This is why rational people who have the time metamoderate when they have the opportunity. Others throw hissy fits when they disagree with someone, and then enter a mental spiral where it can only end hilariously (from everyone else's perspective). Such users are tools and can provide a couple of hours of entertainment until their karma is at a permanent -1.
Now, why couldn't you just state that a post was modded down incorrectly and why, and leave it to meta-moderators to correct the error? But no, you had to bitch and moan and scream like a demon-possessed character from The Exorcist.
Some people take douchebaggery to a whole new level. Frankly, I am impressed!
At this point your karma is shot and no one will have to mod you down anymore. 19 posts modded down in a single day? You did us a service with your special brand of asshattery.
Today's moderators: We slashdotters thank you. Generally I dislike downmodding and when I moderate I mod great posts up, but Das here is a particularly amusing troll and if I had points to spend, I'd mod him down as well. Kudos to the moderators today! It's always greatly amusing to watch a two-year-old brat throw a tantrum.
(oh and just to set the record straight: if you have a problem with something on/. just contact the admins. Believe it or not they DO respond!)
Solution? Don't pay for permits if you know what you're doing. Do the work right (from an engineering perspective) and to Hell with the bureaucracy. Technically I need to ask my landlord to pull a permit and get an inspector to come to my apartment when I replaced a light fixture with a fan. Did I do that? Hell no. I just replaced the fixture.
When I can afford to have a house built I plan to do the wiring myself. I'll hire an electrician friend to oversee the work (need to jump through the legality hoops), but I plan to over-build; 10ga wire for outlets and 12ga wire for lighting (rather than 12 for outlets and 14 for lighting). It'll be legal, and the inspector will go "uhhhh" but it'll exceed code by far. Another thing I plan to do is pull two cables for every one required (or in the case of CAT6 and coax, four for every one required) to make future additions easier.
The codes are horrible and just barely meet requirements. There is no reason that turning on a television or the fridge compressor turning on (just barely a 612-VA surge) should cause lights to flicker. An AC unit should NOT make a circuit breaker hot enough to cause a blister. I worked for an electrician who insisted on over-building his own house, and I helped him with it (my dad made me learn a trade, it was ether electricity or plumbing. I chose the cleaner job) and the lights never, ever flicker even when appliances like the electric stove are turned on. If his home ever catches fire, it won't be caused by the electrical system.
My dad's house? My dad does his own electrical work a lot of the time, and some of the things he has done makes me cringe. Ugh. He KNOWS the right way, but when it comes to fixing his own stuff, he used to take shortcuts. He doesn't any more, but my god, one of the wiring hacks he has done is still in place and has failed. Last time I visited he was in the process of taking the ceiling down and was replacing the circuit the right way.
Blu-ray has yet to get any traction, and in all honesty, with only higher quality video and marginally better audio to have over DVD, I seriously doubt it ever will. It's going to remain a niche videophile technology for the foreseeable future, until HD downloads become commonplace and available under reasonable pricing terms.
My first home DVD player was the Sony S360 (or was it 360S) -- Really nice user interface, FULL controls on the front, it was WONDERFUL. Oops, nope, wait - at over $330 at the time one would expect it to last longer than sub-$200 players. No such luck. The thing died - they had a bad run with defective laser assemblies and I replaced it with the Apex AD-600A. A player that cost only $179 but was Macrovision and Region free, offered vastly superior features and fewer compression artifacts. Granted, the user interface sucked on the Apex (the remote was a clumsy disorganized grid of buttons, only a couple of front panel controls - hey, just like ALL of today's DVD players. Apex was ahead of the curve on that one!) but it was a far better value, and it still works to this day. I should have bought the Apex in the first place, but silly me, I thought the Sony would be a better-quality player than the no-name built-in-a-tent Apex.
Soooo, I won't pay over $100 for a Blu-Ray player. I'm not getting suckered into paying a premium for a player which is built to crappy tolerances where the company will not admit to a bad run. My current player is a $60 Philips player (I don't use the Apex any more because I wanted a player with Xvid support) and it suits me fine. I'll be upgrading to an upscaling player soon, and wait until Blu-Ray players come to reasonable prices. I'm looking forward to seeing how good the integrated upscalers are in the Samsung television though. If the upscaler is good enough, why will I need Blu-Ray at all? Most of the shows I like were not recorded in high def, and the ones that were recorded in high def or remastered/re-transferred off of film into high def, well, high def won't make them any more entertaining.
Don't get me wrong; I like high-def TV. I just won't sit gawking at PBS and discovery shows just for the sake of pixel peeping, at least, not after the TV is calibrated and I'm through playing with it.;)
This is wonderful. If you can read modern square-script Hebrew it's simple to learn Paleo-Hebrew as it is very similar, other than that the glyphs themselves changed (a yod is still a yod, a vav is still a vav, so if you learn the paleo-hebrew glyphs you can read the manuscripts which are in paleo hebrew). This will be great because it will give us direct access to high-quality scans of early scripts of leviticus and other manuscripts from the tenach (old testament). With these going online showing proof of Yeshua (Jesus) having fulfilled the messianic prophecies, it becomes much harder to deny who the creator is, and it underscores the authenticity of the Bible in general.
It is the LOCAL as in town or city government which typically grants the city/town-wide monopolies when they court/invite cable providers and/or entertain proposals from them. The feds have nothing to do with this process.
The fact that Comcast is in many states (nation-wide, as you put it, is inaccurate) is irrelevant, since the feds do not grant the local monopolies, the local town/city councils do.
And sure, the majority of users are not going to use much bandwidth. I'm typically out of town 1/3 to 1/2 the week, and my bandwidth is pretty much limited to connecting to check email. When I am home I download open source packages or am telecommuting.
My parents were heavy bandwidth users until I got them to stop using spyware-ridden P2P programs. Now they check their email a few times a week and that's what probably 95% of people do.
The CORRECT solution Comcast should offer
What is the solution from Comcast's side? It should be any of the following:
1. Give the heaviest 1% of users the option to either have their P2P traffic throttled (NOT BLOCKED) or to be cut off
2. Advertise the plans HONESTLY (and since current customers bought unlimited internet plans, honor that as they are grandfathered in!), and for those who go over, give them a heads up and give them a choice between a higher tier for unlimited access, bandwidth throttling, or be cut off
Personally, I'd opt for throttling. When I use a lot of bandwidth it's in spurts; two or three distro updates are released in a short time period, or I'm downloading system updates, I'll use a few gig worth of bandwidth in a day. When I download distros I generally seed until I get to a 1.5:1 ratio or so just to be a good "netizen."
Monitoring bandwidth use yourself; confirm or deny Comcast's claims
Want to know if Comcast is full of shit or not if they threaten to cut you off? Get a DD-WRT compatible router and run DD-WRT. it now includes bandwidth monitoring; you can check monthly reports and see how much bandwidth you're really consuming, in realtime.
Do I hate Comcast? Not really. I do loathe Verizon though so I'll use any alternative to them that is available. From Comcast I get voice, internet, and cable (every available channel aside from smut) and two cable boxes; one high-def DVR and one regular high-def receiver, so I spend quite a bit of money with them. I've been a comcast customer for years now (well, Adelphia for a short while after the last time I moved until Comcast took over) and I do expect to be treated with a little bit of decency since I pay month after month quite a bit of money for their services. If I were to get hit with a threat to get shut down, everything is logged in DD-WRT and you can bet your ass I'd be filing a complaint if not a law suit, especially since I've signed up for unlimited internet access.
They're not exactly fixed; they use different compression ratios on different channels, as you can see watching some high-def programming the clarity is sometimes no better than standard def programming because of compression artifacts (blocking, banding, etc.) and if you go into the diagnostic screens you can watch how many packets are being transferred in realtime. (They don't forbid you from going into those screens in case you were wondering - I went into them myself to gather info to report to customer support when I had my service updated and wasn't getting programming I should have access to. They just won't tell you how to go into those screens). Incidentally if you're not 100% sure which channels are actually analog and you have a newer box which gives you S/PDIF on both digital an analog channels, use the diagnostic screens to determine what the tuner is actually receiving.
Now, there is a LOT of unique traffic; on demand programming. So, yes, there are a lot of programming streams unique to individual users at any given moment, probably most commonly weekend evenings.
Receiver Setup
Incidentally, when you upgrade to high def, you will definitely want to get into the receiver's diag and config screens, because your box might be recycled and be configured for a previous install for 720i, 720p, or even 480p at a previous install, or the cable tech might leave it at the default 720p setting. Just FYI.
Bandwidth Cap
250GB? That seems fair at first, until you consider online programming. Do you do a lot of netflix? How much bandwidth does each
I download quite a bit, in spurts. When a new kubuntu, OpenSuSE, or CentOS release comes out, I download DVD and CD ISO images, and I seed them for a bit. That could easily be 10GB in a single day. Now, 250GB / 30 days = 8.3GB / day, just under a dual layer DVD per day. Is that fair when for the last 10 years they have been fraudulently advertising unlimited internet and surreptitiously enforcing unpublished caps?
The Real Reason for Caps?
I think part of the reason for the bandwidth cap rather than throttling (not blocking) the heaviest users is that they do not want you to use netflix, hulu, blockbuster, or other third-party online programming services; they want you to use theirs. I think that what they're saying publicly is just a cover to ward off any potential anti-competitive complaints. Now, let me just restate that this is my opinion (I am not stating this as fact) based on the evidence I see.
The Solution
Contact your local selectmen, town manager, mayor, etc. and let them know that sanctioned monopolies are a bad thing. Want to bring Comcast into check? Get your town to invite competitors so that residents have a choice between two or more cable providers. Forget Verizion and FIOS, since their TV service stinks. Get real competition.
That $400 PC won't have the same specs. A $500 PC might have a better video card, but very likely won't have IEEE1394. A $600 PC might have IEEE1394 and will very likely have a much better video card, as MacinPC^H^Htosh video cards tend to lag several generations behind wintel PCs.
Yes, I have. And the 64 to 32 bit thunking library is why I still run 32-bit Linux. It is not fun trying to resolve broken dependencies on 64-bit Linux, and flash is notoriously unstable for some reason. Hell, flash on Linux isn't very stable running natively on 32-bit Linux.
RTFA? Are you nuts? This is slashdot. Unlike fark, we do not have to RTFA in order to come up with snarky comments! All one has to do is skim a thread to see all the GNAA and goatse and scat-eating posts to prove that claim.
You underestimate the length to which we slashdotters will go to maintain our reputation of being lazy! Look at me. I have not RTFA yet and I'm procrastinating reading the fine article by making this post.
Again, as further proof that slashdotters are lazy and will not RTFA I will continue this diatribe.
It's not that we lack comprehension skills, nor is it that we don't understand the basic concept of science and learning, it is just that the vast majority of us simply don't care and would rather talk out of our asses and belittle the editors and other posters rather than read and learn for ourselves. We prefer our soundbites and summaries (if we could even be bothered to read the 'fine' summaries, let alone the articles) to detailed articles, and we prefer that a few of you who give a damn to predigest the knowledge and regurgitate it for us. We prefer that someone mention that animals are thought to use their own internal magnets made of crystals of magnetite, and that it is unknown at this time whether cows possess this anatomical feature. Why, I'd have to read the entire "fine" article in order to learn that the biologists investigating this don't yet know.
Now obviously I read the article, but you know, the vast majority here couldn't be bothered.
Good point. I wouldn't consider an orbit to be flight in any record-breaking sense. The journey UP to orbit? Sure. Maybe. The journey back? Sure. Maybe. However, manned orbit is a completely different category from flight in the sense that aircraft fly. As you said, an orbit is a controlled fall, and does not rely upon lift.
Even rocket planes which do fly in the atmosphere blur the lines and should be a separate category, especially if they cross the "official" demarcation of space. It ceases to be flight in the sense of lift-generating surfaces counteracting gravity at some point.
300 ohm cable works great for analog, but digital is all or nothing, or occasional periods of all and then annoying periods of nothing which results in the MPEG stream breaking up into blocks and stuttering audio. For digital you want the nice impedance-balanced and shielded transmission line.
Oh, and if you're going the cheap route: RG-59 is superior to cheap RG-6. Good RG-6 is better than RG-59. For long runs I've had good success with RG-59 though, but YMMV and if you do have a long run with RG-59 make sure that your splices, terminations, etc. are all flawless.
The linux camp is similar without the thoundands of paper wavers, as there aren't that many certifications -- and most real linux people won't touch them. (certs are for people who want decorations.)
Actually I've considered getting certs for both RedHat and Novell, but purely for my own edification. I've been using Linux off and on since it was a 7-floppy install image (and it's been my only OS since 2003 or 2004, since then I've only booted Windows for games and once for data recovery from PST files), and I may know quite a bit and run many different distros at levels ranging from home to small business and up to enterprise, but I do not know everything - not by a long shot. So, the certs may be useful for my own satisfaction. I wouldn't consider them the basis to get a job (I hope to never work for anyone else again in the future anyhow) nor a basis for hiring anyone. There are two things I consider important in the hiring process, in the order of importance:
1. Thought process: How are your problem-solving skills (i.e., how good of an engineer are you) and how do you use your resources (man pages, books, search engines, etc.)
2. Experience: what have you worked with?
Now, #2 is less important than #1 and here's why. If you are a good engineer, you can learn any tool. You can learn how to put together a network, or to write bash scripts, or whatever. Experience is less important because without #1, even if you've created new accounts a thousand times, that doesn't mean you know to read.bashrc or check permissions if a user has problems logging in, or to check.ssh/* and/or/etc/sshd/* if a user has problem sshing out or a problem logging in remotely.
Actually there is one more criteria I consider more important than both #2 and even #1: the ability and integrity to say "I don't know." When I've interviewed network admin candidates I'd put together a list of random but very difficult/esoteric networking problems, and on the spot I'd rule out anyone who tried to make it up to sound intelligent. I'd consider the ones who knew or figured out the solution, but for them I'd pick another problem and run that by them. The ones who said "I don't know" would receive strong consideration; the ones who said "I don't know, but I'd RTFM or search knowledgebases and search engines" would definitely get the second interview. The network admin we hired for that position was one of those people who knew how to think, how to research, knew his stuff solid, but on top of that, he knew how to admit "I don't know." The ability to admit not knowing something is far more important than most PHB types realise.
Oh, and by the way: the sysadmin I hired for that company was not an MCSE and knew more than every MCSE I interviewed except for some of the mundane things like "what does PCMCIA stand for?" -- who cares if you can memorize what an acronym stands for if you don't know how it works or what it's used for or how to troubleshoot the devices? In that respect certs are worthless; they, like school, teach you to memorize; not how to think.
Logic is not taught in our schools. Thinking for yourself is not taught in our schools. That is why we have become weak in the sciences and ultimately economics.
See, the thing is, with a Windows enterprise you can get away with a paper-MCSE providing someone who knows what they're doing installed and deployed it all and set up the backup/recovery regimen, along with writing some custom offline maintenance scripts along with scheduling accompanied downtime windows. Your paper MCSE needs to do little more than create active directory accounts, add computers to the domain, and maybe tweak a login script or answer RTFM questions all the time. Providing it never breaks, your average void with a pulse can "administer the network." When it breaks, you're SOL. Hell, even with an EXPERIENCED Windows admin (MCSE or not, although most good Windows admins seem to be not MCSE-carrying folks) you often have to resort to reformat/reinstall when Windows does break, and may God have mercy on your soul if you don't have the configuration well documented because restoring is a pain in the ass if you're at different patch levels. Oh sure it might work if the patches are different but there is good chance of encountering an instability sooner rather than later.
Ever try to repair an Exchange Info Store when eseutil and isinteg refuse to do anything with it? Ever try to force SQL Server to mount a hot-backup or a broken database file even after the tools refuse to do it? I have -- successfully on both counts. It's a pain in the ass though, and no paper MCSE is going to be able to figure out how to do it, and if they call Microsoft they would tell you reformat/reinstall and push data up from pst/ost files.
Now, when it comes to Linux - maintenance, backup, and even much of recovery can almost always be done live. Maintenance windows? Scheduled down time? HA! Adding users, computers, etc. to the network? A little more tricky than Windows. What distro are you on? Which protocol are you using? NIS? LDAP (or SMB, LDAP's low-functioning bastard cousin with Down's Syndrome)? NFS? Which printer protocols are you using, and if supporting multiple platforms, how are you making it possible to map the printers on Windows clients and where are the drivers located? Again, is it SMB? LPD?
Chances are when you're all set up, it won't break. If it does break, it's usually due to hardware (or firmware) and not the OS. Backup/Restore on a Linux/*nix system is FAST and nearly painless. However if a system DOES go down due to software, even if rooted, it's often possible to repair the system without going to reformat/reinstall or reformat/restore. Even if a database or mail store breaks you can nearly always repair and remount it. Depending on the GUI you might get by with someone who is the equivalent of an MCSE, but would you want to? Chances are if you have a good unix admin, almost all routine tasks will be fully automated and all he or she will have to do is read crond log file/summary emails in the morning to check for problems, and chances are those emails will include RAID and/or SMART health as well so problems can be dealt with proactively -- oh, and also chances are your databases were probably integrity-checked and shrunk/optimized overnight as well, with no down time required.
SMARTD is available for Windows, along with hacks to query some RAID controllers. What are the chances that your paper-MCSE admin is going to even know what S.M.A.R.T. is, let alone think to proactively keep an eye on it?
Sure you can get by with a cheaper admin on Windows, but again would you want to?
Why? It is a commodity good sold off the shelf - it is NOT a licensed product despite whatever bullshit is present in the EULA. You buy it without signing a contract off the shelf therefore you have the right of first sale to install it on anything you can put it on (aside from violating copyrights of course, so that means installing it on one workstation), use it as a coaster, sell it for a zillion times the price you paid for it (as long as you retain no backups) or use a heat wire cutter and carve the disc into a shuriken (local laws may prohibit the possession of a throwing star). Apple doesn't really have any legal basis to prevent your exercising your right of first sale.
Microsoft is really trying to save Vista, they had a really nice OS with Windows XP and it seems so far they're too thick headed to realize that. I just hope they realize soon that they failed, they tried something new and nobody likes it.
"they had a really nice OS with Windows XP"
Weren't we saying that about Windows 2000 when people hated XP not so long ago?
I use Vista at home. Its sole purpose is to play a couple of games, but to make the experience more tolerable I installed andlinux on it.
The problem with vistas are:
* UAC does not really solve security problems; it is just annoying. I turned that shit off since all I do is play games on it (and as soon as Cedega or Crossover Games runs it I'll be dumping Vista) * Diagnostics is a little harder because more is hidden from the user * WHY must drivers be signed? This is slowing adoption of 64-bit Windows -- and it certainly hasn't stopped the propogation of viruses, spyware, etc. * It requires way too many resources for a home machine.
There are some things I really like about it, but the driver signing is a mistake (vendors won't keep their drivers updated with maintenance releases) and UAC is a flawed solution.
Also the UI is kind of weak. In MSIE 7 why did they do away with the menus? yeah it looks cleaner but it's more of a hassle to use. Some of the 3D effects are neat, but have they even looked at XGL/Compiz Fusion? I show people my Linux desktop and they ask me if I can put Linux on their systems, and they're amazed at what comes free with the OS (I do usually pay for the distro to support it though).
DRM slows networking to a crawl. Still.:(
Windows Media Center IS really nice though. Honestly, it's a hell of a lot better than Myth, because unlike Myth it just works. That is one thing Microsoft got right in both Vista and XP (Windows Media Center Edition).
I happened to catch a Vista ad when watching a movie on hulu.com last night. This older gentleman was going on and on about how great Vista was, etc. and I just kept thinking that it's either not a real-world user but "just" an actor reading a script, or it's a user who is BRAND NEW to Vista and is looking at it for the first time, and hasn't encountered any of the annoyances.
Oh sure, preinstalled it's _okay_ but why should the OS all by itself require 1GB of RAM (512 for basic)?
What I'd love to see Microsoft do is make the system less monolithic. Go back to the Windows/DOS model. Not the 16-bitness and instability of course, but separate the GUI from the underpinnings, and make loading the GUI optional (maybe powershell or SFU could be one of the interfaces you could boot to) to make diagnostics easier, and hell, even make the system lightweight for certain applications.
Go back to making the install program more modular - so you can pick and choose which components get installed.
Drop the driver signing, as it hasn't hindered crackers and virus authors at all, but has hindered 64-bit adoption.
Either drop backwards compatibility, or provide backwards compatibility via a VM which runs a stripped-down XP environment.
Fix the underlying security model. At security Microsoft still fails. UAC is a hack for perception purposes only, and while it MIGHT prevent idiots from shooting themselves in the foot, it does not solve any inherent security issues.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why rational people who have the time metamoderate when they have the opportunity. Others throw hissy fits when they disagree with someone, and then enter a mental spiral where it can only end hilariously (from everyone else's perspective). Such users are tools and can provide a couple of hours of entertainment until their karma is at a permanent -1.
Now, why couldn't you just state that a post was modded down incorrectly and why, and leave it to meta-moderators to correct the error? But no, you had to bitch and moan and scream like a demon-possessed character from The Exorcist.
Some people take douchebaggery to a whole new level. Frankly, I am impressed!
At this point your karma is shot and no one will have to mod you down anymore. 19 posts modded down in a single day? You did us a service with your special brand of asshattery.
Today's moderators: We slashdotters thank you. Generally I dislike downmodding and when I moderate I mod great posts up, but Das here is a particularly amusing troll and if I had points to spend, I'd mod him down as well. Kudos to the moderators today! It's always greatly amusing to watch a two-year-old brat throw a tantrum.
(oh and just to set the record straight: if you have a problem with something on /. just contact the admins. Believe it or not they DO respond!)
Right, and Fox did not cancel Futurama or Arrested Development, they just quit ordering more episodes. Semantics.
Solution? Don't pay for permits if you know what you're doing. Do the work right (from an engineering perspective) and to Hell with the bureaucracy. Technically I need to ask my landlord to pull a permit and get an inspector to come to my apartment when I replaced a light fixture with a fan. Did I do that? Hell no. I just replaced the fixture.
When I can afford to have a house built I plan to do the wiring myself. I'll hire an electrician friend to oversee the work (need to jump through the legality hoops), but I plan to over-build; 10ga wire for outlets and 12ga wire for lighting (rather than 12 for outlets and 14 for lighting). It'll be legal, and the inspector will go "uhhhh" but it'll exceed code by far. Another thing I plan to do is pull two cables for every one required (or in the case of CAT6 and coax, four for every one required) to make future additions easier.
The codes are horrible and just barely meet requirements. There is no reason that turning on a television or the fridge compressor turning on (just barely a 612-VA surge) should cause lights to flicker. An AC unit should NOT make a circuit breaker hot enough to cause a blister. I worked for an electrician who insisted on over-building his own house, and I helped him with it (my dad made me learn a trade, it was ether electricity or plumbing. I chose the cleaner job) and the lights never, ever flicker even when appliances like the electric stove are turned on. If his home ever catches fire, it won't be caused by the electrical system.
My dad's house? My dad does his own electrical work a lot of the time, and some of the things he has done makes me cringe. Ugh. He KNOWS the right way, but when it comes to fixing his own stuff, he used to take shortcuts. He doesn't any more, but my god, one of the wiring hacks he has done is still in place and has failed. Last time I visited he was in the process of taking the ceiling down and was replacing the circuit the right way.
New copy of Ghostbusters from Sprawl-Mart, on DVD: $5.00.
DVD::Rip: Free.
ffmpeg to transcode for viewing on your PDA, ipod, or phone: Free.
Crap. I guess I can't type yivret on /.?
This is wonderful. If you can read modern square-script Hebrew it's simple to learn Paleo-Hebrew as it is very similar, other than that the glyphs themselves changed (a yod is still a yod, a vav is still a vav, so if you learn the paleo-hebrew glyphs you can read the manuscripts which are in paleo hebrew). This will be great because it will give us direct access to high-quality scans of early scripts of leviticus and other manuscripts from the tenach (old testament). With these going online showing proof of Yeshua (Jesus) having fulfilled the messianic prophecies, it becomes much harder to deny who the creator is, and it underscores the authenticity of the Bible in general.
I encourage you to learn Hebrew - once you start learning it and dig into the tenach in its original language and read it within its original Jewish context (modern mainstream Christianity is extremely warped by removing the Jewish context and the syncretism -- which is patently ridiculous considering that Yeshua is the messiah; the King of the Jews and the redeemer) it takes on a whole new level. You learn the meanings of names ( ×(TM)ש××, or Yeshua, is "savior" or "Yahuah/YHVH is my savior" referencing Yahuah/YHVH, or it could mean "I am your deliverer" since 'Yah" is "I"). Other names are equally fascinating and it is amazing how many lived up to the meanings of their names.
It is the LOCAL as in town or city government which typically grants the city/town-wide monopolies when they court/invite cable providers and/or entertain proposals from them. The feds have nothing to do with this process.
The fact that Comcast is in many states (nation-wide, as you put it, is inaccurate) is irrelevant, since the feds do not grant the local monopolies, the local town/city councils do.
And sure, the majority of users are not going to use much bandwidth. I'm typically out of town 1/3 to 1/2 the week, and my bandwidth is pretty much limited to connecting to check email. When I am home I download open source packages or am telecommuting.
My parents were heavy bandwidth users until I got them to stop using spyware-ridden P2P programs. Now they check their email a few times a week and that's what probably 95% of people do.
The CORRECT solution Comcast should offer
What is the solution from Comcast's side? It should be any of the following:
1. Give the heaviest 1% of users the option to either have their P2P traffic throttled (NOT BLOCKED) or to be cut off
2. Advertise the plans HONESTLY (and since current customers bought unlimited internet plans, honor that as they are grandfathered in!), and for those who go over, give them a heads up and give them a choice between a higher tier for unlimited access, bandwidth throttling, or be cut off
Personally, I'd opt for throttling. When I use a lot of bandwidth it's in spurts; two or three distro updates are released in a short time period, or I'm downloading system updates, I'll use a few gig worth of bandwidth in a day. When I download distros I generally seed until I get to a 1.5:1 ratio or so just to be a good "netizen."
Monitoring bandwidth use yourself; confirm or deny Comcast's claims
Want to know if Comcast is full of shit or not if they threaten to cut you off? Get a DD-WRT compatible router and run DD-WRT. it now includes bandwidth monitoring; you can check monthly reports and see how much bandwidth you're really consuming, in realtime.
Do I hate Comcast? Not really. I do loathe Verizon though so I'll use any alternative to them that is available. From Comcast I get voice, internet, and cable (every available channel aside from smut) and two cable boxes; one high-def DVR and one regular high-def receiver, so I spend quite a bit of money with them. I've been a comcast customer for years now (well, Adelphia for a short while after the last time I moved until Comcast took over) and I do expect to be treated with a little bit of decency since I pay month after month quite a bit of money for their services. If I were to get hit with a threat to get shut down, everything is logged in DD-WRT and you can bet your ass I'd be filing a complaint if not a law suit, especially since I've signed up for unlimited internet access.
Watching QAM traffic
If you go into the diagnostics screens of your digital cable box you can see how much traffic is transferred. Wikipedia has an OK (not great) article on QAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation
They're not exactly fixed; they use different compression ratios on different channels, as you can see watching some high-def programming the clarity is sometimes no better than standard def programming because of compression artifacts (blocking, banding, etc.) and if you go into the diagnostic screens you can watch how many packets are being transferred in realtime. (They don't forbid you from going into those screens in case you were wondering - I went into them myself to gather info to report to customer support when I had my service updated and wasn't getting programming I should have access to. They just won't tell you how to go into those screens). Incidentally if you're not 100% sure which channels are actually analog and you have a newer box which gives you S/PDIF on both digital an analog channels, use the diagnostic screens to determine what the tuner is actually receiving.
Now, there is a LOT of unique traffic; on demand programming. So, yes, there are a lot of programming streams unique to individual users at any given moment, probably most commonly weekend evenings.
Receiver Setup
Incidentally, when you upgrade to high def, you will definitely want to get into the receiver's diag and config screens, because your box might be recycled and be configured for a previous install for 720i, 720p, or even 480p at a previous install, or the cable tech might leave it at the default 720p setting. Just FYI.
Bandwidth Cap
250GB? That seems fair at first, until you consider online programming. Do you do a lot of netflix? How much bandwidth does each
I download quite a bit, in spurts. When a new kubuntu, OpenSuSE, or CentOS release comes out, I download DVD and CD ISO images, and I seed them for a bit. That could easily be 10GB in a single day. Now, 250GB / 30 days = 8.3GB / day, just under a dual layer DVD per day. Is that fair when for the last 10 years they have been fraudulently advertising unlimited internet and surreptitiously enforcing unpublished caps?
The Real Reason for Caps?
I think part of the reason for the bandwidth cap rather than throttling (not blocking) the heaviest users is that they do not want you to use netflix, hulu, blockbuster, or other third-party online programming services; they want you to use theirs. I think that what they're saying publicly is just a cover to ward off any potential anti-competitive complaints. Now, let me just restate that this is my opinion (I am not stating this as fact) based on the evidence I see.
The Solution
Contact your local selectmen, town manager, mayor, etc. and let them know that sanctioned monopolies are a bad thing. Want to bring Comcast into check? Get your town to invite competitors so that residents have a choice between two or more cable providers. Forget Verizion and FIOS, since their TV service stinks. Get real competition.
IF you know to ask for them.
7) used for hiring more teachers in math, sciences, and phys-ed so you canucks don't become dumb lazy fatties like we Americans are becoming.
That $400 PC won't have the same specs. A $500 PC might have a better video card, but very likely won't have IEEE1394. A $600 PC might have IEEE1394 and will very likely have a much better video card, as MacinPC^H^Htosh video cards tend to lag several generations behind wintel PCs.
Yes, I have. And the 64 to 32 bit thunking library is why I still run 32-bit Linux. It is not fun trying to resolve broken dependencies on 64-bit Linux, and flash is notoriously unstable for some reason. Hell, flash on Linux isn't very stable running natively on 32-bit Linux.
RTFA? Are you nuts? This is slashdot. Unlike fark, we do not have to RTFA in order to come up with snarky comments! All one has to do is skim a thread to see all the GNAA and goatse and scat-eating posts to prove that claim.
You underestimate the length to which we slashdotters will go to maintain our reputation of being lazy! Look at me. I have not RTFA yet and I'm procrastinating reading the fine article by making this post.
Again, as further proof that slashdotters are lazy and will not RTFA I will continue this diatribe.
It's not that we lack comprehension skills, nor is it that we don't understand the basic concept of science and learning, it is just that the vast majority of us simply don't care and would rather talk out of our asses and belittle the editors and other posters rather than read and learn for ourselves. We prefer our soundbites and summaries (if we could even be bothered to read the 'fine' summaries, let alone the articles) to detailed articles, and we prefer that a few of you who give a damn to predigest the knowledge and regurgitate it for us. We prefer that someone mention that animals are thought to use their own internal magnets made of crystals of magnetite, and that it is unknown at this time whether cows possess this anatomical feature. Why, I'd have to read the entire "fine" article in order to learn that the biologists investigating this don't yet know.
Now obviously I read the article, but you know, the vast majority here couldn't be bothered.
In 2004 that would have been great. ;)
Good point. I wouldn't consider an orbit to be flight in any record-breaking sense. The journey UP to orbit? Sure. Maybe. The journey back? Sure. Maybe. However, manned orbit is a completely different category from flight in the sense that aircraft fly. As you said, an orbit is a controlled fall, and does not rely upon lift.
Even rocket planes which do fly in the atmosphere blur the lines and should be a separate category, especially if they cross the "official" demarcation of space. It ceases to be flight in the sense of lift-generating surfaces counteracting gravity at some point.
I live in Tax^H^H^HMassachusetts (USA) and get approximately 19/3.5 (19mbps down, 3.5mbps up) courtesy of Comcast (according to speedtest.net).
Can't every species have klutzes?
300 ohm cable works great for analog, but digital is all or nothing, or occasional periods of all and then annoying periods of nothing which results in the MPEG stream breaking up into blocks and stuttering audio. For digital you want the nice impedance-balanced and shielded transmission line.
Oh, and if you're going the cheap route: RG-59 is superior to cheap RG-6. Good RG-6 is better than RG-59. For long runs I've had good success with RG-59 though, but YMMV and if you do have a long run with RG-59 make sure that your splices, terminations, etc. are all flawless.
Actually I've considered getting certs for both RedHat and Novell, but purely for my own edification. I've been using Linux off and on since it was a 7-floppy install image (and it's been my only OS since 2003 or 2004, since then I've only booted Windows for games and once for data recovery from PST files), and I may know quite a bit and run many different distros at levels ranging from home to small business and up to enterprise, but I do not know everything - not by a long shot. So, the certs may be useful for my own satisfaction. I wouldn't consider them the basis to get a job (I hope to never work for anyone else again in the future anyhow) nor a basis for hiring anyone. There are two things I consider important in the hiring process, in the order of importance:
1. Thought process: How are your problem-solving skills (i.e., how good of an engineer are you) and how do you use your resources (man pages, books, search engines, etc.)
2. Experience: what have you worked with?
Now, #2 is less important than #1 and here's why. If you are a good engineer, you can learn any tool. You can learn how to put together a network, or to write bash scripts, or whatever. Experience is less important because without #1, even if you've created new accounts a thousand times, that doesn't mean you know to read .bashrc or check permissions if a user has problems logging in, or to check .ssh/* and/or /etc/sshd/* if a user has problem sshing out or a problem logging in remotely.
Actually there is one more criteria I consider more important than both #2 and even #1: the ability and integrity to say "I don't know." When I've interviewed network admin candidates I'd put together a list of random but very difficult/esoteric networking problems, and on the spot I'd rule out anyone who tried to make it up to sound intelligent. I'd consider the ones who knew or figured out the solution, but for them I'd pick another problem and run that by them. The ones who said "I don't know" would receive strong consideration; the ones who said "I don't know, but I'd RTFM or search knowledgebases and search engines" would definitely get the second interview. The network admin we hired for that position was one of those people who knew how to think, how to research, knew his stuff solid, but on top of that, he knew how to admit "I don't know." The ability to admit not knowing something is far more important than most PHB types realise.
Oh, and by the way: the sysadmin I hired for that company was not an MCSE and knew more than every MCSE I interviewed except for some of the mundane things like "what does PCMCIA stand for?" -- who cares if you can memorize what an acronym stands for if you don't know how it works or what it's used for or how to troubleshoot the devices? In that respect certs are worthless; they, like school, teach you to memorize; not how to think.
Logic is not taught in our schools. Thinking for yourself is not taught in our schools. That is why we have become weak in the sciences and ultimately economics.
See, the thing is, with a Windows enterprise you can get away with a paper-MCSE providing someone who knows what they're doing installed and deployed it all and set up the backup/recovery regimen, along with writing some custom offline maintenance scripts along with scheduling accompanied downtime windows. Your paper MCSE needs to do little more than create active directory accounts, add computers to the domain, and maybe tweak a login script or answer RTFM questions all the time. Providing it never breaks, your average void with a pulse can "administer the network." When it breaks, you're SOL. Hell, even with an EXPERIENCED Windows admin (MCSE or not, although most good Windows admins seem to be not MCSE-carrying folks) you often have to resort to reformat/reinstall when Windows does break, and may God have mercy on your soul if you don't have the configuration well documented because restoring is a pain in the ass if you're at different patch levels. Oh sure it might work if the patches are different but there is good chance of encountering an instability sooner rather than later.
Ever try to repair an Exchange Info Store when eseutil and isinteg refuse to do anything with it? Ever try to force SQL Server to mount a hot-backup or a broken database file even after the tools refuse to do it? I have -- successfully on both counts. It's a pain in the ass though, and no paper MCSE is going to be able to figure out how to do it, and if they call Microsoft they would tell you reformat/reinstall and push data up from pst/ost files.
Now, when it comes to Linux - maintenance, backup, and even much of recovery can almost always be done live. Maintenance windows? Scheduled down time? HA! Adding users, computers, etc. to the network? A little more tricky than Windows. What distro are you on? Which protocol are you using? NIS? LDAP (or SMB, LDAP's low-functioning bastard cousin with Down's Syndrome)? NFS? Which printer protocols are you using, and if supporting multiple platforms, how are you making it possible to map the printers on Windows clients and where are the drivers located? Again, is it SMB? LPD?
Chances are when you're all set up, it won't break. If it does break, it's usually due to hardware (or firmware) and not the OS. Backup/Restore on a Linux/*nix system is FAST and nearly painless. However if a system DOES go down due to software, even if rooted, it's often possible to repair the system without going to reformat/reinstall or reformat/restore. Even if a database or mail store breaks you can nearly always repair and remount it. Depending on the GUI you might get by with someone who is the equivalent of an MCSE, but would you want to? Chances are if you have a good unix admin, almost all routine tasks will be fully automated and all he or she will have to do is read crond log file/summary emails in the morning to check for problems, and chances are those emails will include RAID and/or SMART health as well so problems can be dealt with proactively -- oh, and also chances are your databases were probably integrity-checked and shrunk/optimized overnight as well, with no down time required.
SMARTD is available for Windows, along with hacks to query some RAID controllers. What are the chances that your paper-MCSE admin is going to even know what S.M.A.R.T. is, let alone think to proactively keep an eye on it?
Sure you can get by with a cheaper admin on Windows, but again would you want to?
Why? It is a commodity good sold off the shelf - it is NOT a licensed product despite whatever bullshit is present in the EULA. You buy it without signing a contract off the shelf therefore you have the right of first sale to install it on anything you can put it on (aside from violating copyrights of course, so that means installing it on one workstation), use it as a coaster, sell it for a zillion times the price you paid for it (as long as you retain no backups) or use a heat wire cutter and carve the disc into a shuriken (local laws may prohibit the possession of a throwing star). Apple doesn't really have any legal basis to prevent your exercising your right of first sale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
Pointless perhaps, but hissterical nonetheless.
"they had a really nice OS with Windows XP"
Weren't we saying that about Windows 2000 when people hated XP not so long ago?
I use Vista at home. Its sole purpose is to play a couple of games, but to make the experience more tolerable I installed andlinux on it.
The problem with vistas are:
* UAC does not really solve security problems; it is just annoying. I turned that shit off since all I do is play games on it (and as soon as Cedega or Crossover Games runs it I'll be dumping Vista)
* Diagnostics is a little harder because more is hidden from the user
* WHY must drivers be signed? This is slowing adoption of 64-bit Windows -- and it certainly hasn't stopped the propogation of viruses, spyware, etc.
* It requires way too many resources for a home machine.
There are some things I really like about it, but the driver signing is a mistake (vendors won't keep their drivers updated with maintenance releases) and UAC is a flawed solution.
Also the UI is kind of weak. In MSIE 7 why did they do away with the menus? yeah it looks cleaner but it's more of a hassle to use. Some of the 3D effects are neat, but have they even looked at XGL/Compiz Fusion? I show people my Linux desktop and they ask me if I can put Linux on their systems, and they're amazed at what comes free with the OS (I do usually pay for the distro to support it though).
DRM slows networking to a crawl. Still. :(
Windows Media Center IS really nice though. Honestly, it's a hell of a lot better than Myth, because unlike Myth it just works. That is one thing Microsoft got right in both Vista and XP (Windows Media Center Edition).
I happened to catch a Vista ad when watching a movie on hulu.com last night. This older gentleman was going on and on about how great Vista was, etc. and I just kept thinking that it's either not a real-world user but "just" an actor reading a script, or it's a user who is BRAND NEW to Vista and is looking at it for the first time, and hasn't encountered any of the annoyances.
Oh sure, preinstalled it's _okay_ but why should the OS all by itself require 1GB of RAM (512 for basic)?
What I'd love to see Microsoft do is make the system less monolithic. Go back to the Windows/DOS model. Not the 16-bitness and instability of course, but separate the GUI from the underpinnings, and make loading the GUI optional (maybe powershell or SFU could be one of the interfaces you could boot to) to make diagnostics easier, and hell, even make the system lightweight for certain applications.
Go back to making the install program more modular - so you can pick and choose which components get installed.
Drop the driver signing, as it hasn't hindered crackers and virus authors at all, but has hindered 64-bit adoption.
Either drop backwards compatibility, or provide backwards compatibility via a VM which runs a stripped-down XP environment.
Fix the underlying security model. At security Microsoft still fails. UAC is a hack for perception purposes only, and while it MIGHT prevent idiots from shooting themselves in the foot, it does not solve any inherent security issues.