Apart from the fact that the latest version of Samba 4 is clearly labelled as being an alpha build, and has the following warning (lifted straight from samba.org):
Samba 4 is currently not yet in a state where it is usable in production environments.
You tried browsing the web with a modem lately? Must be honest and confess I haven't, but I have been doing so with Firebug. AFAICT, the days of most major sites being designed to download and work over a modem link are long gone.
I've worked at a school myself, however, and the argument generally speaking (amongst the more technically-literate staff) went something like this:
"Web filtering technology is lousy. We know this perfectly well.
However we are also certain that many pupils have parents who either A: are legal eagles of some sort or B: would have no qualms in hiring one in the event of their little darling(s) downloading something dodgy.
It is common knowledge that the Internet has a vast amount of material a parent may find offensive, so we can hardly claim we didn't know about its existence. So we'll set up the web filtering. It may never actually protect the kids, but it will mean that if the worst comes to the worst, we can at least stand up and say "We did all we could to prevent this from happening"".
If anyone honestly believes that this is going to result in the various record labels worldwide finally throwing their hands up and saying "Enough! We give up", they're living in cloud cuckoo land. Far more likely it'll lead to much tighter regulation of the Internet in many first-world countries.
After all, we already have "three-strikes and you're out" laws in many countries, and those strikes frequently don't require any sort of due process. Plenty of governments have hinted by their actions that they rather like the idea of a tightly-controlled Internet where everyone does as they are damn well told or faces the consequences, this kind of thing could be all the justification they need to tighten the screw a little further.
Of course, it won't be painted in that fashion. It'll be painted as "Cyber-attacks cost businesses millions of ${CURRENCY} a year in lost revenue, this law will force ISPs to automatically detect and shut-off the Internet connection of anyone launching such an attack".
Wouldn't it be easier to take a picture of the label or write down the code instead of keeping around an entire computer for that information?
This is a good idea in any case. Those stickers are non-replaceable - if yours gets worn or damaged (quite possible considering that Microsoft make them flimsier every year) and you need the number on it, you're SOL. Your OEM likely didn't record the number and won't replace the sticker, no matter how sweetly you ask. Your only option is to either buy a new copy or pirate a piece of software you own perfectly legally.
And I will place cold, hard cash on it that a lot of developers are totally unaware of that. After all, if your average Windows developer took time to learn the API (rather than just muddling along doing whatever they can to get things to work), UAC wouldn't have been anything like as much pain.
Equally possible that they were sent a bog-standard contract and they decided that particular clause wasn't worth haggling over.
After all, if you've already decided to standardise on one company's product, it's probably not a particular hardship if the contract you sign with that company essentially forces you to do that. You were going to do it anyway.
Probably less than the cost of being locked into no-shop clauses in an MS agreement.
Such a non-compete clause is most likely an anti-trust violation if TFS is correct.
It wouldn't surprise me if it is. Certainly Windows desktop licensing, you are obliged by the terms of the license to count every x86 desktop PC regardless of what OS you propose running on it.
Obviously you don't have to buy a site-license for Windows desktop OSs - you could just rely on the OEM license the PCs ship with - but the OEM license terms preclude using the copy of Windows that came with the PC to roll out across all your PCs, even if they all have OEM licenses. Only way around that is if you are the OEM.
You'd think one copy of Windows is as good as any other, but it turns out that every OEM thinks different things should be installed on a PC from the factory - and those things change every few months. Same's true of drivers - HP ship the PC with version X of the Broadcom ethernet driver, three months later they ship version X+1 of the driver (and both versions are at least one major version behind what Broadcom have on their website). I tried supporting that, what you tend to wind up with is a bunch of PCs that are subtly different enough that they all show issues, and every issue is different and hard to reproduce on any other PC. The only solution is to buy all your PCs at the same time and spec them identically - and by the time you're large enough to do this, chances are you need to image your PCs anyway if only to get all the software you need on them.
I don't know if Microsoft's license terms would stand up in the event of an anti-trust case actually focusing on them, but I do know that very few companies are lining up to be the test case.
While I know for a fact it's possible to have a whole farm of Windows servers run well - I've seen it happen - I haven't seen it recently.
I've seen Windows systems go wrong, I've seen admins who show no interest in figuring out why that is - let alone actually fixing it, but instead go with the old "Retry, reboot, reinstall" mantra. I am 90% sure that the reason Windows admins are cheaper is because the incompetent morons are pushing salaries down for everyone, and hiring managers can't tell the difference between an incompetent moron and someone who knows what s/he's doing.
I worked for a startup that used branded google services for email, instant messaging and calendar. It worked pretty well. Not sure how the cost worked out, but it was certainly less headache than maintaining our own mail server. Especially since we didn't have a dedicated IT person.
We do exactly that - it's UK£30/person/annum and includes Google Docs and Sites (though your admin may not have enabled these). At that kind of cost, it's hard for a small company to buy a half-decent server to handle your email on and replace it every 3-5 years - never mind any commercial software if you're not happy with a plain IMAP server. It's even harder if you want a secondary MX offsite.
I haven't even looked at the man-hours required to set up and manage the thing. A properly setup mail server requires practically zero management, but your users certainly do. I can't count the number of times I've been asked to chase down an email that went "missing" only to prove that the recipient just hasn't found it in their inbox with about 5,000 unread emails.
With a GUI, if you need to do something complicated that it doesn't already provide a quick, easy way to do, you're generally stuck mindlessly clicking buttons. If you need to do this on a regular basis or you need to do it predictably when something in particular happens, it gets very old very quickly. (Tools like AutoIT help but they can break horribly with minor upgrades and fundamentally, you're trying to add scripting to an interface that was never designed to be scriptable).
With a proper scriptable CLI, you've got all the tools at your disposal to ensure you never find yourself stuck mindlessly clicking buttons.
It's the difference between a flatpack Ikea bookcase and a bunch of planks, screws, table saw, power drill and set of screwdriver bits. Either can build you a bookcase, and the Ikea one's a lot quicker if you've never used the power tools, but it may be totally unsuitable if you need to fit the bookcase in a particular alcove.
Well, one obvious way would be that there haven't been truly new things in the tech industry in years. Possibly decades.
There are new ways of doing the same old things, and what may have been a valid assumption 10 or 15 years ago may not be valid today, but databases are still databases, programming languages generally have fairly similar primitive types, loops and function call mechanisms (though they may describe them differently or use different syntax). And operating systems still need to provide a means of getting data to and from mass storage, a means of getting onto a network and a platform on which to run your applications.
Active Directory's a good example of this. Not a single technology within AD was particularly new at the time, but nobody had fully integrated it all at that point.
I'm not demeaning Powershell. I'm demeaning shoehorning windows into the server closet.
Thing is, while your argument may have made some sense in the Bad Old Days of NT 4 prior to service pack...ooh, about 3, I think, it doesn't make much sense today.
Today Windows can be a perfectly capable server OS. Granted, Microsoft have a bit of a habit of taking a concept that's perfectly simple and complicating the hell out of it just so they can slap a GUI on top and call it easy to use, but virtually all commercial software vendors are guilty of that to a greater or lesser extent.
Probably because it was only a few years ago that there was no other serious business phone that did a half-decent job of email and had management features built right in (such as encforcing endpoint encryption and remote wiping).
Now more-or-less every smartphone offers such features, and non-smart phones are rapidly starting to look like an endangered species. Blackberry no longer offer anything particularly special.
And finally, a project at the University of Catania in Italy was awarded the management prize for demonstrating mathematically that organizations can improve efficiency by promoting people randomly.
This research deserves a far better prize than the Ig Nobel. Just look at the management in companies! An algorithm far worse than random is being used to select the worst of the worst to run companies.
I believe most institutions run in spite of management.
And don't mod this funny.
That doesn't actually hugely surprise me. At least one well-known jobhunting book claims that companies get just as good results choosing new staff by pulling names out of a hat as they do through the traditional application/interview process, and I first read that in around 2002.
Way OT here, but I think (at least in the UI department, haven't really looked under the hood) Windows 7 is quite an improvement over XP for a number of reasons - and yes I know a lot of these debuted in Vista:
- GUI is resolution-independent. No more squinting to see the screen on a high-res monitor. The only amazing thing about this was it took so long for it to happen. - Taskbar deals with many applications open much more efficiently. The only amazing thing about this was it took so long for it to happen. - As does the system tray. The only amazing thing about th...... you get the idea. - Much more effort made to ensure things JFW, and to fix it when things get broken. - "Yes I know you've got updates. Bug me later over them" - you can tell Windows to bug you again in several hours rather than having to tell it every 10 minutes.
Of course, there are still some issues:
- Things still don't always JFW - and when they don't, getting into the relevant configuration to sort them by hand is often more convoluted. - It's called the Event Log. It's there for a reason. Seriously, how in God's name does anyone ever fix anything in Windows when so few things - even internal Windows components - bother to write to the damn thing? Don't bother answering that one, I already know - it's a combination of trial and error and learning all the little glitches through experience. - Speaking of the Event Log, why does Windows still not have a mechanism to access it which lends itself to browsing? Double-clicking on every entry in the hope of turning up something interesting gets really old really fast. - Microsoft's own developers appear to have given up on expecting people to actually read error messages. As a rule, they've become even more meaningless. Think along the lines of "Something went wrong".
Not a great deal in practical terms, but it's a little more complicated than that.
There are quite a lot of things it's actually quite difficult to do with a layer of NAT in the way. Things that you may well want to do on your iPhone.
IPSec is a PITA, as is SIP. Both of these have workarounds that are commonly implemented which deal with NAT, but these workarounds can introduce all sorts of interoperability issues which don't otherwise exist. Anyone who's supported large numbers of road warriors using an IPSec based VPN knows what I mean - sooner or later you can more-or-less guarantee that someone's going to stay somewhere where the hotel's wireless configuration unintentionally breaks IPSec, and Murphy's law dictates the person affected will be your CEO at a conference discussing the benefits of outsourcing your IT support to India.
(Variation for IT Support People who Live in India: It'll be your CEO at a conference discussing outsourcing your IT to the US, which has become much cheaper now there are so many IT specialists and so few IT jobs).
The fact of the matter is that those workarounds shouldn't really need to exist in the first place.
AFAIK, most countries already have some sort of "driving without due care" law, which is a generic law to deal with the motorist who's all over the place but didn't have any obvious cause (such as drink driving).
If such laws were effective against people texting, they'd be used. They're not, mainly because something like this quite often isn't an obvious case of driving without due care until it's too late.
That's almost certainly what they'll do, and I'll tell you how they'll do it.
They'll point out that iPhone, iPod and Apple are all trademarks of Apple Computer. If the distributors wish to continue selling their product, they'll have to sell it with a description along the lines of:
"The new Peel device turns a well-known MP3 player into a telephone! But we can't tell you which MP3 player it is!".
Wasn't a well-known parallel importer from Hong Kong closed down with a similar suit?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
Not necessarily true - many network technologies simply don't degrade gracefully towards 100% saturation, which means that you can be using only a small fraction of your hypothetically available bandwidth yet performance goes to hell.
It's possible to set up QoS to avoid this issue, making better use of available bandwidth - which involves making trade-offs based on latency and reliability - and if done carefully, you can make overall performance much more predictable without significantly slowing it. Obviously you can't give two HTTP downloads 10Mbps each when you've only got a 10Mbps link, but you can ensure things like VoIP and SSH remain usable when such demand is being placed on the link. The difficult bit is configuring everything appropriately.
There exist scripts for Linux firewalls which attempt to do this in a fairly idiot-proof "one-size fits all" fashion. A well-known example of this is Wondershaper.
(Disclaimer: my employer produces QoS software, though I'm not directly involved in that bit).
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
There are only about 15-20 ISPs who have unbundled services in the entire country, and none have every exchange covered. Even the most heavily unbundled exchange I could find (Battersea) only has equipment from 9 ISPs.
However, it's very common for one ISP to offer their services wholesale to another - so you're paying Company A for broadband, all your bills and technical support queries are directed through Company A, but your actual connection is going over equipment owned by Company B. Several ISPs offer nationwide service by doing just this - if they haven't unbundled your exchange, they will resell you BT's wholesale product.
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Apart from the fact that the latest version of Samba 4 is clearly labelled as being an alpha build, and has the following warning (lifted straight from samba.org):
Samba 4 is currently not yet in a state where it is usable in production environments.
You tried browsing the web with a modem lately? Must be honest and confess I haven't, but I have been doing so with Firebug. AFAICT, the days of most major sites being designed to download and work over a modem link are long gone.
Technically you're quite correct.
I've worked at a school myself, however, and the argument generally speaking (amongst the more technically-literate staff) went something like this:
"Web filtering technology is lousy. We know this perfectly well.
However we are also certain that many pupils have parents who either A: are legal eagles of some sort or B: would have no qualms in hiring one in the event of their little darling(s) downloading something dodgy.
It is common knowledge that the Internet has a vast amount of material a parent may find offensive, so we can hardly claim we didn't know about its existence. So we'll set up the web filtering. It may never actually protect the kids, but it will mean that if the worst comes to the worst, we can at least stand up and say "We did all we could to prevent this from happening"".
Basically, it's a big arse-covering exercise.
If anyone honestly believes that this is going to result in the various record labels worldwide finally throwing their hands up and saying "Enough! We give up", they're living in cloud cuckoo land. Far more likely it'll lead to much tighter regulation of the Internet in many first-world countries.
After all, we already have "three-strikes and you're out" laws in many countries, and those strikes frequently don't require any sort of due process. Plenty of governments have hinted by their actions that they rather like the idea of a tightly-controlled Internet where everyone does as they are damn well told or faces the consequences, this kind of thing could be all the justification they need to tighten the screw a little further.
Of course, it won't be painted in that fashion. It'll be painted as "Cyber-attacks cost businesses millions of ${CURRENCY} a year in lost revenue, this law will force ISPs to automatically detect and shut-off the Internet connection of anyone launching such an attack".
Wouldn't it be easier to take a picture of the label or write down the code instead of keeping around an entire computer for that information?
This is a good idea in any case. Those stickers are non-replaceable - if yours gets worn or damaged (quite possible considering that Microsoft make them flimsier every year) and you need the number on it, you're SOL. Your OEM likely didn't record the number and won't replace the sticker, no matter how sweetly you ask. Your only option is to either buy a new copy or pirate a piece of software you own perfectly legally.
And I will place cold, hard cash on it that a lot of developers are totally unaware of that. After all, if your average Windows developer took time to learn the API (rather than just muddling along doing whatever they can to get things to work), UAC wouldn't have been anything like as much pain.
Equally possible that they were sent a bog-standard contract and they decided that particular clause wasn't worth haggling over.
After all, if you've already decided to standardise on one company's product, it's probably not a particular hardship if the contract you sign with that company essentially forces you to do that. You were going to do it anyway.
Probably less than the cost of being locked into no-shop clauses in an MS agreement.
Such a non-compete clause is most likely an anti-trust violation if TFS is correct.
It wouldn't surprise me if it is. Certainly Windows desktop licensing, you are obliged by the terms of the license to count every x86 desktop PC regardless of what OS you propose running on it.
Obviously you don't have to buy a site-license for Windows desktop OSs - you could just rely on the OEM license the PCs ship with - but the OEM license terms preclude using the copy of Windows that came with the PC to roll out across all your PCs, even if they all have OEM licenses. Only way around that is if you are the OEM.
You'd think one copy of Windows is as good as any other, but it turns out that every OEM thinks different things should be installed on a PC from the factory - and those things change every few months. Same's true of drivers - HP ship the PC with version X of the Broadcom ethernet driver, three months later they ship version X+1 of the driver (and both versions are at least one major version behind what Broadcom have on their website). I tried supporting that, what you tend to wind up with is a bunch of PCs that are subtly different enough that they all show issues, and every issue is different and hard to reproduce on any other PC. The only solution is to buy all your PCs at the same time and spec them identically - and by the time you're large enough to do this, chances are you need to image your PCs anyway if only to get all the software you need on them.
I don't know if Microsoft's license terms would stand up in the event of an anti-trust case actually focusing on them, but I do know that very few companies are lining up to be the test case.
While I know for a fact it's possible to have a whole farm of Windows servers run well - I've seen it happen - I haven't seen it recently.
I've seen Windows systems go wrong, I've seen admins who show no interest in figuring out why that is - let alone actually fixing it, but instead go with the old "Retry, reboot, reinstall" mantra. I am 90% sure that the reason Windows admins are cheaper is because the incompetent morons are pushing salaries down for everyone, and hiring managers can't tell the difference between an incompetent moron and someone who knows what s/he's doing.
I worked for a startup that used branded google services for email, instant messaging and calendar. It worked pretty well. Not sure how the cost worked out, but it was certainly less headache than maintaining our own mail server. Especially since we didn't have a dedicated IT person.
We do exactly that - it's UK£30/person/annum and includes Google Docs and Sites (though your admin may not have enabled these). At that kind of cost, it's hard for a small company to buy a half-decent server to handle your email on and replace it every 3-5 years - never mind any commercial software if you're not happy with a plain IMAP server. It's even harder if you want a secondary MX offsite.
I haven't even looked at the man-hours required to set up and manage the thing. A properly setup mail server requires practically zero management, but your users certainly do. I can't count the number of times I've been asked to chase down an email that went "missing" only to prove that the recipient just hasn't found it in their inbox with about 5,000 unread emails.
How on Earth did you ever get modded insightful?
What do you think your ISPs DNS server uses to for the first step of resolving any query it doesn't have cached? Psychic powers? Magic fairy dust?
Having said that, the whole point of having multiple root DNS servers is to ensure the failure of one is nothing more than a minor irritation.
The big thing the CLI gives you is automation.
With a GUI, if you need to do something complicated that it doesn't already provide a quick, easy way to do, you're generally stuck mindlessly clicking buttons. If you need to do this on a regular basis or you need to do it predictably when something in particular happens, it gets very old very quickly. (Tools like AutoIT help but they can break horribly with minor upgrades and fundamentally, you're trying to add scripting to an interface that was never designed to be scriptable).
With a proper scriptable CLI, you've got all the tools at your disposal to ensure you never find yourself stuck mindlessly clicking buttons.
It's the difference between a flatpack Ikea bookcase and a bunch of planks, screws, table saw, power drill and set of screwdriver bits. Either can build you a bookcase, and the Ikea one's a lot quicker if you've never used the power tools, but it may be totally unsuitable if you need to fit the bookcase in a particular alcove.
Well, one obvious way would be that there haven't been truly new things in the tech industry in years. Possibly decades.
There are new ways of doing the same old things, and what may have been a valid assumption 10 or 15 years ago may not be valid today, but databases are still databases, programming languages generally have fairly similar primitive types, loops and function call mechanisms (though they may describe them differently or use different syntax). And operating systems still need to provide a means of getting data to and from mass storage, a means of getting onto a network and a platform on which to run your applications.
Active Directory's a good example of this. Not a single technology within AD was particularly new at the time, but nobody had fully integrated it all at that point.
I'm not demeaning Powershell. I'm demeaning shoehorning windows into the server closet.
Thing is, while your argument may have made some sense in the Bad Old Days of NT 4 prior to service pack...ooh, about 3, I think, it doesn't make much sense today.
Today Windows can be a perfectly capable server OS. Granted, Microsoft have a bit of a habit of taking a concept that's perfectly simple and complicating the hell out of it just so they can slap a GUI on top and call it easy to use, but virtually all commercial software vendors are guilty of that to a greater or lesser extent.
Probably because it was only a few years ago that there was no other serious business phone that did a half-decent job of email and had management features built right in (such as encforcing endpoint encryption and remote wiping).
Now more-or-less every smartphone offers such features, and non-smart phones are rapidly starting to look like an endangered species. Blackberry no longer offer anything particularly special.
Three words for you: Picasa Web Albums.
And finally, a project at the University of Catania in Italy was awarded the management prize for demonstrating mathematically that organizations can improve efficiency by promoting people randomly.
This research deserves a far better prize than the Ig Nobel. Just look at the management in companies! An algorithm far worse than random is being used to select the worst of the worst to run companies.
I believe most institutions run in spite of management.
And don't mod this funny.
That doesn't actually hugely surprise me. At least one well-known jobhunting book claims that companies get just as good results choosing new staff by pulling names out of a hat as they do through the traditional application/interview process, and I first read that in around 2002.
Way OT here, but I think (at least in the UI department, haven't really looked under the hood) Windows 7 is quite an improvement over XP for a number of reasons - and yes I know a lot of these debuted in Vista:
- GUI is resolution-independent. No more squinting to see the screen on a high-res monitor. The only amazing thing about this was it took so long for it to happen.
- Taskbar deals with many applications open much more efficiently. The only amazing thing about this was it took so long for it to happen.
- As does the system tray. The only amazing thing about th...... you get the idea.
- Much more effort made to ensure things JFW, and to fix it when things get broken.
- "Yes I know you've got updates. Bug me later over them" - you can tell Windows to bug you again in several hours rather than having to tell it every 10 minutes.
Of course, there are still some issues:
- Things still don't always JFW - and when they don't, getting into the relevant configuration to sort them by hand is often more convoluted.
- It's called the Event Log. It's there for a reason. Seriously, how in God's name does anyone ever fix anything in Windows when so few things - even internal Windows components - bother to write to the damn thing? Don't bother answering that one, I already know - it's a combination of trial and error and learning all the little glitches through experience.
- Speaking of the Event Log, why does Windows still not have a mechanism to access it which lends itself to browsing? Double-clicking on every entry in the hope of turning up something interesting gets really old really fast.
- Microsoft's own developers appear to have given up on expecting people to actually read error messages. As a rule, they've become even more meaningless. Think along the lines of "Something went wrong".
Not a great deal in practical terms, but it's a little more complicated than that.
There are quite a lot of things it's actually quite difficult to do with a layer of NAT in the way. Things that you may well want to do on your iPhone.
IPSec is a PITA, as is SIP. Both of these have workarounds that are commonly implemented which deal with NAT, but these workarounds can introduce all sorts of interoperability issues which don't otherwise exist. Anyone who's supported large numbers of road warriors using an IPSec based VPN knows what I mean - sooner or later you can more-or-less guarantee that someone's going to stay somewhere where the hotel's wireless configuration unintentionally breaks IPSec, and Murphy's law dictates the person affected will be your CEO at a conference discussing the benefits of outsourcing your IT support to India.
(Variation for IT Support People who Live in India: It'll be your CEO at a conference discussing outsourcing your IT to the US, which has become much cheaper now there are so many IT specialists and so few IT jobs).
The fact of the matter is that those workarounds shouldn't really need to exist in the first place.
AFAIK, most countries already have some sort of "driving without due care" law, which is a generic law to deal with the motorist who's all over the place but didn't have any obvious cause (such as drink driving).
If such laws were effective against people texting, they'd be used. They're not, mainly because something like this quite often isn't an obvious case of driving without due care until it's too late.
You'd better tell Lik Sang that. They thought they could do exactly that.
People said the same thing about Japan 30 or 40 years ago. Now look where they are.
That's almost certainly what they'll do, and I'll tell you how they'll do it.
They'll point out that iPhone, iPod and Apple are all trademarks of Apple Computer. If the distributors wish to continue selling their product, they'll have to sell it with a description along the lines of:
"The new Peel device turns a well-known MP3 player into a telephone! But we can't tell you which MP3 player it is!".
Wasn't a well-known parallel importer from Hong Kong closed down with a similar suit?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
Not necessarily true - many network technologies simply don't degrade gracefully towards 100% saturation, which means that you can be using only a small fraction of your hypothetically available bandwidth yet performance goes to hell.
It's possible to set up QoS to avoid this issue, making better use of available bandwidth - which involves making trade-offs based on latency and reliability - and if done carefully, you can make overall performance much more predictable without significantly slowing it. Obviously you can't give two HTTP downloads 10Mbps each when you've only got a 10Mbps link, but you can ensure things like VoIP and SSH remain usable when such demand is being placed on the link. The difficult bit is configuring everything appropriately.
There exist scripts for Linux firewalls which attempt to do this in a fairly idiot-proof "one-size fits all" fashion. A well-known example of this is Wondershaper.
(Disclaimer: my employer produces QoS software, though I'm not directly involved in that bit).
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
There are only about 15-20 ISPs who have unbundled services in the entire country, and none have every exchange covered. Even the most heavily unbundled exchange I could find (Battersea) only has equipment from 9 ISPs.
However, it's very common for one ISP to offer their services wholesale to another - so you're paying Company A for broadband, all your bills and technical support queries are directed through Company A, but your actual connection is going over equipment owned by Company B. Several ISPs offer nationwide service by doing just this - if they haven't unbundled your exchange, they will resell you BT's wholesale product.