with mouse drivers calling daily and now the "genuine advantage" calling in daily you would expect that, by now, MS would have a database bigger than Google's. What are they going to do with this, anyway? BTW: I have a client who was told by Genuine Advantage that he had a pirated version of XP and that he had to pay for a new OS. I left him trying to find his sales receipt from a large, national, computer distributor.
.... it's just not stable running an MS operating system. I have converted many an older PC to running Linux/FreeBSD and had it run just dandy for years with no reboots. I've configured Linux desktops to use Windows-based (SMB) printers faster than a co-worker could configure a Win2k desktop to do the same thing. Drivers aren't the cause of MS's operating systems' problems... it's their basic design.
There is no reason OS-X shouldn't be at least as stable on PC hardware as Linux/FreeBSD already is.
What a joke to have someone say that MS is consistent. The only thing they are consisten in is inconsistency. Every iteration of Windows changes the way you configure it. Policies, users, networks, routes, you name it and they've changed it. From Win95 to NT to Win2k to Windows 2003 server lots changed. And it appears that they change things just to make people re-take their certification exams because the functionality hasn't changed that much.
If anything is consistent it's Unix/Linux. In fact, to those who ask me how I manage to remember all those Linux commands I tell them that those commands haven't changed much in 25 years. I had to learn a few right off the bat and a few along the way, but I can still use the same commands I learned on Unix in 1979. Not so with Windows.
Umm... the "slaves" are the machines we use so that, say, one farmer can profit from 5,000 acres just like in the old South you know... and the "food" the "slaves" "eat" is oil... and we can't have an economy without them so we look for more... oh, forget it. You get an "F".
I think you've identified a few symptoms of the basic problem.
Our current dilemma is that we have created a modern slave economy and, like any slave economy, once the slaves can no longer perform the economy goes right into the crapper. So much of civilization depends upon oil that it's frightening to contemplate. It's become a toss-up as to what will destroy us first: running out of oil or not running out of oil.
So, like any slave economy, we design our civilization around our slaves. It only makes sense to use alternative fuels because without some fuel we can't use our slaves and because any alternative to the use of slaves is unthinkable. If the slaves need food and the food is running out then go find new food.
So I think the real question is, "How do we move away from a slave economy without destroying civilization?" And maybe that question will be solved technologically by some miracle fuel. Or by some pandemic.
Maybe the invention of agriculture was our biggest mistake after all.
I'm not sure we differ that much. I think you have been trying to take an idealistic view of the situation while I'm just trying to be pragmatic.
...but I would argue that you should get the service that your service agreement describes whether you're a residential, business or government customer.
Most service agreements make some specific mention of acting as a "server". My position is that a P2P user who leaves their system up and files available worldwide at the rates our system is capable of delivering is acting as a server.
In fact, rate limiting can have a benefit to many users; at least under our conditions. Remember we aren't DSL or cable but fiber to the home and a home user can move some amazing amounts of traffic. Often unwittingly. And that traffic can overwhelm their own home network which is usually handled by cheap routers. One client called with a complaint of being unable to get email or browse the Internet. We went out there and found that her son had several P2P applications happily serving up music and video files to users from Russia, China, Australia... and more (netstat -a -n on his computer). I took his computer off their network and his mother was miraculously able to connect again.
Back at the office I took their outbound b/w down to 56k and she's been a happy camper ever since. Him too, since his inbound b/w hasn't changed.
He noted that our telco/ISP had a "Customer Care" group for customer advocacy, which was fine, but that it should have been complimented with a "Customer Don't Care" group for company advocacy that called up "poison" customers of whatever sort to give them the boot.
Well I guess that's my job at my company. I don't believe customers are purposely serving files... most of them have no idea of what is happening. Their interest is downloading music and videos. My theory is to interfere as little as possible with that and instead keep controls over their outbound traffic.
We're probably in a unique position here with the capabilities of the fiber system. The PUD (our upstream provider) is having the same problems with P2P as we are and just had to buy another 100mb pipe to handle increased traffic which came without a corresponding increase in customer base or income. Most of it due to P2P.
When home users can stream at 100mbps you have to do something. And I suspect that very soon many more providers will be facing the same issues as I face now.
BTW: I am using the bwmgr from www.etinc.com. Cost for the software for 10mb is $700; you furnish the unix box. A 100mbps appliance is less than $10k. Take a look at it and see if it doesn't give you ideas. At the very least it will give you a "heads-up" if there are problems and pointers to where those problems are. I'm available as a consultant. (grin)
Hi... what a great reply. We are in the same business - sort of - but with differing approaches. Frist of all, remember that the original comment was P2P users not corporate or government users.
Okay, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who does capacity planning for a regional ISP that does 750M peak daily transit with a primarily small/medium business (25-300 employees) customer base and a couple Fortune 100 customers too.
I run another small ISP with several hundred home users plus a dozen medium-sized companies and governmental agencies each with 25 to 100 users. Plus one regional hospital and one rural school district. All of these are capable of moving data at 100mbps over a 1-gb fiber gateway installed at their home/business. That's 100mbps in and 100mbps out simultaneously. Our daily traffic count runs about 60gb both ways.
Everyone's bandwidth is capped, either at line rate for the circuit, or at some *contracted* fraction thereof. Note the word "contracted", it's important. Oversubscription is, of course, essential to ISP profits, but it's got to be above-board. If they pay for it, I must provide it.
The fiber system locally is capable of 1gbps transmission speeds so that we can offer the ability of a user to burst to quite high rates and as long as the overall bandwidth is still within my target they are allowed to do this. Thus the hospital, which occasionally must transmit large files, doesn't have to buy a 10mb circuit from me and pay for bandwidth they mostly don't use.
Businesses, however, are the least of our worries. It's P2P users who, in the aggregate, can drive an ISP out of business under the conditions of the market in which I operate. Ten active P2P users won't really have much incoming bandwidth but by leaving their systems acting as file servers their outgoing bandwidth can be amazing. These ten could easily swamp the 100mbps circuit unless we cap that traffic.
As a broadband consumer myself, I would scream bloody hell if my provider actively rate-limited me below the advertised up/down rates I'm paying for. I can accept the natural ebb and flow of connection speeds as the network is busy or idle, but false ceilings or other sly schemes will NOT fly.
Oh, I bet there are schemes and ceilings aplenty on your home connection. Let's say you have an advertised b/w of 700k down and 300k up. I'd be willing to bet that most bandwidth speed tests would give you results pretty close to this. But if you tried to do these on a 24/7 basis you'd get some surprises.
A friend who is an IT tech of a company on my system is a home user of DSL from the local phone company and pays extra for 5mb. When his boss, who is also on my system, downloads a large data file from this guy's DSL connection he gets good connectivity for an hour, then reasonable connectivity for another hour, then 56k for the rest of the time. This is not an accident.
If I need tens of thousands of $ in enhanced hardware to rate-limit--especially the dynamic per-user limiting you describe--plus an engineer or two to babysit this high-touch network, adding bandwidth looks awfully cheap.
If it took that, then you might be right. But it doesn't, thankfully. The rate-limiter I use has a learning feature that can implement exactly the tiering that I describe above and did not cost me anywhere near $10k. Nor do I have to do any constant management. It just works to keep my aggregated bandwidth in line with what I need to stay competitive in this area and still keep the users happy. Especially since I can identify potential problem users and put them in a special category while keeping business users in another category.
The cheapest method for handling is to call up the bandwidth hogs, tell them you don't need their business and welcome them to find another provider...
Um... isn't that pretty much what I started this out with? P2P users swiftly become a problem on any network that offers large bandwidth. No ISP will b
Nope... they don't even want these guys. At least not without some method of limiting their ability to continuously move files at full b/w. The reason is that the ISP itself has limited upstream bandwidth and almost certainly has to pay extra when they burst upwards; at least if they burst beyond a time or b/w limit. If the ISP's b/w is capped then all users can be affected when the pipe fills with a few users allowing P2P access.
While under the terms of their use Policies they can charge these users for the extra bandwidth, ISPs are skittish about sending a user a bill for, say, $346 for their home Internet access. For one reason, it may be a one-time problem but that user may pay up and then move to another ISP. Another reason is that the users may successfully avoid the bill in small claims court or simply fail to pay and force collection where the ISP gets 50% (or less) of the bill. Meanwhile the ISP has to pay.
So they will use b/w limiting more and more often. Some of it very well disguised to alleviate the concerns of the more casual - or occasional - P2P user. One product allows the ISP to create b/w rules that allow every user to have full bandwidth for a relatively long period of time - say ten minutes - and then limit them to a lower level for another ten minutes before choking them down further. Unlike bursting which is generally measured in seconds, this tiered control gives most user the impression that there is no limiting at all. Only the hard-core P2P user would discover them and, again, the ISP would prefer that user move on anyway.
This is not rocket science. No ISP can afford to allow a few users to dominate the available bandwidth and if it's cheaper to limit - and it is - then that's what they'll do.
Oh sure, there will be some new ISPs that won't do any limiting come onto the scene but these will be finalists in the "race to the bottom"; don't count on them lasting long unless they are very well capitalized. And just try to find capital for opening an ISP nowadays. LOL.
Slashdotters seem to want unlimited bandwidth for whatever purpose and, along with that, cheap - or free - pricing. You can't get both. No ISP can provide both. P2P users who leave their computers on line and available for file sharing cost the ISPs in either bandwidth or money. On many "broadband" networks a few dozen P2P users can dominate all the available bandwidth and leave little left over for the other few hundred users. What ISP would tolerate this? Why would any ISP tolerate this? The ISP managers I've spoken with would prefer all their P2P users move to another ISP; any other ISP... along with the hundreds of people all over the world sucking down that music and videos and costing them (the ISPs) money.
Around here an ISP pays the PUD $350 for every average mb of bandwidth per month. It's not unusual to see a small percentage of users each sending 5mb of P2P files out to the world 24 hours a day. One user averaging 1mb of file sharing over a month will cost the ISP $350. Mulitply this by as many P2P users on line. This on a connection charge of under $40 a month.
So yeah... vote with your feet folks. See if they care. Take your business to another provider. Bandwidth limiting isn't a choice most providers want to make; it's a choice they were forced to make.
There is at least *some* reasonable evidence that the war in Iraq started as a war for their oil but that subsequent events then cascaded out of their control. It's pretty clear that the excuses they offered the world for starting this war were faked. Links to Al Qaida? Invented. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Oh puhlease. Revenge for Saddam Hussein allegedly targeting Geo. Bush The First? It doesn't seem likely. Wolfowitz and company were pushing for war against Iraq long before 911. So the fact that people suspect that two oil magnates (ok, one oil magnate and one wanna-be) invading a country which had no ability to harm anyone but other Iraqis might be linked to oil can't be viewed as only a "liberal plot".
And anyway, your definition of "hearsay" is flawed. A witness can testify as to what they were told by someone without it being hearsay. But a witness who testifies that someone told them what a third party said is hearsay. So you can testify if you hear two people planning a bank robbery. You can't testify if someone tells you that he heard two people planning a bank robbery. *That* would be "hearsay".
So a professor can legally and ethically tell people what someone told them without it being "hearsay"
Keri, a college administrator, was concerned when she saw debris "falling from earth" until Drew told her it was ice.
This is truly pathetic and mean-spirited; this "adventure" will follow these poor people the rest of their lives. It's not nice to make unwitting people the laughingstock of the world.
that it took them a year to weed this clueless newbie out of the pack. I'd bet that his supervisor tried to let him go a half-dozen times over that period but *his* boss blocked it. Maybe the kid should have listened to that negative feedback he was getting from his managers who were probably trying to make him productive enough so that the company could profit from his work. That's the whole idea, you know. Now, instead of learning from this as he should have, he'll take all his misconceptions about how he *should* have been treated to his next job; which will last six months. In ten years - unless this boy clues up - he'll have one of those resumes with 23 jobs on it to proudly present to number 24. Learn from this example, boys and girls.
The other day I was at a client's site removing spyware and adware from yet-another-windows computer and wondering why companies put up with this. I can imagine hundreds - if not thousands - of IT guys all wasting their education and talent removing shit from an OS that should never have allowed it on there in the first place. This must be costing the economy billions of dollars. Yet companies continue to buy XP (Pro or Home... both vulnerable) and will almost certainly line up to pay $400 to upgrade to Vista.
Meanwhile I use an iBook on the road (for its Unix network capabilities) and Linux on the desktop. And an old Win98 box ONLY for Quickbooks Pro. And I wouldn't be doing that if I could find a similarly-priced Linux accounting solution that does everything for $800.
How exactly do you buy a larger house on a smaller salary?
Anyone who has watched "What You Get for the Money" on cable tv knows that what you get depends more on where you are than on what you make. Rural America is no different. In N. Dakota you can buy 300 acre farms for less than a studio apartment in San Francisco. But unless you are a damn good farmer (or semi-retired) you might not want to move there.
However there are lots of places with most of the amenities of big cities without the high prices. In Moses Lake, Washington, for instance, you can buy a nice 3br, 2ba ranch house for under $100,000; often lots less. Or a condo on the water with dock for your jet-skiis for $129,000. And about 2.5 hours to Seattle or 1.5 hours to Spokane if you really *must* get to a big city.
Want Internet? Moses Lake has DSL and cable Internet plus Fiber-to-the-home in many places (not all) at reasonable prices (under $50 per month for duplex 1mbps). And power rates that are among the lowest in the country at under 4 cents per kw/hour.
Moses Lake has an entire former B-52 bomber base with a 13,000 foot runway and tons of room for construction of new buildings in case you don't like the old Air Force hangars.
Recreation? The lake itself is great for water skiing, kayaking, sailing and jet-skiing. We have hundreds of acres of sand dunes south of town for 4-wheeling and off road motorcycling. Bird hunting in the fall, fishing in the summer and deer and elk close by if you really have to go kill something. We are 1.5 hours from ski resorts and x/c ski areas, Moses Lake has a *FREE* ice skating rink in the winter, bike trails, tennis courts, a dozen baseball fields, great parks, and friendly people.
Ever want to learn to fly gliders? One of the finest locations for soaring flight is run by the Seattle Glider Council and located at a former WWII training base in Ephrata; only 20 miles away. This is where the Seattle pilots come to really learn to fly gliders.
Top it off with free concerts in the park every Saturday during the summer, a Community College and affiliations with several 4-year universities, splendid weather featuring summers with rainy days you can count on the fingers one hand and friendly people.
So not only can you buy a bigger house on a smaller salary but you get a better lifestyle too.
Any more than retaining an early edition of a book or pamphlet would be. This is similar to suing me because I have an edition of your book which has since been abridged or changed. Keeping the book is not a violation of any copyright nor would be allowing someone to read or otherwise access that book. As long as I didn't change the form (making a copy of the book, for instance).
Trying to sue over truthful information just because it shows a weakness in your case is unjustiable. Even SCO hasn't tried that.
it appears that Maureen O'Gara would be more qualified; after all, PJ hasn't published MOG's home address and that of her mother. Perhaps MOG's miffed that PJ has torpedoed virtually every article she's written. So, now it's gotten personal.
I stopped looking at LW's web site long ago specifically because of MOG's poorly researched pieces and her bitter style. Why they allowed her to publish details of a journalist's personal life when it's entirely possible that there really were threats to that journalist's life is beyond me. Now, of course, if anything does happen to the woman (PJ or not) whose mother lives at that Connecticut address the cops there will certainly have something to say to MOG. And lawyers will be involved. What if publication of those addresses led to someone being killed?
PJ's articles stand on their own merit without regard to the age, gender, religion and lifestyle of the writer. MOG just can't stand it that she is constantly upstaged by someone who shows her to the world for the twit she is.
Are you saying the average person will spend $10 on something they could spend $7 on once they're making some arbitrary income?
Lots of people do exactly this. Not that they think "Hey, I'm making more so I can buy this device for more" but they make decisions about whether to buy a nice shirt for $25 or a custom shirt for $50. Or they will buy a product from a store that offers better service even though that same product may be more expensive than at Wal-Mart. Or maybe the store is closer. Or the aisles are not crowded with crap or people with kids. Whatever the reason, their income provides the means for them to make these decisions.
Before wages took a dump in the 1980s a larger percentage of the population (at least in the USA) could do this. Now, because of low wages (in a real sense) most of us decide between Value Village and Wal-Mart.
of practically everything... including the Internet (which he thought was pretty lame 13 years ago). I quit reading his articles about then and I'm amazed he still has any audience at all.
Yes, people shop at Wal-Mart because of low prices but the reason they have to shop low prices is that their wages have gone down (in real terms) over the past 30 years.
As an example, my wife graduated from HS in 1974 and her first job was at paper plant. The job was union and paid $7 per hour and worked 40 hours a week. This, mind you, for a HS grad with no college and no special skills in a small city north of Seattle. By the time she left that job (in 1980) she was making over $10 per hour and getting full medical.
Then wages went into the toilet. Now kids are lucky to get a $7 job (at Wal-Mart) and work 20-hours a week.
In 1974 you could buy a house ($35,000 for a 3br/2ba home in the Seattle area) with a $7/hour job. In 2005 houses there average $250,000. Try buying one of those right out of HS.
So ya... people shop for cheap prices but only because we don't have much of a choice any more.
The guys who thought this idea up are similar to those who tried offshore casinos. The problems are mostly legal. For one thing, where do you register the ship? If the ship is registered in the USA then it's part of the US legal system and visas are required so that's out. But if it's registered in a foreign country (say... Panama or Liberia) then there are certain legal niceties that have to be observed. And the Panamanians (or Liberians) may have something to say about who works aboard that ship and what sorts of licenses or documentation they carry.
And if the US gets really pissed then you may find other restrictions. Like the 3-mile limit is really a 12-mile limit. Oh, wait.. there is an economic zone that extends 200 miles out. Providing food or a crew change 3 miles out isn't so hard... but 200 miles out gets beyond the useful range of helicopters and you begin to need crew boats (with LOTS of sicksacks) and offshore supply vessels (one reason offshore drilling costs millions a day).
And ocean waves, even off California, can be BIG and ships, including those with stabilizers, need to be moving in order to position themselves to ride those waves safely. Otherwise they just roll around in the trough (more sicksacks). This means that the ship has to either be dynamically positioned (with thrusters and computers and GPS - not cheap to retrofit onto a used cruise ship) or just keep underway all the time. And there goes the fuel bill right up the smokestack.
The idea is so bizarre that I suspect it's a holdover from someone's April Fool joke.
"Norris says you won't need a pilot's license if you fly it under 400 feet in non-restricted air space."
Well damn! That should be interesting what with all the major obstructions (bridges, buildings, power cables and towers and television antennas, etc.) mostly being under 400 feet. Just the place *I* want to fly.
And I'll bet that "non-restricted air space" doesn't include anyplace *you* want to go to.
Slashdot Mirror
with mouse drivers calling daily and now the "genuine advantage" calling in daily you would expect that, by now, MS would have a database bigger than Google's. What are they going to do with this, anyway? BTW: I have a client who was told by Genuine Advantage that he had a pirated version of XP and that he had to pay for a new OS. I left him trying to find his sales receipt from a large, national, computer distributor.
Thank God I've been running Linux since 1993!!!
.... it's just not stable running an MS operating system. I have converted many an older PC to running Linux/FreeBSD and had it run just dandy for years with no reboots. I've configured Linux desktops to use Windows-based (SMB) printers faster than a co-worker could configure a Win2k desktop to do the same thing. Drivers aren't the cause of MS's operating systems' problems... it's their basic design.
There is no reason OS-X shouldn't be at least as stable on PC hardware as Linux/FreeBSD already is.
What a joke to have someone say that MS is consistent. The only thing they are consisten in is inconsistency. Every iteration of Windows changes the way you configure it. Policies, users, networks, routes, you name it and they've changed it. From Win95 to NT to Win2k to Windows 2003 server lots changed. And it appears that they change things just to make people re-take their certification exams because the functionality hasn't changed that much.
If anything is consistent it's Unix/Linux. In fact, to those who ask me how I manage to remember all those Linux commands I tell them that those commands haven't changed much in 25 years. I had to learn a few right off the bat and a few along the way, but I can still use the same commands I learned on Unix in 1979. Not so with Windows.
You still get an "F".
Umm... the "slaves" are the machines we use so that, say, one farmer can profit from 5,000 acres just like in the old South you know... and the "food" the "slaves" "eat" is oil... and we can't have an economy without them so we look for more ... oh, forget it. You get an "F".
I think you've identified a few symptoms of the basic problem.
Our current dilemma is that we have created a modern slave economy and, like any slave economy, once the slaves can no longer perform the economy goes right into the crapper. So much of civilization depends upon oil that it's frightening to contemplate. It's become a toss-up as to what will destroy us first: running out of oil or not running out of oil.
So, like any slave economy, we design our civilization around our slaves. It only makes sense to use alternative fuels because without some fuel we can't use our slaves and because any alternative to the use of slaves is unthinkable. If the slaves need food and the food is running out then go find new food.
So I think the real question is, "How do we move away from a slave economy without destroying civilization?" And maybe that question will be solved technologically by some miracle fuel. Or by some pandemic.
Maybe the invention of agriculture was our biggest mistake after all.
I'm not sure we differ that much. I think you have been trying to take an idealistic view of the situation while I'm just trying to be pragmatic.
...but I would argue that you should get the service that your service agreement describes whether you're a residential, business or government customer.
Most service agreements make some specific mention of acting as a "server". My position is that a P2P user who leaves their system up and files available worldwide at the rates our system is capable of delivering is acting as a server.
In fact, rate limiting can have a benefit to many users; at least under our conditions. Remember we aren't DSL or cable but fiber to the home and a home user can move some amazing amounts of traffic. Often unwittingly. And that traffic can overwhelm their own home network which is usually handled by cheap routers. One client called with a complaint of being unable to get email or browse the Internet. We went out there and found that her son had several P2P applications happily serving up music and video files to users from Russia, China, Australia... and more (netstat -a -n on his computer). I took his computer off their network and his mother was miraculously able to connect again.
Back at the office I took their outbound b/w down to 56k and she's been a happy camper ever since. Him too, since his inbound b/w hasn't changed.
He noted that our telco/ISP had a "Customer Care" group for customer advocacy, which was fine, but that it should have been complimented with a "Customer Don't Care" group for company advocacy that called up "poison" customers of whatever sort to give them the boot.
Well I guess that's my job at my company. I don't believe customers are purposely serving files... most of them have no idea of what is happening. Their interest is downloading music and videos. My theory is to interfere as little as possible with that and instead keep controls over their outbound traffic.
We're probably in a unique position here with the capabilities of the fiber system. The PUD (our upstream provider) is having the same problems with P2P as we are and just had to buy another 100mb pipe to handle increased traffic which came without a corresponding increase in customer base or income. Most of it due to P2P.
When home users can stream at 100mbps you have to do something. And I suspect that very soon many more providers will be facing the same issues as I face now.
BTW: I am using the bwmgr from www.etinc.com. Cost for the software for 10mb is $700; you furnish the unix box. A 100mbps appliance is less than $10k. Take a look at it and see if it doesn't give you ideas. At the very least it will give you a "heads-up" if there are problems and pointers to where those problems are. I'm available as a consultant. (grin)
Hi... what a great reply. We are in the same business - sort of - but with differing approaches. Frist of all, remember that the original comment was P2P users not corporate or government users.
Okay, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who does capacity planning for a regional ISP that does 750M peak daily transit with a primarily small/medium business (25-300 employees) customer base and a couple Fortune 100 customers too.
I run another small ISP with several hundred home users plus a dozen medium-sized companies and governmental agencies each with 25 to 100 users. Plus one regional hospital and one rural school district. All of these are capable of moving data at 100mbps over a 1-gb fiber gateway installed at their home/business. That's 100mbps in and 100mbps out simultaneously. Our daily traffic count runs about 60gb both ways.
Everyone's bandwidth is capped, either at line rate for the circuit, or at some *contracted* fraction thereof. Note the word "contracted", it's important. Oversubscription is, of course, essential to ISP profits, but it's got to be above-board. If they pay for it, I must provide it.
The fiber system locally is capable of 1gbps transmission speeds so that we can offer the ability of a user to burst to quite high rates and as long as the overall bandwidth is still within my target they are allowed to do this. Thus the hospital, which occasionally must transmit large files, doesn't have to buy a 10mb circuit from me and pay for bandwidth they mostly don't use.
Businesses, however, are the least of our worries. It's P2P users who, in the aggregate, can drive an ISP out of business under the conditions of the market in which I operate. Ten active P2P users won't really have much incoming bandwidth but by leaving their systems acting as file servers their outgoing bandwidth can be amazing. These ten could easily swamp the 100mbps circuit unless we cap that traffic.
As a broadband consumer myself, I would scream bloody hell if my provider actively rate-limited me below the advertised up/down rates I'm paying for. I can accept the natural ebb and flow of connection speeds as the network is busy or idle, but false ceilings or other sly schemes will NOT fly.
Oh, I bet there are schemes and ceilings aplenty on your home connection. Let's say you have an advertised b/w of 700k down and 300k up. I'd be willing to bet that most bandwidth speed tests would give you results pretty close to this. But if you tried to do these on a 24/7 basis you'd get some surprises.
A friend who is an IT tech of a company on my system is a home user of DSL from the local phone company and pays extra for 5mb. When his boss, who is also on my system, downloads a large data file from this guy's DSL connection he gets good connectivity for an hour, then reasonable connectivity for another hour, then 56k for the rest of the time. This is not an accident.
If I need tens of thousands of $ in enhanced hardware to rate-limit--especially the dynamic per-user limiting you describe--plus an engineer or two to babysit this high-touch network, adding bandwidth looks awfully cheap.
If it took that, then you might be right. But it doesn't, thankfully. The rate-limiter I use has a learning feature that can implement exactly the tiering that I describe above and did not cost me anywhere near $10k. Nor do I have to do any constant management. It just works to keep my aggregated bandwidth in line with what I need to stay competitive in this area and still keep the users happy. Especially since I can identify potential problem users and put them in a special category while keeping business users in another category.
The cheapest method for handling is to call up the bandwidth hogs, tell them you don't need their business and welcome them to find another provider...
Um... isn't that pretty much what I started this out with? P2P users swiftly become a problem on any network that offers large bandwidth. No ISP will b
One that charges by the megabit.
Nope... they don't even want these guys. At least not without some method of limiting their ability to continuously move files at full b/w. The reason is that the ISP itself has limited upstream bandwidth and almost certainly has to pay extra when they burst upwards; at least if they burst beyond a time or b/w limit. If the ISP's b/w is capped then all users can be affected when the pipe fills with a few users allowing P2P access.
While under the terms of their use Policies they can charge these users for the extra bandwidth, ISPs are skittish about sending a user a bill for, say, $346 for their home Internet access. For one reason, it may be a one-time problem but that user may pay up and then move to another ISP. Another reason is that the users may successfully avoid the bill in small claims court or simply fail to pay and force collection where the ISP gets 50% (or less) of the bill. Meanwhile the ISP has to pay.
So they will use b/w limiting more and more often. Some of it very well disguised to alleviate the concerns of the more casual - or occasional - P2P user. One product allows the ISP to create b/w rules that allow every user to have full bandwidth for a relatively long period of time - say ten minutes - and then limit them to a lower level for another ten minutes before choking them down further. Unlike bursting which is generally measured in seconds, this tiered control gives most user the impression that there is no limiting at all. Only the hard-core P2P user would discover them and, again, the ISP would prefer that user move on anyway.
This is not rocket science. No ISP can afford to allow a few users to dominate the available bandwidth and if it's cheaper to limit - and it is - then that's what they'll do.
Oh sure, there will be some new ISPs that won't do any limiting come onto the scene but these will be finalists in the "race to the bottom"; don't count on them lasting long unless they are very well capitalized. And just try to find capital for opening an ISP nowadays. LOL.
Slashdotters seem to want unlimited bandwidth for whatever purpose and, along with that, cheap - or free - pricing. You can't get both. No ISP can provide both. P2P users who leave their computers on line and available for file sharing cost the ISPs in either bandwidth or money. On many "broadband" networks a few dozen P2P users can dominate all the available bandwidth and leave little left over for the other few hundred users. What ISP would tolerate this? Why would any ISP tolerate this? The ISP managers I've spoken with would prefer all their P2P users move to another ISP; any other ISP... along with the hundreds of people all over the world sucking down that music and videos and costing them (the ISPs) money.
Around here an ISP pays the PUD $350 for every average mb of bandwidth per month. It's not unusual to see a small percentage of users each sending 5mb of P2P files out to the world 24 hours a day. One user averaging 1mb of file sharing over a month will cost the ISP $350. Mulitply this by as many P2P users on line. This on a connection charge of under $40 a month.
So yeah... vote with your feet folks. See if they care. Take your business to another provider. Bandwidth limiting isn't a choice most providers want to make; it's a choice they were forced to make.
There is at least *some* reasonable evidence that the war in Iraq started as a war for their oil but that subsequent events then cascaded out of their control. It's pretty clear that the excuses they offered the world for starting this war were faked. Links to Al Qaida? Invented. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Oh puhlease. Revenge for Saddam Hussein allegedly targeting Geo. Bush The First? It doesn't seem likely. Wolfowitz and company were pushing for war against Iraq long before 911. So the fact that people suspect that two oil magnates (ok, one oil magnate and one wanna-be) invading a country which had no ability to harm anyone but other Iraqis might be linked to oil can't be viewed as only a "liberal plot".
And anyway, your definition of "hearsay" is flawed. A witness can testify as to what they were told by someone without it being hearsay. But a witness who testifies that someone told them what a third party said is hearsay. So you can testify if you hear two people planning a bank robbery. You can't testify if someone tells you that he heard two people planning a bank robbery. *That* would be "hearsay".
So a professor can legally and ethically tell people what someone told them without it being "hearsay"
Keri, a college administrator, was concerned when she saw debris "falling from earth" until Drew told her it was ice.
This is truly pathetic and mean-spirited; this "adventure" will follow these poor people the rest of their lives. It's not nice to make unwitting people the laughingstock of the world.
that it took them a year to weed this clueless newbie out of the pack. I'd bet that his supervisor tried to let him go a half-dozen times over that period but *his* boss blocked it. Maybe the kid should have listened to that negative feedback he was getting from his managers who were probably trying to make him productive enough so that the company could profit from his work. That's the whole idea, you know. Now, instead of learning from this as he should have, he'll take all his misconceptions about how he *should* have been treated to his next job; which will last six months. In ten years - unless this boy clues up - he'll have one of those resumes with 23 jobs on it to proudly present to number 24. Learn from this example, boys and girls.
"Embrace and extend" mean anything to you?
um.... no payroll
The other day I was at a client's site removing spyware and adware from yet-another-windows computer and wondering why companies put up with this. I can imagine hundreds - if not thousands - of IT guys all wasting their education and talent removing shit from an OS that should never have allowed it on there in the first place. This must be costing the economy billions of dollars. Yet companies continue to buy XP (Pro or Home... both vulnerable) and will almost certainly line up to pay $400 to upgrade to Vista.
Meanwhile I use an iBook on the road (for its Unix network capabilities) and Linux on the desktop. And an old Win98 box ONLY for Quickbooks Pro. And I wouldn't be doing that if I could find a similarly-priced Linux accounting solution that does everything for $800.
How exactly do you buy a larger house on a smaller salary?
Anyone who has watched "What You Get for the Money" on cable tv knows that what you get depends more on where you are than on what you make. Rural America is no different. In N. Dakota you can buy 300 acre farms for less than a studio apartment in San Francisco. But unless you are a damn good farmer (or semi-retired) you might not want to move there.
However there are lots of places with most of the amenities of big cities without the high prices. In Moses Lake, Washington, for instance, you can buy a nice 3br, 2ba ranch house for under $100,000; often lots less. Or a condo on the water with dock for your jet-skiis for $129,000. And about 2.5 hours to Seattle or 1.5 hours to Spokane if you really *must* get to a big city.
Want Internet? Moses Lake has DSL and cable Internet plus Fiber-to-the-home in many places (not all) at reasonable prices (under $50 per month for duplex 1mbps). And power rates that are among the lowest in the country at under 4 cents per kw/hour.
Moses Lake has an entire former B-52 bomber base with a 13,000 foot runway and tons of room for construction of new buildings in case you don't like the old Air Force hangars.
Recreation? The lake itself is great for water skiing, kayaking, sailing and jet-skiing. We have hundreds of acres of sand dunes south of town for 4-wheeling and off road motorcycling. Bird hunting in the fall, fishing in the summer and deer and elk close by if you really have to go kill something. We are 1.5 hours from ski resorts and x/c ski areas, Moses Lake has a *FREE* ice skating rink in the winter, bike trails, tennis courts, a dozen baseball fields, great parks, and friendly people.
Ever want to learn to fly gliders? One of the finest locations for soaring flight is run by the Seattle Glider Council and located at a former WWII training base in Ephrata; only 20 miles away. This is where the Seattle pilots come to really learn to fly gliders.
Top it off with free concerts in the park every Saturday during the summer, a Community College and affiliations with several 4-year universities, splendid weather featuring summers with rainy days you can count on the fingers one hand and friendly people.
So not only can you buy a bigger house on a smaller salary but you get a better lifestyle too.
Any more than retaining an early edition of a book or pamphlet would be. This is similar to suing me because I have an edition of your book which has since been abridged or changed. Keeping the book is not a violation of any copyright nor would be allowing someone to read or otherwise access that book. As long as I didn't change the form (making a copy of the book, for instance).
Trying to sue over truthful information just because it shows a weakness in your case is unjustiable. Even SCO hasn't tried that.
Yet.
there is also someone named Gates.
it appears that Maureen O'Gara would be more qualified; after all, PJ hasn't published MOG's home address and that of her mother. Perhaps MOG's miffed that PJ has torpedoed virtually every article she's written. So, now it's gotten personal.
I stopped looking at LW's web site long ago specifically because of MOG's poorly researched pieces and her bitter style. Why they allowed her to publish details of a journalist's personal life when it's entirely possible that there really were threats to that journalist's life is beyond me. Now, of course, if anything does happen to the woman (PJ or not) whose mother lives at that Connecticut address the cops there will certainly have something to say to MOG. And lawyers will be involved. What if publication of those addresses led to someone being killed?
PJ's articles stand on their own merit without regard to the age, gender, religion and lifestyle of the writer. MOG just can't stand it that she is constantly upstaged by someone who shows her to the world for the twit she is.
Are you saying the average person will spend $10 on something they could spend $7 on once they're making some arbitrary income?
Lots of people do exactly this. Not that they think "Hey, I'm making more so I can buy this device for more" but they make decisions about whether to buy a nice shirt for $25 or a custom shirt for $50. Or they will buy a product from a store that offers better service even though that same product may be more expensive than at Wal-Mart. Or maybe the store is closer. Or the aisles are not crowded with crap or people with kids. Whatever the reason, their income provides the means for them to make these decisions.
Before wages took a dump in the 1980s a larger percentage of the population (at least in the USA) could do this. Now, because of low wages (in a real sense) most of us decide between Value Village and Wal-Mart.
of practically everything... including the Internet (which he thought was pretty lame 13 years ago). I quit reading his articles about then and I'm amazed he still has any audience at all.
Yes, people shop at Wal-Mart because of low prices but the reason they have to shop low prices is that their wages have gone down (in real terms) over the past 30 years.
As an example, my wife graduated from HS in 1974 and her first job was at paper plant. The job was union and paid $7 per hour and worked 40 hours a week. This, mind you, for a HS grad with no college and no special skills in a small city north of Seattle. By the time she left that job (in 1980) she was making over $10 per hour and getting full medical.
Then wages went into the toilet. Now kids are lucky to get a $7 job (at Wal-Mart) and work 20-hours a week.
In 1974 you could buy a house ($35,000 for a 3br/2ba home in the Seattle area) with a $7/hour job. In 2005 houses there average $250,000. Try buying one of those right out of HS.
So ya... people shop for cheap prices but only because we don't have much of a choice any more.
The guys who thought this idea up are similar to those who tried offshore casinos. The problems are mostly legal. For one thing, where do you register the ship? If the ship is registered in the USA then it's part of the US legal system and visas are required so that's out. But if it's registered in a foreign country (say... Panama or Liberia) then there are certain legal niceties that have to be observed. And the Panamanians (or Liberians) may have something to say about who works aboard that ship and what sorts of licenses or documentation they carry.
And if the US gets really pissed then you may find other restrictions. Like the 3-mile limit is really a 12-mile limit. Oh, wait.. there is an economic zone that extends 200 miles out. Providing food or a crew change 3 miles out isn't so hard... but 200 miles out gets beyond the useful range of helicopters and you begin to need crew boats (with LOTS of sicksacks) and offshore supply vessels (one reason offshore drilling costs millions a day).
And ocean waves, even off California, can be BIG and ships, including those with stabilizers, need to be moving in order to position themselves to ride those waves safely. Otherwise they just roll around in the trough (more sicksacks). This means that the ship has to either be dynamically positioned (with thrusters and computers and GPS - not cheap to retrofit onto a used cruise ship) or just keep underway all the time. And there goes the fuel bill right up the smokestack.
The idea is so bizarre that I suspect it's a holdover from someone's April Fool joke.
"Norris says you won't need a pilot's license if you fly it under 400 feet in non-restricted air space."
Well damn! That should be interesting what with all the major obstructions (bridges, buildings, power cables and towers and television antennas, etc.) mostly being under 400 feet. Just the place *I* want to fly.
And I'll bet that "non-restricted air space" doesn't include anyplace *you* want to go to.