I think you're asking the wrong question here. When you're just getting out into the "real world," you need to focus on finding a position that's going to make you the happiest, not the one that looks the best on paper.
Look at the type of culture, the location, the history of the company, the people they hire, their strategy for success, even their reputation among their competitors. Are these the types of people you want to work with or for? Do you love working in the boonies, or is a downtown location more enjoyable? Does your excite you? Would you rather work for Porsche or Ford? Microsoft or Mozilla? Wal-Mart or Nordstroms?
When you're young you have the luxury of relatively little excess baggage. You probably don't have a mortgage, wife, children, or outrageous car payments (yet). You can move, change careers, and take risks that may not be as easy when you are committed.
This is arguably the last time you will ever be able to truly consider a variety of positions and select the one that best fits you. The next time you start looking, you'll have other concerns that will impact your decision.
If you like to tinker or play with fun new technology, then a boutique shop (smaller shops focused on one particular area/technology) or a commercial research lab might be a good choice. If you like to travel and wear expensive shoes, then you might look into consulting. If you just want to program, then try to find a company whose story you can really dig into. Don't rule anything out until you really know, because some of the best jobs are lying in unexpected places.
I've seen many people go 12-18 months in a job and absolutely hate it. Maybe you will too, but chances are there's a company looking for people just like you. A company that will meet all of your requirements and keep you happy too. That's where you want to work.
Your search might not be easy. You may have to relocate far away. You'll have to find the balance of incentives that suits you best (location, hours, benefits, compensation, etc). Digits on a paycheck can only cure a handful of ailments, none of them fatal.
Technicalities like tax (which is the driving factor behind W2 vs 1099) should only play a factor when trying to decide between two equally attractive positions or if you have extenuating circumstances (insurance, for example). If you let them guide you to a position, you'll likely end up somewhere you'd rather not be.
To be truthful, the first stream wasn't in 1996. It was way back in 1994, when WXYC started streaming using CuSeeMe. WREK (Georgia Tech's student radio) also started streaming with their own in-house software the same day WXYC went live, but it was not officially advertised until a later date.
You know, this is the second time in recent memory that Slashdot has been caught posting rumors that turn out to be hoaxes (potato-powered PC anyone?). Perhaps this is a sign that our friendly rumormill admin team needs to do a little bit more footwork before anything hits the front page. I personally know I've seen hundreds of stories with interesting topics get trashed in favor of filth like a potato-powered PC or a Seti@Home PCI accelerator.
I know you guys made a pile off of your merger with Andover (and I'd assume even more when VA bought Andover), why don't you guys prove you are actually worth it and don't post up all of this stupid news that nobody really cares about.
They mention in the article that Napster is a formal company now, and it appears as though they have employees and the like. My question would be, since napster is free to download, and since you can use the servers for free, how does Napster's corporation make money?
I work for a webhosting company, and I know several people who work for large corporations as well. I know that we personally are not planning any downtime because of Y2K (since we use UTC it's only about 2 hours out now). I do know that many large companies with several layers of management are shutting down virtually EVERYTHING, because they are afraid of Y2K issues (one such local company dug a 1500ft well in their parking lot, added a US$600k generator to their aresenal and brought in futons and port-o-lets for their Y2K staffers in case of wide-scale failures). Does anyone work for a large company that isn't going crazy over Y2K already, or are all of the big companies planning for the end of the world? (seeing from the CNN reports perhaps it was all much ado about nothing;)
Well, I hate doing shameless plugs, but I thought I could offer the services of my company, Vener Net Inc (aka FastURL). After reading the comments and working at an ISP for about 4 years, I know that the claims that many hosts make of having "fully redundany OC## to the Internet" and "fully redundant" servers are normally lies. I have worked on staff of several ISPs and assisted many other friends who ran webhosting companies, and sometimes you really need to verify their claims (traceroute's are great, since they often show that they don't really have those quad OC12's to the Net like they claim they do, esp knowing that OC12 linecards for any Cisco product are a wad of cash, something most hosting companies surely can't afford). Before you sign on the dotted line with ANY hosting company insist on a tour of their operation (if local), or traceroute to their servers, or ask to see a demo account if at all possible, or at least a list of a few of their clients so you can check response times, etc.
<PLUG> I now work for Vener Net Inc, a hosting company located right outside of the Twin Cities area of MN. All of our machines run FreeBSD-STABLE (the latest incarnation of which happens to be 3.4 right now), and all of them are Dual pIII systems (MHz ranges from 450 to 550) w/ 512mb of RAM (with a few exceptions) and 18GB+ of disks in RAID5 (hardware RAID5 driven by DPT PM3334UW cards). We run several webservers, and we put no more than 254 customers on any one box to ensure that all customers have ample resources available should their site have a traffic spike (it may sound like a lot of customers per box, but most hosting companies put close to a thousand on plain pentium classic boxes). We offer all of the essentials, Perl 5.005, PHP 3.0.12, mod_ssl, mod_rewrite, Frontpage 2000 (ICK!), anonymous FTP accounts, account control panels, etc.
Unlike many webhosting providers, we don't claim to have our own backbone connections. We concentrate on webhosting, and we co-locate our servers in datacenters where they enjoy Ethernet connections right to the ISP (I'll gladly give out hostnames of our servers to traceroute to, but I'm not gonna give them out here for security reasons). The ISPs are selected with care (I always ask myself if I would choose the company to host my own server if I had one), and all of them enjoy multimegabit connections to at least 3 major carriers (I won't say OC3 because not all of them are, while their aggregate capacity is close to or above OC3 speeds, we don't ever want to be accused of dishonesty). It is with confidence that I can say we are one of the best hosting provider available on the market (I could not always say that about the places I have worked in the past).
If anyone has any questions about anything (server configs, names of upstream providers, etc.), please feel free to Email me at the address in the signature (minus the nospam's), and I will answer your question to the very best of my ability.
This latest bill that has passed, along with the mandantory net censorship bill seem to be sending out the signal "Australia does not want a hi-tech industry." I know that if I lived in a country where these laws were put into effect, and I were a hi-tech worker, I would "Get out of denver" (in the immortal words of Bob Seger).
Another important question -- does this infringe any copyright laws in.au? What if the government was paid off by some large corporation that knew someone in.au was developing the next killer app and they abused the system into allowing them full access to what is on the other company's servers?
Perhaps it's time for someone to start a business in a small country with a very small government where hi-tech companies can headquarter themselves and keep all development servers (the island would need really really fat net pipes to everywhere). That way.au companies can circumvent the possibility of (il)legal search and seizure.
We are always hearing about the new speeds of the processors and how much better/faster they are than the previous processor. However, with every new CPU and the accompanying motherboards the same system bus remains: PCI, ISA (being phazed out), and AGP. I understand that AGP is continually getting faster (1,2, and now 4x), but PCI and ISA aren't getting any quicker. Esp. with the new wave of gigabit ethernet cards hitting the market, even if you assumed that the CPU and disks could/would push a full gigabit, when does the PCI bus hit the wall? Are there new busses in the works for the system internals, or will everything eventually be powered by USB2 or IEEE1394?
I work as a sysadmin for a fairly large webhosting firm, and I always need to rememper a plethora of passwords. The passwords must also be fairly secure (IE- we never use words in the passwords, etc.). I've found that to make up passwords, makepasswd is the best program available (check freshmeat for your copy, or `apt-get install makepasswd` on Debian systems).
I run makepasswd like this makepasswd --count=60 --maxchars=8 --minchars=8 --string=qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm1234567890 That generates passwords with only lower case and numbers (I have found when remembering in upwards of 20-30 passwords, it's easiest to stick to one case). After I generate my new password lists I normally transfer them to my Pilot in a memo, and lock that memo down under the private area (I rarely use it, but it's always nice to have).
It's not a horribly complex system, but by using makepasswd you have no tendencies to lean twoards ceratin patterns, and you can generate hundreds of passwords very quickly.
Another word of the wise- keep an archive of all of your old system passwords, even after you have changed them. I have often found some part of a system or a rarely-used piece of equipment (Switch, Router, etc.) that has been forgotten in a password roll and is set to some old password. Having a list of them somewhere makes trying the old combinations VERY easy. (I once knew a guy who forgot the password to his 3Com Switch 1000, and he rendered the management portion of the switch useless)
I'll have a mirror up for you all at http://www.gashalot.com/setihack if anyone wants to see this and it's gone from the SETI servers.
This is actually one of the funny website hacks that I have seen recently, instead of one that uses some 3l33t h4x0r sp34k trying to free Kevin Mitnik (or however you spell his name).
I don't share your optimism on this subject. Just because we have trillions of addresses available on the net dosen't mean that our providers will magically give us IP's to use for our own personal use. Even if we go IPv6 I expect the cable providers and ISP's to continue their one IP address scheme. It would be *NICE* if we could all get subnets (even if we registered them on our own through ARIN), but the Internet's routing architecture dosen't work quite like DNS, where you are free to point it wherever. I'd love to ditch NAT in favor of real IP's, but I'm not so sure we can do that. This will make more IP's easily available for providers and other users that want/need more IP's, but not for the home user using a DHCP or otherwise dynamically assigned IP address to connect to the net.
I also don't think we'll all suddenly see free static IP's, since this is just simply put a management nightmare, unless the routing system the Internet uses is given a major overhaul at the same time IPv6 goes into production.
This looks like MAC Addressess on steroids. Looks like I'll be setting up DNS for all my IP's now, as it might be impossible to remember them otherwise.
This article comes at a very opportune time, I was asked to give a little interview on our local ABC station (WJXX 25, http://www.wjxx.com) about the SETI@Home project and was even gonna get a little Slashdot plug in there, but the powers that be (at my office) didn't want to be associated with SETI@Home (even though they don't care I run it on my workstation), so I had to decline.
Not that this matters or that anyone cares, I just thought I'd tell someone:)
I don't really think that this holds completley true. Many say the future is what we make of it. So why not make it a Linux-based future? I think you are loosing sight of the fact that the very open nature of the Linux development project means that Linux can become whatever we think we need for the future, be it based on completley new hardware or completley new ways of thinking about an OS/computer combo. Linux *CAN* be the future, if we embrace it and help it work.
Some people have touched on this before, but many have not. If no one has noticed, MediaOne has had a policy like this in effect for several years now in most areas. Initial beta deployments and some of the first 2-way services rolled out 2-4 years ago had no real cap on their upstream/downstream capabilities (aside from the technical limits of the cablesystem), however it quickly changed. Unfortunatley for the pile of/.'ers that run some type of server/firewall at home for *PERFECTLY* legitimate reasons (personal file transfers, personal eMails since we can only have one per acct on their servers, webcams, etc.) are penalized for the actions of a few.
In a way this is actually a good thing really, because everyone knows of at least one server you have run across somewhere that is on your local node running some type of illegal activity and is thus sucking down your good bandwidth. While the bandwidth cap Mediaone places is *VERY* reasonable (about 400kbit/s which is roughly 55kb/s), some disagree with the policy beacuse the links MediaOne use to connect our networks to the Internet work in both ways at the same speed, and we all know how blazing fast our downloads are, so there is no reason for us to not have blazing upload speeds, except for the fact you have to control your users or you end up with a nasty mess on your hands. This is precisly what the cable providers are doing, making sure that down the road we get the same high-level of service that we all expect (and have come to love).
Back to the topic of the @Home change, I do feel that limiting users to 128kbit/s (ISDN 2-B channel speeds, about 12kb/s) is too harsh, I feel that some sort of restraint needed to be placed on the users so the network is still usable by most of the general customer base.
In short, this sort of policy has to be placed in effect, otherwise we'd wakeup one morning and realize our service sucks and we can't really do anything to fix it (and remember, it beats the crap out of the 2-3kb/s upstream of a normal modem!).
-R
PS- In retrospect a better plan might be to hire a squad of a few people and give them the task of hunting down the *REAL* abusers of the network. I know paying someone to surf the IRC channels all day looking for subscribers abusing their privlidges might seem like a bad idea, it is probably worth the effort since you could catch a large number of the abusers who are running public-access services from their modems and simply limit them to slower speeds. But that is just a thought.
I have written a program that I use on my local Linux firewall to monitor our customer's bandwidth uses as well as usage for port-specific bandwidth on machines. I wrote it so you can get MRTG to dump data based on *ANY* ip chain you can create, whether it be for a single port in a single machine, a single port in a subnet, or an entire subnet, you can dump information on it to MRTG. If anyone is interested you can eMail me and I'll send you a copy (remove the nospam up top), and if you subscribe to linux-net, I posted it on that list about 3 months ago, so you can check it out.
Why is everyone so upset about the Calvin sticker thing? I personally think that what someone puts on their car (and spends the time to design) is their business any nobody (including/.'ers) has the right to say "his taste is bad, we shall punish him." As for those who want to eMail UnitedMedia about that one, get a life. If you spent half as much time doing something useful rather than playing "tattletale" like a 6 or 7 year old you would probably get a lot more done and become a productive citizen.
All around Jacksonville the cable prospects are pretty poor. I will say that if you do move to Jacksonville, move to Mandarin or Southside (south and east of the St. Johns River). You can head over to the NE FL mediaone website at www.jacksonville.net and surf over to the broadband area and see the map. If you wish, I can eMail you the URL's for the ADSL service area page and the Broadband service area. These areas have broadband AND ADSL (both are available immediatley). I have heard that broadband modem service is ok, but unless you live in a broadband-serviced area you will be looking at pretty poor cable service all around, and while the 1-way SB1000 has a really nice Linux driver (I use it and it allows me to stay online when Windows users can't connect), the signal strength sucks and the boosters filter out the cablemodem signal as "noise". BellSouth's ADSL is probably the way to go if you can afford it, as soon as they offer it in OP. eMail me if you want a more in-depth rundown of the better areas to live in town and their associated services / net access / traffic.
I live just south of Jacksonville, FL (Orange Park actually), and MediaOne service is shoddy at best. I do get Cartoon Network and Comedy Central, but no Sci-Fi and I get 4 religious channels too, but they leave out the good ones like fX or SciFi. In addition to my poor channel selection (only about 54 channels, most modern cable systems have 60-100+, the signal strength sucks! I have to have boosters and noise filters on my cable lines to even be WATCHABLE, and by watchable I mean I can spend longer than 10 minutes watching it w/o a splitting headache. MediaOne comes and checks and it is never ever fixed. In addition, MediaOne has had broadband available in areas for about 4 years (yes, 4 years), but they still have yet to turn most people on to Broadband (and I'm not even talking about 2-way cable). As far as I can tell MediaOne likes to run new cables and let them sit w/o hooking them up (mine have been sitting for about 5 months).
Even though I have crappy TV Service I still need a fast net connection to my house, and since I'm in a 1980's style cable network area (and it's a very large residential area, not like I am 50 miles from civilization) I can only have 1-way data. This would be fine, except the modem numbers are ALWAYS busy. I am not talking SOME of the time, it's ALL of the time. I normally spend 15-20 minutes trying to connect in the evenings (and 5-10 in the early afternoons). I call MediaOne, and it's always "We're working on it, it'll be fixed soon!" However, months later, it's still not fixed. I work at an ISP, and I know how long it takes to get new PRI's and configure equipment (even if it IS cable/modem hybrid), and it dosen't take 5 months to get a PRI (ESPICALLY when your company is a local PRI provider!!).
In general my expirence w/ MediaOne has been crap (real feelings suppressed to save the kids' minds from extra filth). Their customer support is horrible, always telling the customer that Broadband will be in in a few months, or it'll get better in a few days after they upgrade, but can you guess how much better service is after X (note X time, where X >= forever) amount of time? NONE! MediaOne (at least the NE FL division) has to be one of the most dishonest companies I have ever seen, constantly lying about upgrades, and ALWAYS giving the customer information that is contradicted in the SAME sentence (ex- "When will I get broadband?" "Broadband is installed in your area now, you can expect Broadband in the end of 2000."). Other cable companies have rapidly deployed 2-way data, and are activley deploying digital cable and other future technologies, where MediaOne is just sitting on its horrible network (with poor data speeds, horrible TV signals, and bad channel selection) and seems content to wait well into the next century (2001) to provide services that others will have had for years.
I only hope that the Comcast acquisition of MediaOne will lead to Comcast quality service. I know people in ComCast areas and they love the @home service and they have good signal quality and great channel selection, even DIGITAL cable in some areas! If Comcast can make MediaOne's network/employees provide this service I will hail them as the greatest pub service company to ever grace the face of the planet!
So in brief- Rob I am with you, MediaOne sucks. If there was another viable alternative (not DSS, because in FL they go out in hard rains) I would be all over it.
Sorry for venting, but when I complain to MediaOne it falls on deaf (and/or dumb) ears, so I had to get it off my chest somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're asking the wrong question here. When you're just getting out into the "real world," you need to focus on finding a position that's going to make you the happiest, not the one that looks the best on paper.
Look at the type of culture, the location, the history of the company, the people they hire, their strategy for success, even their reputation among their competitors. Are these the types of people you want to work with or for? Do you love working in the boonies, or is a downtown location more enjoyable? Does your excite you? Would you rather work for Porsche or Ford? Microsoft or Mozilla? Wal-Mart or Nordstroms?
When you're young you have the luxury of relatively little excess baggage. You probably don't have a mortgage, wife, children, or outrageous car payments (yet). You can move, change careers, and take risks that may not be as easy when you are committed.
This is arguably the last time you will ever be able to truly consider a variety of positions and select the one that best fits you. The next time you start looking, you'll have other concerns that will impact your decision.
If you like to tinker or play with fun new technology, then a boutique shop (smaller shops focused on one particular area/technology) or a commercial research lab might be a good choice. If you like to travel and wear expensive shoes, then you might look into consulting. If you just want to program, then try to find a company whose story you can really dig into. Don't rule anything out until you really know, because some of the best jobs are lying in unexpected places.
I've seen many people go 12-18 months in a job and absolutely hate it. Maybe you will too, but chances are there's a company looking for people just like you. A company that will meet all of your requirements and keep you happy too. That's where you want to work.
Your search might not be easy. You may have to relocate far away. You'll have to find the balance of incentives that suits you best (location, hours, benefits, compensation, etc). Digits on a paycheck can only cure a handful of ailments, none of them fatal.
Technicalities like tax (which is the driving factor behind W2 vs 1099) should only play a factor when trying to decide between two equally attractive positions or if you have extenuating circumstances (insurance, for example). If you let them guide you to a position, you'll likely end up somewhere you'd rather not be.
To be truthful, the first stream wasn't in 1996. It was way back in 1994, when WXYC started streaming using CuSeeMe. WREK (Georgia Tech's student radio) also started streaming with their own in-house software the same day WXYC went live, but it was not officially advertised until a later date.
More information at: http://wxyc.org/about/first/ and http://www.wrek.org/wreknet-first.html.
You know, this is the second time in recent memory that Slashdot has been caught posting rumors that turn out to be hoaxes (potato-powered PC anyone?). Perhaps this is a sign that our friendly rumormill admin team needs to do a little bit more footwork before anything hits the front page. I personally know I've seen hundreds of stories with interesting topics get trashed in favor of filth like a potato-powered PC or a Seti@Home PCI accelerator.
I know you guys made a pile off of your merger with Andover (and I'd assume even more when VA bought Andover), why don't you guys prove you are actually worth it and don't post up all of this stupid news that nobody really cares about.
The April fools postings in different languages/h4x0r speak is getting a little lame. You've had your fun, get back to work.
Does Avantgo have any official plans to offer the /. channel any time soon?
They mention in the article that Napster is a formal company now, and it appears as though they have employees and the like. My question would be, since napster is free to download, and since you can use the servers for free, how does Napster's corporation make money?
I work for a webhosting company, and I know several people who work for large corporations as well. I know that we personally are not planning any downtime because of Y2K (since we use UTC it's only about 2 hours out now). I do know that many large companies with several layers of management are shutting down virtually EVERYTHING, because they are afraid of Y2K issues (one such local company dug a 1500ft well in their parking lot, added a US$600k generator to their aresenal and brought in futons and port-o-lets for their Y2K staffers in case of wide-scale failures). Does anyone work for a large company that isn't going crazy over Y2K already, or are all of the big companies planning for the end of the world? (seeing from the CNN reports perhaps it was all much ado about nothing ;)
<PLUG>
I now work for Vener Net Inc, a hosting company located right outside of the Twin Cities area of MN. All of our machines run FreeBSD-STABLE (the latest incarnation of which happens to be 3.4 right now), and all of them are Dual pIII systems (MHz ranges from 450 to 550) w/ 512mb of RAM (with a few exceptions) and 18GB+ of disks in RAID5 (hardware RAID5 driven by DPT PM3334UW cards). We run several webservers, and we put no more than 254 customers on any one box to ensure that all customers have ample resources available should their site have a traffic spike (it may sound like a lot of customers per box, but most hosting companies put close to a thousand on plain pentium classic boxes). We offer all of the essentials, Perl 5.005, PHP 3.0.12, mod_ssl, mod_rewrite, Frontpage 2000 (ICK!), anonymous FTP accounts, account control panels, etc.
Unlike many webhosting providers, we don't claim to have our own backbone connections. We concentrate on webhosting, and we co-locate our servers in datacenters where they enjoy Ethernet connections right to the ISP (I'll gladly give out hostnames of our servers to traceroute to, but I'm not gonna give them out here for security reasons). The ISPs are selected with care (I always ask myself if I would choose the company to host my own server if I had one), and all of them enjoy multimegabit connections to at least 3 major carriers (I won't say OC3 because not all of them are, while their aggregate capacity is close to or above OC3 speeds, we don't ever want to be accused of dishonesty). It is with confidence that I can say we are one of the best hosting provider available on the market (I could not always say that about the places I have worked in the past).
If anyone has any questions about anything (server configs, names of upstream providers, etc.), please feel free to Email me at the address in the signature (minus the nospam's), and I will answer your question to the very best of my ability.
</PLUG>
Another important question -- does this infringe any copyright laws in .au? What if the government was paid off by some large corporation that knew someone in .au was developing the next killer app and they abused the system into allowing them full access to what is on the other company's servers?
Perhaps it's time for someone to start a business in a small country with a very small government where hi-tech companies can headquarter themselves and keep all development servers (the island would need really really fat net pipes to everywhere). That way .au companies can circumvent the possibility of (il)legal search and seizure.
We are always hearing about the new speeds of the processors and how much better/faster they are than the previous processor. However, with every new CPU and the accompanying motherboards the same system bus remains: PCI, ISA (being phazed out), and AGP. I understand that AGP is continually getting faster (1,2, and now 4x), but PCI and ISA aren't getting any quicker. Esp. with the new wave of gigabit ethernet cards hitting the market, even if you assumed that the CPU and disks could/would push a full gigabit, when does the PCI bus hit the wall? Are there new busses in the works for the system internals, or will everything eventually be powered by USB2 or IEEE1394?
I run makepasswd like this
makepasswd --count=60 --maxchars=8 --minchars=8 --string=qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm1234567890
That generates passwords with only lower case and numbers (I have found when remembering in upwards of 20-30 passwords, it's easiest to stick to one case). After I generate my new password lists I normally transfer them to my Pilot in a memo, and lock that memo down under the private area (I rarely use it, but it's always nice to have).
It's not a horribly complex system, but by using makepasswd you have no tendencies to lean twoards ceratin patterns, and you can generate hundreds of passwords very quickly.
Another word of the wise- keep an archive of all of your old system passwords, even after you have changed them. I have often found some part of a system or a rarely-used piece of equipment (Switch, Router, etc.) that has been forgotten in a password roll and is set to some old password. Having a list of them somewhere makes trying the old combinations VERY easy. (I once knew a guy who forgot the password to his 3Com Switch 1000, and he rendered the management portion of the switch useless)
I'll have a mirror up for you all at http://www.gashalot.com/setihack if anyone wants to see this and it's gone from the SETI servers.
This is actually one of the funny website hacks that I have seen recently, instead of one that uses some 3l33t h4x0r sp34k trying to free Kevin Mitnik (or however you spell his name).
I don't share your optimism on this subject. Just because we have trillions of addresses available on the net dosen't mean that our providers will magically give us IP's to use for our own personal use. Even if we go IPv6 I expect the cable providers and ISP's to continue their one IP address scheme. It would be *NICE* if we could all get subnets (even if we registered them on our own through ARIN), but the Internet's routing architecture dosen't work quite like DNS, where you are free to point it wherever. I'd love to ditch NAT in favor of real IP's, but I'm not so sure we can do that. This will make more IP's easily available for providers and other users that want/need more IP's, but not for the home user using a DHCP or otherwise dynamically assigned IP address to connect to the net.
I also don't think we'll all suddenly see free static IP's, since this is just simply put a management nightmare, unless the routing system the Internet uses is given a major overhaul at the same time IPv6 goes into production.
This looks like MAC Addressess on steroids. Looks like I'll be setting up DNS for all my IP's now, as it might be impossible to remember them otherwise.
This article comes at a very opportune time, I was asked to give a little interview on our local ABC station (WJXX 25, http://www.wjxx.com) about the SETI@Home project and was even gonna get a little Slashdot plug in there, but the powers that be (at my office) didn't want to be associated with SETI@Home (even though they don't care I run it on my workstation), so I had to decline.
:)
Not that this matters or that anyone cares, I just thought I'd tell someone
I don't really think that this holds completley true. Many say the future is what we make of it. So why not make it a Linux-based future? I think you are loosing sight of the fact that the very open nature of the Linux development project means that Linux can become whatever we think we need for the future, be it based on completley new hardware or completley new ways of thinking about an OS/computer combo. Linux *CAN* be the future, if we embrace it and help it work.
-R
Some people have touched on this before, but many have not. If no one has noticed, MediaOne has had a policy like this in effect for several years now in most areas. Initial beta deployments and some of the first 2-way services rolled out 2-4 years ago had no real cap on their upstream/downstream capabilities (aside from the technical limits of the cablesystem), however it quickly changed. Unfortunatley for the pile of /.'ers that run some type of server/firewall at home for *PERFECTLY* legitimate reasons (personal file transfers, personal eMails since we can only have one per acct on their servers, webcams, etc.) are penalized for the actions of a few.
In a way this is actually a good thing really, because everyone knows of at least one server you have run across somewhere that is on your local node running some type of illegal activity and is thus sucking down your good bandwidth. While the bandwidth cap Mediaone places is *VERY* reasonable (about 400kbit/s which is roughly 55kb/s), some disagree with the policy beacuse the links MediaOne use to connect our networks to the Internet work in both ways at the same speed, and we all know how blazing fast our downloads are, so there is no reason for us to not have blazing upload speeds, except for the fact you have to control your users or you end up with a nasty mess on your hands. This is precisly what the cable providers are doing, making sure that down the road we get the same high-level of service that we all expect (and have come to love).
Back to the topic of the @Home change, I do feel that limiting users to 128kbit/s (ISDN 2-B channel speeds, about 12kb/s) is too harsh, I feel that some sort of restraint needed to be placed on the users so the network is still usable by most of the general customer base.
In short, this sort of policy has to be placed in effect, otherwise we'd wakeup one morning and realize our service sucks and we can't really do anything to fix it (and remember, it beats the crap out of the 2-3kb/s upstream of a normal modem!).
-R
PS- In retrospect a better plan might be to hire a squad of a few people and give them the task of hunting down the *REAL* abusers of the network. I know paying someone to surf the IRC channels all day looking for subscribers abusing their privlidges might seem like a bad idea, it is probably worth the effort since you could catch a large number of the abusers who are running public-access services from their modems and simply limit them to slower speeds. But that is just a thought.
I have written a program that I use on my local Linux firewall to monitor our customer's bandwidth uses as well as usage for port-specific bandwidth on machines. I wrote it so you can get MRTG to dump data based on *ANY* ip chain you can create, whether it be for a single port in a single machine, a single port in a subnet, or an entire subnet, you can dump information on it to MRTG. If anyone is interested you can eMail me and I'll send you a copy (remove the nospam up top), and if you subscribe to linux-net, I posted it on that list about 3 months ago, so you can check it out.
-Robert Gash
Why is everyone so upset about the Calvin sticker thing? I personally think that what someone puts on their car (and spends the time to design) is their business any nobody (including /.'ers) has the right to say "his taste is bad, we shall punish him." As for those who want to eMail UnitedMedia about that one, get a life. If you spent half as much time doing something useful rather than playing "tattletale" like a 6 or 7 year old you would probably get a lot more done and become a productive citizen.
All around Jacksonville the cable prospects are pretty poor. I will say that if you do move to Jacksonville, move to Mandarin or Southside (south and east of the St. Johns River). You can head over to the NE FL mediaone website at www.jacksonville.net and surf over to the broadband area and see the map. If you wish, I can eMail you the URL's for the ADSL service area page and the Broadband service area. These areas have broadband AND ADSL (both are available immediatley). I have heard that broadband modem service is ok, but unless you live in a broadband-serviced area you will be looking at pretty poor cable service all around, and while the 1-way SB1000 has a really nice Linux driver (I use it and it allows me to stay online when Windows users can't connect), the signal strength sucks and the boosters filter out the cablemodem signal as "noise". BellSouth's ADSL is probably the way to go if you can afford it, as soon as they offer it in OP. eMail me if you want a more in-depth rundown of the better areas to live in town and their associated services / net access / traffic.
Even though I have crappy TV Service I still need a fast net connection to my house, and since I'm in a 1980's style cable network area (and it's a very large residential area, not like I am 50 miles from civilization) I can only have 1-way data. This would be fine, except the modem numbers are ALWAYS busy. I am not talking SOME of the time, it's ALL of the time. I normally spend 15-20 minutes trying to connect in the evenings (and 5-10 in the early afternoons). I call MediaOne, and it's always "We're working on it, it'll be fixed soon!" However, months later, it's still not fixed. I work at an ISP, and I know how long it takes to get new PRI's and configure equipment (even if it IS cable/modem hybrid), and it dosen't take 5 months to get a PRI (ESPICALLY when your company is a local PRI provider!!).
In general my expirence w/ MediaOne has been crap (real feelings suppressed to save the kids' minds from extra filth). Their customer support is horrible, always telling the customer that Broadband will be in in a few months, or it'll get better in a few days after they upgrade, but can you guess how much better service is after X (note X time, where X >= forever) amount of time? NONE! MediaOne (at least the NE FL division) has to be one of the most dishonest companies I have ever seen, constantly lying about upgrades, and ALWAYS giving the customer information that is contradicted in the SAME sentence (ex- "When will I get broadband?" "Broadband is installed in your area now, you can expect Broadband in the end of 2000."). Other cable companies have rapidly deployed 2-way data, and are activley deploying digital cable and other future technologies, where MediaOne is just sitting on its horrible network (with poor data speeds, horrible TV signals, and bad channel selection) and seems content to wait well into the next century (2001) to provide services that others will have had for years.
I only hope that the Comcast acquisition of MediaOne will lead to Comcast quality service. I know people in ComCast areas and they love the @home service and they have good signal quality and great channel selection, even DIGITAL cable in some areas! If Comcast can make MediaOne's network/employees provide this service I will hail them as the greatest pub service company to ever grace the face of the planet!
So in brief- Rob I am with you, MediaOne sucks. If there was another viable alternative (not DSS, because in FL they go out in hard rains) I would be all over it.
Sorry for venting, but when I complain to MediaOne it falls on deaf (and/or dumb) ears, so I had to get it off my chest somewhere.