This is also why I think projects like SETI@Home are ridiculously stupid. From your post, you seem to be basing that opinion on the possibility of carrying on two-way communication with life on another world.
From my perspective, things like SETI are extremely worthwhile, even if the likelihood of finding something are tiny, and even if there's no way we could ever communicate with them.
Simply having solid proof that there is other intelligent life out there would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of our species. Sure, communication would be nice, but it's not at all a requirement for making a search for that proof a worthwhile endeavor.
That's actually very interesting. Were there any incidents during his time at Fermilab where seemingly interesting data was found, and Frank Shoemaker dismissed it as noise?
Has this colleague done further research, became convinced that it is significant, and pointing the direction to data that needs to be revisited?
Could this be someone's way of letting the folks at Fermilab know that they're sitting on a major breakthrough in their archives? One that has been dismissed as meaningless?
Probably. Just find another identical drive (brand, model, and size) and swap the circuit boards around.
Of course, this is more likely to be feasible in a work setting, where drives are typically purchased in batches. Most home users probably won't have pairs of identical drives lying around.
I have a 5 1/4 floppy drive and some disks set aside for the exact same reason.....someday I'll want that info and then I'll be all set. If you believe you might want that data someday, you'd be best off to retrieve it immediately (if it's even still intact) and get it stored somewhere safe. That's not much data, it would be much safer in zip archives sent to your gmail account than sitting on old disks that are deteriorating day by day.
Why should they bother tracking down the specific house that's causing the problem? That could take hours. If they know there's voltage on the line that's not legally supposed to be there, and they can get rid of it quickly by frying the illegal equipment, that's what they should do. That gets the power in my (code compliant) house back on faster.
I don't want to go without power for an extra six hours 'cuz some self-righteous geek set up a rogue system and refused to comply with regulations.
If you want to experiment, great, go for it. I experiment with this stuff, too. But don't tie your homebrew hacks into the same wiring that I depend on in my house.
I like the way you think. As I said above, my motivation is more about reducing my "checking account footprint" than it is about reducing my "carbon footprint".
That said, during this whole discussion, I've started to wonder if it might be better, for either motivation, to focus these efforts all into a single outlet for one of the plug-in hybrid cars that will be appearing on the market shortly.
I see your point. As a point of fact, my eventual goal actually is to go all out with the grid tie-in, and mostly for the reasons you detailed.
I still stand by my opinion that once you get into that level, you're beyond the "hobbyist" point. You're talking multi-thousand dollar pieces of equipment, permits, contractors, inspections, contracts with the power company, and potential liability if something goes wrong. That doesn't sound like a "hobbyist" project to me.
What does sound like a hobbyist project to me, is building a homebrew windmill, using it to charge a UPS, and using that to power, say your low-voltage garden lighting, and your garage lighting. This is what I have installed currently. I've got capacity to add a bit more load to the system, so I'm currently deciding on what's getting wired in next. Then it will probably be a second windmill, or an upgrade to the current one.
I agree with everything you're saying, and do plan to go that route myself eventually. Please don't misunderstand my comments as saying it's all a bad idea. I just think it falls outside the hobbyist scope.
And speaking for myself, I would have never gotten interested in going that far if I hadn't started out small by building that little windmill out of a leftover motor and seeing what I could do with it.
Well, I would argue that it is patently ridiculous to think that anyone in the software business, particularly in the Unix business, has an honest belief that Linux programming books don't exist. I don't believe for one second that he didn't know it was a bullshit statement, and I doubt that I could be convinced.
And, of course, I know that that's a long way from proving it in a court of law. The perjury charge was mainly a joke (albeit a poor attempt, but hey, we all blow one every now and then).
"Are there really people investing in new sources of energy so they can power a toothbrush? Remember the mantra is reduce, reuse, recycle..."
That may be your mantra. Mine is "Save Money".
I should have probably elaborated a bit more. My point was, which I was admittedly unclear about, that since this is a hobbyist discussion, it would be a good idea to start small. Clock radios, electric toothbrush, etc... Once you've got that under control, use what you've learned from the experience to move on to the next level.
Why get rid of the wall warts, when those low power devices are the perfect sort of items to cut your teeth on? The goal may be to get your A/C and fridge off of the grid, but why not start with getting your alarm clock off the grid first, to get a better idea of what you're getting into?
And, yeah, if you eventually want to move to the point of a grid tie-in, go for it. But, IMHO, at that stage of the game you have moved well out of the "hobbyist" realm.
But for a small scale system, the ability to tie in to the grid is essentially useless. Since you're not going to be generating enough energy to sell a significant portion back to the electric co, why not just have separate circuits to power small items like alarm clocks, charging electric toothbrushes, etc....
Unless you're going to be generating significantly more energy than you use, I don't see the grid tie-in as being all that useful.
And once you do produce that amount, you're not really in the hobbyist league anymore, which is what the original question was about.
"When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on "How to Program UNIX" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist"
Taking a quick look at my bookshelf, I see the titles "Beginning Linux Programming", "Professional Linux Programming", and "Linux Application Development". And that's not even counting the boxes and boxes of books I have stored on shelves in my basement.
That could be implemented in asterisk in about 10 minutes, depending on the terms that you'd be allowed to use a phone at whatever place you're planning to get locked up.
If you'll be allowed to just make calls at will, then you just need a simple script to let you enter a code on the telephone keypad to abort the self-destruct.
If you think it's likely to be a jail where only collect calls are allowed (even for local calls), then you'll have to get more creative. Perhaps have it watch for incoming calls at a specific set of time intervals.... I'd have to give that one a little more thought.
In whatever case, it would be a good idea to have an 800 number on that line. Oh, and be aware that if you're locked up, it's likely that your phone calls will be monitored, so design any voice prompts to sound benign.
You raise some very valid points. I guess the solution to be implemented depends a great deal on the nature of the data being protected. You would handle an embarrassing porn collection differently than, say, incriminating evidence that you, yourself, have been engaged in insider trading, which would in turn be handled differently than highly secret, irrefutable evidence that the head of the CIA has been embezzling from the government. (Ignoring for now the obvious question of why not just turn the info over to authorities immediately. For now, we'll assume there is a compelling reason that you have been forced to sit on it for awhile.)
If you're porn gets wiped prematurely, eh, not the end of the world. In a case where losing the data would be truly damaging, a reasonably safe backup procedure could be put into place. Perhaps chop them up into 15 MB chunks, run through multiple levels of encryption, then email them to one or more gmail accounts via an anonymizing proxy. These gmail accounts have been, of course, set up from the an open wifi hotspot somewhere, and are untraceable to you. Depending on the nature of the data, I would be comfortable enough that nobody would ever make a connection between "0a8aff5a0f3@gmail.com" and my real life identity, particularly if I never access it through an IP that could be linked to me. Setting up a truly untraceable gmail account would probably require jumping through a few hoops, but I'm sure it could be done if the motivation were strong enough.
Like you, I don't have anything on my computers that would be "life-destroying" if it "fell into the wrong hands". There are things, though, that I'd rather my mom not find if I were to die and she had to clean out my house. She's very old-school about a lot of things, while I'm much more open minded. There are aspects of my life that she simply need not know about.
That said, your encrypt then shutdown solution would be entirely adequate for files that are merely "embarrassing". My original idea was spurred some time back by a discussion of how to store data in a way that would be undetected during a police raid (which I believe in turn stemmed from a conversation about recent RIAA actions and seizure of people's computers). The problem with encrypting the data is that a court could compel you to turn over the encryption keys. Wiping the drive means that there's nothing left to decrypt, although you'll probably have to resort to claiming something like "embarrassingly large midget-porn collection" to justify why you wiped the drives in the first place.
That all said, this is all really just an interesting thought exercise for me. All of my data sits on unencrypted drives in computers that are in plain site. A few files might be embarrassing if the wrong person found them, but there's nothing I'm going to go to jail for.
I've actually given this some thought, and think I've come up with a pretty reliable plan.
For performance reasons, I've left out encryption and instead rely on the data being stored on a physically hidden server. My suggestion is inside a wall in your house, where you can tap into the electrical wiring. This, combined with accessing the server over wifi means that there would be no visible cables to tip anyone off to the location of the server.
Now add a script that will shut down the wifi connection if you don't log in and enter a password in 24 hours. Once this happens, bring the wifi back up for, say, 5 minutes at a time at specific intervals so you have a chance to abort the self-destruct sequence. If 7 entire days pass without you performing the abort, initiate a secure wipe of the hard drives, followed by powering down the machine. At this point, even the existence of the computer will go undetected until someone remodels the house, and it will contain nothing but blank, unformatted hard drives anyway.
If you're concerned about the wifi being detected from outside the house, use a basement wall to hide the server in. I have an access point in my basement, and the surrounding soil renders it undetectable about 3 feet away from my house. Another thing that could be tacked on is keeping the wifi down normally, and bringing it up for a few seconds every 10 minutes or so to check for an indicator that you want to use the server. Would be simple enough to code a couple small apps to allow the server to poll your desktop machine to see if you've requested the wifi to stay up, and supplied proper credentials.
All things considered, I think this plan would provide a pretty darn reliable way of making sure that your private data stays private, while also avoiding the performance penalties that would be inherent with encryption of offsite hosting.
Most definitely crack his root and user passwords.
I personally don't know of anybody who has a different password for each and every place they log in to. Myself as an example, if you were to obtain my password to my laptop, it would also get you into several of my online accounts. Of course, banking accounts and other important accounts get a better security effort than that, but, honestly, if someone manages to hijack my/. or digg accounts, it's not the end of the world. And, frankly, it's simply not worth my time to maintain a list of 100 different passwords to protect accounts that are just for fun and hold no critical personal data.
So, yeah, in all likelihood, brute forcing the passwords on the laptop would probably open many, many more doors.
As someone who has been around/. for a very long time, and has also spent some time at Digg, I give Digg the credit for the vastly improved signal/noise ratio here on/. in recent times.
Why you ask? Simple. All of the douchebags that used to make/. unbearable seem to congregate over there now.
What's being stated, which is a fact, is that with a digital signal, if you're not seeing and/or hearing a blatantly OBVIOUS problem, then higher quality cables will offer you NO benefit.
A $200 HDMI cable will not offer a sharper or brighter picture than a $10 cable. It will produce the EXACT SAME picture. (Provided the obvious assumption that the $10 cable isn't so extremely substandard that it's producing obvious flaws in the picture.)
That's been my experience, as well. I've used older GPS units that did, in fact, take several minutes to acquire satellites every time you turned them on. All recent models that I've used, though, incorporate various trickery to greatly reduce this time. My Garmin Nuvi acquires satellites incredibly fast, and even the GPS that was in my Blackjack II would always pinpoint my location in less than a minute.
And as I was typing that, Digg went "Out of Service"...
Thanks to the podcast, I can actually hear Kevin Rose's voice saying "Fuck those sheep, just shut the site down for an hour and they'll fall in line"....
I've never once made a comment that anyone should abandon/. and go to digg. I have, however, even during my own absence from this site, made many posts on digg suggesting that users head over to slashdot if they wanted a useful tech news site.
I just wanted to go on public record, for the two people that care (me, and the drunken version of me that will show up in 5 or so hours) as saying that my future participation on digg.com will consist of the following two comments...
This is not done from a standpoint of immaturity, this is done from a legitimate sense of disgust with what has happened at Digg today. Despite all of the problems inherent in a user-moderated system (to which slashdot is no stranger) I always found digg useful.
I no longer do. What Digg did today was unforgivable. Operating from the position of strength that comes along with being in the right, they cowtowed to the parties with the advertising cash.
In hindsight, this should come as much less of a surprise to me than it does, seeing as how they feature GoDaddy.com as a sponsor on their podcast.
You could always take the approach I did. Tell your boss that switching to Comcast is a great idea, he's very wise for thinking of it. Of course, there are a few services that our current ISP offers that Comcast doesn't, we'll have to replace those of course. Then you get him to pay for some nice, fast broadband for your house as well as a small server. You provide secondary DNS and MX from your basement. I also do nightly rsync backups of some of our most critical data, and run a backup Asterisk server.
Bingo, your home Internet service is now free.
All that's left is explaining why you're going to need to charge him an extra $100 a month to cover the time it takes you administer all of these extra services in your personal time (and, of course, electical usage).
Even with the extra Internet connection, and my little consulting fee, it saves my company about $150 a month. It's actually turned out to be a good solution, despite my initial concerns. Of course, we're talking a small (35 employee) telecom company here, not Fortune 500.
Not quite, but remember this is still in development. Once they start producing the dual-core, hyperthreading "Extreme Edition", it should run Vista just fine.
Why exactly are people so excited by faster wireless networking when very few of them actually HAVE the "fat pipes" to connect to. Is there ANY residential cable/DSL service that actually exceeds the capacity of 802.11g?
The speed of my Internet connection has absolutely NOTHING to do with how much bandwidth I need between the computers and other devices on my network.
For example, transferring a show from the living room Tivo to the bedroom Tivo happens at roughly 1x FF speed over 100 Mbps ethernet, but takes almost 2 hours for a 30 minute show over my 802.11b network.
Need to move a couple terrabytes of video files to a different MythTV box? I don't know about you, but I'd much rather do that over wired gigabit than any form of wireless currently available.
Have you tried VOIP over wireless? It works, but wired is still a much more "issue free" solution.
Wireless is good for casual web browsing when I'm out in the back yard. Other than that, I still haven't found a case where running cable isn't more than worth the tiny hassle involved.
Slashdot Mirror
From my perspective, things like SETI are extremely worthwhile, even if the likelihood of finding something are tiny, and even if there's no way we could ever communicate with them.
Simply having solid proof that there is other intelligent life out there would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of our species. Sure, communication would be nice, but it's not at all a requirement for making a search for that proof a worthwhile endeavor.
That's actually very interesting. Were there any incidents during his time at Fermilab where seemingly interesting data was found, and Frank Shoemaker dismissed it as noise?
Has this colleague done further research, became convinced that it is significant, and pointing the direction to data that needs to be revisited?
Could this be someone's way of letting the folks at Fermilab know that they're sitting on a major breakthrough in their archives? One that has been dismissed as meaningless?
Who knows? Interesting stuff to ponder, though.
Probably. Just find another identical drive (brand, model, and size) and swap the circuit boards around.
Of course, this is more likely to be feasible in a work setting, where drives are typically purchased in batches. Most home users probably won't have pairs of identical drives lying around.
Why should they bother tracking down the specific house that's causing the problem? That could take hours. If they know there's voltage on the line that's not legally supposed to be there, and they can get rid of it quickly by frying the illegal equipment, that's what they should do. That gets the power in my (code compliant) house back on faster.
I don't want to go without power for an extra six hours 'cuz some self-righteous geek set up a rogue system and refused to comply with regulations.
If you want to experiment, great, go for it. I experiment with this stuff, too. But don't tie your homebrew hacks into the same wiring that I depend on in my house.
I like the way you think. As I said above, my motivation is more about reducing my "checking account footprint" than it is about reducing my "carbon footprint".
That said, during this whole discussion, I've started to wonder if it might be better, for either motivation, to focus these efforts all into a single outlet for one of the plug-in hybrid cars that will be appearing on the market shortly.
I see your point. As a point of fact, my eventual goal actually is to go all out with the grid tie-in, and mostly for the reasons you detailed.
I still stand by my opinion that once you get into that level, you're beyond the "hobbyist" point. You're talking multi-thousand dollar pieces of equipment, permits, contractors, inspections, contracts with the power company, and potential liability if something goes wrong. That doesn't sound like a "hobbyist" project to me.
What does sound like a hobbyist project to me, is building a homebrew windmill, using it to charge a UPS, and using that to power, say your low-voltage garden lighting, and your garage lighting. This is what I have installed currently. I've got capacity to add a bit more load to the system, so I'm currently deciding on what's getting wired in next. Then it will probably be a second windmill, or an upgrade to the current one.
I agree with everything you're saying, and do plan to go that route myself eventually. Please don't misunderstand my comments as saying it's all a bad idea. I just think it falls outside the hobbyist scope.
And speaking for myself, I would have never gotten interested in going that far if I hadn't started out small by building that little windmill out of a leftover motor and seeing what I could do with it.
Well, I would argue that it is patently ridiculous to think that anyone in the software business, particularly in the Unix business, has an honest belief that Linux programming books don't exist. I don't believe for one second that he didn't know it was a bullshit statement, and I doubt that I could be convinced.
And, of course, I know that that's a long way from proving it in a court of law. The perjury charge was mainly a joke (albeit a poor attempt, but hey, we all blow one every now and then).
"Are there really people investing in new sources of energy so they can power a toothbrush? Remember the mantra is reduce, reuse, recycle..."
That may be your mantra. Mine is "Save Money".
I should have probably elaborated a bit more. My point was, which I was admittedly unclear about, that since this is a hobbyist discussion, it would be a good idea to start small. Clock radios, electric toothbrush, etc... Once you've got that under control, use what you've learned from the experience to move on to the next level.
Why get rid of the wall warts, when those low power devices are the perfect sort of items to cut your teeth on? The goal may be to get your A/C and fridge off of the grid, but why not start with getting your alarm clock off the grid first, to get a better idea of what you're getting into?
And, yeah, if you eventually want to move to the point of a grid tie-in, go for it. But, IMHO, at that stage of the game you have moved well out of the "hobbyist" realm.
But for a small scale system, the ability to tie in to the grid is essentially useless. Since you're not going to be generating enough energy to sell a significant portion back to the electric co, why not just have separate circuits to power small items like alarm clocks, charging electric toothbrushes, etc....
Unless you're going to be generating significantly more energy than you use, I don't see the grid tie-in as being all that useful.
And once you do produce that amount, you're not really in the hobbyist league anymore, which is what the original question was about.
From the description:
"When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on "How to Program UNIX" but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist"
Taking a quick look at my bookshelf, I see the titles "Beginning Linux Programming", "Professional Linux Programming", and "Linux Application Development". And that's not even counting the boxes and boxes of books I have stored on shelves in my basement.
Perjury charge?
That could be implemented in asterisk in about 10 minutes, depending on the terms that you'd be allowed to use a phone at whatever place you're planning to get locked up.
If you'll be allowed to just make calls at will, then you just need a simple script to let you enter a code on the telephone keypad to abort the self-destruct.
If you think it's likely to be a jail where only collect calls are allowed (even for local calls), then you'll have to get more creative. Perhaps have it watch for incoming calls at a specific set of time intervals.... I'd have to give that one a little more thought.
In whatever case, it would be a good idea to have an 800 number on that line. Oh, and be aware that if you're locked up, it's likely that your phone calls will be monitored, so design any voice prompts to sound benign.
You raise some very valid points. I guess the solution to be implemented depends a great deal on the nature of the data being protected. You would handle an embarrassing porn collection differently than, say, incriminating evidence that you, yourself, have been engaged in insider trading, which would in turn be handled differently than highly secret, irrefutable evidence that the head of the CIA has been embezzling from the government. (Ignoring for now the obvious question of why not just turn the info over to authorities immediately. For now, we'll assume there is a compelling reason that you have been forced to sit on it for awhile.)
If you're porn gets wiped prematurely, eh, not the end of the world. In a case where losing the data would be truly damaging, a reasonably safe backup procedure could be put into place. Perhaps chop them up into 15 MB chunks, run through multiple levels of encryption, then email them to one or more gmail accounts via an anonymizing proxy. These gmail accounts have been, of course, set up from the an open wifi hotspot somewhere, and are untraceable to you. Depending on the nature of the data, I would be comfortable enough that nobody would ever make a connection between "0a8aff5a0f3@gmail.com" and my real life identity, particularly if I never access it through an IP that could be linked to me. Setting up a truly untraceable gmail account would probably require jumping through a few hoops, but I'm sure it could be done if the motivation were strong enough.
Like you, I don't have anything on my computers that would be "life-destroying" if it "fell into the wrong hands". There are things, though, that I'd rather my mom not find if I were to die and she had to clean out my house. She's very old-school about a lot of things, while I'm much more open minded. There are aspects of my life that she simply need not know about.
That said, your encrypt then shutdown solution would be entirely adequate for files that are merely "embarrassing". My original idea was spurred some time back by a discussion of how to store data in a way that would be undetected during a police raid (which I believe in turn stemmed from a conversation about recent RIAA actions and seizure of people's computers). The problem with encrypting the data is that a court could compel you to turn over the encryption keys. Wiping the drive means that there's nothing left to decrypt, although you'll probably have to resort to claiming something like "embarrassingly large midget-porn collection" to justify why you wiped the drives in the first place.
That all said, this is all really just an interesting thought exercise for me. All of my data sits on unencrypted drives in computers that are in plain site. A few files might be embarrassing if the wrong person found them, but there's nothing I'm going to go to jail for.
I've actually given this some thought, and think I've come up with a pretty reliable plan.
For performance reasons, I've left out encryption and instead rely on the data being stored on a physically hidden server. My suggestion is inside a wall in your house, where you can tap into the electrical wiring. This, combined with accessing the server over wifi means that there would be no visible cables to tip anyone off to the location of the server.
Now add a script that will shut down the wifi connection if you don't log in and enter a password in 24 hours. Once this happens, bring the wifi back up for, say, 5 minutes at a time at specific intervals so you have a chance to abort the self-destruct sequence. If 7 entire days pass without you performing the abort, initiate a secure wipe of the hard drives, followed by powering down the machine. At this point, even the existence of the computer will go undetected until someone remodels the house, and it will contain nothing but blank, unformatted hard drives anyway.
If you're concerned about the wifi being detected from outside the house, use a basement wall to hide the server in. I have an access point in my basement, and the surrounding soil renders it undetectable about 3 feet away from my house. Another thing that could be tacked on is keeping the wifi down normally, and bringing it up for a few seconds every 10 minutes or so to check for an indicator that you want to use the server. Would be simple enough to code a couple small apps to allow the server to poll your desktop machine to see if you've requested the wifi to stay up, and supplied proper credentials.
All things considered, I think this plan would provide a pretty darn reliable way of making sure that your private data stays private, while also avoiding the performance penalties that would be inherent with encryption of offsite hosting.
Most definitely crack his root and user passwords.
/. or digg accounts, it's not the end of the world. And, frankly, it's simply not worth my time to maintain a list of 100 different passwords to protect accounts that are just for fun and hold no critical personal data.
I personally don't know of anybody who has a different password for each and every place they log in to. Myself as an example, if you were to obtain my password to my laptop, it would also get you into several of my online accounts. Of course, banking accounts and other important accounts get a better security effort than that, but, honestly, if someone manages to hijack my
So, yeah, in all likelihood, brute forcing the passwords on the laptop would probably open many, many more doors.
As someone who has been around /. for a very long time, and has also spent some time at Digg, I give Digg the credit for the vastly improved signal/noise ratio here on /. in recent times.
/. unbearable seem to congregate over there now.
Why you ask? Simple. All of the douchebags that used to make
Nobody is claiming that digital is foolproof.
What's being stated, which is a fact, is that with a digital signal, if you're not seeing and/or hearing a blatantly OBVIOUS problem, then higher quality cables will offer you NO benefit.
A $200 HDMI cable will not offer a sharper or brighter picture than a $10 cable. It will produce the EXACT SAME picture. (Provided the obvious assumption that the $10 cable isn't so extremely substandard that it's producing obvious flaws in the picture.)
You might want to replace that gasket.
That's been my experience, as well. I've used older GPS units that did, in fact, take several minutes to acquire satellites every time you turned them on. All recent models that I've used, though, incorporate various trickery to greatly reduce this time. My Garmin Nuvi acquires satellites incredibly fast, and even the GPS that was in my Blackjack II would always pinpoint my location in less than a minute.
And as I was typing that, Digg went "Out of Service"...
Thanks to the podcast, I can actually hear Kevin Rose's voice saying "Fuck those sheep, just shut the site down for an hour and they'll fall in line"....
I've never once made a comment that anyone should abandon /. and go to digg. I have, however, even during my own absence from this site, made many posts on digg suggesting that users head over to slashdot if they wanted a useful tech news site.
I just wanted to go on public record, for the two people that care (me, and the drunken version of me that will show up in 5 or so hours) as saying that my future participation on digg.com will consist of the following two comments...
1. 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
2. http://www.subliminalurge.com/
This is not done from a standpoint of immaturity, this is done from a legitimate sense of disgust with what has happened at Digg today. Despite all of the problems inherent in a user-moderated system (to which slashdot is no stranger) I always found digg useful.
I no longer do. What Digg did today was unforgivable. Operating from the position of strength that comes along with being in the right, they cowtowed to the parties with the advertising cash.
In hindsight, this should come as much less of a surprise to me than it does, seeing as how they feature GoDaddy.com as a sponsor on their podcast.
You could always take the approach I did. Tell your boss that switching to Comcast is a great idea, he's very wise for thinking of it. Of course, there are a few services that our current ISP offers that Comcast doesn't, we'll have to replace those of course. Then you get him to pay for some nice, fast broadband for your house as well as a small server. You provide secondary DNS and MX from your basement. I also do nightly rsync backups of some of our most critical data, and run a backup Asterisk server.
Bingo, your home Internet service is now free.
All that's left is explaining why you're going to need to charge him an extra $100 a month to cover the time it takes you administer all of these extra services in your personal time (and, of course, electical usage).
Even with the extra Internet connection, and my little consulting fee, it saves my company about $150 a month. It's actually turned out to be a good solution, despite my initial concerns. Of course, we're talking a small (35 employee) telecom company here, not Fortune 500.
Not quite, but remember this is still in development. Once they start producing the dual-core, hyperthreading "Extreme Edition", it should run Vista just fine.
Why exactly are people so excited by faster wireless networking when very few of them actually HAVE the "fat pipes" to connect to. Is there ANY residential cable/DSL service that actually exceeds the capacity of 802.11g?
The speed of my Internet connection has absolutely NOTHING to do with how much bandwidth I need between the computers and other devices on my network.
For example, transferring a show from the living room Tivo to the bedroom Tivo happens at roughly 1x FF speed over 100 Mbps ethernet, but takes almost 2 hours for a 30 minute show over my 802.11b network.
Need to move a couple terrabytes of video files to a different MythTV box? I don't know about you, but I'd much rather do that over wired gigabit than any form of wireless currently available.
Have you tried VOIP over wireless? It works, but wired is still a much more "issue free" solution.
Wireless is good for casual web browsing when I'm out in the back yard. Other than that, I still haven't found a case where running cable isn't more than worth the tiny hassle involved.
You wouldn't be violating the DMCA, but you would still be in violation of the terms that you agreed to in exchange for access to the material.
It is not necessary to violate the DMCA in order to violate copyright law.