Those same studies determined that there is an increase of accident risk associated with TALKING TO OTHER PEOPLE IN THE CAR.
Are you going to suggest that passengers should be outlawed? Or maybe they should be required by law to wear muzzles? And what about children?
No. This is going too far. I can understand (and support) restricting handset use. I cannot support restricting ALL cell phone use. While it would be nice to have drivers completely free of any and all distractions, it is not realistic by any means.
Although I am a radical liberal by most measures... Mommy State = BAD.
We only run a relatively small network, but you can bet that if anything went wrong, we could walk into the server room and pick up the appropriate back-up tapes and/or call the off-site data archive service we use and get every copy they have within a couple of hours. A very small network, apparently. Most backup methods are predicated on the fact that you will never need to delete JUST ONE record out of a backup set, without deleting the entire backup (of that filesystem, data store, etc.) Also, I rather suspect they use read-only media to store their backups-- but that's only a suspicion. Deleting part of a backup is much, MUCH harder-- well-nigh impossible-- than restoring part of a backup.
Asking Google to cleanse out ALL of your data, at your whim, is... a bit unreasonable, don't you think?
One of the biggest differences between Google and other online companies is this: Google is being absolutely, utterly honest about their actual privacy policies and data retention. They will NEVER lie just to tell you what you want to hear, nor will they pretend things are easier than they really are.
BZZZZZZZZT! Wrong. Well, wrong if we're talking about internet connectivity, and I believe that's what the original question was about.
In a point-to-point, telco-tech sense, no, T-1s cannot be oversubscribed, not like frame relay can be. However, they can (and damn well ARE) in an internet-bandwidth sense. Do you seriously propose that all ISPs maintain excess upstream bandwidth equal to all their customer T-1s added together? Hell no.
I've worked for a number of ISPs and telcos over the years, and I know for a fact we oversold our available bandwidth. Sometimes the customer noticed, sometimes not. Of course, when the customer noticed, more upstream was added in a hurry... at least, when we wanted to keep the customer, it was.
You say you sold circuits. I think you may have confused the concept of point-to-point circuits with the concept of selling an Internet Connection-- if you follow me.
Nice idea, but with Robert's Rules, you are at least guaranteed that each "second" is coming from a separate person.
The fundamental problem here is that each actual person may hold several* accounts, each of which could second another's edits.
A weighted scoring system or moderation system might work better, but would take much more work from the community to maintain.
* Theoretically, an unlimited number of accounts. Actually, with enough accounts, someone could manipulate even a voting system, if it wasn't well-thought-out enough.
Well, that is of course true. Unfortunately, most management prefer to pretend otherwise. If I.T. personnel draw Management's attention to that vulnerability, they will probably be let go and replaced with someone that WILL lie about the safety of the company's secrets (from IT).
Actually, the O' prefix-- correct me if I'm wrong, Gaelic readers-- is an Anglicization of the Gaelic "Ui", which I understand in this context means "grandson of" or "of the line of".
For example, Sean, son of Cerbaill, grandson of Lochlainn, would have been "Sean mac Cerbaill ui Lochlainn", and Anglicized as "Sean MacCarroll O'Laughlin" (or some such).
Heh. Please forgive me for being an A/R Celtiphile...
Has Pratchett read Adams?
on
Thief of Time
·
· Score: 1
I think he has. "The Last Continent", his book about Australia (or at least the DiscWorld analog of it) was clearly based at least in part on an extremely funny essay commonly attributed to Adams.
This mirrors my own experience working for two different ISPs from 1995-1999. I'm still waiting for the second ISP to go under from the idiotic machinations of the egomaniac in charge. (The first ISP was sold.)
The points about the marketroids and the idiots in sales making losing deals were particularly on-target. I *still* marvel over some of the unbelievably stupid sales contracts we signed.
And, of course, the techies got the blame. We were actually told once by our CEO that we (the tech department) were losing the company huge amounts of money, presumably because we were failing to squeeze blood from a turnip, and were desperately trying to get equipment actually capable of handling those web customers the sales droids were constantly acquiring (at a net loss, of course).
Raises? HA! Of course not. We didn't make the company any money, the SALES people were the ones bringing in the revenue.
I will say this: trying to keep those ridiculously overloaded mail systems running for two years taught me a LOT about the management of Unix boxes in extreme conditions. I do not think I would have been able to acquire that experience elsewhere. And I should add that this experience has seriously increased my worth at my current job. Unfortunately, the daily interpersonal and technological battles almost completely burned me out -- a burnout I'm still trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to recover from.
I am wondering about one thing, though. How in the WORLD did you find a company without marketroids? It seems they're everywhere in the tech sector. I would love to learn where to look in order to avoid them.
Regarding the dot-com "crash", I truly believe that a lot of it is simply a reality check at these mismanaged companies. I hope that enough administrative types learn from these experiences, so we will end up with much smarter internet-focused companies.
The DUL ("Dial-Up List", or list of dynamic IP pools used by ISPs) was incredibly effective when I implemented it. It blocked a lot of the spam that I couldn't filter out otherwise, and completely eliminated all shotgun-spam*.
If your ISP is reluctant to implement the other two (several very valid reasons come to mind) I would strongly recommend they consider the DUL. There are no liability, control, or loss of service concerns that could possibly be generated by it.
* Er, shotgun-spam: a term I (and probably others) use to describe spam sent to a large list of commonly-found usernames. Similar to the concept of a dictionary attack, most of the spam bounces to the sender (usually resulting in a double-bounce, since the sender almost never exists) but a percentage of the spam makes it to accounts that would otherwise not be found on normal spam lists. Ingenious, and terribly evil...
Are you absolutely, TOTALLY certain that you don't have a prior business relationship with these people? If you gave them your email address at some point in the past, and (probably inadvertently) checked one of those annoying "please send me news about our product" checkboxes, then they will feel justified in sending you commercial mail. Furthermore, their ISP will not do anything about it, because it is not UCE, or UNsolicited commercial email.
If this is the case (and ONLY if this is the case!) I would recommend that you use the removal address they provide. Otherwise, the business won't know to remove you and the ISP will laugh off any complaints they receive. If you ask to be removed and aren't, THEN you will have some ammo for the ISP.
Just please remember: commercial email, no matter how unwanted, does not equal spam. It's got to be unsolicited.
Hm, one additional point: Make ABSOLUTELY sure you know which email address the spam is being sent to. A lot of us have acquired countless old email addresses, and it's easy to forget that everything is getting forwarded to your current address. If you ask for the wrong address to be removed, it (obviously) won't work.
And if they're really spammers? Heh. Draw some blood for me, would you?
Solaris will do this, but you will probably need to run it on a _big_ box, like a Sun Ex500 class machine with about 8 or more processors.
Uh, I hate to say this, but I strongly disagree.
Speaking from first-hand experience (35,000 or so users), an Ex500 machine is vast overkill. A fully spec'ed-out E450 (4 procs, lotsa memory) is still overkill, but will leave you room to grow. You could probably survive with only two processors, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Please note that we did NOT run SIMS. This was with Sendmail 8.9, cucipop and a small NetApp.
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Those same studies determined that there is an increase of accident risk associated with TALKING TO OTHER PEOPLE IN THE CAR.
Are you going to suggest that passengers should be outlawed? Or maybe they should be required by law to wear muzzles? And what about children?
No. This is going too far. I can understand (and support) restricting handset use. I cannot support restricting ALL cell phone use. While it would be nice to have drivers completely free of any and all distractions, it is not realistic by any means.
Although I am a radical liberal by most measures... Mommy State = BAD.
Asking Google to cleanse out ALL of your data, at your whim, is... a bit unreasonable, don't you think?
One of the biggest differences between Google and other online companies is this: Google is being absolutely, utterly honest about their actual privacy policies and data retention. They will NEVER lie just to tell you what you want to hear, nor will they pretend things are easier than they really are.
And they're getting raked over the coals for it.
BZZZZZZZZT! Wrong. Well, wrong if we're talking about internet connectivity, and I believe that's what the original question was about.
In a point-to-point, telco-tech sense, no, T-1s cannot be oversubscribed, not like frame relay can be. However, they can (and damn well ARE) in an internet-bandwidth sense. Do you seriously propose that all ISPs maintain excess upstream bandwidth equal to all their customer T-1s added together? Hell no.
I've worked for a number of ISPs and telcos over the years, and I know for a fact we oversold our available bandwidth. Sometimes the customer noticed, sometimes not. Of course, when the customer noticed, more upstream was added in a hurry... at least, when we wanted to keep the customer, it was.
You say you sold circuits. I think you may have confused the concept of point-to-point circuits with the concept of selling an Internet Connection-- if you follow me.
Nice idea, but with Robert's Rules, you are at least guaranteed that each "second" is coming from a separate person.
The fundamental problem here is that each actual person may hold several* accounts, each of which could second another's edits.
A weighted scoring system or moderation system might work better, but would take much more work from the community to maintain.
* Theoretically, an unlimited number of accounts. Actually, with enough accounts, someone could manipulate even a voting system, if it wasn't well-thought-out enough.
Well, that is of course true. Unfortunately, most management prefer to pretend otherwise. If I.T. personnel draw Management's attention to that vulnerability, they will probably be let go and replaced with someone that WILL lie about the safety of the company's secrets (from IT).
There's no respect for IT anymore, I tell ya.
Actually, the O' prefix-- correct me if I'm wrong, Gaelic readers-- is an Anglicization of the Gaelic "Ui", which I understand in this context means "grandson of" or "of the line of".
For example, Sean, son of Cerbaill, grandson of Lochlainn, would have been "Sean mac Cerbaill ui Lochlainn", and Anglicized as "Sean MacCarroll O'Laughlin" (or some such).
Heh. Please forgive me for being an A/R Celtiphile...
That essay can be found here.
This mirrors my own experience working for two different ISPs from 1995-1999. I'm still waiting for the second ISP to go under from the idiotic machinations of the egomaniac in charge. (The first ISP was sold.)
;-)
The points about the marketroids and the idiots in sales making losing deals were particularly on-target. I *still* marvel over some of the unbelievably stupid sales contracts we signed.
And, of course, the techies got the blame. We were actually told once by our CEO that we (the tech department) were losing the company huge amounts of money, presumably because we were failing to squeeze blood from a turnip, and were desperately trying to get equipment actually capable of handling those web customers the sales droids were constantly acquiring (at a net loss, of course).
Raises? HA! Of course not. We didn't make the company any money, the SALES people were the ones bringing in the revenue.
I will say this: trying to keep those ridiculously overloaded mail systems running for two years taught me a LOT about the management of Unix boxes in extreme conditions. I do not think I would have been able to acquire that experience elsewhere. And I should add that this experience has seriously increased my worth at my current job. Unfortunately, the daily interpersonal and technological battles almost completely burned me out -- a burnout I'm still trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to recover from.
I am wondering about one thing, though. How in the WORLD did you find a company without marketroids? It seems they're everywhere in the tech sector. I would love to learn where to look in order to avoid them.
Regarding the dot-com "crash", I truly believe that a lot of it is simply a reality check at these mismanaged companies. I hope that enough administrative types learn from these experiences, so we will end up with much smarter internet-focused companies.
I *hate* working for stupid people.
The DUL ("Dial-Up List", or list of dynamic IP pools used by ISPs) was incredibly effective when I implemented it. It blocked a lot of the spam that I couldn't filter out otherwise, and completely eliminated all shotgun-spam*.
If your ISP is reluctant to implement the other two (several very valid reasons come to mind) I would strongly recommend they consider the DUL. There are no liability, control, or loss of service concerns that could possibly be generated by it.
* Er, shotgun-spam: a term I (and probably others) use to describe spam sent to a large list of commonly-found usernames. Similar to the concept of a dictionary attack, most of the spam bounces to the sender (usually resulting in a double-bounce, since the sender almost never exists) but a percentage of the spam makes it to accounts that would otherwise not be found on normal spam lists. Ingenious, and terribly evil...
Are you absolutely, TOTALLY certain that you don't have a prior business relationship with these people? If you gave them your email address at some point in the past, and (probably inadvertently) checked one of those annoying "please send me news about our product" checkboxes, then they will feel justified in sending you commercial mail. Furthermore, their ISP will not do anything about it, because it is not UCE, or UNsolicited commercial email.
If this is the case (and ONLY if this is the case!) I would recommend that you use the removal address they provide. Otherwise, the business won't know to remove you and the ISP will laugh off any complaints they receive. If you ask to be removed and aren't, THEN you will have some ammo for the ISP.
Just please remember: commercial email, no matter how unwanted, does not equal spam. It's got to be unsolicited.
Hm, one additional point: Make ABSOLUTELY sure you know which email address the spam is being sent to. A lot of us have acquired countless old email addresses, and it's easy to forget that everything is getting forwarded to your current address. If you ask for the wrong address to be removed, it (obviously) won't work.
And if they're really spammers? Heh. Draw some blood for me, would you?
Solaris will do this, but you will probably need to run it on a _big_ box, like a Sun Ex500 class machine with about 8 or more processors.
Uh, I hate to say this, but I strongly disagree.
Speaking from first-hand experience (35,000 or so users), an Ex500 machine is vast overkill. A fully spec'ed-out E450 (4 procs, lotsa memory) is still overkill, but will leave you room to grow. You could probably survive with only two processors, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Please note that we did NOT run SIMS. This was with Sendmail 8.9, cucipop and a small NetApp.
(My first posting -- please be kind...)