In most US markets, there's only one cable company, but there are lots of DSL companies. The speed/price floor is going to based on the telco wiring, and your ISP may be buying telco services at protocol layers 1,2,3,or 8, but they're still much different. For instance, I'm using sonic.net as my provider, and their terms of service are radically different from the local telco DSL service which they're using for wholesale. Telco service is cheaper, but since I want a static IP address, which the telco marks up much more heavily than my ISP, it balances out. If I want to run a web server at home, or send email over port 25 from my own Linux mail server, I'm free to do that. (I'm not currently doing the latter, and I think they're currently dealing with Port 25 by having it disabled by default but letting you turn it on by checking a web form.)
That still isn't what I'm looking for - I'd like encrypted-but-unauthenticated sessions. Guest mode lets you have a mixture of encrypted-authenticated and unencrypted-unauthenticated sessions. I guess it's a start, but it's probably easier to just put the old 802.11b hub on a channel I'm not using with an SSID of "guest"and hang it off the DMZ on my other router.
Unfortunately, according to one of the EFF blurbs, if I just set my SSID to "password=guest" and let everybody figure out that the password is "guest", they can easily crack the other sessions.
.... but getting typewriter ribbons has been increasingly difficult. Admittedly, we probably haven't used my wife's father's manual typewriter for 5-10 years, but getting ribbons was a problem back then, and is presumably worse now.
My team works in a basement lab full of equipment. We used to go up to the cafeteria for lunch every day, but a year or so ago they downscaled considerably, and the most social of my coworkers started bringing his lunch and eating at his desk. We lost critical mass for eating upstairs, and a couple others of us now usually get lunch and bring it back to the lab. I'm now telecommuting more often, or working from home in the mornings and maybe showing up after lunch.
The objective is to prevent trouble, not to punish the guilty after they've caused it. Sometimes trouble is drive-bys spamming, sometimes it's a regular abuser, like the neighbor's kid downloading too many movies and hogging all your bandwidth. The main things you want to do are keep their bandwidth use limited, and keep them from connecting to any machines you don't want them to access (e.g. visiting friends can access your printer, but strangers can't.)
You may not want any strangers on the "trusted" side of your firewall, but that's a job for a DMZ, which has access controls between it and your trusted side as well as between it and your internet connection.
Yup. The biggest concerns I had when picking my ISP were Terms of Service and availability of static routing. Back when I first got consumer broadband, there were many ISPs that didn't want you to run web servers from home, and some major ones that only allowed you to use one computer on the account unless you paid extra. Eventually the ISPs decided to allow multiple home computers (usually with NAT), because they understood that the market had changed and when people got new computers for themselves their kids got the old ones, but some of them still don't like the idea of guests. The real concern for ISPs was to make sure that you didn't buy one set of cable modem service and share it with your neighbors, instead of them each buying their own. They've pretty much accomplished that by now, but they're not going to let up on the scare stories.
My ISP's approach to ToS was "We're selling you a connection to the Internet, that means you've got a connection to the Internet. Do anything you want except for spam. If you want to share it with other people, we'll be happy to sell you extra email addresses for a small extra price."
QoS may help you throttle your guests' upstream bandwidth, which is more important, but it's not going to do anything for downstream, which is the more common problem, because the QoS markings on downstream packets will normally be set to the default value by the websites or bittorrent peers that are sending them.
You've got a couple of choices - get a system that gives you lots of detailed controls so you can do anything you want, at the cost of understanding the complexity yourself, or sticking to simple cookie-cutter tools, but you won't find most of those letting you do bandwidth limitations on some connections. You can probably take DDWRT and convince it to do what you want, or you can take a dedicated BSD or maybe Linux machine and do all sorts of interesting things with it, but either way you'll have to do some work. But even if you take a commercial Cisco router, which can do fancy prioritization and rate-limiting, you'll find yourself burning a lot of its limited CPU.
I usually run into higher-bandwidth versions of this problem, where the one easy kluge is to put in a 10 Mbps Ethernet segment, so the speed limit happens in hardware and the priority queueing works naturally. If your home DSL is more than 2 Mbps, I suppose you could get an old 802.11b or maybe 802.11g wireless router, limit it to 2 Mbps per channel, and put it on a different radio channel than the one you use for yourself (e.g. put it on Channel 1 and use Channel 11.)
Most universities are either privately run or state run. Cornell's a hybrid, with some colleges private and some state, and the tuition's radically different - Ivy-League prices for the private colleges, in-state or out-of-state prices for the state schools. So Agriculture, Industrial&Labor Relations, and Human Ecology were state-run, Engineering, Architecture, Hotel, and Arts&Sciences were private. Aggies could take some fraction of their courses over in the private colleges, and Engineers didn't get discounts if we took Aggie courses, and Ann Coulter (Cornell '84) could rag on Keith Olbermann (Cornell '79) for being an Aggie instead of from the Ivy League side (forgetting that the Ivy League was originally a football league for colleges that didn't give athletic scholarships.)
A few years ago, when coffee-shop internet access was much less reliable, my usual mobile wireless data carrier was "Linksys". They had nodes almost everywhere, and were usually good enough to check if I had new email (even though they usually didn't work for sending it.) Eventually people started using encryption (yay!) and closing their open access (boo!) and coffee shops started to be consistent about offering access - I'm just fine with buying a cup of coffee in return for internet access, but I usually needed it in the evenings after Peet's was closed, and Starbucks's wifi connections often didn't work.
A friend of mine used to leave his wireless access open, figuring that not only was it nice for guests, but it was a public service to allow the neighbors' teenagers to have uncensored Internet access if they needed it. Eventually the neighbors' teenagers discovered file sharing and started hogging all his bandwidth, so he closed it off.
The push to eliminate guest wireless has largely come from ISPs, especially the cable companies, who don't want people sharing bandwidth with their neighbors instead of everybody buying their own connection. A few ISPs, such as Sonic and Speakeasy, actually encourage sharing and roaming, but the companies like Comcast that also are pushing bandwidth caps have been the main propagandists against sharing wireless, and they're also the people who didn't want you running a web server from home when the broadband business was getting started.
On the other hand, sometimes there are actual problems. Back when I was running open wireless, I once got a call from my ISP saying they'd blocked half a million spams from my address overnight, and could I check that my computer wasn't infected? The computer was fine, but my neighbor's laptop had gotten infected and was blasting away over my wifi. Eventually when I upgraded to wireless-N I turned on encryption; unfortunately the wifi standards don't give you an easy way to have open access and encrypted connections, and I'd rather have the privacy.
Or sometimes they're more Pica. And sometimes hipsters use Courier because it's monospaced, and sometimes they use Comic Sans to be ironic and annoying to font geeks.
Back in the late 80s or so, a friend of mine was moving off to Africa. We tried to find a manual typewriter for her, but nobody really sold them any more - electrics had pretty much replaced them. Eventually we found a children's manual typewriter, which was fairly light-weight and portable. I wish I'd known about that typewriter company back then - I lived an hour or so away from Somerset.
I'm assuming that you didn't bother checking with the Nethack development team before engraving "Elbereth" into your slashdot user identity, but did you at least ask the Tolkien estate for permission?
In the last few days, I've found that increasing numbers of videos will work ok at 240, maybe or maybe not at 360, and fail at 480. The failure mode is that the image is a big blob of green, maybe with a few red pixels around the edges.
So how safe are the gaseous and particulate byproducts of microwaving or otherwise zapping CDs? Is it safe to do this indoors? Is it safe to use the microwave for food after using it for this sort of entertainment? Are CDROMs known to the state of California to cause cancer and sudden growth of extra limbs?
Ok, microwaving CDs is fun, but how do you make sure you don't trash the microwave in the process? (Putting a cup of water in along with the CD helps, but I'm not sure if it does the whole job if you're doing this kind of thing repeatedly.)
More important, is it safe to use the microwave for food after zapping CDs, or could there be chemicals in there you don't want in your food? Do you need to have a separate microwave for trashing electronics?
Let's see, where would you find elephants on the map? Oh, right, Google says they're located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, 20006, and the population of them has tripled in the last few years since Barnum and Bailey came to town.
It's easy enough to confirm - just look at all the geotagged photos on Flickr and Google that show circus tents and elephants out front.
Back in the 80s I ran a Vax with the 14" RM05 removable disks. My successor at the job got to decommission the disks, which she did by taking them to the machine shop in the building's basement and having them sandblasted. Most sysadmins in those days had one or two RM05 platters on their wall scratched up by a head crash; hers was down to the bare metal.
The reason that Google is important is that they have good algorithms for judging site quality and showing the interesting relevant sites first. They became the dominant search player because PageRank produced better results than many other search engines when they started, as well as being fast and uncluttered. (DEC's Altavista, the original dominant player, was also fast and uncluttered, but Google's result quality was a lot better.)
If they weren't judging site quality, AdSense wouldn't be producing enough revenue for you to live on either.
What I don't get is why the suspects in this case would register domain names using a US domain registrar, which makes it easy for the Feds to seize their domain names? Sure, the legal justification for seizing domain names is bogus, but they've been asserting it for long enough that I'd think anybody trying to sell online gambling to Americans would register a domain name in a jurisdiction the US government can't just seize, whether that means getting a name from a ccTLD where gambling is legal or at least using a non-US registrar which isn't necessarily going to hand over the name without a court order. The suckers are supposed to be the players, not the house.
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I think all the ISPs pretty much gave up on that one years ago, fortunately, but it was the kind of policies bad ISPs had.
In most US markets, there's only one cable company, but there are lots of DSL companies. The speed/price floor is going to based on the telco wiring, and your ISP may be buying telco services at protocol layers 1,2,3,or 8, but they're still much different. For instance, I'm using sonic.net as my provider, and their terms of service are radically different from the local telco DSL service which they're using for wholesale. Telco service is cheaper, but since I want a static IP address, which the telco marks up much more heavily than my ISP, it balances out. If I want to run a web server at home, or send email over port 25 from my own Linux mail server, I'm free to do that. (I'm not currently doing the latter, and I think they're currently dealing with Port 25 by having it disabled by default but letting you turn it on by checking a web form.)
That still isn't what I'm looking for - I'd like encrypted-but-unauthenticated sessions. Guest mode lets you have a mixture of encrypted-authenticated and unencrypted-unauthenticated sessions. I guess it's a start, but it's probably easier to just put the old 802.11b hub on a channel I'm not using with an SSID of "guest"and hang it off the DMZ on my other router.
Unfortunately, according to one of the EFF blurbs, if I just set my SSID to "password=guest" and let everybody figure out that the password is "guest", they can easily crack the other sessions.
.... but getting typewriter ribbons has been increasingly difficult. Admittedly, we probably haven't used my wife's father's manual typewriter for 5-10 years, but getting ribbons was a problem back then, and is presumably worse now.
My team works in a basement lab full of equipment. We used to go up to the cafeteria for lunch every day, but a year or so ago they downscaled considerably, and the most social of my coworkers started bringing his lunch and eating at his desk. We lost critical mass for eating upstairs, and a couple others of us now usually get lunch and bring it back to the lab. I'm now telecommuting more often, or working from home in the mornings and maybe showing up after lunch.
"Why don't you boys have yourselves a Pepsi!"
The objective is to prevent trouble, not to punish the guilty after they've caused it. Sometimes trouble is drive-bys spamming, sometimes it's a regular abuser, like the neighbor's kid downloading too many movies and hogging all your bandwidth. The main things you want to do are keep their bandwidth use limited, and keep them from connecting to any machines you don't want them to access (e.g. visiting friends can access your printer, but strangers can't.)
Hey, we let you in, Mr. Anonymous Coward!
You may not want any strangers on the "trusted" side of your firewall, but that's a job for a DMZ, which has access controls between it and your trusted side as well as between it and your internet connection.
Yup. The biggest concerns I had when picking my ISP were Terms of Service and availability of static routing. Back when I first got consumer broadband, there were many ISPs that didn't want you to run web servers from home, and some major ones that only allowed you to use one computer on the account unless you paid extra. Eventually the ISPs decided to allow multiple home computers (usually with NAT), because they understood that the market had changed and when people got new computers for themselves their kids got the old ones, but some of them still don't like the idea of guests. The real concern for ISPs was to make sure that you didn't buy one set of cable modem service and share it with your neighbors, instead of them each buying their own. They've pretty much accomplished that by now, but they're not going to let up on the scare stories.
My ISP's approach to ToS was "We're selling you a connection to the Internet, that means you've got a connection to the Internet. Do anything you want except for spam. If you want to share it with other people, we'll be happy to sell you extra email addresses for a small extra price."
QoS may help you throttle your guests' upstream bandwidth, which is more important, but it's not going to do anything for downstream, which is the more common problem, because the QoS markings on downstream packets will normally be set to the default value by the websites or bittorrent peers that are sending them.
You've got a couple of choices - get a system that gives you lots of detailed controls so you can do anything you want, at the cost of understanding the complexity yourself, or sticking to simple cookie-cutter tools, but you won't find most of those letting you do bandwidth limitations on some connections. You can probably take DDWRT and convince it to do what you want, or you can take a dedicated BSD or maybe Linux machine and do all sorts of interesting things with it, but either way you'll have to do some work. But even if you take a commercial Cisco router, which can do fancy prioritization and rate-limiting, you'll find yourself burning a lot of its limited CPU.
I usually run into higher-bandwidth versions of this problem, where the one easy kluge is to put in a 10 Mbps Ethernet segment, so the speed limit happens in hardware and the priority queueing works naturally. If your home DSL is more than 2 Mbps, I suppose you could get an old 802.11b or maybe 802.11g wireless router, limit it to 2 Mbps per channel, and put it on a different radio channel than the one you use for yourself (e.g. put it on Channel 1 and use Channel 11.)
Most universities are either privately run or state run. Cornell's a hybrid, with some colleges private and some state, and the tuition's radically different - Ivy-League prices for the private colleges, in-state or out-of-state prices for the state schools. So Agriculture, Industrial&Labor Relations, and Human Ecology were state-run, Engineering, Architecture, Hotel, and Arts&Sciences were private. Aggies could take some fraction of their courses over in the private colleges, and Engineers didn't get discounts if we took Aggie courses, and Ann Coulter (Cornell '84) could rag on Keith Olbermann (Cornell '79) for being an Aggie instead of from the Ivy League side (forgetting that the Ivy League was originally a football league for colleges that didn't give athletic scholarships.)
A few years ago, when coffee-shop internet access was much less reliable, my usual mobile wireless data carrier was "Linksys". They had nodes almost everywhere, and were usually good enough to check if I had new email (even though they usually didn't work for sending it.) Eventually people started using encryption (yay!) and closing their open access (boo!) and coffee shops started to be consistent about offering access - I'm just fine with buying a cup of coffee in return for internet access, but I usually needed it in the evenings after Peet's was closed, and Starbucks's wifi connections often didn't work.
A friend of mine used to leave his wireless access open, figuring that not only was it nice for guests, but it was a public service to allow the neighbors' teenagers to have uncensored Internet access if they needed it. Eventually the neighbors' teenagers discovered file sharing and started hogging all his bandwidth, so he closed it off.
The push to eliminate guest wireless has largely come from ISPs, especially the cable companies, who don't want people sharing bandwidth with their neighbors instead of everybody buying their own connection. A few ISPs, such as Sonic and Speakeasy, actually encourage sharing and roaming, but the companies like Comcast that also are pushing bandwidth caps have been the main propagandists against sharing wireless, and they're also the people who didn't want you running a web server from home when the broadband business was getting started.
On the other hand, sometimes there are actual problems. Back when I was running open wireless, I once got a call from my ISP saying they'd blocked half a million spams from my address overnight, and could I check that my computer wasn't infected? The computer was fine, but my neighbor's laptop had gotten infected and was blasting away over my wifi. Eventually when I upgraded to wireless-N I turned on encryption; unfortunately the wifi standards don't give you an easy way to have open access and encrypted connections, and I'd rather have the privacy.
Or sometimes they're more Pica. And sometimes hipsters use Courier because it's monospaced, and sometimes they use Comic Sans to be ironic and annoying to font geeks.
Back in the late 80s or so, a friend of mine was moving off to Africa. We tried to find a manual typewriter for her, but nobody really sold them any more - electrics had pretty much replaced them. Eventually we found a children's manual typewriter, which was fairly light-weight and portable.
I wish I'd known about that typewriter company back then - I lived an hour or so away from Somerset.
I'm assuming that you didn't bother checking with the Nethack development team before engraving "Elbereth" into your slashdot user identity, but did you at least ask the Tolkien estate for permission?
In the last few days, I've found that increasing numbers of videos will work ok at 240, maybe or maybe not at 360, and fail at 480. The failure mode is that the image is a big blob of green, maybe with a few red pixels around the edges.
Thanks - I've been using html5 on Chrome, hadn't known FF4 supported it yet.
So how safe are the gaseous and particulate byproducts of microwaving or otherwise zapping CDs? Is it safe to do this indoors? Is it safe to use the microwave for food after using it for this sort of entertainment? Are CDROMs known to the state of California to cause cancer and sudden growth of extra limbs?
Ok, microwaving CDs is fun, but how do you make sure you don't trash the microwave in the process? (Putting a cup of water in along with the CD helps, but I'm not sure if it does the whole job if you're doing this kind of thing repeatedly.)
More important, is it safe to use the microwave for food after zapping CDs, or could there be chemicals in there you don't want in your food? Do you need to have a separate microwave for trashing electronics?
Let's see, where would you find elephants on the map? Oh, right, Google says they're located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, 20006, and the population of them has tripled in the last few years since Barnum and Bailey came to town.
It's easy enough to confirm - just look at all the geotagged photos on Flickr and Google that show circus tents and elephants out front.
Back in the 80s I ran a Vax with the 14" RM05 removable disks. My successor at the job got to decommission the disks, which she did by taking them to the machine shop in the building's basement and having them sandblasted. Most sysadmins in those days had one or two RM05 platters on their wall scratched up by a head crash; hers was down to the bare metal.
The reason that Google is important is that they have good algorithms for judging site quality and showing the interesting relevant sites first. They became the dominant search player because PageRank produced better results than many other search engines when they started, as well as being fast and uncluttered. (DEC's Altavista, the original dominant player, was also fast and uncluttered, but Google's result quality was a lot better.)
If they weren't judging site quality, AdSense wouldn't be producing enough revenue for you to live on either.
What I don't get is why the suspects in this case would register domain names using a US domain registrar, which makes it easy for the Feds to seize their domain names? Sure, the legal justification for seizing domain names is bogus, but they've been asserting it for long enough that I'd think anybody trying to sell online gambling to Americans would register a domain name in a jurisdiction the US government can't just seize, whether that means getting a name from a ccTLD where gambling is legal or at least using a non-US registrar which isn't necessarily going to hand over the name without a court order. The suckers are supposed to be the players, not the house.