It's not just the HFC network that's required to make the bandwidth available. Converting from analog to digital channels does regain an awful lot of spectrum, which can then be repurposed for data channels. With a digital conversion and using multicast to distribute linear video, you can mux a crap load of channels into a single 38 meg stream, especially standard def.
However, keeping the cable plant clean enough to actually support all of that is not a trivial task, especially in a rural environment. Finding people who are qualified to do it is also difficult.
Then there's all of the equipment on the backend. Converting a CMTS infrastructure from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3 is not a trivial undertaking either. It requires a fairly significant investment in equipment. For metro areas this is a no brainer, the investment easily returns. For rural areas, it's a much much harder sell. Giving a thousand rural customers the same quality of service as 10,000 in a metro area costs very nearly the same amount of capital, but the rural area returns the investment a hell of alot slower.
You have no idea how much of your cable bill goes to pay ESPN, if you did, you would be sick. Let's just say that a $20/month streaming bill wouldn't actually be 'far more than what they get from the cable company'.
Sports channels are easily the biggest cost, and the biggest driver of increased costs.
And you will have employees refuse the training, the smart ones anyway. I refuse to allow my employer to put me in any sort of bondage. at-will employment means an employee can walk anytime they want, and the employer can toss them anytime they want. Attempts to put fetters on the employee for leaving is an attempt to circumvent the employee protections of at-will employment.
If I ever found myself working for a company that required me to stay because I received some training or suffer financial penalty, and then made that training mandatory to keep the job, I would resign on the spot.
I remember once upon a time when movies had no ads before the movie itself, just trailers (which I guess could be a form of advertisement). I'll never forget the first time I walked in and started seeing ads for crap other than yet to come out movies and being highly angered.
I find it ironic that I'm a highly capable of techno geek who's capable of doing lots of fun things with technology, but I maintain only tacit involvement for most things just due to the amount of marketing, whether it's too me directly, or to companies that want to take my information to try and figure out how to better market at me. I highly resent attempts at manipulation.
I get confused looks when I pay for most things in cash, and no, I honestly don't want your loyalty rewards program. My personal information is worth alot more to me than the pittance it'll save me (looking at you Best Buy and Gamestop)
A well executed DNS reflection attack is very very broad spectrum, and doesn't have to involve broken or compromised DNS servers.
It's easy to armchair quarterback, try being on the receiving end of one sometime and actually looking at the data you get, you'll be impressed.
Eliminating this kind of attack would take an unprecedented level of cooperation among service providers, and for most of them, there would be absolutely no business reason for them to undertake it.
It's not as simple as that. Blacklisting badly behaving mail servers is one thing. That's pretty much an application level fix. You just don't accept the mail from the mailserver.
DNS reflection is more insidious. If I spoof an IP address and send a query to a DNS server that's authoritative for the domain, it's going to send a response back to the IP address in the source of the packet. Now I do that with a shitload of domains and a shitload of DNS servers, and they all start sending responses to the spoofed IP. A good DNS reflection attack will hit so many sources that it's impractical to filter them all, you'll spend a crapload of time just trying to keep the access-lists updated, and it's exponentially worse the bigger your border is. The only thing you can do is null-route the spoofed IP at your border to prevent the responses from getting into your network and bringing down your entire infrastructure.......... assuming you have border routers that won't die under the flood in the first place. The second you do that, the attacker has won.
If they're sending queries to authoritative name servers what are you going to do? Blacklist them? The authoritatives are doing what they're supposed to.
The only real way to stop DNS reflection is to convince every operator to do proper border filtering. If the source address in the packet didn't come from their allocation, they should drop it. Convincing network operators to do so is incredibly difficult.
The one I was on the end of, they did it smart. They started at 5am on Christmas day, which is pretty much about the best time to ensure that any response is sluggish at best. It went on for two weeks and didn't cease until 4 different providers had operators willing to pool their Netflow data in order to track back where the shit was actually coming from, and we found the CnC nodes buried in TWC's network. TWC was kind enough to terminate those nodes with extreme prejudice.
Yes, but there isn't a router out there capable of allowing every port to have their own traffic prioritization rules and/or allow them to be configured by end users, so that is currently impossible to implement the way you want it to be.
Sure there are. My border router, the one directly connected to the cable modem, is a Cisco 3925. I can apply whatever QoS policy I want to whatever port I want, in whatever direction I want. The Juniper J2320 it replaced could do the same thing, just like the Cisco 1841 it replaced, and the Cisco 2611XM that it replaced.
What you really mean is that the majority of end users aren't capable of comprehending and actually implementing and fine tuning their own QoS policy on a real router. So instead, most end users are stuck with whatever options are thrown into the GUI of whatever D-Link or formerly-Linksys piece of residential trash that they bought.
Which is fine, folks don't expect to need to be network engineers in order to get their stuff working, they expect to just plug it in and work. Which is reasonable, right up to the point where those same folk decide to start arguing technical detail with folk who actually are network engineers.
Been on the business end of a DNS reflection attack. Not fun. Not only do you have to figure out how to deal with loads of DNS responses invading your network, the contact that's listed for the allocation that the spoofed IP falls under gets slammed with inquiries from angry operators wanting to know why their network is sending so many damned DNS queries to them. Very disruptive.
Well, keep in mind, you have to take Comcast out of that, because they *are* content provider. There was a big uproar last year about that, with Netflix saying that Comcast was discriminating against Netflix in order to favor it's own streaming service, Streampix. (It was bullshit, it was a peering dispute. Netflix was saturating their links and demanding that Comcast turn up more, for free. Comcast said they'd be more than happy to provide Netflix with more links, but they were going to have to pay for them).
Not discriminating against other providers traffic was one of the things Comcast had to promise not to do in order to get the acquisition of NBC approved.So I'm not terribly worried about service providers biasing traffic in the favor of their products.
And all service providers are there to make money, don't kid yourself. Comcast has actually been doing massive network upgrades for over a year now. This was in direct response to AT&T's announcement about their big network upgrade, targeting Comcast's customers especially. That's where your higher quality service is going to come from. The service provider industry has hit a point where growth has become difficult because the market is very saturated, there's really not much else that can be done as far as expansion goes, so you have to look to take your competitors customers, and that means you have to beat them on quality or price (preferably both)
Ok, you don't know how network hardware works at layer 1.
When it comes to transmit, a network interface has a hardware ring, the tx-ring. The tx-ring transmits packets in the order they're received, period. You don't need to actually fill the tx-ring to induce latency via serialization delay, you merely need to have competing traffic that's large in size delivered to the tx-ring ahead of your time sensitive traffic, and this is alot easier to do when you've got Jumbo frames enabled. You do not have to saturate the link to the point where it starts buffering.
This is why when you have time sensitive traffic, you don't implement a queuing policy that waits until the link *is* saturated before it starts kicking in.
This is especially important when your speed doesn't match that which your line rate is capable of. For example, let's say you take a metro-E connection. Most of those are going to be physical port speeds of 1 gig these days (or at least 100 megs), but you may have only ordered 50 megs. If you wait for line saturation to kick in before you start applying QoS policy, then it's never going to kick in, your traffic will never prioritize properly, and you will have crappy service for anything that's time sensitive.
Instead, the right thing to do is implement a policy that sends all traffic to be evaluated before it hits the hardware queues in order to enforce your queuing policy. Then your QoS mechanisms decide what actually hits the tx ring, and in what order.
Waiting for link saturation before applying QoS policy is bad network engineering. Unfortunately, there are alot of bad network engineers out there.
I have 3 kids and a wife. Counting myself, that means 5 people. Prices in my area run ~10 for an adult, ~8 for a child. So I'm already up to $44 just to get into the door. Then for concessions, figure about 7.50 a head, and that's being conservative. So add another $38ish, and I've already got a pretty expensive night out for the family. Since we traditionally eat out when we go to the movies, that generally adds another 40 bucks or so.
Now, I'm also a technically savvy geek, who likes his toys. I have a fairly nice home theater system. Have to watch Star Wars in style, you know.
Now let's say my tv provider was offering the same movie I'd go see in the theater as an on demand option, at the same time it's in the theater, for $50. A quick run to the store to buy some soda and microwave popcorn and order out for a pizza for dinner instead, and I've got some fairly substantial savings, can watch the movie in the comfort of my own home on my nice equipment, and I don't have to drive anywhere and deal with a crowd. I'd leap at that.
You vastly overestimate the common ISP customer. Of course you would never install the software. The person who pays for the truck roll to get an install, however, doesn't know any better. The tech performing the install likely doesn't know any better either.
Comcast understands technology quite well. Last numbers I heard, Comcast had around 23 million subscribers. How many of that 23 million do you suppose are actually tech savy? How many do you think just install the software, plug in their computer (or put it on the wireless) and expect it to just work like magic?
No. That's too hard to pull off for the amount of traffic that goes through the Comcast network, it'd create a huge bottleneck and way too much impact to performance, not to mention another point of failure. It would also require a major effort reengineering traffic flow and routing policy.
This will likely be done through DNS and URI inspection, allowing the service to stay on the periphery and be turned off without any impact to customers when it breaks, needs maintenance, etc.
I do not, nor did I ever have an issue with traffic prioritization. Mostly the people who don't know what that is, or how it works have issues with it, but that's just ignorance. Real traffic prioritization only kicks in when lines are completely full, and then it lets stuff through with higher priority (VOIP, gaming packets, web browsing, video on demand) first.
Not entirely accurate. Traffic prioritization is not only a saturation thing, it's also about time sensitivity. Network interfaces are still FIFO, so if you've got a big transfer going, those big packets take longer to serialize on the wire, and things like VOIP, Video, and gaming start to suffer from time delay. A properly done QoS setup will prioritize time sensitive traffic to be sent before anything else, regardless of whether the interface is full or not (obviously, you put a limit on the amount of bandwidth you give priority to, so that it doesn't starve all other traffic just because a few folk are making a phone call)
We're worried about the NSA seeing everything that goes over our connections.
But how much worse is it to have your own ISP doing so?
Here's the thing you've got to remember. Comcast is no longer just a service provider. With the acquisition of NBC, Comcast is also a content provider. It's in the companies best interests to curtail the piracy if they can, but they have to do it for everyone, not just their own content, or the company gets accused of unfair business practices.
The brick and mortars going out of business was something that was going to happen regardless. When you can make distribution more or less instantaneous from the comfort of your own home, folks will take the convenient option most of the time. I for one do not miss having to haul around a mess of CD's in my car, which has a six-changer that's never been used, nor do I miss lugging around a huge library of technical books when my tablet can essentially hold a full reference library for a fraction of the weight.
The next thing to go will be movie theaters. Sooner or later, some enterprising company is going to try offering movies on demand at release instead of waiting out the normal theater release period. It'll cost something like $50, but that will still be cheaper than hauling the family into the theater, paying marked up ticket prices, marked up concession prices, and having to deal with some idiots crying kid.
Whether or not it's right or contributes to the degradation of our society's ability to actually socialize is a whole other discussion, but there is no stopping the march of technology and it's use to feed the public's ever growing demand for instant gratification.
I suspect your willingness to place pride above your pay may have something to do with being poorly paid. The technical name for folks like you is 'sucker'.
I used to be the same way. Couldn't let a problem go unfixed, whether it was in my job description or not. And employers noticed to, realizing 'this kid is good, smart, and cheap, we should use him as much as possible!'.
Nowadays, I'll still offer the occasional hand out of the goodness of my heart, but the second the trend starts developing, there's a sit down conversation revisiting the subject of my compensation.
As far as answering questions for an employer I left in the past? Happy to do it under two conditions:
#1 - It's not a conflict of interest. If I'm working for a competitor, then under no circumstances am I going to aid a former employer.
#2 - They pay my rate. I spend a shitload of time learning and honing my skillset on my own time, and frequently on my own dime. I would consider passing up my rate for a non-profit, but for any for-profit company, they get to pay. It doesn't matter if I left on good terms. Unless I retired, I left for a reason, or I'd still be there. If I retired, it means I said I don't want to do this shit anymore, so yeah, if they want me to do it, then compensation is in order. If I left because I was angry at them, then they get to pay extra. And if I left because they tossed me out, I wouldn't take the job for any amount of money, because I'm not sure I'd be able to restrain myself from doing everything possible to fuck them even more.
Of course helping the business get its task done is the only reason IT exists at all. If the increased usage results in a more profitable operation, then its a good thing.
Ah, that's the problem though. Your typical corporate bean counter doesn't look at it that way. What they see is an increase in overhead, which drives profitability down. You have to have damn good data in order to prove that the increased cost actually lead to greater revenue and more profit than if they hadn't spent the money. That's the kind of thing that drives good IT managers fucking insane.
to the Baldur's Gate franchise. Beamdog is basically in a holding pattern because Atari told them to cease and desist for now, which is holding up the Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate 2.
There are a number of security companies, including one of Dell's acquired business units, that sell security appliances that are basically snort boxes. So yes, Snort is pretty widely used and deployed and not just messed around with by open source enthusiasts.
Personally, given Cisco's (mis)management of acquired companies in the past, and the inability of their business units to actually work together, I just lost all interest in Snort, unless someone forks it and manages to keep it up to the snuff that Sourcefire has. In the meantime, I'll be giving Bro IDS a very strong look
I don't think he was saying that. The government does pay attention to home grown terrorists, Tim McVeigh made sure of that. As such, you're more likely going to find that gun nut websites are more likely to attract federal attention than a website about fluffy kittens.
I do think he should be a little more specific than just a guns and ammo website though. The majority of gun nut (and I'm not using that term as a pejorative) websites I've participated in have a heavy law enforcement population, so NSA monitoring would be a bit redundant.
No, but he's stating that it takes too long to open a safe, load, and fire. Presumably, in a situation which calls for the discharge of a firearm, that means you're being stupid. If your go to gun is locked up, then it should be fully loaded and ready to fire as soon as the safe is opened.
Personally speaking, I keep my handguns, even the ones that are locked up, loaded at all times when in storage. There's no downside to it, as they are my second most likely choices for home defense (there are 5 people in the house, all trained in the use of firearms, small arms will be their first choices).
My long guns, I don't keep loaded, as they are hunting or varmint killing weapons. My shotgun, I do keep loaded, as that's *my* primary choice for home defense.
In this case, I'm not talking about armed revolution. That's another aspect to the gun debate, and one I do believe in, but it's an entirely different subject.
In this case, I'm referring to the fact that a disarmed populace is just a bunch of lambs before lions. When you establish gun-free zones without staffing those zones with appropriate security (which is most of them, school shootings being a primary example), you've basically just created a hunting preserve for society's predators.
An armed populace is a major deterrent to common criminal activity. If most adults were of legal age and legally licensed to carry and did so, the common predator is going to think twice about anything involving violence to the general citizenry, as they'll never know whether or not they're going to face armed resistance.
For those who would make an argument about countries which have successfully banned guns and had a corresponding drop in gun crime rates, I suspect those folks haven't looked at the aggregate violent crime rates, and noticed that they increase. If you make guns scarce, criminals move on to other things, knives tending to be the most popular.
Guns are an equalizer. It doesn't matter how old, how young, how healthy or how infirm you are. If you can lift, point, and click, you have a reasonable chance of defending yourself. Somehow, I don't see soccer moms taking courses in knife fighting. I have seen soccer moms taking firearms lessons, then going out and getting a firearms license.
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It's not just the HFC network that's required to make the bandwidth available. Converting from analog to digital channels does regain an awful lot of spectrum, which can then be repurposed for data channels. With a digital conversion and using multicast to distribute linear video, you can mux a crap load of channels into a single 38 meg stream, especially standard def.
However, keeping the cable plant clean enough to actually support all of that is not a trivial task, especially in a rural environment. Finding people who are qualified to do it is also difficult.
Then there's all of the equipment on the backend. Converting a CMTS infrastructure from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3 is not a trivial undertaking either. It requires a fairly significant investment in equipment. For metro areas this is a no brainer, the investment easily returns. For rural areas, it's a much much harder sell. Giving a thousand rural customers the same quality of service as 10,000 in a metro area costs very nearly the same amount of capital, but the rural area returns the investment a hell of alot slower.
Disclosure: I work for Comcast
You have no idea how much of your cable bill goes to pay ESPN, if you did, you would be sick. Let's just say that a $20/month streaming bill wouldn't actually be 'far more than what they get from the cable company'.
Sports channels are easily the biggest cost, and the biggest driver of increased costs.
And you will have employees refuse the training, the smart ones anyway. I refuse to allow my employer to put me in any sort of bondage. at-will employment means an employee can walk anytime they want, and the employer can toss them anytime they want. Attempts to put fetters on the employee for leaving is an attempt to circumvent the employee protections of at-will employment.
If I ever found myself working for a company that required me to stay because I received some training or suffer financial penalty, and then made that training mandatory to keep the job, I would resign on the spot.
I remember once upon a time when movies had no ads before the movie itself, just trailers (which I guess could be a form of advertisement). I'll never forget the first time I walked in and started seeing ads for crap other than yet to come out movies and being highly angered.
I find it ironic that I'm a highly capable of techno geek who's capable of doing lots of fun things with technology, but I maintain only tacit involvement for most things just due to the amount of marketing, whether it's too me directly, or to companies that want to take my information to try and figure out how to better market at me. I highly resent attempts at manipulation.
I get confused looks when I pay for most things in cash, and no, I honestly don't want your loyalty rewards program. My personal information is worth alot more to me than the pittance it'll save me (looking at you Best Buy and Gamestop)
It's not that simple.
A well executed DNS reflection attack is very very broad spectrum, and doesn't have to involve broken or compromised DNS servers.
It's easy to armchair quarterback, try being on the receiving end of one sometime and actually looking at the data you get, you'll be impressed.
Eliminating this kind of attack would take an unprecedented level of cooperation among service providers, and for most of them, there would be absolutely no business reason for them to undertake it.
It's not as simple as that. Blacklisting badly behaving mail servers is one thing. That's pretty much an application level fix. You just don't accept the mail from the mailserver.
DNS reflection is more insidious. If I spoof an IP address and send a query to a DNS server that's authoritative for the domain, it's going to send a response back to the IP address in the source of the packet. Now I do that with a shitload of domains and a shitload of DNS servers, and they all start sending responses to the spoofed IP. A good DNS reflection attack will hit so many sources that it's impractical to filter them all, you'll spend a crapload of time just trying to keep the access-lists updated, and it's exponentially worse the bigger your border is. The only thing you can do is null-route the spoofed IP at your border to prevent the responses from getting into your network and bringing down your entire infrastructure.......... assuming you have border routers that won't die under the flood in the first place. The second you do that, the attacker has won.
If they're sending queries to authoritative name servers what are you going to do? Blacklist them? The authoritatives are doing what they're supposed to.
The only real way to stop DNS reflection is to convince every operator to do proper border filtering. If the source address in the packet didn't come from their allocation, they should drop it. Convincing network operators to do so is incredibly difficult.
The one I was on the end of, they did it smart. They started at 5am on Christmas day, which is pretty much about the best time to ensure that any response is sluggish at best. It went on for two weeks and didn't cease until 4 different providers had operators willing to pool their Netflow data in order to track back where the shit was actually coming from, and we found the CnC nodes buried in TWC's network. TWC was kind enough to terminate those nodes with extreme prejudice.
Didn't help though, we still lost the customer.
Yes, but there isn't a router out there capable of allowing every port to have their own traffic prioritization rules and/or allow them to be configured by end users, so that is currently impossible to implement the way you want it to be.
Sure there are. My border router, the one directly connected to the cable modem, is a Cisco 3925. I can apply whatever QoS policy I want to whatever port I want, in whatever direction I want. The Juniper J2320 it replaced could do the same thing, just like the Cisco 1841 it replaced, and the Cisco 2611XM that it replaced.
What you really mean is that the majority of end users aren't capable of comprehending and actually implementing and fine tuning their own QoS policy on a real router. So instead, most end users are stuck with whatever options are thrown into the GUI of whatever D-Link or formerly-Linksys piece of residential trash that they bought.
Which is fine, folks don't expect to need to be network engineers in order to get their stuff working, they expect to just plug it in and work. Which is reasonable, right up to the point where those same folk decide to start arguing technical detail with folk who actually are network engineers.
Been on the business end of a DNS reflection attack. Not fun. Not only do you have to figure out how to deal with loads of DNS responses invading your network, the contact that's listed for the allocation that the spoofed IP falls under gets slammed with inquiries from angry operators wanting to know why their network is sending so many damned DNS queries to them. Very disruptive.
Well, keep in mind, you have to take Comcast out of that, because they *are* content provider. There was a big uproar last year about that, with Netflix saying that Comcast was discriminating against Netflix in order to favor it's own streaming service, Streampix. (It was bullshit, it was a peering dispute. Netflix was saturating their links and demanding that Comcast turn up more, for free. Comcast said they'd be more than happy to provide Netflix with more links, but they were going to have to pay for them).
Not discriminating against other providers traffic was one of the things Comcast had to promise not to do in order to get the acquisition of NBC approved.So I'm not terribly worried about service providers biasing traffic in the favor of their products.
And all service providers are there to make money, don't kid yourself. Comcast has actually been doing massive network upgrades for over a year now. This was in direct response to AT&T's announcement about their big network upgrade, targeting Comcast's customers especially. That's where your higher quality service is going to come from. The service provider industry has hit a point where growth has become difficult because the market is very saturated, there's really not much else that can be done as far as expansion goes, so you have to look to take your competitors customers, and that means you have to beat them on quality or price (preferably both)
Ok, you don't know how network hardware works at layer 1.
When it comes to transmit, a network interface has a hardware ring, the tx-ring. The tx-ring transmits packets in the order they're received, period. You don't need to actually fill the tx-ring to induce latency via serialization delay, you merely need to have competing traffic that's large in size delivered to the tx-ring ahead of your time sensitive traffic, and this is alot easier to do when you've got Jumbo frames enabled. You do not have to saturate the link to the point where it starts buffering.
This is why when you have time sensitive traffic, you don't implement a queuing policy that waits until the link *is* saturated before it starts kicking in.
This is especially important when your speed doesn't match that which your line rate is capable of. For example, let's say you take a metro-E connection. Most of those are going to be physical port speeds of 1 gig these days (or at least 100 megs), but you may have only ordered 50 megs. If you wait for line saturation to kick in before you start applying QoS policy, then it's never going to kick in, your traffic will never prioritize properly, and you will have crappy service for anything that's time sensitive.
Instead, the right thing to do is implement a policy that sends all traffic to be evaluated before it hits the hardware queues in order to enforce your queuing policy. Then your QoS mechanisms decide what actually hits the tx ring, and in what order.
Waiting for link saturation before applying QoS policy is bad network engineering. Unfortunately, there are alot of bad network engineers out there.
Let me put it this way -
I have 3 kids and a wife. Counting myself, that means 5 people. Prices in my area run ~10 for an adult, ~8 for a child. So I'm already up to $44 just to get into the door. Then for concessions, figure about 7.50 a head, and that's being conservative. So add another $38ish, and I've already got a pretty expensive night out for the family. Since we traditionally eat out when we go to the movies, that generally adds another 40 bucks or so.
Now, I'm also a technically savvy geek, who likes his toys. I have a fairly nice home theater system. Have to watch Star Wars in style, you know.
Now let's say my tv provider was offering the same movie I'd go see in the theater as an on demand option, at the same time it's in the theater, for $50. A quick run to the store to buy some soda and microwave popcorn and order out for a pizza for dinner instead, and I've got some fairly substantial savings, can watch the movie in the comfort of my own home on my nice equipment, and I don't have to drive anywhere and deal with a crowd. I'd leap at that.
You vastly overestimate the common ISP customer. Of course you would never install the software. The person who pays for the truck roll to get an install, however, doesn't know any better. The tech performing the install likely doesn't know any better either.
Comcast understands technology quite well. Last numbers I heard, Comcast had around 23 million subscribers. How many of that 23 million do you suppose are actually tech savy? How many do you think just install the software, plug in their computer (or put it on the wireless) and expect it to just work like magic?
Trust me, if you knew the guys on the backend of this, you wouldn't feel sorry for them at all.
No. That's too hard to pull off for the amount of traffic that goes through the Comcast network, it'd create a huge bottleneck and way too much impact to performance, not to mention another point of failure. It would also require a major effort reengineering traffic flow and routing policy.
This will likely be done through DNS and URI inspection, allowing the service to stay on the periphery and be turned off without any impact to customers when it breaks, needs maintenance, etc.
I do not, nor did I ever have an issue with traffic prioritization. Mostly the people who don't know what that is, or how it works have issues with it, but that's just ignorance. Real traffic prioritization only kicks in when lines are completely full, and then it lets stuff through with higher priority (VOIP, gaming packets, web browsing, video on demand) first.
Not entirely accurate. Traffic prioritization is not only a saturation thing, it's also about time sensitivity. Network interfaces are still FIFO, so if you've got a big transfer going, those big packets take longer to serialize on the wire, and things like VOIP, Video, and gaming start to suffer from time delay. A properly done QoS setup will prioritize time sensitive traffic to be sent before anything else, regardless of whether the interface is full or not (obviously, you put a limit on the amount of bandwidth you give priority to, so that it doesn't starve all other traffic just because a few folk are making a phone call)
We're worried about the NSA seeing everything that goes over our connections.
But how much worse is it to have your own ISP doing so?
Here's the thing you've got to remember. Comcast is no longer just a service provider. With the acquisition of NBC, Comcast is also a content provider. It's in the companies best interests to curtail the piracy if they can, but they have to do it for everyone, not just their own content, or the company gets accused of unfair business practices.
The brick and mortars going out of business was something that was going to happen regardless. When you can make distribution more or less instantaneous from the comfort of your own home, folks will take the convenient option most of the time. I for one do not miss having to haul around a mess of CD's in my car, which has a six-changer that's never been used, nor do I miss lugging around a huge library of technical books when my tablet can essentially hold a full reference library for a fraction of the weight.
The next thing to go will be movie theaters. Sooner or later, some enterprising company is going to try offering movies on demand at release instead of waiting out the normal theater release period. It'll cost something like $50, but that will still be cheaper than hauling the family into the theater, paying marked up ticket prices, marked up concession prices, and having to deal with some idiots crying kid.
Whether or not it's right or contributes to the degradation of our society's ability to actually socialize is a whole other discussion, but there is no stopping the march of technology and it's use to feed the public's ever growing demand for instant gratification.
I suspect your willingness to place pride above your pay may have something to do with being poorly paid. The technical name for folks like you is 'sucker'.
I used to be the same way. Couldn't let a problem go unfixed, whether it was in my job description or not. And employers noticed to, realizing 'this kid is good, smart, and cheap, we should use him as much as possible!'.
Nowadays, I'll still offer the occasional hand out of the goodness of my heart, but the second the trend starts developing, there's a sit down conversation revisiting the subject of my compensation.
As far as answering questions for an employer I left in the past? Happy to do it under two conditions:
#1 - It's not a conflict of interest. If I'm working for a competitor, then under no circumstances am I going to aid a former employer.
#2 - They pay my rate. I spend a shitload of time learning and honing my skillset on my own time, and frequently on my own dime. I would consider passing up my rate for a non-profit, but for any for-profit company, they get to pay. It doesn't matter if I left on good terms. Unless I retired, I left for a reason, or I'd still be there. If I retired, it means I said I don't want to do this shit anymore, so yeah, if they want me to do it, then compensation is in order. If I left because I was angry at them, then they get to pay extra. And if I left because they tossed me out, I wouldn't take the job for any amount of money, because I'm not sure I'd be able to restrain myself from doing everything possible to fuck them even more.
Of course helping the business get its task done is the only reason IT exists at all. If the increased usage
results in a more profitable operation, then its a good thing.
Ah, that's the problem though. Your typical corporate bean counter doesn't look at it that way. What they see is an increase in overhead, which drives profitability down. You have to have damn good data in order to prove that the increased cost actually lead to greater revenue and more profit than if they hadn't spent the money. That's the kind of thing that drives good IT managers fucking insane.
to the Baldur's Gate franchise. Beamdog is basically in a holding pattern because Atari told them to cease and desist for now, which is holding up the Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate 2.
There are a number of security companies, including one of Dell's acquired business units, that sell security appliances that are basically snort boxes. So yes, Snort is pretty widely used and deployed and not just messed around with by open source enthusiasts.
Personally, given Cisco's (mis)management of acquired companies in the past, and the inability of their business units to actually work together, I just lost all interest in Snort, unless someone forks it and manages to keep it up to the snuff that Sourcefire has. In the meantime, I'll be giving Bro IDS a very strong look
I don't think he was saying that. The government does pay attention to home grown terrorists, Tim McVeigh made sure of that. As such, you're more likely going to find that gun nut websites are more likely to attract federal attention than a website about fluffy kittens.
I do think he should be a little more specific than just a guns and ammo website though. The majority of gun nut (and I'm not using that term as a pejorative) websites I've participated in have a heavy law enforcement population, so NSA monitoring would be a bit redundant.
No, but he's stating that it takes too long to open a safe, load, and fire. Presumably, in a situation which calls for the discharge of a firearm, that means you're being stupid. If your go to gun is locked up, then it should be fully loaded and ready to fire as soon as the safe is opened.
Personally speaking, I keep my handguns, even the ones that are locked up, loaded at all times when in storage. There's no downside to it, as they are my second most likely choices for home defense (there are 5 people in the house, all trained in the use of firearms, small arms will be their first choices).
My long guns, I don't keep loaded, as they are hunting or varmint killing weapons. My shotgun, I do keep loaded, as that's *my* primary choice for home defense.
If I put a picture of Justin Bieber's face on it, then it would certainly be effective in the case of my 10 year old daughter.
Not to mention personally satisfying.
In this case, I'm not talking about armed revolution. That's another aspect to the gun debate, and one I do believe in, but it's an entirely different subject.
In this case, I'm referring to the fact that a disarmed populace is just a bunch of lambs before lions. When you establish gun-free zones without staffing those zones with appropriate security (which is most of them, school shootings being a primary example), you've basically just created a hunting preserve for society's predators.
An armed populace is a major deterrent to common criminal activity. If most adults were of legal age and legally licensed to carry and did so, the common predator is going to think twice about anything involving violence to the general citizenry, as they'll never know whether or not they're going to face armed resistance.
For those who would make an argument about countries which have successfully banned guns and had a corresponding drop in gun crime rates, I suspect those folks haven't looked at the aggregate violent crime rates, and noticed that they increase. If you make guns scarce, criminals move on to other things, knives tending to be the most popular.
Guns are an equalizer. It doesn't matter how old, how young, how healthy or how infirm you are. If you can lift, point, and click, you have a reasonable chance of defending yourself. Somehow, I don't see soccer moms taking courses in knife fighting. I have seen soccer moms taking firearms lessons, then going out and getting a firearms license.