There are still places where the use of Caps is mandatory and used on a daily basis. I work for a telephone company in Alaska and all the phone switches back end access requires all the commands to be entered in Caps. True, the use is rare and limited, but there is still a use for the Caps Lock.
Being a small ISP, that's a good solution, but you run into implementation problems. I am dealing with a migration to a usage based billing. And it is difficult to extract that data from the DSLAMS and then turn it into meaningful data that our billing system can handle. Plus you need to provide the user access to that data so they can check to see what their usage is at any given point. It's expensive to implement, and it must be custom written for your specific DSL DSLAMS and billing system. Ours currently can't tally usage.. So we'd have to write our own scripts to do that. What if there is an error in them? What if it breaks in 3 months after I leave the company or get hit by a bus? What if a customer refutes his usage, can you back up your data's integrity against his data? There are tons of expensive problems we're running into going usage based:(
You couldn't afford to buy 8MB of dedicated Internet content. I pay upwards of several thousands a month for dedicated 25Mbit of service for providing content to our small locations. Actual dedicated Internet content is very expensive. The only reason you can afford DSL is because the cost of your circuit is offset by overselling the uplink assuming that not all people will be using 100% of your link 100% of the time. If you look at the ToS of your provider, they will always state speeds "up to" what you buy. That's because it's oversold.
I an the senior network tech for a small ISP. We manage 10 sites. Some with as many as 2000 customers, some with as few as 40.
All it takes is one abusive user to ruin the internet experience for all people in a site. We also face the problem of satellite delivery for our network content since most of our locations are unaccessible via terrestrial means. So bandwidth is not only limited, but very, very expensive. We also limit our DSL and cable modem services down to 256k because of the cost of delivery.
We have implemented Packeteer Packetshapers and have filtered out all P2P traffic except bittorrent. And we have torrent traffic limited to a max rate of 10% of the pipe to an area.
This is especially important to satellite as most p2p software streams without regard to satellite latency and bandwidth constraints and floods the link causing service outages for our sites.
We have only had a few complaints over the years. And those folks we refer back to our ToS as we lay out the p2p restrictions in there.
We have had to take the approach to penalize the few for the sake of the many. We would rather have one or two pissed off customers then have 1000..
We also utilize monitoring software to track overall bandwidth utilization of each client to find abusive users (users that peg their bandwidth 100% of the time) and penalize them if it is causing detrimental service to our other customers.
We have learned over the years that you can never had enough bandwidth. The more you provide, the more the users utilize. And you will always have a few that push the envelope.
M$ "tried" to kill AutoPatcher. It is back and working better then ever. Now, instead of downloading the entire distribution, you download a single small executable. It then retrieves all the XP hotfixes from M$ website.
In effect achieving two goals:
1) Avoiding the source of the cease and desist that M$ sent the author. The unauthorized and unverifiable distribution of the hotfixes.
2) Chewing up M$ bandwidth instead of the author's...
The thread to the new beta version is located at http://www.autopatcher.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=89
I live in Alaska. Up here, some technology is up to par, but most of it lags 4 to 5 years behind. Broadcast television is one of them. I do not see the companys up here scrambling to meet the HD deadline, and there are large areas where cable and even satellite is not available.
Although our situation up here is unique in some respects, I'm sure there are other areas around the US that have similar issues.
Traditional broadcast television up here is still kicking and will be for many years to come.
Unless they wish to provide funding for this, it will kill small mom and pop ISP's that are barely making a profit with small scale operations. Now they would have to invest large amount of cash in hardware and storage space to archive huge amounts of data. I don't see this going anywhere, and it's going to be impossible to enforce.
There is a utility that already exists to remove some of the new kernel level Malware utilites out there. It is referred to as LSPFIX. The home website for this is:
This utility allows you to see what network level drivers are loading into the kernel. I've had to use this utility to strip Malware off of several client systems. Be very careful, if you pull out a legitimate network driver, you will permanently damage your network settings.
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There are still places where the use of Caps is mandatory and used on a daily basis. I work for a telephone company in Alaska and all the phone switches back end access requires all the commands to be entered in Caps. True, the use is rare and limited, but there is still a use for the Caps Lock.
Being a small ISP, that's a good solution, but you run into implementation problems. I am dealing with a migration to a usage based billing. And it is difficult to extract that data from the DSLAMS and then turn it into meaningful data that our billing system can handle. Plus you need to provide the user access to that data so they can check to see what their usage is at any given point. It's expensive to implement, and it must be custom written for your specific DSL DSLAMS and billing system. Ours currently can't tally usage.. So we'd have to write our own scripts to do that. What if there is an error in them? What if it breaks in 3 months after I leave the company or get hit by a bus? What if a customer refutes his usage, can you back up your data's integrity against his data? There are tons of expensive problems we're running into going usage based :(
You couldn't afford to buy 8MB of dedicated Internet content. I pay upwards of several thousands a month for dedicated 25Mbit of service for providing content to our small locations. Actual dedicated Internet content is very expensive. The only reason you can afford DSL is because the cost of your circuit is offset by overselling the uplink assuming that not all people will be using 100% of your link 100% of the time. If you look at the ToS of your provider, they will always state speeds "up to" what you buy. That's because it's oversold.
I an the senior network tech for a small ISP. We manage 10 sites. Some with as many as 2000 customers, some with as few as 40. All it takes is one abusive user to ruin the internet experience for all people in a site. We also face the problem of satellite delivery for our network content since most of our locations are unaccessible via terrestrial means. So bandwidth is not only limited, but very, very expensive. We also limit our DSL and cable modem services down to 256k because of the cost of delivery. We have implemented Packeteer Packetshapers and have filtered out all P2P traffic except bittorrent. And we have torrent traffic limited to a max rate of 10% of the pipe to an area. This is especially important to satellite as most p2p software streams without regard to satellite latency and bandwidth constraints and floods the link causing service outages for our sites. We have only had a few complaints over the years. And those folks we refer back to our ToS as we lay out the p2p restrictions in there. We have had to take the approach to penalize the few for the sake of the many. We would rather have one or two pissed off customers then have 1000.. We also utilize monitoring software to track overall bandwidth utilization of each client to find abusive users (users that peg their bandwidth 100% of the time) and penalize them if it is causing detrimental service to our other customers. We have learned over the years that you can never had enough bandwidth. The more you provide, the more the users utilize. And you will always have a few that push the envelope.
No, once downloaded, you can then burn it off to CD and run it on any number of systems after you've downloaded the hotfixes from Microsoft's site.
M$ "tried" to kill AutoPatcher. It is back and working better then ever. Now, instead of downloading the entire distribution, you download a single small executable. It then retrieves all the XP hotfixes from M$ website. In effect achieving two goals: 1) Avoiding the source of the cease and desist that M$ sent the author. The unauthorized and unverifiable distribution of the hotfixes. 2) Chewing up M$ bandwidth instead of the author's... The thread to the new beta version is located at http://www.autopatcher.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=89
I live in Alaska. Up here, some technology is up to par, but most of it lags 4 to 5 years behind. Broadcast television is one of them. I do not see the companys up here scrambling to meet the HD deadline, and there are large areas where cable and even satellite is not available. Although our situation up here is unique in some respects, I'm sure there are other areas around the US that have similar issues. Traditional broadcast television up here is still kicking and will be for many years to come.
Unless they wish to provide funding for this, it will kill small mom and pop ISP's that are barely making a profit with small scale operations. Now they would have to invest large amount of cash in hardware and storage space to archive huge amounts of data. I don't see this going anywhere, and it's going to be impossible to enforce.
There is a utility that already exists to remove some of the new kernel level Malware utilites out there. It is referred to as LSPFIX. The home website for this is:
http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.htm
This utility allows you to see what network level drivers are loading into the kernel. I've had to use this utility to strip Malware off of several client systems. Be very careful, if you pull out a legitimate network driver, you will permanently damage your network settings.