When someone calls, you have the right to hang up. When someone sends something, you can throw it away. You are not being forced to listen to the marketing sphiel or read the "you may have already won" letters. But, if you open a line of communication, you may be subjected to it. Just like walking in a public square opens you to people's speach, connecting your phone to a public phone network opens the door into your home.
Look, you have a phone so that you can be contacted. If you want to pick and choose who contacts you, fine. Use an answering machine or another device to filter based on the senders phone number. Otherwise, you have to deal with wrong numbers, harassing calls, potential employeers offering work, and marketing droids.
If you had read further, I stated that being together does not prevent bad things from happening. What I said was that if bad things do happen, you should be together to support each other.
Not to pick nits, but just turn off the damn ringer. I think the point is that the constitution guarentees my right to say what I want.
I actually theink the framers were speaking about political speach. My personal belief is that insulting the president and burning the flag are covered, while pornography and hate speach is not covered.
Anyway, the constitution gives freedom of speach, but never covers the freedom to have a phone no one can call.
If you don't want to be called, turn off the ringer and get an answering machine to pick up in 2 rings. If 50 million americans did that for about 2 weeks, telemarketing would have been dead long ago.
Look, I don't usualy bust someone's balls, but here goes:
My wife used to stop at the post office and leave our kid in the car seat. It was a small, one room post office and the car seat is a real PITA. When I found out she was doing that, I went ballistic.
First, nothing is more important than your kids. Not mail, not a bag of clothes, not that next hit of crack.
Second, you never know what's going to happen. If you are sepperated, then you run the risk of something happening to one party and the other is unaware of that. What if you'd fallen in the store and been knocked unconcious? What if the car had been hit by some teenagers playing around acting all 'fast and furious' in the lot? What if someone broke the window and grabbed your kid? You can't stop bad things from happening, but the least you can do is be there for yourkids when those things do happen.
Third, while reporting you to the cops might be a bit harsh, people in this world do care. I care about you and your family. If it was early, i'd stop to help jump your car. If it was late, I'd offer a ride home. I gave almost 15% of my gross income last year to charity. I care about people. Sometimes people who care offer friendly reminders like this one. Sometimes, we call the cops to make our message loud-and-clear.
In short, I think spanking is OK, repeated hitting is abuse. Letting your kid be independent is OK, but letting them run arround a store unsupervised is abuse. Definately seperating yourself from your kid just because it's convenient for you shows a lack of priority in your life.
A KVM is a recipe for screw-ups. Take a hint from the military. Have one open network and one closed network. The closed networks have no CD-R/RW, floppy, or other removable media. The closed network is clearly marked as closed. The closed boxen are then physicaly seperated from the public network.
Having a KVM would only be acceptable if the login script set your desktop background to a bright orange/red bitmap and a one-minute screensaver. You never know when some tool will forget what machine he is on. Having seperate monitors and keyboards can be a pain, but it's well worth it to prevent code leaks.
Untill recently, I had never played a MMO. Let me try and share my answers to your questions.
First, if you are not playing in any given month, don't pay for that month. I have a DAoC and Ragnarok account that I play, on and off, throughout the year.
Second, of those games (I play a few more, but those are the main ones), one of those is free, the other is $18. Of course, monthly fees apply. The experience on a pay-per-month MMO is slightly better than a free MMO. People tend to be more community-oriented vice battle-oriented.
I can't really go into depth about why paying $45 for a box and then $13/month is the model they came up with. I remember that a bunch of people said it will never work. Well, 8 years later, they are alive and kicking. I can still log into UO with my username and password and have my character waiting. Where are all the Phantasy Star Online people now? They are all SooL. Who really knows why.
Uuh, in about 90% of the orginizations out there, if a PC breaks, you have to move about 5' to find another. In my office, we keep a spare computer (an older p3) on a abandoned desk.
Besides, even if you don't have a spare PC online, the workgroup manager will have a replacement to your office inside an hour. Having a worker with no PC to work on is a big no-no.
Yeah, look at the power cable coming into your house and calculate the ammount of power used in kilowatt-hours...Oh, that's right, we already do that./sarcasm
It will be coming. Bandwidth is a resource. Like all resources, it is limited. When people start grabbing more and more, the prices will be adjusted.
This explains the difference from baud and bit: http://www.totse.com/en/technology/telecommu nicati ons/bitsbaud.html
And this explains how phase and level can combine to form a pattern of bits: http://www.airlinx.com/details/QAMAirlinx.h tml
There is also some printed material I have that talks about modem "chirping". Basicly, the only interesting part of a wave is the peak or trough. Someone came up with a technique that allows you to send the part of the wave just before and after the peak or trough. This allows faster transmission by not waiting for the carrier to complete a cycle.
Yeah, Kazaa and bit-torrent throws all that out the window. If you have 3000 customers, odds are that 500 of them will have peak utilization over a 24-hour period. One step to eliminate that would be to slowly migrate all the power users to a single DSLAM and then throttle the DSLAM to core connection. However, over time, more and more users will utilize more and more bandwidth. After all, if I'm paying $60/month, why shouldn't I be a P2P mofo?
The only real solution to the bandwidth problem is to start charging people for what they use.
Why don't you like that? I think it'd be great to have people come to realize that bandwidth is a finite resource. Your ISP only has a few OC-whatevers. Mine has a single T-3 (45mbps) feeding about 3000 customers with DSL and another 3000 with dialup. We are told that we are buying a 1.5mbps DSL line, but there just isn't enough pipe to give everyone what they are paying for.
I think it'd be great that these customers would only grab things off the internet worth paying for. Maybe people would realize that downloading Girls-Gone-Wild and pirate ISOs just isn't worth it. It wouldn't bother me to pay $3 to try out RedHat 9.1 beta, so I'd be, basicly, unaffected.
The only problem with a varible bill is that you can never count on a specific price. Electricity and water usage is always about tha same. But have you ever gotten a big bill after washing your car or hosting a weekend LAN party? It'd suck to not know till the end of the month how much my DSL bill is.
8-bit encoding at 8000 samples per second. The raw PCM signal is 64kbps. Some older systems used 7-bit encoding which produced a 56kbps stream.
By time your voice enters the big multiplexers, a lot of that is recovered. Any bits covering time you aren't speaking are discarded. The remaining stuff is compressed to about 16kbps for longhaul transmission.
As for your 56k modem problem. The carrier cannot excede 1/2 of the sample rate. Remember when you has a 300 BAUD modem? Then it became 14.4k with no BAUD on the end. That was when the actual data rates became higher than the carrier. Basicly, a combination of FM and AM along with phase changes allows a 4khz carrier to contain 53kbps of data. It's pretty creepy stuff once you start reading about it.
It'd be a great way to end piracy. Just start charging people 10 cents per megabyte (mibibyte?) of download. Then the ISPs could be required to give royalties to media producers.
I could seriously see the day that we pay per bit, but right now, people would revolt agianst it. It's too hard to tell someone they have to pay for something that used to be "free".
I'm not trying to be an asshole, but you have to block the ISP. The only way to bring about change is to bring things to a head. Once these international customers start asking questions, tell them that their ISP sucks. Then they will either change ISPs or leave you. Hell, they might do both.
But once enough American ISPs blackhole their Asian peers, people will start to notice. The Asian customers will respond by moving to ISPs that are not spammer/DDoS friendly. The bad ISPs will dry up and the good will flourish. Just one simple phonecall to your ISP and you can be the lynchpin of that movement.
If your ISP refuses to blackhole the subnets, then have your contract ammended to state that you refuse to pay for traffic originating from there. Then blackhole them at your premise router. It may not help in a DDoS, but spam will dry up.
Also, if you are under a DDoS attack, your ISP has no choice but to blackhole the offenders. If you are bombed by an international customer and your American ISP does not help stop the attack, they can be held responsible. They could even be brought up on criminal charges for aiding a crime.
Why can't you just call your ISP and request that they blackhole the traffic from the offending subnets? It may seem harsh, but if a Pacific-Rim ISP is generating DDoS traffic, then cut them off. If a customer in that area contacts you via a third party, explain to them that their ISP sucks and they should get another. Or they can use an annonymizer on a case-by-case basis.
I know I have toyed with the idea of just blackholing Korea and China.
Thanks for bringing that up. Maybe I can come up with some script on a floppy to chmod a lot of stuff in/bin and/usr/bin to root-only execute.
As it stands, the kiosk is being used by mostly incompetent people. We even silk-screened "click here for the interweb" onto the bottom of the monitor to help people out.
Maybe it'll just be easier to set up a firewall and block all incoming and outgoing and then allow port 80. If anyone complains about not getting service, we can open up more ports as needed. Well, that's the poor-mans way. I suppose I should run a sniffer for a week and see what ports are actually used, but I'm too lazy for that.
Our NICs support PXE booting. The Knoppix CDROM has a ClusterKnoppix application. You launch it and it starts a DHCP server. The clients get an IP addy and then go to the server in order to boot.
If you need more help, reply and I'll give you a bunch of links.
Tha main problem with a DVD version is that it'd take too long to boot. They already use a lot of compression to get 2GB of stuff onto a 700MB CD. Going up to a DVD would slow down the load times and make it inconvenient.
On a side note, we use Knoppix in our Internet Boutique. We have one server booting off a CD and then the stations boot via PXE from the server. At the end of the day, the last one out flips the main circuit-breaker and all the machines go dark. In the morning, the server comes on automatically and the clients come up when we push the power buttons. No fsck, no worry about configurations. An added benifit is that if anyone tries to seize our machines for forensic analasys, we can point out that none of them have a hard drive to analyze.
UUh, maybe I'm missing something here. Why would you not want a customer to see all the data associated with his server.
I work in a network shop that provides connectivity to remote buildings on our campus. Each building has a psuedo-network admin. Usually a second job that some paper-pusher takes to get in good with his boss. By default, the building admin has his home page set to a MRTG log showing every switch in his building. They are trained to look for network spikes on user's ports and notify us so we can disable that port, if nescessary. He can also monitor everything from fan speed to temprature setings on his router and the core router for our remote users.
I hope ID releases the Doom3 demo on linux and MacOS-X first like they did with Quake3. That would be a real boost to the linux guys (both of us) in our local gaming group.
It's almost impossible to get people to install linux when they could be playing BF1942 or C&C:Generals instead. I can only imagine the work we would have to put in the weekend that the Doom3 demo for Linux only comes out. Maybe some of these wankers will ask us to help them set up RedHat then.
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Nothing compels us to listen to or view...
When someone calls, you have the right to hang up. When someone sends something, you can throw it away. You are not being forced to listen to the marketing sphiel or read the "you may have already won" letters. But, if you open a line of communication, you may be subjected to it. Just like walking in a public square opens you to people's speach, connecting your phone to a public phone network opens the door into your home.
Look, you have a phone so that you can be contacted. If you want to pick and choose who contacts you, fine. Use an answering machine or another device to filter based on the senders phone number. Otherwise, you have to deal with wrong numbers, harassing calls, potential employeers offering work, and marketing droids.
If you had read further, I stated that being together does not prevent bad things from happening. What I said was that if bad things do happen, you should be together to support each other.
Not to pick nits, but just turn off the damn ringer. I think the point is that the constitution guarentees my right to say what I want.
I actually theink the framers were speaking about political speach. My personal belief is that insulting the president and burning the flag are covered, while pornography and hate speach is not covered.
Anyway, the constitution gives freedom of speach, but never covers the freedom to have a phone no one can call.
If you don't want to be called, turn off the ringer and get an answering machine to pick up in 2 rings. If 50 million americans did that for about 2 weeks, telemarketing would have been dead long ago.
Wow, that looks exactly like a spellcheck function in PERL! :)
Look, I don't usualy bust someone's balls, but here goes:
My wife used to stop at the post office and leave our kid in the car seat. It was a small, one room post office and the car seat is a real PITA. When I found out she was doing that, I went ballistic.
First, nothing is more important than your kids. Not mail, not a bag of clothes, not that next hit of crack.
Second, you never know what's going to happen. If you are sepperated, then you run the risk of something happening to one party and the other is unaware of that. What if you'd fallen in the store and been knocked unconcious? What if the car had been hit by some teenagers playing around acting all 'fast and furious' in the lot? What if someone broke the window and grabbed your kid? You can't stop bad things from happening, but the least you can do is be there for yourkids when those things do happen.
Third, while reporting you to the cops might be a bit harsh, people in this world do care. I care about you and your family. If it was early, i'd stop to help jump your car. If it was late, I'd offer a ride home. I gave almost 15% of my gross income last year to charity. I care about people. Sometimes people who care offer friendly reminders like this one. Sometimes, we call the cops to make our message loud-and-clear.
In short, I think spanking is OK, repeated hitting is abuse. Letting your kid be independent is OK, but letting them run arround a store unsupervised is abuse. Definately seperating yourself from your kid just because it's convenient for you shows a lack of priority in your life.
A KVM is a recipe for screw-ups. Take a hint from the military. Have one open network and one closed network. The closed networks have no CD-R/RW, floppy, or other removable media. The closed network is clearly marked as closed. The closed boxen are then physicaly seperated from the public network.
Having a KVM would only be acceptable if the login script set your desktop background to a bright orange/red bitmap and a one-minute screensaver. You never know when some tool will forget what machine he is on. Having seperate monitors and keyboards can be a pain, but it's well worth it to prevent code leaks.
Untill recently, I had never played a MMO. Let me try and share my answers to your questions.
First, if you are not playing in any given month, don't pay for that month. I have a DAoC and Ragnarok account that I play, on and off, throughout the year.
Second, of those games (I play a few more, but those are the main ones), one of those is free, the other is $18. Of course, monthly fees apply. The experience on a pay-per-month MMO is slightly better than a free MMO. People tend to be more community-oriented vice battle-oriented.
I can't really go into depth about why paying $45 for a box and then $13/month is the model they came up with. I remember that a bunch of people said it will never work. Well, 8 years later, they are alive and kicking. I can still log into UO with my username and password and have my character waiting. Where are all the Phantasy Star Online people now? They are all SooL. Who really knows why.
Uuh, in about 90% of the orginizations out there, if a PC breaks, you have to move about 5' to find another. In my office, we keep a spare computer (an older p3) on a abandoned desk.
Besides, even if you don't have a spare PC online, the workgroup manager will have a replacement to your office inside an hour. Having a worker with no PC to work on is a big no-no.
Yeah, look at the power cable coming into your house and calculate the ammount of power used in kilowatt-hours...Oh, that's right, we already do that. /sarcasm
It will be coming. Bandwidth is a resource. Like all resources, it is limited. When people start grabbing more and more, the prices will be adjusted.
No problem. I work in telecom. Most of our systems are T-1 and up, but some of us old-schoolers still remember when the modem and the DS-0 was king.
Look into clusterKnoppix.
This explains the difference from baud and bit:u nicati ons/bitsbaud.html
h tml
http://www.totse.com/en/technology/telecomm
And this explains how phase and level can combine to form a pattern of bits:
http://www.airlinx.com/details/QAMAirlinx.
There is also some printed material I have that talks about modem "chirping". Basicly, the only interesting part of a wave is the peak or trough. Someone came up with a technique that allows you to send the part of the wave just before and after the peak or trough. This allows faster transmission by not waiting for the carrier to complete a cycle.
Yeah, Kazaa and bit-torrent throws all that out the window. If you have 3000 customers, odds are that 500 of them will have peak utilization over a 24-hour period. One step to eliminate that would be to slowly migrate all the power users to a single DSLAM and then throttle the DSLAM to core connection. However, over time, more and more users will utilize more and more bandwidth. After all, if I'm paying $60/month, why shouldn't I be a P2P mofo?
The only real solution to the bandwidth problem is to start charging people for what they use.
I have often wondered about 56k. Do you have any background on how 56k gets in sync with PCM in order to manipulate the stream.
I remember spending hours reading about x/y o-scope patterns on low-speed modems and how they convey data.
Why don't you like that? I think it'd be great to have people come to realize that bandwidth is a finite resource. Your ISP only has a few OC-whatevers. Mine has a single T-3 (45mbps) feeding about 3000 customers with DSL and another 3000 with dialup. We are told that we are buying a 1.5mbps DSL line, but there just isn't enough pipe to give everyone what they are paying for.
I think it'd be great that these customers would only grab things off the internet worth paying for. Maybe people would realize that downloading Girls-Gone-Wild and pirate ISOs just isn't worth it. It wouldn't bother me to pay $3 to try out RedHat 9.1 beta, so I'd be, basicly, unaffected.
The only problem with a varible bill is that you can never count on a specific price. Electricity and water usage is always about tha same. But have you ever gotten a big bill after washing your car or hosting a weekend LAN party? It'd suck to not know till the end of the month how much my DSL bill is.
8-bit encoding at 8000 samples per second. The raw PCM signal is 64kbps. Some older systems used 7-bit encoding which produced a 56kbps stream.
By time your voice enters the big multiplexers, a lot of that is recovered. Any bits covering time you aren't speaking are discarded. The remaining stuff is compressed to about 16kbps for longhaul transmission.
As for your 56k modem problem. The carrier cannot excede 1/2 of the sample rate. Remember when you has a 300 BAUD modem? Then it became 14.4k with no BAUD on the end. That was when the actual data rates became higher than the carrier. Basicly, a combination of FM and AM along with phase changes allows a 4khz carrier to contain 53kbps of data. It's pretty creepy stuff once you start reading about it.
It'd be a great way to end piracy. Just start charging people 10 cents per megabyte (mibibyte?) of download. Then the ISPs could be required to give royalties to media producers.
I could seriously see the day that we pay per bit, but right now, people would revolt agianst it. It's too hard to tell someone they have to pay for something that used to be "free".
I'm not trying to be an asshole, but you have to block the ISP. The only way to bring about change is to bring things to a head. Once these international customers start asking questions, tell them that their ISP sucks. Then they will either change ISPs or leave you. Hell, they might do both.
But once enough American ISPs blackhole their Asian peers, people will start to notice. The Asian customers will respond by moving to ISPs that are not spammer/DDoS friendly. The bad ISPs will dry up and the good will flourish. Just one simple phonecall to your ISP and you can be the lynchpin of that movement.
If your ISP refuses to blackhole the subnets, then have your contract ammended to state that you refuse to pay for traffic originating from there. Then blackhole them at your premise router. It may not help in a DDoS, but spam will dry up.
Also, if you are under a DDoS attack, your ISP has no choice but to blackhole the offenders. If you are bombed by an international customer and your American ISP does not help stop the attack, they can be held responsible. They could even be brought up on criminal charges for aiding a crime.
Why can't you just call your ISP and request that they blackhole the traffic from the offending subnets? It may seem harsh, but if a Pacific-Rim ISP is generating DDoS traffic, then cut them off. If a customer in that area contacts you via a third party, explain to them that their ISP sucks and they should get another. Or they can use an annonymizer on a case-by-case basis.
I know I have toyed with the idea of just blackholing Korea and China.
Thanks for bringing that up. Maybe I can come up with some script on a floppy to chmod a lot of stuff in /bin and /usr/bin to root-only execute.
As it stands, the kiosk is being used by mostly incompetent people. We even silk-screened "click here for the interweb" onto the bottom of the monitor to help people out.
Maybe it'll just be easier to set up a firewall and block all incoming and outgoing and then allow port 80. If anyone complains about not getting service, we can open up more ports as needed. Well, that's the poor-mans way. I suppose I should run a sniffer for a week and see what ports are actually used, but I'm too lazy for that.
Our NICs support PXE booting. The Knoppix CDROM has a ClusterKnoppix application. You launch it and it starts a DHCP server. The clients get an IP addy and then go to the server in order to boot.
If you need more help, reply and I'll give you a bunch of links.
Tha main problem with a DVD version is that it'd take too long to boot. They already use a lot of compression to get 2GB of stuff onto a 700MB CD. Going up to a DVD would slow down the load times and make it inconvenient.
On a side note, we use Knoppix in our Internet Boutique. We have one server booting off a CD and then the stations boot via PXE from the server. At the end of the day, the last one out flips the main circuit-breaker and all the machines go dark. In the morning, the server comes on automatically and the clients come up when we push the power buttons. No fsck, no worry about configurations. An added benifit is that if anyone tries to seize our machines for forensic analasys, we can point out that none of them have a hard drive to analyze.
UUh, maybe I'm missing something here. Why would you not want a customer to see all the data associated with his server.
I work in a network shop that provides connectivity to remote buildings on our campus. Each building has a psuedo-network admin. Usually a second job that some paper-pusher takes to get in good with his boss. By default, the building admin has his home page set to a MRTG log showing every switch in his building. They are trained to look for network spikes on user's ports and notify us so we can disable that port, if nescessary. He can also monitor everything from fan speed to temprature setings on his router and the core router for our remote users.
I hope ID releases the Doom3 demo on linux and MacOS-X first like they did with Quake3. That would be a real boost to the linux guys (both of us) in our local gaming group.
It's almost impossible to get people to install linux when they could be playing BF1942 or C&C:Generals instead. I can only imagine the work we would have to put in the weekend that the Doom3 demo for Linux only comes out. Maybe some of these wankers will ask us to help them set up RedHat then.
Hope that thing was ATX compliant...