No artificial cap needed, the link is simply saturated and instead of taking one piece of the pie, you take 10.
Nope, the internet doesn't work like that. If a router is receiving more data than will fit down the link it will simply drop packets stochasticly, irrespective of what logical connection they belong to. Of course, it's possible to track connections and throttle them individually, but that's not generally what routers on the internet do. I guess there may be some interesting interplay between the slow-start/fast-backoff mechanisms within the concurrent TCP sessions, but I doubt that would give you a significant gain.
In Europe most people buy subsidized phones too. But unless you want a very expensive phone + plan, it will add up to hundreds of euros, not thousands, over two years. Buying phone and service separately is slightly cheaper, but not spectacularly.
The big money savings can be had by buying a used phone - when the MNOs give people a subsidised upgrade to replace their 18 month old phone, those 18 month old phones often end up on ebay... and because there are so many of them (and seemingly so few people looking for them) they go for far less than the original retail price. If you're happy to have an 18 month old used phone in practically brand new condition (which the MNOs probably only stopped selling a few weeks ago) then this is a good option. Unlocking is very cheap too.
Wow, that seems like a rip off. What on earth does your plan provide you? Unlimited data and no roaming charges even off continent? On the other hand, this is one reason I still don't have a smart phone. I can't imagine the utility justifies the extra guaranteed per-month expenditure.
I got a HTC Dream off ebay and unlocked it (total cost: £140), stuck in a Three PAYG SIM (cost: £0). Every £5 I credit to my account gets me 150MB of free data for up to 3 months and a bunch of free SMS messages. Paying £5 will get me a "2GB for 1 month" package. There are no restrictions on tethering. I probably average somewhere around £5 / month or so, which basically is just the cost of calls since I pretty much never exceed the 150MB freebee.
Admittedly the wifi stopped working on the phone after a couple of years, but the same would be true if I had bought it on contract so it makes little difference.
It would reduce the amount of waste too (which is another reason the phone manufacturers like it - more sales) - How many people *actually* need to upgrade their phone every 2 years (and would decline to do so if they had to pay for it)?
I'm still looking for a "bring your own phone" GSM plan with good pricing.
Might be a silly question, but can't you just buy the cheapest of the cheap phone from them and swap the SIM into a decent handset? (and ebay the phone you had to buy)
A switch isn't necessarily a computer but a router definitely is.
The only difference between a router and a switch is the network layer they operate upon - switches operate on layer 2 traffic, routers operate on layer 3 traffic (or potentially layer 4 traffic if it is doing NAT and stateful firewalling). In fact, most modern managed switches have some level of layer 3 support (e.g. IGMP snooping).
I'm not even clear that the article is talking about a router - it could very easily be talking about a wireless bridge, in which case it too is only operating on layer 2 traffic.
How about we stop babying luddites and tell them to swim or sink. The ease of using a new model of same class of software has nothing to do with being a nerd. People buy new TVs with vastly different controls to their old TVs and adjust. Many of the same people they resist learning new tools of trade out of resentment of change in the workplace, which they hide behind a screen of technological difficulty. What's the difference between Word, Pages, Open Office Writer, etc. Function location and some workflow differences. None of it is technological, it's simply design.
Don't defend the dumb. Embrace change, it makes us smarter.
The difference here is that when someone gets a new TV they are getting a benefit from it, which offsets the need to learn new stuff. I.e. you just upgraded your crappy old 24" screen to a shiny new 50" one so there is incentive in figuring it out (not to mention the fact that TVs are pretty easy to figure out compared to most desktop software). When your employer mandates that you are going to have to change to a new bit of software what essentially does exactly what the old software does then there is no "instant reward" for you, so you're probably going to resent having to learn this new thing (especially as, inevitably, you discover some functionality missing... and this isn't to say that one bit of software has worse functionality to another, but that the functionality has minor differences so that whichever way you go you are likley to find some functionality that you're used to is missing.)
It does seem to me that a lot of the circumstances you describe have a better solution, be that PDF, web based forms or whatever else.
Just because there are better solutions doesn't mean that people will use them.
I have customers who *never* send me a plain text email - they send me a word attachment instead. Yes, it's stupid, annoying and wastes my time (waiting for OO Writer to fire up is a lot slower than just reading a plain text email in Alpine), but no amount of wishing will make them stop doing this sort of crazyness. Similarly customers who, when reporting an error, will send me a screen shot embedded in a word document rather than just copying/pasting the error text (or even a screenshot attached to an email rather than being wrapped in a word doc). Again, I have no clue why anyone would do this but the fact remains that they do and I have to deal with it.
Similarly, most people use closed systems such as MSN IM, Skype, etc. instead of the better (more open and therefore more interoperable) solutions such as XMPP and SIP. They simply know no different, and when it is explained to them they usually tend to think that this isn't important enough to them to bother changing. Personally I use XMPP and SIP for my communication needs... when people discover that they can't contact me via MSN and Skype they just end up phoning me instead.
In my experience, no one trains anyone on shit, which may be your point.
Whether of not there is an official training course, there are still training costs associated with any change in the UI - you lose productivity while those staff are "training themselves". Of course, this applies whether you move to a new version of MS Office with a fundamentally different UI, or to Open Office.
I hear that Armin Meiwes used everyday kitchen implements to kill and cannibalize a man. Excuse my rhetoric, but should we ban those too?
(I'm sure a bit more parental guidance could have saved that two-year old. In the mean time, the adults of Australia would like to be treated like... well... adults.)
Crazyness abounds. I recently purchased a new cutlery set (just your plain old table knives, forks and spoons, nothing especially sharp). Here in the UK you're allowed to get married, leave home and have kids when you're 16. The label on the cutlery set stated that it wasn't to be sold to anyone under 21. I've got no clue how someone who left home at 16 actually manages to live, given that they are banned from purchasing so much common stuff until they get to 18 or 21 (e.g. the aforementioned cutlery, many cleaning products, solvents including many household paints, etc.)
Assuming the phone times were accurate and in sync (big assumption)
Its not that big an assumption. Phone networks have some pretty tight tolerances on time synchronisation in order to work (they tend to use GPS receivers and rubidium clocks all over the place to keep things in sync), so it is reasonable to believe that the time stamps on phone records will be pretty accurate. Of course, the handsets themselves may not be that accurate (although they tend to have clocks set from the network these days anyway), but any subpoenaed call records should be pretty reasonable.
Hey, that's great. You're in Europe. We're all impressed. Obviously, as should be inferred by my references to Clear Channel, I was talking about the US. But don't let that stop you from posting irrelevant nitpicks.
Taking 30 seconds to glance at a satellite directory tells me there are a fair few satellites carrying free to air commercial radio and TV visible from the US. For example, NSS-806 at 40.5W appears to carry 194 free to air TV and radio channels.
No matter what part of the world you're in, claiming "people can't tune into satellite for free" is pretty much universally bogus and ill informed.
Unless you work for a media company, or have some other legitimate deal set up, you're pirating it, and I don't think Gizzmonic was referring to criminals or employees of the broadcasters.
Eh? Sorry, can you just explain that?
First of all, piracy is a war-like act committed by private parties (not affiliated with any government) that engage in acts of robbery and/or criminal violence at sea.
Secondly, a variety of _public_ TV channels and radio stations are broadcast in the clear from many satellites. These channels are intended to be received by the general public - receiving them is no more illegal than tuning your radio in to an FM radio station. I receive TV and Radio from a cluster of 3 satellites located at 28.2E (Astra 2A, 2B and 2D) and a satellite at 28.5E (Eurobird 1).
You're only partially correct about the limitation: normally MBR disks are limited to four PRIMARY partitions. The limit on non-primary (extended) partitions is a bit more generous.
Nope, an extended partition is just a different type of primary partition - your extended + primary partitions can't sum to more than 4. The only thing an extended partition may contain is one or more logical volumes - these are what you can put your actual data in, not the extended partition itself.
So if you already have 4 primary partitions, you cannot create an extended partition (and thus any logical volumes) without deleting one of them. You _could_ replace the primary Windows partition with an extended partition and then put all the data it contained in a logical volume within it (assuming Windows is happy to exist in a logical volume?), but this involves much shuffling of data because you have to insert the extended boot record at the start of the partition, so it certainly isn't a trivial operation.
The one reservation I'd have with that is that it's not just your own bandwidth you're wasting, but a company that provides a free service
Nope, you're not wasting Skype's bandwidth. Although you might be wasting the bandwidth of the suckers who allow Skype to proxy via them if you're not careful.
I'd be more inclined to use a SIP based system though, since it isn't proprietary and does the same job. One of the many SIP softphones that do video should do the job, such as Ekiga.
I now use Google Talk and Skype because some of my contacts prefer one or the other. It would suck if I needed to use 3 different types of programs programs (1 for chat, 1 for file transfers and 1 for voice) but my contacts chose different incompatible programs (as it is now with Skype and GTalk).
Generally there is little problem transparently gatewaying between open protocols such as XMPP (which is used by Google Talk, and many other IM services). The reason you are having to use 2 incompatible programs is because Skype is proprietary.
But is has one main advantage over all other clients: decent encryption. When governments start complaining they can't decrypt the calls, like the Indian did, you know you're on the right track.
Didn't the Chinese government end up arresting rather a lot of people based on the contents of supposedly encrypted instant messages that had been supplied to them by Skype?
Does it support text chat? I use Skype mainly for text chat, but sometimes I also call and use it as voice chat for games (not having the voice chat app and the game on the same computer is helpful).
SIP does support text chat (although I don't think it is widely supported by the VoIP servers), but what's wrong with XMPP for text chat anyway?
You can get those SPA's to work? Shit, you must be pro!
I've worked at a couple of organizations where they rolled out those SPA's on a relatively large scale, and we couldn't get them to be stable and consistent.
I wouldn't touch that shit for mission critical stuff.
Never had a problem with the SPA3102. Seems rock solid, although it does occasionally suffer minor echo but I think that's caused by some odd impedance on my POTS line.
_However_ I'm not entirely sure why you would use them on a "large scale" - they are perfect for home use or for a small office with a single phone line, but for largish scale stuff you'd be using ISDN on the PSTN side (SS7 or SIGTRAN for even larger stuff) and on the internal side you may as well chuck out your POTS phones and get SIP ones, given the comparative costs of ATAs and SIP phones.
As an example of small office use: myself and my business partner both work from our respective homes. We have a central Callweaver server and each have an SPA3102 on our POTS lines. Incoming calls on the POTS lines go to our respective phones (both an analogue handset connected to the SPA for emergency use and also SIP phones), outgoing PSTN calls go either via POTS or a commercial SIP-PSTN gateway, depending on the destination. Calls between us go purely over SIP. Customers call a DID which rings both our offices. Calls can be freely transferred between extensions across the whole system, even though the offices are geographically separate.
There are a few SIP devices that I consider woefully unstable (the UTStarcom F1000G 802.11g phone is the most notably crap device I think), but the SPA3102 isn't one of them.
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No artificial cap needed, the link is simply saturated and instead of taking one piece of the pie, you take 10.
Nope, the internet doesn't work like that. If a router is receiving more data than will fit down the link it will simply drop packets stochasticly, irrespective of what logical connection they belong to. Of course, it's possible to track connections and throttle them individually, but that's not generally what routers on the internet do. I guess there may be some interesting interplay between the slow-start/fast-backoff mechanisms within the concurrent TCP sessions, but I doubt that would give you a significant gain.
In Europe most people buy subsidized phones too. But unless you want a very expensive phone + plan, it will add up to hundreds of euros, not thousands, over two years. Buying phone and service separately is slightly cheaper, but not spectacularly.
The big money savings can be had by buying a used phone - when the MNOs give people a subsidised upgrade to replace their 18 month old phone, those 18 month old phones often end up on ebay... and because there are so many of them (and seemingly so few people looking for them) they go for far less than the original retail price. If you're happy to have an 18 month old used phone in practically brand new condition (which the MNOs probably only stopped selling a few weeks ago) then this is a good option. Unlocking is very cheap too.
Meanwhile, Brits pay a per-device tax for television. (Hurr durr...)
No, we don't. You're misinformed.
Wow, that seems like a rip off. What on earth does your plan provide you? Unlimited data and no roaming charges even off continent? On the other hand, this is one reason I still don't have a smart phone. I can't imagine the utility justifies the extra guaranteed per-month expenditure.
I got a HTC Dream off ebay and unlocked it (total cost: £140), stuck in a Three PAYG SIM (cost: £0). Every £5 I credit to my account gets me 150MB of free data for up to 3 months and a bunch of free SMS messages. Paying £5 will get me a "2GB for 1 month" package. There are no restrictions on tethering. I probably average somewhere around £5 / month or so, which basically is just the cost of calls since I pretty much never exceed the 150MB freebee.
Admittedly the wifi stopped working on the phone after a couple of years, but the same would be true if I had bought it on contract so it makes little difference.
It would reduce the amount of waste too (which is another reason the phone manufacturers like it - more sales) - How many people *actually* need to upgrade their phone every 2 years (and would decline to do so if they had to pay for it)?
I'm still looking for a "bring your own phone" GSM plan with good pricing.
Might be a silly question, but can't you just buy the cheapest of the cheap phone from them and swap the SIM into a decent handset? (and ebay the phone you had to buy)
A switch isn't necessarily a computer but a router definitely is.
The only difference between a router and a switch is the network layer they operate upon - switches operate on layer 2 traffic, routers operate on layer 3 traffic (or potentially layer 4 traffic if it is doing NAT and stateful firewalling). In fact, most modern managed switches have some level of layer 3 support (e.g. IGMP snooping).
I'm not even clear that the article is talking about a router - it could very easily be talking about a wireless bridge, in which case it too is only operating on layer 2 traffic.
How about we stop babying luddites and tell them to swim or sink. The ease of using a new model of same class of software has nothing to do with being a nerd. People buy new TVs with vastly different controls to their old TVs and adjust. Many of the same people they resist learning new tools of trade out of resentment of change in the workplace, which they hide behind a screen of technological difficulty. What's the difference between Word, Pages, Open Office Writer, etc. Function location and some workflow differences. None of it is technological, it's simply design.
Don't defend the dumb. Embrace change, it makes us smarter.
The difference here is that when someone gets a new TV they are getting a benefit from it, which offsets the need to learn new stuff. I.e. you just upgraded your crappy old 24" screen to a shiny new 50" one so there is incentive in figuring it out (not to mention the fact that TVs are pretty easy to figure out compared to most desktop software). When your employer mandates that you are going to have to change to a new bit of software what essentially does exactly what the old software does then there is no "instant reward" for you, so you're probably going to resent having to learn this new thing (especially as, inevitably, you discover some functionality missing... and this isn't to say that one bit of software has worse functionality to another, but that the functionality has minor differences so that whichever way you go you are likley to find some functionality that you're used to is missing.)
It does seem to me that a lot of the circumstances you describe have a better solution, be that PDF, web based forms or whatever else.
Just because there are better solutions doesn't mean that people will use them.
I have customers who *never* send me a plain text email - they send me a word attachment instead. Yes, it's stupid, annoying and wastes my time (waiting for OO Writer to fire up is a lot slower than just reading a plain text email in Alpine), but no amount of wishing will make them stop doing this sort of crazyness. Similarly customers who, when reporting an error, will send me a screen shot embedded in a word document rather than just copying/pasting the error text (or even a screenshot attached to an email rather than being wrapped in a word doc). Again, I have no clue why anyone would do this but the fact remains that they do and I have to deal with it.
Similarly, most people use closed systems such as MSN IM, Skype, etc. instead of the better (more open and therefore more interoperable) solutions such as XMPP and SIP. They simply know no different, and when it is explained to them they usually tend to think that this isn't important enough to them to bother changing. Personally I use XMPP and SIP for my communication needs... when people discover that they can't contact me via MSN and Skype they just end up phoning me instead.
In my experience, no one trains anyone on shit, which may be your point.
Whether of not there is an official training course, there are still training costs associated with any change in the UI - you lose productivity while those staff are "training themselves". Of course, this applies whether you move to a new version of MS Office with a fundamentally different UI, or to Open Office.
I hear that Armin Meiwes used everyday kitchen implements to kill and cannibalize a man. Excuse my rhetoric, but should we ban those too?
(I'm sure a bit more parental guidance could have saved that two-year old. In the mean time, the adults of Australia would like to be treated like... well... adults.)
Crazyness abounds. I recently purchased a new cutlery set (just your plain old table knives, forks and spoons, nothing especially sharp). Here in the UK you're allowed to get married, leave home and have kids when you're 16. The label on the cutlery set stated that it wasn't to be sold to anyone under 21. I've got no clue how someone who left home at 16 actually manages to live, given that they are banned from purchasing so much common stuff until they get to 18 or 21 (e.g. the aforementioned cutlery, many cleaning products, solvents including many household paints, etc.)
Assuming the phone times were accurate and in sync (big assumption)
Its not that big an assumption. Phone networks have some pretty tight tolerances on time synchronisation in order to work (they tend to use GPS receivers and rubidium clocks all over the place to keep things in sync), so it is reasonable to believe that the time stamps on phone records will be pretty accurate. Of course, the handsets themselves may not be that accurate (although they tend to have clocks set from the network these days anyway), but any subpoenaed call records should be pretty reasonable.
Hey, that's great. You're in Europe. We're all impressed. Obviously, as should be inferred by my references to Clear Channel, I was talking about the US. But don't let that stop you from posting irrelevant nitpicks.
Taking 30 seconds to glance at a satellite directory tells me there are a fair few satellites carrying free to air commercial radio and TV visible from the US. For example, NSS-806 at 40.5W appears to carry 194 free to air TV and radio channels.
No matter what part of the world you're in, claiming "people can't tune into satellite for free" is pretty much universally bogus and ill informed.
and commercial satellite television services like Dish and DirecTV
You do know that the Astra 2 / Eurobird constellation carries commercial satellite television services (which are transmitted in the clear), right?
Unless you work for a media company, or have some other legitimate deal set up, you're pirating it, and I don't think Gizzmonic was referring to criminals or employees of the broadcasters.
Eh? Sorry, can you just explain that?
First of all, piracy is a war-like act committed by private parties (not affiliated with any government) that engage in acts of robbery and/or criminal violence at sea.
Secondly, a variety of _public_ TV channels and radio stations are broadcast in the clear from many satellites. These channels are intended to be received by the general public - receiving them is no more illegal than tuning your radio in to an FM radio station. I receive TV and Radio from a cluster of 3 satellites located at 28.2E (Astra 2A, 2B and 2D) and a satellite at 28.5E (Eurobird 1).
People can't tune in to satellite for free
Err.. they can't? Since when? (for the record: I receive satellite TV and radio for free)
And what about the poor innocent sods who happen to be running a website on a shared (probably compromised) server?
You're only partially correct about the limitation: normally MBR disks are limited to four PRIMARY partitions. The limit on non-primary (extended) partitions is a bit more generous.
Nope, an extended partition is just a different type of primary partition - your extended + primary partitions can't sum to more than 4. The only thing an extended partition may contain is one or more logical volumes - these are what you can put your actual data in, not the extended partition itself.
So if you already have 4 primary partitions, you cannot create an extended partition (and thus any logical volumes) without deleting one of them. You _could_ replace the primary Windows partition with an extended partition and then put all the data it contained in a logical volume within it (assuming Windows is happy to exist in a logical volume?), but this involves much shuffling of data because you have to insert the extended boot record at the start of the partition, so it certainly isn't a trivial operation.
everything else would just be some hacked together video chat.
But conversely, everything else probably wouldn't involve selling your childrens' kidneys to pay for it :)
The one reservation I'd have with that is that it's not just your own bandwidth you're wasting, but a company that provides a free service
Nope, you're not wasting Skype's bandwidth. Although you might be wasting the bandwidth of the suckers who allow Skype to proxy via them if you're not careful.
I'd be more inclined to use a SIP based system though, since it isn't proprietary and does the same job. One of the many SIP softphones that do video should do the job, such as Ekiga.
Facebook don't support xmpp s2s (nor do I believe have they expressed any intention of ever doing so)
I now use Google Talk and Skype because some of my contacts prefer one or the other. It would suck if I needed to use 3 different types of programs programs (1 for chat, 1 for file transfers and 1 for voice) but my contacts chose different incompatible programs (as it is now with Skype and GTalk).
Generally there is little problem transparently gatewaying between open protocols such as XMPP (which is used by Google Talk, and many other IM services). The reason you are having to use 2 incompatible programs is because Skype is proprietary.
But is has one main advantage over all other clients: decent encryption. When governments start complaining they can't decrypt the calls, like the Indian did, you know you're on the right track.
Didn't the Chinese government end up arresting rather a lot of people based on the contents of supposedly encrypted instant messages that had been supplied to them by Skype?
Does it support text chat? I use Skype mainly for text chat, but sometimes I also call and use it as voice chat for games (not having the voice chat app and the game on the same computer is helpful).
SIP does support text chat (although I don't think it is widely supported by the VoIP servers), but what's wrong with XMPP for text chat anyway?
You can get those SPA's to work? Shit, you must be pro!
I've worked at a couple of organizations where they rolled out those SPA's on a relatively large scale, and we couldn't get them to be stable and consistent.
I wouldn't touch that shit for mission critical stuff.
Never had a problem with the SPA3102. Seems rock solid, although it does occasionally suffer minor echo but I think that's caused by some odd impedance on my POTS line.
_However_ I'm not entirely sure why you would use them on a "large scale" - they are perfect for home use or for a small office with a single phone line, but for largish scale stuff you'd be using ISDN on the PSTN side (SS7 or SIGTRAN for even larger stuff) and on the internal side you may as well chuck out your POTS phones and get SIP ones, given the comparative costs of ATAs and SIP phones.
As an example of small office use: myself and my business partner both work from our respective homes. We have a central Callweaver server and each have an SPA3102 on our POTS lines. Incoming calls on the POTS lines go to our respective phones (both an analogue handset connected to the SPA for emergency use and also SIP phones), outgoing PSTN calls go either via POTS or a commercial SIP-PSTN gateway, depending on the destination. Calls between us go purely over SIP. Customers call a DID which rings both our offices. Calls can be freely transferred between extensions across the whole system, even though the offices are geographically separate.
There are a few SIP devices that I consider woefully unstable (the UTStarcom F1000G 802.11g phone is the most notably crap device I think), but the SPA3102 isn't one of them.