I have and ADSL connection that is supposedly at 1.5Mbps downstream, 320kbps upstream. It was working well until July, that means having basically zero lost packets on the first visible IP hop good minimum latency 54ms and reasonable max roundtrip (about 100ms) on the usual five minutes MRTG
After July Telecom Italia probablly channeled my ATM stream into a busy trunk since I now have about 2% lost packets, extreme jitter on roundtrip (not uncomon to have one second roundtrip on my first IP hop) and so basically my conncetion is BAD for voip and annoying for http
So, it is good to have a high speed phisical link, but do not forget to check the rest of the infrastructure, othervise the
first high speed link is just to make you pay more but give NO additional benefit at all
You assume that there is a choice and that switching is less or equal hassle than try to "fix" the current service
This is not often the case. I am attempting to have Telecom Italia fix my ADSL, it is losing packets and by using a special crafted MRTG and line quality data collection I can pinpoint the issue, but this is no good with the "trolls" at the helpdesk.
What they did is to lower my maximum ADSL speed at 41% of channel capacity (as reported by my router), the problem is still there
Do I have a choice ? maybe yes. How difficult is to switch, a lot of hassle, really
At retirement time, in Italy, 90% of people live on state pension. Let me tell you what happens.
State pension works by having current workers pay pension of retired people. In the golden years (70,80,90) we had people working and an apparent "extra" money into the pension "funds". Politicians thought to use the extra money to send the retiring workers early to pension.
Not only, but it was "normal" to go to pension with 90% of the last monthly income
The problem is that workforce is now declining, taxes are increasing and we currently pay pension to people that are just lucky to have retired early with a hefty pension (apparently nobody is willing to know how much a worker has PAID into the pension scheme and refund just that, plus interest).
I know I will have to work as long as I can, I am just upset that jurnalists and politicians brush this issue under the carpet leaving for when it will be too late
We do have private pension scheme but they are a money drain (basically another way to give luxury cars to some fund manager) they give no
guarantee on the capital (as far as I know) and after the Parmalat scandal there is even less
trust on any private fund manager institution (Parmalat is not a fund manager, but if you "invested" on their bonds you have lost the money)
The web was invented right, HTML for documents, HTML forms for simple data entry and APPLETS/OBJECT for complex and "rich" content
The problem is that not all developers look for the right tool for the job, they have a screwdriver and think how to adapt it to a wrench
Of course the correct solution is to use the right tool, but, hey, this means learning something new !
Having javascript doing what java/C# does is just reinventing the wheel, it can be done, someone will even be happy to slam Java once again
but really it is just pain can you immagine having to support all the variations of javascript what will be coming out ??
even if you use google web toolkit the pain will be there in the form of something not working on some browser (with associated angry customer)
I hope that the developers thinking "KISS" (Keep It Simple Stupid) are not too few and apart
Yes, I know, the managers are the ones demanding the wirl, sliding, panning, fading, zooming, jarring, smearing... effects on a simple
dataentry web page, I suppose is the Peter Law
This is borderline to humor, but hey, we are allowed some joking no ?
It is easier to define "be allergic to a 2.4Ghz radiowave" than "be allergic to idiots"
After all I have doubts that we will ever be able to define (and agree upon) what an Idiot is..:-)
P.S. The definition of idiot I like is: A person that while doing something hurts him and the others
The issue here is not if any other system is available, beside Windows. Ths issue here is: is it "correct" to make it difficult for a customer to change ?
To me this is tied with antitrust regulation. A trust is a trust even if it does not have 100% of the market ! actually, Microsoft is probably eager to have some few percentages of "different" systems around so it can say "see, the customer HAVE choice !!!"
I also had bough an HP with Vista and had to zap it, did I get a refund ? no, why ? too long, too difficult. Was I able to use Windows XP ?
no, no drivers on HP website, why ? (due to agreements with Microsoft)
To all the people "defending" Microsoft on this, cmon, this is really astroturfing. Do you want fair competition ? then have PC sold without OS and let people choose and pay for what thay want
I bought a HP laptop pavilion dv9000, with vista (next time I will buy something with better linux support).
I wanted to make the recovery CD, before using it, just to be sure to be able to receover the machine.
(You cannot buy a barebone laptop nowdays, not at CDCpoint.it or Esprinet.com)
Vista did not even allow me to make the recovery DVD without agreeing on the EULA, and therefore I ZAPPED everything
and installed UBUNTU
I have the usual office programs OpenOffice (now even better than ever) and all my development with Eclipse and Jdeveloper
Do I regret it ? no. If I want eye candy I can have all of it with Ubuntu
Pay per usage severely limits services that use bandwidth and normally new services uses more bandwidth
Normally new services needs a minimum number of subscribers but subscribers do not "try it out" since it costs them money
There is another chilling effect bound to the fact that telcos have to repay the infrastructure and will therefore bill the
traffic very dearly, leading to even less bandwidth/services usage by the users
cases of study
X.25 switched network, it did work, but was extremly expensive
Current european plan for internet over cellphone, so expensive...
Squeeze as much cash from the West by having a secure ans strong antipiracy system
Keep the "new markets" seeded for windows by allowing them "cheap" (once upon a time pirated) copies of windows
The solution...
Is to "give away" windows copies, after all one dollar is the true cost fo Windows, all the rest is just profit
(How do you think Microsoft manages to have such obscene cash reserve ???)
I understand the points and being an "offshore datacenter" is bad for local US economy, however, I would add something to think before slamming
SUN is a company, and if it does not make profits for long enough it will disappear
Some seems interested on the demise of SUN, I do not believe products like Eclipse have that name by chance, C# struggle to declare
itself "not like Java", professor says that Java is harmful to students, I am sure I can continue
SUN gives to the community (they pay, you get the benefit), OpenOffice, Java, teaching tools and has contributed in many ways to open source (even if only by hosting sunsite at a time when web hosting was damm expensive)
Now I ask all of you, what would you do if you where in SUN place ? (it would be nice to have unlimited cash but you do not have it, it would be
nice if competitors just recognize good ideas and join the club, it would be nice if people says thanks for free products, but it does not seems to happen) It may as well be that a few "containers" in NOCs are cheaper and more reliable than the current structure, maybe...
You letter is a damming letter, or at least this is what it seems, it does not need to be so. Maybe SUN would not need to "offshore" if they
had a more positive attitute from the community on what they did, after all sales are also a result of perceived value and perceived value is
a bit irrational and easliy manipulated
I am not saying that you should actually like what they do !, just do not slam them, give them a chance....
Electronic voting is/will be a fraud, the prize for winning is too high
I am not saying that it happened now, but i surely will happen, no matter what. Please all of you "good will" men/women come down to earth and
stop pretending that electronic voting can be made perfect !
Electronic voting says: "trust me, I will count your vote for you in a way that you cannot verify". This is going to be a terrible democracy crash
Paper trail should/must be the one that counts, all the rest is exit polls (do we really care to know who the next president of US
is in real time ? or better, what are we giving up to have real time results ?
Why is the professor whining about Java (or C# for that matter) instead of teaching what he think is "useful" ?
I suppose he will say that there is no time.... well then either make the course longer or more focused !
Java/c# have solved a number of bugging issues in programming, do we want to program using tools that helps our job or
tools that hinder us ? NOTE: I do not think that java is good for Device drivers or OS, but if you do GUI or any other
higher level stuff.... why not, just to have fun with pointers ?
If you really want you can reach the "guts" of the OS even from Java, but unless you really need to why bother ? for fun ?
Another thing, only Java is mentioned, why not c# ?
Companies wants to retain control over devices they sell, they want to lock you into it as much as they can,
by the sheer pressure of customers Apple will provide a toolkit, but in the name of SECURITY they will decide
what application will be able to run on the machine.
Customers should be aware that the data they produce and own are caged into a device that is under control of somebody else !
It hardly helps with the overall lack of new students majoring in those subjects at university in the first place
you also say
I tend to not hire CompSci or CompE students from this program because as entry level hires they have incredibly unrealistic expectations about their first job
To me it follows that what you want is cheap, submissive employees that just do what some "manager" told them
Really, why should somebody do engineering ?, do managment instead. You will know nothing about what you are managing (Dilber Principle)
but at least you will be rewarded with a manager position and the associated money
From the customer point of view, it is not silly, can be called wasteful, but it is economic sound
This is what I did when the four cartridges for my laserjet 2600n did cost more than a new printer
Really, I did buy a second printer since overall I was saving 50Euros over buying the for cartridges...
When they run out I will buy something else (more linux compatible)
What makes me sad is that it is quite difficult for manufactures to actually "convince" a customer that a more expensive printer with a cheaper "refill" is worthwhile.
Maybe they should have a simple page that says "total costo over a year", where you input how many pages you plan to print
and it will compare a printer against the others. This would be good for the environment, and the customers, less for sneaky companies that tends to mess up with advertising
Question for you: Do you believe properly implemented strong encryption is breakable ?
The answer is NO. Do not be fooled by DVD and H-DVD, BLUEray they have a fundamental issue that the keys are within the medium, so they are way more difficult to secure.
Now, on the forensic issue, the question is: Is it possible to mess up with the data so they become irrecoverable ?
the answer is yes, either with crypting or with messing with the content.
The point is: Computer forensic method "assumes" that actions on the computer are similar to actions in real life (in real life you cannot change time flow, you cannot change matter properties, you cannot erase your friend memory), this is NOT the case with computer forensic, the assumprions are wrong and therefore the results are wrong or unreliable.
Even the algorithm for finding out doctored digital images can be twarted, if you know the detection algorithm.
Crypting the images is no good, unless, of course the "criminal" has the key and the police has the data.... that would guarantee
that the police does not mess with the images and the criminal does not erase the data....
Some of this is like taking a fingerprint of the image and writing it out for the record, but I wonder if there could be
a method that "reconstruct a fingerprint" from a modified image....
I did try Second Life, I wanted to try if I could have something similar to a web page into the virtual world.
I discovered that land price is artificially high, what happens is that "landlords" buy "islands" and then resell small plots
at high margin.
Let me do a few calculations (correct me if any of the assumptions are wrong)
An island is driven by a server and an island maps 65535sqm square meters
A one year resident pays about 70 US dollars and once upon a time you could have a 512sqm plot with it (it means that
they had the First Land policy)
If we divide an island by 512sqm we have about 127 "plots", i.e you can put 127 residents, each paying 70 US dollars.
It follows that each "server" can host customers paying about 9000 us dollars EVERY year
Current land costs ten time as much as that, at least, and you find weird plots or space for rent ant HIGH prices (compared
with the cost of servers). This seems to me a scam,
I have even blogged about it, hoping
that someone notices.
I did write to Linden about it, but I have yet to receive a reply [rt.lindenlab.com #631998], what irritates me is that current policy just makes Landlords rich doing basically nothing, it does not seems fair at all to me.
Regarding my original plan, I have realized that it is not enough to have a "shop" there, you also have to staff it.
So, the cost of having a shop in second life is way more that a website !
Yes, renting is "useful" if the cost of the item is big, but this is NOT the case with Wordprocessors/Spreadsheet/Dbase.
Beside Google you could use OpenOffice to do you letter writing/spreadsheet etc.
Also, you are renting since the repayment time of a house in UK now is in the order of 30years, here we are talking of
ONE year, so really, this scheme is only good for Microsoft
I believe that this study is paid (in some way) by Microsoft to have FREE marketing material
Yes, they are smart, having all of us Slashdotter to give them hints on how to start the next marketing campaign
Yes, we hate them because they are good on being in the borderline of all the bad practices they do and yet appease the "normal" user and suck money out of him/her
Gates spend millions on charity (and so please the public), with the money he got from all of us, so he play nice with OUR money. If I want to do charity I decide who gets the money !
They are not constantly bad, unfortunately, they manage to be good enough to continue to be in monopoly condition to abuse developers, resellers, customers, but not too much to have a revolution, just enough to squeeze all possible money out of them
I hope some moderator do not flag this a troll, I am just pointing out that you can also have another point of view from
the statistical review of BpAmoco
Slashdot Mirror
I have and ADSL connection that is supposedly at 1.5Mbps downstream, 320kbps upstream. It was working well until July, that means having basically zero lost packets on the first visible IP hop good minimum latency 54ms and reasonable max roundtrip (about 100ms) on the usual five minutes MRTG
After July Telecom Italia probablly channeled my ATM stream into a busy trunk since I now have about 2% lost packets, extreme jitter on roundtrip (not uncomon to have one second roundtrip on my first IP hop) and so basically my conncetion is BAD for voip and annoying for http
To measure all of this I use a modified MRTG
So, it is good to have a high speed phisical link, but do not forget to check the rest of the infrastructure, othervise the first high speed link is just to make you pay more but give NO additional benefit at all
You assume that there is a choice and that switching is less or equal hassle than try to "fix" the current service
This is not often the case. I am attempting to have Telecom Italia fix my ADSL, it is losing packets and by using a special crafted MRTG and line quality data collection I can pinpoint the issue, but this is no good with the "trolls" at the helpdesk.
What they did is to lower my maximum ADSL speed at 41% of channel capacity (as reported by my router), the problem is still there
Do I have a choice ? maybe yes.
How difficult is to switch, a lot of hassle, really
At retirement time, in Italy, 90% of people live on state pension. Let me tell you what happens.
State pension works by having current workers pay pension of retired people. In the golden years (70,80,90) we had people working and an apparent "extra" money into the pension "funds". Politicians thought to use the extra money to send the retiring workers early to pension.
Not only, but it was "normal" to go to pension with 90% of the last monthly income
The problem is that workforce is now declining, taxes are increasing and we currently pay pension to people that are just lucky to have retired early with a hefty pension (apparently nobody is willing to know how much a worker has PAID into the pension scheme and refund just that, plus interest).
I know I will have to work as long as I can, I am just upset that jurnalists and politicians brush this issue under the carpet leaving for when it will be too late
We do have private pension scheme but they are a money drain (basically another way to give luxury cars to some fund manager) they give no guarantee on the capital (as far as I know) and after the Parmalat scandal there is even less trust on any private fund manager institution (Parmalat is not a fund manager, but if you "invested" on their bonds you have lost the money)
The web was invented right, HTML for documents, HTML forms for simple data entry and APPLETS/OBJECT for complex and "rich" content
The problem is that not all developers look for the right tool for the job, they have a screwdriver and think how to adapt it to a wrench
Of course the correct solution is to use the right tool, but, hey, this means learning something new !
Having javascript doing what java/C# does is just reinventing the wheel, it can be done, someone will even be happy to slam Java once again but really it is just pain
can you immagine having to support all the variations of javascript what will be coming out ?? even if you use google web toolkit the pain will be there in the form of something not working on some browser (with associated angry customer)
I hope that the developers thinking "KISS" (Keep It Simple Stupid) are not too few and apart
Yes, I know, the managers are the ones demanding the wirl, sliding, panning, fading, zooming, jarring, smearing... effects on a simple dataentry web page, I suppose is the Peter Law
This is borderline to humor, but hey, we are allowed some joking no ?
It is easier to define "be allergic to a 2.4Ghz radiowave" than "be allergic to idiots" :-)
After all I have doubts that we will ever be able to define (and agree upon) what an Idiot is..
P.S. The definition of idiot I like is: A person that while doing something hurts him and the others
The issue here is not if any other system is available, beside Windows. Ths issue here is: is it "correct" to make it difficult for a customer to change ?
To me this is tied with antitrust regulation. A trust is a trust even if it does not have 100% of the market ! actually, Microsoft is probably eager to have some few percentages of "different" systems around so it can say "see, the customer HAVE choice !!!"
I also had bough an HP with Vista and had to zap it, did I get a refund ? no, why ? too long, too difficult. Was I able to use Windows XP ? no, no drivers on HP website, why ? (due to agreements with Microsoft)
To all the people "defending" Microsoft on this, cmon, this is really astroturfing. Do you want fair competition ? then have PC sold without OS and let people choose and pay for what thay want
You ask about alternatives ?, my story
I bought a HP laptop pavilion dv9000, with vista (next time I will buy something with better linux support). I wanted to make the recovery CD, before using it, just to be sure to be able to receover the machine. (You cannot buy a barebone laptop nowdays, not at CDCpoint.it or Esprinet.com)
Vista did not even allow me to make the recovery DVD without agreeing on the EULA, and therefore I ZAPPED everything and installed UBUNTU
I have the usual office programs OpenOffice (now even better than ever) and all my development with Eclipse and Jdeveloper
Do I regret it ? no. If I want eye candy I can have all of it with Ubuntu
Pay per usage chill innovation
Pay per usage severely limits services that use bandwidth and normally new services uses more bandwidth
Normally new services needs a minimum number of subscribers but subscribers do not "try it out" since it costs them money
There is another chilling effect bound to the fact that telcos have to repay the infrastructure and will therefore bill the traffic very dearly, leading to even less bandwidth/services usage by the users
cases of study
X.25 switched network, it did work, but was extremly expensive
Current european plan for internet over cellphone, so expensive...
This would be true with Windows XP, not vista
Microsoft has two opposite target now
- Squeeze as much cash from the West by having a secure ans strong antipiracy system
- Keep the "new markets" seeded for windows by allowing them "cheap" (once upon a time pirated) copies of windows
The solution...Is to "give away" windows copies, after all one dollar is the true cost fo Windows, all the rest is just profit (How do you think Microsoft manages to have such obscene cash reserve ???)
I understand the points and being an "offshore datacenter" is bad for local US economy, however, I would add something to think before slamming
SUN is a company, and if it does not make profits for long enough it will disappear
Some seems interested on the demise of SUN, I do not believe products like Eclipse have that name by chance, C# struggle to declare itself "not like Java", professor says that Java is harmful to students, I am sure I can continue
SUN gives to the community (they pay, you get the benefit), OpenOffice, Java, teaching tools and has contributed in many ways to open source (even if only by hosting sunsite at a time when web hosting was damm expensive)
Now I ask all of you, what would you do if you where in SUN place ? (it would be nice to have unlimited cash but you do not have it, it would be nice if competitors just recognize good ideas and join the club, it would be nice if people says thanks for free products, but it does not seems to happen) It may as well be that a few "containers" in NOCs are cheaper and more reliable than the current structure, maybe...
You letter is a damming letter, or at least this is what it seems, it does not need to be so. Maybe SUN would not need to "offshore" if they had a more positive attitute from the community on what they did, after all sales are also a result of perceived value and perceived value is a bit irrational and easliy manipulated
I am not saying that you should actually like what they do !, just do not slam them, give them a chance....
Electronic voting is/will be a fraud, the prize for winning is too high
I am not saying that it happened now, but i surely will happen, no matter what. Please all of you "good will" men/women come down to earth and stop pretending that electronic voting can be made perfect !
Electronic voting says: "trust me, I will count your vote for you in a way that you cannot verify". This is going to be a terrible democracy crash
Paper trail should/must be the one that counts, all the rest is exit polls (do we really care to know who the next president of US is in real time ? or better, what are we giving up to have real time results ?
Why is the professor whining about Java (or C# for that matter) instead of teaching what he think is "useful" ?
I suppose he will say that there is no time.... well then either make the course longer or more focused !
Java/c# have solved a number of bugging issues in programming, do we want to program using tools that helps our job or tools that hinder us ? NOTE: I do not think that java is good for Device drivers or OS, but if you do GUI or any other higher level stuff.... why not, just to have fun with pointers ?
If you really want you can reach the "guts" of the OS even from Java, but unless you really need to why bother ? for fun ?
Another thing, only Java is mentioned, why not c# ?
If you want to read what Nokia does on E90 to cage the customer then have a look at what happened when I tried to import my old 9110i Contacts into my new E90
Companies wants to retain control over devices they sell, they want to lock you into it as much as they can, by the sheer pressure of customers Apple will provide a toolkit, but in the name of SECURITY they will decide what application will be able to run on the machine.
Customers should be aware that the data they produce and own are caged into a device that is under control of somebody else !
You say
It hardly helps with the overall lack of new students majoring in those subjects at university in the first placeyou also say
I tend to not hire CompSci or CompE students from this program because as entry level hires they have incredibly unrealistic expectations about their first jobTo me it follows that what you want is cheap, submissive employees that just do what some "manager" told them
Really, why should somebody do engineering ?, do managment instead. You will know nothing about what you are managing (Dilber Principle) but at least you will be rewarded with a manager position and the associated money
From the customer point of view, it is not silly, can be called wasteful, but it is economic sound
This is what I did when the four cartridges for my laserjet 2600n did cost more than a new printer
Really, I did buy a second printer since overall I was saving 50Euros over buying the for cartridges...
When they run out I will buy something else (more linux compatible)
What makes me sad is that it is quite difficult for manufactures to actually "convince" a customer that a more expensive printer with a cheaper "refill" is worthwhile.
Maybe they should have a simple page that says "total costo over a year", where you input how many pages you plan to print and it will compare a printer against the others. This would be good for the environment, and the customers, less for sneaky companies that tends to mess up with advertising
Why should they pay good money out of their pocket to please Microsoft ?
They are printing, not editing equations !
As usual, if you pay me for Word 2007 and all following forced Microsoft release then, thanks, I will use it.
If you are not going to, please stop advocating it without comparing it with other alternatives.
Question for you: Do you believe properly implemented strong encryption is breakable ?
The answer is NO. Do not be fooled by DVD and H-DVD, BLUEray they have a fundamental issue that the keys are within the medium, so they are way more difficult to secure.Now, on the forensic issue, the question is: Is it possible to mess up with the data so they become irrecoverable ?
the answer is yes, either with crypting or with messing with the content. The point is: Computer forensic method "assumes" that actions on the computer are similar to actions in real life (in real life you cannot change time flow, you cannot change matter properties, you cannot erase your friend memory), this is NOT the case with computer forensic, the assumprions are wrong and therefore the results are wrong or unreliable.Even the algorithm for finding out doctored digital images can be twarted, if you know the detection algorithm.
Crypting the images is no good, unless, of course the "criminal" has the key and the police has the data.... that would guarantee that the police does not mess with the images and the criminal does not erase the data.... Some of this is like taking a fingerprint of the image and writing it out for the record, but I wonder if there could be a method that "reconstruct a fingerprint" from a modified image....Virtual Land is infinite, real land is not.
There are differences in virtual world, differences that should be taken into account
Even in real life you can be ripped off (that means charged way above the "value" of the good you are buying
If the current value of Second Life Land is kept artificialyl high by Linden Policy of not releasing land then this seems a scam to me.
But whatever, if the rest of the people are happy like this then it must be ok :-)
I did try Second Life, I wanted to try if I could have something similar to a web page into the virtual world.
I discovered that land price is artificially high, what happens is that "landlords" buy "islands" and then resell small plots at high margin.
Let me do a few calculations (correct me if any of the assumptions are wrong)
Current land costs ten time as much as that, at least, and you find weird plots or space for rent ant HIGH prices (compared with the cost of servers). This seems to me a scam, I have even blogged about it, hoping that someone notices.
I did write to Linden about it, but I have yet to receive a reply [rt.lindenlab.com #631998], what irritates me is that current policy just makes Landlords rich doing basically nothing, it does not seems fair at all to me.
Regarding my original plan, I have realized that it is not enough to have a "shop" there, you also have to staff it. So, the cost of having a shop in second life is way more that a website !
Yes, renting is "useful" if the cost of the item is big, but this is NOT the case with Wordprocessors/Spreadsheet/Dbase.
Beside Google you could use OpenOffice to do you letter writing/spreadsheet etc.
Also, you are renting since the repayment time of a house in UK now is in the order of 30years, here we are talking of ONE year, so really, this scheme is only good for Microsoft
and how difficult to get it back
This is not just for Computing but the concept is more important than ever now, in Computing
I am sure Microsoft would be happy of your proposal
Basically what you say is to give Bill Gates the key of the entire Internet (since the web is the internet now)
I believe that this study is paid (in some way) by Microsoft to have FREE marketing material
Yes, they are smart, having all of us Slashdotter to give them hints on how to start the next marketing campaign
Yes, we hate them because they are good on being in the borderline of all the bad practices they do and yet appease the "normal" user and suck money out of him/her
Gates spend millions on charity (and so please the public), with the money he got from all of us, so he play nice with OUR money. If I want to do charity I decide who gets the money !
They are not constantly bad, unfortunately, they manage to be good enough to continue to be in monopoly condition to abuse developers, resellers, customers, but not too much to have a revolution, just enough to squeeze all possible money out of them
Why not have ubuntu 6.10 and Qemu to take care of the WIndows iffy programs ?
Even if with kqemu the performance if almost native you still need probably 1Gb of ram, but if you buy a new machine this is almost the norm now.
You can get uset to Ubuntu and all the programs and have the windows confined to the cellar :-)
Do not forget to install VLC (videolan) to enjoy videos
I hope some moderator do not flag this a troll, I am just pointing out that you can also have another point of view from the statistical review of BpAmoco
Bpamoco statistical review