I do work on friends computers for cash, flat rate regardless of time involved and if I have the parts laying around I throw those in free.
The coolest barter I did was for a Hemp clothing store. I did their website and maintained it for 6 months and in return I got: Hemp sweaters Hemp t-shirts Hemp Jeans A leather beanbag chair A battery powered bong (my fav!) A sweet collection of pipes Incense Hemp soap Various other odds and ends
I think it worked out well, got his store online and I got bunch of killer gear. The store owner also introduced me to one of his manufacturers and I did their website also - again a whole bunch of Hemp clothes for me! When you see what these things cost in the store, I think it was well worth the barter:)
**Disclaimer: This applies in north america, I can't speak for other places.**
I work for a cable company and I can explain why you see commercials even though you "pay" for the service. It's quite simple actually: If you live near enough to where a given broadcast is coming from you can pick it up using a plain antenna. If you don't live close enough then you need a really big antenna or you won't be able to get the broadcast.
People seem to forget that the cable company doesn't actually provide the content that you receive. They are basically providing you with a huge antenna system so you can pull in programming from further away then you could with a regular arial.
Networks make their money by selling advertising time. This money pays for the shows they produce plus operating costs etc. The cable company has to buy rights from the networks to air their signal and some of them are pretty expensive.
The cable company doesn't get paid for the commercials you watch. Their job is to provide the system that brings you the broadcast from abroad. This system costs money to support and maintain and this is why you pay for cable television and still have to watch commercials.
If the cable company had to produce the content themselves you can bet your cable bill would be much much higher than it is now. -----------------
There is a fundamental difference between "unlimited access" and "unlimited bandwidth". A good parallel I think would be the highway system (cars make a great parallel to computers). I can legally hop on the highway and drive for as long as I want(access). I cannot legally hop on the highway and take up every lane on it(bandwidth). What they mean by "unlimited access" means you can surf or play games etc all month long without running out of hours because there are no limits on time used in a month.
ISP's (as several people have already posted) base their bandwidth needs on an average user. This is common sense - you don't send 6 delivery people to drop off 1 letter. Paying for too much bandwidth would be a waste and likely result in inflated rates as well. The money is better spent maintaining or upgrading the network.
I work for a fairly large high speed provider and when we go after a "severe" case it's not someone who's downloaded 40gb of data in a month even if our limit is 15gb. Believe it or not but there are users out there who somehow manage to hit well over 120GB's(and more) in a calendar month. These are the people that are using well above and beyond what would be their "fair" share of the available bandwidth. These people are pushing their connections 24/7 which is fine - but they are using every bit of their available pipe - which is not so fine, and it impacts other users as a result - just like if you were to block up every lane on the highway.
If you want a QOS (Quality of Service) that allows you to use a full 1.5mb for 24/7 of every month with no limits then I would suggest you lease a T1 line and pay what the ISP's are paying for your "unlimited" connection. I think your tune will change quickly enough. ---------------
Re:When will it go back to the CPU?
on
Video Card History
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I like the paradigm the way that it is for the moment. Considering if they build all of this into our cpu's then any major graphics advance would probably require changing out your mobo and cpu - and probably cost considerably more. Using expansion cards makes sense and it leaves the owner free to use virtually whatever combination of hardware they require (ie: some cards come with video out and no video in) and lets you pick the features that you need in terms of cheaper cards that don't feature "extra" outputs or inputs. It also avoids you having to rip your entire system apart for one upgrade. Just pop out the card and drop in the new one. It will be a long long time before they can produce a really successful "all-in-one" solution for cpu/graphics processing. -------------------
I wonder if there are still game servers out there? Does anyone know if people still play the original TF? That was THE game that got me into online FPS. It's an icon in it's own right.
I don't personally feel they came off as "whiny" to me they came off as "greedy" which is way worse. We're talking about a band who has made millions and millions of dollars over the years. I bought several of their albums and t-shirts etc back in the day however now I'm not so inclined to hand them any more of my "hard earned" money. The media should have kept their mouths shut about the file trading online - I feel that all the hype about it is what really made it popular in the first place. Metallica jumped right in there and started pointing out THEIR OWN FANS to try and get some control over their material - for what reason? Control over their music that's already been pirated? The stuff that got leaked from the studio is their own problem - nothing to do with the people who were fingered out on napster by them. If they were really pro-bootleg they wouldn't have made the fuss that they did about it. When you make music and it is popular it is going to be hard to control - fact of life boys. I guess what I'm getting at is they killed their image as hardcore by complaining in their versace suits to the courts and this made me not want to pay them for their work anymore. They've made enough money to easily set themselves up for generations to come and going out of their way to kick the people who set them up like this is just plain wrong. This new change in their business model is like hitting a tree with a car and driving away like it never happened - well it did and I know many haven't forgotten. I think they've jumped the shark. RIP Metallica.
Southern Ontario as I know it wasn't hit that badly. The Cable ISP I work for (which shall remain nameless) had maybe 200 - 300 infected out of 80,000. I say those numbers were pretty good. They were mostly snuffed out in a few days. We just dropped their modems and waited for them to call in and help them remove it. No filtering was really needed because it didn't each much bandwidth. As of right now my modem light still blinks for the arp requests but it has diminished quite a bit from the frenzy it was in for the first couple of days.
I'm sorry to rant a bit but I work for a broadband ISP and I was a customer of that ISP for years previous to my employment there so I really am not being biased.
The code red worm has nothing to do with qwest.
QWest did not author the worm nor did they release it to the public in the first place.
The majority of the traffic caused by the worm was ARP traffic which uses minimal bandwidth, perhaps 3 - 9 kbps (more likely 3). Secondly most broadband ISP's or even DSL likely include a clause pertaining to running servers on a residential connection meaning "we do not permit you to use a server on the modem" so for those who were infected they were likely already in breach of the user agreement anyhow. If QWest went to the trouble of informing those who were infected and helping them recover then I would consider that excellent service. As someone in another post said "I could understand if there was a storm and the connection went down for a couple of hours" how is this much different? Probably 75% of the code red infected machines were being run by people who are morons and shouldn't have been running IIS in the first place. A real sys admin would have had it patched before or would have recovered quickly and with a patched system. This has nothing to do with any ISP's ask the idiots who ran infectable and poorly maintained machines for your money back!
Who's going to own up to something like this?
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 1
Surely the person who was savvy enough to write this understands the level of breach this is. To hijack probably more than a quarter million servers worldwide has got to be one heck of a jail sentence.
Re:@Home not blocking port 80 yet
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 1
That address only scans for open news server relays because of a rash of problems with usenet. It doesn't look for anything else.
We're seeing approximatly 1000-1500 arp requests per minute on any given node at the cable isp I work for as of 11am this morning, could be more by now. We aren't looking at filtering port 80 however. My receive light has been solid for 3 days because of this. Fortunatly my linux box isn't vulnerable but it's sure filling the logs nicely.
That was the computer that started this obsession of mine:) I can remember when I got the external 5 1/2" floppy drive with dos 1.0a (or b) that came with it. I ran it with no drives for a good year at least however. I used to have it hooked up to the tv and play games on it and when the joysticks broke I started coding in basic since I couldn't play the games. I must have been 6 at the time. Where does the time go? When I think about it I can't remember what happened to it. But then I got it when I was 6 yrs old so I can't really blame myself for that one.
I'm assuming you're talking about the MTU speed patch which is provided by Speed Guide. First of all you should not need any patch to be applied to a new install of windows except of course the usual microsloth updates to fix the browser bugs etc etc. It only corrects the MTU settings if you had them optimized for a dialup connection. Secondly their main purpose is to provide you with Internet access, not PC Support. They will trouble shoot your connection if it does not work and help you with your email even to be nice. To make an easy to grasp parallel imagine you're driving down the highway when your car encounters engine trouble. Your car will now only go 30mph but the limit is 90mph: Do you?:
A: Call the people who maintain the highway and ask that they fix your car?
-or-
B: Take your car to a mechanic and get it repaired?
This is common sense.
Even though some of those techs may be genuinly stupid, they really should not have ever supported you with that patch anyway.
The whole province did not go out because of the fiber cut. I work another @Home MSO in Ontario and we had internet access thanks to the fact that we do not use @Home's ultra crappy network for DHCP anymore. In fact the only problem we had due to that cut was a loss of email and Excite Homepage services (hardly any of our sub's use newsgroups so nobody noticed those). They did also reroute the traffic but anything going to @Home did not route (too bad for Rogers). @Home in itself does not know how to run a network hence the tremendous drop in its stock price over the past year. They have a hard enough time keeping their mail servers running. The only reason Rogers didn't make this move sooner is because AT&T canada owns most of them and they also happen to own @Home. When I first started with the company I'm at they told me the DHCP is in California. I literally laughed out loud in the training room. Even being new out of college I realized that having your true headend 3000 miles away is a huge mistake. Clearly the idea of setting up a network like this was a pipedream thought up by know-nothing marketing people who don't understand the technology. Rogers has only smartened up after they lost a ton of customers to sympatico. The huge outages a year ago were a rather large sign that this was not going to work and the company I work for (even though sometimes they are pretty dumb too) got the hint and dropped @Home as a DHCP server. Personally I think @Home should rot in hell and all the MSO's that are partenered should break off and do their own thing. The @Home name nowadays on the internet is (to be polite) not a good one.
I work for a fair sized cable isp and on occasion a router somewhere between "us" and "them" goes down. The traffic may get rerouted but the new route does not necessarily work too well. Packets only have so much "time to live" or ttl and quite often the new route takes way too long to make it to its destination without totally timing out and getting discarded by some router along the path. Personally I think the problem lies with the isp. ISP's pay for "X" bandwidth anything beyond that they're out of luck and what ends up happening are routing loops where the upstream isp simply starts bouncing data back to the isp when it's over its limit. Outside of that the sheer size of the internet now makes it incredibly complex compared to what they were dealing with when it was the ARPAnet. Also when you think about it if you were to poke out the center of a spiderweb sure you could get from one side to another still but you have to take a longer way (and in the Internets case a much longer way) around. I sincerly hope that IPv6 does all that it's supposed to. Redundancy is still there (barely) but real redundancy means that for every route there must be a second route that goes the same way and that's not economically feasible for a lot of companies and that is what pretty much constitutes the Internet since it was "commercialized". Try explaining to the company CFO why you need 6 cisco UBR's to manage 3UBR's worth of traffic. It probably all comes down to dollars and cents in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
I do work on friends computers for cash, flat rate regardless of time involved and if I have the parts laying around I throw those in free.
:)
The coolest barter I did was for a Hemp clothing store. I did their website and maintained it for 6 months and in return I got:
Hemp sweaters
Hemp t-shirts
Hemp Jeans
A leather beanbag chair
A battery powered bong (my fav!)
A sweet collection of pipes
Incense
Hemp soap
Various other odds and ends
I think it worked out well, got his store online and I got bunch of killer gear. The store owner also introduced me to one of his manufacturers and I did their website also - again a whole bunch of Hemp clothes for me! When you see what these things cost in the store, I think it was well worth the barter
-----------
**Disclaimer: This applies in north america, I can't speak for other places.**
I work for a cable company and I can explain why you see commercials even though you "pay" for the service. It's quite simple actually: If you live near enough to where a given broadcast is coming from you can pick it up using a plain antenna. If you don't live close enough then you need a really big antenna or you won't be able to get the broadcast.
People seem to forget that the cable company doesn't actually provide the content that you receive. They are basically providing you with a huge antenna system so you can pull in programming from further away then you could with a regular arial.
Networks make their money by selling advertising time. This money pays for the shows they produce plus operating costs etc. The cable company has to buy rights from the networks to air their signal and some of them are pretty expensive.
The cable company doesn't get paid for the commercials you watch. Their job is to provide the system that brings you the broadcast from abroad. This system costs money to support and maintain and this is why you pay for cable television and still have to watch commercials.
If the cable company had to produce the content themselves you can bet your cable bill would be much much higher than it is now.
-----------------
There is a fundamental difference between "unlimited access" and "unlimited bandwidth". A good parallel I think would be the highway system (cars make a great parallel to computers). I can legally hop on the highway and drive for as long as I want(access). I cannot legally hop on the highway and take up every lane on it(bandwidth). What they mean by "unlimited access" means you can surf or play games etc all month long without running out of hours because there are no limits on time used in a month.
ISP's (as several people have already posted) base their bandwidth needs on an average user. This is common sense - you don't send 6 delivery people to drop off 1 letter. Paying for too much bandwidth would be a waste and likely result in inflated rates as well. The money is better spent maintaining or upgrading the network.
I work for a fairly large high speed provider and when we go after a "severe" case it's not someone who's downloaded 40gb of data in a month even if our limit is 15gb. Believe it or not but there are users out there who somehow manage to hit well over 120GB's(and more) in a calendar month. These are the people that are using well above and beyond what would be their "fair" share of the available bandwidth. These people are pushing their connections 24/7 which is fine - but they are using every bit of their available pipe - which is not so fine, and it impacts other users as a result - just like if you were to block up every lane on the highway.
If you want a QOS (Quality of Service) that allows you to use a full 1.5mb for 24/7 of every month with no limits then I would suggest you lease a T1 line and pay what the ISP's are paying for your "unlimited" connection. I think your tune will change quickly enough.
---------------
I like the paradigm the way that it is for the moment. Considering if they build all of this into our cpu's then any major graphics advance would probably require changing out your mobo and cpu - and probably cost considerably more. Using expansion cards makes sense and it leaves the owner free to use virtually whatever combination of hardware they require (ie: some cards come with video out and no video in) and lets you pick the features that you need in terms of cheaper cards that don't feature "extra" outputs or inputs. It also avoids you having to rip your entire system apart for one upgrade. Just pop out the card and drop in the new one. It will be a long long time before they can produce a really successful "all-in-one" solution for cpu/graphics processing.
-------------------
I wonder if there are still game servers out there? Does anyone know if people still play the original TF? That was THE game that got me into online FPS. It's an icon in it's own right.
----
Those boards are excellent. I'm using one right now and it's probably the best system I've ever owned.
I don't personally feel they came off as "whiny" to me they came off as "greedy" which is way worse.
We're talking about a band who has made millions and millions of dollars over the years. I bought several of their albums and t-shirts etc back in the day however now I'm not so inclined to hand them any more of my "hard earned" money.
The media should have kept their mouths shut about the file trading online - I feel that all the hype about it is what really made it popular in the first place. Metallica jumped right in there and started pointing out THEIR OWN FANS to try and get some control over their material - for what reason? Control over their music that's already been pirated? The stuff that got leaked from the studio is their own problem - nothing to do with the people who were fingered out on napster by them. If they were really pro-bootleg they wouldn't have made the fuss that they did about it. When you make music and it is popular it is going to be hard to control - fact of life boys. I guess what I'm getting at is they killed their image as hardcore by complaining in their versace suits to the courts and this made me not want to pay them for their work anymore. They've made enough money to easily set themselves up for generations to come and going out of their way to kick the people who set them up like this is just plain wrong. This new change in their business model is like hitting a tree with a car and driving away like it never happened - well it did and I know many haven't forgotten. I think they've jumped the shark. RIP Metallica.
---------------------
Southern Ontario as I know it wasn't hit that badly. The Cable ISP I work for (which shall remain nameless) had maybe 200 - 300 infected out of 80,000. I say those numbers were pretty good. They were mostly snuffed out in a few days. We just dropped their modems and waited for them to call in and help them remove it. No filtering was really needed because it didn't each much bandwidth. As of right now my modem light still blinks for the arp requests but it has diminished quite a bit from the frenzy it was in for the first couple of days.
I'm sorry to rant a bit but I work for a broadband ISP and I was a customer of that ISP for years previous to my employment there so I really am not being biased.
The code red worm has nothing to do with qwest.
QWest did not author the worm nor did they release it to the public in the first place.
The majority of the traffic caused by the worm was ARP traffic which uses minimal bandwidth, perhaps 3 - 9 kbps (more likely 3). Secondly most broadband ISP's or even DSL likely include a clause pertaining to running servers on a residential connection meaning "we do not permit you to use a server on the modem" so for those who were infected they were likely already in breach of the user agreement anyhow. If QWest went to the trouble of informing those who were infected and helping them recover then I would consider that excellent service. As someone in another post said "I could understand if there was a storm and the connection went down for a couple of hours" how is this much different? Probably 75% of the code red infected machines were being run by people who are morons and shouldn't have been running IIS in the first place. A real sys admin would have had it patched before or would have recovered quickly and with a patched system. This has nothing to do with any ISP's ask the idiots who ran infectable and poorly maintained machines for your money back!
Surely the person who was savvy enough to write this understands the level of breach this is. To hijack probably more than a quarter million servers worldwide has got to be one heck of a jail sentence.
That address only scans for open news server relays because of a rash of problems with usenet. It doesn't look for anything else.
We're seeing approximatly 1000-1500 arp requests per minute on any given node at the cable isp I work for as of 11am this morning, could be more by now. We aren't looking at filtering port 80 however. My receive light has been solid for 3 days because of this. Fortunatly my linux box isn't vulnerable but it's sure filling the logs nicely.
That was the computer that started this obsession of mine :) I can remember when I got the external 5 1/2" floppy drive with dos 1.0a (or b) that came with it. I ran it with no drives for a good year at least however. I used to have it hooked up to the tv and play games on it and when the joysticks broke I started coding in basic since I couldn't play the games. I must have been 6 at the time. Where does the time go? When I think about it I can't remember what happened to it. But then I got it when I was 6 yrs old so I can't really blame myself for that one.
I'm assuming you're talking about the MTU speed patch which is provided by Speed Guide. First of all you should not need any patch to be applied to a new install of windows except of course the usual microsloth updates to fix the browser bugs etc etc. It only corrects the MTU settings if you had them optimized for a dialup connection. Secondly their main purpose is to provide you with Internet access, not PC Support. They will trouble shoot your connection if it does not work and help you with your email even to be nice. To make an easy to grasp parallel imagine you're driving down the highway when your car encounters engine trouble. Your car will now only go 30mph but the limit is 90mph: Do you?: A: Call the people who maintain the highway and ask that they fix your car? -or- B: Take your car to a mechanic and get it repaired? This is common sense. Even though some of those techs may be genuinly stupid, they really should not have ever supported you with that patch anyway.
COLOR1="\[\033[0;36m\]"O LOR5\w$COLOR2)$COLOR1:> $COLOR4"
COLOR2="\[\033[1;31m\]"
COLOR3="\[\033[0;36m\]"
COLOR4="\[\033[1;37m\]"
COLOR5="\[\033[1;33m\]"
COLOR6="\[\033[1;34m\]"
if [ "$TERM" = "ansi" ]; then
PS1='`whoami`@`hostname`:`pwd`>'
else
PS1="$COLOR2($COLOR3\u$COLOR6@$COLOR3\h$COLOR2:$C
fi
The whole province did not go out because of the fiber cut. I work another @Home MSO in Ontario and we had internet access thanks to the fact that we do not use @Home's ultra crappy network for DHCP anymore. In fact the only problem we had due to that cut was a loss of email and Excite Homepage services (hardly any of our sub's use newsgroups so nobody noticed those). They did also reroute the traffic but anything going to @Home did not route (too bad for Rogers). @Home in itself does not know how to run a network hence the tremendous drop in its stock price over the past year. They have a hard enough time keeping their mail servers running. The only reason Rogers didn't make this move sooner is because AT&T canada owns most of them and they also happen to own @Home. When I first started with the company I'm at they told me the DHCP is in California. I literally laughed out loud in the training room. Even being new out of college I realized that having your true headend 3000 miles away is a huge mistake. Clearly the idea of setting up a network like this was a pipedream thought up by know-nothing marketing people who don't understand the technology. Rogers has only smartened up after they lost a ton of customers to sympatico. The huge outages a year ago were a rather large sign that this was not going to work and the company I work for (even though sometimes they are pretty dumb too) got the hint and dropped @Home as a DHCP server. Personally I think @Home should rot in hell and all the MSO's that are partenered should break off and do their own thing. The @Home name nowadays on the internet is (to be polite) not a good one.
I work for a fair sized cable isp and on occasion a router somewhere between "us" and "them" goes down. The traffic may get rerouted but the new route does not necessarily work too well. Packets only have so much "time to live" or ttl and quite often the new route takes way too long to make it to its destination without totally timing out and getting discarded by some router along the path. Personally I think the problem lies with the isp. ISP's pay for "X" bandwidth anything beyond that they're out of luck and what ends up happening are routing loops where the upstream isp simply starts bouncing data back to the isp when it's over its limit. Outside of that the sheer size of the internet now makes it incredibly complex compared to what they were dealing with when it was the ARPAnet. Also when you think about it if you were to poke out the center of a spiderweb sure you could get from one side to another still but you have to take a longer way (and in the Internets case a much longer way) around. I sincerly hope that IPv6 does all that it's supposed to. Redundancy is still there (barely) but real redundancy means that for every route there must be a second route that goes the same way and that's not economically feasible for a lot of companies and that is what pretty much constitutes the Internet since it was "commercialized". Try explaining to the company CFO why you need 6 cisco UBR's to manage 3UBR's worth of traffic. It probably all comes down to dollars and cents in the end.