The initial reaction to leave the content alone, and double the bandwidth. However, the leeches moved in the fill the gap. When the traffic shaping went into effect, you could practically hear the sigh of relief across the campus. Actually there were yells of "WoooHOOO, the INTERNET WORKS!!!"
We actually considered running a T3 in, and figured out what the per-student cost would be. It was bearable, but why shell out a few hundred dollars each so that some snot-nosed freshman punk can be all leet with his 5,000 MP3s? That is so COUNTER to the idea of getting a service you pay for, it's not even funny. Throttling Kazaa was as close as we could come to throttling the Kazaa users around the neck, which the vast majority of us wanted to do.
An apartment and cable connection is a whole lot cheaper than college, if that's all you do there.
If someone wants to sit around all day sucking up bandwidth, blowing off classes and homework in order to do so, an apartment and cable connection is far cheaper than college.
Going to college itself is a service that you pay for, but they can easily kick you off the island if you abuse the services you paid for, like tests and homework. If you don't like it, leaving that college IS your only option.
Stupid college kids and their illusions of having rights and such. When you enter the university doors, you either belong to them or you're gone.
I 100 percent agree with you on this. UoF's killing P2P and trojans/worms on the campus network should be a reason to consider going there more, if anyone's looking.
Let me tell a little story. Napster arrived during my second year of college (a small highly-acclaimed private engineering school). Bandwidth didn't suffer too badly, we had 1500 students on the network with mandatory laptops, and though we maxed out our dual T1's we were still able surf the web and get halfway decent ping rates.
The next year, Kazaa and friends arrived, along with the new freshman laptops with large, empty hard drives. Within weeks, the campus network was unusable. You literally could not surf the web, research online journals, download drivers and development software and other legit uses of the network. No one even tried gaming. Yet, the bandwidth leeches could open a hundred connections and download music at useful rates...it was only the legit applications suffering here. I actually dialed my laptop out to a local ISP in order to get better access.
The situation was so bad, the computing center had to call a "town meeting" to try to work out what the problem was, and allay the obvious anger that many students felt at being able to download at rates less than 2K/s. Hundreds of students showed up, standing room only, it went overtime. The upshot was that a couple months later, our bandwidth was doubled to four T1 lines.
The fun lasted for about two days. After that, the situtation was just as bad. Then our computing department took action: they ran traffic analysis and determined what the percentages were. Over 70% of our bandwidth was going to Kazaa. The top 10 bandwidth users were accounting for over 50% of of the bandwidth. We were notified that traffic shaping was immediately going into effect; during daytime hours the traffic determined to be "non-essential" would be throttled to something like 10%, and it would rise to something like 30% max during the night and weekends. A couple people got their ports disabled, and all "non-essential" traffic was disabled in the classrooms. Apparently, since we had ethernet ports at every desk, a lot of filesharing was going on during classtime!
The effect was instant: pure heaven. Fast page loads, excellent ping times, no more dropped connections. P2P was the worst thing to happen to the college network scene. I happen to know that some of my work was affected by being unable to do research as quickly, since many of the electronic journals we had access to were hosted online. I think the best thing a college can do is block or reduce P2P programs, and let students do what they ostensibly are at college for.
Well, Earthstation 5 isn't exactly an application you would find running on stock exchange servers or air traffic control systems. It is an application you would find only running on individuals' desktop systems. And the original poster stated that the attack would "nuke millions of computers in an instant" meaning that he is referring to deleting all the files on those computers. A DDOS attack would only use those millions of computers to nuke a few servers, if they could. Therefore I was correct in ignoring the critical computer systems, because they could not be affected on a massive scale using this method.
Oh come on, nobody worries about that! Everyone here's just scared they won't be able to check email, post on Slashdot, run a game of Counterstrike. They would have to stumble out of doors, mixing with the rest of the population...uh...ok I see why this would be a terrorist attack now.
I realize that perhaps, to many of you, computers and the Internet is Life Itself. However, a massive computer mixup is NOT a disaster on the scale of WTC or some other event causing major casualties.
I just get annoyed when I hear a computer attack referred to as an effective terrorist strategy. I certainly could survive if my computer didn't turn on today; no terror here, just kind of disappointment. Perhaps something like this could be called a "bummer. oh well" attack.
I'm still waiting for a notebook maker to team up with a cell phone maker, and create a combo where the phone slides completely into a dock on the laptop and becomes part of it. Automatic contact list sync, wireless data, all that good stuff. And then you can pop out the phone and use it normally.
I think maybe they should go the other direction, and start actually making utility belts. Plus add a grappling hook to your PDA, shuriken to your cellphone, etc.
Seriously though, we're on the verge of the true multifunction device. You can get camera/MP3 players, camera phones, phone PDAs, camera PDAs, USB drive MP3 players, and so on. Eventually they will squeeze everything into one.
I actually didn't want my hard drive/wireless server/MP3 player/PDA to be my phone...much too bulky to hold up to your ear. People who use Treos look like idiots. However a light detachable wireless earpiece/mic boom would definitely be acceptable, your "tricorder" could stay on your belt or on the table and you don't have to hold a brick up to your ear.
But maybe still go with the grappling hook. How many times have you wished you could just drop a smoke bomb and airlift yourself out of an embarrassing situation? Unless you fell off halfway up or something.
As someone who occasionally needs information a bit more technical and detailed than is available on foxnews.com or cnn.com, I find that the internet is of mixed usefulness in discovering information. A rule of thumb: if it's free, that's about what it's worth.
A Google search often turns up some useful information, but the real stuff comes from journals, trade magazines, and books. You can't expect someone to devote the same amount of effort when they aren't getting anything out of it. Community projects (if organized) are different though, because what you get out of your time is access to the whole project. Usenet is also good because you can contribute information when you have it, and get some insight when you need it.
Ditto on that. I look at all these people buying crippled proprietary router devices and laugh.
My Freesco router was...free. I have the bottom half of an old HP network scanner, which is essentially a 486 motherboard and whisper-quiet power supply in a small styrofoam-lined steel box with no drive bays or ports other than three ISA slots. Threw in a couple 3Com Etherlink IIIs, a 4G hard disk and it's a great little cable router + caching DNS + internal file server. Doesn't reduce my bandwidth at all. However, I prefer NOT to administer it remotely...to me, that's the whole point.
Doesn't bother me. I think that America's Army is a far cry from the latest commerical FPS games, when it comes to encouraging random machine gun rampages. In fact I believe it does more to discourage that kind of behavior.
It's also pretty inexpensive compared to hundreds of other things I should be worried that tax dollars are paying for. Recently a woman won approximately $300,000 in a suit against the government. She had been placed in a position where she earned over $100,000 per year, but was given nothing to do; after three years of that she claimed that her career was damaged because she lacked job skills due to not doing anything.
Just to add on to what I said before, here's a datasheet for the serial module! Looks really neat, one of the built-in AT commands already gives you a list of devices it's discovered!
To me, this sounds like the perfect application for a short-range wireless protocol such as Bluetooth. With the integrated Bluetooth chipsets coming out these days, manufacturing would be pretty inexpensive; I mean, it only has to read a few buttons.
If you connect every single device to a central node, that's a LOT of bandwidth you're asking for. If you have every device capable of gathering information from its neighbors and passing it along, you can get the information to aggregate itself along the edges of the audience, where it can be collected. The devices could deduce where the edges are by counting the number of nearby devices.
Here's a single-chip solution: the Zeevo, a microcontroller and Bluetooth chipset rolled into one. Now, Bluetooth development kits are HORRIBLY expensive, the page I linked contains a kit selling for about $8,600! But this product looks VERY interesting, it is a Bluetooth-to-serial development board, but you do get control over many Bluetooth parameters and it mentions firmware download. The cost is only $75 (or Euros to be exact). I think that would be an excellent way to get a hackable Bluetooth platform to play with, depending on how much of the firmware you can reprogram.
I don't know if it's really that bad. What's more annoying: a full-force block of annoying commercials, or random insertion of objects into programs as examples of typical use? Do you want a 30 second song-and-dance involving anthropomorphic anything, or being able to see that Monica is obviously using the newest Swiffer to clean the kitchen floor, and maybe makes a remark to the effect of how well it works?
Actually, I think people would rather have the commercials. Companies realize that commercial blocks are incredibly easy to get up and walk away from, and people use those bits of time to get other stuff done. If they can remove the obvious demarcation between programming and advertising, the audience is captive.
Obviously there are always people out there willing to outright scam you, but I haven't run into any that I've noticed. Mostly what you get to deal with are people who cheat you out of incompetence, not knowing or caring what you do. The worst interview is when you arrive, and you and the client realize that you had different ideas of what the position requirements were.
The worst is when the teacher uses a book they wrote, and make every class buy the newest edition.
I did have some good professors who wrote books (actual books, not just class notes) for some of the engineering classes. They stayed internal to the school and were printed out every semester by the campus printshop, and available in the bookstore for less than ten bucks or so.
Many of the courses I looked at had a decent amount of information, but you really couldn't understand what was going on without the book. Engineering texts still cost $60 to $200 these days.
I will probably go through some of these as handy little refresher courses, since I already have books and can get by. But if you go through some of these courses and learned only what is in the notes and handouts, don't consider yourself an MIT graduate yet.
That's more traditional, but not a hard-and-fast grammar rule. As I said, both are acceptable, but "were" is more commonly used in formal writing (probably so that someone brainwashed into "were" won't jump on you for it).
"Was" and "were" are both acceptable for that usage, though "were" is preferred for formal writing. I probably don't have to tell you that Slashdot is pretty informal.
Slashdot Mirror
The initial reaction to leave the content alone, and double the bandwidth. However, the leeches moved in the fill the gap. When the traffic shaping went into effect, you could practically hear the sigh of relief across the campus. Actually there were yells of "WoooHOOO, the INTERNET WORKS!!!"
We actually considered running a T3 in, and figured out what the per-student cost would be. It was bearable, but why shell out a few hundred dollars each so that some snot-nosed freshman punk can be all leet with his 5,000 MP3s? That is so COUNTER to the idea of getting a service you pay for, it's not even funny. Throttling Kazaa was as close as we could come to throttling the Kazaa users around the neck, which the vast majority of us wanted to do.
An apartment and cable connection is a whole lot cheaper than college, if that's all you do there.
Correct...but you could (and probably did) figure that out by following my home page link.
Or else my description of the situation might have sounded awfully familiar.
If someone wants to sit around all day sucking up bandwidth, blowing off classes and homework in order to do so, an apartment and cable connection is far cheaper than college.
Going to college itself is a service that you pay for, but they can easily kick you off the island if you abuse the services you paid for, like tests and homework. If you don't like it, leaving that college IS your only option.
Stupid college kids and their illusions of having rights and such. When you enter the university doors, you either belong to them or you're gone.
I 100 percent agree with you on this. UoF's killing P2P and trojans/worms on the campus network should be a reason to consider going there more, if anyone's looking.
Let me tell a little story. Napster arrived during my second year of college (a small highly-acclaimed private engineering school). Bandwidth didn't suffer too badly, we had 1500 students on the network with mandatory laptops, and though we maxed out our dual T1's we were still able surf the web and get halfway decent ping rates.
The next year, Kazaa and friends arrived, along with the new freshman laptops with large, empty hard drives. Within weeks, the campus network was unusable. You literally could not surf the web, research online journals, download drivers and development software and other legit uses of the network. No one even tried gaming. Yet, the bandwidth leeches could open a hundred connections and download music at useful rates...it was only the legit applications suffering here. I actually dialed my laptop out to a local ISP in order to get better access.
The situation was so bad, the computing center had to call a "town meeting" to try to work out what the problem was, and allay the obvious anger that many students felt at being able to download at rates less than 2K/s. Hundreds of students showed up, standing room only, it went overtime. The upshot was that a couple months later, our bandwidth was doubled to four T1 lines.
The fun lasted for about two days. After that, the situtation was just as bad. Then our computing department took action: they ran traffic analysis and determined what the percentages were. Over 70% of our bandwidth was going to Kazaa. The top 10 bandwidth users were accounting for over 50% of of the bandwidth. We were notified that traffic shaping was immediately going into effect; during daytime hours the traffic determined to be "non-essential" would be throttled to something like 10%, and it would rise to something like 30% max during the night and weekends. A couple people got their ports disabled, and all "non-essential" traffic was disabled in the classrooms. Apparently, since we had ethernet ports at every desk, a lot of filesharing was going on during classtime!
The effect was instant: pure heaven. Fast page loads, excellent ping times, no more dropped connections. P2P was the worst thing to happen to the college network scene. I happen to know that some of my work was affected by being unable to do research as quickly, since many of the electronic journals we had access to were hosted online. I think the best thing a college can do is block or reduce P2P programs, and let students do what they ostensibly are at college for.
Well, Earthstation 5 isn't exactly an application you would find running on stock exchange servers or air traffic control systems. It is an application you would find only running on individuals' desktop systems. And the original poster stated that the attack would "nuke millions of computers in an instant" meaning that he is referring to deleting all the files on those computers. A DDOS attack would only use those millions of computers to nuke a few servers, if they could. Therefore I was correct in ignoring the critical computer systems, because they could not be affected on a massive scale using this method.
;-)
So there!
Oh come on, nobody worries about that! Everyone here's just scared they won't be able to check email, post on Slashdot, run a game of Counterstrike. They would have to stumble out of doors, mixing with the rest of the population...uh...ok I see why this would be a terrorist attack now.
I realize that perhaps, to many of you, computers and the Internet is Life Itself. However, a massive computer mixup is NOT a disaster on the scale of WTC or some other event causing major casualties.
I just get annoyed when I hear a computer attack referred to as an effective terrorist strategy. I certainly could survive if my computer didn't turn on today; no terror here, just kind of disappointment. Perhaps something like this could be called a "bummer. oh well" attack.
I'm still waiting for a notebook maker to team up with a cell phone maker, and create a combo where the phone slides completely into a dock on the laptop and becomes part of it. Automatic contact list sync, wireless data, all that good stuff. And then you can pop out the phone and use it normally.
I think maybe they should go the other direction, and start actually making utility belts. Plus add a grappling hook to your PDA, shuriken to your cellphone, etc.
Seriously though, we're on the verge of the true multifunction device. You can get camera/MP3 players, camera phones, phone PDAs, camera PDAs, USB drive MP3 players, and so on. Eventually they will squeeze everything into one.
I actually didn't want my hard drive/wireless server/MP3 player/PDA to be my phone...much too bulky to hold up to your ear. People who use Treos look like idiots. However a light detachable wireless earpiece/mic boom would definitely be acceptable, your "tricorder" could stay on your belt or on the table and you don't have to hold a brick up to your ear.
But maybe still go with the grappling hook. How many times have you wished you could just drop a smoke bomb and airlift yourself out of an embarrassing situation? Unless you fell off halfway up or something.
As someone who occasionally needs information a bit more technical and detailed than is available on foxnews.com or cnn.com, I find that the internet is of mixed usefulness in discovering information. A rule of thumb: if it's free, that's about what it's worth.
A Google search often turns up some useful information, but the real stuff comes from journals, trade magazines, and books. You can't expect someone to devote the same amount of effort when they aren't getting anything out of it. Community projects (if organized) are different though, because what you get out of your time is access to the whole project. Usenet is also good because you can contribute information when you have it, and get some insight when you need it.
Ditto on that. I look at all these people buying crippled proprietary router devices and laugh.
My Freesco router was...free. I have the bottom half of an old HP network scanner, which is essentially a 486 motherboard and whisper-quiet power supply in a small styrofoam-lined steel box with no drive bays or ports other than three ISA slots. Threw in a couple 3Com Etherlink IIIs, a 4G hard disk and it's a great little cable router + caching DNS + internal file server. Doesn't reduce my bandwidth at all. However, I prefer NOT to administer it remotely...to me, that's the whole point.
Doesn't bother me. I think that America's Army is a far cry from the latest commerical FPS games, when it comes to encouraging random machine gun rampages. In fact I believe it does more to discourage that kind of behavior.
It's also pretty inexpensive compared to hundreds of other things I should be worried that tax dollars are paying for. Recently a woman won approximately $300,000 in a suit against the government. She had been placed in a position where she earned over $100,000 per year, but was given nothing to do; after three years of that she claimed that her career was damaged because she lacked job skills due to not doing anything.
Just to add on to what I said before, here's a datasheet for the serial module! Looks really neat, one of the built-in AT commands already gives you a list of devices it's discovered!
Neat stuff.
To me, this sounds like the perfect application for a short-range wireless protocol such as Bluetooth. With the integrated Bluetooth chipsets coming out these days, manufacturing would be pretty inexpensive; I mean, it only has to read a few buttons.
If you connect every single device to a central node, that's a LOT of bandwidth you're asking for. If you have every device capable of gathering information from its neighbors and passing it along, you can get the information to aggregate itself along the edges of the audience, where it can be collected. The devices could deduce where the edges are by counting the number of nearby devices.
Here's a single-chip solution: the Zeevo, a microcontroller and Bluetooth chipset rolled into one. Now, Bluetooth development kits are HORRIBLY expensive, the page I linked contains a kit selling for about $8,600! But this product looks VERY interesting, it is a Bluetooth-to-serial development board, but you do get control over many Bluetooth parameters and it mentions firmware download. The cost is only $75 (or Euros to be exact). I think that would be an excellent way to get a hackable Bluetooth platform to play with, depending on how much of the firmware you can reprogram.
I don't know if it's really that bad. What's more annoying: a full-force block of annoying commercials, or random insertion of objects into programs as examples of typical use? Do you want a 30 second song-and-dance involving anthropomorphic anything, or being able to see that Monica is obviously using the newest Swiffer to clean the kitchen floor, and maybe makes a remark to the effect of how well it works?
Actually, I think people would rather have the commercials. Companies realize that commercial blocks are incredibly easy to get up and walk away from, and people use those bits of time to get other stuff done. If they can remove the obvious demarcation between programming and advertising, the audience is captive.
Obviously there are always people out there willing to outright scam you, but I haven't run into any that I've noticed. Mostly what you get to deal with are people who cheat you out of incompetence, not knowing or caring what you do. The worst interview is when you arrive, and you and the client realize that you had different ideas of what the position requirements were.
The worst is when the teacher uses a book they wrote, and make every class buy the newest edition.
I did have some good professors who wrote books (actual books, not just class notes) for some of the engineering classes. They stayed internal to the school and were printed out every semester by the campus printshop, and available in the bookstore for less than ten bucks or so.
Many of the courses I looked at had a decent amount of information, but you really couldn't understand what was going on without the book. Engineering texts still cost $60 to $200 these days.
I will probably go through some of these as handy little refresher courses, since I already have books and can get by. But if you go through some of these courses and learned only what is in the notes and handouts, don't consider yourself an MIT graduate yet.
Eh?
punn. A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.
There's enough for both of us, I'll take the first part and you can have the second.
That spider...has spun its last web.
Pun intended.
// Code to make Linux startup look like it's doing something
// Insert in a few hundred random places
long foo = 0;
while (foo < 10000000)
{
foo++;
}
That's more traditional, but not a hard-and-fast grammar rule. As I said, both are acceptable, but "were" is more commonly used in formal writing (probably so that someone brainwashed into "were" won't jump on you for it).
"Was" and "were" are both acceptable for that usage, though "were" is preferred for formal writing. I probably don't have to tell you that Slashdot is pretty informal.
I just got an officewide email describing a recently-found bracelet, with someone's name "incraved" upon it.
And don't get me started on that last sentence. Sometimes I wish I was ignorant, and none of this would bother me.