Yup - that is rght folks... we've already paid for access to the content. Its built into the tarriff we pay for ISP services.
Anyone who lives outside the U.S.A. pretty much knows that when their telcominications carriers call up the backbones in the US, companies like Worldcomm, that their carriers get charged a hefty monthly fee for access to the content they carry to their end users. This fee is passed along to the ISP's and forms part of their cost structure which is ultimately paid for by the end users - that is YOU and ME.
There are generally two ways that a telecommunications company can gain access to internet content: (1) By far that LARGEST source is through a connection to a backbone (via a POP (point of presence = a big fast router)). (2) The second source is from the web servers themselves. Obviously any server not in their own neck of the woods will be behnd a POP. Thus, the POP's are BY FAR the largest source of content - and access to this content has to be paid for. Its covered by what is known as a PEERING AGREEMENT.
Since access to the VAST MAJORITY of the internet content is already being paid for - why should the telecommunications industry single out the second source of content, IE the lowly web servers? If they are willing to pay at the POP then they should also be willing to pay at the server itself.
So - We end users have paid, the ISP's have paid and in general the backbone operators have been paid. The system breaks down at this point and the webmasters in general ARE NOT paid - they are billed instead.
But this is NOT OUR FAULT. This clearly an INCONSISTANCY created by the over-gready telecommunications industry and it happens simply because they figure they have us all by our short and curlies.
The concept of fair play seems to not exisit in this industry. Hense we have the problem.
I don't think ANYONE wants more advertising. Our costs go way up because of the crap that we don't want in the first place. Instead, if the webmasters could actually make a little money our of the servies they supply - then we would probably see a great improvemnt in the content we really do want.
It is incumbant upon us to educate people what is really taking place so that we can get a broad based pressure to correct a situation that is obviously inconsistant, probably illegal under the fair trade practices legislation of most countries , and certainly not in the interest of anyone.
I don't know if I should tell you this but you can upgrade at least the del machines (GX110 with bios A05) to 1.3 gHz tualatin machines for next to nothing. I supect you can also upgrade the IBM 300GL's as well - but it will depend on if they can run the FSB at 100 mHz.
However - even if the FSB can't run at 100mHz, it still might make sense because you may be able to underclock the memory and CPUs and that will still give you a very credible 1gHz performance on those old boxen.
At least the IBM PC 300PL are upgradeable in the following models: 6584-90U 6862-24A 6862-52U 6862-C3A 6862-V1U 6892
The MOST SIGNIFICANT issue is going to be the amount of ram. I suspect MOST of your machines are running 64MB ram. This is not going to be enough if you wish to run say a KDE desktop. Perhaps another desktop manager is in order. I've heard FVM is pretty good and lighter weight.
I KNOW these upgrades make sense because I already did it. I upgraded an old 1998 celeron 433 based system to 1.3gHz and it is wonderful... it fully performs in the league of a 1.7gHz P4 and burns much much less power (like 23 watts for the CPU instead of what? over 60 watts for the P4 with the newest P4's burning over 150 watts)
Now - I use to have 128MB ram on the 433. It now sports 384mb ram and with KDE and Debian - I never find it thrashing. At 128 it did thrash sometimes.
So at a minimum I suspect you will be adding a 128MB stick of ram and a new CPU into each of those old boxen - the cost should be in around $100-$125 per machine and it will take you about 15 minutes per. (I'd got for a 256MB stick if you can)
So... that is a pretty good deal for even the cheapest outfits.
And the reason maybe I shouldn't tell you all this good news is that a machine configured this way actually has enuf horsepower to run the Microsoft XP bloatware!!!!
What SCO needs to do is call up the IBM sales team and request a new copy of AIX and the source code for same. Clearly SCO should simply ask to become a licencee of AIX and abide by IBM's terms.
HAHAHAHA
What a JOKE.
It gets better if you actually READ the documentation that is posted on GROKLAW - like section 13 for instance.
The premise of the SCO claim is becoming painfully apparent. The claim is that the moment IBM put ANY new code into AIX that this new code became a derivative copy of AIX and thus SCO has the right to control it.
I shall use an analogy here - an opera.
======================
I write an opera and you listen to it. You also are a talented song writer just as I am - perhaps more talented and you can easily write your own operas. But - this is not what happens. For whatever reasons you decide to IMPROVE my opera and then release it.
So you add in some new songs of yours to my opera and your version becomes more popular than mine. Mine in fact dies. So - do I have claims apon your version of the opera? Do I have claims against your songs? Do I have claims against say a single line you modified in one of my songs? How about individual words you might have changed? What if you changed the spelling of some of these words? Should I have claims against the sequence of letters you used to spell a word?
So you see - since YOU had the power to NOT use or contribute to my opera, I do get to make all sorts of outragous claims and I do get to control you.
On the other hand, suppose you are NOT a talented writer. Suppose you are just talented at arrangments. Suppose your friend is a talented writer and you find he has all these great songs that you can import into my opera. Clearly, your friend will not lose the rights to his copyrights by your actions. In fact, he may and I may grant you the right to make a derived opera so it is clear in this case that nobody has stepped on anyone's toes and there can be no claims by me on you.
The confusion stems from the fact that there is no boundry when you make the modifications. I get to claim you are making a derivative work - which you may have the right to do. And the question then becomes whether I get to control your work because some of it happened to be used in something I wrote before you did.
In staying with the analogy of the opera, suppose we get to the point where you feel your songs have a life of their own and you chop out 100% of my original material. Basically this is what IBM did.
Well, when at least _SOME_ of my material was in the derived work I may have had the right to control some aspects of the derivative work. When NONE of my material exists any longer we are left with the question of whether what you created is still a derived work which I get to control.
=============== So is it?
Well - In a way it is. And in a way it isn't. The way I read copyright law, I may in fact still get to control your work even though it is exclusively your work.... simply because during its history it was co mingled with mine. The premise for this claim is that your work would NEVER have existed were it not for my work and the structure it imparted.
This is a very important premise because when we look at software projects, the vast majority of new clean implementations suffer very bad teething problems and often lose their market share. Examples include Wordperfect, Mozilla and many others.
However, the practice in our industry is that each separate function bears its own copyright. As to code inserted in-line in functions - well - that is not as well sorted out. It becomes pretty arbitrary and the vast majority of us simply chose to not waste our time fighting about it.
=============== New analogy:
Lets look at a house. I build a house on my lot and you buy the lot next door and live in my house. You pay rent to me and get a contract from me that you can make tenant improvments. You ar
I have thought more on this subject after having already posted a note.
The idea of a class action lawsuit makes even more sense IMHO.
1) SCO has already disavowed the GPL. I believe this is in their court filings. As such they have no legal right to use or distribute any GPL code.
2) This fact is easily provable. The court documents already are filed. As such - in many jurisdictions this is a summary judgement matter.
3) It costs only a couple hundred bux to file a statment of claim and a summary judgement application can be done for under a couple thousand in legal fees. This is not very hard to do.
4) Courts usually hear summary judgment applications in chambers AFAIK. So this ruling can be obtained before the end of January I would think. Their lawyers typically need about 2 weeks to respond. The summary judgement application does not have to wait for discoveries or anything else because it is self evident.
Given this...
5) Once a summary judgement has been obtained, the next step is for the judge to determine damages. This will be much harder of course because the basis for damages will probably have to be established first.
However, it is clear that neither Caldera Linux nor _any_ flavour of System V unix has any value whatsoever without inclusion of the GPL software.
On this basis, the lion's share of ANYTHING that SCO has received in the past or may receive in the future including the proceeds from the law suit against IBM falls into the category of money SCO has no legal right to. They are guilty of unjust enrichment.
Furthermore, since it is the LION's that they are not entitled to, then SCO is technically bankrupt. They owe more to the opensource community than they can ever be worth.
Since a company cannot be allowed to do business while insolvent - a receiver must be appointed and we just wind them up - grabbing the System V copyrights in the process and we are all done.
IANAL but like most - I have some knowledge of the law. I think you have hit the nail right on the head here and I think you are brilliant.
UNIXWARE contains one HELL of a lot of GPL code. Thus SCO, as you clearly point out, has no legal right to distribute any of the GPL code that UNIXWARE contains and this is by their own admissions. By disavowing the GPL they invalidate their own licenses to IBM, HP, SUN and so on.
So, it would seem that NOW is the right time for a class action lawsuit to be launched against SCO by all the opensource developers who have contributed copyrighted code used in ANY System V related code.
By doing this, if SCO wins anything against the GPL they consequently lose the offsetting lawsuit from the opensource community. The damages on the offsetting lawsuit will exceed the damages they can collect from IBM and this means that SCO itself will be rendered in default.
As such, SCO will be bankrupt and it is the recievers duty to seize all assets of the corporation for distribution to the claimants.
Once of these assests is the copyright to the System V source code. Since it will be the OpenSource community who wins the copyright via this class action, the community can then simply OpenSource it and return any money back to IBM.
The long and the short of it is that if SCO has distributed code they have no right to under license to others (IBM et al) then SCO is guilty of "UNJUST ENRICHMENT". So this is a winable case.
1) plastic welding is a viable repair - you will find that if you contact your local panel banger (autobody repair shop) that they will be able to offer advise how to proceed.
The laptops are injection moulded plastics - possibly a TPE same as is used in the auto industy so the same techniques may apply.
2) glue it yourself. Call up your local 3M representative and ask them what structural glues they have for the plastic your lap top is made of. One product that MIGHT work is DP8005.
Another option is to contact polyurathane supply company. Those people have a nice website with good technical information.
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The type of equipment you need to plastic weld is generally an injection hot melt gun - they typically sell for about $5000 bux and are not too difficult to learn how to use. These guns force plastic under pressure into the crack and form a seam that is over 80% as strong as the original. The plastic comes in rods and is available in ABS, TPE, TFE,
You may want to check your Yellow Pages - look under PLASTIC WELDING equipment - call a supplier of the equipment and ask for a referal to who has the gun. Try to get to know the guy a bit and pay him well - broken plastic parts are a fact of life and these guys can do magic!!!
There is absolutly no good reason what-so-ever why a static IP should cost any money at all. All IP addresses were created when the tcp/ip protocol was developed and the _ONLY_ reason they can be dynamic is because the DHCP server was designed. It costs extra to run DHCP over statics - but in some cases it may be a little more convieniant, like in a large company where you juast wnat to be able to plug a machine in.
In the begining the IP address blocks were just handed out to whoever asked for them - for free.
Later Telephone companies and ISP's learned that since they held them, they could bill for them.
This is not much different than the Oklahoma Land Grab where the early settlers got their land for free, and everyone since then has had to pay through the nose.
Early Oil and Gas rights were similarly generally given out for free to the first settlers.
If you check your history, you will probably find that the greatest concentrations of wealth in North America come from early grants that were free or very close to it. Then when certain towns grew into cities the ranchers and farmers in the area received windfall profits which they used to invest in industries that later also proved quite lucrative.
Others probably would have used the capital better, but they never had the chance because they chose the wrong parents.
Clearly the static IP address range falls into a similar pattern. It might be a very good idea if we programmers start figuring out a way that the IPv6 address range can be gurranteed to be static.
What happens with dynamic IP is analagous to the idea that every time you pick up your cell phone, the phone company injects a new phone number ito it - then proclaims that you should pay extra for a phone number that doesn't change because then your friends can call you up and that is clearly an "EXTRA" service which puts you into a different category... OH... and if you want your name to be associated with your phone then that requires a NAMESERVER (DNS) and you have to pay even more money to Verisign.
Wonderful system we have here. Clearly it is not what we want, not what we intended and we are the once getting our collective pockets picked.
We have security issues because people are going to poke around whether we praise them or not.
In fact, if we DON'T have security then one of our enemies will use this ina surprise attack against us and we'll be like chickens with a fox in the hen house.
It is MUCH better we are prepared. Without our crackers out rattling our doors to see if they fall off the hinges - no one would bother with any security until it is too late.
Even as it stands now - most people do not have adequate security and I do worry that someone is going to release a DOOZER of a bad virus and really nail their toes to the floor.
It is very clear this is an impossible task. All one needs to do is run a standard PUBLIC KEY ENCRIPTION - you can get the code from www.openssl.org - then stow the encripted bits into the noise in the target file.
It can be stowed as replaced low order bits where the address of the bit is generated via a hashing function.
Even IF ( a really big IF here) it is possible to determine which bits were flipped (XOR) or stowed, one is still faced with knowing the arbitrary hashing function that was used.
If one is so lucky to find the hashing function one is still faced with cracking the public key encription and this has been shown to be impossible. Oh - and the hashing function istself can be derived from the public key encription code. If so - then it is provable that the hash cannot be derived much less the message that is being hidden.
For years it has been feasible to hide messages in any commonly available digital or even non-digital data streams.
The only messages they are likely to detected are very poorly encoded ones or ones that are deliberatly poorly encoded so they can be found.
Yet - I am sure there are many people who will gladly produce some literary fiction and take the money and run. We've all seen alot of this in reports commissioned by official agencies.
How many people are on this planet? How many prisons have been built. Please look around at the people you have known and ask yourself if you left something valuable in your back yard if every one of the people you have met in your life would respect your property rights.
It is pretty obvious there are bad apples just as it is obvious there are pot holes in our roads.
As a programmer I KNOW what nasty things can be done to a computer. I know how to adjust the CRTC register sweeps. I know how to wipe or alter a BIOS. Assembler is no big deal - I've used at least 4 assemblers on 4 different architectures: IBM 360/370/390, TI990, HP3000, Intel x86 and PDP 11xx and VAX.
For me it is easy to see both why some people are so keen on this - it is just a big game - and at the same time I see how easy it is to layer some ass on a buffer overflow. In fact - it is as easy as spreading butter on toast.
There was a story on slashdot a couple days ago about a 12 yo who was suspended from school for send a NET* message. Clearly this kids was abused by his teacher and principal. Personally, with two grown kids, one in 3rd year managment, and a wife who was a teacher, I would take that group of idiots on (his teachers) like a lion shaking a rat.
The issue here is that intelligent kids realise they deserve respect - and if they don't get it there is a natural tendancy to get even. And, there is a natural tendancy to explore and take chances just for the thrill of it and to rattle the cage sometimes too just to see what falls out of the rafters.
It is perfectly human for kids to do this.
Since this is the case - we need to build in proper safeguards so that no harm is done by this perfectly normal activity.... and IMHO thank GAWD these guys do it. Otherwise we would all be sheep and you might like to note that every dictator in the world loves to treat people like sheep.
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Kevin Metnik wanted to look at the Solaris source code because he was interested in it. He never caused a bit of harm. Any harm was the over-reaction of bleeding idjots.... who then tried to justify themselves by claiming rediculous damages. AFAIK - that source code was available for $300 bux. AFAIK - Sun open sourced it before Metnik was off parole.
As for Adrian Lamo - he clearly does not have any criminal intent - he has been quite open about his activities. Therefore there is NO CASE.
BTW - a friend of mine is a crown prosecutor! I do know some law.
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You commented about walking into my living room. How about my servers?
Be my guest... If you can get in please leave a note: WWW.WorldWineGuide.com
These are OpenBSD servers.
I guess if you do get in you should be free sift through my dirty landry. But please be respectly as Adrian Lamo was and tell me what I need to fix. I'll even offer to pay you!
As was pointed out in posts about Kevin Metnik - the glory days of cracking systems past quite a few years ago.
Back then people sent passwords in plain text, there were no firewalls, nfs was as vulnerable as eggs laid on a freeway. Practically nobody paid any attention to security issues.
And this illustrates exactly why the crackers have done all of us a service.
There are enemies in this world... but they are not people like Adrian Lamo.
Without the crackers our systems would still be as vulnerable as they were 15 and 20 years ago. People would still take risks that any normal person would consider insane. In fact, a lot of people, perhaps the majority, still have a lot to learn.
So again I say - thank Gawd for the crakers and guys - keep up the good work. Keep pounding home the point that people must pay attention to proper security. Without consequences for lax security it is clear they won't do a damn thing.
When the Telephone industry started - they were given right of ways for free. Everyone wanted a telephone, everyone wanted electrity and gas and thus laws were passed that FORCED farmers for instance to allow said companies to install telephone poles or to dig trenches across their land - usually without any compensation.
Today - these companies STILL hold the access rights - but no-one else has these rights.
One company I know was quoted $30,000 per month to run an OC3 connection to their offices across the road. BTW - that T3 is a typo - I meant OC3.
This was in an industrial park in a small city. My suggestion to them was to keep their mouths shut and call up Annexitor and buy a spool of underground fiber. This they could bury using a DITCH WITCH under the front lawn. As for the gravel road? Hell - cut a damn trench through it.
All they needed to do was to call a small contractor and offer to pay them.
As for the legal issues? I doubt there would be ANY reprocussions in our life times. Small cities just do not go around digging up roads for no reason. That cable could lay there for 100 years and nobody would be any the wiser or even care.
In fact - the company was big enough that they could call the city and offer to take over the MAINTANCE of the road because they were the only ones who used it anyways and the city didn't do a very good job.
I never heard what they did. Perhaps they cheaped out and strung the cable through the culvert that was in the road pretty much exactly where the cable run needed to go anyways. Or perhaps they bought a laser and set up a line of sight connection... (that was my other suggestion).
However you look at it - we really are getting ripped off really big time by the industry.
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It is NOT that it does not cost a great deal of money to maintain and install lines - it does. It is just that once these lines are installed and paid for - we who have footed the bill (IE the CUSTOMERS) should be able to use them any way we see fit. We need to SEPARATE the physical installation and maintence of the lines with way the lines are used. These lines are after all a common heritage typically built and paid for by our parents and grandparents.
It does not cost one RED cent more to use a line once it is installed than to NOT use it. So why are the usage rates at usary levels?
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For the average telephone company - the cost of preparing bills and collecting the money exceeds by a considerable amount the cost of maintaining the lines.
In fact the cost of installing fiber is so cheap that in your normal city you will find:
(1) the sewer department has pulled fiber through all their sewer pipes - its dark genrally
(2) the gas company is pulling or has pulled fiber through many of its gas lines.
(3) the electrical companies have installed fiber along their electrical lines.
The Railroads installed both TELEPHONE and Fiber along the railway right-of-ways years ago!!!
Pipeline companies have installed fiber along their piplines. This they generally use for private use - but these lines _could_ be opened up for public use.
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The point everyone should realise is that the Telecommunications industry was created in general by the public, paid by the public and operated in a monopoly granted by the public for DECADES. That is you and me who paid for those lines. It is totally ridiculous that the present day managment of the telecomminucations company who INHERITED that already paid for infrastruction should feel they have a right to DENY us fair use of the resource we created, paid for,and pay them to maintain and manage.
You may need to build a time division reflectometer and shoot the line. There is a chance that you are in the death zone on the line. Note: 1) TDR's are totally safe. You drive them with a single AA battery and 2) they can be built for under $20 bux and 3) you do need a dual channel osilloscope.
There is a death zone in the design of pots lines (Plain old telephone service). Most well managed telcos run the twisted pairs from the CO out to a demarcation point. They drop a connection from this continous twisted pair to the houses along the route. Conceptually they "TEE IN".
CentralOffice==========T===========DemarcationPo in t
So a short peice of twisted pair pair is just clipped onto the main twisted pair running along the big bundle of perhaps 100's if pairs in the main feed line.
The advantage of this design is that if a subscriber changes the phone service - it is a simple matter to disconnect and reconnect at the TEE. The disadvantage is that sometimes those old connections are disconnected near the house or run into old warehouses and so forth. When this happens you have an opportunity for the xDSL signals to split.
What happens is the happy little electrons get pushed out the back door of your DSL modem and the run up the wire leading to the TEE. When they get there they have no idea which way they should go so 1/2 of them head off to the CO while the other 1/2 head off to the demarkation point.
The ones that reach the demarkation point typically find they went the wrong way. They find this out when they hit the infinite impedance change at the end of the wire. So they bounce off this and head back towards the CO.
Along the way they hit the TEE again - and again don't know which way to go so 1/2 them (1/4 of the original signal) heads towards your modem while the other 1/2 heads towards the CO. This approximately 1/4 of the original signal is in the form of an echo delayed a certain number of microseconds depending on the distance - which you can read and compute from your TDR.
The ones that hit your DSL modem get bled off. This is easily done - via what is called a terminating resistor. A Terminating Resistor can be had for less than a couple cents and you can pick them up at your local Radio Shack - you need about 90-100 ohms and you simply clip it across the ends of the twisted pairs over at the demarkation point. That is one way to improve your lines - and your telephone company probably does not know this. Telus didn't. We had to tell them after we re-engineered their xDSL circuits then paid them $1400 bux for an hour's work... then they asked us for free consulting. No kidding.
Well - there is a much better way to deal with the problem other than a terminating resistor at the CO. You can go up to the TEE at the back of your house and use a pair of snips to chop off the wires that head over to the demarkation point.
This is perfectly safe and reversible - it would take oh about an extra minuet for the telco service tech to reattach if they need to.
By doing this - you stop that split and this means that the signal heading to the CO is actually 2x as strong.
There is a secondary effect - the one that screws you up royally.
The speed of the signal propagation down the twisted pair is about 0.6x the speed of light. From this you can easily see where your splits are on the line - IE - how many feet from your TDR.
Note: in the days of voice communications - the reflection was great. It came back in time shifted - but the amount of shift was so little that the wave forms up to about 3,000 HZ generally overlaid the original waveform. So you have an echo - but it was close by.
With high speed digital communications - that echo is deadly and can come in several bits behind. It really smears the communications channel.
The short of it is that if you are at the very end of the cable - the end of the wire may be close enuf to your xDSL modem so that the e
The reason you don't hear from Telus is that they are so disorganised they havn't been able to even answer their phones over the last 3 years.
Telus has some serious internal problems. I've received letters from the President's office appologising for their billing incompetance. No kidding - and signed by the president.
So the executive is trying but down below its a mess.
First off - the internet content is clearly dropping because the telecomunications uindustry has found a way to sit on the golden egg and squash it.
Second - it is quite clear that the telecommunications carrier technology is about as computerized as any other aspect of the tech revolution and hense they enjoy the same cost reductions as everyone else. The exception is that these cost reductions are generally not passed on to the customers.
The problem is that peering arrangements are "negotiated" and the flip side of this is that the organisation with the most power is able to generally impose ineterconnection fees on smaller organisations. This means that your ISP has to pay for bandwidth you use with no regard whatsoever to the cost of providing the capacity or for that matter Who is providing a service to whom
Quoting from the paper:
This assertion of role reversal is perhaps most significant when the generic interconnection environment is one of a zero sum financial settlement, in which the successful assertion by a client of a change from client to peer status results in the dropping of client service revenue without any net change in the cost base of the provider's operation. The party making the successful assertion of peer interconnection sees the opposite, with an immediate drop in the cost of the ISP operation with no net revenue change."
This means that small fish always pay big fish. It was pointed out in an Australia study that when the client of a small ISP sends an email to the client of a large ISP, that the small ISP pays the large ISP for the data transfer. When the client of the large ISP reply to the email then the small ISP pays again for the delivery. At the time this was used to evaluate a review of Australian Perring arrangments. I have not heard the results.
Now - as it applies to you - it means that even though a fiber optic line for instance can easily carry say 100 mb/sec with the use of two allied telesyn ethernet to fiber line drives which cost under $1000 bux and will drive for over 75 km... and even though the cost of 6 pair overhead fibre cable for instance is only about 25% more than copper - and costs less than $1.50 per foot - that the telecomunications company who installs it feels they should be able to charge upwards of $50,000 bux per month for the rent of each "circuit". This is what your ISP faces. Wholesale usary charges.
I calculated a while back that 100baseT is about 2/3 of a T3 (155mb/sec) and on a short haul dedicated circuit to connect our servers for instance to the local backbone - the local telco would recover their total capital outlay in less than a month. Of course - once the data from our servers is in their backbone they can ship it to their customers about as easily as if they had obtained that data from the POP's that connect into the US backbone.
The simple matter is that if we for instance choose to co-locate in the US that our local telcos will be viewed as "customers" of the larger USA carries and be expected to pay very heafty fees to connect via the POP's (Point of Presence - IE a router). On the other hand any content their customer base obtains locally from our servers results in us paying them instead of them paying the USA. So they really try to put the screws on and their "bandwidth charges" would make you choke.
What you are looking at is the consequence of a system that is totally broken and not in anyone's interests... not even the biggest carriers. The reason it is not in the biggest carriers interest is that in order to be the biggest carrier they have to overbuild and take on massive debt that they cannot in many cases handle. This is why PSINET for instance didn't make it.
So we have stupid risks to be the biggest shark and everyo
Now - we should be able to build a simple model that will predict what will happen.
What I see at a simplistic level is a positive feedback cycle. Suppose we introduce as many GM males as there are non-GM males in the population. In the 1st generation this would imply that 50% of females mate with GM males and 100% of those offspring are now GM males.
The other 50% of females produce a population that is normal. So we have 1/2 of the next generation of females dissapear. and 2/3 of the male population in generation #2 carry the GM gene.
In generation 3 the balence tips further and so on and so on. IE - this model predicts extinction.
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Ok - the GM fish can never be uniformly distributed everywhere. Somewhere there will be a pool of carp that does not carry the gene.
As the population in the infected areas die out - their habitate will re-populate with the normal gene mix. So the experiment will undoubtably fail
But it is certainly worthwhile to try to model it and see when and how the experiment fails and under what circumstances it will work.
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Now - here is the rub. The ratio of males to females in any species is not exactly 50:50. Clearly a sexual imbalence tipped in favour of males will cause the species to die off unless there is some mechanizm that limits this.
Species have been on planet earth for billions of years so it is clear that the sex ratio has a negative feedback mechanizm and is quite stable.
It is not clear to me at this point what that mechanizm might be unless it happens to be that one never can achieve complete genetic mixing and hense the sub optimal population will collapse before any real harm can be done.
Alas - this does look like a real oversimplification. Females are XX and Males are XY. This means that a male can only inherit "X" linked tendancies from their mothers while females can inherit from either parent. It strikes me that there must be some mechanism in the X chromosome which prevents a significant shift in the ratios of XY to XX offspring.
I think some people take things too seriously. I think this is rather funny.
BTW - As to BSD dying. I don't think so. We've migrated to OpenBSD on the servers and we really like it. It is solid, secure and stable. It is easy to install what we need and performance is certainly adequate for what we are doing.
This does not mean that Linux would not do the job... yet with Linux we found that the last two (2) redhat distros we bought were broken miserably. Hense - we do not expect to ever use RedHat again.
So its a toss up - those folks who install one of the BSD's on their servers generally know why they are doing it and generally are going to be pretty happy with it.
Those people who elect to go with a Linux distro probably also know why they are chosing what they chose (even if its the support they are looking for) and they also probably are going to be happy.
As for the people who install Microsoft servers. Well - they probably are happy too - but for different reasons. First off, ignorance is bliss. Next they have a marketing machine that certainly knows how to passify people who don't know too much and are dumb enuf to listen to marketroids. Yup - so they can be happy too.
I guess that leaves one group that probably isn't all that happy and they would be the professional admins who know better but are told by their collective bosses to use what they are given. To this group I will address the following comment.
A professional knows when to say NO. Just say NO dammit! Don't install it - don't support it - don't clean it up. Let them sink if necessary. A professional engineer will not use faulty concrete to build a bridge any more than a professional doctor will follow the bad advise of a bean counter. Right?
As a professional developer I personally have had to stand up to dumb ass bosses. One wanted us to use (of all things) BASIC to build a system that eventually had more than 1/2 million lines of code in it. Now - that was a really dumb suggestion since the BASIC in question only had variables of the type A B C... Z and was so restrictive that you could not write a callable function.
The point is that sometimes we have to simply say NO to the dumb ideas that float around and we need to do this even if we feel our job is in jeopardy.
Let me get this right ok? Here we have a company that people have invested in. The investors have never received a single cent for this investment - until recently with the declaration of this petty dividend.
The dividend of course is really low - it is so low that were Microsoft to actually pay a return on the investment that even approached the bank rate - then Microsoft's cash reserves would be drained. In fact - if one calculates how fast the reserves would be drained one would find out that if a decent dividend were declared say 5 years ago - then today Microsoft would be broke.
Next it appears that actually giving something to the folks that invvest their hard earned cash becomes interpreted as "divedends biting them in the rear".
By this line of reasoning it is clear that the investors are the problem - they should just hand their money over as a gift of course and exepct nothing back in return while Billy plays his silly games with their money.
But of course - when I look at this stock I conclude that it is little more than a gift investment and I personally will not touch it - when it starts to decline it will go deep and it will go fast and a lot of stock analysts will be running around squawking like chickens proclaiming that they can't understand how this happened...
Thankfully I have no investments in any of the institutional funds who buy these shares. I do imagine there are going to be a lot of pensioners down the track wondering where all the assets went of course.
Re:Internet legislation futility - alternate root
on
The Year In Tech Law
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· Score: 1
Pacificroot had alternate servers running years ago.
More recently I don't know what the status is. But it was sure nice being able to type in www.bbc.news and get the proper website!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup - that is rght folks... we've already paid for access to the content. Its built into the tarriff we pay for ISP services.
Anyone who lives outside the U.S.A. pretty much knows that when their telcominications carriers call up the backbones in the US, companies like Worldcomm, that their carriers get charged a hefty monthly fee for access to the content they carry to their end users. This fee is passed along to the ISP's and forms part of their cost structure which is ultimately paid for by the end users - that is YOU and ME.
There are generally two ways that a telecommunications company can gain access to internet content: (1) By far that LARGEST source is through a connection to a backbone (via a POP (point of presence = a big fast router)). (2) The second source is from the web servers themselves. Obviously any server not in their own neck of the woods will be behnd a POP. Thus, the POP's are BY FAR the largest source of content - and access to this content has to be paid for. Its covered by what is known as a PEERING AGREEMENT.
Since access to the VAST MAJORITY of the internet content is already being paid for - why should the telecommunications industry single out the second source of content, IE the lowly web servers? If they are willing to pay at the POP then they should also be willing to pay at the server itself.
So - We end users have paid, the ISP's have paid and in general the backbone operators have been paid. The system breaks down at this point and the webmasters in general ARE NOT paid - they are billed instead.
But this is NOT OUR FAULT. This clearly an INCONSISTANCY created by the over-gready telecommunications industry and it happens simply because they figure they have us all by our short and curlies.
The concept of fair play seems to not exisit in this industry. Hense we have the problem.
I don't think ANYONE wants more advertising. Our costs go way up because of the crap that we don't want in the first place. Instead, if the webmasters could actually make a little money our of the servies they supply - then we would probably see a great improvemnt in the content we really do want.
It is incumbant upon us to educate people what is really taking place so that we can get a broad based pressure to correct a situation that is obviously inconsistant, probably illegal under the fair trade practices legislation of most countries , and certainly not in the interest of anyone.
As a friend once said - if she drives a white jeep cherokee paid for by her ex husband - you don't want to know her.
I don't know if I should tell you this but you can upgrade at least the del machines (GX110 with bios A05) to 1.3 gHz tualatin machines for next to nothing. I supect you can also upgrade the IBM 300GL's as well - but it will depend on if they can run the FSB at 100 mHz.
However - even if the FSB can't run at 100mHz, it still might make sense because you may be able to underclock the memory and CPUs and that will still give you a very credible 1gHz performance on those old boxen.
At least the IBM PC 300PL are upgradeable in the following models: 6584-90U 6862-24A 6862-52U 6862-C3A 6862-V1U 6892
The MOST SIGNIFICANT issue is going to be the amount of ram. I suspect MOST of your machines are running 64MB ram. This is not going to be enough if you wish to run say a KDE desktop. Perhaps another desktop manager is in order. I've heard FVM is pretty good and lighter weight.
I KNOW these upgrades make sense because I already did it. I upgraded an old 1998 celeron 433 based system to 1.3gHz and it is wonderful... it fully performs in the league of a 1.7gHz P4 and burns much much less power (like 23 watts for the CPU instead of what? over 60 watts for the P4 with the newest P4's burning over 150 watts)
Now - I use to have 128MB ram on the 433. It now sports 384mb ram and with KDE and Debian - I never find it thrashing. At 128 it did thrash sometimes.
So at a minimum I suspect you will be adding a 128MB stick of ram and a new CPU into each of those old boxen - the cost should be in around $100-$125 per machine and it will take you about 15 minutes per. (I'd got for a 256MB stick if you can)
So... that is a pretty good deal for even the cheapest outfits.
And the reason maybe I shouldn't tell you all this good news is that a machine configured this way actually has enuf horsepower to run the Microsoft XP bloatware!!!!
Just say NO.
What SCO needs to do is call up the IBM sales team and request a new copy of AIX and the source code for same. Clearly SCO should simply ask to become a licencee of AIX and abide by IBM's terms.
HAHAHAHA
What a JOKE.
It gets better if you actually READ the documentation that is posted on GROKLAW - like section 13 for instance.
The premise of the SCO claim is becoming painfully apparent. The claim is that the moment IBM put ANY new code into AIX that this new code became a derivative copy of AIX and thus SCO has the right to control it.
I shall use an analogy here - an opera.
======================
I write an opera and you listen to it. You also are a talented song writer just as I am - perhaps more talented and you can easily write your own operas. But - this is not what happens. For whatever reasons you decide to IMPROVE my opera and then release it.
So you add in some new songs of yours to my opera and your version becomes more popular than mine. Mine in fact dies. So - do I have claims apon your version of the opera? Do I have claims against your songs? Do I have claims against say a single line you modified in one of my songs? How about individual words you might have changed? What if you changed the spelling of some of these words? Should I have claims against the sequence of letters you used to spell a word?
So you see - since YOU had the power to NOT use or contribute to my opera, I do get to make all sorts of outragous claims and I do get to control you.
On the other hand, suppose you are NOT a talented writer. Suppose you are just talented at arrangments. Suppose your friend is a talented writer and you find he has all these great songs that you can import into my opera. Clearly, your friend will not lose the rights to his copyrights by your actions. In fact, he may and I may grant you the right to make a derived opera so it is clear in this case that nobody has stepped on anyone's toes and there can be no claims by me on you.
The confusion stems from the fact that there is no boundry when you make the modifications. I get to claim you are making a derivative work - which you may have the right to do. And the question then becomes whether I get to control your work because some of it happened to be used in something I wrote before you did.
In staying with the analogy of the opera, suppose we get to the point where you feel your songs have a life of their own and you chop out 100% of my original material. Basically this is what IBM did.
Well, when at least _SOME_ of my material was in the derived work I may have had the right to control some aspects of the derivative work. When NONE of my material exists any longer we are left with the question of whether what you created is still a derived work which I get to control.
===============
So is it?
Well - In a way it is. And in a way it isn't. The way I read copyright law, I may in fact still get to control your work even though it is exclusively your work.... simply because during its history it was co mingled with mine. The premise for this claim is that your work would NEVER have existed were it not for my work and the structure it imparted.
This is a very important premise because when we look at software projects, the vast majority of new clean implementations suffer very bad teething problems and often lose their market share. Examples include Wordperfect, Mozilla and many others.
However, the practice in our industry is that each separate function bears its own copyright. As to code inserted in-line in functions - well - that is not as well sorted out. It becomes pretty arbitrary and the vast majority of us simply chose to not waste our time fighting about it.
===============
New analogy:
Lets look at a house. I build a house on my lot and you buy the lot next door and live in my house. You pay rent to me and get a contract from me that you can make tenant improvments. You ar
I have a better idea. Why don't you close all your RBC accounts like I did and site their contribution to SCO as the reason (Like I did)
I have thought more on this subject after having already posted a note.
The idea of a class action lawsuit makes even more sense IMHO.
1) SCO has already disavowed the GPL. I believe this is in their court filings. As such they have no legal right to use or distribute any GPL code.
2) This fact is easily provable. The court documents already are filed. As such - in many jurisdictions this is a summary judgement matter.
3) It costs only a couple hundred bux to file a statment of claim and a summary judgement application can be done for under a couple thousand in legal fees. This is not very hard to do.
4) Courts usually hear summary judgment applications in chambers AFAIK. So this ruling can be obtained before the end of January I would think. Their lawyers typically need about 2 weeks to respond. The summary judgement application does not have to wait for discoveries or anything else because it is self evident.
Given this...
5) Once a summary judgement has been obtained, the next step is for the judge to determine damages. This will be much harder of course because the basis for damages will probably have to be established first.
However, it is clear that neither Caldera Linux nor _any_ flavour of System V unix has any value whatsoever without inclusion of the GPL software.
On this basis, the lion's share of ANYTHING that SCO has received in the past or may receive in the future including the proceeds from the law suit against IBM falls into the category of money SCO has no legal right to. They are guilty of unjust enrichment.
Furthermore, since it is the LION's that they are not entitled to, then SCO is technically bankrupt. They owe more to the opensource community than they can ever be worth.
Since a company cannot be allowed to do business while insolvent - a receiver must be appointed and we just wind them up - grabbing the System V copyrights in the process and we are all done.
IANAL but like most - I have some knowledge of the law. I think you have hit the nail right on the head here and I think you are brilliant.
UNIXWARE contains one HELL of a lot of GPL code. Thus SCO, as you clearly point out, has no legal right to distribute any of the GPL code that UNIXWARE contains and this is by their own admissions. By disavowing the GPL they invalidate their own licenses to IBM, HP, SUN and so on.
So, it would seem that NOW is the right time for a class action lawsuit to be launched against SCO by all the opensource developers who have contributed copyrighted code used in ANY System V related code.
By doing this, if SCO wins anything against the GPL they consequently lose the offsetting lawsuit from the opensource community. The damages on the offsetting lawsuit will exceed the damages they can collect from IBM and this means that SCO itself will be rendered in default.
As such, SCO will be bankrupt and it is the recievers duty to seize all assets of the corporation for distribution to the claimants.
Once of these assests is the copyright to the System V source code. Since it will be the OpenSource community who wins the copyright via this class action, the community can then simply OpenSource it and return any money back to IBM.
The long and the short of it is that if SCO has distributed code they have no right to under license to others (IBM et al) then SCO is guilty of "UNJUST ENRICHMENT". So this is a winable case.
Brilliant!!! Brilliant!!! Brilliant!!!
There are two alternative strategies.
1) plastic welding is a viable repair - you will find that if you contact your local panel banger (autobody repair shop) that they will be able to offer advise how to proceed.
The laptops are injection moulded plastics - possibly a TPE same as is used in the auto industy so the same techniques may apply.
2) glue it yourself. Call up your local 3M representative and ask them what structural glues they have for the plastic your lap top is made of. One product that MIGHT work is DP8005.
Another option is to contact polyurathane supply company. Those people have a nice website with good technical information.
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The type of equipment you need to plastic weld is generally an injection hot melt gun - they typically sell for about $5000 bux and are not too difficult to learn how to use. These guns force plastic under pressure into the crack and form a seam that is over 80% as strong as the original. The plastic comes in rods and is available in ABS, TPE, TFE,
You may want to check your Yellow Pages - look under PLASTIC WELDING equipment - call a supplier of the equipment and ask for a referal to who has the gun. Try to get to know the guy a bit and pay him well - broken plastic parts are a fact of life and these guys can do magic!!!
There is absolutly no good reason what-so-ever why a static IP should cost any money at all. All IP addresses were created when the tcp/ip protocol was developed and the _ONLY_ reason they can be dynamic is because the DHCP server was designed. It costs extra to run DHCP over statics - but in some cases it may be a little more convieniant, like in a large company where you juast wnat to be able to plug a machine in.
In the begining the IP address blocks were just handed out to whoever asked for them - for free.
Later Telephone companies and ISP's learned that since they held them, they could bill for them.
This is not much different than the Oklahoma Land Grab where the early settlers got their land for free, and everyone since then has had to pay through the nose.
Early Oil and Gas rights were similarly generally given out for free to the first settlers.
If you check your history, you will probably find that the greatest concentrations of wealth in North America come from early grants that were free or very close to it. Then when certain towns grew into cities the ranchers and farmers in the area received windfall profits which they used to invest in industries that later also proved quite lucrative.
Others probably would have used the capital better, but they never had the chance because they chose the wrong parents.
Clearly the static IP address range falls into a similar pattern. It might be a very good idea if we programmers start figuring out a way that the IPv6 address range can be gurranteed to be static.
What happens with dynamic IP is analagous to the idea that every time you pick up your cell phone, the phone company injects a new phone number ito it - then proclaims that you should pay extra for a phone number that doesn't change because then your friends can call you up and that is clearly an "EXTRA" service which puts you into a different category... OH... and if you want your name to be associated with your phone then that requires a NAMESERVER (DNS) and you have to pay even more money to Verisign.
Wonderful system we have here. Clearly it is not what we want, not what we intended and we are the once getting our collective pockets picked.
We have security issues because people are going to poke around whether we praise them or not.
In fact, if we DON'T have security then one of our enemies will use this ina surprise attack against us and we'll be like chickens with a fox in the hen house.
It is MUCH better we are prepared. Without our crackers out rattling our doors to see if they fall off the hinges - no one would bother with any security until it is too late.
Even as it stands now - most people do not have adequate security and I do worry that someone is going to release a DOOZER of a bad virus and really nail their toes to the floor.
It is very clear this is an impossible task. All one needs to do is run a standard PUBLIC KEY ENCRIPTION - you can get the code from www.openssl.org - then stow the encripted bits into the noise in the target file.
It can be stowed as replaced low order bits where the address of the bit is generated via a hashing function.
Even IF ( a really big IF here) it is possible to determine which bits were flipped (XOR) or stowed, one is still faced with knowing the arbitrary hashing function that was used.
If one is so lucky to find the hashing function one is still faced with cracking the public key encription and this has been shown to be impossible. Oh - and the hashing function istself can be derived from the public key encription code. If so - then it is provable that the hash cannot be derived much less the message that is being hidden.
For years it has been feasible to hide messages in any commonly available digital or even non-digital data streams.
The only messages they are likely to detected are very poorly encoded ones or ones that are deliberatly poorly encoded so they can be found.
Yet - I am sure there are many people who will gladly produce some literary fiction and take the money and run. We've all seen alot of this in reports commissioned by official agencies.
Without pot holes I would not need to pay people to dp wheel alignments on my car. Without mice I would not have to buy mouse traps.
Common. Get out of your cage and smell the coffee
How many people are on this planet? How many prisons have been built. Please look around at the people you have known and ask yourself if you left something valuable in your back yard if every one of the people you have met in your life would respect your property rights.
... who then tried to justify themselves by claiming rediculous damages. AFAIK - that source code was available for $300 bux. AFAIK - Sun open sourced it before Metnik was off parole.
It is pretty obvious there are bad apples just as it is obvious there are pot holes in our roads.
As a programmer I KNOW what nasty things can be done to a computer. I know how to adjust the CRTC register sweeps. I know how to wipe or alter a BIOS. Assembler is no big deal - I've used at least 4 assemblers on 4 different architectures: IBM 360/370/390, TI990, HP3000, Intel x86 and PDP 11xx and VAX.
For me it is easy to see both why some people are so keen on this - it is just a big game - and at the same time I see how easy it is to layer some ass on a buffer overflow. In fact - it is as easy as spreading butter on toast.
There was a story on slashdot a couple days ago about a 12 yo who was suspended from school for send a NET* message. Clearly this kids was abused by his teacher and principal. Personally, with two grown kids, one in 3rd year managment, and a wife who was a teacher, I would take that group of idiots on (his teachers) like a lion shaking a rat.
The issue here is that intelligent kids realise they deserve respect - and if they don't get it there is a natural tendancy to get even. And, there is a natural tendancy to explore and take chances just for the thrill of it and to rattle the cage sometimes too just to see what falls out of the rafters.
It is perfectly human for kids to do this.
Since this is the case - we need to build in proper safeguards so that no harm is done by this perfectly normal activity.... and IMHO thank GAWD these guys do it. Otherwise we would all be sheep and you might like to note that every dictator in the world loves to treat people like sheep.
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Kevin Metnik wanted to look at the Solaris source code because he was interested in it. He never caused a bit of harm. Any harm was the over-reaction of bleeding idjots.
As for Adrian Lamo - he clearly does not have any criminal intent - he has been quite open about his activities. Therefore there is NO CASE.
BTW - a friend of mine is a crown prosecutor! I do know some law.
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You commented about walking into my living room. How about my servers?
Be my guest... If you can get in please leave a note: WWW.WorldWineGuide.com
These are OpenBSD servers.
I guess if you do get in you should be free sift through my dirty landry. But please be respectly as Adrian Lamo was and tell me what I need to fix. I'll even offer to pay you!
As was pointed out in posts about Kevin Metnik - the glory days of cracking systems past quite a few years ago.
Back then people sent passwords in plain text, there were no firewalls, nfs was as vulnerable as eggs laid on a freeway. Practically nobody paid any attention to security issues.
And this illustrates exactly why the crackers have done all of us a service.
There are enemies in this world... but they are not people like Adrian Lamo.
Without the crackers our systems would still be as vulnerable as they were 15 and 20 years ago. People would still take risks that any normal person would consider insane. In fact, a lot of people, perhaps the majority, still have a lot to learn.
So again I say - thank Gawd for the crakers and guys - keep up the good work. Keep pounding home the point that people must pay attention to proper security. Without consequences for lax security it is clear they won't do a damn thing.
This is a VERY GOOD IDEA.
It will promote cooperation between the Russian people and North America. It will help rebuild the Russian economy.
It will save us money.
This will promote intercourse with the Russian people and will help world peice and in the process we will gain strong allies from the Eastern Block.
I can only see good comming from a program like this.
The biggest reason is the lack of a right of way.
When the Telephone industry started - they were given right of ways for free. Everyone wanted a telephone, everyone wanted electrity and gas and thus laws were passed that FORCED farmers for instance to allow said companies to install telephone poles or to dig trenches across their land - usually without any compensation.
Today - these companies STILL hold the access rights - but no-one else has these rights.
One company I know was quoted $30,000 per month to run an OC3 connection to their offices across the road. BTW - that T3 is a typo - I meant OC3.
This was in an industrial park in a small city. My suggestion to them was to keep their mouths shut and call up Annexitor and buy a spool of underground fiber. This they could bury using a DITCH WITCH under the front lawn. As for the gravel road? Hell - cut a damn trench through it.
All they needed to do was to call a small contractor and offer to pay them.
As for the legal issues? I doubt there would be ANY reprocussions in our life times. Small cities just do not go around digging up roads for no reason. That cable could lay there for 100 years and nobody would be any the wiser or even care.
In fact - the company was big enough that they could call the city and offer to take over the MAINTANCE of the road because they were the only ones who used it anyways and the city didn't do a very good job.
I never heard what they did. Perhaps they cheaped out and strung the cable through the culvert that was in the road pretty much exactly where the cable run needed to go anyways. Or perhaps they bought a laser and set up a line of sight connection... (that was my other suggestion).
However you look at it - we really are getting ripped off really big time by the industry.
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It is NOT that it does not cost a great deal of money to maintain and install lines - it does. It is just that once these lines are installed and paid for - we who have footed the bill (IE the CUSTOMERS) should be able to use them any way we see fit. We need to SEPARATE the physical installation and maintence of the lines with way the lines are used. These lines are after all a common heritage typically built and paid for by our parents and grandparents.
It does not cost one RED cent more to use a line once it is installed than to NOT use it. So why are the usage rates at usary levels?
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For the average telephone company - the cost of preparing bills and collecting the money exceeds by a considerable amount the cost of maintaining the lines.
In fact the cost of installing fiber is so cheap that in your normal city you will find:
(1) the sewer department has pulled fiber through all their sewer pipes - its dark genrally
(2) the gas company is pulling or has pulled fiber through many of its gas lines.
(3) the electrical companies have installed fiber along their electrical lines.
The Railroads installed both TELEPHONE and Fiber along the railway right-of-ways years ago!!!
Pipeline companies have installed fiber along their piplines. This they generally use for private use - but these lines _could_ be opened up for public use.
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The point everyone should realise is that the Telecommunications industry was created in general by the public, paid by the public and operated in a monopoly granted by the public for DECADES. That is you and me who paid for those lines. It is totally ridiculous that the present day managment of the telecomminucations company who INHERITED that already paid for infrastruction should feel they have a right to DENY us fair use of the resource we created, paid for,and pay them to maintain and manage.
In a sane world - this bullshit would not happen.
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But it gets worse.
The current internet is a multibil
You may need to build a time division reflectometer and shoot the line. There is a chance that you are in the death zone on the line. Note: 1) TDR's are totally safe. You drive them with a single AA battery and 2) they can be built for under $20 bux and 3) you do need a dual channel osilloscope.
There is a death zone in the design of pots lines (Plain old telephone service). Most well managed telcos run the twisted pairs from the CO out to a demarcation point. They drop a connection from this continous twisted pair to the houses along the route. Conceptually they "TEE IN".
CentralOffice==========T===========DemarcationPo in t
So a short peice of twisted pair pair is just clipped onto the main twisted pair running along the big bundle of perhaps 100's if pairs in the main feed line.
The advantage of this design is that if a subscriber changes the phone service - it is a simple matter to disconnect and reconnect at the TEE. The disadvantage is that sometimes those old connections are disconnected near the house or run into old warehouses and so forth. When this happens you have an opportunity for the xDSL signals to split.
What happens is the happy little electrons get pushed out the back door of your DSL modem and the run up the wire leading to the TEE. When they get there they have no idea which way they should go so 1/2 of them head off to the CO while the other 1/2 head off to the demarkation point.
The ones that reach the demarkation point typically find they went the wrong way. They find this out when they hit the infinite impedance change at the end of the wire. So they bounce off this and head back towards the CO.
Along the way they hit the TEE again - and again don't know which way to go so 1/2 them (1/4 of the original signal) heads towards your modem while the other 1/2 heads towards the CO. This approximately 1/4 of the original signal is in the form of an echo delayed a certain number of microseconds depending on the distance - which you can read and compute from your TDR.
The ones that hit your DSL modem get bled off. This is easily done - via what is called a terminating resistor. A Terminating Resistor can be had for less than a couple cents and you can pick them up at your local Radio Shack - you need about 90-100 ohms and you simply clip it across the ends of the twisted pairs over at the demarkation point. That is one way to improve your lines - and your telephone company probably does not know this. Telus didn't. We had to tell them after we re-engineered their xDSL circuits then paid them $1400 bux for an hour's work... then they asked us for free consulting. No kidding.
Well - there is a much better way to deal with the problem other than a terminating resistor at the CO. You can go up to the TEE at the back of your house and use a pair of snips to chop off the wires that head over to the demarkation point.
This is perfectly safe and reversible - it would take oh about an extra minuet for the telco service tech to reattach if they need to.
By doing this - you stop that split and this means that the signal heading to the CO is actually 2x as strong.
There is a secondary effect - the one that screws you up royally.
The speed of the signal propagation down the twisted pair is about 0.6x the speed of light. From this you can easily see where your splits are on the line - IE - how many feet from your TDR.
Note: in the days of voice communications - the reflection was great. It came back in time shifted - but the amount of shift was so little that the wave forms up to about 3,000 HZ generally overlaid the original waveform. So you have an echo - but it was close by.
With high speed digital communications - that echo is deadly and can come in several bits behind. It really smears the communications channel.
The short of it is that if you are at the very end of the cable - the end of the wire may be close enuf to your xDSL modem so that the e
The reason you don't hear from Telus is that they are so disorganised they havn't been able to even answer their phones over the last 3 years.
Telus has some serious internal problems. I've received letters from the President's office appologising for their billing incompetance. No kidding - and signed by the president.
So the executive is trying but down below its a mess.
First off - the internet content is clearly dropping because the telecomunications uindustry has found a way to sit on the golden egg and squash it.
Second - it is quite clear that the telecommunications carrier technology is about as computerized as any other aspect of the tech revolution and hense they enjoy the same cost reductions as everyone else. The exception is that these cost reductions are generally not passed on to the customers.
If you look here: Interconnection, Peering, and Settlements You can read a very good analysis of one aspect of the industry.
The problem is that peering arrangements are "negotiated" and the flip side of this is that the organisation with the most power is able to generally impose ineterconnection fees on smaller organisations. This means that your ISP has to pay for bandwidth you use with no regard whatsoever to the cost of providing the capacity or for that matter Who is providing a service to whom
Quoting from the paper: This assertion of role reversal is perhaps most significant when the generic interconnection environment is one of a zero sum financial settlement, in which the successful assertion by a client of a change from client to peer status results in the dropping of client service revenue without any net change in the cost base of the provider's operation. The party making the successful assertion of peer interconnection sees the opposite, with an immediate drop in the cost of the ISP operation with no net revenue change. "
This means that small fish always pay big fish. It was pointed out in an Australia study that when the client of a small ISP sends an email to the client of a large ISP, that the small ISP pays the large ISP for the data transfer. When the client of the large ISP reply to the email then the small ISP pays again for the delivery. At the time this was used to evaluate a review of Australian Perring arrangments. I have not heard the results.
Now - as it applies to you - it means that even though a fiber optic line for instance can easily carry say 100 mb/sec with the use of two allied telesyn ethernet to fiber line drives which cost under $1000 bux and will drive for over 75 km... and even though the cost of 6 pair overhead fibre cable for instance is only about 25% more than copper - and costs less than $1.50 per foot - that the telecomunications company who installs it feels they should be able to charge upwards of $50,000 bux per month for the rent of each "circuit". This is what your ISP faces. Wholesale usary charges.
I calculated a while back that 100baseT is about 2/3 of a T3 (155mb/sec) and on a short haul dedicated circuit to connect our servers for instance to the local backbone - the local telco would recover their total capital outlay in less than a month. Of course - once the data from our servers is in their backbone they can ship it to their customers about as easily as if they had obtained that data from the POP's that connect into the US backbone.
The simple matter is that if we for instance choose to co-locate in the US that our local telcos will be viewed as "customers" of the larger USA carries and be expected to pay very heafty fees to connect via the POP's (Point of Presence - IE a router). On the other hand any content their customer base obtains locally from our servers results in us paying them instead of them paying the USA. So they really try to put the screws on and their "bandwidth charges" would make you choke.
What you are looking at is the consequence of a system that is totally broken and not in anyone's interests... not even the biggest carriers. The reason it is not in the biggest carriers interest is that in order to be the biggest carrier they have to overbuild and take on massive debt that they cannot in many cases handle. This is why PSINET for instance didn't make it.
So we have stupid risks to be the biggest shark and everyo
Yes - this is over 20 years old. No doubt next we'll be hearing that oak makes some red wines taste better.
Talk about scraping the bottom of the old wine barrel looking for a story eh?
You have made some excellent points.
Now - we should be able to build a simple model that will predict what will happen.
What I see at a simplistic level is a positive feedback cycle. Suppose we introduce as many GM males as there are non-GM males in the population. In the 1st generation this would imply that 50% of females mate with GM males and 100% of those offspring are now GM males.
The other 50% of females produce a population that is normal. So we have 1/2 of the next generation of females dissapear. and 2/3 of the male population in generation #2 carry the GM gene.
In generation 3 the balence tips further and so on and so on. IE - this model predicts extinction.
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Ok - the GM fish can never be uniformly distributed everywhere. Somewhere there will be a pool of carp that does not carry the gene.
As the population in the infected areas die out - their habitate will re-populate with the normal gene mix. So the experiment will undoubtably fail
But it is certainly worthwhile to try to model it and see when and how the experiment fails and under what circumstances it will work.
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Now - here is the rub. The ratio of males to females in any species is not exactly 50:50. Clearly a sexual imbalence tipped in favour of males will cause the species to die off unless there is some mechanizm that limits this.
Species have been on planet earth for billions of years so it is clear that the sex ratio has a negative feedback mechanizm and is quite stable.
It is not clear to me at this point what that mechanizm might be unless it happens to be that one never can achieve complete genetic mixing and hense the sub optimal population will collapse before any real harm can be done.
Alas - this does look like a real oversimplification. Females are XX and Males are XY. This means that a male can only inherit "X" linked tendancies from their mothers while females can inherit from either parent. It strikes me that there must be some mechanism in the X chromosome which prevents a significant shift in the ratios of XY to XX offspring.
Why don't they just catch them and eat them. Carp are really tasty.
I think some people take things too seriously. I think this is rather funny.
... Z and was so restrictive that you could not write a callable function.
BTW - As to BSD dying. I don't think so. We've migrated to OpenBSD on the servers and we really like it. It is solid, secure and stable. It is easy to install what we need and performance is certainly adequate for what we are doing.
This does not mean that Linux would not do the job... yet with Linux we found that the last two (2) redhat distros we bought were broken miserably. Hense - we do not expect to ever use RedHat again.
So its a toss up - those folks who install one of the BSD's on their servers generally know why they are doing it and generally are going to be pretty happy with it.
Those people who elect to go with a Linux distro probably also know why they are chosing what they chose (even if its the support they are looking for) and they also probably are going to be happy.
As for the people who install Microsoft servers. Well - they probably are happy too - but for different reasons. First off, ignorance is bliss. Next they have a marketing machine that certainly knows how to passify people who don't know too much and are dumb enuf to listen to marketroids. Yup - so they can be happy too.
I guess that leaves one group that probably isn't all that happy and they would be the professional admins who know better but are told by their collective bosses to use what they are given. To this group I will address the following comment.
A professional knows when to say NO. Just say NO dammit! Don't install it - don't support it - don't clean it up. Let them sink if necessary. A professional engineer will not use faulty concrete to build a bridge any more than a professional doctor will follow the bad advise of a bean counter. Right?
As a professional developer I personally have had to stand up to dumb ass bosses. One wanted us to use (of all things) BASIC to build a system that eventually had more than 1/2 million lines of code in it. Now - that was a really dumb suggestion since the BASIC in question only had variables of the type A B C
The point is that sometimes we have to simply say NO to the dumb ideas that float around and we need to do this even if we feel our job is in jeopardy.
Let me get this right ok? Here we have a company that people have invested in. The investors have never received a single cent for this investment - until recently with the declaration of this petty dividend.
The dividend of course is really low - it is so low that were Microsoft to actually pay a return on the investment that even approached the bank rate - then Microsoft's cash reserves would be drained. In fact - if one calculates how fast the reserves would be drained one would find out that if a decent dividend were declared say 5 years ago - then today Microsoft would be broke.
Next it appears that actually giving something to the folks that invvest their hard earned cash becomes interpreted as "divedends biting them in the rear".
By this line of reasoning it is clear that the investors are the problem - they should just hand their money over as a gift of course and exepct nothing back in return while Billy plays his silly games with their money.
But of course - when I look at this stock I conclude that it is little more than a gift investment and I personally will not touch it - when it starts to decline it will go deep and it will go fast and a lot of stock analysts will be running around squawking like chickens proclaiming that they can't understand how this happened...
Thankfully I have no investments in any of the institutional funds who buy these shares. I do imagine there are going to be a lot of pensioners down the track wondering where all the assets went of course.
Pacificroot had alternate servers running years ago.
More recently I don't know what the status is. But it was sure nice being able to type in www.bbc.news and get the proper website!!!