It's the truth. When you force users to conform to absurd password rules, you force them to write the passwords down.
Some admins believe that you should enforce these crazy long and complicated passwords, and then have everyone change them every month or less.
I wouldn't blame you for writing that password down on a sticky note, and I'm willing to bet that almost everyone else the company will do so as well. Not to mention the volume of calls that will be made to Help Desk when the people that DIDN'T write down their passwords forget what they were.
A strong password policy is fine, as long as it's loose enough for users to remember what they are. Forcing the changing of passwords too often is always bad, however.
The best solution would be some sort of SecureID type thing - but these hardware key solutions are often very expensive and come with their own set of problems. They aren't for every business. Not yet, at least.
Yea, you're damned right. Microsofts' point-and-click stuff really backfires on them sometimes because you end up with these Admins that set up AD systems completely half-assed.
AD works. Sure, Windows 2000 without any service packs sucked, but they've pretty much nailed down most of the functionality bugs by now. And, it's not all that hard to use AD as a directory for all your systems, including Linux and Mac systems.
There's a lot of considerations for AD design and if you spend some quality time designing the directory and infrastructure with knowledgable people, you'll get it running well and it will stay running well.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, and as much as I didn't like AD at first, it's not all that bad.
So was my Packard Bell Legend, with a 486SX 20Mhz. No fan in the system, and no heat sink on the CPU. Ran for years (with the lid shut) until I had a power surge that killed the PSU, which burned off several resistors and capacitors on the mainboard.
I overclocked it to 33Mhz and it still needed no fan. Back in 1991, nobody believed me at the computer shows when I told them all you had to do was set a jumper to make the CPU run faster.
They reviewed the technology behind CrossFire a month or so ago.
From what I saw, I think CrossFire is going to be better - it might have a little less performance then the nVidia SLI but it seems like it will be a LOT more compatible with existing and new games.
AND, you don't have to match boards. So, you can have an X850 from Company A, use it for a year, then get the Crossfire from Company B - slap it in and you're good to go. No compatibility issues.
I'm willing to bet their mixture tops out at about 140.
By the pictures, there's a lot of that white stuff and it's all packed around and on the bottom of the coffee. Since it takes 6 - 8 minutes to get it to 140, and there's not a lot of coffee in the cup, I think it doesn't get very much hotter then that.
Plus, any dumb kid could buy one and bust it open - 140 degrees won't do any damage but 250 could burn you.
It would be different if the H-1 imports got the same salary rates as everyone else, which they generally don't. An indian programmer is going to make a lot less money then a native one. So every single one of those 200K people is going to go straight to the workforce - and the locals either take 40% pay cuts or find a new profession.
There's not many professional professions where this type of thing happens. Think doctors, lawyers, stamped surveyors, etc. Good programmers and IT professionals usually have had to undergo years of study to land the jobs that the H1's are taking. But you don't see an Indian, Russian, Chinese, or whatever Doctor coming in and working for 40% less.
I don't think the problem is epidemic yet, but yea people are definately threatened by this and I can't really blame them. In 10 years it could very well be impossible to find a decent wage programming.
There really isn't a shortage of skilled computer people in the US, as much as some big businesses would make people believe. Companies just want cheaper programmers and IT workers.
While if it's true that commoditization of workforce might help the economy in the long run, it's hurting local talent now. It only helps put more money in the pockets of executives and stock holders.
Interesting point but things like H-1 visas and letting illegal immigrants work in the US when there's a labor shortage can hurt the corresponding industries in the US.
Wages won't go up, because there's suddenly more workers available. Thus, it won't lure new workers in from other industries where there may be a more abundance of workforce right here in the US.
And when times get tough, these H-1's, illegal immigrants, and other special practices are rarely scaled back, and so we end up with unemployed citizens and employed immigrants.
I'm not saying we should close the border, or that we shouldn't allow a qualified worker from another country to work here. But these special allowances don't seem to be helping our enconomy much.
My own field hasn't been heavily impacted by these things (yet) but I do feel the pain of many friends and collegues that have been impacted.
I don't have the answers, and there's never going to be an easy solution to these types of problems.
His "new way of thinking" isn't new at all. Many large corporate networks are set up the same way - you have clients on one segment/group, servers on another, and Internet-accessable on another. You filter between the networks.
Not sure how he can say they "gave up" the firewalls - if it's a router doing filtering or a special "application firewall" (whatever the difference is) it's still doing *firewalling* and thus still needs to be managed.
He never really mentioned that they removed any firewalls, really. There's going to be packet filtering for the client machines, be it in the form of NAT or whatever. I'm sure they don't want people using Bittorrent all day, so they're going to lock it down. And that requires firewalls.
You can pretend that your firewall isn't a firewall but if it's blocking packets, it's one.
"NNTP, which, although it's not as popular as it once was,"
NNTP is mostly just out of the mainstream, but it's still very, very popular. There exists over 100,000 USENET groups today, and the size of a fully populated usenet feed with 20 days binary retention is tens of terrabytes. Maybe even hundreds. There's dozens of companies which offer usenet access. I can't imagine how fast their network connections must have to be to maintain the feeds AND all the clients. (Interesting to note however that even with the vast amount of data being transmitted with NNTP, it's still very low on the list of top internet traffic protocols!)
Of course, this is off-topic but I thought I might comment on that.
Like me, you waited entirely too long to do something. If this ever happens to me again, I'm going to seek legal council immediately.
It's not that expensive. A lawyers office down the road from me will talk to you for nothing, and if it's obvious there's a law being broke (as in the case of calling multiple times) any lawyer would be more then happy to send a letter and make a phone call or two on your behalf for $30 or so.
As soon as you show that you're not going to roll over for these criminals, they lay off. Usually. And if they don't, now you have a lawyer that's already involved in the matter, and you've got the law on your side. If you do sue them, chances are the lawyer will do it at no cost to you - the burdon of your council will rest on the agency that's breaking the law.
I really hope that some day people smarten up and simply don't get caught up with these loan sharks. I get credit card offers in the mail all the time - most of them are such bad deals they should be illegal. 29.9% interest on some of them, with a jack up to 39.9% if you're late on *any* bill; car loan, electric, mortgage, anything. Isn't that insane? 40% interest!
So they give out these $300 or $500 cards, with high rates, to anyone. They make the late fees so high that it's very easy to get caught up like you did - late fees bring you over limit easily, then there's over-limit fees, then they charge even more the next month because you're STILL over the limit. Before you know it you owe $1000 and the credit company only ever dished out $400 for your purchases.
It's such a racket and I really feel bad for people caught up in it. I'll never let it happen to me again, but I paid dearly for that lesson.
In 2001, I had lost my job and finding a new one in NYC in October was, let's say "difficult."
I had a credit card with $4,000 on it, from Citibank. It went default; rent was more important then this debt. I told them I intended to pay the debt but I would have to find work first.
They sent it to a collection agency and let me tell you, this guy was a fucking dipshit. He'd call four times a day, and every time I'd ask "who is this" (because they're only allowed to call once a day, they don't like to identify themselves) and he would not. I'd hang up, he'd call back. Finally after a few calls he would, and I'd say "sorry, he's not here." I started out with them by explaining the situation, but it didn't matter.
Once a bill goes to a collection agency, that's it. The damage has been done - it's on your credit history as a charge-off. The collection agency can not do anything else to ruin your credit. The only thing they can do is bug you until you pay, so that's what most of them do. And they don't mind breaking the law because you can't trace their calls with Caller ID, they don't identify themselves, and when you're broke you can't hire a lawyer. Police won't do a damned thing either. (I called them.)
Finally I did get a job and I sued his ass. He settled and I no longer had to pay the debt. But it was a pain in the ass.
I had another small debt, that went to a lawyers office. They took me to court. But it was better then the collection agency, because I told the judge my situation and he was sympathetic. I paid something like $10 a month until it was paid. Most judges will do the same thing. Once I got some income I paid off the debt in two weeks. This was much more effective then the collection agencies.
So to anyone with a collection agency on your ass - fuck'em. If they refuse to work with you (resonably) on a debt, they're rude, and call more then once a day, don't be afraid. They have NO power. Once you get some cash, call a lawyer.
Re:But what did the PDP 11 really DO?
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Of course, the leading cause of reboots these days is security patching. There's NT4 boxes that ran for 5 years without reboots, Novell 3 and 4 boxes that ran for years, etc. A lot of it is the hardware (and with commodity hardware it's often luck) and what you actually do with the machines.
The good thing about VMS (and Unix, to a good degree) is that they're designed to be more tolerant to major software updates without reboots. Well, more tolerant then Windows.
While these mainframes did a lot of work in a lot of aspects of industry and technology, the software WAS more simple.
What's more efficient? That's a question for another day. But when I go to the store to buy a power tool and the cashier has to roll a mouse all over the place, or when I see data entry clercs rolling mice and navigating GUI's, I do think that keyboard controlled text terminals are far more effecient. But we all like pretty pictures, and so the complexity ensues.
I feel the same way - although I guess I never really thought about it.
Hey, what if I need that program some day? What if they stop Bittorrent and all the other stuff by requiring ISP's to only allow cached web traffic? What if?
It could happen, and in the current climate of technology things, it seems likely. In the meantime, I'm downloading everything I can get because in the future I might not be able to.
Of course, I wouldn't bother if this shit wasn't so expensive. $25 for a movie? $60 for a game? $500 for Photoshop? If movies were $5, games were $15, and Photoshop was $30, I wouldn't bother pirating any software or media.
However, I do buy DVD's occationally, because I know I can get that movie off the disc any time I wanted. I probably won't ever copy it or send it over the Internet, but I *could.*
They get a bit of their software running on your system, and they control how that software interacts with their systems.
We might not need it, and I probably won't install it, but that's probably why they are doing it. That, and because every acknowledgement of OSS as a viable alternative to Microsoft is good for everyone except Microsoft.
But what did the PDP 11 really DO?
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I'm not going to downplay the stability of the old mainframes, but what did you actually do with them?
Console apps, simple OS design, hardware from the same vendor..
If you set up a single new big Sun box with X terminals, you'd get similar availability and a lot more functionality then the old PDP 11.
But when you try to use hardware that's mass-produced and multi-vendor, based on some good and some loose standards, with software from all over the place and an operating system from Microsoft, you'd bound to run into problems and it's really no surprise.
No, you aren't coming full circle at all. You had completely denied that it was efficient (past some odd reference to a college LAN) - you didn't understand how bittorrent could ever be more efficient then a server-client transfer.
But now, you seem to, at least a little bit. Although you still seem to miss the point:
"Reduce popularity and/or density, however, and its efficency begins to reduce dramatically in proportion. Or just how many servers in a given network are online AND happen to still have a fragement of an infrequently accessed file?"
In the case of *legitimately* distributing a file, you'll have your trackers running with the full file all the time. The more popular, the less you actually end up sending out to network clients. But if that number dwindles, you just end up sending a more traditional amount of data - but still less then a web server or FTP server as long as even one client is downloading the file. Server might only have 3Mbit upstream, but if 10 clients with 300Kbit upstream join the mix, now you suddenly have 6Mbit of aggregate bandwidth available.
And who cares about your judgement thing about abusing and subverting - you keep putting this in to distract the arguement from the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about. SO ONCE AGAIN, like I said, it's political and completely seperate from the fact that you see/saw no *technical* merit to Bittorrent. I replied to THAT aspect of your post, not about the little one line at the end.
I think that could definately have something to do with it.
I don't think it's wrong to have waited until the right time to sue. Microsoft is a huge ass company with billions and billions in reserve funds - before you sue them you need to plan out your case.
If you can deal with the trolls and ignorant posts that are very much the norm on Slashdot, you'll also find some very interesting and well written comments. The ratio of good > bad is low, but it is interesting to see what some people around here think about things.
Comments about how bad Slashdot is, and how "everyone" is a troll, are a bit too harsh.
With any public forum you get a lot of noise. Slashdot is no exception. But there is a signal here, you just have to have the patience to look for it.
The user-moderation does have a lot to be desired but if you read more then just the +5's you're more likely to find good comments.
But when you get to the levels of inter-city network speeds, it's almost impossible to saturate those links. Terrabits of bandwidth is available, and a lot of the fiber is dark. In fact, in most of the UK, only about 3% of the fiber capacity is actually active. The rest is just waiting to go.
What you DO distribute out is the bandwidth required on any particular network segment- and even more specifically, your individual link. That's where the bandwidth squeeze happens. The higher up the ISP chain you go, the less important bandwidth is.
Pakistan isn't really a great example at all. Most of the big Internet-connectec areas (North America, UK/Europe, Japan, China..) have more then ONE cable connecting them to each other. This point is actually moot after the previous statements above.
At the same time, however, it does create an example of why Bittorrent is good. Say someone in Pakistan created a movie that was freely available on the Internet. They could set up a torrent, and the more people that downloaded the file, the less traffic would have to be sent over that single cable, and it wouldn't require paying Akamai or some other world-wide cache service thousands of dollars. It would take the load OFF that link and spread it out all over the world.
Sure, Akamai might be a more straight-forward solution but it's very expensive to serve out files via server-client when thousands of people download it. The reason Akamai can do it is by distributing the content across several key network points with very, very fast connections. Bittorrent does a similar thing, just further down the line and more granular.
Bittorrent is proven to work - if you look at who's sharing some bootleg movie on the internet it's not a company with a lot of bandwidth. It's a person with a cable modem or DSL, and yet hundreds of people can download it very rapidly all at the same time. The load is distributed across ISP's, network segments, nodes, and finally individual links.
"Because it is closed-source, they will more easily be able to focus on their goals. When something needs to be done, there won't be endless mailing-list threads and forum discussions before someone actually writes down some code. When the SkyOS team decides that feature X must go in, it goes in. That is a major advantage over open development constructions because it can speed up the development process."
I don't see how being closed source automatically frees the developers from any discussion about functionality and/or bug fixes?
Inversely, just because a software is open source doesn't mean it's always bogged down in mailing lists. You better believe that there's a lot of discussion, a lot of meetings, and a lot of bickering in any large scale project - be it open source or not. Just because we can all witness the discussion on open source doesn't mean it's more prevelant.
And I see that as an advantage. With many open source projects, you as an end-user are able to join in on the discussions and voice your own opinions about things. You can change the course of a project without even being a developer.
This guy clearly just used the traditional/popular notions about software development and put it down on paper.
"Again, and for the last time, it will be interesting to see how far the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived abuses."
I don't care about that. It's political. We both know there's going to be people that use it for both good and bad things, like anything else. Sure, it might be interesting, but that's not the arguement. The arguement is that you don't see any benefit in bittorrent at all - even from a technical standpoint.
"I think you're ignoring common network topology. It "may" be more efficient if someone in your ISP's local network has the entire specific file you're looking for, or most of it, otherwise you're still routing out and back anyway." "but all of those packets still need to be routed from there over the backbone to"
What do you mean by "the backbone?" You don't think the Internet has a few major links that connect everything, do you? It's a distributed network. There's a whole bunch of routes to anywhere, and the ISPs and Telcos all connect to each other across many redundant links. Some of them are absurdly fast, and some of them are just plain fast. But there's so much redundency and load balancing involved that only your regional traffic is going to go through the same locations.
That being said, it's also likely that with most torrents, people will be downloading the peices from all over the place. I don't feel as though this should even have to be explained but I guess I must.
Someone seeds a download. It's downloaded by, say, 20 clients, all random peices. More clients join in, and they start to download peices from not only the seeders, but from those 20 clients. 200 more clients join in, and download from the seeders, the 20 clients, and the last bunch of clients. Another 2,000. Now there's thousands of clients with peices of the file, all spread out over the internet. Traffic from any single torrent client is minimal, but the aggregate bandwidth is tremendous. You're not filling up any one backbone since you're downloading peices from all over the country/world.
Bittorrent isn't about giving you, as a downloader of some file, the fastest download. It's about the ability to download said file AT ALL when it's a popular download. The side-effect is that you can end up reaching much greater speeds then the server could have done on it's own - at the same time as everyone else.
Web caches are one thing, but they don't solve the problem because you'd need 100% participation with all ISP's to make it really worth a shit. And even then, there's thousands of ISPs - you'd still have to upload your file thousands of times to get it onto everyone's web proxy.
And let's not go and assume that all linux distributions are created by big companies with lots of cash. Knoppix is a good example - they're not a big company. And they struggle with mirrors all the time. But when there's a big release, you can sure get on a torrent and download it nice and fast.
Even WoW beta used Bittorrent to distribute the 3GB+ installation flat to the beta testers. They seeded it with a few fast machines on some fast connections - but they would never have been able to distribute it to 10,000 clients simultaneously without paying BIG bucks to an Akamai type service.
So, why is it that you see no value in Bittorrent? Because every 50K of data ends up being padded with 2k of control data? Who cares? There's enough aggregate bandwidth available to eat up that control data no problem, and with a distributed network like the Internet, it works great.
Even Microsoft is apparently developing it's own bittorrent type thing (avalanche.) Although we'll believe it when we see it.
I'm sure you could have picked a better analogy. For instance, you could have said "Ford makes a tire that LASTS longer."
But the point remains. While I don't believe patents are bad, the original timeframes for them were created at a time when invention and technology development was a lot slower. Now, 15 years is an eternity.
But even if the 15 years remains, the patents they grant now aren't any good. They allow patents for non-specific ideas.
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It's the truth. When you force users to conform to absurd password rules, you force them to write the passwords down.
Some admins believe that you should enforce these crazy long and complicated passwords, and then have everyone change them every month or less.
I wouldn't blame you for writing that password down on a sticky note, and I'm willing to bet that almost everyone else the company will do so as well. Not to mention the volume of calls that will be made to Help Desk when the people that DIDN'T write down their passwords forget what they were.
A strong password policy is fine, as long as it's loose enough for users to remember what they are. Forcing the changing of passwords too often is always bad, however.
The best solution would be some sort of SecureID type thing - but these hardware key solutions are often very expensive and come with their own set of problems. They aren't for every business. Not yet, at least.
Yea, you're damned right. Microsofts' point-and-click stuff really backfires on them sometimes because you end up with these Admins that set up AD systems completely half-assed.
AD works. Sure, Windows 2000 without any service packs sucked, but they've pretty much nailed down most of the functionality bugs by now. And, it's not all that hard to use AD as a directory for all your systems, including Linux and Mac systems.
There's a lot of considerations for AD design and if you spend some quality time designing the directory and infrastructure with knowledgable people, you'll get it running well and it will stay running well.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, and as much as I didn't like AD at first, it's not all that bad.
So was my Packard Bell Legend, with a 486SX 20Mhz. No fan in the system, and no heat sink on the CPU. Ran for years (with the lid shut) until I had a power surge that killed the PSU, which burned off several resistors and capacitors on the mainboard.
I overclocked it to 33Mhz and it still needed no fan. Back in 1991, nobody believed me at the computer shows when I told them all you had to do was set a jumper to make the CPU run faster.
They reviewed the technology behind CrossFire a month or so ago.
From what I saw, I think CrossFire is going to be better - it might have a little less performance then the nVidia SLI but it seems like it will be a LOT more compatible with existing and new games.
AND, you don't have to match boards. So, you can have an X850 from Company A, use it for a year, then get the Crossfire from Company B - slap it in and you're good to go. No compatibility issues.
I'm willing to bet their mixture tops out at about 140.
By the pictures, there's a lot of that white stuff and it's all packed around and on the bottom of the coffee. Since it takes 6 - 8 minutes to get it to 140, and there's not a lot of coffee in the cup, I think it doesn't get very much hotter then that.
Plus, any dumb kid could buy one and bust it open - 140 degrees won't do any damage but 250 could burn you.
It would be different if the H-1 imports got the same salary rates as everyone else, which they generally don't. An indian programmer is going to make a lot less money then a native one. So every single one of those 200K people is going to go straight to the workforce - and the locals either take 40% pay cuts or find a new profession.
There's not many professional professions where this type of thing happens. Think doctors, lawyers, stamped surveyors, etc. Good programmers and IT professionals usually have had to undergo years of study to land the jobs that the H1's are taking. But you don't see an Indian, Russian, Chinese, or whatever Doctor coming in and working for 40% less.
I don't think the problem is epidemic yet, but yea people are definately threatened by this and I can't really blame them. In 10 years it could very well be impossible to find a decent wage programming.
There really isn't a shortage of skilled computer people in the US, as much as some big businesses would make people believe. Companies just want cheaper programmers and IT workers.
While if it's true that commoditization of workforce might help the economy in the long run, it's hurting local talent now. It only helps put more money in the pockets of executives and stock holders.
But hey, I'm no expert. I only know what I see.
Interesting point but things like H-1 visas and letting illegal immigrants work in the US when there's a labor shortage can hurt the corresponding industries in the US.
Wages won't go up, because there's suddenly more workers available. Thus, it won't lure new workers in from other industries where there may be a more abundance of workforce right here in the US.
And when times get tough, these H-1's, illegal immigrants, and other special practices are rarely scaled back, and so we end up with unemployed citizens and employed immigrants.
I'm not saying we should close the border, or that we shouldn't allow a qualified worker from another country to work here. But these special allowances don't seem to be helping our enconomy much.
My own field hasn't been heavily impacted by these things (yet) but I do feel the pain of many friends and collegues that have been impacted.
I don't have the answers, and there's never going to be an easy solution to these types of problems.
Good thing it takes a lot more then 140 degrees to start a fire - paper generally sets fire at 450F degrees or so.
A Bic lighter can put out about 1300 degrees F, and a lot of lighters find their way into the garbage.
His "new way of thinking" isn't new at all. Many large corporate networks are set up the same way - you have clients on one segment/group, servers on another, and Internet-accessable on another. You filter between the networks.
Not sure how he can say they "gave up" the firewalls - if it's a router doing filtering or a special "application firewall" (whatever the difference is) it's still doing *firewalling* and thus still needs to be managed.
He never really mentioned that they removed any firewalls, really. There's going to be packet filtering for the client machines, be it in the form of NAT or whatever. I'm sure they don't want people using Bittorrent all day, so they're going to lock it down. And that requires firewalls.
You can pretend that your firewall isn't a firewall but if it's blocking packets, it's one.
"NNTP, which, although it's not as popular as it once was,"
NNTP is mostly just out of the mainstream, but it's still very, very popular. There exists over 100,000 USENET groups today, and the size of a fully populated usenet feed with 20 days binary retention is tens of terrabytes. Maybe even hundreds. There's dozens of companies which offer usenet access. I can't imagine how fast their network connections must have to be to maintain the feeds AND all the clients. (Interesting to note however that even with the vast amount of data being transmitted with NNTP, it's still very low on the list of top internet traffic protocols!)
Of course, this is off-topic but I thought I might comment on that.
Like me, you waited entirely too long to do something. If this ever happens to me again, I'm going to seek legal council immediately.
It's not that expensive. A lawyers office down the road from me will talk to you for nothing, and if it's obvious there's a law being broke (as in the case of calling multiple times) any lawyer would be more then happy to send a letter and make a phone call or two on your behalf for $30 or so.
As soon as you show that you're not going to roll over for these criminals, they lay off. Usually. And if they don't, now you have a lawyer that's already involved in the matter, and you've got the law on your side. If you do sue them, chances are the lawyer will do it at no cost to you - the burdon of your council will rest on the agency that's breaking the law.
I really hope that some day people smarten up and simply don't get caught up with these loan sharks. I get credit card offers in the mail all the time - most of them are such bad deals they should be illegal. 29.9% interest on some of them, with a jack up to 39.9% if you're late on *any* bill; car loan, electric, mortgage, anything. Isn't that insane? 40% interest!
So they give out these $300 or $500 cards, with high rates, to anyone. They make the late fees so high that it's very easy to get caught up like you did - late fees bring you over limit easily, then there's over-limit fees, then they charge even more the next month because you're STILL over the limit. Before you know it you owe $1000 and the credit company only ever dished out $400 for your purchases.
It's such a racket and I really feel bad for people caught up in it. I'll never let it happen to me again, but I paid dearly for that lesson.
In 2001, I had lost my job and finding a new one in NYC in October was, let's say "difficult."
I had a credit card with $4,000 on it, from Citibank. It went default; rent was more important then this debt. I told them I intended to pay the debt but I would have to find work first.
They sent it to a collection agency and let me tell you, this guy was a fucking dipshit. He'd call four times a day, and every time I'd ask "who is this" (because they're only allowed to call once a day, they don't like to identify themselves) and he would not. I'd hang up, he'd call back. Finally after a few calls he would, and I'd say "sorry, he's not here." I started out with them by explaining the situation, but it didn't matter.
Once a bill goes to a collection agency, that's it. The damage has been done - it's on your credit history as a charge-off. The collection agency can not do anything else to ruin your credit. The only thing they can do is bug you until you pay, so that's what most of them do. And they don't mind breaking the law because you can't trace their calls with Caller ID, they don't identify themselves, and when you're broke you can't hire a lawyer. Police won't do a damned thing either. (I called them.)
Finally I did get a job and I sued his ass. He settled and I no longer had to pay the debt. But it was a pain in the ass.
I had another small debt, that went to a lawyers office. They took me to court. But it was better then the collection agency, because I told the judge my situation and he was sympathetic. I paid something like $10 a month until it was paid. Most judges will do the same thing. Once I got some income I paid off the debt in two weeks. This was much more effective then the collection agencies.
So to anyone with a collection agency on your ass - fuck'em. If they refuse to work with you (resonably) on a debt, they're rude, and call more then once a day, don't be afraid. They have NO power. Once you get some cash, call a lawyer.
You can't be that dull. I refuse to believe it.
Of course, the leading cause of reboots these days is security patching. There's NT4 boxes that ran for 5 years without reboots, Novell 3 and 4 boxes that ran for years, etc. A lot of it is the hardware (and with commodity hardware it's often luck) and what you actually do with the machines.
The good thing about VMS (and Unix, to a good degree) is that they're designed to be more tolerant to major software updates without reboots. Well, more tolerant then Windows.
While these mainframes did a lot of work in a lot of aspects of industry and technology, the software WAS more simple.
What's more efficient? That's a question for another day. But when I go to the store to buy a power tool and the cashier has to roll a mouse all over the place, or when I see data entry clercs rolling mice and navigating GUI's, I do think that keyboard controlled text terminals are far more effecient. But we all like pretty pictures, and so the complexity ensues.
I feel the same way - although I guess I never really thought about it.
Hey, what if I need that program some day? What if they stop Bittorrent and all the other stuff by requiring ISP's to only allow cached web traffic? What if?
It could happen, and in the current climate of technology things, it seems likely. In the meantime, I'm downloading everything I can get because in the future I might not be able to.
Of course, I wouldn't bother if this shit wasn't so expensive. $25 for a movie? $60 for a game? $500 for Photoshop? If movies were $5, games were $15, and Photoshop was $30, I wouldn't bother pirating any software or media.
However, I do buy DVD's occationally, because I know I can get that movie off the disc any time I wanted. I probably won't ever copy it or send it over the Internet, but I *could.*
They get a bit of their software running on your system, and they control how that software interacts with their systems.
We might not need it, and I probably won't install it, but that's probably why they are doing it. That, and because every acknowledgement of OSS as a viable alternative to Microsoft is good for everyone except Microsoft.
I'm not going to downplay the stability of the old mainframes, but what did you actually do with them?
Console apps, simple OS design, hardware from the same vendor..
If you set up a single new big Sun box with X terminals, you'd get similar availability and a lot more functionality then the old PDP 11.
But when you try to use hardware that's mass-produced and multi-vendor, based on some good and some loose standards, with software from all over the place and an operating system from Microsoft, you'd bound to run into problems and it's really no surprise.
No, you aren't coming full circle at all. You had completely denied that it was efficient (past some odd reference to a college LAN) - you didn't understand how bittorrent could ever be more efficient then a server-client transfer.
But now, you seem to, at least a little bit. Although you still seem to miss the point:
"Reduce popularity and/or density, however, and its efficency begins to reduce dramatically in proportion. Or just how many servers in a given network are online AND happen to still have a fragement of an infrequently accessed file?"
In the case of *legitimately* distributing a file, you'll have your trackers running with the full file all the time. The more popular, the less you actually end up sending out to network clients. But if that number dwindles, you just end up sending a more traditional amount of data - but still less then a web server or FTP server as long as even one client is downloading the file. Server might only have 3Mbit upstream, but if 10 clients with 300Kbit upstream join the mix, now you suddenly have 6Mbit of aggregate bandwidth available.
And who cares about your judgement thing about abusing and subverting - you keep putting this in to distract the arguement from the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about. SO ONCE AGAIN, like I said, it's political and completely seperate from the fact that you see/saw no *technical* merit to Bittorrent. I replied to THAT aspect of your post, not about the little one line at the end.
Nice chatting with you.
And what market is the Tablet PC aimed at?
Who knows - if Microsoft hadn't stalled Go (and probably others) it could have been a technology that got popular 15 years ago.
As a footnote, PDA's are selling better now then ever before - what's your scale for popular? Complete dominance?
I think that could definately have something to do with it.
I don't think it's wrong to have waited until the right time to sue. Microsoft is a huge ass company with billions and billions in reserve funds - before you sue them you need to plan out your case.
Unless you're SCO.
If you can deal with the trolls and ignorant posts that are very much the norm on Slashdot, you'll also find some very interesting and well written comments. The ratio of good > bad is low, but it is interesting to see what some people around here think about things.
Comments about how bad Slashdot is, and how "everyone" is a troll, are a bit too harsh.
With any public forum you get a lot of noise. Slashdot is no exception. But there is a signal here, you just have to have the patience to look for it.
The user-moderation does have a lot to be desired but if you read more then just the +5's you're more likely to find good comments.
I like Slashdot.
But when you get to the levels of inter-city network speeds, it's almost impossible to saturate those links. Terrabits of bandwidth is available, and a lot of the fiber is dark. In fact, in most of the UK, only about 3% of the fiber capacity is actually active. The rest is just waiting to go.
What you DO distribute out is the bandwidth required on any particular network segment- and even more specifically, your individual link. That's where the bandwidth squeeze happens. The higher up the ISP chain you go, the less important bandwidth is.
Pakistan isn't really a great example at all. Most of the big Internet-connectec areas (North America, UK/Europe, Japan, China..) have more then ONE cable connecting them to each other. This point is actually moot after the previous statements above.
At the same time, however, it does create an example of why Bittorrent is good. Say someone in Pakistan created a movie that was freely available on the Internet. They could set up a torrent, and the more people that downloaded the file, the less traffic would have to be sent over that single cable, and it wouldn't require paying Akamai or some other world-wide cache service thousands of dollars. It would take the load OFF that link and spread it out all over the world.
Sure, Akamai might be a more straight-forward solution but it's very expensive to serve out files via server-client when thousands of people download it. The reason Akamai can do it is by distributing the content across several key network points with very, very fast connections. Bittorrent does a similar thing, just further down the line and more granular.
Bittorrent is proven to work - if you look at who's sharing some bootleg movie on the internet it's not a company with a lot of bandwidth. It's a person with a cable modem or DSL, and yet hundreds of people can download it very rapidly all at the same time. The load is distributed across ISP's, network segments, nodes, and finally individual links.
From the article:
"Because it is closed-source, they will more easily be able to focus on their goals. When something needs to be done, there won't be endless mailing-list threads and forum discussions before someone actually writes down some code. When the SkyOS team decides that feature X must go in, it goes in. That is a major advantage over open development constructions because it can speed up the development process."
I don't see how being closed source automatically frees the developers from any discussion about functionality and/or bug fixes?
Inversely, just because a software is open source doesn't mean it's always bogged down in mailing lists. You better believe that there's a lot of discussion, a lot of meetings, and a lot of bickering in any large scale project - be it open source or not. Just because we can all witness the discussion on open source doesn't mean it's more prevelant.
And I see that as an advantage. With many open source projects, you as an end-user are able to join in on the discussions and voice your own opinions about things. You can change the course of a project without even being a developer.
This guy clearly just used the traditional/popular notions about software development and put it down on paper.
"Again, and for the last time, it will be interesting to see how far the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived abuses."
I don't care about that. It's political. We both know there's going to be people that use it for both good and bad things, like anything else. Sure, it might be interesting, but that's not the arguement. The arguement is that you don't see any benefit in bittorrent at all - even from a technical standpoint.
"I think you're ignoring common network topology. It "may" be more efficient if someone in your ISP's local network has the entire specific file you're looking for, or most of it, otherwise you're still routing out and back anyway." "but all of those packets still need to be routed from there over the backbone to"
What do you mean by "the backbone?" You don't think the Internet has a few major links that connect everything, do you? It's a distributed network. There's a whole bunch of routes to anywhere, and the ISPs and Telcos all connect to each other across many redundant links. Some of them are absurdly fast, and some of them are just plain fast. But there's so much redundency and load balancing involved that only your regional traffic is going to go through the same locations.
That being said, it's also likely that with most torrents, people will be downloading the peices from all over the place. I don't feel as though this should even have to be explained but I guess I must.
Someone seeds a download. It's downloaded by, say, 20 clients, all random peices. More clients join in, and they start to download peices from not only the seeders, but from those 20 clients. 200 more clients join in, and download from the seeders, the 20 clients, and the last bunch of clients. Another 2,000. Now there's thousands of clients with peices of the file, all spread out over the internet. Traffic from any single torrent client is minimal, but the aggregate bandwidth is tremendous. You're not filling up any one backbone since you're downloading peices from all over the country/world.
Bittorrent isn't about giving you, as a downloader of some file, the fastest download. It's about the ability to download said file AT ALL when it's a popular download. The side-effect is that you can end up reaching much greater speeds then the server could have done on it's own - at the same time as everyone else.
Web caches are one thing, but they don't solve the problem because you'd need 100% participation with all ISP's to make it really worth a shit. And even then, there's thousands of ISPs - you'd still have to upload your file thousands of times to get it onto everyone's web proxy.
And let's not go and assume that all linux distributions are created by big companies with lots of cash. Knoppix is a good example - they're not a big company. And they struggle with mirrors all the time. But when there's a big release, you can sure get on a torrent and download it nice and fast.
Even WoW beta used Bittorrent to distribute the 3GB+ installation flat to the beta testers. They seeded it with a few fast machines on some fast connections - but they would never have been able to distribute it to 10,000 clients simultaneously without paying BIG bucks to an Akamai type service.
So, why is it that you see no value in Bittorrent? Because every 50K of data ends up being padded with 2k of control data? Who cares? There's enough aggregate bandwidth available to eat up that control data no problem, and with a distributed network like the Internet, it works great.
Even Microsoft is apparently developing it's own bittorrent type thing (avalanche.) Although we'll believe it when we see it.
I'm sure you could have picked a better analogy. For instance, you could have said "Ford makes a tire that LASTS longer."
But the point remains. While I don't believe patents are bad, the original timeframes for them were created at a time when invention and technology development was a lot slower. Now, 15 years is an eternity.
But even if the 15 years remains, the patents they grant now aren't any good. They allow patents for non-specific ideas.