I remember this one (its an old VCR recording of the local news)
A recently fired worker goes into a Riverside Pac Bell CO with a shotgun, and blows the crap out of the switching equipment. This is before internet and cell phones were common, which means it took out people's only means of telecommunication, for a couple days in some areas.
You can't plan for everything
You could consider me an extremely heavy home user. I spend a decent amount of time downloading torrents, and I share my connection out with about 20 people in my neighborhood via wireless, and I very rarely go over 250 GB in a month. I did once in one very heavy month (hit about 300 GB), but normally, I'm about 200 GB/mo.
In the past 30 days, I'm at 202 GB, for the past 6 months I'm at 1.08 TB, and since mid october of last year, I'm at 1.45 TB. That's upstream and downstream combined.
As Michael Shermer has observed, "smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."
And a humble explanation for the liberal mindset as well!
I have seen more and more of a divide between "democrats" and "republicans" over the past 15 years or so, and its reached a crescendo. But its looking like perhaps we may all unite against both...one of the few things that it seems most people agree on these days is that neither represent the interests of the people. Maybe that's enough to unite the two parties behind a 3rd party?
And I'm a pretty heavy user myself, my DSL sees about 140 MB/month down and about 30 MB/month up. That's for me and about 15 other users (I live in a pretty densely populate area). I use DSL Extreme, they have no caps, and implicitly allow sharing in their ToS. I could get a faster connection through the local cable provider,(I get about 5.3Mb/s down and 680 Kb/s up) but I feel much more comfortable with a reseller.
I think comcasts 250 MB/month cap is quite generous....for now.
I do this currently for several clients using PFsense (www.pfsense.org) . Its a BSD based free project that can run on pretty much any x86 hardware. All you would need would be an old 1Ghz or so PC with 3 network cards, and a little bit of patience. Will do connection based load balancing as well as failover....if you set it up right.
Is it possible that some of these instances of slow downloads and interrupted streams are the result of an actual saturation of available bandwidth and not some ISP conspiracy?
Go on, try it. You send me that script, and I promise I will double-click on it.
Nothing will happen; the OS will stop it. How? By the trivial means of not allowing downloaded files to be executed unless I explicitly edit their permissions to turn on the execute bit.
Yes, this really would help. Mere double-clicking can be done reflexively. But more complex instructions like "save this to your filesystem, then open a terminal window and type 'chmod +x free_porn.sh', and then double-click it for free porn!" gives your victim just that little bit longer to realise that they're being conned. Is it 100% secure? No, of course it isn't. Is it more secure than an OS that will blindly execute anything that has a filename ending.exe,.bat,.cmd, or any of half a dozen other extensions? You bet. Are you kidding? Everyone is foaming at the mouth because of Vista's "are you sure you're sure?" UAC to help give people a little more time to think about what they're doing....and you're going to make them learn unix commands? Right
I have both Cox cable 15mb/s x 1mb/s and DSLExtreme DSL 6mb/s x 768kb/s. I'm currently running them both into a load balancing/failover box and have been doing so for a good 6 months now. This has given me plenty of time to compare the 2 back to back.
First of all, I'm about 5000' away from my CO, so I get just about 5.3 mb/s out of my DSL. With the Cox Cable, the speed is all over the place, and it actually gets down right slow in the evening. On speed tests, I have seen as high as 17mb/s
Cox is generally faster any time of day than the DSL, but I have yet to find a more drastic example than Xbox Live. When I download content from DSL, the traffic graph is a flat line, right at 5.3mb/s. However, when I use Cox, not only does the traffic graph look more like a mountain range, but the speeds are pathetic, around 1.5 mb/s.
I've always wondered if Cox intentionally throttles Xbox Live traffic, or if perhaps they're just oversold on that particular route, due to so many people on their network downloading massive live content?
I will probably drop one of these connections in the near future, and its probably going to be the cable. I think Cox is a great cable ISP, one of the best, but I think they're just oversold in my neighborhood (just outside downtown San Diego, so the housing density is quite high).
I think Cox has plans to move to DOCSIS 3 soon as well, and I will re-evaluate my options once that happens. Sure, I won't expect to get 50mb/s from everywhere every time, but as long as their back end can keep up with demand, I see DSL's days as being relegated to areas that don't have cable service.
A lot of it depends on what time you're watching. If you're watching during prime time, you're much more likely to encounter a story about some missing white woman. These are the hours when they feel they have to compete with pure entertainment channels. Its the price we pay for having at least 5 major 24 hour news stations. Back in the day, you got Walter Cronkite once a night telling you "that's the way it is" and that was the extent of it.
I think even though we tend to be cynical about TV news, overall, the coverage is much more in depth than we got from the pre cable tv networks.
And just think, by simply using 50 mW lasers, it will now be possible for the masses to skywrite commercials on the cloud cover. Or at the very least, everyone can have their own Bat Signal Device. Or project a 500' Goatse on a downtown sky scraper. I don't see how this can possibly go wrong.
-M@
I don't see how it can slide any further than the local news in anytown America. I don't know how many more stories I can listen to about how an everyday item in my kitchen might kill or otherwise harm me.
Honestly, if you're going to be sharing an office with all the equipment, I'd first make sure that the machine room is nice and insulated to keep all that A/C in, then have a partition built between you and the equipment with a couple of big double paned windows so you can still see all the blinky blinky, going on.... and a good strong fire rated door between you and the machine room.
If you have enough room, I would have two doors that lead to the exterior, one that leads directly into your office area, and one that leads into the machine room, both good solid doors with good heavy locks. That way, you won't have people traipsing through your office to get to the machine room, and vice versa.
Install your own HVAC for you office partition.... unless you enjoy 60 degree weather. It will also be an advantage if your fire suppression system is ever activated!!
-M@
50 years and still no micro singularities!!
on
Happy 50th Cern!
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· Score: 1
John Titor didn't say anything about that! Wanker:P
You could at least cut down on battery size, although you would still need a battery. We have a solar powered repeater running right now on a rooftop in downtown San Diego. Details including pictures are here
We used 2 6 volt 220 Ah trojan deep cycle batteries wired in series for 12 volts and a 65 watt solar panel.
This was all to power a soekris board which only draws about.3 of an amp. So even without the sun, it would run for something like 6 weeks.
But we plan on many more of these, specifically on mountain tops where there isn't power. This one was mainly as a test, but it's been up rock solid for about 2 or 3 months now.
Of course, it only takes 1 jackass with a 200 mW Senao long range card to associate with one of those low power AP's and you'll find that spectrum tightening up fast!
I live on a busy street in San Diego near the beach, it's not a bad area, but I can put out ANYTHING on the sidewalk and it will be gone in a few hours. Old monitors, keyboards, anything.
-M@
....what makes us think the grid can handle this sort of thing? Ever notice how the gas station is most crowded during the morning and evening rush hour? What happens when the majority of commuters gets home at 4-6pm and all plug in their cars to recharge?
Building more power plants is one thing, but upgrading the tranmission grid for all of the US, right down to the local stepdown transformers in every nieghborhood is a hidden cost of going electric.
And what happens if and when there is another power outage like the east coast blackout a few months ago? Not only are we all sitting in the dark, but can't find a place to plug in our cars?
I'm not saying these are reasons the electric car can never become mainstream, just things most people don't think about.
This is a smart move. If they can get the outcome of this case decided by 12 average people, I think they have a pretty good chance of getting whatever they ask for. The only question is, will that ruling eventually be overturned in the supreme court a few years from now.
-M@
Re:Perhaps community wireless networks relays may.
on
Saving the Net
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
I remember this one (its an old VCR recording of the local news)
A recently fired worker goes into a Riverside Pac Bell CO with a shotgun, and blows the crap out of the switching equipment. This is before internet and cell phones were common, which means it took out people's only means of telecommunication, for a couple days in some areas.
You can't plan for everything
-M@
You could consider me an extremely heavy home user. I spend a decent amount of time downloading torrents, and I share my connection out with about 20 people in my neighborhood via wireless, and I very rarely go over 250 GB in a month. I did once in one very heavy month (hit about 300 GB), but normally, I'm about 200 GB/mo.
In the past 30 days, I'm at 202 GB, for the past 6 months I'm at 1.08 TB, and since mid october of last year, I'm at 1.45 TB. That's upstream and downstream combined.
-M@
As Michael Shermer has observed, "smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."
And a humble explanation for the liberal mindset as well!
No Body will EVER need more than 640 TB of memory.
I've had m0n0wall running on a soekris board with over a year of uptime....probably the most viable "prosumer" router I know of.
I have seen more and more of a divide between "democrats" and "republicans" over the past 15 years or so, and its reached a crescendo. But its looking like perhaps we may all unite against both...one of the few things that it seems most people agree on these days is that neither represent the interests of the people. Maybe that's enough to unite the two parties behind a 3rd party?
woops, replace MB w/ GB
And I'm a pretty heavy user myself, my DSL sees about 140 MB/month down and about 30 MB/month up. That's for me and about 15 other users (I live in a pretty densely populate area). I use DSL Extreme, they have no caps, and implicitly allow sharing in their ToS. I could get a faster connection through the local cable provider,(I get about 5.3Mb/s down and 680 Kb/s up) but I feel much more comfortable with a reseller.
I think comcasts 250 MB/month cap is quite generous....for now.
I do this currently for several clients using PFsense (www.pfsense.org) . Its a BSD based free project that can run on pretty much any x86 hardware. All you would need would be an old 1Ghz or so PC with 3 network cards, and a little bit of patience. Will do connection based load balancing as well as failover....if you set it up right.
Is it possible that some of these instances of slow downloads and interrupted streams are the result of an actual saturation of available bandwidth and not some ISP conspiracy?
Nothing will happen; the OS will stop it. How? By the trivial means of not allowing downloaded files to be executed unless I explicitly edit their permissions to turn on the execute bit.
Yes, this really would help. Mere double-clicking can be done reflexively. But more complex instructions like "save this to your filesystem, then open a terminal window and type 'chmod +x free_porn.sh', and then double-click it for free porn!" gives your victim just that little bit longer to realise that they're being conned. Is it 100% secure? No, of course it isn't. Is it more secure than an OS that will blindly execute anything that has a filename ending
I have both Cox cable 15mb/s x 1mb/s and DSLExtreme DSL 6mb/s x 768kb/s. I'm currently running them both into a load balancing/failover box and have been doing so for a good 6 months now. This has given me plenty of time to compare the 2 back to back.
First of all, I'm about 5000' away from my CO, so I get just about 5.3 mb/s out of my DSL. With the Cox Cable, the speed is all over the place, and it actually gets down right slow in the evening. On speed tests, I have seen as high as 17mb/s
Cox is generally faster any time of day than the DSL, but I have yet to find a more drastic example than Xbox Live. When I download content from DSL, the traffic graph is a flat line, right at 5.3mb/s. However, when I use Cox, not only does the traffic graph look more like a mountain range, but the speeds are pathetic, around 1.5 mb/s.
I've always wondered if Cox intentionally throttles Xbox Live traffic, or if perhaps they're just oversold on that particular route, due to so many people on their network downloading massive live content?
I will probably drop one of these connections in the near future, and its probably going to be the cable. I think Cox is a great cable ISP, one of the best, but I think they're just oversold in my neighborhood (just outside downtown San Diego, so the housing density is quite high).
I think Cox has plans to move to DOCSIS 3 soon as well, and I will re-evaluate my options once that happens. Sure, I won't expect to get 50mb/s from everywhere every time, but as long as their back end can keep up with demand, I see DSL's days as being relegated to areas that don't have cable service.
Preach on Brotha!! -M@
Its probably just that everything sounds more legitimate when spoken with an English accent lol
I think even though we tend to be cynical about TV news, overall, the coverage is much more in depth than we got from the pre cable tv networks.
-M@
And just think, by simply using 50 mW lasers, it will now be possible for the masses to skywrite commercials on the cloud cover. Or at the very least, everyone can have their own Bat Signal Device. Or project a 500' Goatse on a downtown sky scraper. I don't see how this can possibly go wrong. -M@
I don't see how it can slide any further than the local news in anytown America. I don't know how many more stories I can listen to about how an everyday item in my kitchen might kill or otherwise harm me.
Honestly, if you're going to be sharing an office with all the equipment, I'd first make sure that the machine room is nice and insulated to keep all that A/C in, then have a partition built between you and the equipment with a couple of big double paned windows so you can still see all the blinky blinky, going on.... and a good strong fire rated door between you and the machine room.
If you have enough room, I would have two doors that lead to the exterior, one that leads directly into your office area, and one that leads into the machine room, both good solid doors with good heavy locks. That way, you won't have people traipsing through your office to get to the machine room, and vice versa.
Install your own HVAC for you office partition.... unless you enjoy 60 degree weather. It will also be an advantage if your fire suppression system is ever activated!!
-M@
-M@
We used 2 6 volt 220 Ah trojan deep cycle batteries wired in series for 12 volts and a 65 watt solar panel.
This was all to power a soekris board which only draws about .3 of an amp. So even without the sun, it would run for something like 6 weeks.
But we plan on many more of these, specifically on mountain tops where there isn't power. This one was mainly as a test, but it's been up rock solid for about 2 or 3 months now.
-M@
-M@
I live on a busy street in San Diego near the beach, it's not a bad area, but I can put out ANYTHING on the sidewalk and it will be gone in a few hours. Old monitors, keyboards, anything. -M@
Building more power plants is one thing, but upgrading the tranmission grid for all of the US, right down to the local stepdown transformers in every nieghborhood is a hidden cost of going electric.
And what happens if and when there is another power outage like the east coast blackout a few months ago? Not only are we all sitting in the dark, but can't find a place to plug in our cars?
I'm not saying these are reasons the electric car can never become mainstream, just things most people don't think about.
-M@
This is a smart move. If they can get the outcome of this case decided by 12 average people, I think they have a pretty good chance of getting whatever they ask for. The only question is, will that ruling eventually be overturned in the supreme court a few years from now.
-M@
www.socal-freenet.com
-M@