I would have to agree with your comments. Threads like this, and./ as a whole, have started to take a ultra liberal approach to everything. For starters, search for RFID, Patriot Act, Black Courts, or Echelon.
Do I really care that a manufacturer knows I bought their shampoo at a corner store at 11pm on Friday? Of course not! The outrage over RFID tags is similar to UPC codes.
As for this loyal slashdot reader for 8 years - time to go someplace else for my tech news. The garbage articles and comments are finally too much to bear.
Who really cares? Not me. If it can improve the product pipeline and lower costs by making sure that the product stays on the shelf - then I am all for it.
I did the same to mine. Dumped a 22oz Diet Pepsi in the keyboard. Picked it up carefully (it was still dripping pepsi) and took it to the kitchen at work. Turned it upside down and drained the keyboard - took it apart and washed everything that wasn't a circuit - and put it back together. Plugged it in - and nothing. Put a USB adaptor on it, and it worked. I blew the PS/2 port on the motherboard, but the keyboard still worked.
Ellacoya Networks also makes a switch that, like the packeteer device, uses signature detection to determine if a flow is p2p or not.
Before we started to use their switches, p2p traffic accounted for 65% of our network traffic (both inbound and outboud). By placing p2p limits on the upstream (or outbound) portion of internet pipes, we were able to reduce that to 40%.
When Ellacoya introduced signature detection in their 5.0 release, we were able to catch Kazaa2 flows which reduced our p2p usage to 30%.
Not only has this saved us a tremendous ammount of money (we don't have to keep buying pipe), but we were able to keep the cost down for our customers that don't use p2p, or care.
Another use for the switch is usage-based billing. People scoff at usage based billing, but it evens the billing field. Look at the grandmother that uses her connection to send emails to her kids, and then look at the kid down the street. Both pay the same ammount, but one uses 95% more bandwidth. A recent study that we did here concluded that 5% of our users use 90% of the available bandwidth.
So, what is fair? Limiting bandwidth-hungry applications to the point that they are no longer useable, or charging the customer that wants to use that application his fair share of the costs of delivering the service?
Basic cable channels (usually the off-air channels) are not necessarily free.
Local broadcasters have 2 methods that they can use to get their signals on your cable system. They can elect for a Must Carry (you have to carry them per FCC regulations) or a contract. The Must Carry is free. A contract of any sort is going to involve dollars.
We are currently in renegotiations with the local NBC and ABC affiliates. The ABC affiliate wants us to pay $0.25 per subscriber per month to carry their signal. The NBC affiliate wants us to carry their signal, roll out their HDTV signal in 30 days, still provide a channel for their weather broadcasts, advertising swaps, and what the cable industry calls Most Favored Nation (i.e. they get paid what the highest local affiliate charges us to carry their local signal - in our case $0.25 per sub per month).
HDTV alone is going to cost us about $10k a channel to add (the reason is that the UHF channel spectrum that the off-air broadcasts use is not directly transportable on a cable system without wastng channel space. The UHF channels don't match up directly with the cable channels). So, we have to either take their off air channel, upconvert it, and sell a box to the subscriber to get it. Or, we can waste channel space, and a normal HDTV ready TV would be able to watch the signal.
That, and the ABC contract says that if we roll out HDTV for any other local broadcaster, then we have to roll theirs out too.
Basic cable is something that cable companies are required by the FCC to carry. It isn't always as cheap as you might think.
Let me preface this by saying that I work for the local muni.
Mediacom, who is the local competitor to our local municipal cable/data product is trying to get the law changed in Iowa to prevent the formation of new Communications utilities and severly limit the ability of the already formed utilities to do business. The link to the legislation is here.
In Iowa, like most states, there are open meetings and open records laws. Mediacom has, in the past, requested and received all of our financial data including customer counts, contracts with providers, etc. We, on the other hand, can not ask them for any of that information which results in an unlevel playing field.
Our product costs less because we don't have to pay off stock holders and the like. All that we have to pay off is our municipal bonds that were floated on the creation of the utility.
The company that I work for, Cedar Falls Utilities was a 3 service utility (gas, water, and electric) that started to provide communications services (cable tv, high speed data, and dedicated facilities) in 1997. Broadband Bob has a report from Jan of 1997 here.
The typical RF cable network requires 2-way amplifiers and can span about a 1 mile radius from the fiber->rf conversion node. And our equipment isn't washing machine sized - it can be lashed to the cable itself.
I am the Network Administrator for the Cedar Falls Utilities "CyberNet" service. Thanks dirtkilla for the props!
I think that we are doing a pretty good job here in Cedar Falls. We started this system using first generation cable data products and ran into a lot of problems in the beginning. We think that we have it figured out now though. Sure, it is more difficult than electricity, but then everything is more difficult than electricity. I'm sure that by the time data communications is as old as electrical delivery is now, it will be as, if not more, stable.
We are continuing to invest in our infrastructure (this includes the Residential service, the Business service, and our 60+ miles of our own fiber backbone within the city).
Before we started our telecommunications utility, the only providers in town were dialup (TCI had 36 channels of cable TV). We built our network - competively priced our services. We aren't in it to make a profit - but to make sure that we can keep financing our operations and offer additional services for our customers.
If you are a customer of CFU - and you are having problems - let us know! We pride ourselves on our service which we feel is far better than Mediacom. Most problems can be resolved same day or next. You don't have to wait a week to get a service tech if you have our services:)
That sounds like an indirect result of the cap. The problem with most cable company equipment - the company that I work for included - is that upstream bandwidth that is available.
DOCSIS specifications - for US channel plan anyway - call for a 6mhz wide channel on the downstream. The downstream is anywhere from 91mhz to 750mhz (there are even some 850mhz cable plants). The 6mhz channel corresponds to a standard tv channel. With DOCSIS 1.0, the downstream can be either 64QAM or 256QAM. This is just the modulation of the digital signal as it is sent from the main facility to the subscriber. 256QAM gets you about 38mb/s of data transfer. 64QAM a little bit less.
Now, here is the crappy part. The upstream channel space from the subscriber back to the cable facilities is limited to 5-40 mhz. This is the width of the return path that the amplifiers in the system will receive and re-transmit. 0-10 is pretty much useless on most cable plants. That is the frequency space that short wave radios and the like use (a funny side note is that we once picked up a short wave religious station out of Boston using the signal ingress and amplification at our main facility). The rest is usefull for your upstream bandwidth on a DOCSIS system. The 1.0/1.1 spec states that you can use a frequency with a width of 200hz up to 3.2mhz. Obviously, the more space that you use, the more bandwidth that you have. There are also 2 types of modulation schemes that you can use. QAM16 and QPSK. QPSK is more reliable. QAM16 can carry more data. Most cable plants will use QPSK - your cable plant has to be air tight to use QAM16.
Anyway, if you use QPSK on a 3.2mhz wide channel for the upstream, you get about 5mb/s of available bandwidth. If you put 150 customers on this upstream port, and they all uploading files, emails, etc: then you could very well max out your upstream bandwidth.
That's why you have an upstream cap.
Re:What if you are the designated driver?
on
Remote Breathalyzer
·
· Score: 2
No kidding. If they install this, then you can't ever give your drunk friends a ride home. All this means is that people will find out where the sensor is, and disable it.
I called cisco one night, while replacing my Nortel BCN with a cisco3662. For some reason, I couldn't get my BGP peer established with Sprint. It was 3am Central US time when I called cisco. I first talked to an individual who stated that they were on a callback. I figured that I would get a call in 45 minutes to an hour. 3 minutes later, my phone rang, and it was a gent from Belgium. He logged into my router for me, found the bgp error immediately, fixed it, and I was on my merry way. He even fixed some of my access-lists for me while he was there.
Cisco has _the_best_ customers service that I have ever seen. It is good enough, that I don't mind paying a bit more for the hardware, because I know that if it breaks, there will always be someone to help me out.
How do you think that cable companies do it? We can mux up to 850mhz of radio frequency (that's was television is), through fiber, and dump it out the other side with _minimal_ loss (like 1dBmV).
I am not a telco guy, but why doesn't it work? Crappy field equipment?
We actually had a customer once who had their 10baseT fiber media convertor plugged into a lamp timer. At 5pm, internet access was cut off and the office had to go home. At 7am, internet access was back on and people could come to work.
I wish that my users were more like you. They blame us for slow connections to the internet. Well, I have 2 DS3 to seperate tier-1 providers, our upstream and downstream channels are under-utilized, and they still complain that their connections are slow.
in the past, what has stopped Power Line Carrier (PLC) internet access is the transformer in the neighborhood. It seems that the transformer is pretty good at blocking PLC from traversing from the home into the power system (this is what also keeps your X10 home automation stuff from controlling your neighbors house:)
PLC would be good for us (we are a municipal electric utility). We have already installed a coax and fiber network, but PLC would let us get to the residential customers that are just to expensive to reach otherwise.
I wonder if they offer any kind of SLA for this? Imagine the ammount of bandwidth that a couple of users could consume downloading divx movies, or something like that.
I imagine that this service won't be around for too long. They'll just run out of money.
I know that some people think of Pluto as a captured asteroid, and some think of it as a planetoid. Maybe a visit to the last planet would tell us what it really is. Plus, hey, why not? Our space exploration programs are speeding up a bit after the stagnant 80's, and I am glad to see it.
If this fiber links Australia to two other continents, then why isn't it fully looped? I mean, you run one cable from australia to continent a, then another cable to continent b. Hopefully, you are smart enough to run a cable from continent a to continent b, and you have a loop. Say you have OC192 running in this loop, then you have sub 50ms switching capacity and you can switch all traffic from the broken loop to a working loop.
People cut stuff, they drive dump trucks through aerial fiber (hitting power lines as well), and other really stupid stuff. If you have an entire continent running on one link, then that link better be redundant and fully looped. These people have one to blame but themselves (people being the inet company).
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How about 24v DC into a laptop ethernet port? I only noticed because of the smell!
It still works though.
I would have to agree with your comments. Threads like this, and ./ as a whole, have started to take a ultra liberal approach to everything. For starters, search for RFID, Patriot Act, Black Courts, or Echelon.
Do I really care that a manufacturer knows I bought their shampoo at a corner store at 11pm on Friday? Of course not! The outrage over RFID tags is similar to UPC codes.
As for this loyal slashdot reader for 8 years - time to go someplace else for my tech news. The garbage articles and comments are finally too much to bear.
I agree. Why is it that everything that deals with tracking anything results in a over-the-top response from slashdot readers/posters?
Who really cares? Not me. If it can improve the product pipeline and lower costs by making sure that the product stays on the shelf - then I am all for it.
I did the same to mine. Dumped a 22oz Diet Pepsi in the keyboard. Picked it up carefully (it was still dripping pepsi) and took it to the kitchen at work. Turned it upside down and drained the keyboard - took it apart and washed everything that wasn't a circuit - and put it back together. Plugged it in - and nothing. Put a USB adaptor on it, and it worked. I blew the PS/2 port on the motherboard, but the keyboard still worked.
The A records only resolve for domains that aren't already registered. DNS queries to a down, or broken, nameserver will return an NXDOMAIN.
Ellacoya Networks also makes a switch that, like the packeteer device, uses signature detection to determine if a flow is p2p or not.
Before we started to use their switches, p2p traffic accounted for 65% of our network traffic (both inbound and outboud). By placing p2p limits on the upstream (or outbound) portion of internet pipes, we were able to reduce that to 40%.
When Ellacoya introduced signature detection in their 5.0 release, we were able to catch Kazaa2 flows which reduced our p2p usage to 30%.
Not only has this saved us a tremendous ammount of money (we don't have to keep buying pipe), but we were able to keep the cost down for our customers that don't use p2p, or care.
Another use for the switch is usage-based billing. People scoff at usage based billing, but it evens the billing field. Look at the grandmother that uses her connection to send emails to her kids, and then look at the kid down the street. Both pay the same ammount, but one uses 95% more bandwidth. A recent study that we did here concluded that 5% of our users use 90% of the available bandwidth.
So, what is fair? Limiting bandwidth-hungry applications to the point that they are no longer useable, or charging the customer that wants to use that application his fair share of the costs of delivering the service?
I think that Microsoft lost the teeth to fight a war on interfaces when they beat Apple over the use of Windows.
Basic cable channels (usually the off-air channels) are not necessarily free.
Local broadcasters have 2 methods that they can use to get their signals on your cable system. They can elect for a Must Carry (you have to carry them per FCC regulations) or a contract. The Must Carry is free. A contract of any sort is going to involve dollars.
We are currently in renegotiations with the local NBC and ABC affiliates. The ABC affiliate wants us to pay $0.25 per subscriber per month to carry their signal. The NBC affiliate wants us to carry their signal, roll out their HDTV signal in 30 days, still provide a channel for their weather broadcasts, advertising swaps, and what the cable industry calls Most Favored Nation (i.e. they get paid what the highest local affiliate charges us to carry their local signal - in our case $0.25 per sub per month).
HDTV alone is going to cost us about $10k a channel to add (the reason is that the UHF channel spectrum that the off-air broadcasts use is not directly transportable on a cable system without wastng channel space. The UHF channels don't match up directly with the cable channels). So, we have to either take their off air channel, upconvert it, and sell a box to the subscriber to get it. Or, we can waste channel space, and a normal HDTV ready TV would be able to watch the signal.
That, and the ABC contract says that if we roll out HDTV for any other local broadcaster, then we have to roll theirs out too.
Basic cable is something that cable companies are required by the FCC to carry. It isn't always as cheap as you might think.
Let me preface this by saying that I work for the local muni.
Mediacom, who is the local competitor to our local municipal cable/data product is trying to get the law changed in Iowa to prevent the formation of new Communications utilities and severly limit the ability of the already formed utilities to do business. The link to the legislation is here.
In Iowa, like most states, there are open meetings and open records laws. Mediacom has, in the past, requested and received all of our financial data including customer counts, contracts with providers, etc. We, on the other hand, can not ask them for any of that information which results in an unlevel playing field.
Our product costs less because we don't have to pay off stock holders and the like. All that we have to pay off is our municipal bonds that were floated on the creation of the utility.
The company that I work for, Cedar Falls Utilities was a 3 service utility (gas, water, and electric) that started to provide communications services (cable tv, high speed data, and dedicated facilities) in 1997. Broadband Bob has a report from Jan of 1997 here.
The typical RF cable network requires 2-way amplifiers and can span about a 1 mile radius from the fiber->rf conversion node. And our equipment isn't washing machine sized - it can be lashed to the cable itself.
I am the Network Administrator for the Cedar Falls Utilities "CyberNet" service. Thanks dirtkilla for the props!
:)
I think that we are doing a pretty good job here in Cedar Falls. We started this system using first generation cable data products and ran into a lot of problems in the beginning. We think that we have it figured out now though. Sure, it is more difficult than electricity, but then everything is more difficult than electricity. I'm sure that by the time data communications is as old as electrical delivery is now, it will be as, if not more, stable.
We are continuing to invest in our infrastructure (this includes the Residential service, the Business service, and our 60+ miles of our own fiber backbone within the city).
Before we started our telecommunications utility, the only providers in town were dialup (TCI had 36 channels of cable TV). We built our network - competively priced our services. We aren't in it to make a profit - but to make sure that we can keep financing our operations and offer additional services for our customers.
If you are a customer of CFU - and you are having problems - let us know! We pride ourselves on our service which we feel is far better than Mediacom. Most problems can be resolved same day or next. You don't have to wait a week to get a service tech if you have our services
That sounds like an indirect result of the cap. The problem with most cable company equipment - the company that I work for included - is that upstream bandwidth that is available.
DOCSIS specifications - for US channel plan anyway - call for a 6mhz wide channel on the downstream. The downstream is anywhere from 91mhz to 750mhz (there are even some 850mhz cable plants). The 6mhz channel corresponds to a standard tv channel. With DOCSIS 1.0, the downstream can be either 64QAM or 256QAM. This is just the modulation of the digital signal as it is sent from the main facility to the subscriber. 256QAM gets you about 38mb/s of data transfer. 64QAM a little bit less.
Now, here is the crappy part. The upstream channel space from the subscriber back to the cable facilities is limited to 5-40 mhz. This is the width of the return path that the amplifiers in the system will receive and re-transmit. 0-10 is pretty much useless on most cable plants. That is the frequency space that short wave radios and the like use (a funny side note is that we once picked up a short wave religious station out of Boston using the signal ingress and amplification at our main facility). The rest is usefull for your upstream bandwidth on a DOCSIS system. The 1.0/1.1 spec states that you can use a frequency with a width of 200hz up to 3.2mhz. Obviously, the more space that you use, the more bandwidth that you have. There are also 2 types of modulation schemes that you can use. QAM16 and QPSK. QPSK is more reliable. QAM16 can carry more data. Most cable plants will use QPSK - your cable plant has to be air tight to use QAM16.
Anyway, if you use QPSK on a 3.2mhz wide channel for the upstream, you get about 5mb/s of available bandwidth. If you put 150 customers on this upstream port, and they all uploading files, emails, etc: then you could very well max out your upstream bandwidth.
That's why you have an upstream cap.
No kidding. If they install this, then you can't ever give your drunk friends a ride home. All this means is that people will find out where the sensor is, and disable it.
I called cisco one night, while replacing my Nortel BCN with a cisco3662. For some reason, I couldn't get my BGP peer established with Sprint. It was 3am Central US time when I called cisco. I first talked to an individual who stated that they were on a callback. I figured that I would get a call in 45 minutes to an hour. 3 minutes later, my phone rang, and it was a gent from Belgium. He logged into my router for me, found the bgp error immediately, fixed it, and I was on my merry way. He even fixed some of my access-lists for me while he was there.
:)
Cisco has _the_best_ customers service that I have ever seen. It is good enough, that I don't mind paying a bit more for the hardware, because I know that if it breaks, there will always be someone to help me out.
And, I don't work for cisco
How do you think that cable companies do it? We can mux up to 850mhz of radio frequency (that's was television is), through fiber, and dump it out the other side with _minimal_ loss (like 1dBmV).
I am not a telco guy, but why doesn't it work? Crappy field equipment?
We actually had a customer once who had their 10baseT fiber media convertor plugged into a lamp timer. At 5pm, internet access was cut off and the office had to go home. At 7am, internet access was back on and people could come to work.
hilarious.
I wish that my users were more like you. They blame us for slow connections to the internet. Well, I have 2 DS3 to seperate tier-1 providers, our upstream and downstream channels are under-utilized, and they still complain that their connections are slow.
in the past, what has stopped Power Line Carrier (PLC) internet access is the transformer in the neighborhood. It seems that the transformer is pretty good at blocking PLC from traversing from the home into the power system (this is what also keeps your X10 home automation stuff from controlling your neighbors house :)
PLC would be good for us (we are a municipal electric utility). We have already installed a coax and fiber network, but PLC would let us get to the residential customers that are just to expensive to reach otherwise.
I wonder if they offer any kind of SLA for this? Imagine the ammount of bandwidth that a couple of users could consume downloading divx movies, or something like that. I imagine that this service won't be around for too long. They'll just run out of money.
I know that some people think of Pluto as a captured asteroid, and some think of it as a planetoid. Maybe a visit to the last planet would tell us what it really is. Plus, hey, why not? Our space exploration programs are speeding up a bit after the stagnant 80's, and I am glad to see it.
Your IP address would change because of an area code split?
If this fiber links Australia to two other continents, then why isn't it fully looped? I mean, you run one cable from australia to continent a, then another cable to continent b. Hopefully, you are smart enough to run a cable from continent a to continent b, and you have a loop. Say you have OC192 running in this loop, then you have sub 50ms switching capacity and you can switch all traffic from the broken loop to a working loop.
People cut stuff, they drive dump trucks through aerial fiber (hitting power lines as well), and other really stupid stuff. If you have an entire continent running on one link, then that link better be redundant and fully looped. These people have one to blame but themselves (people being the inet company).
abc had 242 to 242.
cnn had 246 to 242.
hmm... too much glamour and not enought work...