I think it's interesting how man personifies God. I personally believe that God is nothing more than the personification of nature, of science, created by humans who (for lack of a better explanation) believe in the existance of a superbeing.
I believe in the same God that all these religious fanatics do, I just understand it for what it is. I just wish they would stop the "God wants us to do this" crap and the whole blasphemy thing.
Either that, or Adam and Eve were aliens and the Garden of Eden was this really rad spaceship. Eve fucked a native and was kicked out. Ehh, yeah..
I work for a mid-size ISP and we use switch boxes. Make sure to spend the money on a digital switch box as you will soon find yourself very unhappy with the analog ones.
The 'console on serial port' option in the 2.2.x kernels is most likely a cheaper route. And do you really need the three-finger salute when you have/sbin/shutdown?
And if you really need to power-cycle a machine, maybe look into the SNMP-manageable power strips.
If I remember correctly, someone from ChooseYourMail.com was at the Mail Abuse Round Table at the ISP Forum in San Diego.
It was actually quite amusing. These guys send bulk e-mail but they claim none of it is unsolicited. The guy got up in front of a room full of postmasters and abuse administrators and tried to rationalize what they do.
Personally, I think the company is legitimate and they are trying to do e-mail marketing to people who want it. At least this guy was at the round table and wanted to find out how they could do this without pissing off the recipients. I don't think they're going to go away any time soon unless the CDNow thing bankrupts them (I doubt it).
Yeah, when I tried the college thing a couple of years ago they tried teaching me COBOL. It's really a joke. I know, I know.. they're trying to teach some kind of fundamentals or something.
I work for an ISP and find that I write most of my stuff in Perl. There's a huge module base (I love CPAN!) and that makes it easy to do complex things.
The biggest hurdle will be decoding the data but I think that can easily be overcome.
You said that your problems with the people at Seti were that they wouldn't give you any details about the data, right? Maybe we can find one of the source releases and go from there?
I just assumed there would not be a screensaver available for Unix platforms. However, I was peeking through the.txt files that are created after you run the client. What would stop us from creating our own visual display of the data?
outfile.txt = interesting signals? work_unit.txt = the raw data
I'm no astrophysicist but I got enough from Contact that ra must mean right ascension (or something like that), dec == declination, time is time, there's the frequency, and the rest I'm a little unsure about.
Couldn't we figure this out and make a GTK/SVGALib app that polls the files and displays pretty pictures?
And hell, that program could communicate with some type of master server. It would say, "Hey, I'm working on this part of the sky". And you could go to a web page and see a generated imagemap of the sky that contains color-coded regions of places you've checked, places everyone has checked, etc.. and you could click on those regions to see the peaks. And there could be a top-10 list of peak signals.
This doesn't sound unreasonable to me. I'd be willing to work on the webpage end and contribute what I can to decoding the text files.
I just assumed there would not be a screensaver available for Unix platforms. However, I was peeking through the.txt files that are created after you run the client. What would stop us from creating our own visual display of the data? outfile.txt = interesting signals? work_unit.txt = the raw data Outfile contains things like: gaussian: peak=5.596647e-01 mean=5.280021e-01 ra=21.901 dec= 22.28 time= 2451246.16512 freq=1420360510.73 sigma=4.804805e+00 chisqr=2.706838e+00 fft_len=8192 chir prate=7.105420e-01 I'm no astrophysicist but I got enough from Contact that ra must mean right ascension (or something like that), dec == declination, time is time, there's the frequency, and the rest I'm a little unsure about. work_unit.txt contains things like: start_ra=21.888 start_dec= 22.16 end_ra=21.928 end_dec= 22.53 angle_range= 0.666 time_recorded= 2451246.16476 (Mon Mar 8 07:57:14 1999) subband_center=1420355832.96 subband_base=1420351560.50 subband_sample_rate=9765.62 fft_len=2048 ifft_len=8 subband_number=36 receiver=ao1420 nsamples=1048576 tape_version= 1.30 num_positions=22 [$num_positions coordinates] end_seti_header [DATA] Couldn't we figure this out and make a GTK/SVGALib app that polls the files and displays pretty pictures? And hell, that program could communicate with some type of master server. It would say, "Hey, I'm working on this part of the sky". And you could go to a web page and see a generated imagemap of the sky that contains color-coded regions of places you've checked, places everyone has checked, etc.. and you could click on those regions to see the peaks. And there could be a top-10 list of peak signals. This doesn't sound unreasonable to me. I'd be willing to work on the webpage end and contribute what I can to decoding the text files.
"The Commission declared that Internet traffic is jurisdictionally mixed and appears to be largely interstate in nature. But the decision preserves the rule that exempts the Internet and other information services from interstate access charges. This means that those consumers who continue to access the Internet by dialing a seven-digit number will not incur long distance charges when they do so. In a notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission also asked for comment on proposals governing future carrier-to-carrier compensation for handling this traffic."
(Emphasis Mine)
The FCC is trying to blur the lines between ISPs and telephone companies. This is a bad thing to do. Once this traffic hits an Internet connected network, it should not involve the telephone companies. Unless, of course, the FCC wants to severely regulate ISPs.
So what's in these people's minds? Why would they want to blur the lines between normal telecommunications and network data communications? Well, taxes come to mind. The Internet is the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you're not on the Internet, you're out of the loop so everyone and their brother (and grandmother) are jumping on. So of course the government wants to get a piece of the action. What better way than to microtax access time?
What's in it for the RBOCs? They want to blur these lines because their networks weren't designed for the load that 12 hour data connections cause. I work for an ISP and we've had tons of problems with USWest. They came out and sold us a DS3 with 250 trunks for dialup Internet access and their local central office can't handle that many simultaneous calls through their digital switch. When they reach capacity, they give a fast busy, a regular busy, or an "All circuits are busy" message. One of our users even called to ask them about this and USWest told them it was our equipment!
Needless to say, we have a lawsuit pending and Electric Lightwave dialtone coming in.
So everyone who breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the newer Slashdot article and some positive-sounding articles on news sites had better think to themselves what the implications are if these hard lines are blurred and data versus normal telecommunications become considering the same. When you access a site in Europe, do you really want to be charged a tax on that because "hey, it's not interstate, it's international!".
That's what's coming down the pike if we don't bring it to a head now and say, no yell, "NO!". The phone company should be out of the picture once that call reaches it's destination, which is my local network access server. It's none of their business from there and it's really none of the FCC's business either. We already pay Telco for the local loop to our upstream network provider and that *DOES* get assessed interstate access charges. How many angles do they get to charge us from?
The thing is, the RBOCs don't care. They all have their own little ISP projects going on. They'll be more than happy to *pay themselves*. It's the smaller providers who will get hurt by this. Hell, maybe no one cares. If you want network access from the telephone companies and the cable companies only, you'll be all for this. If you want competition and choice, you won't. All these statements from the FCC do is set a precedent that dial-up calls to access the Internet are interstate in nature and eventually they *WILL* stop being nice about it and will give in to the telco lobbyists.
I know what you're thinking. Modems are dinosaurs and they need to be phased out anyway. Well, sorry to say but they're going to be around for a while. It's cheap and that's bottom line. If we're stuck with RBOC ISPs, DSL, and Cable, you'll be looking at the "haves" and the "have nots". The "have nots" may be able to afford access through the RBOC ISPs because those ISPs can eat the costs. So, all the small ISPs go out of business.
I didn't each touch on the subject of Voice Over IP. I cringe when I think about the FCC's plans for this.
I work for an ISP and over the past year we've purchased two smaller local providers. They were both running NT and I had to convert everything over to run on our Linux servers.
Among the issues I ran into was determining which domains were registered to the other ISP's nameservers. Their nameservers were poorly maintained, some domains had transferred, etc.. I also wanted to know if there were any domains that listed these nameservers as authoritative but weren't listed in the config files.
The only way to do this was a root zone transfer. I received an e-mail a few weeks ago from InterNIC stating that access would be renigged soon. I just checked and my access is gone. Luckily, I downloaded them all a few days ago.
Yes, some of the things I needed to check could have been done with Whois. But others couldn't. Of course, InterNIC is now offering monthly reports of domains associated with a nameserver but at the time, this service didn't exist.
I think it's bad policy to restrict access to people who have a legitimite need. Restricting access to root zone files will not stop spam to domain contacts. The spammers will simply scour other sources for e-mail addresses and run Whois queries on each domain they encounter. Yeah, it makes it a little bit harder but they'll do it nonetheless.
I've been checking out the Linux Router Project and my cheesy 1.44MB floppy lets me boot and do some simple stuff but not much else. The ls-120 superdisk from Imation and Maxell seem to be the best storage solution if you consider the price.
It would probably cost over $200 to do something similar with these flash cards. Thanks, but no thanks. Does anyone have a compelling reason to consider these flash cards over normal ls-120s disks?
I heard rumors about this and am glad it happened. Some of the Ascend stuff I have to deal with is just brain-dead so maybe Lucent can address these issues. Then again, it's better then 3com racks so I can't complain.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's interesting how man personifies God. I personally believe that God is nothing more than the personification of nature, of science, created by humans who (for lack of a better explanation) believe in the existance of a superbeing.
I believe in the same God that all these religious fanatics do, I just understand it for what it is. I just wish they would stop the "God wants us to do this" crap and the whole blasphemy thing.
Either that, or Adam and Eve were aliens and the Garden of Eden was this really rad spaceship. Eve fucked a native and was kicked out. Ehh, yeah..
I work for a mid-size ISP and we use switch boxes. Make sure to spend the money on a digital switch box as you will soon find yourself very unhappy with the analog ones.
/sbin/shutdown?
The 'console on serial port' option in the 2.2.x kernels is most likely a cheaper route. And do you really need the three-finger salute when you have
And if you really need to power-cycle a machine, maybe look into the SNMP-manageable power strips.
If I remember correctly, someone from ChooseYourMail.com was at the Mail Abuse Round Table at the ISP Forum in San Diego.
It was actually quite amusing. These guys send bulk e-mail but they claim none of it is unsolicited. The guy got up in front of a room full of postmasters and abuse administrators and tried to rationalize what they do.
Personally, I think the company is legitimate and they are trying to do e-mail marketing to people who want it. At least this guy was at the round table and wanted to find out how they could do this without pissing off the recipients. I don't think they're going to go away any time soon unless the CDNow thing bankrupts them (I doubt it).
Yeah, when I tried the college thing a couple of years ago they tried teaching me COBOL. It's really a joke. I know, I know.. they're trying to teach some kind of fundamentals or something.
I work for an ISP and find that I write most of my stuff in Perl. There's a huge module base (I love CPAN!) and that makes it easy to do complex things.
Why don't we get a mailing list together?
The biggest hurdle will be decoding the data but I think that can easily be overcome.
You said that your problems with the people at Seti were that they wouldn't give you any details about the data, right? Maybe we can find one of the source releases and go from there?
I just assumed there would not be a screensaver available for Unix platforms. However, I was peeking through the .txt files that are created after you run the client. What would stop us from creating our own visual display of the data?
outfile.txt = interesting signals?
work_unit.txt = the raw data
Outfile contains things like:
gaussian: peak=5.596647e-01 mean=5.280021e-01 ra=21.901 dec= 22.28 time= 2451246.16512 freq=1420360510.73 sigma=4.804805e+00 chisqr=2.706838e+00 fft_len=8192 chir
prate=7.105420e-01
I'm no astrophysicist but I got enough from Contact that ra must mean right ascension (or something like that), dec == declination, time is time, there's the frequency, and the rest I'm a little unsure about.
work_unit.txt contains things like:
start_ra=21.888
start_dec= 22.16
end_ra=21.928
end_dec= 22.53
angle_range= 0.666
time_recorded= 2451246.16476 (Mon Mar 8 07:57:14 1999)
subband_center=1420355832.96
subband_base=1420351560.50
subband_sample_rate=9765.62
fft_len=2048
ifft_len=8
subband_number=36
receiver=ao1420
nsamples=1048576
tape_version= 1.30
num_positions=22
[$num_positions coordinates]
end_seti_header
[DATA]
Couldn't we figure this out and make a GTK/SVGALib app that polls the files and displays pretty pictures?
And hell, that program could communicate with some type of master server. It would say, "Hey, I'm working on this part of the sky". And you could go to a web page and see a generated imagemap of the sky that contains color-coded regions of places you've checked, places everyone has checked, etc.. and you could click on those regions to see the peaks. And there could be a top-10 list of peak signals.
This doesn't sound unreasonable to me. I'd be willing to work on the webpage end and contribute what I can to decoding the text files.
I just assumed there would not be a screensaver available for Unix platforms. However, I was peeking through the .txt files that are created after you run the client. What would stop us from creating our own visual display of the data? outfile.txt = interesting signals? work_unit.txt = the raw data Outfile contains things like: gaussian: peak=5.596647e-01 mean=5.280021e-01 ra=21.901 dec= 22.28 time= 2451246.16512 freq=1420360510.73 sigma=4.804805e+00 chisqr=2.706838e+00 fft_len=8192 chir prate=7.105420e-01 I'm no astrophysicist but I got enough from Contact that ra must mean right ascension (or something like that), dec == declination, time is time, there's the frequency, and the rest I'm a little unsure about. work_unit.txt contains things like: start_ra=21.888 start_dec= 22.16 end_ra=21.928 end_dec= 22.53 angle_range= 0.666 time_recorded= 2451246.16476 (Mon Mar 8 07:57:14 1999) subband_center=1420355832.96 subband_base=1420351560.50 subband_sample_rate=9765.62 fft_len=2048 ifft_len=8 subband_number=36 receiver=ao1420 nsamples=1048576 tape_version= 1.30 num_positions=22 [$num_positions coordinates] end_seti_header [DATA] Couldn't we figure this out and make a GTK/SVGALib app that polls the files and displays pretty pictures? And hell, that program could communicate with some type of master server. It would say, "Hey, I'm working on this part of the sky". And you could go to a web page and see a generated imagemap of the sky that contains color-coded regions of places you've checked, places everyone has checked, etc.. and you could click on those regions to see the peaks. And there could be a top-10 list of peak signals. This doesn't sound unreasonable to me. I'd be willing to work on the webpage end and contribute what I can to decoding the text files.
And updates RFC 1149
"The Commission declared that Internet traffic is jurisdictionally mixed and appears to be largely interstate in nature. But the decision preserves the rule that exempts the Internet and other information services from interstate access charges. This means that those consumers who continue to access the Internet by dialing a seven-digit number will not incur long distance charges when they do so. In a notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission also asked for comment on proposals governing future carrier-to-carrier compensation for handling this traffic."
(Emphasis Mine)The FCC is trying to blur the lines between ISPs and telephone companies. This is a bad thing to do. Once this traffic hits an Internet connected network, it should not involve the telephone companies. Unless, of course, the FCC wants to severely regulate ISPs.
So what's in these people's minds? Why would they want to blur the lines between normal telecommunications and network data communications? Well, taxes come to mind. The Internet is the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you're not on the Internet, you're out of the loop so everyone and their brother (and grandmother) are jumping on. So of course the government wants to get a piece of the action. What better way than to microtax access time?
What's in it for the RBOCs? They want to blur these lines because their networks weren't designed for the load that 12 hour data connections cause. I work for an ISP and we've had tons of problems with USWest. They came out and sold us a DS3 with 250 trunks for dialup Internet access and their local central office can't handle that many simultaneous calls through their digital switch. When they reach capacity, they give a fast busy, a regular busy, or an "All circuits are busy" message. One of our users even called to ask them about this and USWest told them it was our equipment!
Needless to say, we have a lawsuit pending and Electric Lightwave dialtone coming in.So everyone who breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the newer Slashdot article and some positive-sounding articles on news sites had better think to themselves what the implications are if these hard lines are blurred and data versus normal telecommunications become considering the same. When you access a site in Europe, do you really want to be charged a tax on that because "hey, it's not interstate, it's international!".
That's what's coming down the pike if we don't bring it to a head now and say, no yell, "NO!". The phone company should be out of the picture once that call reaches it's destination, which is my local network access server. It's none of their business from there and it's really none of the FCC's business either. We already pay Telco for the local loop to our upstream network provider and that *DOES* get assessed interstate access charges. How many angles do they get to charge us from?
The thing is, the RBOCs don't care. They all have their own little ISP projects going on. They'll be more than happy to *pay themselves*. It's the smaller providers who will get hurt by this. Hell, maybe no one cares. If you want network access from the telephone companies and the cable companies only, you'll be all for this. If you want competition and choice, you won't. All these statements from the FCC do is set a precedent that dial-up calls to access the Internet are interstate in nature and eventually they *WILL* stop being nice about it and will give in to the telco lobbyists.
I know what you're thinking. Modems are dinosaurs and they need to be phased out anyway. Well, sorry to say but they're going to be around for a while. It's cheap and that's bottom line. If we're stuck with RBOC ISPs, DSL, and Cable, you'll be looking at the "haves" and the "have nots". The "have nots" may be able to afford access through the RBOC ISPs because those ISPs can eat the costs. So, all the small ISPs go out of business.
I didn't each touch on the subject of Voice Over IP. I cringe when I think about the FCC's plans for this.
So, when should I start looking for a new job?
dig @192.5.5.241 com. axfr | gzip - > com.zone.gz
I work for an ISP and over the past year we've purchased two smaller local providers. They were both running NT and I had to convert everything over to run on our Linux servers.
Among the issues I ran into was determining which domains were registered to the other ISP's nameservers. Their nameservers were poorly maintained, some domains had transferred, etc.. I also wanted to know if there were any domains that listed these nameservers as authoritative but weren't listed in the config files.
The only way to do this was a root zone transfer. I received an e-mail a few weeks ago from InterNIC stating that access would be renigged soon. I just checked and my access is gone. Luckily, I downloaded them all a few days ago.
Yes, some of the things I needed to check could have been done with Whois. But others couldn't. Of course, InterNIC is now offering monthly reports of domains associated with a nameserver but at the time, this service didn't exist.
I think it's bad policy to restrict access to people who have a legitimite need. Restricting access to root zone files will not stop spam to domain contacts. The spammers will simply scour other sources for e-mail addresses and run Whois queries on each domain they encounter. Yeah, it makes it a little bit harder but they'll do it nonetheless.
I've been checking out the Linux Router Project and my cheesy 1.44MB floppy lets me boot and do some simple stuff but not much else. The ls-120 superdisk from Imation and Maxell seem to be the best storage solution if you consider the price.
It would probably cost over $200 to do something similar with these flash cards. Thanks, but no thanks. Does anyone have a compelling reason to consider these flash cards over normal ls-120s disks?
that's a handful of loaded MAX TNTs
I heard rumors about this and am glad it happened. Some of the Ascend stuff I have to deal with is just brain-dead so maybe Lucent can address these issues. Then again, it's better then 3com racks so I can't complain.
long-hair, boot clad, linux freak
That's me.