The guy installed a CPU and memory into a desktop box, and hooked up a couple cables.
We used to do real "speed assembling servers". You start out with organized piles of parts from the vendors. Memory, CPU, hard drives, rails, piles of sorted screws. We used a lot of SuperMicro machines, so the motherboards came mounted in their case. Well, originally, it was all from scratch. We just got lazy with the SuperMicro stuff.:) We were probably under 2 minutes, and then just around 5 minutes to get it complete with OS. It was more impressive with two people flowing 10 machines through simultaneously. While you have all your powered up positions full, keep the assembled hardware pool ready to start new installs on.
All they did was complete the assembled hardware, which looks like they just pulled a little of it apart anyways. They didn't get the OS on the drive, which is kind of essential to call a computer a server.:)
'
You know, I've been sitting on 100 tons of that stuff. No one will buy it. They keep insisting that if I have it, it can't be unobtainium. I just stuffed it in the back of warehouse 13, with all the other crap people won't buy. {sigh}
Come on, we all know that's what decision making committees are for.
Who needs an emergency ascent system. We can just have it navigate up if it loses contact. It would just add weight. We've built it perfectly, it won't fail.
Then again, we don't know the real cause of why it lost contact. Did it lose power? Did it get swallowed by a whale? Did it get hung up in some human debris and the antennas knocked off? Did it get hit by some random ship at sea?
I prefer to think aliens took it, thinking it was the only intelligent life on the planet. They'll build probes in it's image and send them back to communicate with the rest of the life forms here.:)
(Hmmm. We sent out one, and 100 came back. Wonder how that happened.)
I guess it really depends on if the average consumer is going to try the advertised max on a regular basis or not. I don't think it's right in any of the cases for them to misrepresent their products. That is why the phrase "Caveat emptor" came into existence. This has been going on long before you or I were alive, and I'm sure absolute truth in advertising will never become a reality.
If advertising were to be believed verbatim, I would believe that using Axe hygiene products would have women chasing the user to the ends of the earth. I would find it hard to differentiate from normal life, since it already happens with or without Axe products.:)
I'd love for the requirement *and* enforcement in truthful advertising. Then you won't everseeanythinglikethese.
Ok, maybe that last one is more representative of the general Slashdot community. But the rest of them were bad ads.:) It's not hard to find. Pretty much look at any ad,and realize that they're stretching the truth somehow. Either that, or the soap I use, the beer I drink, and the car I drive are all going to get me laid more, make me richer, and happy.:)
They're very hit and miss. I liked MaxMind GeoIP. It did pretty well, but sometimes they have no real way of knowing. For example, I had a cage in a datacenter in Los Angeles, with multiple GigE drops from a Tier 1 provider. From there, I had a T1 loop run to another city 11 miles away (roughly 5 "cities" away) and I managed the routers at both ends. I routed a/25 over that. From there, I had a point to point wireless connection my house 1 mile away. Usually if you queried something to ask where the IP resided, it was at the Tier 1 providers corporate office. If you called that provider (with sufficient cause), they'd say that it was routed to customer X (us) in Los Angeles. That would put you in downtown, 12 miles away from the real location of my IP.
There is no requirement to report where lines are routed to. Some providers play nicely, and will say at least the city an IP block resides. Sometimes it's close. Sometimes it's not. When I first got my FiOS line in the southern US, Google would automatically redirect me to google.ca , and show "local" Canadian results with a priority over my local results. Like, if I searched for "pizza delivery" because I was hungry, I'd get a bunch of Canadian delivery results.:)
Right now where I'm sitting, it's a business Road Runner line. I just tried it, and it returned Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, and Domino's, and map results for a dozen places 20 to 30 miles from here.:)
I won't bother testing with the VPN fired up to bring me elsewhere, that's just cheating.:)
Probably for the same reason that we let car manufacturers show that a car can do 180mph. It's not that you'll do it, but in theory you could. How many people test out their top speed, and then complain when the car is incapable of it?
Of course, if say a drill manufacturer advertises that a variable speed drill will spin up to 10k RPM, it'd better do 10k RPM.:)
I love the conspiracy of it, but in reality they probably just need the address to properly grade the results. For DSL, if you're within so many feet of the last CO you should get so much throughput, degrading as distance increases. Cable degrades by population density. Dialup (which I don't think they're testing) degrades by distance, usually inducing line noise. FiOS, may degrade in a similar fashion to cable, but I've never seen it happen in practice. All of them (obviously) degrade when the provider uplink(s) have been saturated.
To show that there is a problem, you can't just say "Provider X is bad". They want to show that it is misleading the customers as a whole (no one gets the advertised speeds), or as a subset (folks in Harlem get much less than advertised, but in Manhattan get better than advertised). But, all the advertising has been careful to prepend "Up to..." before the advertised speeds. You can get "up to" 1Gb/s, but you'll only ever see 3Mb/s.:)
I was working on an Internet mapping program, to show where the routers between points significant to the company I was working at were. It's not just that there is no standard for naming, it becomes amazingly chaotic. I had made a huge set of rules based on what we could extrapolate of the names. Sometimes they are obvious, but some were downright cryptic. I had set up a huge ruleset to try to convert hostnames to cities. It was fairly (but not completely) accurate.
I'll just use New York in the following examples of naming I had found. Oddly enough, the city I'm sitting in right now doesn't show up as a listed host in any of these.:)
T airport code of the nearest airport (which I prefer)? (Ex: NYC, JFK, or LGA for New York)
A 3 letter code for the city? (NYC)
A 2 letter code followed by an aribtrary letter? (NYA, NYB.. NYZ)
A 2 letter code followed by an aribtrary number indication a site location ID used internally? (NY1, NY2.. NY9)
A 1 letter city followed by a 2 letter state? (NNY)
or some other arbitrary name or internal code...
or just an IP which they'd have mapped, hopefully on something better than a piece of scrap paper in the network ops room.:)
Here's a few I just got on a traceroute. I'm leaving off the first bit if it just identifies a port, and the domain so I don't offend too many providers. Removed pieces are indicated by underscores.
Chicago, IL ___.CT8-Chicago.___ ___.chi-bb1-link.___ ___.chicago-il.us.xo.___ ___.hostway-115910-chi-bb1.c.___ (sorry the city identifiable part has their name)
Toronto, ON, Canada ___.TTT-Scarborough.___ ___.TTT-Scarborough.___
Washington DC (also coded WDC, and DC and frequently with nearby Virginia city names) ___.washington-dc.us.___ ___.te2-2-bbnet2.wdc002.___
Others, unknown. ___.ptr.us.___ (only identifies it's a PTR record, and contains no geographic info) ___.z204-47-65.customer.___
The same kind of chaos exists for the actual host names. I had a problem with my servers not being able to send notifications to AOL users. They required "real" hostnames. I took all the IP's, converted them to roman numerals, and then put that in the PTR files (and matching zone files) AOL said they weren't unique enough (basards), so I reversed the octets which made them look more unique. When I called them again, they were satisfied. Like, 192.168.1.100 would be CXCII.CLXVIII.I.C . To satisify the AOL want for uniqueness, it became C.I.CLXVIII.CXCII.example.com . I was always entertained when someone would try to read the hostname back to me. I'd stop them eventually as they were tripping over letters and say "just read me the numbers.":)
Check the fine print. It's written in 1px tall letters, but not necessarily every available to you.
The advertised rate is the maximum data rate that would be possible with your account.
They may have the pipe between your house and their first pop at the advertised speeds, but that won't necessarily be available through their network. They cannot assert the reliability of any 3rd part web sites, nor connectivity on any network beyond their own.
Additionally, they probably don't (read: never) have enough capacity on their network to take 100% of advertised rate for all users simultaneously. Providers always oversell their bandwidth. They have since the dialup days. "Ok, we have 1,000 56k modems. Therefore we should have 56Mb/s available. Great, we'll run it over this T1, and blame line noise on their end for any slower speeds."
Bandwidth calculations for sales are very dependent on the fact that some of the customers will never use their service. Some will only use it intermittently. Those who use too much capacity will be throttled or cancelled.
When cable modems were first coming out, RoadRunner was using the same provider as my work. I could download stuff from work to home at 10Mb/s. That lasted for a few months, and then I suddenly found it capped at 3Mb/s. Ok, still, I'm happy, this was years ago and my other choice was a 56k modem. Then I found it capped at 1.5Mb/s. I was starting to get annoyed, so I called to complain. "My connection is getting slower and slower." They told me it couldn't have possibly been 10Mb/s, they never provisioned anything like that. Hmm. They also said the advertised rate of 3Mb/s is only a maximum. If other people in the area are using service at the same time as me, I should expect slower times. No one ever sees their maximum advertised throughput. If I'd like, I could upgrade to "Business" service for 10x as much, which has a higher advertised rate, but still does not have a guarantee for throughput. It's in the fine print, in the addendum that I wasn't provided a copy of. In the cellar. Behind the locked door marked "Beware the Leopard". In the disused lavatory. In the bottom drawer of a locked file cabinet. Clearly it was my fault for not understanding the terms of the contract, therefore I need to shut up and pay my bill like a happy little customer.
I'd be more than comfortable doing it from work or a friends house, to show the speeds. Then again, it's not *MY* address that I'm giving away.:) This sounds like a wonderful way to build up a database associating physical street addresses to IP's. I think your tinfoil hat is aligned properly if you're a bit concerned about this.
I trust the government and any disclaimer that they'd put on a web site, for almost the full duration it took to read the disclaimer. There's absolutely no reason to believe that with a warrant (or a warrantless search that's become so popular) that your associated data won't come back to bite you. Come on. "The user at IP 1.2.3.4 is suspected to have committed [enter charge here], request their physical address from broadband.gov. It would be so much faster, easier, and less obvious than asking the ISP for those records.
All things considered, *MY* address doesn't even exist. I'm one of the millions who have found themselves more transient than all American 2.5 kids, 3br house and 2 cars, who own their own houses (and are mortgaged for the rest of their lives). My address (and IP) right now is different than it will be in a few hours. Hell, even my phone number is transient. Is my home number a friends house, or the prepaid cell of the week? It's by far intentional. I'd love to have a stable location with someone I can do some long term projects. My plans can't ever be beyond just a few days, before I'm packing everything back up in the car, and changing locations again.
:) My Ruger P97DC isn't really that hard to fire. Well, if it's already cocked, I could see a kid firing it. It's a bit harder when it's not. Of course, I've had it for quite a few years, and I don't put anything less than a couple hundred rounds through it when I go to the range, so it's nicely broken in. Honestly, I don't remember quite what it was like when it was brand new.
I don't quite get the confusion between the WII controller and the gun. The pictures in the article make it obvious that he had bought a very realistic gun controller, but if the kid had been playing the game, he'd know to point it towards the TV, not at himself. But ya, you can't leave anything out when you have kids. Anyone who's had kids, or has even read any books about raising kids, knows that they can and will get into everything.
I did drop one of my Colt 1911's once. I was carrying it in a slip in holster in my belt (concealed carry permit means really concealed in my state). I had to use the restroom, and it hit the floor when I unbuckled my belt. It chipped the tile floor and made a god awful noise, considering I didn't really want anyone to know I was carrying. Other than that, no problems. I carry chambered with the hammer down. I can't say I've dropped any of my others. I take pretty good care of my weapons, so I'm generally careful. Since I don't have a lot of options for concealed carry in the subtropical zone of the US, I only have a few places I can carry a decent sized weapon on me without being obvious. After that, I bought a Kel-Tec 380, which fit nicely in my pocket, but they're pretty bad about jamming. You'll get the first shot off, but don't expect another one. I gave it to someone for home protection, and told them, "You'll probably only get one shot. If it stops going bang, hit the attacker with it."
You damned kids and your newfangled toys. I telnet straight to port 80 and read from there. Damn I hate all these new tags. It was so much easier when folks just wrapped a text file in PRE tags.
It really depends on the weapon. My dad had an old.38 revolver that fell out of it's holster and fired when it hit the floor. Needless to say, he threw that holster away after that. He told me about a tommy gun that he had in the military that did start firing if the butt was even lightly tapped on the floor.
I've owned and used quite a few weapons, and I've never had any accidentally discharge.
I wouldn't doubt that my 3 year old daughter could pull the trigger, but it wouldn't be done properly. She could probably do it with 2 to 3 fingers on each hand on the trigger. The weapon in question was a S&W 380, so I'd suspect it had a pretty easy trigger pull.:( The only time she has trouble lifting or moving something is when she doesn't want to do it. She brought me her backpack the other day, and said it was too heavy for her to lift. Since she was carrying it to me, I just had to laugh.:)
I really feel for the family though. Losing a kid is a terrible thing. Unfortunately, I know from personal experience. It wasn't under the same circumstances.
The article said that it was a S&W 380. I don't know that specific weapon, but I know most of the 380's are pretty small weapons with pretty easy triggers. Kids can be stronger than you think. My 3 year old can squeeze my hand harder than it would take to fire most of my weapons. Not that she gets to shoot any. She's been taught not to play with anything that looks like a gun. When she's older, she will be taught proper handling and use. Until then, she knows not to play with them, just like she isn't suppose to touch the stove or play with knives.
I was first introduced to weapon handling when I was about 8. Before that, they were kept well out of reach. Even after that until I was 16, they were kept away from me, except when we were going to the shooting range.
That would be consistent with trying to support their case.
I was once charged with careless driving, that a couple corrupt cops wanted to make into a serious case, and get another notch in their belts. The charges were just shy of attempted murder, where I could have run someone over, except for the fact that I was driving down an empty back road in rural nowhere, and there wasn't a person to be seen along the route. The lied the whole way, including claiming that my car flew. Well, more like a "Dukes of Hazzard" jump, except my car couldn't get out it's own way. They had "experts" testify that my car had been modified for racing, and I switched it back to claim innocence. That was tough for a 16 year old with no money. A couple years later they were officially charged and convicted of a whole slew of charges including falsifying evidence and other various nasty charges. In my case, the DA stood in front of a judge, and said that I was a danger to the safety of the citizens of the state and I should be held until the conclusion of the hearings. As the courts run, that would have put me in county jail for about a year. In the end, it was dropped to careless driving, and I was let off with probation and community service.
So a single pesky word passed by the grand jury was done for the drama, and to influence their case. It doesn't necessarily reflect the facts. Then again, it may be a hint of what they have.
All they said is that his job was to work on the servers and database. They said "knowingly transmitted code". Was it a shell script to maintain something? Was it a virus on his PC that accidentally got on there (pesky Windows networks and poor security)? Was it something nefarious? It'll come out in the real case, but this guy will be spending an awful lot of time in jail and court before it's proven either way.
I hope for the sake of justice that this isn't another innocent man run through the system just to prove that he's innocent.
I strongly suspect that the dumber part would apply to what the subject was watching. Sure, an American Idol marathon followed by countless hours of... well, a vast array of mindless television designed to fill the airwaves slightly better than a test pattern, could dumb the subject down just below the IQ of a rock (my apologies to the rocks for the implied insult).
Some shows are educational, either in their direct education value (documentaries) or through making you think harder (some dramas and comedies). The later category falls way behind though. Those stuck in a particular genre and continue to watch it even after they can predict the ending from the first few minutes, need to change to something new they can learn from. I've had some fun with that, watching a couple minutes of a show, blurting out "The wife did it", and walking out to do something more constructive. It always throws people when I'm right.:) Of course, it takes them 30 to 60 minutes to find out, while I've done something more constructive (built sometime, surfed internet porn, whatever).
The same can be said for games. Ok, maybe you've become the worlds greatest Solitaire or Minesweeper player. Great. Move on to something else. Maybe write your own version. Online. With a live connection to a real minefield.:)
Too many people prefer to do something they're comfortable with, and let their mind idle, rather than expand... and I say that as I'm reading Slashdot. Maybe I should go do something more constructive too.:)
I used Los Angeles very intentionally. I lived there for a few years, and yes, what you said is absolutely correct. It was very rare to see water in the Los Angeles "river". The only time I can recall that I did see water in it was during their rainy season, which lasts for about 2 days.:) Ok, it's a couple months, where everything turns green. Otherwise, the only green in the area is created by the fact that every home with grass has sprinklers.
If they did become isolated by a natural disaster such as we've seen a couple of recently in other countries, it would be catastrophic.
Not that people would die in large numbers or anything.
That is actually arguable. With more companies using the Internet to coordinate tasks such as purchasing and shipping, and more dependence on VoIP for telephone service, you could have people dying.
That sounds silly, but consider a few things. Most essential products (food, clothing, shelter) are not sourced locally. While clothing and shelter do not need to be replenished daily, food is essential.
Most areas do not have sufficient production nor storage of food supplies for any sort of long term survival. Therefore, food must be brought in from those areas that are production areas. Huh? How many cows have you seen grazing in Manhattan? To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of maybe the Central Park Zoo, there are none. How many places can you buy milk, a hamburger, or steak? Ooohh, a whole lot. If the food supply were to be cut off to Manhattan, how long would the food supplies last? My best guess would be a week or two. Looters and hoarders will swing that to be a very wide range.
Quite a bit of the coordination of moving these food supplies are done over the Internet. But, moving the supplies is just one thing. Transportation requires fuel, vehicles, and workers.
Sure, it could maintain in a world without the Internet, but since quite a few facilities have migrated over to Internet based technologies for management, reinventing them without access to the previous resources may be virtually impossible.
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Some people who lived there said, "we'd make it", until I spelled it out. They shifted to "We'll drive to..." and they all had different directions. I broke the bad news to them. Millions of people will have the same idea, and most passenger vehicles are only designed for a 300 to 400 maximum range before refueling. They didn't get the reports that bridges or sections of roads were blocked. Putting millions of people on the road all trying to leave would unfortunately leave you parked, burning off what fuel you may have had before whatever incident happened. That of course was countered with "We'll walk." Good luck there. It's somewhere over 350 miles to get to the San Francisco area. 125 miles to the San Diego area. It could be pretty much assumed that they'd both be in the same predicament at that point. Las Vegas is only 256 miles, or Phoenix is 375 miles. There's a lot of dry areas, so unless you happen to have a mule to carry water for you, I wouldn't hold out hope to surviving the hike. Considering rest breaks, people generally walk about 2 miles per hour, and may be able to sustain that for 8 hours. Say you're feeling really ambitious, and walk without stopping for 16 hours per day, you may make it 100 miles in 3.5 days. Oh ya, you had to carry supplies to do that too. Lets ask the military how far they could expect in shape folks carrying supplies to walk every day...
"An infantry div on the march averages 12-15 miles per day, an armored div 100 miles per day." - U.S. De
Actually, having lived out in the country for many years, it is pretty obvious.
If you're on a road, you're on public property. Well, technically state owned property.
If you leave the road, you're on private property, or you're on state owned property.
I use the term state to apply to any government body.
If the state has designated an area to be for public use, sure you can go wandering off. If it isn't, you're trespassing. Just because the state owns property, and you pay your taxes, doesn't mean you're welcome going on it. I found that out the hard way a long time ago. Wandering around on state property that had unmarked trails, we were approached by the local Sheriffs department. We had been spotted by one of their helicopters, who sent a patrol after us. We were not, under any circumstances, allowed on that property, regardless of the lack of markings.
I'd also recommend hiring someone who focuses their efforts on managing the servers and taking care of network security. This job is usually referred to as a system administrator or network administrator.
That's probably the most relevant thing I've seen. I'm amazed at how many places don't want or have people with a clue working on their equipment. TFA said they have *NO* sys/net admin, and the guy who attends to those task is a "n00b".
There's more than one way to address this (which plenty of us have mentioned), but the important part is to have someone on staff who actually knows what they're doing.
I had someone ask me the same thing a while back. It wasn't tallied over a year, but it was something like 10,000 connections from China to SSH on port 22 in an hour. They were all unsuccessful. I gave a few options. Move SSH. Bring up proper iptables rules (or ANY iptables rules). Put a firewall out front. Set rules in the router to prevent it. Their final decision was.... [drum roll]... "well, as long as they were unsuccessful, it doesn't matter." That from a group who had a few machines compromised in the past for various reasons.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if you've given them the best, or even reasonable answers, they'll only hear what they want to.
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Oh. :) I thought it was pretty quick stuffing the CPU in without checking the alignment, or bending any pins.
Ya, severely misrepresented.
The guy installed a CPU and memory into a desktop box, and hooked up a couple cables.
We used to do real "speed assembling servers". You start out with organized piles of parts from the vendors. Memory, CPU, hard drives, rails, piles of sorted screws. We used a lot of SuperMicro machines, so the motherboards came mounted in their case. Well, originally, it was all from scratch. We just got lazy with the SuperMicro stuff. :) We were probably under 2 minutes, and then just around 5 minutes to get it complete with OS. It was more impressive with two people flowing 10 machines through simultaneously. While you have all your powered up positions full, keep the assembled hardware pool ready to start new installs on.
All they did was complete the assembled hardware, which looks like they just pulled a little of it apart anyways. They didn't get the OS on the drive, which is kind of essential to call a computer a server. :)
'
You know, I've been sitting on 100 tons of that stuff. No one will buy it. They keep insisting that if I have it, it can't be unobtainium. I just stuffed it in the back of warehouse 13, with all the other crap people won't buy. {sigh}
Come on, we all know that's what decision making committees are for.
Who needs an emergency ascent system. We can just have it navigate up if it loses contact. It would just add weight. We've built it perfectly, it won't fail.
Then again, we don't know the real cause of why it lost contact. Did it lose power? Did it get swallowed by a whale? Did it get hung up in some human debris and the antennas knocked off? Did it get hit by some random ship at sea?
I prefer to think aliens took it, thinking it was the only intelligent life on the planet. They'll build probes in it's image and send them back to communicate with the rest of the life forms here. :)
(Hmmm. We sent out one, and 100 came back. Wonder how that happened.)
I guess it really depends on if the average consumer is going to try the advertised max on a regular basis or not. I don't think it's right in any of the cases for them to misrepresent their products. That is why the phrase "Caveat emptor" came into existence. This has been going on long before you or I were alive, and I'm sure absolute truth in advertising will never become a reality.
If advertising were to be believed verbatim, I would believe that using Axe hygiene products would have women chasing the user to the ends of the earth. I would find it hard to differentiate from normal life, since it already happens with or without Axe products. :)
I'd love for the requirement *and* enforcement in truthful advertising. Then you won't ever see anything like these.
Ok, maybe that last one is more representative of the general Slashdot community. But the rest of them were bad ads. :) It's not hard to find. Pretty much look at any ad,and realize that they're stretching the truth somehow. Either that, or the soap I use, the beer I drink, and the car I drive are all going to get me laid more, make me richer, and happy. :)
They're very hit and miss. I liked MaxMind GeoIP. It did pretty well, but sometimes they have no real way of knowing. For example, I had a cage in a datacenter in Los Angeles, with multiple GigE drops from a Tier 1 provider. From there, I had a T1 loop run to another city 11 miles away (roughly 5 "cities" away) and I managed the routers at both ends. I routed a /25 over that. From there, I had a point to point wireless connection my house 1 mile away. Usually if you queried something to ask where the IP resided, it was at the Tier 1 providers corporate office. If you called that provider (with sufficient cause), they'd say that it was routed to customer X (us) in Los Angeles. That would put you in downtown, 12 miles away from the real location of my IP.
There is no requirement to report where lines are routed to. Some providers play nicely, and will say at least the city an IP block resides. Sometimes it's close. Sometimes it's not. When I first got my FiOS line in the southern US, Google would automatically redirect me to google.ca , and show "local" Canadian results with a priority over my local results. Like, if I searched for "pizza delivery" because I was hungry, I'd get a bunch of Canadian delivery results. :)
Right now where I'm sitting, it's a business Road Runner line. I just tried it, and it returned Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, and Domino's, and map results for a dozen places 20 to 30 miles from here. :)
I won't bother testing with the VPN fired up to bring me elsewhere, that's just cheating. :)
Probably for the same reason that we let car manufacturers show that a car can do 180mph. It's not that you'll do it, but in theory you could. How many people test out their top speed, and then complain when the car is incapable of it?
Of course, if say a drill manufacturer advertises that a variable speed drill will spin up to 10k RPM, it'd better do 10k RPM. :)
I love the conspiracy of it, but in reality they probably just need the address to properly grade the results. For DSL, if you're within so many feet of the last CO you should get so much throughput, degrading as distance increases. Cable degrades by population density. Dialup (which I don't think they're testing) degrades by distance, usually inducing line noise. FiOS, may degrade in a similar fashion to cable, but I've never seen it happen in practice. All of them (obviously) degrade when the provider uplink(s) have been saturated.
To show that there is a problem, you can't just say "Provider X is bad". They want to show that it is misleading the customers as a whole (no one gets the advertised speeds), or as a subset (folks in Harlem get much less than advertised, but in Manhattan get better than advertised). But, all the advertising has been careful to prepend "Up to..." before the advertised speeds. You can get "up to" 1Gb/s, but you'll only ever see 3Mb/s. :)
I was working on an Internet mapping program, to show where the routers between points significant to the company I was working at were. It's not just that there is no standard for naming, it becomes amazingly chaotic. I had made a huge set of rules based on what we could extrapolate of the names. Sometimes they are obvious, but some were downright cryptic. I had set up a huge ruleset to try to convert hostnames to cities. It was fairly (but not completely) accurate.
I'll just use New York in the following examples of naming I had found. Oddly enough, the city I'm sitting in right now doesn't show up as a listed host in any of these. :)
T airport code of the nearest airport (which I prefer)? (Ex: NYC, JFK, or LGA for New York) .. NYZ) .. NY9) :)
A 3 letter code for the city? (NYC)
A 2 letter code followed by an aribtrary letter? (NYA, NYB
A 2 letter code followed by an aribtrary number indication a site location ID used internally? (NY1, NY2
A 1 letter city followed by a 2 letter state? (NNY)
or some other arbitrary name or internal code...
or just an IP which they'd have mapped, hopefully on something better than a piece of scrap paper in the network ops room.
Here's a few I just got on a traceroute. I'm leaving off the first bit if it just identifies a port, and the domain so I don't offend too many providers. Removed pieces are indicated by underscores.
Chicago, IL
___.CT8-Chicago.___
___.chi-bb1-link.___
___.chicago-il.us.xo.___
___.hostway-115910-chi-bb1.c.___ (sorry the city identifiable part has their name)
Dallas, TX (also coded Dallas, DAL, DALTX, DTX, DFW...)
___.dls-bb1-link.___
___.dfw10.tbone.___
___.DTX-Dallas.___
___.pr0.dfw10.tbone.___
Tampa, FL (also coded Tampa, TB, TPA, TPB, and TFL)
___.tampfledc-rtr1.tampflrdc.___
___.tampabay.res.___
Toronto, ON, Canada
___.TTT-Scarborough.___
___.TTT-Scarborough.___
Washington DC (also coded WDC, and DC and frequently with nearby Virginia city names)
___.washington-dc.us.___
___.te2-2-bbnet2.wdc002.___
Others, unknown.
___.ptr.us.___ (only identifies it's a PTR record, and contains no geographic info)
___.z204-47-65.customer.___
The same kind of chaos exists for the actual host names. I had a problem with my servers not being able to send notifications to AOL users. They required "real" hostnames. I took all the IP's, converted them to roman numerals, and then put that in the PTR files (and matching zone files) AOL said they weren't unique enough (basards), so I reversed the octets which made them look more unique. When I called them again, they were satisfied. Like, 192.168.1.100 would be CXCII.CLXVIII.I.C . To satisify the AOL want for uniqueness, it became C.I.CLXVIII.CXCII.example.com . I was always entertained when someone would try to read the hostname back to me. I'd stop them eventually as they were tripping over letters and say "just read me the numbers." :)
We'll be at your door momentarily to collect you.
When the agents knock on your door, don't try to run. It won't do you any good. Do feel free to resist though. It gives us an excuse to use violence.
Check the fine print. It's written in 1px tall letters, but not necessarily every available to you.
The advertised rate is the maximum data rate that would be possible with your account.
They may have the pipe between your house and their first pop at the advertised speeds, but that won't necessarily be available through their network. They cannot assert the reliability of any 3rd part web sites, nor connectivity on any network beyond their own.
Additionally, they probably don't (read: never) have enough capacity on their network to take 100% of advertised rate for all users simultaneously. Providers always oversell their bandwidth. They have since the dialup days. "Ok, we have 1,000 56k modems. Therefore we should have 56Mb/s available. Great, we'll run it over this T1, and blame line noise on their end for any slower speeds."
Bandwidth calculations for sales are very dependent on the fact that some of the customers will never use their service. Some will only use it intermittently. Those who use too much capacity will be throttled or cancelled.
When cable modems were first coming out, RoadRunner was using the same provider as my work. I could download stuff from work to home at 10Mb/s. That lasted for a few months, and then I suddenly found it capped at 3Mb/s. Ok, still, I'm happy, this was years ago and my other choice was a 56k modem. Then I found it capped at 1.5Mb/s. I was starting to get annoyed, so I called to complain. "My connection is getting slower and slower." They told me it couldn't have possibly been 10Mb/s, they never provisioned anything like that. Hmm. They also said the advertised rate of 3Mb/s is only a maximum. If other people in the area are using service at the same time as me, I should expect slower times. No one ever sees their maximum advertised throughput. If I'd like, I could upgrade to "Business" service for 10x as much, which has a higher advertised rate, but still does not have a guarantee for throughput. It's in the fine print, in the addendum that I wasn't provided a copy of. In the cellar. Behind the locked door marked "Beware the Leopard". In the disused lavatory. In the bottom drawer of a locked file cabinet. Clearly it was my fault for not understanding the terms of the contract, therefore I need to shut up and pay my bill like a happy little customer.
I'd be more than comfortable doing it from work or a friends house, to show the speeds. Then again, it's not *MY* address that I'm giving away. :) This sounds like a wonderful way to build up a database associating physical street addresses to IP's. I think your tinfoil hat is aligned properly if you're a bit concerned about this.
I trust the government and any disclaimer that they'd put on a web site, for almost the full duration it took to read the disclaimer. There's absolutely no reason to believe that with a warrant (or a warrantless search that's become so popular) that your associated data won't come back to bite you. Come on. "The user at IP 1.2.3.4 is suspected to have committed [enter charge here], request their physical address from broadband.gov. It would be so much faster, easier, and less obvious than asking the ISP for those records.
All things considered, *MY* address doesn't even exist. I'm one of the millions who have found themselves more transient than all American 2.5 kids, 3br house and 2 cars, who own their own houses (and are mortgaged for the rest of their lives). My address (and IP) right now is different than it will be in a few hours. Hell, even my phone number is transient. Is my home number a friends house, or the prepaid cell of the week? It's by far intentional. I'd love to have a stable location with someone I can do some long term projects. My plans can't ever be beyond just a few days, before I'm packing everything back up in the car, and changing locations again.
I don't quite get the confusion between the WII controller and the gun. The pictures in the article make it obvious that he had bought a very realistic gun controller, but if the kid had been playing the game, he'd know to point it towards the TV, not at himself. But ya, you can't leave anything out when you have kids. Anyone who's had kids, or has even read any books about raising kids, knows that they can and will get into everything.
I did drop one of my Colt 1911's once. I was carrying it in a slip in holster in my belt (concealed carry permit means really concealed in my state). I had to use the restroom, and it hit the floor when I unbuckled my belt. It chipped the tile floor and made a god awful noise, considering I didn't really want anyone to know I was carrying. Other than that, no problems. I carry chambered with the hammer down. I can't say I've dropped any of my others. I take pretty good care of my weapons, so I'm generally careful. Since I don't have a lot of options for concealed carry in the subtropical zone of the US, I only have a few places I can carry a decent sized weapon on me without being obvious. After that, I bought a Kel-Tec 380, which fit nicely in my pocket, but they're pretty bad about jamming. You'll get the first shot off, but don't expect another one. I gave it to someone for home protection, and told them, "You'll probably only get one shot. If it stops going bang, hit the attacker with it."
You damned kids and your newfangled toys. I telnet straight to port 80 and read from there. Damn I hate all these new tags. It was so much easier when folks just wrapped a text file in PRE tags.
It really depends on the weapon. My dad had an old .38 revolver that fell out of it's holster and fired when it hit the floor. Needless to say, he threw that holster away after that. He told me about a tommy gun that he had in the military that did start firing if the butt was even lightly tapped on the floor.
I've owned and used quite a few weapons, and I've never had any accidentally discharge.
I wouldn't doubt that my 3 year old daughter could pull the trigger, but it wouldn't be done properly. She could probably do it with 2 to 3 fingers on each hand on the trigger. The weapon in question was a S&W 380, so I'd suspect it had a pretty easy trigger pull. :( The only time she has trouble lifting or moving something is when she doesn't want to do it. She brought me her backpack the other day, and said it was too heavy for her to lift. Since she was carrying it to me, I just had to laugh. :)
I really feel for the family though. Losing a kid is a terrible thing. Unfortunately, I know from personal experience. It wasn't under the same circumstances.
The article said that it was a S&W 380. I don't know that specific weapon, but I know most of the 380's are pretty small weapons with pretty easy triggers. Kids can be stronger than you think. My 3 year old can squeeze my hand harder than it would take to fire most of my weapons. Not that she gets to shoot any. She's been taught not to play with anything that looks like a gun. When she's older, she will be taught proper handling and use. Until then, she knows not to play with them, just like she isn't suppose to touch the stove or play with knives.
I was first introduced to weapon handling when I was about 8. Before that, they were kept well out of reach. Even after that until I was 16, they were kept away from me, except when we were going to the shooting range.
That would be consistent with trying to support their case.
I was once charged with careless driving, that a couple corrupt cops wanted to make into a serious case, and get another notch in their belts. The charges were just shy of attempted murder, where I could have run someone over, except for the fact that I was driving down an empty back road in rural nowhere, and there wasn't a person to be seen along the route. The lied the whole way, including claiming that my car flew. Well, more like a "Dukes of Hazzard" jump, except my car couldn't get out it's own way. They had "experts" testify that my car had been modified for racing, and I switched it back to claim innocence. That was tough for a 16 year old with no money. A couple years later they were officially charged and convicted of a whole slew of charges including falsifying evidence and other various nasty charges. In my case, the DA stood in front of a judge, and said that I was a danger to the safety of the citizens of the state and I should be held until the conclusion of the hearings. As the courts run, that would have put me in county jail for about a year. In the end, it was dropped to careless driving, and I was let off with probation and community service.
So a single pesky word passed by the grand jury was done for the drama, and to influence their case. It doesn't necessarily reflect the facts. Then again, it may be a hint of what they have.
All they said is that his job was to work on the servers and database. They said "knowingly transmitted code". Was it a shell script to maintain something? Was it a virus on his PC that accidentally got on there (pesky Windows networks and poor security)? Was it something nefarious? It'll come out in the real case, but this guy will be spending an awful lot of time in jail and court before it's proven either way.
I hope for the sake of justice that this isn't another innocent man run through the system just to prove that he's innocent.
Too late. Oh, by the way, when you rolled over last night, you crushed a small country.
I strongly suspect that the dumber part would apply to what the subject was watching. Sure, an American Idol marathon followed by countless hours of ... well, a vast array of mindless television designed to fill the airwaves slightly better than a test pattern, could dumb the subject down just below the IQ of a rock (my apologies to the rocks for the implied insult).
Some shows are educational, either in their direct education value (documentaries) or through making you think harder (some dramas and comedies). The later category falls way behind though. Those stuck in a particular genre and continue to watch it even after they can predict the ending from the first few minutes, need to change to something new they can learn from. I've had some fun with that, watching a couple minutes of a show, blurting out "The wife did it", and walking out to do something more constructive. It always throws people when I'm right. :) Of course, it takes them 30 to 60 minutes to find out, while I've done something more constructive (built sometime, surfed internet porn, whatever).
The same can be said for games. Ok, maybe you've become the worlds greatest Solitaire or Minesweeper player. Great. Move on to something else. Maybe write your own version. Online. With a live connection to a real minefield. :)
Too many people prefer to do something they're comfortable with, and let their mind idle, rather than expand. .. and I say that as I'm reading Slashdot. Maybe I should go do something more constructive too. :)
I used Los Angeles very intentionally. I lived there for a few years, and yes, what you said is absolutely correct. It was very rare to see water in the Los Angeles "river". The only time I can recall that I did see water in it was during their rainy season, which lasts for about 2 days. :) Ok, it's a couple months, where everything turns green. Otherwise, the only green in the area is created by the fact that every home with grass has sprinklers.
If they did become isolated by a natural disaster such as we've seen a couple of recently in other countries, it would be catastrophic.
Certains d'entre nous ne parlent pas français, vous inconsidérée bâtard!
That is actually arguable. With more companies using the Internet to coordinate tasks such as purchasing and shipping, and more dependence on VoIP for telephone service, you could have people dying.
That sounds silly, but consider a few things. Most essential products (food, clothing, shelter) are not sourced locally. While clothing and shelter do not need to be replenished daily, food is essential.
Most areas do not have sufficient production nor storage of food supplies for any sort of long term survival. Therefore, food must be brought in from those areas that are production areas. Huh? How many cows have you seen grazing in Manhattan? To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of maybe the Central Park Zoo, there are none. How many places can you buy milk, a hamburger, or steak? Ooohh, a whole lot. If the food supply were to be cut off to Manhattan, how long would the food supplies last? My best guess would be a week or two. Looters and hoarders will swing that to be a very wide range.
Quite a bit of the coordination of moving these food supplies are done over the Internet. But, moving the supplies is just one thing. Transportation requires fuel, vehicles, and workers.
Sure, it could maintain in a world without the Internet, but since quite a few facilities have migrated over to Internet based technologies for management, reinventing them without access to the previous resources may be virtually impossible.
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Some people who lived there said, "we'd make it", until I spelled it out. They shifted to "We'll drive to ..." and they all had different directions. I broke the bad news to them. Millions of people will have the same idea, and most passenger vehicles are only designed for a 300 to 400 maximum range before refueling. They didn't get the reports that bridges or sections of roads were blocked. Putting millions of people on the road all trying to leave would unfortunately leave you parked, burning off what fuel you may have had before whatever incident happened. That of course was countered with "We'll walk." Good luck there. It's somewhere over 350 miles to get to the San Francisco area. 125 miles to the San Diego area. It could be pretty much assumed that they'd both be in the same predicament at that point. Las Vegas is only 256 miles, or Phoenix is 375 miles. There's a lot of dry areas, so unless you happen to have a mule to carry water for you, I wouldn't hold out hope to surviving the hike. Considering rest breaks, people generally walk about 2 miles per hour, and may be able to sustain that for 8 hours. Say you're feeling really ambitious, and walk without stopping for 16 hours per day, you may make it 100 miles in 3.5 days. Oh ya, you had to carry supplies to do that too. Lets ask the military how far they could expect in shape folks carrying supplies to walk every day...
"An infantry div on the march averages 12-15 miles per day, an armored div 100 miles per day."
- U.S. De
Actually, having lived out in the country for many years, it is pretty obvious.
If you're on a road, you're on public property. Well, technically state owned property.
If you leave the road, you're on private property, or you're on state owned property.
I use the term state to apply to any government body.
If the state has designated an area to be for public use, sure you can go wandering off. If it isn't, you're trespassing. Just because the state owns property, and you pay your taxes, doesn't mean you're welcome going on it. I found that out the hard way a long time ago. Wandering around on state property that had unmarked trails, we were approached by the local Sheriffs department. We had been spotted by one of their helicopters, who sent a patrol after us. We were not, under any circumstances, allowed on that property, regardless of the lack of markings.
That's probably the most relevant thing I've seen. I'm amazed at how many places don't want or have people with a clue working on their equipment. TFA said they have *NO* sys/net admin, and the guy who attends to those task is a "n00b".
There's more than one way to address this (which plenty of us have mentioned), but the important part is to have someone on staff who actually knows what they're doing.
I had someone ask me the same thing a while back. It wasn't tallied over a year, but it was something like 10,000 connections from China to SSH on port 22 in an hour. They were all unsuccessful. I gave a few options. Move SSH. Bring up proper iptables rules (or ANY iptables rules). Put a firewall out front. Set rules in the router to prevent it. Their final decision was .... [drum roll] ... "well, as long as they were unsuccessful, it doesn't matter." That from a group who had a few machines compromised in the past for various reasons.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if you've given them the best, or even reasonable answers, they'll only hear what they want to.