum)! You do realise I have a patent on the technology involved ("A New Method For Producing An Unlimited Number Of Consecutive Integers Using A Programmable Electronic Calculation Device")? Ok you owe me 100000$..
Do you have any special software you use to test the memory in this way? What is the exact method of memory testing? Anything open source?
This would be of great interest to me, and certainly to others too. I've bought duff memory several times in the past and proving (to oneself and the retailer) that it's broken is often very difficult.
Enormous ISPs have enough resources to handle things properly - basically, enough spare cash, which hopefully translates to enough servers, enough bandwidth, enough staff. They're also usually dirt cheap. On the other hand, that very fact that they're so damn cheap means that 90% of their customers are morons. It certainly does make a difference if you're on the same physical server as some college student with tons of pr0n on his site, with the added effect of inviting script kiddies to break into the server. (Of course, if the pr0n is good, and the server disk crashes, your data might be among the first to be recovered :) Customer support usually sucks, after all, too many cooks spoil the broth, esp. if all but one of the cooks don't have a clue what they're doing.
Then there are ISPs consisting of a 486 in someone's bedroom. These people (in general) work their asses off to offer good customer support, you can call their mobile phone at 3am on a Saturday, they are usually very competent, and your virtual server neighbours are a friendly bunch. Who care's if they're a bit more expensive? However, infrastructure costs money and these outfits don't have too much of that.
So, which one to choose? It's a hard question, and one without easy answers. I've found the best bet is someone in between the two: Some company with 4 years experience, 20 staff, refused several takeover bids from Netcom,... basically, not small, not huge.
What do you guys think? Experiences?
I'd just like to say this:
Certificate Authorities (CAs) *CANNOT* read your encrypted traffic, which seems to be what some people think. All they do is sign your PUBLIC key, the one available to everyone.
That's what a sign on my math profs. door said
According to my mom, all action figures have one thing in common: The people they depict DON'T ACTUALLY EXIST... :)
Um, AFAIK you're supposed to use the keyboard and mouse with the fingers on your HAND..
it occurs to me that the job of making this kind of predictions might be worse than being a lawyer! Think about it. You're paid insane amounts of money to talk bullshit. So far, same job as some lawyers. But after that, you're then paid even more wads of money to "update" your prediction, which usually means that in the end you end up getting paid for contradicting yourself and proving yourself a bad futurologist! How bad can that be?
Where exactly do these people get their predictions from? The bottom of a coffee cup perhaps, or the configuration of an elephant's latest dung? I think the 5 year thing comes from the communist era.. but 5 year plans came from the time when plans actually took 5 years to implement.
Anyway, what is required (IMHO) is a site that keeps tabs on all predictions ever made by an individual or a group, along with up-to-date information on what predictions came true. Then we could check who really can predict the future and who are just a bunch of morons who run a newspaper. As a side effect, we would know which pundits are actually time travellers in disguise...
Am I really the only one who doesn't use a chair at all? I've got a king size mattress on the floor and lay down on it. It's impossible to get back pain that way and it supports my arms too. The end fits about 5 laptops next to each other; you can also put monitors on the floor next to the mattress. The problem of not enough desk space is gone, too; essentially the whole floor acts as a desk! The thing I like best is that I can get naked and wrap myself in a continental quilt for those late night hacking sessions. It rocks!
I don't understand these guys. If you want your company name to convey power and greatness, call your company Power And Greatness, Inc.. And write me a check for $50000.
Don't believe this! It's misinformation intended to make us complacent, thinking that the NSA will miss our plans to Ussama bin Laden World Trade Center bomb President Clinton American Embassy Iran missile or what ever... they have plenty of capacity and just released this information to trap the smart guys who can see through their plans, cos THEY'RE the really dangerous ones.. oh. oops.
All the big swiss banks as well as the post office bank have had Internet services for a while now, starting with Credit Suisse in 1996 IIRC. Almost everyone does Internet banking here, since often the charges are less. They all use 128 bit SSL, btw, as using anything less would get them into legal trouble. That's how it should be - government forcing you to use high grade encryption rather than banning it!
-komet (an englishman in switzerland)
So I gather Cmdr. Data isn't under the General Public Licence? Bad, bad, bad...
We do this with all our servers (medium-size ISP in Europe) and it works without any problems at all.
Just take a bit of the isolation off the wire of Pin 14 (usually, bit NOT ALWAYS green). There's a GROUND signal on either side of this; take the isolation off that as well. Then solder together and wrap with insulating tape. Works like a charm. The only thing you shouldn't do is tell the mobo to power off; it gets a bit confused then.
This is where pin 14 is:
Looking down onto the contacts: (wires on rear)
v--(plastic tab)
===
+ + 0 # 0 + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + +
# is pin 14. 0 is ground signal, should be a black wire.
That's not entirely true. Electricity, like data packets, move from A to B via connections. Now if A and B are not connected to each other, but A has a connection to C and D and B also connects to C and D, then you can move the electricity via C or D, where C and D will charge you a certain amount. The situation with bandwidth is exactly the same. Electrcal transmission line owners also have "routers" (those enormous switching stations you see by the road, not made by cisco).
Bandwidth brokerage applies to ISPs which are not connected directly to each other. The same applies to electricity. Gas is the same, AFAIK.
Yes, but the difference is that your upstream provider is always the same one. The point of bandwidth brokerage is that you have several upstream providers, each bidding to get your traffic, and you choose where to send each packet based on cost, but also quality of service. You can also offer transit capacity to two ISPs which are connected to you but not to each other. This is of course already done, but usually by way of writing new peering agreements, signing them and returning them by fax, i.e. slow. A bandwidth brokerage would speed this process up and also offer a measure of automatability (no humans involved). And then of course, you can do all the things you can do in real commodity markets: futures, options and all the other derivative thingies that I don't understand a thing about. :)
Anyway, that's my take on bandwidth brokerage. The article might of course be talking about something completely different.
With any luck (?), patent office incompetence may prove to be the downfall of the patent system. When the American Public @ Large realise that the patent office does these antics on a regular basis, with any luck someone will decide that patents are a Bad Thing and get rid of them, or at least knock a bit sense into the patent system. Of course, this could be a few centuries down the road...
IMHO, network admins are a completely different bunch of people than stock brokers. Who will do the dealing? Will network admins have to learn to phone with 3 people at once? Or will stock brokers learn about BGP4? Only time will tell...
I get the German version of Network Computing, and for the last few months they've always had some nice words to say about Linux. About every other issue has a picture of Tux in it somewhere. Network Computing is the kind of magazine you can cut articles out of to give to your manager :)
Where do you get spray paint that converts beige metal into translucent plastic on contact?