There is a noticeable difference between servers and regular usages. I look at my work's network usage and the output can hold a steady 850Mb/s with only minor ripples, humps, and spikes. If I un-throttle my symmetric connection at home, even with the fastest of people downloading from me, it doesn't take long and there are huge troughs and crests.
The difference between a real server a play-server is that a real server is very popular and has thousands of clients constantly transferring data, while a lesser play-server will not be so popular and tends to be all over the place.
The network patterns are completely different.
If google don't want people to max out the bandwidth, there are technical measures they can take to prevent that without completely ignoring net neutrality.
speaking as someone who's been static for over a decade, and worked with some dozen others in getting set up static, I can assure you that is not the case. ISPs that offer static addresses can offer them in several ways, the easiest of which is simply to add your modem's hardware ID to their dhcp server, and tell it to always assign a specific address to your device.
This is very very dependent on the ISP's infrastructure and almost never as simple as you describe.
First of all, an ISP providing PPPoA or PPPoE ADSL services does not have a DHCP server. Your ADSL router establishes a PPP session with one of the ISP's LNSes (of which there may be many) - if you're doing dynamic IPs then each LNS can be given a pool of IP (relatively) statically routed addresses and dish them out to connecting clients whereas for static IP addresses a client always has to get the same address which means that the ISP-side routing has to be dynamically changed to ensure traffic destined for you actually goes to the LNS you're connected to.
Your post seems to be aimed more at DOCSIS infrastructure, but even there it is inaccurate - an ISP will subnet their DOCSIS network appropriately and in this case you can indeed just allocate a client a static IP address within the subnet to which you are connected. *But* when the ISP needs to reorganise the network segment to which you're connected (which they do have to do every so often in order to meet changes in demand), all the clients within that segment will need to be readdressed. With dynamic addresses this is fine - you just revoke the DHCP lease and hand out a new lease with the new IP address. With static IP addresses you either have to change the user's address (in which case it's hardly static is it?), or you have to set up routing on the ISP-side to ensure the original static address still goes to the right part of the network since it is no longer within that network's "standard" subnet. To my knowledge, Virgin Media have never offered static IP addressing to customers on their DOCSIS network for exactly these reasons.
This function is also available on many consumer-grade routers.
What your CPE is capable of is irrelevant - static IP addresses require ISP-side routing work, which can increase the complexity compared to offering dynamic IP addresses.
(That's not to say that some ISPs can't do this - of course they can, and I've certainly never paid anything extra to get a small static IPv4 subnet on either olde dial-up or modern ADSL. But to imagine that the ISP's infrastructure can always trivially accommodate this is incorrect.)
TL;DR - your post seems to be based on customer experience with a single network technology and assumes that just because you can pay an ISP to give you a static address it is always trivial with no backend infrastructure or management required. However, this is not the case - in many networks there is overhead in using static addresses and this is good enough reason for ISPs to not use them in situations where people don't actually need them.
Only a small handful of businesses I've worked with in the area have had an actual need for a static address.
Conversely, all of my customers have at least 1 static address (usually a subnet somewhere between/26 and/29) - they usually run a primary MX directly on the end of their internet connection, require remote management capabilities for multiple machines and require many of their internal services to be available externally.
That's the point. If you want to pay for the bandwidth to run a server business, you buy business class. You want residential, you pay residential. You try to run a business on residential, that's leeching.
No, if I buy an internet connection from an ISP and it says it is "unlimited" then I expect to be able to use all the bandwidth available for whatever purpose I want. If they don't want me downloading an "unlimited" amount of data then they can stop advertising it as "unlimited".
Now, I'm of the opinion that uncapped download limits are utterly unsustainable - I steer clear of ISPs advertising "unlimited" connections because such a connection would be one of three things: 1. A con - not actually unlimited because there would be some "fair usage" clause in there somewhere. 2. Far too expensive - a truely "unlimited" connection would cost the ISP more to provide than I could afford to pay. 3. Extremely low quality - if a connection is both cheap and unlimited, the only possible way this can work is to have an extremely high contention ratio.
So when I choose an ISP, I go for one with a sensible cap which fits my needs - I don't *need* unlimited downloads and don't want to subsidise the people who do. However, if my ISP tells me I have a 100GB/month cap then just like the "unlimited" option above, they should expect me to use up to 100GB/month for whatever I like.
Honestly, ISPs should just learn to set price tiers for the bandwidth people actually use instead of misadvertising what they are offering and then trying to gouge people for extra money by placing ounerous terms in their T&Cs. When I go to the shop for some milk, I get a 2 litre bottle of milk - I don't come back with "unlimited" milk that will see me penalised if I use more than 2 litres of it and I don't have to sign some terms and conditions saying that the milk is for home use only and that I won't use it in my morning cup of tea at work.
Static addressing is wasteful, subnets even more so. And every internet registry has frowned upon the practice for nearly 20 years. We'd've run out of IPv4 addresses LONG ago had they not stopped that shit.
You don't have to do this stuff by default, just make it a (free) option. For example, my ISP (and the one I had before that) do static IPs and small IPv4 subnets on request - to get my/29 I just had to fill in a RIPE form justifying my requirement; no extra cost.
Port blocking was done out of f'ing necessity. There are just too many stupid people connecting machines to the internet. Running insecure software that they don't know how to secure -- and in many cases they don't even know was installed.
Again; no problem building a firewall into the ISP-side of the connection (in fact,t his would be a good idea), but give the users the option of disabling it themselves. I certainly wouldn't be paying an ISP who forced a firewall upon me with no method of disabling it.
Net Neutrality, as I've understood it, means that an ISP must treat the packets to and from the Internet the same.
You seem to be saying that this is ok because on a technical level they are treating all packets the same and its only the T&Cs that disallow certain types of traffic (namely, traffic to/from a server on your network)? So you think it's ok for AT&T to have "you must not use VoIP" in their T&Cs?
Well that means users have to keep their usage reasonable and that means no servers that gobble up bandwidth.
Ah, so small webserver that uses a few megabytes a day to serve photos to my family is banned because it is a server and will gobble the bandwidth, but maxing out the bandwidth 24/7 with movie downloads is ok coz that's a client and therefore bandwidth-light. Gotcha.
If they care about bandwidth they can institute bandwidth caps and traffic throttling systems; the only reason for differentiating between "servers" and other traffic is to segment the market because people operating servers are often happier to pay more (often because they are a business). None of this is about "fair use" - its all about pushing people onto a more expensive "business" package (which is fundamentally identical to the "home" package, except for the price and a minor tweak to the T&Cs).
Replying to myself, but I guess my point is: Google *shouldn't care* what you're using the bandwidth for - they can impose a bandwidth cap, etc, but its none of their business what you're using the bandwidth for.
On a side note, I reject the premise of this headline. I don't think offering a nobbled residential plan that doesn't allow for you to run a server - allowing Google to drive people onto a more expensive business plan that frees you from these constraints - is an assault to net neutrality. That's akin to charging more for a static IP address. It's just segmenting your market to extract better profits.
I disagree here.
The static/dynamic IP thing is a difference to the service on a technical level - they have to specifically change the way the service operates in order to offer a static IP - in particular, the routing is probably more complex because they now need to dynamically change the routing for your IP address depending on which equipment your connection appears on when you "dial in" (and yes, ADSL still "dials in" and will appear on an arbitrary trunk at the ISP end); also IPv4 addresses are running pretty short, so there is a real, but non-monetary, cost associated with giving everyone their own IPv4 address instead of handing them out dynamically. So at a technical level, it may well be more costly for the ISP to offer a static IP, so charging more doesn't seem unreasonable here.
On the other hand, the "you may not run a server" thing is purely a change to the T&Cs - if you pay extra to be allowed to run a server then you're getting *exactly the same service* at a technical level, its just they're relaxing the restrictions. Other than trying to segment the market in order to push the "richer" customers into paying more for the same thing, this serves no purpose - this isn't about the idea that servers may use more bandwidth than clients, if it were they would be concerned about bit torrent, etc. and would be putting in actual traffic management systems to mitigate bandwidth overuse.
To my mind, Google saying "you may not run servers on your internet connection" isn't any different from AT&T saying "you may not do VoIP over your connection" or TimeWarner saying "you may not watch movies over your internet connection" - this is *exactly* the stuff that net neutrality legislation is supposed to prevent.
Now, none of this detracts that there may be other reasons why businesses may be better off with a business connection (e.g. better SLAs, etc.); but an ISP shouldn't be able to simply say "you're a business and therefore you must pay us extra" whilst providing exactly the same service as their cheaper home users will get.
Ooooo, someone's a little butthurt, yeah? BSD offers more freedom and is a license that wasn't cooked up by a bearded, fat-ass Jew who likes to eat his own toejam.
Why do you actually care? If you don't want to comply with the GPL then don't use GPLed code - your choice.
As a developer I actually *don't care* if you use my code - my code is written to do a job I need it to do, and rather than keeping it all to myself I release it in case its useful to other people. I usually use GPL under the premise that any improvements someone makes to the code will be made available to other people - they're benefitting from my code, why shouldn't other people benefit from their improvements too? If you don't like the terms under which I release my code, you're free to not use it - go find some code that does the same job under a licence that suits you better; or write your own; or even negotiate a different licence with me. But instead, what Fantec did was get some code they found useful and ignored the licensing terms - that's not cool and companies who ignore the licence and refuse to come into compliance after they've been asked to really do deserve to be sued. No one forced them into breaking the licence, there was nothing stopping them saying "we don't like that licence, lets write our own code instead of using someone else's work".
If the Fantec product had been proprietary, they wouldn't have been under violation, and they couldn't have verified if there was a licensing issue with any firmware provided by their supplier, which would have been noted in any good contract.
No more so than they could with GPLed software.
Their supplier provided them with a product which incorporated third party code. The supplier assured them that the third party licence was being adhered to. This turned out to be incorrect, and Fantec got hauled up for breaking the licence. In this case the third party code was GPLed, but lets suppose that it came from Microsoft under one of their licences - if the licence hadn't been adhered to they still could've been hauled up to court.
The licence is pretty irrelevant here; all that is relevant is that the supplier used third party code and didn't comply with the licence, which in turn caused Fantec to fail to comply with the licence. Fantec's next step is going to be to sue their supplier and recover their costs.
Of course, whatever licence you use, the idea that your licensing responsibilities evaporate as soon as your supplier screws up would be insane - that kind of system would simply lead to shell limited companies being set up as the "suppliers" which could be dissolved as soon as there is a claim against them, absolving the real company of any responsibility. So really, nothing to see here, the law operates as expected.
Face it, there are a lot of new and different things you have to be aware of when going down the OSS road. These things are no worse than the traditional methods, just different And that different can land you in court and cost you piles of cash of varying sizes. The two options are like riding a horse versus driving a horse-drawn wagon.
None of this is "new and different" - any third party code is a risk, whatever the licence. The only safe way is to write all your own code - most people consider that to be unrealistically expensive and therefore decide to take the risk with third party code. Third party code means due-dilligence in order to mitigate the risk of infringing a licence.
Possibly. But I imagine the motion detector type described tends to put off people that are prowling. There's plenty of other houses they can go to where their presence won't be as obvious.
On the other hand, they tend to decrease the feeling of security of the householder, every time a cat lights it up.
I doubt they put people off prowling - they aren't going to draw any attention since wildlife lights them up all the time anyway, much less attention than an intruder waving a torch around would draw anyway. Easy enough to hide in a shadow when the light's on too.
A few years ago my brother and I were bringing home a computer setup to my mother who lives in south Ozone Park, Queens, NY, a neighborhood that has gone downhill over the past 15 years. I was getting the last box from the car when I heard a commotion and my brother yelling. I ran and this guy was nervously explaining to my brother he entered our driveway gate to relieve himself when my brother walked in on him. I took my phone out to call the cops and they guy bolted. The problem, the alleyway light burnt out and it was pitch black.
If the rest of the environment wasn't over-lit, your eyes would be adjusted to the dark and the alleyway wouldn't seem pitch black.
Would a light stop an intruder hiding? Probably not - the light causes your eyes to lose their dark adaption and creates deep shadows for someone to hide in. It takes about 30 minutes for your eyes to properly dark-adapt after being exposed to the light, so better to keep lighting to a minimum so you can see into the unlit areas. Conversely, if you're carrying a torch instead of relying on the street lighting then you can point the torch into the shadows and see an intruder. Similarly, the intruder would likely need a torch too, which would draw attention to him.
IMHO there is way too much lighting - residential areas just plain don't need outdoor lighting at all; what's wrong with just carrying a torch?
Because I don't have a flashlight (aka torch) every time I want one.
Do you have a roof over your head wherever you go in case you don't have a rain jacket when you want it? What about space heaters all over the place in case you forgot your warm clothes? Stop being so damned inconsiderate to other people just because you're too lazy to carry the necessary equipment with you.
There is this crazy belief that just because one shines a light on a burglar, there'll suddenly appear concerned citizen's eyes that can make use of this visual input. Of course this is a load of bollocks. Lights are a mild deterrent, because many burglars are otherwise as silly as the rest of the citizenry and they themselves believe this stupid shit.
Lights create deep shadows for intruders to hide in, and allow them to see so they don't need a torch (which would draw attention to them).
this is endangering the elderly and school children
The fuck?
Yes, that was my attitude... Didn't stop the next council making it an election promise to turn them all back on again though...
I don't think any areas were actually ever turned off entirely, but they did stuff like turning off every other light. Having walked down some of the roads where half the lights were turned off I couldn't actually see a problem, they still seemed far brighter than actually needed.
If you really think its feasible for everyone in the world to live with a 3 acre buffer, your delusional.
A 3 acre buffer won't help you - light pollution is still very visible 50Km away from the edge of a big city, and its getting worse (cities are expanding, but they're also increasing the density of the lighting); there aren't that many dark sky locations left in the UK because there just aren't that many places far enough from a big city.
Except that "light pollution" isn't pollution by definition, and the safety benefits of illumination in cities far outweighs any potential inconvenience to astronomers.
Also the benefits of electricity far outweigh the environmental damage caused by generating it; the benefits of oil far outweigh the wars required to get it; the benefits of censorship "to protect the children" far outweigh the problems... Trashing the environment and other people's freedoms with the excuse that there is some benefit that you think outweighs them is a pretty crappy thing to be doing.
Illuminating the more hazardous road junctions is certainly beneficial. Illuminating the city centres may well be a good thing (although I think we currently massively exceed the amount of illumination required - there's absolutely no need to light them up like day time, especially at times of the day when there's almost no one around.) But residential areas really don't need street lighting at all - would it kill you to take a torch when you go out at night?
Street lighting uses a huge amount of energy (8% of all energy in the US is used for street lighting); it makes the night sky invisible (this isn't just about the astronomers - everyone should have the right to enjoy the natural environment); lighting frequently decreases safety by providing deep shadow for attackers to hide in and glaring drivers; 24 hour lighting completely fucks up wildlife, and there's some evidence to show it can cause psychological problems for humans too.
personally, it's hard to walk my dog at night (so it poops/ pee before bedtime). I have one hand on the leash, another on the flashlight, and then somehow manage to scoop the poop....especially in the rain while trying to balance an umbrella.
Short answer, my landlord installed the floodlight and the motion detector that runs in. I think she was partly concerned with security, which I don't really think is an issue.
Its fairly well documented that whilst lighting provides an increased sense of security, it frequently decreases security in real terms by creating deep shadows.
Longer answer, my wife has MS which gives her both vision problems and balance problems. She also walks with a cane which would make it hard to carry a torch. I think that a lot of older people have similar issues.
Fair enough - I understand that people with disabilities may need additional lighting, etc. Although I can recommend keeping a head torch handy - the modern LED ones are light, bright, and last a long time. Another possibility is to have a remote controlled light (rather than a motion detector), which would avoid mis-triggering by wildlife.
My local council made a decision to turn off some of the street lighting between 1am and 5am a few years ago, saving several tens of millions of pounds in energy charges. This was met with lots of complaints along the lines of "this is endangering the elderly and school children!" (who are obviously always walking to and from school at 1 in the morning(!)). Eventually a new council was voted in and undid all that.
If you believe that highend graphics machines requires tweaking drivers just to make them work then you're clearly doing something wrong.
I used to use nVidia graphics cards before Intel appeared on the scene - I had far too many incidents of upgrading the kernel, or Xorg, etc. and discovering that the drivers no longer worked, then having to roll back the upgrade and wait for 6 months before nVidia got their finger out. Too many incidents of nVidia releasing broken drivers resulting in an upgrade breaking some functionality I was using. Too many bugs in the drivers that many people on the nVidia forums were reporting to be met with absolutely no response from nVidia, combined with a completely opaque bug reporting system. And finding that nVidia dropped support for old hardware long before I was ready to give it up (I don't like being forced into upgrading perfectly good hardware just because the vendor drops support).
Conversely, the Intel drivers are pretty much rock solid. When bugs are found, they can be reported and tracked using Intel's publicly accessible Bugzilla. Intel have (in my experience) resolved bugs rapidly and I've been able to check the progress of the bug fixing rather than having to sit on my hands for 2 years checking the change logs (which is what I did with nVidia), and when Intel finally decide not to support the hardware any more, the community pick up the slack to some extent because the drivers are open and well documented.
So I stand by my opinion that in my experience, nVidia hardware is more powerful but also a hell of a lot more hassle for the user, whereas Intel hardware is powerful enough to meet pretty much all non-gaming needs and Just Works.
I'm after the latter - I have absolutely no interest in gaming.
The idea that the only people interested in anything but lowend integrated graphics is gamers is just ignorant.
For home users, that pretty much is the case - there are only a few niche cases where high-end graphics are required outside of games.
Of course, for business use there are a few more cases (e.g. CAD work, etc) but still, it is a minority - we've standardised on Intel graphics because we don't need anything more powerful, they are a lot less effort, and we don't have to retire ancient hardware just because the vendor drops support.
Which was pretty much my point - there's a lot of PC hardware out there that does just work perfectly with only open drivers.
And in the end even if that is true it doesn't matter because just as the general populace doesn't care for open source drivers and running linux they also don't care about the available open source phones, both are confined to a niche.
That is irrelevant. The original question raised was "why can't we just install the latest OS like we do with PC hardware" and the answer I gave was "because there are no open drivers for much of the mobile hardware, whereas a large proportion of PC hardware does have good open drivers". None of this was about what the "general populace" cares about - I was simply explaining why phones and PCs can't currently be treated the same way in terms of software upgrades.
Outside of Intel, most of the hardware vendors don't do open source drivers and realistically intel graphics is the ass-end of desktop graphics hardware.
I certainly wouldn't call them the "ass end" - it depends what you want. If you want a top of the line gaming machine that you have to fart around with tweaking drivers to make them work, etc. all the time then Intel isn't for you. If you just want a machine that can run a modern desktop and keeps working with no farting around then Intel hardware is excellent. I'm after the latter - I have absolutely no interest in gaming. Whilst PC gamers are a significant market segment, they are certainly not the majority of PC owners, so for most people Intel hardware is probably the best choice.
Plenty of other hardware vendors write drivers or release the specs allowing others to write drivers without reverse engineering - look at all the SATA and SCSI controllers, for example - mostly vendor-written drivers.
I didn't equate "official" with "excellent", but obviously reverse engineered drivers by their very nature are going to be behind the official ones in features, performance and stability.
This certainly isn't my experience - frequently the vendor written Windows drivers are bloatware, unstable with proprietary APIs whilest the reverse engineered Linux drivers are much higher quality. Certainly not always the case, but I don't think there's a lot of correllation between the quality of a driver and whether or not it was reverse engineered.
Well, my crappy Acer Travelmate laptop is entirely supported by open drivers (ok, there is closed firmware running on some of the hardware, but I'm talking about stuff running on the CPU that has to be integrated into the OS in such a way as to prevent arbitrary OS upgrades without the vendor's help). I can install Fedora on that machine and it Just Works.
You can do that on just about any machine, it just doesn't work well and hardware support is mostly pretty crappy.
Except on my machine it does work well, including all of the hardware. Which was pretty much my point - there's a lot of PC hardware out there that does just work perfectly with only open drivers.
There are lots of bad arguments though. The standard approach is to swiftly change the topic: Whenever the block is being discussed, rapidly turn the conversation towards child pornography or (second choice) graphically violent pornography.
Herein lies half the problem with the discussions with the public that have been had over this. The politicians seem to (intentionally or not) confuse several issues: 1. Kids accidentally stumbling across porn 2. Kids intentionally looking at porn 3. Adults looking at kiddie porn (or faux kiddie porn) 4. Adults committing child abuses
(And similar arguments for violence, rape and murder... and yet we still get to see plenty of violent stuff on TV and in the papers that is probably more extreme than the faux-rape porn that they are also trying to ban).
These are all very separate issues - a filter that reduces the chance of a child accidentally sumbling upon porn is quite viable. All the big search engines have these and they do work quite well without leading to too many false positives.
Stopping people intentionally looking at porn is impossible though, and the harder you try the less legitimate stuff is going to work properly on the filtered internet connections (not just websites - lots of applications would get caught up in this too). And stopping *adults* intentionally looking at porn is never going to work with either an opt-in or opt-out system because they'd just opt-out.
And to my mind, there is a complete lack of evidence to show that looking at "extreme" porn (e.g. faux-child porn, cartoons depicting child abuse, faux-rape, etc.) is actually going to make someone go out and actually commit that act any more than watching CSI on TV will make someone go out and commit murder. It may very well be that someone who can relieve themselves watching a cartoon might be less likley to go out and actually abuse a child. So here, the reason for blocking extreme porn seems to largely be "I find what you're into in private distasteful and you should be locked up to protect me from being offended" rather than actually to protect anyone. It sounds very similar to the old anti-homosexuality laws, which were there because some people found homosexuality distasteful and therefore wanted to prevent it, rather than actually protecting people from anything.
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing.
My thoughts exactly. When you are old enough to want to see it you are old enough to see it IMHO. We need to discover another continent again so we can ship off the all the Puritans to it again.
I suggest an inflatable continent. We can slash it once we're done and let them all sink...
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There is a noticeable difference between servers and regular usages. I look at my work's network usage and the output can hold a steady 850Mb/s with only minor ripples, humps, and spikes. If I un-throttle my symmetric connection at home, even with the fastest of people downloading from me, it doesn't take long and there are huge troughs and crests.
The difference between a real server a play-server is that a real server is very popular and has thousands of clients constantly transferring data, while a lesser play-server will not be so popular and tends to be all over the place.
The network patterns are completely different.
If google don't want people to max out the bandwidth, there are technical measures they can take to prevent that without completely ignoring net neutrality.
speaking as someone who's been static for over a decade, and worked with some dozen others in getting set up static, I can assure you that is not the case. ISPs that offer static addresses can offer them in several ways, the easiest of which is simply to add your modem's hardware ID to their dhcp server, and tell it to always assign a specific address to your device.
This is very very dependent on the ISP's infrastructure and almost never as simple as you describe.
First of all, an ISP providing PPPoA or PPPoE ADSL services does not have a DHCP server. Your ADSL router establishes a PPP session with one of the ISP's LNSes (of which there may be many) - if you're doing dynamic IPs then each LNS can be given a pool of IP (relatively) statically routed addresses and dish them out to connecting clients whereas for static IP addresses a client always has to get the same address which means that the ISP-side routing has to be dynamically changed to ensure traffic destined for you actually goes to the LNS you're connected to.
Your post seems to be aimed more at DOCSIS infrastructure, but even there it is inaccurate - an ISP will subnet their DOCSIS network appropriately and in this case you can indeed just allocate a client a static IP address within the subnet to which you are connected. *But* when the ISP needs to reorganise the network segment to which you're connected (which they do have to do every so often in order to meet changes in demand), all the clients within that segment will need to be readdressed. With dynamic addresses this is fine - you just revoke the DHCP lease and hand out a new lease with the new IP address. With static IP addresses you either have to change the user's address (in which case it's hardly static is it?), or you have to set up routing on the ISP-side to ensure the original static address still goes to the right part of the network since it is no longer within that network's "standard" subnet. To my knowledge, Virgin Media have never offered static IP addressing to customers on their DOCSIS network for exactly these reasons.
This function is also available on many consumer-grade routers.
What your CPE is capable of is irrelevant - static IP addresses require ISP-side routing work, which can increase the complexity compared to offering dynamic IP addresses.
(That's not to say that some ISPs can't do this - of course they can, and I've certainly never paid anything extra to get a small static IPv4 subnet on either olde dial-up or modern ADSL. But to imagine that the ISP's infrastructure can always trivially accommodate this is incorrect.)
TL;DR - your post seems to be based on customer experience with a single network technology and assumes that just because you can pay an ISP to give you a static address it is always trivial with no backend infrastructure or management required. However, this is not the case - in many networks there is overhead in using static addresses and this is good enough reason for ISPs to not use them in situations where people don't actually need them.
Only a small handful of businesses I've worked with in the area have had an actual need for a static address.
Conversely, all of my customers have at least 1 static address (usually a subnet somewhere between /26 and /29) - they usually run a primary MX directly on the end of their internet connection, require remote management capabilities for multiple machines and require many of their internal services to be available externally.
That's the point. If you want to pay for the bandwidth to run a server business, you buy business class. You want residential, you pay residential. You try to run a business on residential, that's leeching.
No, if I buy an internet connection from an ISP and it says it is "unlimited" then I expect to be able to use all the bandwidth available for whatever purpose I want. If they don't want me downloading an "unlimited" amount of data then they can stop advertising it as "unlimited".
Now, I'm of the opinion that uncapped download limits are utterly unsustainable - I steer clear of ISPs advertising "unlimited" connections because such a connection would be one of three things:
1. A con - not actually unlimited because there would be some "fair usage" clause in there somewhere.
2. Far too expensive - a truely "unlimited" connection would cost the ISP more to provide than I could afford to pay.
3. Extremely low quality - if a connection is both cheap and unlimited, the only possible way this can work is to have an extremely high contention ratio.
So when I choose an ISP, I go for one with a sensible cap which fits my needs - I don't *need* unlimited downloads and don't want to subsidise the people who do. However, if my ISP tells me I have a 100GB/month cap then just like the "unlimited" option above, they should expect me to use up to 100GB/month for whatever I like.
Honestly, ISPs should just learn to set price tiers for the bandwidth people actually use instead of misadvertising what they are offering and then trying to gouge people for extra money by placing ounerous terms in their T&Cs. When I go to the shop for some milk, I get a 2 litre bottle of milk - I don't come back with "unlimited" milk that will see me penalised if I use more than 2 litres of it and I don't have to sign some terms and conditions saying that the milk is for home use only and that I won't use it in my morning cup of tea at work.
Static addressing is wasteful, subnets even more so. And every internet registry has frowned upon the practice for nearly 20 years. We'd've run out of IPv4 addresses LONG ago had they not stopped that shit.
You don't have to do this stuff by default, just make it a (free) option. For example, my ISP (and the one I had before that) do static IPs and small IPv4 subnets on request - to get my /29 I just had to fill in a RIPE form justifying my requirement; no extra cost.
Port blocking was done out of f'ing necessity. There are just too many stupid people connecting machines to the internet. Running insecure software that they don't know how to secure -- and in many cases they don't even know was installed.
Again; no problem building a firewall into the ISP-side of the connection (in fact,t his would be a good idea), but give the users the option of disabling it themselves. I certainly wouldn't be paying an ISP who forced a firewall upon me with no method of disabling it.
Net Neutrality, as I've understood it, means that an ISP must treat the packets to and from the Internet the same.
You seem to be saying that this is ok because on a technical level they are treating all packets the same and its only the T&Cs that disallow certain types of traffic (namely, traffic to/from a server on your network)? So you think it's ok for AT&T to have "you must not use VoIP" in their T&Cs?
Well that means users have to keep their usage reasonable and that means no servers that gobble up bandwidth.
Ah, so small webserver that uses a few megabytes a day to serve photos to my family is banned because it is a server and will gobble the bandwidth, but maxing out the bandwidth 24/7 with movie downloads is ok coz that's a client and therefore bandwidth-light. Gotcha.
If they care about bandwidth they can institute bandwidth caps and traffic throttling systems; the only reason for differentiating between "servers" and other traffic is to segment the market because people operating servers are often happier to pay more (often because they are a business). None of this is about "fair use" - its all about pushing people onto a more expensive "business" package (which is fundamentally identical to the "home" package, except for the price and a minor tweak to the T&Cs).
Replying to myself, but I guess my point is: Google *shouldn't care* what you're using the bandwidth for - they can impose a bandwidth cap, etc, but its none of their business what you're using the bandwidth for.
On a side note, I reject the premise of this headline. I don't think offering a nobbled residential plan that doesn't allow for you to run a server - allowing Google to drive people onto a more expensive business plan that frees you from these constraints - is an assault to net neutrality. That's akin to charging more for a static IP address. It's just segmenting your market to extract better profits.
I disagree here.
The static/dynamic IP thing is a difference to the service on a technical level - they have to specifically change the way the service operates in order to offer a static IP - in particular, the routing is probably more complex because they now need to dynamically change the routing for your IP address depending on which equipment your connection appears on when you "dial in" (and yes, ADSL still "dials in" and will appear on an arbitrary trunk at the ISP end); also IPv4 addresses are running pretty short, so there is a real, but non-monetary, cost associated with giving everyone their own IPv4 address instead of handing them out dynamically. So at a technical level, it may well be more costly for the ISP to offer a static IP, so charging more doesn't seem unreasonable here.
On the other hand, the "you may not run a server" thing is purely a change to the T&Cs - if you pay extra to be allowed to run a server then you're getting *exactly the same service* at a technical level, its just they're relaxing the restrictions. Other than trying to segment the market in order to push the "richer" customers into paying more for the same thing, this serves no purpose - this isn't about the idea that servers may use more bandwidth than clients, if it were they would be concerned about bit torrent, etc. and would be putting in actual traffic management systems to mitigate bandwidth overuse.
To my mind, Google saying "you may not run servers on your internet connection" isn't any different from AT&T saying "you may not do VoIP over your connection" or TimeWarner saying "you may not watch movies over your internet connection" - this is *exactly* the stuff that net neutrality legislation is supposed to prevent.
Now, none of this detracts that there may be other reasons why businesses may be better off with a business connection (e.g. better SLAs, etc.); but an ISP shouldn't be able to simply say "you're a business and therefore you must pay us extra" whilst providing exactly the same service as their cheaper home users will get.
Ooooo, someone's a little butthurt, yeah? BSD offers more freedom and is a license that wasn't cooked up by a bearded, fat-ass Jew who likes to eat his own toejam.
Why do you actually care? If you don't want to comply with the GPL then don't use GPLed code - your choice.
As a developer I actually *don't care* if you use my code - my code is written to do a job I need it to do, and rather than keeping it all to myself I release it in case its useful to other people. I usually use GPL under the premise that any improvements someone makes to the code will be made available to other people - they're benefitting from my code, why shouldn't other people benefit from their improvements too? If you don't like the terms under which I release my code, you're free to not use it - go find some code that does the same job under a licence that suits you better; or write your own; or even negotiate a different licence with me. But instead, what Fantec did was get some code they found useful and ignored the licensing terms - that's not cool and companies who ignore the licence and refuse to come into compliance after they've been asked to really do deserve to be sued. No one forced them into breaking the licence, there was nothing stopping them saying "we don't like that licence, lets write our own code instead of using someone else's work".
If the Fantec product had been proprietary, they wouldn't have been under violation, and they couldn't have verified if there was a licensing issue with any firmware provided by their supplier, which would have been noted in any good contract.
No more so than they could with GPLed software.
Their supplier provided them with a product which incorporated third party code. The supplier assured them that the third party licence was being adhered to. This turned out to be incorrect, and Fantec got hauled up for breaking the licence. In this case the third party code was GPLed, but lets suppose that it came from Microsoft under one of their licences - if the licence hadn't been adhered to they still could've been hauled up to court.
The licence is pretty irrelevant here; all that is relevant is that the supplier used third party code and didn't comply with the licence, which in turn caused Fantec to fail to comply with the licence. Fantec's next step is going to be to sue their supplier and recover their costs.
Of course, whatever licence you use, the idea that your licensing responsibilities evaporate as soon as your supplier screws up would be insane - that kind of system would simply lead to shell limited companies being set up as the "suppliers" which could be dissolved as soon as there is a claim against them, absolving the real company of any responsibility. So really, nothing to see here, the law operates as expected.
Face it, there are a lot of new and different things you have to be aware of when going down the OSS road. These things are no worse than the traditional methods, just different And that different can land you in court and cost you piles of cash of varying sizes. The two options are like riding a horse versus driving a horse-drawn wagon.
None of this is "new and different" - any third party code is a risk, whatever the licence. The only safe way is to write all your own code - most people consider that to be unrealistically expensive and therefore decide to take the risk with third party code. Third party code means due-dilligence in order to mitigate the risk of infringing a licence.
Possibly. But I imagine the motion detector type described tends to put off people that are prowling. There's plenty of other houses they can go to where their presence won't be as obvious.
On the other hand, they tend to decrease the feeling of security of the householder, every time a cat lights it up.
I doubt they put people off prowling - they aren't going to draw any attention since wildlife lights them up all the time anyway, much less attention than an intruder waving a torch around would draw anyway. Easy enough to hide in a shadow when the light's on too.
A few years ago my brother and I were bringing home a computer setup to my mother who lives in south Ozone Park, Queens, NY, a neighborhood that has gone downhill over the past 15 years. I was getting the last box from the car when I heard a commotion and my brother yelling. I ran and this guy was nervously explaining to my brother he entered our driveway gate to relieve himself when my brother walked in on him. I took my phone out to call the cops and they guy bolted. The problem, the alleyway light burnt out and it was pitch black.
If the rest of the environment wasn't over-lit, your eyes would be adjusted to the dark and the alleyway wouldn't seem pitch black.
Would a light stop an intruder hiding? Probably not - the light causes your eyes to lose their dark adaption and creates deep shadows for someone to hide in. It takes about 30 minutes for your eyes to properly dark-adapt after being exposed to the light, so better to keep lighting to a minimum so you can see into the unlit areas. Conversely, if you're carrying a torch instead of relying on the street lighting then you can point the torch into the shadows and see an intruder. Similarly, the intruder would likely need a torch too, which would draw attention to him.
What do you need a floodlight for?
IMHO there is way too much lighting - residential areas just plain don't need outdoor lighting at all; what's wrong with just carrying a torch?
Because I don't have a flashlight (aka torch) every time I want one.
Do you have a roof over your head wherever you go in case you don't have a rain jacket when you want it? What about space heaters all over the place in case you forgot your warm clothes? Stop being so damned inconsiderate to other people just because you're too lazy to carry the necessary equipment with you.
There is this crazy belief that just because one shines a light on a burglar, there'll suddenly appear concerned citizen's eyes that can make use of this visual input. Of course this is a load of bollocks. Lights are a mild deterrent, because many burglars are otherwise as silly as the rest of the citizenry and they themselves believe this stupid shit.
Lights create deep shadows for intruders to hide in, and allow them to see so they don't need a torch (which would draw attention to them).
this is endangering the elderly and school children
The fuck?
Yes, that was my attitude... Didn't stop the next council making it an election promise to turn them all back on again though...
I don't think any areas were actually ever turned off entirely, but they did stuff like turning off every other light. Having walked down some of the roads where half the lights were turned off I couldn't actually see a problem, they still seemed far brighter than actually needed.
If you really think its feasible for everyone in the world to live with a 3 acre buffer, your delusional.
A 3 acre buffer won't help you - light pollution is still very visible 50Km away from the edge of a big city, and its getting worse (cities are expanding, but they're also increasing the density of the lighting); there aren't that many dark sky locations left in the UK because there just aren't that many places far enough from a big city.
no, pollution is something that damages life. gives people cancer, kills fish and other animals, kills trees, etc
light doesn't kill or hurt anyone. unless you are shining a light into the jungle where night time animals rely on cover to survive
There's plenty of evidence to show that 24 hour lighting fucks up the wildlife and causes psychological problems for humans.
Except that "light pollution" isn't pollution by definition, and the safety benefits of illumination in cities far outweighs any potential inconvenience to astronomers.
Also the benefits of electricity far outweigh the environmental damage caused by generating it; the benefits of oil far outweigh the wars required to get it; the benefits of censorship "to protect the children" far outweigh the problems... Trashing the environment and other people's freedoms with the excuse that there is some benefit that you think outweighs them is a pretty crappy thing to be doing.
Illuminating the more hazardous road junctions is certainly beneficial. Illuminating the city centres may well be a good thing (although I think we currently massively exceed the amount of illumination required - there's absolutely no need to light them up like day time, especially at times of the day when there's almost no one around.) But residential areas really don't need street lighting at all - would it kill you to take a torch when you go out at night?
Street lighting uses a huge amount of energy (8% of all energy in the US is used for street lighting); it makes the night sky invisible (this isn't just about the astronomers - everyone should have the right to enjoy the natural environment); lighting frequently decreases safety by providing deep shadow for attackers to hide in and glaring drivers; 24 hour lighting completely fucks up wildlife, and there's some evidence to show it can cause psychological problems for humans too.
personally, it's hard to walk my dog at night (so it poops/ pee before bedtime). I have one hand on the leash, another on the flashlight, and then somehow manage to scoop the poop....especially in the rain while trying to balance an umbrella.
Allow me to introduce you to a revolutionary new concept.
My floodlights are on motion sensor, however. It helps cut down on the obnoxiousness.
In my experience, motion sensors on external floodlights are perpetually triggered by wildlife.
Short answer, my landlord installed the floodlight and the motion detector that runs in. I think she was partly concerned with security, which I don't really think is an issue.
Its fairly well documented that whilst lighting provides an increased sense of security, it frequently decreases security in real terms by creating deep shadows.
Longer answer, my wife has MS which gives her both vision problems and balance problems. She also walks with a cane which would make it hard to carry a torch. I think that a lot of older people have similar issues.
Fair enough - I understand that people with disabilities may need additional lighting, etc. Although I can recommend keeping a head torch handy - the modern LED ones are light, bright, and last a long time. Another possibility is to have a remote controlled light (rather than a motion detector), which would avoid mis-triggering by wildlife.
My local council made a decision to turn off some of the street lighting between 1am and 5am a few years ago, saving several tens of millions of pounds in energy charges. This was met with lots of complaints along the lines of "this is endangering the elderly and school children!" (who are obviously always walking to and from school at 1 in the morning(!)). Eventually a new council was voted in and undid all that.
What do you need a floodlight for?
IMHO there is way too much lighting - residential areas just plain don't need outdoor lighting at all; what's wrong with just carrying a torch?
If you believe that highend graphics machines requires tweaking drivers just to make them work then you're clearly doing something wrong.
I used to use nVidia graphics cards before Intel appeared on the scene - I had far too many incidents of upgrading the kernel, or Xorg, etc. and discovering that the drivers no longer worked, then having to roll back the upgrade and wait for 6 months before nVidia got their finger out. Too many incidents of nVidia releasing broken drivers resulting in an upgrade breaking some functionality I was using. Too many bugs in the drivers that many people on the nVidia forums were reporting to be met with absolutely no response from nVidia, combined with a completely opaque bug reporting system. And finding that nVidia dropped support for old hardware long before I was ready to give it up (I don't like being forced into upgrading perfectly good hardware just because the vendor drops support).
Conversely, the Intel drivers are pretty much rock solid. When bugs are found, they can be reported and tracked using Intel's publicly accessible Bugzilla. Intel have (in my experience) resolved bugs rapidly and I've been able to check the progress of the bug fixing rather than having to sit on my hands for 2 years checking the change logs (which is what I did with nVidia), and when Intel finally decide not to support the hardware any more, the community pick up the slack to some extent because the drivers are open and well documented.
So I stand by my opinion that in my experience, nVidia hardware is more powerful but also a hell of a lot more hassle for the user, whereas Intel hardware is powerful enough to meet pretty much all non-gaming needs and Just Works.
I'm after the latter - I have absolutely no interest in gaming.
The idea that the only people interested in anything but lowend integrated graphics is gamers is just ignorant.
For home users, that pretty much is the case - there are only a few niche cases where high-end graphics are required outside of games.
Of course, for business use there are a few more cases (e.g. CAD work, etc) but still, it is a minority - we've standardised on Intel graphics because we don't need anything more powerful, they are a lot less effort, and we don't have to retire ancient hardware just because the vendor drops support.
Which was pretty much my point - there's a lot of PC hardware out there that does just work perfectly with only open drivers.
And in the end even if that is true it doesn't matter because just as the general populace doesn't care for open source drivers and running linux they also don't care about the available open source phones, both are confined to a niche.
That is irrelevant. The original question raised was "why can't we just install the latest OS like we do with PC hardware" and the answer I gave was "because there are no open drivers for much of the mobile hardware, whereas a large proportion of PC hardware does have good open drivers". None of this was about what the "general populace" cares about - I was simply explaining why phones and PCs can't currently be treated the same way in terms of software upgrades.
Outside of Intel, most of the hardware vendors don't do open source drivers and realistically intel graphics is the ass-end of desktop graphics hardware.
I certainly wouldn't call them the "ass end" - it depends what you want. If you want a top of the line gaming machine that you have to fart around with tweaking drivers to make them work, etc. all the time then Intel isn't for you. If you just want a machine that can run a modern desktop and keeps working with no farting around then Intel hardware is excellent. I'm after the latter - I have absolutely no interest in gaming. Whilst PC gamers are a significant market segment, they are certainly not the majority of PC owners, so for most people Intel hardware is probably the best choice.
Plenty of other hardware vendors write drivers or release the specs allowing others to write drivers without reverse engineering - look at all the SATA and SCSI controllers, for example - mostly vendor-written drivers.
I didn't equate "official" with "excellent", but obviously reverse engineered drivers by their very nature are going to be behind the official ones in features, performance and stability.
This certainly isn't my experience - frequently the vendor written Windows drivers are bloatware, unstable with proprietary APIs whilest the reverse engineered Linux drivers are much higher quality. Certainly not always the case, but I don't think there's a lot of correllation between the quality of a driver and whether or not it was reverse engineered.
Well, my crappy Acer Travelmate laptop is entirely supported by open drivers (ok, there is closed firmware running on some of the hardware, but I'm talking about stuff running on the CPU that has to be integrated into the OS in such a way as to prevent arbitrary OS upgrades without the vendor's help). I can install Fedora on that machine and it Just Works.
You can do that on just about any machine, it just doesn't work well and hardware support is mostly pretty crappy.
Except on my machine it does work well, including all of the hardware. Which was pretty much my point - there's a lot of PC hardware out there that does just work perfectly with only open drivers.
There are lots of bad arguments though. The standard approach is to swiftly change the topic: Whenever the block is being discussed, rapidly turn the conversation towards child pornography or (second choice) graphically violent pornography.
Herein lies half the problem with the discussions with the public that have been had over this. The politicians seem to (intentionally or not) confuse several issues:
1. Kids accidentally stumbling across porn
2. Kids intentionally looking at porn
3. Adults looking at kiddie porn (or faux kiddie porn)
4. Adults committing child abuses
(And similar arguments for violence, rape and murder... and yet we still get to see plenty of violent stuff on TV and in the papers that is probably more extreme than the faux-rape porn that they are also trying to ban).
These are all very separate issues - a filter that reduces the chance of a child accidentally sumbling upon porn is quite viable. All the big search engines have these and they do work quite well without leading to too many false positives.
Stopping people intentionally looking at porn is impossible though, and the harder you try the less legitimate stuff is going to work properly on the filtered internet connections (not just websites - lots of applications would get caught up in this too). And stopping *adults* intentionally looking at porn is never going to work with either an opt-in or opt-out system because they'd just opt-out.
And to my mind, there is a complete lack of evidence to show that looking at "extreme" porn (e.g. faux-child porn, cartoons depicting child abuse, faux-rape, etc.) is actually going to make someone go out and actually commit that act any more than watching CSI on TV will make someone go out and commit murder. It may very well be that someone who can relieve themselves watching a cartoon might be less likley to go out and actually abuse a child. So here, the reason for blocking extreme porn seems to largely be "I find what you're into in private distasteful and you should be locked up to protect me from being offended" rather than actually to protect anyone. It sounds very similar to the old anti-homosexuality laws, which were there because some people found homosexuality distasteful and therefore wanted to prevent it, rather than actually protecting people from anything.
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing.
My thoughts exactly. When you are old enough to want to see it you are old enough to see it IMHO. We need to discover another continent again so we can ship off the all the Puritans to it again.
I suggest an inflatable continent. We can slash it once we're done and let them all sink...