Isn't having one person in charge of the official tree against the whole idea of open-source?
And I qoute;
"
That tree is called "Linus' tree" for a reason. The only thing you are ENTITLED to is to have your own tree."
It isn't "the official tree" - it's "the Linus tree". If you don't like it, use Alan's tree, or any of the dozens of others out there.
Shouldn't everyone have input of equal value?
They do. Subscribe to the LKML and post it there. Pretty well all of the important developers of the kernel (most trees) frequent it.
Then again, a certain popular linux site also has 'super-users' who control everything. I guesse the open-source world is full of contradictions.
Ok then - we have two VMs - Riks and Andreas's. Since everyone's supposed to get equal input and nobody is supposed to control the kernel - we're supposed to have both of them in play?
Would you like to write the code that keeps them separate depending on which box I fill with an 'X' in menuconfig? What about all the other aspects of the kernel where we have two, five, ten, or a hundred different patches that all do the same thing? I don't know about you, but I don't really fancy downloading a 500MB Bzip2-ball of kernel source. HDDs and bandwidth may be cheap, but come on, there are limits.
So in short, if you don't like the way Linus manages his tree - branch. Take the entire code base of any of the trees you'd like as a starting point and implement your anarchist's paradise. Let me know when it becomes stable and I'll give it a whirl.
The sad thing is that many morons wouldn't know what to do with a PDF since they have never heard of Adobe. The way to send docs so you know other people can read them is ( Yikes ) MSWord.
Most of our business customers (small or large) use PDF as their globally accepted format for documents. Especially in cases where agents are frequently on the road, they need a format that's always available.
We actually had issue with one such customer because Outlook Express decided that PDFs were "insecure attachments" and not to be permitted. Needless to say, the company is sufficiently large that a changing their document format is out of the question. More likely they'll be changing e-mail clients instead.
Sheesh...can't people freaking wait until it's released? Is it really THAT important that they warez an alpha version of the game?
I probably wouldn't ever run an Alpha/Beta copy of a game anyways, but not out of 'respect' - out of fear that it'll make my Athlon XP1800 system look like a 486 due to, well, whatever reasons developers have for doing that.;)
The last Beta I tried was Warcraft III which ran so dog-slow I decided that I probably wouldn't ever be interested in purchasing it, since I'd just sunk $700 into my computer and wasn't prepared to do it again just yet. As it turns out, of course, it runs perfectly well on my system now that I'm running the official release.
But I'd sooner not be turned off a game before I can see it at its full potential. My opinion, and I'm sticking to it.:)
... and ignorant. I can't "RTFA" because it seems to be quite Slashdotted (off the face of the Earth, I'd say) but isn't PDF's strength the PORTABLE aspect of it?
When I want to e-mail an invoice, I can feel comfortable sending it in a PDF file as opposed to, say, an Excell spreadsheet, because I know that whatever platform my customer is running will have one or a hundred PDF readers. Be it his Windows workstation, Linux machine, his iPaq or Palm Pilot, or his Apple G4 - he'll be able to read my invoice.
So if Microsoft's new format is supposed to kill off PDF - wouldn't they have to succumb and create a reader for {gasp!} Linux?
Oh, and every other platform in existance while they're at it...
From Dell's online ordering [dell.com]: Power management features limit processor speed when running on battery.
There is no excuse for not reading this.
If you wonder "Gee, how much does it limit processor speed?" You should put down your credit card and start researching.
When I bought my laptop (a Toshiba Satellite, which I'm exceptionally pleased with, FWIW) I asked questions, compared it with the laptops in the store, and understood what the differences were. I also got assurance from the sales person that I could return it within 30 days for a FULL MONEY BACK REFUND if I was not satisfied with the purchase. For the next 29 days, I proceeded to, figuritively speaking, beat the snot out of it. I used it on battery, experimented with power saving features, read the manual cover to cover, exploited all the features of it, installed Linux (to the point where every piece of hardware was fully functional). In short, I made sure that my laptop suited all of my needs, and if not, that I had recourse so that I could exchange it for one that did.
It's a year and a half later (halfway through my warranty - eep!) and I'm still just as happy with it as the day I got it.
Point being; I did my research beforehand (it was actually about 2 months before I bought it. As a result of my patience, I got an extra 200MHz, 5GB of HDD space, and double the RAM), then I made sure I was satisfied with my purchase before it was too late.
For all who've said 'Caveat Emptor' - good on you. Merely having a credit card isn't a license to spend money like it's going out of style. Spend wisely, think before you buy, and most important of all pay attention.
(And yes, Slashdot was slow for me all day on a 3MB connection)
Is there another service on offer to provide porn / windows service packs on demand, which cross-subsidises data traffic? No.
No, but we do have video stores, satellite TV, digital cable who are all willing to provide porn to people, and you can order CDs from Microsoft.
More topically; we have ICQ, AIM, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, and many other messengers who (from personal experience) reduce the number of telephone calls. For example, I have a friend in California with whom I can speak for hours without ever picking up my handset. That's a lot of money not going into the telco's coffers. However, as indicated above, I pay my share for the transit of this information via my monthly ISP bill. My ISP peers with several other national ISPs, who either are themselves, or peer with international ISPs, and everybody gets a buck along the way.
If the multi-national ISP backbone providers were silly enough to rely on voice calls to subsidize their (by your logic) fledgeling Internet business, we wouldn't have the Internet as we know it today. You don't create one business that directly competes with your mainstay and survive in a capitalist economy. That's known as economic suicide, plain and simple.
You're right -- this ruling is protectionism. It protects the majority of consumers from a few who can abuse the system by getting services at a fraction of the cost, thereby increasing the cost to the majority.
This ruling is protectionism alright, but not the way you portray it. This ruling protects a monopoly that won't adapt to the times. If monopolies remain in the past, they find themselves in one of three scenarios;
Lose substantial business to new up-and-comers (the Internet providers)
Seek regulation to force their business model, thus forcing their customers to remain behind the times
Adapt.
A telcom monopoly is a Good Thing only initially - until a nation has a telecommunication infrastructure in place. Afterwards, the only model that suits the nation (and encourages growth) is to break up that monopoly and let others into the mix. Companies who will compete to keep customers, rather than keep them at bay. Service growth, enhancement of services, quality of service are all things that monopolies tend to forget about while they sit atop their respective dung heaps.
If the telco is having that much difficulty, perhaps they should invest in some VoIP POTS conversion facilities and start reaping the benefeits of inexpensive international traffic, or provide a VoIP gateway service (with a premium fee for the extra service/bandwidth usage) for their customers.
I'm currently using Netscape 7.0 which does this; but I've used Outlook previously and it is stupid enough to request GIFs from a web server unless you explicitly turn it off; that misfeature is on by default in both.
Ok; common-sense measures indicates you turn off remote images and plugins for your mail + news reading.
Weren't we talking about people intelligent enough to be proactive about their SPAM prevention measures?
Now then - what URLs are your e-mail client loading for you?
No. I think you've missed atleast one point. Quite a lot of spammers send mail messages that contain URLs that are unique to you. If you open an email message that contains a URL like that- your browser opens the URL...
Whoa! What kind of browser and e-mail client are you using?!? I don't even think Outlook/IE are stoopid enough to automatically request URLs!
Don't tell me you're confusing human stupidity with intelligent SPAM filtering?
The first one says the screenshots have been removed due to microsoft request!?
Not to be black-helicopterish or anything (as if that's ever stopped me.;) ) but wouldn't adding a line like "REMOVED DUE TO MICROSOFT REQUEST" give the shots an ounce of legitimacy? I mean, they already had to make a claim that they are, in fact, real, and went so far as to suggest a possible method by which they could be faked...
How would a person go about confirming whether or not Microsoft took action? Phone them and ask? Which office? Which department? Would they even answer questions to the public about it?
Everything just wraps into a nice little package, doesn't it?
Ever since Symantec bought Ghost, they've been changing it from a simple, easy to use, small, beautiful and most of all SMALL utility to a typical bloated pile of junk. It's so nice to see someone develop an open and free version that recaptures the original idea - just copy the fricken hard disk already!
That's all well and good, until you need to take an image from a 6GB test machine and put it on one lab of 10GB machines and another of 4GB, with a couple 3.3 and 8.4's thrown in for good measure (you don't always get the same size drive back for an RMA, for one thing). Sending an image to a batch of brand-new workstations involves the following steps;
Image one workstation. Ghost automatically resizes all partitions to fill the HDD. (Potentially as large as, say, 80 or 120GB)
Update all installed drivers.
Create new image on server.
Batch-load image to all new workstations.
The prospect of either manually resizing, or dumping and re-creating several partitions is a headache I'd much sooner live without.
Creating and maintaining eight identical workstation images with the only difference being the size of the HDD costs a lot of time (money) and server storage, not to mention far too much administrative overhead. If I want to image 100 workstations, I'd prefer to associate them in LCCM and instruct them to 'go', or tell the Ghost MultiCast server which workstations to image and have it fire away. Running 6+ multicast sessions either takes six times as long, else runs at 1/6th the speed.
It's lunch-hour, you have to have 75 machines re-imaged and useable by the end of lunch. Choose your application wisely.
Ghost's ability to back up a workstation onto CDR discs (@ 650, 700, or 800MB) which can be booted and restoring your disk in one easy shot is also a fantastic feature. Backing up a laptop to a connected USB HDD is another example of phenominal functionality.
G4U seems like a nice novelty, and perhaps a good way to back up your home workstation, but I don't forsee it ever replacing even a small portion of Ghost's utility.
Isn't Apple going to release OS X for x86? Well, wait till that happens, then ask that troll/dumbass to run OS X on X86. And I can tell you what is going to happen--he'll have to buy his hardware according to an "approved HW list" published by Apple, and you can bet there are going to be an amazing choice of 3 motherboards and 4 soundcards on that list.
People tend to forget quickly that their canned operating system manufacturers aren't always supporting all hardware out of the box so easily. Windows has an HCL - remember? Hardware types that are known to work with Windows ${VARIANT}, and other types that are known to leave it in the lurch. When you have an unsupported sound card in ${VARIANT} - what do you do? Wait for someone to release a driver, that's what.
Under Linux I applied a five line.diff to an i810 sound module source, `make dep modules modules_install`, loaded the module and proceeded to listen to music. Shortly thereafter the diff was applied to the kernel and my sound was supported natively.
Every OS has its strengths and weakneses as far as hardware support is concerned - some will prevent your OS from booting, others are a mere inconvenience until support is added.
It's dead simple, though, when a vendor controls both the hardware and software on a platform. "Sound support was easy! I have Sound Card Number Three Of Five! It was SO SMART that it detected it for me, all by itself!"
We sell about 20 different sound cards alone right now, and have sold and/or serviced probably 2000 different cards. Call me when OS X supports all of them.:)
Wonderful. Include autodetection of everything you like - just leave the option of turning it off during install. Please? When I install my servers I *DON'T* want to be distracted by such things. Thankyouverymuch.
Yeah, I hate it when simple PCI detection scripts find my servers' NICs and the like. Drives me up the bloody wall.
Get back to work Dr. Bragsalot. If you ate your degree maybe you'd realize it's flamebait because it implies Linux is unstable, lacks development tools and is unsecure.
I hate to contribute to this discussion, which is why I'm posting without my +1 bonus, but...
Linux technically is unstable - it's in a constant state of development.
Linux technically is unsecure - although that could change once these new security patches are finished and thoroughly tested.
I've found that it can take two days to convince users that outgoing via SMTP and incoming via POP3 are two seperate things. An other problem I've found is explaining that the mouse being jerky while the email client is downloading a 14MB load of Emails through a WIFI network connected a WinME machine running a DirectPC link isn't a computer problem.
Uhm, actually, it is.:)
Possible symptoms;
Too much overhead for the WEP - hardware not handling it, and sending it off to the CPU(s) to handle
Poor choice of operating system - use a proper 32-bit multitasking environment on each end. WinME can't timeslice to save its life (Try Win2k instead)
Underpowered client machines running said operating systems.
Poor choice of connection forwarding. Use a proper WAP (even a SOHO/RESE unit) instead of a WinME machine.
I mean - you have to tell people where to ftp the attached files to, how to reference them in the email. To attach an email, you only need to click on the "attach" button, and the rest is sorted out fairly automatically.
It's also easier to not get an oil change in your car - in the short run. In the long run, however, you'll get a larger bill from your service provider and a larger budget forecast from your IT department because of it. (Oh, and you'll likely need to overhaul your engine while you're at it.)
Something that people seem to always forget is that the short term ease is rarely ever worth the long-term headaches. Drag'n'dropping a file onto an FTP server and typing the name into the e-mail takes all of five seconds. Let it transfer in the background while you compose the message. That way, too, you can send a 5KB e-mail to 1000 people, and the QoS on the FTP server (and the nature of people getting around to downloading the file as they see fit, which means staggered downloading) eases the strain on servers and end-users and networks all along the way.
Remember that your saving ten seconds per e-mail could displace a thousand people for several hours (or days).
E-mail wasn't designed for file transfers. FTP was. Leave the square pegs where they belong.:)
If you are an ISP, the users are your customers, and they are right (as customers always should be).
Here we come down to a catch-22 situation. Customers want to be able to a) send as much e-mail as they desire without size limits, b) send said e-mail to as many people as they desire, and c) store all these neat-o e-mails in their folders (in their server home directory, or perhaps in IMAP folders, in their Exchange inbox, etc.) but! BUT! They don't want to spend a couple thousand dollars on a RAID array sufficient to store said e-mail.
When you explain to some of these poeple that hey, you just can't put 200GB on a 120GB disk along with your operating environment and other company file storage, they blink.
Customers are not always right - customers in many cases need to be educated so that they may understand how "this e-mail stuff" works.
Putting a large file on an ftp site that is password protected and sending an email with a url containing the password and username already is just as secure as sending an email.
Of course, you could have a pre-determined location with a previously known username and/or password, else you could tell them something like "The password is the name of your childhood dog of fifteen years." - something that wouldn't be easily known, and would presumably take someone long enough to figure out that the file would already be retreived and deleted.
The added benefit is, you've also then got logs to see if the file has been accessed, which you can't guarantee with email.
That is true, mostly. With e-mail return receipts and MTA "Send Failure" logs are all configurable by the manager of the particular client/servers, wheras FTP logs tend to be a bit more reliable. (Note: I said "tend to be".;) )
I'd also like to note that Microsoft is planning to possibly remove access to attachments in Outlook altogether, quite probably due to all the bad press about their piss-poor handling of insecure (or "Level 1") attachments.
So what we have is not only a problem where many mail servers will continue to refuse messages greater than 5MB in size, we also have issues with many e-mail providers (HotMail, Yahoo, Softhome, etc.) restricting people to 5MB TOTAL mailbox size, with dial-up users cursing you out for sending them a 45 minute download (they COULD use something that previews the messages on the server and prune the big ones before downloading, but hey... ), and with umpteen tens of thousands of viruses/worms/trojans that are perpetually mis-handled by retarded mail clients, and more and more companies, ISPs, etc. either virus scanning, removing potentially harmful, or flat-out removing access to all attachments on incoming and/or outgoing mail (for virus and security / confidentiality reasons).
It's very rare that I send an attachment that can't be embedded in the e-mail itself (a.DOC file that could be copy/pasted) or linked to from a webserver (even GeoCities or something would be easy enough - that's point and shoot, and many free web hosting companies virus scan uploads for you anyways).
I am currently living in Beijing, China and all of the apartments in my area have continuous 100MBit connections.
We pay zero installation and 150 RMB (US$18) per month for unlimited, uncapped, unrestricted service.
All the people in my building have unlimited, uncapped, unrestricted 100BaseTX connections, too. It's called a LAN, and it has nothing to do with our connection speed to the outside world.
What's your connection speed to the actual Internet? Can you honestly tell me that you can transfer at 12MBytes/sec from halfway around the world?
And likewise, people like me who like to go for drives on the weekend, or visit their friends in distant towns should pay extra 'road-use' surcharges for the additional mileage. After all, roadways aren't free, the facilities for maintaining roadways aren't free, the people who maintain roads aren't free, and I think it's entirely fair that the states charge more to the people who drive more.
You do pay more - it's called "gas tax". Atleast 50% of the cost of a tank of gas is tax which goes towards - you guessed it - roadways.
but what they really want is users that barely turn on the computer, check their email, read a text site or two, and sign off.
Perhaps what they want is more of a happy medium. I mean, they have users who use perhaps 1GB/Month, then they have users who consume upwards of 500GB/Month. DSL companies, of course, face the same concerns. Many DSL companies in Canada have implemented caps, and the major cable providers are preparing to do the same (January 2003, from what I understand).
Bandwidth isn't free, the facilities for distributing bandwidth aren't free, the people who maintain those facilities aren't free, and I think it's entirely fair that companies charge more to the people who use more. I do think the caps could be a bit more reasonable in some cases; something like 10-20GB/Month with the ability to carry your unused KBs to the next month. That would be enough to curb the continuous 200KB/Second all day, all night, all month types (ie; people who queue a dozen movies, a couple binary newsgroups, then play various 3D online games for a few hours until their movies are transferred) and still allow the majority of users to continue regular use without noticing a difference. Maybe as an added benefeit they could allow people to purchase 'chunks' of extra bandwidth to add to their account at a reasonable discount.
We may yet see a day where continuous 100MBit/Sec connections are as standard in homes as water pipes, but today isn't that day.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't "the official tree" - it's "the Linus tree". If you don't like it, use Alan's tree, or any of the dozens of others out there.
They do. Subscribe to the LKML and post it there. Pretty well all of the important developers of the kernel (most trees) frequent it. Ok then - we have two VMs - Riks and Andreas's. Since everyone's supposed to get equal input and nobody is supposed to control the kernel - we're supposed to have both of them in play?Would you like to write the code that keeps them separate depending on which box I fill with an 'X' in menuconfig? What about all the other aspects of the kernel where we have two, five, ten, or a hundred different patches that all do the same thing? I don't know about you, but I don't really fancy downloading a 500MB Bzip2-ball of kernel source. HDDs and bandwidth may be cheap, but come on, there are limits.
So in short, if you don't like the way Linus manages his tree - branch. Take the entire code base of any of the trees you'd like as a starting point and implement your anarchist's paradise. Let me know when it becomes stable and I'll give it a whirl.
(Sorry; couldn't resist)
We actually had issue with one such customer because Outlook Express decided that PDFs were "insecure attachments" and not to be permitted. Needless to say, the company is sufficiently large that a changing their document format is out of the question. More likely they'll be changing e-mail clients instead.
Great - now I can rest easy!
The last Beta I tried was Warcraft III which ran so dog-slow I decided that I probably wouldn't ever be interested in purchasing it, since I'd just sunk $700 into my computer and wasn't prepared to do it again just yet. As it turns out, of course, it runs perfectly well on my system now that I'm running the official release.
But I'd sooner not be turned off a game before I can see it at its full potential. My opinion, and I'm sticking to it. :)
When I want to e-mail an invoice, I can feel comfortable sending it in a PDF file as opposed to, say, an Excell spreadsheet, because I know that whatever platform my customer is running will have one or a hundred PDF readers. Be it his Windows workstation, Linux machine, his iPaq or Palm Pilot, or his Apple G4 - he'll be able to read my invoice.
So if Microsoft's new format is supposed to kill off PDF - wouldn't they have to succumb and create a reader for {gasp!} Linux?
Oh, and every other platform in existance while they're at it ...
It's a year and a half later (halfway through my warranty - eep!) and I'm still just as happy with it as the day I got it.
Point being; I did my research beforehand (it was actually about 2 months before I bought it. As a result of my patience, I got an extra 200MHz, 5GB of HDD space, and double the RAM), then I made sure I was satisfied with my purchase before it was too late.
For all who've said 'Caveat Emptor' - good on you. Merely having a credit card isn't a license to spend money like it's going out of style. Spend wisely, think before you buy, and most important of all pay attention.
(And yes, Slashdot was slow for me all day on a 3MB connection)
More topically; we have ICQ, AIM, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, and many other messengers who (from personal experience) reduce the number of telephone calls. For example, I have a friend in California with whom I can speak for hours without ever picking up my handset. That's a lot of money not going into the telco's coffers. However, as indicated above, I pay my share for the transit of this information via my monthly ISP bill. My ISP peers with several other national ISPs, who either are themselves, or peer with international ISPs, and everybody gets a buck along the way.
If the multi-national ISP backbone providers were silly enough to rely on voice calls to subsidize their (by your logic) fledgeling Internet business, we wouldn't have the Internet as we know it today. You don't create one business that directly competes with your mainstay and survive in a capitalist economy. That's known as economic suicide, plain and simple.
This ruling is protectionism alright, but not the way you portray it. This ruling protects a monopoly that won't adapt to the times. If monopolies remain in the past, they find themselves in one of three scenarios;- Lose substantial business to new up-and-comers (the Internet providers)
- Seek regulation to force their business model, thus forcing their customers to remain behind the times
- Adapt.
A telcom monopoly is a Good Thing only initially - until a nation has a telecommunication infrastructure in place. Afterwards, the only model that suits the nation (and encourages growth) is to break up that monopoly and let others into the mix. Companies who will compete to keep customers, rather than keep them at bay. Service growth, enhancement of services, quality of service are all things that monopolies tend to forget about while they sit atop their respective dung heaps.If the telco is having that much difficulty, perhaps they should invest in some VoIP POTS conversion facilities and start reaping the benefeits of inexpensive international traffic, or provide a VoIP gateway service (with a premium fee for the extra service/bandwidth usage) for their customers.
Weren't we talking about people intelligent enough to be proactive about their SPAM prevention measures?
Now then - what URLs are your e-mail client loading for you?
Don't tell me you're confusing human stupidity with intelligent SPAM filtering?
How would a person go about confirming whether or not Microsoft took action? Phone them and ask? Which office? Which department? Would they even answer questions to the public about it?
Everything just wraps into a nice little package, doesn't it?
The prospect of either manually resizing, or dumping and re-creating several partitions is a headache I'd much sooner live without.
Creating and maintaining eight identical workstation images with the only difference being the size of the HDD costs a lot of time (money) and server storage, not to mention far too much administrative overhead. If I want to image 100 workstations, I'd prefer to associate them in LCCM and instruct them to 'go', or tell the Ghost MultiCast server which workstations to image and have it fire away. Running 6+ multicast sessions either takes six times as long, else runs at 1/6th the speed.
It's lunch-hour, you have to have 75 machines re-imaged and useable by the end of lunch. Choose your application wisely.
Ghost's ability to back up a workstation onto CDR discs (@ 650, 700, or 800MB) which can be booted and restoring your disk in one easy shot is also a fantastic feature. Backing up a laptop to a connected USB HDD is another example of phenominal functionality.
G4U seems like a nice novelty, and perhaps a good way to back up your home workstation, but I don't forsee it ever replacing even a small portion of Ghost's utility.
Under Linux I applied a five line .diff to an i810 sound module source, `make dep modules modules_install`, loaded the module and proceeded to listen to music. Shortly thereafter the diff was applied to the kernel and my sound was supported natively.
Every OS has its strengths and weakneses as far as hardware support is concerned - some will prevent your OS from booting, others are a mere inconvenience until support is added.
It's dead simple, though, when a vendor controls both the hardware and software on a platform. "Sound support was easy! I have Sound Card Number Three Of Five! It was SO SMART that it detected it for me, all by itself!"
We sell about 20 different sound cards alone right now, and have sold and/or serviced probably 2000 different cards. Call me when OS X supports all of them. :)
Linux technically is unstable - it's in a constant state of development.
Linux technically is unsecure - although that could change once these new security patches are finished and thoroughly tested.
Possible symptoms;
Something that people seem to always forget is that the short term ease is rarely ever worth the long-term headaches. Drag'n'dropping a file onto an FTP server and typing the name into the e-mail takes all of five seconds. Let it transfer in the background while you compose the message. That way, too, you can send a 5KB e-mail to 1000 people, and the QoS on the FTP server (and the nature of people getting around to downloading the file as they see fit, which means staggered downloading) eases the strain on servers and end-users and networks all along the way.
Remember that your saving ten seconds per e-mail could displace a thousand people for several hours (or days).
E-mail wasn't designed for file transfers. FTP was. Leave the square pegs where they belong. :)
When you explain to some of these poeple that hey, you just can't put 200GB on a 120GB disk along with your operating environment and other company file storage, they blink.
Customers are not always right - customers in many cases need to be educated so that they may understand how "this e-mail stuff" works.
I'd also like to note that Microsoft is planning to possibly remove access to attachments in Outlook altogether, quite probably due to all the bad press about their piss-poor handling of insecure (or "Level 1") attachments.
So what we have is not only a problem where many mail servers will continue to refuse messages greater than 5MB in size, we also have issues with many e-mail providers (HotMail, Yahoo, Softhome, etc.) restricting people to 5MB TOTAL mailbox size, with dial-up users cursing you out for sending them a 45 minute download (they COULD use something that previews the messages on the server and prune the big ones before downloading, but hey ... ), and with umpteen tens of thousands of viruses/worms/trojans that are perpetually mis-handled by retarded mail clients, and more and more companies, ISPs, etc. either virus scanning, removing potentially harmful, or flat-out removing access to all attachments on incoming and/or outgoing mail (for virus and security / confidentiality reasons).
It's very rare that I send an attachment that can't be embedded in the e-mail itself (a .DOC file that could be copy/pasted) or linked to from a webserver (even GeoCities or something would be easy enough - that's point and shoot, and many free web hosting companies virus scan uploads for you anyways).
What's your connection speed to the actual Internet? Can you honestly tell me that you can transfer at 12MBytes/sec from halfway around the world?
Bandwidth isn't free, the facilities for distributing bandwidth aren't free, the people who maintain those facilities aren't free, and I think it's entirely fair that companies charge more to the people who use more. I do think the caps could be a bit more reasonable in some cases; something like 10-20GB/Month with the ability to carry your unused KBs to the next month. That would be enough to curb the continuous 200KB/Second all day, all night, all month types (ie; people who queue a dozen movies, a couple binary newsgroups, then play various 3D online games for a few hours until their movies are transferred) and still allow the majority of users to continue regular use without noticing a difference. Maybe as an added benefeit they could allow people to purchase 'chunks' of extra bandwidth to add to their account at a reasonable discount.
We may yet see a day where continuous 100MBit/Sec connections are as standard in homes as water pipes, but today isn't that day.
I plan on visiting the site in a few hours to give it a critical read when I can actually click through to the next page.
You may find that the most common use of 'arbitrary' is;