Is the name more about the plot or the design?
on
Tabula Rasa Goes Live
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· Score: 1
It seems kind of like an ego-boosting maneuver for the designers. "We started fresh and rethought the whole idea of MMO. Yay us, let's call the game 'Blank Slate', err... um, 'Tabula Rasa' (it sounds so much cooler!)".
Sure, the characters have fled Earth and had to set up bases elsewhere, but lots of names could fit that backstory ("Starship Troopers", "Alpha Centauri", "Titan AE", and "Earth 2" come to mind immediately).
Otherwise, it seems kind of cool. I wonder if people looking for casual games really will enjoy the cooperative, team-building, getting-to-know-you aspects of an MMO though. Part of what separates MMO players from casual gamers is the sense of obligation to play and temporal continuity of the game world. I have many times declined to start playing one or another MMO game particularly to avoid those entanglements.
Sure, but I keep wondering after reading that... what's going to conduct the nanowires along a path, and how do you measure the presence or absence of the nanowires in a memory cell? Seems a whole lot simpler to me to just use the nanowires to replace larger wires, and still use electrons conducted across the nanowires.
QoS is preferable to forged RST packets. It's not as nice for the P2P file transfer as no QoS, but it's a lot better for the person making an emergency call over VoIP.
The upsetting thing for me isn't throttling certain traffic or even traffic shaping all of a customer's traffic during peak hours using a packet rate limiter. It's the method they're using. Sure, it'd be nice to have the whole pipe. However, I'd bet a lot of customers would like to be able to make a VoIP call and download something on BT at the same time in their own home without the VoIP call breaking up and sounding shitty. QoS can help achieve that if the BT would otherwise cause it.
Forging RST packets is dishonest, and it causes your network stack to do something entirely different from getting no response at all or having the traffic shaped. That's what pisses me off for these Comcast customers, and it'd piss me off more if AT&T was doing it to me.
AbiWord and Gnumeric are pretty cool if you don't need good interoperability with Office. There are WordPerfect for Linux versions, too, and IIRC those do a pretty good job with most Office documents.
Really, the Office document argument for a home machine bothers me anyway. How often must someone get an Office document at home and edit it, then sen it back out as an Office document? If you're generating your own documents, you can always send RTF or CSV to people who really need to use them in Office. Most of the time home documents are for use within the home.
Did you miss this: "They're advertising a particular speed of access that's on all the time. That's not unlimited bandwidth. That's not unlimited traffic. Bandwidth is not the same as total traffic moved."
Or perhaps you missed this: '"Unlimited bandwidth" would mean they were offering to allow you to download things instantaneously. "Unlimited traffic" would mean they were allowing you to download every bit of information in the universe. Clearly they aren't offering those things.'
Or perhaps this: "People are being led to believe that they can use 8 Mbps or 6Mbps or whatever the stated download speed is as well as the 512 kbps or whatever the stated upload speed is subject to congestion and limited over-subscription of the bandwidth."
Look, I was in the ISP business for over 7 years. I understand oversubscription and the post to which you replied makes that pretty clear. The "congestion and limited over-subscripion of the bandwidth" I thought was abundantly clearly dealing with the issue of over-subscription and the congestion that causes for traffic down the wire. I've also made that point probably three dozen times over the last couple of years on Slashdot.
The major issue here isn't that Comcast is dealing with leechers. It's how they're doing it. Period. If they want to do QoS or traffic shaping by customer, that's fine. If they want to make BitTorrent a TOS violation when people sign up, that's shitty but it's an honest and legit way to handle any issue they have with BitTorrent use. Forging packets in a man-in-the-middle attack to shut down a network connection is rude, dishonest, and possibly illegal despite being initiated by the ISP.
I give less than a rat's right asscheek about Comcast's dainty little network breaking if they oversubscribe to the point of moving no data. Some oversubscription is not the same as cramming every last user on a wire that can physically be connected regardless of service viability. There's a ratio that's acceptable, and overselling your last-mile bandwidth anywhere from 8/1 to 15/1 is probably arguably within an acceptable range. Overselling your network uplink about 4/1 or 6/1 is usually no problem, either. Beyond that, you have to get more creative with traffic management, including maybe metering heavy users or some kind of shaping. Forging packets is not a legitimate traffic management technique under any circumstances. Oversubscribing the network resources to the point of breakage is only enough reason for two actions: upgrading the network to a more reasonable level of oversubscription or freezing new subscriptions in an area until an upgrade can take place.
So big government that intrudes on the freedom of the people through excessive laws, regulations, and taxes is "everything bad"? I don't suppose you have some reference to me calling rape, child molestation, AIDS, dengue fever, bridge collapses, and terrorism "leftist", do you? It's going to be pretty difficult to find those references, since they don't exist.
Those who don't understand socialism vs. capitalism nor authoritarian vs. representative governments are doomed to reinvent the horrors of past socio-political experiments that have failed. Whether the bulk of wealth is tied in name to the government or to corporations that lobby the government and are in turn propped up by the government makes very little difference in the freedom of the people. It's the lack of wealth and power of the private citizens that leads to abuse of the people. The centralization of power into the hands of a few on a national scale is what makes it easy to abuse the people.
Whether you can argue for or against any particular combination of government and economic systems is irrelevant if you can't even see where big, powerful, restrictive government from one party is the same as big, powerful, restrictive government from the supposedly polar opposite party. The supposed goals of protecting workers or protecting people from crime are irrelevant when it's the government causing the loss of the most important aspects of a free, happy, fulfilling life.
Just because the American media calls the Democrats the "left" and the Republicans the "right" or one "liberal" and the other "conservative" does not make it so. Both major parties are for big government. They both favor lots of social programs and lots of spending on keeping the people in line. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. If it talks like a liberal and votes like a liberal, it's probably a liberal.
They're advertising a particular speed of access that's on all the time. That's not unlimited bandwidth. That's not unlimited traffic. Bandwidth is not the same as total traffic moved. They're not offering me anything, because I'm not and can't be a Comcast subscriber.
"Unlimited bandwidth" would mean they were offering to allow you to download things instantaneously. "Unlimited traffic" would mean they were allowing you to download every bit of information in the universe. Clearly they aren't offering those things.
What they do offer is 24 hours a day 365 a year to allow you to use up to the advertised speed of the line, as shared with other users. The limits they impose with their forged traffic which impersonates the other end of your connection is not the limit of the technology as shared by their customers. It is an artificial limit imposed on those users they fear are using a resource other than the way Comcast finds most advantageous to Comcast.
People are being led to believe that they can use 8 Mbps or 6Mbps or whatever the stated download speed is as well as the 512 kbps or whatever the stated upload speed is subject to congestion and limited over-subscription of the bandwidth. They are further convinced by Comcast that they can do so all the time without interference from Comcast. These things turn out not to be the case. Guaranteeing a speed would mean that you'll always get at least X bits per minute. That has nothing to do with this. This discussion is about Comcast picking and choosing which network connections to terminate and nothing to do with congestion, over-subscription, or traffic shaping.
If the network is fragile, the steps they should take are either to make the network less fragile or to stop offering a service the network cannot support. Impersonating one's friends and colleagues and ending network connections on their behalf is not a legitimate network administration technique. Traffic shaping for high-use customers may be less than desirable for users, but it's honest and legitimate. Dropping BitTorrent, Lotus Notes, or Google traffic for customers with average or below average total usage is discriminatory against certain parties, is dishonest, and is not legitimate.
To summarize what Shakrai said, if BitTorrent is breaking the network, it's because the network was designed in a fragile way.
To offer something on the market you're not able to realistically deliver is a type of fraud and is specifically referred to as deceptive marketing. Either Comcast can deliver unlimited Internet service or they can't. If they want to sell it, they should deliver it. If they don't intend to deliver it, they shouldn't be selling it. Bitching that they didn't do the work necessary to deliver what they're selling and that therefore they have to further impair one customer's service to enhance another's just doesn't cut it. Doing the work necessary to deliver what they sold is their only legal and equitable option AFAICT. Hopefully the courts or Congress will see it the same way.
by mr_mischief (456295) on Tuesday October 30, @01:34PM (#21173431) by Seraphim_72 (622457) Alter Relationship on Tuesday October 30, @01:44PM (#21173597)
If you had read my first reply, I wouldn't have had to reply to the same idea again and you'd look a lot less silly right now.
Where did I say "Democrats, as opposed to our lovely Bushite true conservatives"? Before implying I have some mental disorder, perhaps you might want to consider that both of the major parties in the US are pretty much big government types. I said "leftists", which, by Bush's actions of growing the government to crack down on personal freedoms and take away the freedom of movement, freedom to do business without being tracked, and a whole bunch more pretty much includes him and his ilk.
Government can only be trusted when it fears the people. That's not going to happen under the control of any group as statist and centralist as the Democrats or Republicans. Many of the supposed differences between them are talking points to get votes. The rest are not so much a difference of opinion on government growth but at the rate it should happen.
Beware, though, of many "small government, freedom to the people" parties who have planks in their platforms specifically calling for curtailing of freedoms of those with whom they disagree, like the Prohibition Party, American Heritage Party, or the America First Party. Freedom for your friends and not your opponents is not really freedom at all.
A strong military under civilian control, the right to retaliate to attack, open trade with other countries not subsidized or tariffed in either direction, regulation of interstate trade, equitable strategic arms reduction and extradition treaties, and the right to contain or forcibly extract people like bin Laden when extradition won't work are pretty much all the federal government should be concerned about. Everything else is guaranteed by the Constitution to be delegated to the states or the people, after all.
I'll stop calling the Republican party leftists along with the Democrats when they stop doing the same things the Democrats do.
The government has captured aliens. It then drops them off 1 mile past the fence, where the Mexicans give them food and water for their return trip.
Oh... you meant the other type of alien conspiracy. Sorry, AC, can't help you there. As entertaining as they are, the claims are extraordinary and require extraordinary proof, not fuzzy pictures of Halloween costumes.
Unfortunately your Dutch experience isn't too far removed from the US experience. Our phone company that served almost 100% of the local phones and almost 100% of the long distance until 1984 was a private company, but their monopoly was granted and enforced by the government. The rights-of-way for the cable were granted by the government and the cable plants subsidized.
Then, the government that had been setting the prices decided the prices could be lower, so instead of regulating lower prices they split the company into many smaller, regional monopolies and a nationwide long distance monopoly. They regulated that all of these other companies had to be given access and at what rates, and competition did lower prices but service went to hell.
Finally, most of the companies are back together again, prices are (for now) somewhat reasonable, but the service still sucks compared to what it could be.
The cable companies are private companies, but mostly have regional monopolies or duopolies granted and enforced by governments (often state or local in this case). They often had breaks on taxes or help laying their infrastructure. Now they're using that infrastructure for new things like internet access. It might just be my opinion, but it seems that Internet access is a natural outgrowth of the user-to-user public switched telephone network, and not necessarily from the wired broadcasting industry of cable TV. Therefore, the rationalizations for allowing cable TV companies to leverage themselves into the ISP market are thinner and weaker than for allowing the phone companies to do so, but the competition is nice.
I think one way new competition could work is if new companies were allowed to use the last mile connection to the home, but had to string new wire or fiber from there. Just wiring to every block of a city is much less expensive than wiring to every individual apartment, house, and office. They could use the same cable paths, laying side by side. It's also much less disruptive, as the main cables get much more maintenance anyway and many of them are strung from poles at that point in the route, too.
It does me no good to try to contact someone through WHOIS with their nonexistent email address, their disconnected phone number, and their fake shell company. In those instances where I can work out a networking problem with a legitimate company, university, or ISP based on accurate WHOIS info, it makes life much easier than calling a techno-peasant receptionist and explaining who it might be int what possible department that might handle the kind of thing I need to talk to someone about, only to find out that the network is provided by someone entirely different.
In all, I'd say that ARIN's, RIPE's, and APNIC's IP-based WHOIS are much more useful than any of the domain registrars' collective WHOIS systems. If I'm contacting someone about a site and there's no contact info on the site itself, the WHOIS is probably useless anyway. If I'm working on a problem of wacky routing, mysterious traffic origination, packet loss, or the source of an attempted security breach, contacting the IT people in charge of the network in question directly is often the fastest and easiest way to get things resolved. There is no other reliable place to find solid information on who to contact about the IP space, which is different from a website that usually has that information in-band. Reverse DNS can be useful, but it's far from reliable and still doesn't give me the contact info.
Private domain registration is a pain, but it does solve the spam problem of public WHOIS information. I can think of alternatives, but none of them are clearly much better. However, as I already said, I think the domain name WHOIS services are less useful and less important than network WHOIS anyway. For network WHOIS, private registration shouldn't even be considered.
The biggest problem here is that the Executive branch has all the agencies, and whenever the leftists win a bigger government vote all the extra people in the bigger government are at the Executive branch's disposal.
Congress has some support staff, as do the justices of the Supreme Court. There are roughly two million civilian personnel of the federal government outside the Postal Service. For 535 people or 9 people to hold responsible two million individuals who are neither elected by nor directly responsible to the people is a bit ludicrous. The sheer size of the Executive branch makes accountability and the notion of checks and balances pretty difficult, even with the 94 federal district courts involved.
The Judiciary simply must be larger or the Executive smaller in order for the people to be properly served by checks and balances. In fact, I'd say the Judiciary really needs to be larger and account for more of the federal budget simply in order to guarantee a speedy trial as the sixth amendment promises while not putting undue strain on the court to shorten previous trials. Perhaps civil cases could be heard by a separate set of judges in each district specializing in civil cases, but I digress.
In any case, I'd think the huge Executive branch, with its apparent penchant for shifting blame and covering things up, is much too large right now for the other branches to balance it enough.
Do we really need 2 million people to provide federal government services to 303 million citizens on top of all the 16 million state, county, and city personnel providing services as well? In 2000, 19 million or so people were government employees (it doesn't say whether that includes revenue-generating government agencies like the Post Service). That's over 6% of the population living on taxes and borrowed money who are not elected, or over 14% of the total work force. I fail to see how that is sustainable, let alone sufficiently kept in check by state and federal courts and legislatures.
I'm still not convinced the bandwidth is Comcast's major concern. Comcast still makes the majority of their money from being a cable company, and only uses Internet access as a diversification method, don't they? All the Comcast commercials I see are for cable TV, not for Internet access.
It seems to me the whole rage against P2P traffic (which is how lots of games are played, BTW, and how almost all VPNs are set up) is not so much about capacity as about a conflict of interests on the part of Comcast. They're the content delivery network for TV programming and music (they have music channels like DirecTV does, don't they?). They are wanting to make sure you use your cable TV for getting video and audio, because that's where they get a bigger cut.
How much human time goes into backups, tests, recovery plans, administration, electricity, and charged depreciation of the hardware? The purchase price of a single desktop drive at Wal-Mart or Circuit City doesn't come close to what it costs to provide failsafe access to data. $3000 per GB does sound high, but it's not going to be $1 per GB either. Perhaps the IT department's figures just haven't been updated in a few years, and it might even be the accounting department's job to do that.
Is the title clear enough? I can't imagine any judge or jury saying Comcast is allowed to impersonate Google and tell Comcast customers they're not allowed to use Google's services or that Google's services are overwhelmed and shutting down connections. That's essentially what forged, fraudulent RST packets from a MITM attack are doing. That can't possibly be considered a legitimate business practice in court.
Another physical machine in the same rack on the same VLAN is still easier to attack than repeating the same attack from across the public network. There's much more bandwidth with much less latency to use. There are also potentially whole new classes of attacks that weren't available from outside the local network (ARP-based attacks, convincing the switch to go into dumb hub mode through various means, duplicating IPs on the LAN) as well as whole classes of attacks made easier by the proximity and network speed (smurf, ping flood, vulnerability scans).
Yes, keeping OS installations on separate physical machines instead of co-hosted virtual machines does make them more secure. However, the further statement that compromising one server in a rack does not make it easier to compromise other physical servers in the same rack does not follow. It is indeed easier to attack another physical machine once you're in a LAN or VLAN segment even though it doesn't give you the same kind of heightened access as a hypervisor or hardware emulator.
So what you're saying is that due to discontinuity of certain functions, our inability to measure things precisely, and possibly our misunderstanding of simpler theories, we need to make our models of space more complex to get the theory to fit the data? Is that about right?
My question is whether or not Occam's razor had been honored. Are all the simpler possibilities being fully explored before jumping to this new mental representation of space? If so, run with it. If not, perhaps explore how to tweak models that fit more with intuitive observations we can perceive and understand more directly. Are all other models really so lacking in every way that we need a new one?
It's one of at least two places lead was banned in the US in the last 40 years or so. Lead paint was once quite common as well. Lead solder used to be used in places where lead-free solder is now. So if the lead from gas turns out not to account for the total, lead from other sources may still have something to do with it.
Oh, and lead-induced brain damage has strong statistical ties already to impulsive behavior and hampered mental function, which decline in the use of slide rules and increases in CPU power do not. This is just trying to measure the effect of lead in gasoline, since lead exposure in general is already believed to be an issue.
A devil's advocate, I would like to say that an increase in CPU power and a huge increase in the availability of computers could actually help lower violent crime rates. It's not because computers make it easier to get a job, though. In fact, in lots of ways computers have both added jobs and taken jobs away from the economy, leaving us probably about even. Productivity is higher in some fields like drafting and manufacturing, but fewer people are actually needed. What they have done, though, is made it a lot easier to profit from non-violent crime. Pump and dump scams, advance fee scams, certified check fraud, identity theft, database infiltration, and laptop theft are the crimes of choice for money now. They're inherently less violent and less risky than bank robbery, mugging, brigandage, piracy, and convenience store robbery. There's less personal contact than during in-person scams and confidence schemes, so the threat of escalation into violence of a nonviolent crime is less.
Still, as the parent post said, the author of the study did what should always be done in this kind of study: the provision was made to test a further hypothesis based on the study. That's good scientific practice, even if the study turns out not to be repeatable. There's a vast difference between having the wrong hypothesis and using the wrong methods, and science is largely advanced through the understanding of that difference.
What if they're causing damage to a "protected computer" engaged in interstate commerce -- say, torrenting a new Linux distro ISO for use in their business or distributing their own published work their users -- by hijacking the session and thereby exceeding their authorization on your system?
IANAL, but this is straight out of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as amended (18 USC Section 1030).
Anyone who:
(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
or who:
(5)(A)(i) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
(ii) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or
(iii) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage; and
(B) by conduct described in clause (i), (ii), or (iii) of subparagraph (A), caused (or, in the case of an attempted offense, would, if completed, have caused)--
(i) loss to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period (and, for purposes of an investigation, prosecution, or other proceeding brought by the United States only, loss resulting from a related course of conduct affecting 1 or more other protected computers) aggregating at least $5,000 in value; (ii) the modification or impairment, or potential modification or impairment, of the medical examination, diagnosis, treatment, or care of 1 or more individuals;
(iii) physical injury to any person;
(iv) a threat to public health or safety; or
(v) damage affecting a computer system used by or for a government entity in furtherance of the administration of justice, national defense, or national security;
or who:
(6) knowingly and with intent to defraud traffics (as defined in section 1029) in any password or similar information through which a computer may be accessed without authorization, if--
(A) such trafficking affects interstate or foreign commerce;
in which "protected computer" can mean:
2) the term "protected computer" means a computer--
(A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial institution or the United States Government and the conduct constituting the offense affects that use by or for the financial institution or the Government; or
(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States;
and
(6) the term "exceeds authorized access" means to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter;
and
(8) the term "damage" means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information;
and
(11) the term "loss" means any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring the data, program, system, or information to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption of service;
Um. No. If you've invested thousands of dollars up front, you're less likely to chuck your application suite than if you're going to pay the same next month as this month.
Let's say you're paying $X per month to Adobe. Some worthy competitor comes along and offers you a comparable suite for $Y per month, where Y X. Remember, you're free to leave Adobe next month and come back the month after if you're happier with their stuff. That creates a lot more decision points than the boxed suite. That means a lot more chances to affect your decision, and therefore more marketing.
There could be year-by-year subscription contracts, but then you might as well be buying the box because you're probably going to upgrade every year or two anyway. It won't be less advertising in any case, because you'll still have an annual decision to make.
The biggest advantage to most over-the-wire applications isn't less advertising. It isn't necessarily the pricing model, either, although that's certainly a good one to put in first place. Another choice for the prize, though, is the development methods network delivery allow you to use.
If you sell a box, you have to try to get all the features in the box and get them all right all at once. Otherwise, you piss people off that they paid so much for your box and spent time installing it only to install huge chunks of it over again online anyway. With a network delivery model, you can offer something much more modular. If it's actually working live across the wire, as the quotes in TFS imply, then you can also upgrade people's application across all customers simultaneously. You can roll out new features or improvements to existing features piecemeal, because you're not rolling trucks to get them to the users. It's a continual, gradual update process to go along with the continual, gradual payments you receive. It makes software a service industry rather than a product industry, and many people think that's a good thing.
Sun? I think IBM is much larger still. There are a lot more people interested in Linux than just the major software companies promoting it, too. They'll get more interested as Microsoft tries to stifle it more.
Novell (NOVL) : 2.69 B Red Hat (RHT) : 4.03 B Sun (JAVA) : 20.21 B Dell (DELL) : 64.08 B Oracle (ORCL) : 108.19 B HP (HPQ) : 135.14 B IBM (IBM) : 155.00 B Intel (INTC) : 155.64 B Google (GOOG) : 202.79 B
I doubt Canonical or Mandriva are even for sale. I know Debian, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, and Slackware aren't. There's no way Microsoft could get Google, Intel, IBM, HP, Oracle, and Dell all swallowed even in a pro-merger regulatory and legal climate. Lenovo's site says approximately US $5.8 billion at current exchange rates.
Some surprising financial or development support might come from larger users of Linux, too. Chrysler and AutoZone, for instance, probably don't appreciate being sued and might want to help defend themselves from that kind of suit in the future. The NSA didn't develop SE Linux because they were using Windows.
Oh, and just for fun, let's look at SCO's market cap today: 5.37 M (and yes, that's an 'M').
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It seems kind of like an ego-boosting maneuver for the designers. "We started fresh and rethought the whole idea of MMO. Yay us, let's call the game 'Blank Slate', err... um, 'Tabula Rasa' (it sounds so much cooler!)".
Sure, the characters have fled Earth and had to set up bases elsewhere, but lots of names could fit that backstory ("Starship Troopers", "Alpha Centauri", "Titan AE", and "Earth 2" come to mind immediately).
Otherwise, it seems kind of cool. I wonder if people looking for casual games really will enjoy the cooperative, team-building, getting-to-know-you aspects of an MMO though. Part of what separates MMO players from casual gamers is the sense of obligation to play and temporal continuity of the game world. I have many times declined to start playing one or another MMO game particularly to avoid those entanglements.
Sure, but I keep wondering after reading that... what's going to conduct the nanowires along a path, and how do you measure the presence or absence of the nanowires in a memory cell? Seems a whole lot simpler to me to just use the nanowires to replace larger wires, and still use electrons conducted across the nanowires.
QoS is preferable to forged RST packets. It's not as nice for the P2P file transfer as no QoS, but it's a lot better for the person making an emergency call over VoIP.
The upsetting thing for me isn't throttling certain traffic or even traffic shaping all of a customer's traffic during peak hours using a packet rate limiter. It's the method they're using. Sure, it'd be nice to have the whole pipe. However, I'd bet a lot of customers would like to be able to make a VoIP call and download something on BT at the same time in their own home without the VoIP call breaking up and sounding shitty. QoS can help achieve that if the BT would otherwise cause it.
Forging RST packets is dishonest, and it causes your network stack to do something entirely different from getting no response at all or having the traffic shaped. That's what pisses me off for these Comcast customers, and it'd piss me off more if AT&T was doing it to me.
Forging packets has nothing to do with whether or not your peak bandwidth is shared with other users.
AbiWord and Gnumeric are pretty cool if you don't need good interoperability with Office. There are WordPerfect for Linux versions, too, and IIRC those do a pretty good job with most Office documents.
Really, the Office document argument for a home machine bothers me anyway. How often must someone get an Office document at home and edit it, then sen it back out as an Office document? If you're generating your own documents, you can always send RTF or CSV to people who really need to use them in Office. Most of the time home documents are for use within the home.
Did you miss this: "They're advertising a particular speed of access that's on all the time. That's not unlimited bandwidth. That's not unlimited traffic. Bandwidth is not the same as total traffic moved."
Or perhaps you missed this: '"Unlimited bandwidth" would mean they were offering to allow you to download things instantaneously. "Unlimited traffic" would mean they were allowing you to download every bit of information in the universe. Clearly they aren't offering those things.'
Or perhaps this: "People are being led to believe that they can use 8 Mbps or 6Mbps or whatever the stated download speed is as well as the 512 kbps or whatever the stated upload speed is subject to congestion and limited over-subscription of the bandwidth."
Look, I was in the ISP business for over 7 years. I understand oversubscription and the post to which you replied makes that pretty clear. The "congestion and limited over-subscripion of the bandwidth" I thought was abundantly clearly dealing with the issue of over-subscription and the congestion that causes for traffic down the wire. I've also made that point probably three dozen times over the last couple of years on Slashdot.
The major issue here isn't that Comcast is dealing with leechers. It's how they're doing it. Period. If they want to do QoS or traffic shaping by customer, that's fine. If they want to make BitTorrent a TOS violation when people sign up, that's shitty but it's an honest and legit way to handle any issue they have with BitTorrent use. Forging packets in a man-in-the-middle attack to shut down a network connection is rude, dishonest, and possibly illegal despite being initiated by the ISP.
I give less than a rat's right asscheek about Comcast's dainty little network breaking if they oversubscribe to the point of moving no data. Some oversubscription is not the same as cramming every last user on a wire that can physically be connected regardless of service viability. There's a ratio that's acceptable, and overselling your last-mile bandwidth anywhere from 8/1 to 15/1 is probably arguably within an acceptable range. Overselling your network uplink about 4/1 or 6/1 is usually no problem, either. Beyond that, you have to get more creative with traffic management, including maybe metering heavy users or some kind of shaping. Forging packets is not a legitimate traffic management technique under any circumstances. Oversubscribing the network resources to the point of breakage is only enough reason for two actions: upgrading the network to a more reasonable level of oversubscription or freezing new subscriptions in an area until an upgrade can take place.
So big government that intrudes on the freedom of the people through excessive laws, regulations, and taxes is "everything bad"? I don't suppose you have some reference to me calling rape, child molestation, AIDS, dengue fever, bridge collapses, and terrorism "leftist", do you? It's going to be pretty difficult to find those references, since they don't exist.
Those who don't understand socialism vs. capitalism nor authoritarian vs. representative governments are doomed to reinvent the horrors of past socio-political experiments that have failed. Whether the bulk of wealth is tied in name to the government or to corporations that lobby the government and are in turn propped up by the government makes very little difference in the freedom of the people. It's the lack of wealth and power of the private citizens that leads to abuse of the people. The centralization of power into the hands of a few on a national scale is what makes it easy to abuse the people.
Whether you can argue for or against any particular combination of government and economic systems is irrelevant if you can't even see where big, powerful, restrictive government from one party is the same as big, powerful, restrictive government from the supposedly polar opposite party. The supposed goals of protecting workers or protecting people from crime are irrelevant when it's the government causing the loss of the most important aspects of a free, happy, fulfilling life.
Just because the American media calls the Democrats the "left" and the Republicans the "right" or one "liberal" and the other "conservative" does not make it so. Both major parties are for big government. They both favor lots of social programs and lots of spending on keeping the people in line. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. If it talks like a liberal and votes like a liberal, it's probably a liberal.
They're advertising a particular speed of access that's on all the time. That's not unlimited bandwidth. That's not unlimited traffic. Bandwidth is not the same as total traffic moved. They're not offering me anything, because I'm not and can't be a Comcast subscriber.
"Unlimited bandwidth" would mean they were offering to allow you to download things instantaneously. "Unlimited traffic" would mean they were allowing you to download every bit of information in the universe. Clearly they aren't offering those things.
What they do offer is 24 hours a day 365 a year to allow you to use up to the advertised speed of the line, as shared with other users. The limits they impose with their forged traffic which impersonates the other end of your connection is not the limit of the technology as shared by their customers. It is an artificial limit imposed on those users they fear are using a resource other than the way Comcast finds most advantageous to Comcast.
People are being led to believe that they can use 8 Mbps or 6Mbps or whatever the stated download speed is as well as the 512 kbps or whatever the stated upload speed is subject to congestion and limited over-subscription of the bandwidth. They are further convinced by Comcast that they can do so all the time without interference from Comcast. These things turn out not to be the case. Guaranteeing a speed would mean that you'll always get at least X bits per minute. That has nothing to do with this. This discussion is about Comcast picking and choosing which network connections to terminate and nothing to do with congestion, over-subscription, or traffic shaping.
If the network is fragile, the steps they should take are either to make the network less fragile or to stop offering a service the network cannot support. Impersonating one's friends and colleagues and ending network connections on their behalf is not a legitimate network administration technique. Traffic shaping for high-use customers may be less than desirable for users, but it's honest and legitimate. Dropping BitTorrent, Lotus Notes, or Google traffic for customers with average or below average total usage is discriminatory against certain parties, is dishonest, and is not legitimate.
To summarize what Shakrai said, if BitTorrent is breaking the network, it's because the network was designed in a fragile way.
To offer something on the market you're not able to realistically deliver is a type of fraud and is specifically referred to as deceptive marketing. Either Comcast can deliver unlimited Internet service or they can't. If they want to sell it, they should deliver it. If they don't intend to deliver it, they shouldn't be selling it. Bitching that they didn't do the work necessary to deliver what they're selling and that therefore they have to further impair one customer's service to enhance another's just doesn't cut it. Doing the work necessary to deliver what they sold is their only legal and equitable option AFAICT. Hopefully the courts or Congress will see it the same way.
by mr_mischief (456295) on Tuesday October 30, @01:34PM (#21173431)
by Seraphim_72 (622457) Alter Relationship on Tuesday October 30, @01:44PM (#21173597)
If you had read my first reply, I wouldn't have had to reply to the same idea again and you'd look a lot less silly right now.
Where did I say "Democrats, as opposed to our lovely Bushite true conservatives"? Before implying I have some mental disorder, perhaps you might want to consider that both of the major parties in the US are pretty much big government types. I said "leftists", which, by Bush's actions of growing the government to crack down on personal freedoms and take away the freedom of movement, freedom to do business without being tracked, and a whole bunch more pretty much includes him and his ilk.
Government can only be trusted when it fears the people. That's not going to happen under the control of any group as statist and centralist as the Democrats or Republicans. Many of the supposed differences between them are talking points to get votes. The rest are not so much a difference of opinion on government growth but at the rate it should happen.
If you want smaller government and more personal freedoms, vote Libertarian (or Freedom Party (International), Jeffersonian Party, American Reform Party, or the Populist Party of America). If the complaint is that no one is running, then promote a candidate or run yourself.
Beware, though, of many "small government, freedom to the people" parties who have planks in their platforms specifically calling for curtailing of freedoms of those with whom they disagree, like the Prohibition Party, American Heritage Party, or the America First Party. Freedom for your friends and not your opponents is not really freedom at all.
A strong military under civilian control, the right to retaliate to attack, open trade with other countries not subsidized or tariffed in either direction, regulation of interstate trade, equitable strategic arms reduction and extradition treaties, and the right to contain or forcibly extract people like bin Laden when extradition won't work are pretty much all the federal government should be concerned about. Everything else is guaranteed by the Constitution to be delegated to the states or the people, after all.
I'll stop calling the Republican party leftists along with the Democrats when they stop doing the same things the Democrats do.
The government has captured aliens. It then drops them off 1 mile past the fence, where the Mexicans give them food and water for their return trip.
Oh... you meant the other type of alien conspiracy. Sorry, AC, can't help you there. As entertaining as they are, the claims are extraordinary and require extraordinary proof, not fuzzy pictures of Halloween costumes.
Unfortunately your Dutch experience isn't too far removed from the US experience. Our phone company that served almost 100% of the local phones and almost 100% of the long distance until 1984 was a private company, but their monopoly was granted and enforced by the government. The rights-of-way for the cable were granted by the government and the cable plants subsidized.
Then, the government that had been setting the prices decided the prices could be lower, so instead of regulating lower prices they split the company into many smaller, regional monopolies and a nationwide long distance monopoly. They regulated that all of these other companies had to be given access and at what rates, and competition did lower prices but service went to hell.
Finally, most of the companies are back together again, prices are (for now) somewhat reasonable, but the service still sucks compared to what it could be.
The cable companies are private companies, but mostly have regional monopolies or duopolies granted and enforced by governments (often state or local in this case). They often had breaks on taxes or help laying their infrastructure. Now they're using that infrastructure for new things like internet access. It might just be my opinion, but it seems that Internet access is a natural outgrowth of the user-to-user public switched telephone network, and not necessarily from the wired broadcasting industry of cable TV. Therefore, the rationalizations for allowing cable TV companies to leverage themselves into the ISP market are thinner and weaker than for allowing the phone companies to do so, but the competition is nice.
I think one way new competition could work is if new companies were allowed to use the last mile connection to the home, but had to string new wire or fiber from there. Just wiring to every block of a city is much less expensive than wiring to every individual apartment, house, and office. They could use the same cable paths, laying side by side. It's also much less disruptive, as the main cables get much more maintenance anyway and many of them are strung from poles at that point in the route, too.
It does me no good to try to contact someone through WHOIS with their nonexistent email address, their disconnected phone number, and their fake shell company. In those instances where I can work out a networking problem with a legitimate company, university, or ISP based on accurate WHOIS info, it makes life much easier than calling a techno-peasant receptionist and explaining who it might be int what possible department that might handle the kind of thing I need to talk to someone about, only to find out that the network is provided by someone entirely different.
In all, I'd say that ARIN's, RIPE's, and APNIC's IP-based WHOIS are much more useful than any of the domain registrars' collective WHOIS systems. If I'm contacting someone about a site and there's no contact info on the site itself, the WHOIS is probably useless anyway. If I'm working on a problem of wacky routing, mysterious traffic origination, packet loss, or the source of an attempted security breach, contacting the IT people in charge of the network in question directly is often the fastest and easiest way to get things resolved. There is no other reliable place to find solid information on who to contact about the IP space, which is different from a website that usually has that information in-band. Reverse DNS can be useful, but it's far from reliable and still doesn't give me the contact info.
Private domain registration is a pain, but it does solve the spam problem of public WHOIS information. I can think of alternatives, but none of them are clearly much better. However, as I already said, I think the domain name WHOIS services are less useful and less important than network WHOIS anyway. For network WHOIS, private registration shouldn't even be considered.
The biggest problem here is that the Executive branch has all the agencies, and whenever the leftists win a bigger government vote all the extra people in the bigger government are at the Executive branch's disposal.
Congress has some support staff, as do the justices of the Supreme Court. There are roughly two million civilian personnel of the federal government outside the Postal Service. For 535 people or 9 people to hold responsible two million individuals who are neither elected by nor directly responsible to the people is a bit ludicrous. The sheer size of the Executive branch makes accountability and the notion of checks and balances pretty difficult, even with the 94 federal district courts involved.
The Judiciary simply must be larger or the Executive smaller in order for the people to be properly served by checks and balances. In fact, I'd say the Judiciary really needs to be larger and account for more of the federal budget simply in order to guarantee a speedy trial as the sixth amendment promises while not putting undue strain on the court to shorten previous trials. Perhaps civil cases could be heard by a separate set of judges in each district specializing in civil cases, but I digress.
In any case, I'd think the huge Executive branch, with its apparent penchant for shifting blame and covering things up, is much too large right now for the other branches to balance it enough.
Do we really need 2 million people to provide federal government services to 303 million citizens on top of all the 16 million state, county, and city personnel providing services as well? In 2000, 19 million or so people were government employees (it doesn't say whether that includes revenue-generating government agencies like the Post Service). That's over 6% of the population living on taxes and borrowed money who are not elected, or over 14% of the total work force. I fail to see how that is sustainable, let alone sufficiently kept in check by state and federal courts and legislatures.
I'm still not convinced the bandwidth is Comcast's major concern. Comcast still makes the majority of their money from being a cable company, and only uses Internet access as a diversification method, don't they? All the Comcast commercials I see are for cable TV, not for Internet access.
It seems to me the whole rage against P2P traffic (which is how lots of games are played, BTW, and how almost all VPNs are set up) is not so much about capacity as about a conflict of interests on the part of Comcast. They're the content delivery network for TV programming and music (they have music channels like DirecTV does, don't they?). They are wanting to make sure you use your cable TV for getting video and audio, because that's where they get a bigger cut.
How much human time goes into backups, tests, recovery plans, administration, electricity, and charged depreciation of the hardware? The purchase price of a single desktop drive at Wal-Mart or Circuit City doesn't come close to what it costs to provide failsafe access to data. $3000 per GB does sound high, but it's not going to be $1 per GB either. Perhaps the IT department's figures just haven't been updated in a few years, and it might even be the accounting department's job to do that.
Is the title clear enough? I can't imagine any judge or jury saying Comcast is allowed to impersonate Google and tell Comcast customers they're not allowed to use Google's services or that Google's services are overwhelmed and shutting down connections. That's essentially what forged, fraudulent RST packets from a MITM attack are doing. That can't possibly be considered a legitimate business practice in court.
Another physical machine in the same rack on the same VLAN is still easier to attack than repeating the same attack from across the public network. There's much more bandwidth with much less latency to use. There are also potentially whole new classes of attacks that weren't available from outside the local network (ARP-based attacks, convincing the switch to go into dumb hub mode through various means, duplicating IPs on the LAN) as well as whole classes of attacks made easier by the proximity and network speed (smurf, ping flood, vulnerability scans).
Yes, keeping OS installations on separate physical machines instead of co-hosted virtual machines does make them more secure. However, the further statement that compromising one server in a rack does not make it easier to compromise other physical servers in the same rack does not follow. It is indeed easier to attack another physical machine once you're in a LAN or VLAN segment even though it doesn't give you the same kind of heightened access as a hypervisor or hardware emulator.
So what you're saying is that due to discontinuity of certain functions, our inability to measure things precisely, and possibly our misunderstanding of simpler theories, we need to make our models of space more complex to get the theory to fit the data? Is that about right?
My question is whether or not Occam's razor had been honored. Are all the simpler possibilities being fully explored before jumping to this new mental representation of space? If so, run with it. If not, perhaps explore how to tweak models that fit more with intuitive observations we can perceive and understand more directly. Are all other models really so lacking in every way that we need a new one?
It's one of at least two places lead was banned in the US in the last 40 years or so. Lead paint was once quite common as well. Lead solder used to be used in places where lead-free solder is now. So if the lead from gas turns out not to account for the total, lead from other sources may still have something to do with it.
Oh, and lead-induced brain damage has strong statistical ties already to impulsive behavior and hampered mental function, which decline in the use of slide rules and increases in CPU power do not. This is just trying to measure the effect of lead in gasoline, since lead exposure in general is already believed to be an issue.
A devil's advocate, I would like to say that an increase in CPU power and a huge increase in the availability of computers could actually help lower violent crime rates. It's not because computers make it easier to get a job, though. In fact, in lots of ways computers have both added jobs and taken jobs away from the economy, leaving us probably about even. Productivity is higher in some fields like drafting and manufacturing, but fewer people are actually needed. What they have done, though, is made it a lot easier to profit from non-violent crime. Pump and dump scams, advance fee scams, certified check fraud, identity theft, database infiltration, and laptop theft are the crimes of choice for money now. They're inherently less violent and less risky than bank robbery, mugging, brigandage, piracy, and convenience store robbery. There's less personal contact than during in-person scams and confidence schemes, so the threat of escalation into violence of a nonviolent crime is less.
Still, as the parent post said, the author of the study did what should always be done in this kind of study: the provision was made to test a further hypothesis based on the study. That's good scientific practice, even if the study turns out not to be repeatable. There's a vast difference between having the wrong hypothesis and using the wrong methods, and science is largely advanced through the understanding of that difference.
What if they're causing damage to a "protected computer" engaged in interstate commerce -- say, torrenting a new Linux distro ISO for use in their business or distributing their own published work their users -- by hijacking the session and thereby exceeding their authorization on your system?
IANAL, but this is straight out of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as amended (18 USC Section 1030).
Anyone who:
(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
or who:
(5)(A)(i) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
(ii) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or
(iii) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage; and
(B) by conduct described in clause (i), (ii), or (iii) of subparagraph (A), caused (or, in the case of an attempted offense, would, if completed, have caused)--
(i) loss to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period (and, for purposes of an investigation, prosecution, or other proceeding brought by the United States only, loss resulting from a related course of conduct affecting 1 or more other protected computers) aggregating at least $5,000 in value;
(ii) the modification or impairment, or potential modification or impairment, of the medical examination, diagnosis, treatment, or care of 1 or more individuals;
(iii) physical injury to any person;
(iv) a threat to public health or safety; or
(v) damage affecting a computer system used by or for a government entity in furtherance of the administration of justice, national defense, or national security;
or who:
(6) knowingly and with intent to defraud traffics (as defined in section 1029) in any password or similar information through which a computer may be accessed without authorization, if--
(A) such trafficking affects interstate or foreign commerce;
in which "protected computer" can mean:
2) the term "protected computer" means a computer--
(A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial institution or the United States Government and the conduct constituting the offense affects that use by or for the financial institution or the Government; or
(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States;
and
(6) the term "exceeds authorized access" means to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter;
and
(8) the term "damage" means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information;
and
(11) the term "loss" means any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring the data, program, system, or information to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption of service;
p2p _is_ legit traffic. Some of the contents may not be legal, but Xandros, Ubuntu, and a hell of a lot of other stuff gets distributed p2p.
Um. No. If you've invested thousands of dollars up front, you're less likely to chuck your application suite than if you're going to pay the same next month as this month.
Let's say you're paying $X per month to Adobe. Some worthy competitor comes along and offers you a comparable suite for $Y per month, where Y X. Remember, you're free to leave Adobe next month and come back the month after if you're happier with their stuff. That creates a lot more decision points than the boxed suite. That means a lot more chances to affect your decision, and therefore more marketing.
There could be year-by-year subscription contracts, but then you might as well be buying the box because you're probably going to upgrade every year or two anyway. It won't be less advertising in any case, because you'll still have an annual decision to make.
The biggest advantage to most over-the-wire applications isn't less advertising. It isn't necessarily the pricing model, either, although that's certainly a good one to put in first place. Another choice for the prize, though, is the development methods network delivery allow you to use.
If you sell a box, you have to try to get all the features in the box and get them all right all at once. Otherwise, you piss people off that they paid so much for your box and spent time installing it only to install huge chunks of it over again online anyway. With a network delivery model, you can offer something much more modular. If it's actually working live across the wire, as the quotes in TFS imply, then you can also upgrade people's application across all customers simultaneously. You can roll out new features or improvements to existing features piecemeal, because you're not rolling trucks to get them to the users. It's a continual, gradual update process to go along with the continual, gradual payments you receive. It makes software a service industry rather than a product industry, and many people think that's a good thing.
Sun? I think IBM is much larger still. There are a lot more people interested in Linux than just the major software companies promoting it, too. They'll get more interested as Microsoft tries to stifle it more.
Novell (NOVL) : 2.69 B
Red Hat (RHT) : 4.03 B
Sun (JAVA) : 20.21 B
Dell (DELL) : 64.08 B
Oracle (ORCL) : 108.19 B
HP (HPQ) : 135.14 B
IBM (IBM) : 155.00 B
Intel (INTC) : 155.64 B
Google (GOOG) : 202.79 B
I doubt Canonical or Mandriva are even for sale. I know Debian, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, and Slackware aren't. There's no way Microsoft could get Google, Intel, IBM, HP, Oracle, and Dell all swallowed even in a pro-merger regulatory and legal climate. Lenovo's site says approximately US $5.8 billion at current exchange rates.
Some surprising financial or development support might come from larger users of Linux, too. Chrysler and AutoZone, for instance, probably don't appreciate being sued and might want to help defend themselves from that kind of suit in the future. The NSA didn't develop SE Linux because they were using Windows.
Oh, and just for fun, let's look at SCO's market cap today: 5.37 M (and yes, that's an 'M').