Yahoo is actually fostering a good relationship between "competing" clients.
----
Great.... I can just see the next headline about this topic on Slashdot:
Yahoo supports collaboration between "competing" clients. In a move that is sure to turn a few heads, a Yahoo spokesperson indicated that collaboration between other clients was their primary goal all along. "It was always our intent to force the competition to work together," said Yahoo. "We never realized it would require this much encouragement." According to the information released by Yahoo, they had no intention of keeping users of other clients off their network; they were simply forcing the other client vendors to improve their products through collaboration.
Actually this is an old concept. RFC 1149 describes the use of IP over avian carriers. I don't believe there is an RFC to describe the layer-4 TCP protocol. The RFC only talks about layer-3 IP. However, there was an additional RFC put out RFC 2549 which allows for QoS.
My understanding is that someone did some tests using this implementation of IP. Apparently the ping times reflected some serious latency problems.
Unfortunately too often managers don't understand this until it's too late.
Equally unfortunately, technical people often don't understand until too late that "good enough, now" is usually better than "great, later". I know that I've screwed more than one business opportunity by being too focused on doing the Right Thing, technically. And I've seen business successes based on what were, in the short term, bad technical decisions that were needed to keep the cash flowing in.
Agreed. Which was the point of my post and the subsequent replies I submitted. Please mod swillden's post to 5 Informative.;)
Actually your correct in most cases. However, I live in PA. We have a sales tax that is not regressive. It's applied to what the state calls "non-essential" items. The basic clothing and food items are taxed. If I buy a loaf of bread as you point out, I don't pay sales tax. If I go to a restaurant, the prepared food is considered "non-essential" so I pay sales tax. If I buy a sterio, I pay tax. If I buy a pair of jeans, I don't. The point is that the poor generally spend most of their income on "essential" items. In this approach, a person with a small income may pay no tax at all based on the fact that they don't buy goods that aren't necesssary. People with larger incomes will generally spend more on non-essential items.
I personally would prefer to have this sales tax raised and have the income tax in PA taken away entirely. I would also be in favor of the same sort of tax at the federal and local levels. Paying even 30% (~20-25 for federal, ~8-10 state, ~1-2 local) or more in tax on non-essential items would be better and easier (cheaper for the gov't) to collect than the millions of 1040 forms every year. And when you say this people get shocked at the percentage, but imagine if you took home everything you made and only payed tax when you bought something that you really didn't "need" to survive. You would be able to afford the 30%+.
That depends, but your post is off-topic as a reply. My point was not whether something is cheaper short or long term. I simply stating that too often the cost factor is looked at with disregard for the technical factor. I personally think that the most expensive solution is always a bad solution as well. There are trade-offs. Unfortunately, as others have indicated in their posts we have too many cases where a decision is made by someone who does not understand the technical aspects and is too lazy, arrogant, or otherwise to ask about it.
Example: If I recall correctly from the Challenger disaster. This flight had a meeting schedule prior to it where engineers and managers were supposed to make a go/no-go call. The conference call was cancelled because of something wrong with video teleconferencing equipment and the managers wouldn't hold a voice-only call without the video. The call was for the engineers to voice their concern about the temperature issue. So instead a manager made a decision without bothering to find out that it was a bad technical decision.
Please note, when I say bad technical decision, I do mean bad. I will admit, often an engineer calls something bad when it's just not the greatest solution. However, that doesn't relieve the managers responsiblity to get the facts and make an informed decision (and to accomplish those two tasks in that order). I've served in both roles and yes the manager is the one who takes the heat when something goes wrong, but if they didn't listen (take the time to hear the input, ask questions so they understand it, and actually utilize the information in their decision making process) to the engineers, they deserve the heat.
I wholeheartedly agree. You apparently didn't read my post. I didn't say that there aren't opportunity costs. I simply said, that a bad technical decision is a bad decision all around. A decision that is "absolutely bad" from a technical standpoint is doomed to failure.
I agree there are some managers that see the benefits. When the idea is to save money by due diligence, that's great. When the idea is to shave every last penny out of it, you've got a problem because that inherently leads to bad technical solutions being implemented for cost reasons.
This is just another example of one of my favorite statements:
"A bad technical decision is never a good business decision!"
Regardless of the circumstances, a bad technical decision is never good from a business perspective. It never cost less in the long run. A mediocre decision may be a good one because of cost, but a bad one will fail, cost you more, and failure is never good for business. Unfortunately too often managers don't understand this until it's too late.
About 15 years ago a computer systems professional wrote an article which was published in Network World magazine that discussed Murphy's Law. The basic premise was that Murphy's Law was a crutch used by incompetants to justify they're lack of planning. The ideas expressed by Murphy should be a warning to all to prepare for the worst you can imagine so your not caught by the small shortcomings; however, they are all too often used to justify the failure of someone to plan. A disaster does not have to be a catastrophe if proper planning is done.
I'm providing the text of the article below. It is used by permission of the author.
Brandt's Laws
It was 1959. I was sixteen years old and had just accepted a job with a small electronics firm. I was employed there but a few days when I learned of Murphy's Law. I had previously learned of Charles' and Boyle's laws and the law of gravity. I instinctively knew if they called it a law, Murphy was right. After all, the other laws I had learned were valid.
I spent four years in electronics and moved to Data Processing after college. From what people said, Murphy seemed to be alive and well in the computer industry too. Something bothered me from time to time. People who had not been prudent used Murphy to avoid facing up to their failures. After all, if something was going to happen no matter what you did, how could you be held responsible for it? Carelessness crept in when Murphy could be blamed.
In the early eighties, I was introduced to men like Ken Copeland, Phil Crosby, Edward Demming and Ken Hagin. They all teach that we are responsible for our actions and we control our futures.
It took time but their message finally started to sink in. If I was prudent, I could control many of the things I had considered beyond my control. If I didn't accept unfavorable results as inevitable, they were not. Slowly, I formulated what is nearly the antithesis of Murphy's law. Although I didn't invent these laws, since I recorded them I don't blanch at calling them Brandt's Laws. Like anyone who is ahead of his peers, I've even been criticized for them. The following are several of the basic ones.
Murphy's law is a crutch used by incompetents to excuse their failures.
Too often, things happen and we simply write them off as inevitable. All too frequently, these are the result of a lack of prudence, fueled by carelessness caused by Murphy's laws.
Things go wrong only if you fail to take action to prevent them.
I have never seen a well-planned fiasco.
If you plan to survive the worst case and plan to avoid its happening, it'll not happen and you will survive.
By carefully studying the situation and engaging in good contingency planning, your survival is assured.
There is no substitute for knowing what one is doing.
Lack of academic preparation and carelessness in on-going study frequently cause failures. I've seen many so-called professionals who don't study enough to keep up with even a minimum of available knowledge. Many work harder at their hobbies than their professions. These are not professionals but overpaid day laborers.
A quick fix is neither quick nor a fix.
So frequently a band-aid is used to treat a severed artery, assuming or hoping it will heal if ignored. This is not to say that there frequently isn't a "simple" fix, but it should correct the problem and not create future problems. A quick fix targets symptoms, not the cause.
Few problems have only one cause.
If, on the surface a problem has one obvious cause, there are several others and the most significant is not the obvious. The most obvious cause is frequently the one attacked, often at the expense of ignoring the real cause.
The path we recognize as the right one but think we cannot afford is usually the one we use after we h
Besides the obvious use as a Kevlar substitute in bulletproof vests, silk has applications in microprocessor production, nanoscale optical fiber, a and any other application requiring strength and flexbility.
Wow now you can really say you were surfing the "web".
This is unmanageable and unnecessary. If you need to track someone down, you have their IP address go to the router do a show arp (or whatever for your routers), then take the MAC address and go to the switches, something like show mac-address-table or show cam dynamic (or whatever for you platform) will let you narrow it down to a given switch port. If you documented correctly, you should know what port in a dorm room is what port on a switch. Viola you have the exact port that is causing the issue. MAC address registration would only help if you were going to filter ports by MAC address (way too much work for what it's worth) because a given user could and likely would change MAC addresses by swapping a card or buying a new compute, etc. and now your records are out of date.
Uhm... no! This was done. In fact one of the variants of the last exploit actually patched an exploit. The problem is that it was too hard to control and it brought down networks as it crawled around patching machines. Worms are not the answer.
I know it's a pain to lose ping functionality, but in the case of Nachia, the fastest way to stop it is to put a filter on your switch. If you use Cisco 65xx's with the Policy Feature Card, you can run the following commands:
set security acl ip WORM deny icmp any any echo set security acl ip WORM permit ip any any commit security acl WORM set security acl map WORM 1 (or whatever VLANs you have)
If you have some other product for LAN switches, shame on you! Well, there probably is a similar filtering capability if you have the right components.
I've been involved in cleaning up after SQLslammer and Nachia on a rather large network. In both cases, I found that router filters were difficult to implement without causing the filters to kill the routers (except on a few very new high-end routers). The PFC claims to work at wire speed. In practice, I've had a hard time proving them wrong on that.
This filtering technique will allow you to drop packets as soon as they enter the switch. Basically your doing a L3 or even a L4/L5 filter (tcp/udp with port) on a device that is really operating at L2.
A couple things to note, you can't log the packets and once you put the filter in place you probably won't be able to determine who is sending junk, but you shouldn't be patching machines for a worm by going after the infected ones... every machine in the network needs patched before you lift filters regardless of whether the worm is still in your network or not. If not, it will be back!
This sounds like a great idea. Let's present a new protocol. I suggest we name it Slashdot Mail Transfer Protocol. We could use the shortened form SMTP. hmmm well... on second thought maybe the name needs more work.
I'm not sure what the issue is here... I have my mail going through SpamAssassin with per-user settings and have it going through qmail-scanner with clamscan for antivirus and the.qmail files are still working.
The only major hurdle was patching qmail with the QMAILQUEUE patch. That's not a big deal though.
So long as the rating information is kept somewhat anonymous, I see no harm in this as well.
I am currious as to how this data might be utilized. I think it would be interesting to see ratings information that shows that TiVo viewers are far different from other viewers and it's better to put their programs on at odd hours of the day. Primetime shows probably won't change much, but wait until non-primetime changes based on TiVo recordings. With TiVo time-of-day and day-of-week timeslots mean nothing. Those shows don't have to fight over the best timeslots.
I agree with the idea that the CDs cost the receiver money. In fact, all junk mail and advertisements do. The end result of anything that gets shipped to my house is wasted money in garbage collection. Certainly one CD doesn't have a significant effect on my garbage. However, when you add up all the groups that send something for which I in no way asked or implied I might want, you have a cost that is incurred by the receiver to get rid of the material that was never requested. I do believe that is the most basic definition of SPAM.
I see nothing wrong with bandwidth limitations. I do however think it is absolutely ludicrous for a group to do a bandwidth limit without an unrestricted FTP/HTTP proxy service.
As the article said, the students will probably be crafting their own shared proxy services anyway. The cost of a few non-redunant 1U servers or something to run a proxy service is far less than the cost of increasing bandwidth (over a few months).
Any organization, school or otherwise, that thinks that restricting bandwidth usage is a benefit doesn't understand the nature of real users... they will do whatever it takes to get more out of it. Give them a solution that is agreeable to both groups and you won't have 80% of the problems.
Setup a few non-redundant 1U servers. Let those devices access the Internet. Make the bw restriction very low and tell students and faculty that they should use the proxies. Set the proxies to keep files up to 800MB or so. The end result is that ISO of linux come down once, software that is commonly installed come down once... etc.
I'm sitting here scratching my head as I read these posts. I've worked in the Communications/Networking industry for the past 8-10 years. I have a BSEE. I went to school for a BSEE because I felt that EE was what I wanted to do. I enjoy what I do. While it's important to make a reasonable living, it's not about the pay.
I worked for one company for about 3 years when I first graduated for college. They gave me a start and I'm grateful for that. When things started to look bad there, I left. I didn't wait for the news that the place was closing. I used my business sense and made a judgement call. The company was small. I tried to speak up about business issues. I was told that engineers didn't need to concern themselves with that. To me, that's the wrong answer. In any organization, everyone must be concerned about the business. You may not be responsible for much, but everyone has a responsibility for something. In addition, the hours and stress were getting out of hand.
So I started looking. I found another position that seemed to be exciting. I accepted it. When I turned in notice, I was offered a significant deal (and I do mean significant) to stay. I didn't accept it. The issue wasn't the money it was enjoying what I do and having peace about it.
I volunteer as a leader over youth (teens) in my area. I often hear from them questions like, so I take it you make good money? and... What kind of money does someone in this position make? They are all valid questions to a point, but it really concerns me if the reason for selecting a career is the money. I would have to say that possibily the reason for not selecting a career might be very poor pay.
But, if your in any career because you wanted the money, I don't agree with that. I'm sorry to say it, but I don't a doctor to work on me who decided to be a doctor because of the pay and not because he cared about people. I don't want to walk in a building designed by a civil engineer who wanted a big salary and didn't really like to design/build things. I don't want to sit down and have a waitor/waitress serve dinner who took the job exclusively for the tips and doesn't care about customers.
sorry for the confusion the NBC/RCA/CBS thing. However, the premise still stands that the market determined when color came to market. Yes, the FCC had to define the standard when it started to come to market, but it didn't dictate and force the end of B&W. In fact, it made it backward compatible. TV/HDTV is one that proposed as a forced transition.
You analogy is not valid. Both the B&W/color and the VHF/UHF enhancements to TV occured because of market pressure not because of gov't involvement.
VHF/UHF: Originally there were only 12 channels (2-13) available in any area. Since VHF signals travel so far and tuners were not great, the area was rather large. This meant that large cities had VHF stations and the suburban and rural area around them could not have any because they were in the "overlap area" of 12 stations. As a result, people in these areas picked up 12 channels of 50%+ snow.
Enter UHF. UHF was specifically put in place to allow more channels for use in smaller cities. Tuner attachments were sold to allow a 2-13 TV to pick up UHF stations and the inherent demand for TV in these areas forced the issue.
B&W/Color: This was NBC's big thing. Remember the NBC proud as a peacock slogan? You know how NBC has the logo with the peacock? That's because NBC was a pioneer in color. They got with manufacturers like RCA... said, "we think this will sell in color if people actually see it." So they started broadcasting some shows in color and when they did they put the logo in the bottom of the screen. They also had TV stores put color TVs on display and did a marketing campaign to explain to viewers that everytime you see the logo that show was available in color and you were missing it because you didn't have a color TV. People saw what they were missing and saw that it was worth to them what the cost was so they bought color TV's.
Now an explanation of HDTV. HDTV is perceived by the general public to be superior; however, it's not perceived by the general public to be worth the cost. As a result, the market demand doesn't exist right now and the product should be delayed at this point.
However, lobbying and so forth has produced gov't intervention to make TV stations broadcast in HDTV by certain deadlines. As a result, some stations will probably disappear most will actually do the upgrades but not because of true demand. Most consumers will need to go get a new TV and/or other equipment and the end result is that the TV manufacturers who lobbied for it get a guarantee on equipment sales in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
----
Great.... I can just see the next headline about this topic on Slashdot:
Yahoo supports collaboration between "competing" clients.
In a move that is sure to turn a few heads, a Yahoo spokesperson indicated that collaboration between other clients was their primary goal all along. "It was always our intent to force the competition to work together," said Yahoo. "We never realized it would require this much encouragement." According to the information released by Yahoo, they had no intention of keeping users of other clients off their network; they were simply forcing the other client vendors to improve their products through collaboration.
Just in case the Google Cache get's slashdotted. Here's a yahoo cache of google.
= UT F-8&url=zhool8dxBV4J:www.google.com/
http://216.109.117.135/search/cache?p=google&ei
Actually this is an old concept. RFC 1149 describes the use of IP over avian carriers. I don't believe there is an RFC to describe the layer-4 TCP protocol. The RFC only talks about layer-3 IP. However, there was an additional RFC put out RFC 2549 which allows for QoS.
My understanding is that someone did some tests using this implementation of IP. Apparently the ping times reflected some serious latency problems.
Unfortunately too often managers don't understand this until it's too late.
;)
Equally unfortunately, technical people often don't understand until too late that "good enough, now" is usually better than "great, later". I know that I've screwed more than one business opportunity by being too focused on doing the Right Thing, technically. And I've seen business successes based on what were, in the short term, bad technical decisions that were needed to keep the cash flowing in.
Agreed. Which was the point of my post and the subsequent replies I submitted. Please mod swillden's post to 5 Informative.
Actually your correct in most cases. However, I live in PA. We have a sales tax that is not regressive. It's applied to what the state calls "non-essential" items. The basic clothing and food items are taxed. If I buy a loaf of bread as you point out, I don't pay sales tax. If I go to a restaurant, the prepared food is considered "non-essential" so I pay sales tax. If I buy a sterio, I pay tax. If I buy a pair of jeans, I don't. The point is that the poor generally spend most of their income on "essential" items. In this approach, a person with a small income may pay no tax at all based on the fact that they don't buy goods that aren't necesssary. People with larger incomes will generally spend more on non-essential items.
I personally would prefer to have this sales tax raised and have the income tax in PA taken away entirely. I would also be in favor of the same sort of tax at the federal and local levels. Paying even 30% (~20-25 for federal, ~8-10 state, ~1-2 local) or more in tax on non-essential items would be better and easier (cheaper for the gov't) to collect than the millions of 1040 forms every year. And when you say this people get shocked at the percentage, but imagine if you took home everything you made and only payed tax when you bought something that you really didn't "need" to survive. You would be able to afford the 30%+.
That depends, but your post is off-topic as a reply. My point was not whether something is cheaper short or long term. I simply stating that too often the cost factor is looked at with disregard for the technical factor. I personally think that the most expensive solution is always a bad solution as well. There are trade-offs. Unfortunately, as others have indicated in their posts we have too many cases where a decision is made by someone who does not understand the technical aspects and is too lazy, arrogant, or otherwise to ask about it.
Example: If I recall correctly from the Challenger disaster. This flight had a meeting schedule prior to it where engineers and managers were supposed to make a go/no-go call. The conference call was cancelled because of something wrong with video teleconferencing equipment and the managers wouldn't hold a voice-only call without the video. The call was for the engineers to voice their concern about the temperature issue. So instead a manager made a decision without bothering to find out that it was a bad technical decision.
Please note, when I say bad technical decision, I do mean bad. I will admit, often an engineer calls something bad when it's just not the greatest solution. However, that doesn't relieve the managers responsiblity to get the facts and make an informed decision (and to accomplish those two tasks in that order). I've served in both roles and yes the manager is the one who takes the heat when something goes wrong, but if they didn't listen (take the time to hear the input, ask questions so they understand it, and actually utilize the information in their decision making process) to the engineers, they deserve the heat.
I wholeheartedly agree. You apparently didn't read my post. I didn't say that there aren't opportunity costs. I simply said, that a bad technical decision is a bad decision all around. A decision that is "absolutely bad" from a technical standpoint is doomed to failure.
I agree there are some managers that see the benefits. When the idea is to save money by due diligence, that's great. When the idea is to shave every last penny out of it, you've got a problem because that inherently leads to bad technical solutions being implemented for cost reasons.
This is just another example of one of my favorite statements:
"A bad technical decision is never a good business decision!"
Regardless of the circumstances, a bad technical decision is never good from a business perspective. It never cost less in the long run. A mediocre decision may be a good one because of cost, but a bad one will fail, cost you more, and failure is never good for business. Unfortunately too often managers don't understand this until it's too late.
About 15 years ago a computer systems professional wrote an article which was published in Network World magazine that discussed Murphy's Law. The basic premise was that Murphy's Law was a crutch used by incompetants to justify they're lack of planning. The ideas expressed by Murphy should be a warning to all to prepare for the worst you can imagine so your not caught by the small shortcomings; however, they are all too often used to justify the failure of someone to plan. A disaster does not have to be a catastrophe if proper planning is done.
I'm providing the text of the article below. It is used by permission of the author.
Brandt's Laws
It was 1959. I was sixteen years old and had just accepted a job with a small electronics firm. I was employed there but a few days when I learned of Murphy's Law. I had previously learned of Charles' and Boyle's laws and the law of gravity. I instinctively knew if they called it a law, Murphy was right. After all, the other laws I had learned were valid.
I spent four years in electronics and moved to Data Processing after college. From what people said, Murphy seemed to be alive and well in the computer industry too. Something bothered me from time to time. People who had not been prudent used Murphy to avoid facing up to their failures. After all, if something was going to happen no matter what you did, how could you be held responsible for it? Carelessness crept in when Murphy could be blamed.
In the early eighties, I was introduced to men like Ken Copeland, Phil Crosby, Edward Demming and Ken Hagin. They all teach that we are responsible for our actions and we control our futures.
It took time but their message finally started to sink in. If I was prudent, I could control many of the things I had considered beyond my control. If I didn't accept unfavorable results as inevitable, they were not. Slowly, I formulated what is nearly the antithesis of Murphy's law. Although I didn't invent these laws, since I recorded them I don't blanch at calling them Brandt's Laws. Like anyone who is ahead of his peers, I've even been criticized for them. The following are several of the basic ones.
Too often, things happen and we simply write them off as inevitable. All too frequently, these are the result of a lack of prudence, fueled by carelessness caused by Murphy's laws.
I have never seen a well-planned fiasco.
By carefully studying the situation and engaging in good contingency planning, your survival is assured.
Lack of academic preparation and carelessness in on-going study frequently cause failures. I've seen many so-called professionals who don't study enough to keep up with even a minimum of available knowledge. Many work harder at their hobbies than their professions. These are not professionals but overpaid day laborers.
So frequently a band-aid is used to treat a severed artery, assuming or hoping it will heal if ignored. This is not to say that there frequently isn't a "simple" fix, but it should correct the problem and not create future problems. A quick fix targets symptoms, not the cause.
If, on the surface a problem has one obvious cause, there are several others and the most significant is not the obvious. The most obvious cause is frequently the one attacked, often at the expense of ignoring the real cause.
Besides the obvious use as a Kevlar substitute in bulletproof vests, silk has applications in microprocessor production, nanoscale optical fiber, a and any other application requiring strength and flexbility.
Wow now you can really say you were surfing the "web".
This is unmanageable and unnecessary. If you need to track someone down, you have their IP address go to the router do a show arp (or whatever for your routers), then take the MAC address and go to the switches, something like show mac-address-table or show cam dynamic (or whatever for you platform) will let you narrow it down to a given switch port. If you documented correctly, you should know what port in a dorm room is what port on a switch. Viola you have the exact port that is causing the issue. MAC address registration would only help if you were going to filter ports by MAC address (way too much work for what it's worth) because a given user could and likely would change MAC addresses by swapping a card or buying a new compute, etc. and now your records are out of date.
Uhm... no! This was done. In fact one of the variants of the last exploit actually patched an exploit. The problem is that it was too hard to control and it brought down networks as it crawled around patching machines. Worms are not the answer.
I know it's a pain to lose ping functionality, but in the case of Nachia, the fastest way to stop it is to put a filter on your switch. If you use Cisco 65xx's with the Policy Feature Card, you can run the following commands:
set security acl ip WORM deny icmp any any echo
set security acl ip WORM permit ip any any
commit security acl WORM
set security acl map WORM 1 (or whatever VLANs you have)
If you have some other product for LAN switches, shame on you! Well, there probably is a similar filtering capability if you have the right components.
I've been involved in cleaning up after SQLslammer and Nachia on a rather large network. In both cases, I found that router filters were difficult to implement without causing the filters to kill the routers (except on a few very new high-end routers). The PFC claims to work at wire speed. In practice, I've had a hard time proving them wrong on that.
This filtering technique will allow you to drop packets as soon as they enter the switch. Basically your doing a L3 or even a L4/L5 filter (tcp/udp with port) on a device that is really operating at L2.
A couple things to note, you can't log the packets and once you put the filter in place you probably won't be able to determine who is sending junk, but you shouldn't be patching machines for a worm by going after the infected ones... every machine in the network needs patched before you lift filters regardless of whether the worm is still in your network or not. If not, it will be back!
This sounds like a great idea. Let's present a new protocol. I suggest we name it Slashdot Mail Transfer Protocol. We could use the shortened form SMTP. hmmm well... on second thought maybe the name needs more work.
I'm not sure what the issue is here... I have my mail going through SpamAssassin with per-user settings and have it going through qmail-scanner with clamscan for antivirus and the .qmail files are still working.
The only major hurdle was patching qmail with the QMAILQUEUE patch. That's not a big deal though.
So long as the rating information is kept somewhat anonymous, I see no harm in this as well.
I am currious as to how this data might be utilized. I think it would be interesting to see ratings information that shows that TiVo viewers are far different from other viewers and it's better to put their programs on at odd hours of the day. Primetime shows probably won't change much, but wait until non-primetime changes based on TiVo recordings. With TiVo time-of-day and day-of-week timeslots mean nothing. Those shows don't have to fight over the best timeslots.
I agree with the idea that the CDs cost the receiver money. In fact, all junk mail and advertisements do. The end result of anything that gets shipped to my house is wasted money in garbage collection. Certainly one CD doesn't have a significant effect on my garbage. However, when you add up all the groups that send something for which I in no way asked or implied I might want, you have a cost that is incurred by the receiver to get rid of the material that was never requested. I do believe that is the most basic definition of SPAM.
I see nothing wrong with bandwidth limitations. I do however think it is absolutely ludicrous for a group to do a bandwidth limit without an unrestricted FTP/HTTP proxy service. As the article said, the students will probably be crafting their own shared proxy services anyway. The cost of a few non-redunant 1U servers or something to run a proxy service is far less than the cost of increasing bandwidth (over a few months). Any organization, school or otherwise, that thinks that restricting bandwidth usage is a benefit doesn't understand the nature of real users... they will do whatever it takes to get more out of it. Give them a solution that is agreeable to both groups and you won't have 80% of the problems. Setup a few non-redundant 1U servers. Let those devices access the Internet. Make the bw restriction very low and tell students and faculty that they should use the proxies. Set the proxies to keep files up to 800MB or so. The end result is that ISO of linux come down once, software that is commonly installed come down once... etc.
I'm sitting here scratching my head as I read these posts. I've worked in the Communications/Networking industry for the past 8-10 years. I have a BSEE. I went to school for a BSEE because I felt that EE was what I wanted to do. I enjoy what I do. While it's important to make a reasonable living, it's not about the pay. I worked for one company for about 3 years when I first graduated for college. They gave me a start and I'm grateful for that. When things started to look bad there, I left. I didn't wait for the news that the place was closing. I used my business sense and made a judgement call. The company was small. I tried to speak up about business issues. I was told that engineers didn't need to concern themselves with that. To me, that's the wrong answer. In any organization, everyone must be concerned about the business. You may not be responsible for much, but everyone has a responsibility for something. In addition, the hours and stress were getting out of hand. So I started looking. I found another position that seemed to be exciting. I accepted it. When I turned in notice, I was offered a significant deal (and I do mean significant) to stay. I didn't accept it. The issue wasn't the money it was enjoying what I do and having peace about it. I volunteer as a leader over youth (teens) in my area. I often hear from them questions like, so I take it you make good money? and... What kind of money does someone in this position make? They are all valid questions to a point, but it really concerns me if the reason for selecting a career is the money. I would have to say that possibily the reason for not selecting a career might be very poor pay. But, if your in any career because you wanted the money, I don't agree with that. I'm sorry to say it, but I don't a doctor to work on me who decided to be a doctor because of the pay and not because he cared about people. I don't want to walk in a building designed by a civil engineer who wanted a big salary and didn't really like to design/build things. I don't want to sit down and have a waitor/waitress serve dinner who took the job exclusively for the tips and doesn't care about customers.
sorry for the confusion the NBC/RCA/CBS thing. However, the premise still stands that the market determined when color came to market. Yes, the FCC had to define the standard when it started to come to market, but it didn't dictate and force the end of B&W. In fact, it made it backward compatible. TV/HDTV is one that proposed as a forced transition.
You analogy is not valid. Both the B&W/color and the VHF/UHF enhancements to TV occured because of market pressure not because of gov't involvement. VHF/UHF: Originally there were only 12 channels (2-13) available in any area. Since VHF signals travel so far and tuners were not great, the area was rather large. This meant that large cities had VHF stations and the suburban and rural area around them could not have any because they were in the "overlap area" of 12 stations. As a result, people in these areas picked up 12 channels of 50%+ snow. Enter UHF. UHF was specifically put in place to allow more channels for use in smaller cities. Tuner attachments were sold to allow a 2-13 TV to pick up UHF stations and the inherent demand for TV in these areas forced the issue. B&W/Color: This was NBC's big thing. Remember the NBC proud as a peacock slogan? You know how NBC has the logo with the peacock? That's because NBC was a pioneer in color. They got with manufacturers like RCA... said, "we think this will sell in color if people actually see it." So they started broadcasting some shows in color and when they did they put the logo in the bottom of the screen. They also had TV stores put color TVs on display and did a marketing campaign to explain to viewers that everytime you see the logo that show was available in color and you were missing it because you didn't have a color TV. People saw what they were missing and saw that it was worth to them what the cost was so they bought color TV's. Now an explanation of HDTV. HDTV is perceived by the general public to be superior; however, it's not perceived by the general public to be worth the cost. As a result, the market demand doesn't exist right now and the product should be delayed at this point. However, lobbying and so forth has produced gov't intervention to make TV stations broadcast in HDTV by certain deadlines. As a result, some stations will probably disappear most will actually do the upgrades but not because of true demand. Most consumers will need to go get a new TV and/or other equipment and the end result is that the TV manufacturers who lobbied for it get a guarantee on equipment sales in the near future.