What "most" of the people here want, and forgive me if I'm bringing in anyone who disagrees, is to make sure neither Comcast nor the govt gets to filter traffic or
somehow tamper with any data passing a network.
QoS has been brought into this and it is a legitimate issue but there is a difference between QoS for VoIP vs other traffic, and QoS for sites who pay up vs those
who don't. QoS wouldn't be an issue if last-mile ISPs had the bandwidth they purport to have where all users get to max out their connection if they want or need to.
On the other side there is the concern that government will create rules allowing them to censor content. A well-founded concern, given the ICE's recent takeover
of various sites and the pressures applied against several news organizations and banks.
So, again, net neutrality is needed, and all proponents are asking for is that neither the govt nor the ISPs get to mess with the bits on the wire.
You won't have problems if you aren't "loud" as being quiet is pretty much the norm there. They also tend to judge on a personal basis, so you shouldn't have problems with people stereotyping you though there is always the oddball.
Being from an eastern-European country myself, I would advise against moving to anything east of Italy or Hungary. Things are improving in those countries, but they are nowhere near as good as the USA at the moment. Corruption is the way things get done there, and EU membership isn't helping for some of the newest members. Croatia is not even a member for that exact reason.
You should be OK in most of Western Europe and I can personally vouch for Switzerland. If you can, try to find a few people from these countries (through social networking sites, etc) and ask them specific questions you have. They'll probably tell you if there's anything you should really know about before settling down there.
Comcast is not officially preventing any services from their network, although they were caught throttling bittorrent traffic in the past.
I've had an Asterisk PBX running on a Comcast account for several years with few to no problems so far. However, Comcast has an interest in degrading SIP as well as video services from 3rd party providers since they provide both of these themselves.
The fact that the telcos are cheering means today's legislation favors content discrimination and they'll no doubt be taking advantage of it soon.
I guess we should enjoy these multimedia services while they last, and that won't be long.
I am personally looking at moving back to Europe which is where I was born, even though I'm a US citizen now. Same reason as yours.
One piece of advice, don't announce the fact you are an American if/when you get to Vancouver. We are not well liked by either Europe or Canada, so make sure you get to know your company well before announcing that to them, lest a cop there decides to get personal with you.
I have actually been harassed at more than one European airport after showing a US passport, so the warning is not purely theoretical.
I have considered doing the same, and I have had a cop actually point a gun at me, hands shaking, because he thought I had stolen a car. Of course I hadn't, and the fact that I was walking and had no car keys on me did not help.
Just asked a Canadian friend of mine, he states it is legal to tape cops there, at least in public. He also says the same cops get quite brutal with certain "troublesome" minorities in the area. He lives around Toronto.
TFA also states one of the victims was arrested for videotaping the cops inside his home, and that the home happened to have a sign stating the premises are under video surveillance. Quote:
In 2006 Michael Gannon of Nashua, New Hampshire, was arrested for recording police in his own home, despite having a warning posted that the premises were monitored by a surveillance camera. And last July, 20-year-old Adam H. Whitman of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was arrested for recording cops who had raided a party where they suspected underage drinking. Both Gannon and Whitman were initially charged with felonies. Charges against both were later dropped.
It looks like there are places in the USA where right now you would be required to turn off any and all video surveillance (inside your own home) when the cops arrive, who are they free to beat the crap out of you if they feel like it. The felony charges will eventually (probably) get dropped, but you're still left with any abuse suffered.
I had a hard time explaining this even here on slashdot - that ISPs would not need to resort to QoS if the last-mile pipes are big enough to accomodate everyone connected. Instead they are not, the ISPs are oversubscribing and we get this funny situation of some users getting totally nowhere when the network gets congested.
I guess we can point out that people are now getting 30-100 Mbps in various countries while Comcast is still selling 3 Mbps service in much of the USA. It will at least show the alarming difference in the service here vs there. Oh wait... think that happened some time ago and was explained away by apologists.
Really, what will it take to get "most" people to agree that the ISPs are charging way too much and providing way too little vs the rest of the developed world?
The peering issue above concerns major backhaul traffic routes, where most of the recent worries are about Comcast's (or other ISP servicing end-users) last-mile links. In the above case level 3 really is asking comcast to take on more than they are sending out, so there is an issue.
On the other hand, there is the separate problem of Comcast oversubscribing last-mile infrastructure to the point it is getting overloaded. Pretty much everyone reaches the "bowels" of the Internet through such links, and these links are the responsibility of the companies operating them. Comcast has a problem of their own if the congestion is in this part of the network and they didn't do their math in the first place.
There definitely is more than one issue involved and with different specifics, and one should not be confused with the other(s).
Yes, I have Comcast and they use the "bus" topology. Still, my outdated modem can do 28 Mbit down and 10 Mbit up - so taking this with Comcast' officially offering 3 Mbit down and 1 up (yes, and this is in Denver) they can reasonably only have 10 customers connected to one segment all capped at 3/1 so that all of these can take full advantage of their connection at any given time.
I agree there's a need for a "minimum guaranteed bandwidth" here so that no one is left out because the other peers on a segment totally clog up the connection. To my knowledge Comcast isn't doing that, and at times my own VoIP calls get interrupted or dropped because of that.
On the other hand, Comcast shouldn't be overselling bandwidth they can't guarantee, but should sell at the minimum possible. As it is they are already playing dirty within their existing technology instead of fixing any of its problems.
If your page load times are crappy then that's your ISP's fault.
DSL offers a dedicated connection to your home so that part of the network sees no interference from other users. The only reason you would see crappy performance on a DSL connection is that the ISP doesn't really provide the bandwidth they advertised.
Broadband through cable is more susceptible to one user hogging the connection of others, but even here each customer's cable modem is capped to put a maximum amount of data per second on the line. So, if the ISP really offers the advertised bandwidth they can split it evenly among all the customers on a given segment where all concerned would get the max bandwidth at the same time. Again, if that's not happening then the ISP is oversubscribing or doesn't really offer the bandwidth they say they offer.
Bottom line, your ISP should tell you the truth about what they offer, not penalize anyone who dares exceed some threshold.
Don't know about the init scripts but Gnome is and was (in 10.04) messed up. Can't change default app settings, can't make the compositor work properly. Pulse audio is a mess for anyone that cares about audio quality and I've had a hell of a time just trying to preserve my settings in either KDE or Gnome - both are more unstable than the older BSD versions I have.
With those kinds of problems they don't have a good desktop offering. The Gnome issues have been there since 10.04 at least too so it seems no one cares enough to fix them.
Yes, as wine often runs games better than linux itself, or to phrase it differently, windows exe's through wine have a better chance of running properly than native binaries, at least on linux. Unfortunately the game makers themselves are unlikely to consider Linux given its small user base, so even if this happens it will benefit Linux or dual-boot users only.
Well said, and is pretty much what I was about to post as well.
Ubuntu has its own issues as does every other OS out there but to say Canonical is not doing anything of importance with Linux is just asinine.
I haven't seen it on Windows either but I definitely have seen it in Ubuntu (10.04). All too often thunderbird is eating up 100% of whichever core its main process happens to be running on. That said that's only happened with the Ubuntu version so the issue is platform-specific at best.
Me too.. or three -
Verifying phone numbers and domain registrations is basic common sense stuff. These guys must've never heard of spammers or been victimized by the same. And they are running ads that will be unleashed on an unsuspecting audience?
Perhaps running noscript/adblock/etc is no longer the paranoid thing to do - looks like it's becoming the only *right* thing to do.
Indeed, St. John's Wort contains hyperforin, which is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (so is Paxil et al). So watch out if you are taking it and take a SSRI or vice versa. In fact don't mix it with any "mood medicine" you are taking without consulting your doctor.
I'll be impressed when they start hiding torrents in EXE files, like with hydan. Bloated installer archives (Nvidia drivers being a good example) should make for nice carriers for this. Or even better, expand to making it possible to hide the info in any kind of file.
Some of it's learned while the rest is inherited. My maine coon running to the VCR and hitting the stop button to get my attention would definitely qualify as learned behavior though.
Conspiracy theory?
A post chronicling someone having a hard time finding fixes for Win 7 issues just got buried, curiously. Anyway as someone who is definitely NOT a microsoft fanboy and who has ran both Vista and 7 I'll have to say Windows 7 is actually a step back from Vista and that's readily apparent from running it for a few hours. It's more sluggish than Vista on the same hardware and presents a yet different and more disorganized user interface (to me, but importantly, it deviates from that of Vista).
Frankly I'm not sure where where all the glowing praise is coming from or what it's about. Sure 7 runs ok and has most bugs fixed by now, but so does Vista and the latter is faster. Did any of these tech-savvy reviews actually do any reviewing? I'm not sure this is even a conspiracy problem, it might just be one of ignorance.
While train simming is not exactly a hot genre it has been entering the mainstream as of late. The proprietary contenders currently include Kuju's Rail Simulator and Auran's Trainz series. Both are closed-source but use plain XML for all their data files which makes developing easy for these sims. Microsoft decided to re-enter the race with a new "Microsoft Train Simulator 2" bragging that they have endless resources and will beat any competitor. A few days ago, however, they canned the project along with everyone at ACES who had been working on it.
Anyway, where it gets interesting is a freebie (fully open-source) sim called openBVE which can be found at http://openbve.uuuq.com/en/index.html. While its predecessor BVE was not fully open, openBVE is and it's making rapid progress, especially as of late. A video showing off its capabilities is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtITwxTWLyM&fmt=18.
So as far as train sims go, yes there is at least one that's starting to turn heads and it's good to see something that's not an FPS for a change.
Slashdot Mirror
What "most" of the people here want, and forgive me if I'm bringing in anyone who disagrees, is to make sure neither Comcast nor the govt gets to filter traffic or somehow tamper with any data passing a network.
QoS has been brought into this and it is a legitimate issue but there is a difference between QoS for VoIP vs other traffic, and QoS for sites who pay up vs those who don't. QoS wouldn't be an issue if last-mile ISPs had the bandwidth they purport to have where all users get to max out their connection if they want or need to.
On the other side there is the concern that government will create rules allowing them to censor content. A well-founded concern, given the ICE's recent takeover of various sites and the pressures applied against several news organizations and banks.
So, again, net neutrality is needed, and all proponents are asking for is that neither the govt nor the ISPs get to mess with the bits on the wire.
You won't have problems if you aren't "loud" as being quiet is pretty much the norm there. They also tend to judge on a personal basis, so you shouldn't have problems with people stereotyping you though there is always the oddball.
Being from an eastern-European country myself, I would advise against moving to anything east of Italy or Hungary. Things are improving in those countries, but they are nowhere near as good as the USA at the moment. Corruption is the way things get done there, and EU membership isn't helping for some of the newest members. Croatia is not even a member for that exact reason.
You should be OK in most of Western Europe and I can personally vouch for Switzerland. If you can, try to find a few people from these countries (through social networking sites, etc) and ask them specific questions you have. They'll probably tell you if there's anything you should really know about before settling down there.
Comcast is not officially preventing any services from their network, although they were caught throttling bittorrent traffic in the past.
I've had an Asterisk PBX running on a Comcast account for several years with few to no problems so far. However, Comcast has an interest in degrading SIP as well as video services from 3rd party providers since they provide both of these themselves.
The fact that the telcos are cheering means today's legislation favors content discrimination and they'll no doubt be taking advantage of it soon.
I guess we should enjoy these multimedia services while they last, and that won't be long.
I am personally looking at moving back to Europe which is where I was born, even though I'm a US citizen now. Same reason as yours.
One piece of advice, don't announce the fact you are an American if/when you get to Vancouver. We are not well liked by either Europe or Canada, so make sure you get to know your company well before announcing that to them, lest a cop there decides to get personal with you.
I have actually been harassed at more than one European airport after showing a US passport, so the warning is not purely theoretical.
I have considered doing the same, and I have had a cop actually point a gun at me, hands shaking, because he thought I had stolen a car. Of course I hadn't, and the fact that I was walking and had no car keys on me did not help.
Just asked a Canadian friend of mine, he states it is legal to tape cops there, at least in public. He also says the same cops get quite brutal with certain "troublesome" minorities in the area. He lives around Toronto.
It looks like there are places in the USA where right now you would be required to turn off any and all video surveillance (inside your own home) when the cops arrive, who are they free to beat the crap out of you if they feel like it. The felony charges will eventually (probably) get dropped, but you're still left with any abuse suffered.
I had a hard time explaining this even here on slashdot - that ISPs would not need to resort to QoS if the last-mile pipes are big enough to accomodate everyone connected. Instead they are not, the ISPs are oversubscribing and we get this funny situation of some users getting totally nowhere when the network gets congested.
I guess we can point out that people are now getting 30-100 Mbps in various countries while Comcast is still selling 3 Mbps service in much of the USA. It will at least show the alarming difference in the service here vs there. Oh wait... think that happened some time ago and was explained away by apologists.
Really, what will it take to get "most" people to agree that the ISPs are charging way too much and providing way too little vs the rest of the developed world?
The peering issue above concerns major backhaul traffic routes, where most of the recent worries are about Comcast's (or other ISP servicing end-users) last-mile links. In the above case level 3 really is asking comcast to take on more than they are sending out, so there is an issue.
On the other hand, there is the separate problem of Comcast oversubscribing last-mile infrastructure to the point it is getting overloaded. Pretty much everyone reaches the "bowels" of the Internet through such links, and these links are the responsibility of the companies operating them. Comcast has a problem of their own if the congestion is in this part of the network and they didn't do their math in the first place.
There definitely is more than one issue involved and with different specifics, and one should not be confused with the other(s).
Yes, I have Comcast and they use the "bus" topology. Still, my outdated modem can do 28 Mbit down and 10 Mbit up - so taking this with Comcast' officially offering 3 Mbit down and 1 up (yes, and this is in Denver) they can reasonably only have 10 customers connected to one segment all capped at 3/1 so that all of these can take full advantage of their connection at any given time.
I agree there's a need for a "minimum guaranteed bandwidth" here so that no one is left out because the other peers on a segment totally clog up the connection. To my knowledge Comcast isn't doing that, and at times my own VoIP calls get interrupted or dropped because of that.
On the other hand, Comcast shouldn't be overselling bandwidth they can't guarantee, but should sell at the minimum possible. As it is they are already playing dirty within their existing technology instead of fixing any of its problems.
If your page load times are crappy then that's your ISP's fault.
DSL offers a dedicated connection to your home so that part of the network sees no interference from other users. The only reason you would see crappy performance on a DSL connection is that the ISP doesn't really provide the bandwidth they advertised.
Broadband through cable is more susceptible to one user hogging the connection of others, but even here each customer's cable modem is capped to put a maximum amount of data per second on the line. So, if the ISP really offers the advertised bandwidth they can split it evenly among all the customers on a given segment where all concerned would get the max bandwidth at the same time. Again, if that's not happening then the ISP is oversubscribing or doesn't really offer the bandwidth they say they offer.
Bottom line, your ISP should tell you the truth about what they offer, not penalize anyone who dares exceed some threshold.
Don't know about the init scripts but Gnome is and was (in 10.04) messed up. Can't change default app settings, can't make the compositor work properly. Pulse audio is a mess for anyone that cares about audio quality and I've had a hell of a time just trying to preserve my settings in either KDE or Gnome - both are more unstable than the older BSD versions I have. With those kinds of problems they don't have a good desktop offering. The Gnome issues have been there since 10.04 at least too so it seems no one cares enough to fix them.
Yes, as wine often runs games better than linux itself, or to phrase it differently, windows exe's through wine have a better chance of running properly than native binaries, at least on linux. Unfortunately the game makers themselves are unlikely to consider Linux given its small user base, so even if this happens it will benefit Linux or dual-boot users only.
Well said, and is pretty much what I was about to post as well. Ubuntu has its own issues as does every other OS out there but to say Canonical is not doing anything of importance with Linux is just asinine.
I haven't seen it on Windows either but I definitely have seen it in Ubuntu (10.04). All too often thunderbird is eating up 100% of whichever core its main process happens to be running on. That said that's only happened with the Ubuntu version so the issue is platform-specific at best.
Me too.. or three - Verifying phone numbers and domain registrations is basic common sense stuff. These guys must've never heard of spammers or been victimized by the same. And they are running ads that will be unleashed on an unsuspecting audience? Perhaps running noscript/adblock/etc is no longer the paranoid thing to do - looks like it's becoming the only *right* thing to do.
Good point. See Outer Limits season 4 episode 3: "Hearts and Minds". Extreme Orwellian example but not impossible.
In fact, Comcast might emerge as a pioneer to what would become the "Cripplenet". They've certainly shown enough enthusiasm as it is.
Indeed, St. John's Wort contains hyperforin, which is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (so is Paxil et al). So watch out if you are taking it and take a SSRI or vice versa. In fact don't mix it with any "mood medicine" you are taking without consulting your doctor.
I'll be impressed when they start hiding torrents in EXE files, like with hydan. Bloated installer archives (Nvidia drivers being a good example) should make for nice carriers for this. Or even better, expand to making it possible to hide the info in any kind of file.
Now hopefully someone will look into the MS shills frequenting this and other technology sites.
Some of it's learned while the rest is inherited. My maine coon running to the VCR and hitting the stop button to get my attention would definitely qualify as learned behavior though.
Conspiracy theory? A post chronicling someone having a hard time finding fixes for Win 7 issues just got buried, curiously. Anyway as someone who is definitely NOT a microsoft fanboy and who has ran both Vista and 7 I'll have to say Windows 7 is actually a step back from Vista and that's readily apparent from running it for a few hours. It's more sluggish than Vista on the same hardware and presents a yet different and more disorganized user interface (to me, but importantly, it deviates from that of Vista). Frankly I'm not sure where where all the glowing praise is coming from or what it's about. Sure 7 runs ok and has most bugs fixed by now, but so does Vista and the latter is faster. Did any of these tech-savvy reviews actually do any reviewing? I'm not sure this is even a conspiracy problem, it might just be one of ignorance.
Anyone seeming abnormally slow load times for wikipedia at this time? (Or at least a very odd title image)
While train simming is not exactly a hot genre it has been entering the mainstream as of late. The proprietary contenders currently include Kuju's Rail Simulator and Auran's Trainz series. Both are closed-source but use plain XML for all their data files which makes developing easy for these sims. Microsoft decided to re-enter the race with a new "Microsoft Train Simulator 2" bragging that they have endless resources and will beat any competitor. A few days ago, however, they canned the project along with everyone at ACES who had been working on it. Anyway, where it gets interesting is a freebie (fully open-source) sim called openBVE which can be found at http://openbve.uuuq.com/en/index.html. While its predecessor BVE was not fully open, openBVE is and it's making rapid progress, especially as of late. A video showing off its capabilities is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtITwxTWLyM&fmt=18. So as far as train sims go, yes there is at least one that's starting to turn heads and it's good to see something that's not an FPS for a change.
Actually even the audiophiles aren't going for this one (link to head-fi): http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f21/500-cable-334319/
:)
Nevertheless the thread over there is just as entertaining