I'm getting seriously fed up of this. You are not paying even in the same ballpark of the actual cost of supplying your full connection's worth of bandwidth for an entire month. If you want to use that much bandwidth, buy a leased line. If you don't like that you get more kb/s than you can use all the time, move back to a 56kb/s modem.
Why on earth the US ISPs have tried telling you that you can just use as much bandwidth as you want, for so long, I'll never understand. Comcast's model of "this much, then we write to you, then we cut you off if you do it again" is absurd, doubly so given they don't provide any easy metering, but that doesn't change the reality of what you're paying for vs what you wish your money covered.
> If we all switch to ipv6 now, then everyone on the existing internet has incurred a cost,
Erm, no? Okay, so there's a cost for the sys-admin time at backbones, DNS servers, and a few other places that need to be adapted. Customers out at the edges don't need to worry about this, IPv4 will continue to work well until they're ready to upgrade.
Why does everyone see these as mutually exclusive options?
Or AJAX. A technology that is frequently used to open a connection to the server and then hold it open on the off chance the server might want to send you some data.
Not to mention every single idea that's been shot at the design stage because "configuring tunnelling through NAT is too hard".
What amazes me is that people scream about 250GB download limits (seriously, WTF are you doing with your connection?), but NATing large parts of the address space? Yeah, sure, why not, I mean there are no applications I want to use that require server sockets, and I'm certain that's not because they're either shot at the design stage or use absurd black magic involving polling the server for data.
Now, my ADSL service comes with a 256kb/s upstream, so it isn't going to exactly withstand a slashdotting, but for running a web app that I can connect to from outside, or letting me SSH into different boxes without having to assign non-standard ports to each...
Please, PLEASE stop with the NAT. Do you know how long it takes to explain to someone WHY they can't run a web server on their computer, why 192.168.0.blah is not the IP address I need from them, where to get the IP address for their modem, why the two are different, and how to even start on tunneling traffic back through.
Can we please try actually SOLVING the problem rather than just duct taping the same mess back together again? The only thing stopping consumer IPv6 takeup is lack of routers, and that Windows XP doesn't support it by default, we need to start getting the router manufacturers to support IPv6 and the rest will all follow.
They don't even have to be that thorough, EULA and all that, they can ban you, your credit card, and your IP all in one go just for spamming, if they want. Heck, without double checking I'd be the EULA lets them ban you just because they feel like it (most EULAs do, because no-one reads them and it helps stop arguments over "fair" later).
The issue is that a lot of this can be automated. Traffic can be routed through compromised systems (good grief, it's not like their spam-bots are lag critical), accounts can be paid for by time cards. It ends up a bit like whack-a-mole; get rid of one gold seller, and up pops another. Also, keep in mind these guys can happily operate 24 hours a day. Should Mythic be assigning (at least) 3 staff on rotation to just handling gold sellers? Could 3 staff even manage to cover all locations on all servers?
There's rumours of Mythic banning gold buyers in the future, and that should both be much more effective as the gold-seller's audience will quickly be either banned, or develop a lot more caution.
The trade itself isn't so inherently bad. It cheapens the experience and skews the economy, but both are more "meh" than "argh". Personally, I think Everquest was on to a good idea by having a "gold trade enabled" server where it was officially an option, for everyone who wanted to do it, without messing with the majority of the game.
The real issue comes from the spam, the account theft, the gold farmers, and basically all the side-effects of the trade.
> what, you think that the person isn't going to check, "Save the password to my digital signature?"
I haven't. Erm. Yeah, totally agreed, most people will check that box:) Well, in reality, I think most people will pull the password off it, but same net result.
I'd point out, academics don't like Wikipedia references, admissions are a completely different department (and we don't really like them, or the rest of the admin, either).
The basic theory is sound, the business models right now are a nonsense though. Until multi-terabyte drives become common enough that I can download movies and not even think about the disk usage, they're generally going to be not worth the hassle to keep.
To rent may work, but I haven't actually seen anywhere that will give me a rental for a film (which is odd, in retrospect, I'm sure I've heard of places that were going to offer it). Even then, tying up my Internet connection while it downloads isn't going to make me all that happy.
Mostly what I'm really getting at is that all the people standing around saying "Oh, the PS4 won't have a drive, why would it when you can download everything" are deeply out of touch with the reality of the situation.
DVDs are dying! Blu-Ray is going nowhere! Why would anyone buy a real physical disk when for almost as much money you could use your limited bandwith allowance downloading a copy which will last unti the hard drive, or the console dies. Oh, and you don't get the extras. Erm, and it's unclear what happens if something goes wrong with the download. Oh, yeah, and you can probably download about 10 before you have to delete one.
Possibly it's mostly an issue because I get so much spam, but the most useful people for me to whitelist (work addresses) spammers frequently use to e-mail me, presumably because they figure they're on the same domain and there's a good chance I'll have whitelisted them.
Customer support centres are going to get spam, nothing to be done about that, BUT it dealing with e-mail doesn't interrupt what they're doing, it IS what they're doing. On the other hand, if I'm coding and see the "Hey, you got e-mail" thing wave, I generally want to check it soonish to make sure it's nothing critical, which interrupts what I am doing.
Contract companies are about the worst case scenario, however that doesn't mean MOST people wouldn't benefit.
Maybe not solve, but I imagine most people get the vast majority of their e-mail, and ALL critical e-mail, from people they know in advance. This means that "uncertain" e-mail can be ignored safely for significant lengths of time, confident in the knowledge that if your boss e-mails you, you'll still get notification ASAP.
As a big fan of signed e-mail, I see something like this:
Anything signed by someone I trust, arrives in my inbox. Anything signed but not by someone I trust, goes into a holding box from which I can fish e-mails I want. Anything not signed, or with a corrupted signature is rejected as unacceptable at the MTA level.
Now, anything arriving in my inbox can only be spam if someone I know has a hacked system, which should be rare AND I can contact them to tell them to fix it, because I know who it is from the signature (unlike e-mail viruses that could be practically anyone I know). This means that I know when I get e-mail in my inbox, it's worth me looking at.
Unexpected e-mails are still an issue, and may get lost, but frankly that happens anyway (I get somewhere over 200 spam per day, only a couple of dozen of which make it through enough filters for me to even glance at the subject line).
Filtering could be multi-stage, too; regular inbox for trusted people, a secondary inbox for people who I have been introduced to (for example, by a mailing list), then signed but unrecognised, and then everything else.
I'll take 10mb/s burstable over 56kb/s sustained any day...
It's actually more like paying road tax, and then discovering there are other cars on the road because you're only paying for a small fraction of the total road.
Hell, I have a surname I have to spell for people, and a quick Google leads to the conclusion that I have my own band, regularly do shows of my art, and hold degrees in Computer Science and Medicine. Suffice to say, most of that isn't accurate.
Sooner or later someone (university admissions, potentional employer, whatever) is going to get themselves badly sued over this, and frankly it serves them right for making snap judgments based on what amounts to unproven rumours.
The hate tends to be caused by finance people earning insane amounts of money. It therefore doesn't seem to unlikely that some techies go "Wait, can I get that money too?", does it?
Areed. I spent 3 months trying to find a good solution. If you've got buckets of money, NxCore ( http://www.nanex.net/NxCore/NxCore.htm - prices start at $500/month) and any of the brokers that support a FIX API (for which you can expect to pay a hefty fee, too; Interactive Brokers (IB - http://www.interactivebrokers.com/ ) for example charge a one time $500 fee, OANDA ( http://www.oanda.com/ ) charge $600 for the first two months then an ongoing subscription fee if you trade $12mil/month or something).
For those people not wanting to pour money into it, as good as you can get is Interactive Broker's Trader Workstation (TWS), and JBookTrader (http://code.google.com/p/jbooktrader/) or a custom trading platform that talks to their API. TWS is a pain that lacks automated login (for security reasons) and auto-exits every 24 hours (for... err... security reasons?), but it gets the job done. Data feed can be an issue still, though; IB offer up to 100 symbols at a time, and a basic historical data service, but some people dislike the fact they drop price ticks during busy market times (over 10 prices per second) and the historical data service is paced so you can only do a limited of number of requests (about one every ten seconds I believe).
In short though, AC is right; use Windows, it may well be less painful. Really.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, had forgotten of the unbundlers, good point. Not here yet, but apparently next month...
I'm getting seriously fed up of this. You are not paying even in the same ballpark of the actual cost of supplying your full connection's worth of bandwidth for an entire month. If you want to use that much bandwidth, buy a leased line. If you don't like that you get more kb/s than you can use all the time, move back to a 56kb/s modem.
Why on earth the US ISPs have tried telling you that you can just use as much bandwidth as you want, for so long, I'll never understand. Comcast's model of "this much, then we write to you, then we cut you off if you do it again" is absurd, doubly so given they don't provide any easy metering, but that doesn't change the reality of what you're paying for vs what you wish your money covered.
> which don't provide unlimited plans: Australia, New Zealand.
, UK,...
> If we all switch to ipv6 now, then everyone on the existing internet has incurred a cost,
Erm, no? Okay, so there's a cost for the sys-admin time at backbones, DNS servers, and a few other places that need to be adapted. Customers out at the edges don't need to worry about this, IPv4 will continue to work well until they're ready to upgrade.
Why does everyone see these as mutually exclusive options?
Or AJAX. A technology that is frequently used to open a connection to the server and then hold it open on the off chance the server might want to send you some data.
Not to mention every single idea that's been shot at the design stage because "configuring tunnelling through NAT is too hard".
What amazes me is that people scream about 250GB download limits (seriously, WTF are you doing with your connection?), but NATing large parts of the address space? Yeah, sure, why not, I mean there are no applications I want to use that require server sockets, and I'm certain that's not because they're either shot at the design stage or use absurd black magic involving polling the server for data.
Mine doesn't.
Now, my ADSL service comes with a 256kb/s upstream, so it isn't going to exactly withstand a slashdotting, but for running a web app that I can connect to from outside, or letting me SSH into different boxes without having to assign non-standard ports to each...
Please, PLEASE stop with the NAT. Do you know how long it takes to explain to someone WHY they can't run a web server on their computer, why 192.168.0.blah is not the IP address I need from them, where to get the IP address for their modem, why the two are different, and how to even start on tunneling traffic back through.
Can we please try actually SOLVING the problem rather than just duct taping the same mess back together again? The only thing stopping consumer IPv6 takeup is lack of routers, and that Windows XP doesn't support it by default, we need to start getting the router manufacturers to support IPv6 and the rest will all follow.
They don't even have to be that thorough, EULA and all that, they can ban you, your credit card, and your IP all in one go just for spamming, if they want. Heck, without double checking I'd be the EULA lets them ban you just because they feel like it (most EULAs do, because no-one reads them and it helps stop arguments over "fair" later).
The issue is that a lot of this can be automated. Traffic can be routed through compromised systems (good grief, it's not like their spam-bots are lag critical), accounts can be paid for by time cards. It ends up a bit like whack-a-mole; get rid of one gold seller, and up pops another. Also, keep in mind these guys can happily operate 24 hours a day. Should Mythic be assigning (at least) 3 staff on rotation to just handling gold sellers? Could 3 staff even manage to cover all locations on all servers?
There's rumours of Mythic banning gold buyers in the future, and that should both be much more effective as the gold-seller's audience will quickly be either banned, or develop a lot more caution.
The trade itself isn't so inherently bad. It cheapens the experience and skews the economy, but both are more "meh" than "argh". Personally, I think Everquest was on to a good idea by having a "gold trade enabled" server where it was officially an option, for everyone who wanted to do it, without messing with the majority of the game.
The real issue comes from the spam, the account theft, the gold farmers, and basically all the side-effects of the trade.
Alas, I'm a strange developer/sys-admin/support person cross-over, so I can't...
> what, you think that the person isn't going to check, "Save the password to my digital signature?"
I haven't. Erm. Yeah, totally agreed, most people will check that box :) Well, in reality, I think most people will pull the password off it, but same net result.
I'd point out, academics don't like Wikipedia references, admissions are a completely different department (and we don't really like them, or the rest of the admin, either).
The basic theory is sound, the business models right now are a nonsense though. Until multi-terabyte drives become common enough that I can download movies and not even think about the disk usage, they're generally going to be not worth the hassle to keep.
To rent may work, but I haven't actually seen anywhere that will give me a rental for a film (which is odd, in retrospect, I'm sure I've heard of places that were going to offer it). Even then, tying up my Internet connection while it downloads isn't going to make me all that happy.
Mostly what I'm really getting at is that all the people standing around saying "Oh, the PS4 won't have a drive, why would it when you can download everything" are deeply out of touch with the reality of the situation.
> With the DRM on DVD a defeated minion of darkness, and BluRay certain to go the same way
AnyDVD HD ( http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html ) will let you play fairly much any Blu-Ray disk, irrespective of HDMI requirements or region coding.
DVDs are dying! Blu-Ray is going nowhere! Why would anyone buy a real physical disk when for almost as much money you could use your limited bandwith allowance downloading a copy which will last unti the hard drive, or the console dies. Oh, and you don't get the extras. Erm, and it's unclear what happens if something goes wrong with the download. Oh, yeah, and you can probably download about 10 before you have to delete one.
WTF?
Possibly it's mostly an issue because I get so much spam, but the most useful people for me to whitelist (work addresses) spammers frequently use to e-mail me, presumably because they figure they're on the same domain and there's a good chance I'll have whitelisted them.
Customer support centres are going to get spam, nothing to be done about that, BUT it dealing with e-mail doesn't interrupt what they're doing, it IS what they're doing. On the other hand, if I'm coding and see the "Hey, you got e-mail" thing wave, I generally want to check it soonish to make sure it's nothing critical, which interrupts what I am doing.
Contract companies are about the worst case scenario, however that doesn't mean MOST people wouldn't benefit.
Maybe not solve, but I imagine most people get the vast majority of their e-mail, and ALL critical e-mail, from people they know in advance. This means that "uncertain" e-mail can be ignored safely for significant lengths of time, confident in the knowledge that if your boss e-mails you, you'll still get notification ASAP.
Make sense?
That's because there's very little actual use of SPF. I can do with it X.509 certs (Thawte do free e-mail certs at https://www.thawte.com/secure-email/personal-email-certificates/index.html - highly recommended), or GPG, as well, but the problem is getting uptake high enough for it to work.
As a big fan of signed e-mail, I see something like this:
Anything signed by someone I trust, arrives in my inbox. Anything signed but not by someone I trust, goes into a holding box from which I can fish e-mails I want. Anything not signed, or with a corrupted signature is rejected as unacceptable at the MTA level.
Now, anything arriving in my inbox can only be spam if someone I know has a hacked system, which should be rare AND I can contact them to tell them to fix it, because I know who it is from the signature (unlike e-mail viruses that could be practically anyone I know). This means that I know when I get e-mail in my inbox, it's worth me looking at.
Unexpected e-mails are still an issue, and may get lost, but frankly that happens anyway (I get somewhere over 200 spam per day, only a couple of dozen of which make it through enough filters for me to even glance at the subject line).
Filtering could be multi-stage, too; regular inbox for trusted people, a secondary inbox for people who I have been introduced to (for example, by a mailing list), then signed but unrecognised, and then everything else.
I'll take 10mb/s burstable over 56kb/s sustained any day...
It's actually more like paying road tax, and then discovering there are other cars on the road because you're only paying for a small fraction of the total road.
Hell, I have a surname I have to spell for people, and a quick Google leads to the conclusion that I have my own band, regularly do shows of my art, and hold degrees in Computer Science and Medicine. Suffice to say, most of that isn't accurate.
Sooner or later someone (university admissions, potentional employer, whatever) is going to get themselves badly sued over this, and frankly it serves them right for making snap judgments based on what amounts to unproven rumours.
The hate tends to be caused by finance people earning insane amounts of money. It therefore doesn't seem to unlikely that some techies go "Wait, can I get that money too?", does it?
Areed. I spent 3 months trying to find a good solution. If you've got buckets of money, NxCore ( http://www.nanex.net/NxCore/NxCore.htm - prices start at $500/month) and any of the brokers that support a FIX API (for which you can expect to pay a hefty fee, too; Interactive Brokers (IB - http://www.interactivebrokers.com/ ) for example charge a one time $500 fee, OANDA ( http://www.oanda.com/ ) charge $600 for the first two months then an ongoing subscription fee if you trade $12mil/month or something).
For those people not wanting to pour money into it, as good as you can get is Interactive Broker's Trader Workstation (TWS), and JBookTrader (http://code.google.com/p/jbooktrader/) or a custom trading platform that talks to their API. TWS is a pain that lacks automated login (for security reasons) and auto-exits every 24 hours (for... err... security reasons?), but it gets the job done. Data feed can be an issue still, though; IB offer up to 100 symbols at a time, and a basic historical data service, but some people dislike the fact they drop price ticks during busy market times (over 10 prices per second) and the historical data service is paced so you can only do a limited of number of requests (about one every ten seconds I believe).
In short though, AC is right; use Windows, it may well be less painful. Really.