The problem with this math is that not all users are using the net at the same time. That's the whole point behind statistical multiplexing. Both cable modem and DSL operators do this: The moment your traffic leaves a Telco's DSLAM, you end up sharing a T1 or other circuit with a whole pile of other people. You can rest guaranteed that this circuit couldn't support even close to all users using their maximum promised bandwidth at the same time.
That said, you won't get 11 Mbps out of 802.11b anyhow. And finally, you'll probably end up terminating all the units into something fairly smaller anyhow. Which brings me to two more points:
How are you connecting all the APs?
Security. The suggestion to DHCP out non-routable addresses, and provide a VPN concentrator as the only way out is a very good one, and I would seriously look at it. However, you still end up with maintenance and tech support needs.
I find this to be a rather grey area. If they had replaced the ads with Daily Bugle ads or completely fictional ones matching the film, I would think that the lawsuit would be baseless. At it stands, Sony probably sold the "virtual" ad space again, and that makes it damned sleazy in my book. Whether it should be illegal, I don't know. The same debacle came up once before, when one of the networks digitally replaced or planned to replace the NY Times Square billboards in their New Year's coverage and resold the space without compensating the original advertisers.
First off, building a home network and building an enterprise network are quite different things. In the enterprise arena, fiber isn't that much more expensive cable cost wise. It's still more expensive labor-wise, but proper Cat-5(e) installation isn't cheap either. The problem with fiber has been the price of electronics, which have been prohibitively expensive.
Secondly, switches are currently the main problem. We can get gig cards cheap, and in fact many servers come standard with them. However, finding switches that offer any kind of density of gig copper ports at a sane cost seems to be impossible. Even if there were such cards available for, say, the Cat 6500 platform, the problem is that practically none of the enterprise class switches currently in use has a backplane capacity sufficient to handle that kind of traffic. Further, aggregating a switchful of gig connections is a problem. 10 gig is the only realistic solution (Sonet/ATM is way expensive at high speeds, and not well suited for switched LANs to begin with), but it's hideously expensive, and not quite there yet standards-wise or equipment-wise.
Finally, a few notes on what I mean when I say enterprise class switch: modular, chassis based, build with line cards. Completely hot-swappable, with full redundancy of critical components. Support for large numbers of MAC addresses (16k), QoS, VLANs and VLAN trunking (with more than 200 concurrent VLANs), configurable spanning tree, security features, very thorough remote management features, good vendor support so replacements can be had (guaranteed) within 24 hours or faster if something breaks. Most of these things don't matter for the average nerd, but when you build a network with hundreds of switches, the requirements suddenly change, and usually you pay for it.
I have not seen either of the two movies. However, I did not find the ending of the series to be all that depressing. Giving the audience enough room to interpret things for themselves is one of the things that makes it such a valuable work. I am getting tired of entertainment that readily hands you all the answers, whether you want them or not, and never gives the viewer much chance to question the ethics and motivations of the characters. Also, there seems to be a strange conception that happy endings are the only kind allowed. Is the American mind really so brainwashed? Maybe some more foreign films are needed in this country... One good start for Anime fans is Jin-Roh, which toured the US in theatrical release, no less, and is an immensely powerful animated feature.
This page, at least for Florida, had no recycling programs listed, only agencies that accept donations. This is something else entirely, and at least all the schools I've spoken have said that they're not interested in getting donated computers, because they lack the know-how and manpower to make them work and support them.
Americans really need to realize that the goods they consume don't magically appear and then disappear. Thought needs to be given to what happens to a given article after its useful life is over. The mindset in Northern Europe is frighteningly far from that in the US in this regard.
Internet connectivity for universities should be free, in the same sense as library access, availability of rooms etc. It's infrastructure. Email and Internet in general are required and necessary in today's academic world.
When trying to apply market based approach to universities or other learning environments, the result is usually disastrous. Your scheme would make it hard for students interested in alternate operating systems to download ~gig images to experiment with. It would make it impossible to do distance education, or for fine arts / sociology / theater majors to get a video material or pictorial material. Impossible here meaning prohibitively expensive. Or maybe just rich people should get a good education?
I'd also like to add a mention of Jin-Roh, which
at least a while back was in theatrical distribution in the US. It's a movie which happens to be animated; it is certainly not for kids!
Porco Rosso from Miyazaki is also a nice, warm work, although with more conflict than Totoro.
However, the moment you start to use any of the service classes that have halfway decent error correction, your rate drops again. Then the overhead, which isn't going to be negligible, eats even more. Sure you can watch videoclips over the network, just as you can watch videoclips over 56 k modems.
The bandwidth is guaranteed in the sense that you can demand guarantees for a certain service/bandwidth class. If those guarantees can't be met, the connection will be refused. I highly doubt that common data use will demand or be given guarantees, since that is expensive for the provider (much fewer concurrent users in a cell), and probably too expensive for the customer.
Also, when a cell gets congested, do you block/drop voice calls, or cut back on available data bandwidth? You may be out of luck trying to get a "high-bandwidth" channel in any populated place, events and such.
Overall, its still a step forward. I hope they get the network built widely, and some handsets out...
It would, wouldn't it? CAM is darn expensive, though, and has other performance bottlenecks. Furthermore, routing isn't just plain old lookup, it's a longest-prefix match. Not only do you have to find a match, you have to find the best match.
In fact they aren't wasted, they're needed. MAC addresses have no hierarchy, and as a result aren't routable. You need a hierarchical address space to do routing. IPv6 essentially separates this routing address space (your wasted bits) from the host portion (MAC bits). Everyone wins: hosts can have a unique address while still being visible on several networks at once, they can move from network to network without really renumbering and so forth.
Gillespie. Once you actually sit down and watch more than fifteen minutes of a In the Heat of the Night episode it starts to dawn on you that they had darn good writers. I think it was an amazingly underrated series, hiding underneath the hick-town crust.
Oh. This was supposed to be about Enterprise? I liked the tits. And the lips. And the hips. And the eyes. And the short hair. Um. I didn't like the technology mumbo-jumbo and that they seem to already have all the conveniences of the later series. I didn't mind the opening. Most CG was good, some was horrendously bad, like the crash-landed Klingon ship. But who cares about what I thought anyways? I hope they can inject some content into the series, or at least sell nice posters of Ms. Blalock.
I'm not willing to go quite that far, but, well, the movie wasn't particularly great. No matter how well you package it, it still isn't particularly great. In fact it was remarkably mediocre.
University of South Florida version
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 1
We have largely the same issues here at USF.
1) We do not install NICs. Students are responsible for buying their computers and buying their network cards. The university bookstore sells them, and hence does the installation etc. support. The same applies to patch cords.
2) The first line of defense are the Resident Advisors in each residence hall. A lot of the problems can be solved within a building, without ever having to reach a help desk.
On the technical side we've done the following:
1) All addresses are DHCP. All students must have a valid email account with a department at the university, and before they can get a routable address they have to register their MAC address so we can track down who's doing what.
2) Redundant / failover DHCP servers.
3) Fully managed network, which allows us to quickly find any duplicate (stolen) IPs or connected MAC addresses. It also gives us error counters so we can quickly see if the NIC or cables are suspect.
4) The cable plant in all residence halls is certified Cat 5. Housing has been very understanding to the concept of doing it right the first time, and saving a bundle in man hours later. So far we've had almost no problems, and the logic has paid off quite nicely.
5) We use Cisco switches, and the above goes for them as well. Out of about 200 switches we've had two break over four years. The switches are managed off of a private vlan that doesn't get routed, so students have no way to get to them. This incidentally also prevents any web-worms/scanners or such from bugging the management and triggering possible bugs in IOS.
6) We scan the student networks with ISS or a similar tool regularly, and notify people of any glaring problems. If they don't comply within a reasonable time, we resort to the rules below and take them off the network until their machines are somewhat secure. This unfortunately affects linux users as much as it does Windows ones.
And political aspects...
1) As part of the lease agreement or the address registration students have to read a set of rules and sign off on them. That way we actually have leverage when someone misbehaves. We can show them the rules that allowed us to disconnect them without a refund or resort to academic discipline.
2) Traffic shaping seems to be the way to go. We're currently trying to figure out how much to allocate to whom, but there are no daily or absolute download limits. Say a student wants watch a 500k video stream of a class over I2. We have the bandwidth, but they could quickly pop any daily gig limit. Instead we just limit the total bandwidth of student connections so that researchers and staff members and such get first picks on bandwidth. Within campus there are no limits.
3) No servers reachable from off campus. If a student needs to run a server, they need to talk to their department and put it on a non-student network. Servers reachable only from within campus are okay, as long as they behave. This is filtered at our edge routers.
4) No registration of external DNS entries. All addresses under our address space are under our namespace.
5) We keep DHCP and similar logs, since we have had a few criminal cases in which someone has to be tracked down a while later. This though gets into law-enforcement and it's quite a mess.
None of these seem to work for me. Site not found, file not found or authorization failed are the errors. Is there a known issue or is my ISP making a mess?
It is hard for me to comprehend that someone would seriously consider that the appropriate penalty for a crime has anything whatsoever to do with the time a prosecutor / police has to spend investigating and prosecuting. The penalty has to do with the crime, with the damage done, taking into account circumstances and the perpetrator.
Otherwise law enforcement turns into a for-profit business where the goal isn't to deter crime or protect society. The goal will be legalized slavery and high-way robbery. This will be a surefire way to demolish any respect for the law or society.
There are a few GSM operators in the US. I am
currently using Voicestream, a couple of my
friends are with someone else, although I'm not
sure whom. With GTE, Aerial, AT&T, Alltel and others playing the musical chairs game with networks and names it gets rather hard to keep up.
In any event, both I and all my friends (with Voicestream and with an alternate carrier) were able to send and receive SMS messages to Finland (Radiolinja), and to each other. I think the situation isn't quite as bad as it seems.
Now if the US would just finally unbundle phones from ludicrously long-term contracts and let people actually pick the phones they want...
Note that the FCC limits the radiated power. If your antenna has a gain of 21 dB, you MUST limit the maximum power of the radio to 5 mW. (4 W EIRP maximum limit). The limits abroad are typically even stricter.
So at some point it makes no sense in making more directional antennas, as you have to decrease the power level accordingly.
What if you're, say, an environmental activist. Not violent, not even one that has caused property damage, but by association you are considered a (potential) terrorist? Wouldn't it be nice to know that just because you think that we shouldn't drill for oil in Alaska the police will keep tabs on you, potentially stop you every so often, ask for ID, or even ask you to leave the area if a politician appears to hold a speech?
There is a reason why even criminals, or suspected criminals have rights. They might be innocent, or their crimes may not warrant the kind of opression that results.
Unfortunately at least our local university library (University of South Florida) has moved to electronic journals with a number of publications. Not only do many of these not allow you to browse them, they also require a computer (and power) to view and often lack crucial graphics and pictures.
In this case, if there is no paper copy of a publication in a library, and the library relied on the electronic database, the worry is real.
This of course also raises the question on whether paying users of these databases can get a refund, since they don't have access to the content they were promised.
Access to TAC depends. This was a valid
network emergency (priority 1) case, and in
those Cisco really has amazing response times
and quality. With regular cases you don't have
to stay on hold either: give them a number
and they'll call you back. Or just open the
ticket via their web page. We end up
opening cases once a month or so and I can't
remember ever having to languish waiting on the
phone.
Please. Artists have created and scientists have researched throughout history without copyright laws. As a matter of fact, trying to keep other people from freely using the knowledge produced by scientific research is rather frowned upon. As a matter of fact it can be argued that if companies or individuals would own research results and refuse to make them available to the rest of the world, science would stop.
Copyright protection is a good idea. I believe an artist or creator should be able to dictate, at least for a while (for example until their death) what is done with or to their creations. However, why these rights should semi-automatically be transferred to publishers and producers, or why they should last for 70 years past the creator's death is wrong and excessive in my opinion. All of our common heritage and culture has been created by someone, and the concept of claiming ownership to it is a fairly recent invention.
(Please deposit $12.50 in order to cover the license for us singing "Happy Birthday to You".)
Merita actually also does SSH, so you only need
a VT52 or thereabouts compatible terminal and Unix account to bank. Really useful at universities and their email-checking terminal stands.
Also Leonia still has their old telnet-based system, which works much in the same manner. Both are probably offerings your average clerk would rather not tell you about, but as an original customer I still use both. It indeed helps a lot when you're trying to bank from across the Atlantic!
It's all based on single-use passwords, one for
login, then another challenge-response pool for each transaction, so being snooped isn't that big
of a worry either.
Remember, though, that in Scandinavia the common
way of paying a bill or giving someone money is
to directly transfer the sum from one account to another. Most people alive today have probably never even seen a cheque.
Disclaimer: I think Merita bites as much as
almost every other Finnish bank, but their SSH
service is cool to have.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, you won't get 11 Mbps out of 802.11b anyhow. And finally, you'll probably end up terminating all the units into something fairly smaller anyhow. Which brings me to two more points:
How are you connecting all the APs?
Security. The suggestion to DHCP out non-routable addresses, and provide a VPN concentrator as the only way out is a very good one, and I would seriously look at it. However, you still end up with maintenance and tech support needs.
I find this to be a rather grey area. If they had replaced the ads with Daily Bugle ads or completely fictional ones matching the film, I would think that the lawsuit would be baseless. At it stands, Sony probably sold the "virtual" ad space again, and that makes it damned sleazy in my book. Whether it should be illegal, I don't know. The same debacle came up once before, when one of the networks digitally replaced or planned to replace the NY Times Square billboards in their New Year's coverage and resold the space without compensating the original advertisers.
First off, building a home network and building an enterprise network are quite different things. In the enterprise arena, fiber isn't that much more expensive cable cost wise. It's still more expensive labor-wise, but proper Cat-5(e) installation isn't cheap either. The problem with fiber has been the price of electronics, which have been prohibitively expensive.
Secondly, switches are currently the main problem. We can get gig cards cheap, and in fact many servers come standard with them. However, finding switches that offer any kind of density of gig copper ports at a sane cost seems to be impossible. Even if there were such cards available for, say, the Cat 6500 platform, the problem is that practically none of the enterprise class switches currently in use has a backplane capacity sufficient to handle that kind of traffic. Further, aggregating a switchful of gig connections is a problem. 10 gig is the only realistic solution (Sonet/ATM is way expensive at high speeds, and not well suited for switched LANs to begin with), but it's hideously expensive, and not quite there yet standards-wise or equipment-wise.
Finally, a few notes on what I mean when I say enterprise class switch: modular, chassis based, build with line cards. Completely hot-swappable, with full redundancy of critical components. Support for large numbers of MAC addresses (16k), QoS, VLANs and VLAN trunking (with more than 200 concurrent VLANs), configurable spanning tree, security features, very thorough remote management features, good vendor support so replacements can be had (guaranteed) within 24 hours or faster if something breaks. Most of these things don't matter for the average nerd, but when you build a network with hundreds of switches, the requirements suddenly change, and usually you pay for it.
I have not seen either of the two movies. However, I did not find the ending of the series to be all that depressing. Giving the audience enough room to interpret things for themselves is one of the things that makes it such a valuable work. I am getting tired of entertainment that readily hands you all the answers, whether you want them or not, and never gives the viewer much chance to question the ethics and motivations of the characters.
Also, there seems to be a strange conception that happy endings are the only kind allowed. Is the American mind really so brainwashed? Maybe some more foreign films are needed in this country... One good start for Anime fans is Jin-Roh, which toured the US in theatrical release, no less, and is an immensely powerful animated feature.
This page, at least for Florida, had no recycling programs listed, only agencies that accept donations. This is something else entirely, and at least all the schools I've spoken have said that they're not interested in getting donated computers, because they lack the know-how and manpower to make them work and support them.
Americans really need to realize that the goods they consume don't magically appear and then disappear. Thought needs to be given to what happens to a given article after its useful life is over. The mindset in Northern Europe is frighteningly far from that in the US in this regard.
Internet connectivity for universities should be free, in the same sense as library access, availability of rooms etc. It's infrastructure. Email and Internet in general are required and necessary in today's academic world.
When trying to apply market based approach to universities or other learning environments, the result is usually disastrous. Your scheme would make it hard for students interested in alternate operating systems to download ~gig images to experiment with. It would make it impossible to do distance education, or for fine arts / sociology / theater majors to get a video material or pictorial material. Impossible here meaning prohibitively expensive. Or maybe just rich people should get a good education?
Rather depends on the class. Basic CS classes are not a great place for bagging fresman babes :-)
Porco Rosso from Miyazaki is also a nice, warm work, although with more conflict than Totoro.
The bandwidth is guaranteed in the sense that you can demand guarantees for a certain service/bandwidth class. If those guarantees can't be met, the connection will be refused. I highly doubt that common data use will demand or be given guarantees, since that is expensive for the provider (much fewer concurrent users in a cell), and probably too expensive for the customer.
Also, when a cell gets congested, do you block/drop voice calls, or cut back on available data bandwidth? You may be out of luck trying to get a "high-bandwidth" channel in any populated place, events and such.
Overall, its still a step forward. I hope they get the network built widely, and some handsets out...
It would, wouldn't it? CAM is darn expensive, though, and has other performance bottlenecks. Furthermore, routing isn't just plain old lookup, it's a longest-prefix match. Not only do you have to find a match, you have to find the best match.
In fact they aren't wasted, they're needed. MAC addresses have no hierarchy, and as a result aren't routable. You need a hierarchical address space to do routing. IPv6 essentially separates this routing address space (your wasted bits) from the host portion (MAC bits). Everyone wins: hosts can have a unique address while still being visible on several networks at once, they can move from network to network without really renumbering and so forth.
Gillespie. Once you actually sit down and watch more than fifteen minutes of a In the Heat of the Night episode it starts to dawn on you that they had darn good writers. I think it was an amazingly underrated series, hiding underneath the hick-town crust.
Oh. This was supposed to be about Enterprise? I liked the tits. And the lips. And the hips. And the eyes. And the short hair. Um. I didn't like the technology mumbo-jumbo and that they seem to already have all the conveniences of the later series. I didn't mind the opening. Most CG was good, some was horrendously bad, like the crash-landed Klingon ship. But who cares about what I thought anyways? I hope they can inject some content into the series, or at least sell nice posters of Ms. Blalock.
I'm not willing to go quite that far, but, well, the movie wasn't particularly great. No matter how well you package it, it still isn't particularly great. In fact it was remarkably mediocre.
We have largely the same issues here at USF.
1) We do not install NICs. Students are responsible for buying their computers and buying their network cards. The university bookstore sells them, and hence does the installation etc. support. The same applies to patch cords.
2) The first line of defense are the Resident Advisors in each residence hall. A lot of the problems can be solved within a building, without ever having to reach a help desk.
On the technical side we've done the following:
1) All addresses are DHCP. All students must have a valid email account with a department at the university, and before they can get a routable address they have to register their MAC address so we can track down who's doing what.
2) Redundant / failover DHCP servers.
3) Fully managed network, which allows us to quickly find any duplicate (stolen) IPs or connected MAC addresses. It also gives us error counters so we can quickly see if the NIC or cables are suspect.
4) The cable plant in all residence halls is certified Cat 5. Housing has been very understanding to the concept of doing it right the first time, and saving a bundle in man hours later. So far we've had almost no problems, and the logic has paid off quite nicely.
5) We use Cisco switches, and the above goes for them as well. Out of about 200 switches we've had two break over four years. The switches are managed off of a private vlan that doesn't get routed, so students have no way to get to them. This incidentally also prevents any web-worms/scanners or such from bugging the management and triggering possible bugs in IOS.
6) We scan the student networks with ISS or a similar tool regularly, and notify people of any glaring problems. If they don't comply within a reasonable time, we resort to the rules below and take them off the network until their machines are somewhat secure. This unfortunately affects linux users as much as it does Windows ones.
And political aspects...
1) As part of the lease agreement or the address registration students have to read a set of rules and sign off on them. That way we actually have leverage when someone misbehaves. We can show them the rules that allowed us to disconnect them without a refund or resort to academic discipline.
2) Traffic shaping seems to be the way to go. We're currently trying to figure out how much to allocate to whom, but there are no daily or absolute download limits. Say a student wants watch a 500k video stream of a class over I2. We have the bandwidth, but they could quickly pop any daily gig limit. Instead we just limit the total bandwidth of student connections so that researchers and staff members and such get first picks on bandwidth. Within campus there are no limits.
3) No servers reachable from off campus. If a student needs to run a server, they need to talk to their department and put it on a non-student network. Servers reachable only from within campus are okay, as long as they behave. This is filtered at our edge routers.
4) No registration of external DNS entries. All addresses under our address space are under our namespace.
5) We keep DHCP and similar logs, since we have had a few criminal cases in which someone has to be tracked down a while later. This though gets into law-enforcement and it's quite a mess.
No, it's not just you. They worked about an hour ago, but no go anymore. My ongoing downloads just timed out.
None of these seem to work for me. Site not found, file not found or authorization failed are the errors. Is there a known issue or is my ISP making a mess?
Otherwise law enforcement turns into a for-profit business where the goal isn't to deter crime or protect society. The goal will be legalized slavery and high-way robbery. This will be a surefire way to demolish any respect for the law or society.
There are a few GSM operators in the US. I am
currently using Voicestream, a couple of my
friends are with someone else, although I'm not
sure whom. With GTE, Aerial, AT&T, Alltel and others playing the musical chairs game with networks and names it gets rather hard to keep up.
In any event, both I and all my friends (with Voicestream and with an alternate carrier) were able to send and receive SMS messages to Finland (Radiolinja), and to each other. I think the situation isn't quite as bad as it seems.
Now if the US would just finally unbundle phones from ludicrously long-term contracts and let people actually pick the phones they want...
So at some point it makes no sense in making more directional antennas, as you have to decrease the power level accordingly.
See this link for more information.
What if you're, say, an environmental activist. Not violent, not even one that has caused property damage, but by association you are considered a (potential) terrorist? Wouldn't it be nice to know that just because you think that we shouldn't drill for oil in Alaska the police will keep tabs on you, potentially stop you every so often, ask for ID, or even ask you to leave the area if a politician appears to hold a speech?
There is a reason why even criminals, or suspected criminals have rights. They might be innocent, or their crimes may not warrant the kind of opression that results.
Unfortunately at least our local university library (University of South Florida) has moved to electronic journals with a number of publications. Not only do many of these not allow you to browse them, they also require a computer (and power) to view and often lack crucial graphics and pictures.
In this case, if there is no paper copy of a publication in a library, and the library relied on the electronic database, the worry is real.
This of course also raises the question on whether paying users of these databases can get a refund, since they don't have access to the content they were promised.
Access to TAC depends. This was a valid
network emergency (priority 1) case, and in
those Cisco really has amazing response times
and quality. With regular cases you don't have
to stay on hold either: give them a number
and they'll call you back. Or just open the
ticket via their web page. We end up
opening cases once a month or so and I can't
remember ever having to languish waiting on the
phone.
Copyright protection is a good idea. I believe an artist or creator should be able to dictate, at least for a while (for example until their death) what is done with or to their creations. However, why these rights should semi-automatically be transferred to publishers and producers, or why they should last for 70 years past the creator's death is wrong and excessive in my opinion. All of our common heritage and culture has been created by someone, and the concept of claiming ownership to it is a fairly recent invention.
(Please deposit $12.50 in order to cover the license for us singing "Happy Birthday to You".)
Merita actually also does SSH, so you only need
a VT52 or thereabouts compatible terminal and Unix account to bank. Really useful at universities and their email-checking terminal stands.
Also Leonia still has their old telnet-based system, which works much in the same manner. Both are probably offerings your average clerk would rather not tell you about, but as an original customer I still use both. It indeed helps a lot when you're trying to bank from across the Atlantic!
It's all based on single-use passwords, one for
login, then another challenge-response pool for each transaction, so being snooped isn't that big
of a worry either.
Remember, though, that in Scandinavia the common
way of paying a bill or giving someone money is
to directly transfer the sum from one account to another. Most people alive today have probably never even seen a cheque.
Disclaimer: I think Merita bites as much as
almost every other Finnish bank, but their SSH
service is cool to have.