It's Network Voice Protocol, and it's safe to block unless You use it (and You should know if You do).
I have default DENY, and specific ACCEPT rules. As everything I do ACCEPT contains a protocol, this means that unknown protocols are denied. For as long as You run only IPv4, no multicast, and so on (like most people do - although IPv6 is gaining), You only need icmp, igmp, tcp, and udp. Read/etc/protocols for mysterious acronyms.
If You default to ACCEPT, or have very broad ACCEPT rules based on just eg. the IP addresses, You can, with ipchains, deny as follows:
Gigabit ethernet has two copper variations. One of them runs fine on Cat5, but requires more expensive equipment. The other requires more expensive cable, but works fine on cheaper equipment.
At least that's what I was told when I talked with a network integrator when gbit had just become available, and everyone and their mother was labeling Cat5 cable as Cat5+ or alike, to show that "It's compatible with the future standard that will be Cat6". And actually lots of the good quality Cat5 cable is good enough to pass for cheap Cat6, while the cheap Cat5 (that most buy when they see the price difference for ten spools) is barely better than Cat3...
I did get extra for working over 40h/wk, although mostly it meant getting days off later - only when it did get out of hand did I request money instead. However, that must have been profitable to my employer, as over 80% of my hours could be billed from the customers. And no, travel between home and office isn't included in working hours, which isn't a problem for me, as I live just some 40 minutes from the office.
Now I'm working with 'compensation for overtime included in salary' contract, though, and don't have problems with the issue. The compensation is decent, and I'm not expected to work myself to death.
I knew that US was weird, but is that even legal? OK, Europe is kind of conservative, socialist, slow-moving beast, and while in some cases Finland may be 'advanced' for a European country, in some other cases it might not be so.
However, while I don't like all the restrictions and legal concepts related to work in Finland, I do understand reasonings behind them - whether I agree or not. And I do agree that unpaid overtime should not be legal. Oh yes, it's done quite a lot, but it's no more legal for that. Mandatory overtime is not legal, either.. Except for one special case ('hätätyö' - roughly translates to "people will die and the company will go bankrupt if You don't do this now!") where the employer may recall people from vacations where possible and so on, but in that case it's automatic +100% plus whatever required additional payments apply (natinal holidays and sundays are in most fields +100%, as is night unless otherwise agreed when the field is such where night-jobs are the norm).
Exceptions for overtime pay exist, but are limited to management and specialists who may, in their contracts, have provision where overtime is compensated in the basic salary and no extras that would apply for standard employees will be paid.
Then again, if overtime is "suggested" to an employee and he doesn't want to, while the employer legally can't force overtime or fire the person for not working overtime, there are enough ways to get rid of "un-cooperative" people that it can be done. Such practice fast leads to not getting good pesonnel, though.
Oh yes, 15h/wk would in about 8 weeks get to the 'yearly overtime limit' and in some 8 more weeks (with standard issue permit by govt) to the maximum yearly overtime limit allowed by the law without special permits - and even with permits, I think maximum yearly overtime is 320h. Which is, afterall, some 19% constant overtime - or quite a lot.
For clarification: I've worked unpaid overtime every now and then. Mostly it's just working a little bit longer than standard workday and not marking up the extra 0.5-1h or so.. What I don't do is: extra days (eg. 6-day weeks) or long days (>10h) without extra compensation, however I'm mostly happy to compensate by getting days off for the hours as counted - for as long as the situation doesn't get out of hand ("no, not this week either, and not the next, and.. say, howabout in september...?") at which point I'll take the cash, thank You very much, and no, I won't be here on saturday this week, and not the next either, until I get a guarantee for at least a long weekend sooner than in september.
I think that'd be pretty inefficient. Rather, get a card that talks to PRI. Don't know of any such cards, but they're very likely to exist. And if they don't exist, find a small engineering shop nearby and ask what would it take to put one together.
Think about it.. A box with six PCI slots and mobo-NIC using six WinModems could handle six phone lines - old analog lines at that. While a single PRI-card could handle 30 lines, and considering that each ISDN line is just 64000bps (8000 samples at 8bits per second - if I remember correctly), it doesn't really all that much computing power, so a single PC should easily handle it.
Of course a small shop doesn't need 30 phone lines, and could do with the WinModem-based setup, and those that need can get the VoIP from the telco, not needing their own VoIP-POTS conversion.
Actually there's a very good other reason for patents: defense. Eg. if Microsoft were to charge RedHat for patent infringement (sp?), RH might be able to counter with their own patent portfolio, charging MS of infringing RH patents. That, of course, would lead to cross-licensing which is likely cheaper than going to court for patents that should never have been granted.
packaged software costs are never more than, say, three, four percent of any significant project 3-4%? What kind of computer do you base this calculation on, Mr. Gates? I can only imagine this figure would be accurate if you operated a Cray at home, or if you were referring to the cost of the RedHat CDs you bought. In other words, your math needs work as well as your grammar, I'm afraid.
Depends on how You count personnel costs.
If talking about a commercial project, software costs are mostly pretty low. One person-year costs about 50-200k, so a half-year project with five full-time persons in the project would have personnel-costs in the ~200-300k range, while the computers (say, one server @20k and five workstations about 3k each) running MS Windows+Office+VS+Visio, with Windows server (software total costs about 25k), amortized over two years would count for about 6k (hardware) plus 4k (software).
That'd make hardware costs about 2-3% and software about 1.5% of the total costs.
However, on a free project where the personnel costs are assumed to be zero (no moneytary value assigned to time used on project) things are pretty different.. If the same project would be run without personnel costs, hardware would be 60%, software 40%.
Of course there may well be other costs involved.. Telecommuting costs for five people six months could be about 5k (business class), travel might be about 6k, and so on. In the end, if people are paid a going rate for their work, it's the man-hours that make up 90% of the price of any software project unless there are special, expensive other needs (eg. embedded software development could easily mean 50k in licenses for a single project, and test-hardware might come to be anything).
Most DVDs on market are single side, dual layer discs of about 8.5B. Some are 4.7GB single layer discs. Typically they have 5-7GB of material, of which some 200-500MB is studio logos and such, then there are extras and stuff, usually leaving a bit more than half for the actual main content (the movie).
Now, HDTV quality would require 2-2.5 times the current maximum transfer rate of the DVD drive, and the main content would be about 3-4 times the current. Of course if all the extras, studio logos and such would also be in HDTV quality (720i to 1080p), the total size of a currently typical disc in the hi-def format would be 15-28GB. Seems like Blueray is just enough..
In ten years I'll probably have 10Gbps switched ethernet or alike at home, so transferring 120TB would take about a few days.. Already transferring all the data from one computer to another (should there be diskspace to do that) would take about a day for me.
Of course having 10Gbps internet connection would be another thing. I believe I'll be stuck to this 10Mbps for a while, but 100Mbps might be possible in the future, and the house is cabled for 1000Base-TX, so it's not completely out of question.
I know video editing takes a lot of space, but would you keep 7 years of video?
Except that the DVD bitrate is far below video editing needs.
Assuming that I'd work with 720x480x~30(fps), or typical NTSC DVD resolution and framerate, which on DVD takes about 4-10Mbps would take more like 230Mbps uncompressed, 80Mbps losslessly compressed. Or about 35GB/h (losslessly compressed).
Then consider the possibility of working with 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan) HDTV material.. In end-user format that'd be about 15-24Mbps MPEG (8GB/h), in editing it'd be about 1900Mbps (down to 600Mbps compressed), or 270GB/h.
Then go for higher frame rate (60fps), multiple layers from which the image is formed (8 layers for this example), and material use rate of eg. 20% (using one shot out of every five), and You end up with 21TB/h of source material, perhaps 4TB/h of working material, and that 270GB/h end result, or total of about 25TB/h.
Of course people working with theatricals and film grade material need more space, but probably not on their home computers.. At least I don't know people working with theatrical material at home.
Of course the above example isn't completely valid, but that's how things could be if amateur-price digital motion cameras are available when the diskspace is. Guess how many tapes does it take to make one 20minute amateur movie? Now assume that it was all digital data, and be very much afraid. 120TB drives are so very small.
OK, how much diskspace do I currently use? Some 400GB or so. I have about 600GB, so I consider the disks "full" (>60% utilization). At the moment I'd guess about 3TB would be enough until I had some free time and about 250-300TB more space. I could currently imagine use for about 500-700TB, but not more. Ask again in ten years and I'll give You a figure at least ten times that, but definitely not 1000 times higher.. Then again, ten years back I had some 4GB and could've probably used about 10-20 at most, and couldn't have imagined use for terabytes.
Shouldn't. Of course it depends on the size of the company, and the availability of the music.
If it's a workgroup/department server where all the people know eachother, it probably isn't a public performance. However, in a large company sharing music to thousands of people You've never even heard of might as well be a public performance.
Of course there are public performances for a small, selected audience, so it's not always safe unless You check with the CO lawyers first.
Self policing worked while the clueless people were the minority. Now they're a huge majority, and unless the minority is allowed to decide for the majority, it won't work.
Note that the same applies to most other things.. However, in democracy the majority gives the power to decide for them to a minority - parliament, congress, senate, president, and so on. And it'd be hard to prove that the clueless masses have given the academia the power to decide how internet should work.
This leads to one logical conclusion: the power to decide and enforce has been given to lawmakers, police force, and the courts. Thus, it's up to them to decide and enforce the code of conduct in the internet as seen by the clueless majority. And if the reasonable people don't agree, they're free to set up a new network which doesn't allow clueless people in.
For further reference, check out Abilene, Internet2, Geant, and so on. The academia is moving forward, leaving the old internet for the masses and setting up a new R&D/edunet.
I run several computers at home. Everything behind a firewall. With Linux systems, I set up things and pretty much know what I'm doing. They should be fairly secure. With my Win2k, I'm not so sure. I don't really know what file permissions I should modify, and so on. Last time I tried to make a Windows workstation secure, I ended up making my NT impossible to use - only the administrator could really do something. And when I changed from "can't do" to "audit log this", I got a huge log, and didn't know what to do about it.
Now, I'm again trying to tighten the screws of this Win2k box. But already, with fairly simple fixes (like removing the "everyone, full control" permissions from the hard drive roots and granting them back to specific directories on data-drives) I got myself into trouble.
Anyone know a good book, article, website, or something about making windows fairly secure (no ultratight stuff, this is behind a firewall afterall) that would be reasonable reading for experienced Unix (and inexperienced VMS) admin who just wants to make his personal, home windows have reasonable file permissions (no, normal users don't install software to "%SYSROOT%/Program Files" or whatever it's called - to install software, I first log on as Administrator)?
OK, I've got 10Mbps from telco and cable (peak 10Mbps) from cableco. Completely automated routines download about 7GB per day, plus email, websurfing, telecommuting, occasional RedHat ISO, and so on. That is, 7GB/day + not very much.
However, the important point is that the 7GB/day is from the local networks. I'd guess it's about 90/10 from telco/cableco networks. And You know what that means? That the cable traffic may be significant in that it's shared bandwidth (except that as it's pretty much evenly distributed, it's not much in the end), but the telco traffic is nothing, as it's 10Mbps dedicated to their backbone. And in there, it's local traffic, and thus there's so much bandwidth that it won't be a problem, and also it doesn't cost them a cent in addition to local equipment and bandwidth, as opposed to any traffic from/to outside their network where they probably pay by the bit to peers and global backbones.
The point is, if the providing ISPs manage to provide such content that the consumers want from within their own network, the issue of bandwidth becomes irrelevant. Then we can finally start talking about broadband content and price of the content.
Oh yes, both the telco and cableco have different kinds of audio and video content services.. Alhough I do prefer my regular TV set for AV content, and the cableco provides enough content via standard cable TV means that I haven't checked what additional AV content do they provide for broadband data customers.
Helsinki Television (HTV) has two plans: Welho Pro and Welho 525. The Pro is their former only plan, with unlimited rate (technical limit is I think 34Mbps downstream limited to 10Mbps by the 10BaseT ethernet on modem), while the 525 is rate limited to (guessed it) 525kbps. Now that they have the new 525 plan, Pro plan has "limited availability". Cost is about the same (I think that the 525 was some even number of euros, as it was introduced only this year, where the Pro plan was even number of Finnish marks) - roughly 40/month, or 54.66 with static IP which I have.
At least the Welho Pro is pretty fast - in Finland. But any traffic elsewhere is slow. And I mean slow as in dial-up. That's why I didn't dump my ADSL when I got the cable.. Had planned to keep them both for a while to see which worked better. Turned out both are of unacceptable quality, but keeping two consumer grade connections was still cheaper than one business grade, and they didn't have outages at the same time.. Unacceptable quality means that I did get refunds and free months in the beginning, but at least now they work more than six days a week, so no more refunds.
Today, electric companies are required by law to report "inordinate amounts" of electricity being used in residences.
How much is that? I mean, I'm using about four times the estimate provided by my electricity provider.. When I signed for the electricity, I also asked for the estimate-based billing to be about twice what they thought it would be, and when they read the meter, it was way over my estimate..
Online banking has been here for long before the web. First it was text only using modem to bank's dial-up banking system. Nowadays it's web. Of course there weren't so many people using the online banking at the time, but it wasn't because it was hard to use (it wasn't, it was very easy - so easy that some people continued to use it even when web version was available), but because not many had computers at the time.
There was a time when 'net usage was charged by non-flat fees in Finland, too. At that time anything except dial-up was for companies only (too expensive for people), and dial-up was charged by minute connected.
Now, where broadband is available (cities), it's flat fee. Cheap ADSL/cable goes for about 40/month (~USD 35), and upwards to about 150/month (~USD 130) for fast pipes with consumer grade service agreements.
Even when dial-up was double-metered (metered phone call, metered ISP charge), I negotiated a flat-rate monthly fee with a 'soft' usage limit (which never actually was enforced), as I knew that I use the 'net enough that I can get it cheaper if I promise to pay for x hours a month minimum.
Wireless (GPRS) 'net is still metered - by the megabyte. Of course there's this small startup telco that provides GPRS data for flat rate, but they'll make a huge loss and I expect that at some point the regional telco coalition that's behind them will crack, as some of the richer telcos currently in the coalition will decline to fund lossmaker any longer, and the rest will have to realize that without the rich partners funding their nice venture they can't handle it. Then, they'll just have to charge what the other wireless operators do, and unless they'll amass enough customers by that time, they're not going to make it.
OK, I don't know all that much about television standards, broadcasting, and such as it's in USA. I only know about Finland (and something about Europe and the rest of the world).
Finland has rolled out DVB-T broadcasts, and will stop analog broadcasts in 2006 (although the deadline may be shifted if there's a good reason). In the process, the govTV (well, public, government funded and legislated station) created the infrastructure to broadcast DVB-T to everyone. That infra was incorporated as Digita, and some of the new company was sold to TDF (subsidiary of France Telecom).
Three new bands were allocated by the government for DVB-T broadcasts, with the notion that in 2006 when analog broadcasts end, the analog bands will go back to the government for reallocation without compensation. The three bands (multiplexes A, B and C) were given to Yleisradio (public TV) and two commercial broadcasters, with some requirements - mainly coverage (will have to broadcast throughout all of Finland, no picking just the 10% land area that covers 70% of people). Also, new air channel permits were given to channels that are mainly owned by the corps that got the multiplexes. All existing analog channels got their own digital permit, and some new channels were started (of which two already lost the permit due to not broadcasting material - that was one requirement: You get a channel, You send out signal -> no signal = no more permit).
The channels are SDTV, not HDTV. But, when done well, the picture quality can be better than analog. There's no more "snow" on TV - if reception is bad, there are MPEG artefacts, then jerkiness, then no more picture. Which is of course not supposed to happen.
More multiplexes will be given to new broadcasters later, and while currently the DVB-T signal must be used mainly for TV channels, different content will later be allowed. I'd guess we go HDTV slowly when old analog bands revert to the government and thus more airspace will be available for TV operations..
Of course currently there are very few options for receiving digital TV content.. Set top boxes that do nothing but receive the signal, demux and decode, and send via analog out to TV (dummy boxes) go for about 300. Then there's some way-too-expensive Sony TV set. Currently perhaps about 1% of Finns have DigiTV set top box. However, by next Xmas we'll have better boxes, and dummy boxes will be cheaper, so I'd expect that the real conversion to digital will happen in about two years - until that, it's more like a novelty.
However, note that nowhere is pay per view mentioned. On the air we currently have mostly free channels. There are some pay channels, but I don't think they have pay per view material yet.
While digital TV makes different kinds of payment schemens easy to implement, it doesn't really mean that all TV will be for fee. Also, as TV sets have average life of at least 10 years, it'll probably be at least 2020 before all (>98%) TVs in use have internal digi-receiver. So, until that, set top boxes are mostly the way to go, and that means analog output, which again can be captured by VCRs (and computers).
Also, as DVB-T with MHP is now a standard, and a standard in use (here, and chosen by other countries), it will last for years to come. When Finnish government chose DVB-T, it was considered a risky move, as Finland was the first (or at least one of the first) to choose a digital TV standard, and as a small country, if eg. Germany, France and UK chose some other standard (and the same one), we'd never get real receivers for reasonable prices. However, after that the gamble paid off in that as the others chose the same standard, we were a little ahead of the curve, and got the chance to be technology exporters in the field - an important thing for a small country that tries to live from highly educated people exporting knowledge and hi-tech (where paper, too, qualifies as hi-tech;) - and yes, paper technology actually does qualify as hi-tech).
Now, as I'm no expert in US politics (hey, I'm a/.er, so that should go without say), I don't know what the hell is going on there and if all TV already is pay per open eye or what, but digital does not mean instant evil. It's a technology that allows for better quality in same airspace; more channels in same airspace; or same number of channels in less airspace; AND allows for more than just audio and video - eg. interactive content, multicast and broadcast data, and so on.
Fortunately the DigiTV payment methods take a little more care to use than just sitting on the remote - unless You practice "precision sitting";)
Of course that's just until someone makes a remote with a one-click-pay button, but for as long as Amazon doesn't make remotes, we probably don't have to worry about that.
The program scheduling and recording leaves much to be desired (if its going, thats all you get from your TV card - no way to record one show and watch another -- even if your machine has the horse power, this card does not).
There's a very simple reason for that: one receiver means one channel. With DVB digital television, one receiver could theoretically mean multiple channels from one multiplex, as it depends on the capabilities of demux (and decoder(s) and so on), not the actual receiver front end.
Now, You're not going to get multiple receivers on a single TV/Video card for some time, as each receiver takes real estate on the board. You can see how much just by looking at the card: the receiver is the part enclosed within the metal cover. It's perhaps about 40*80mm (1.75"*3.5").
What I really would like is pure receiver + demux cards for DVB-(T/C/S) reception. Cards which I could just tell the tuning parameters and request specific PIDs as separate streams. That way a small piece of software could just receive a single channel and store it on disk for each card, without any recompression (end result would be whatever was in the air/cable/sat - mostly SDTV 3-7Mbps CBR MPEG2 streams, perhaps some additional meta-data). If I wanted to watch something while storing, just have a second process read the (constantly growing) file on disk.
FWIW, I own about 150 albums and another 150 CDs. And yet I really haven't bought any CDs in probably 2 years. Why? Cost, and the level of crap which is being put out now (which is probably more a function of me being 25 and having already found a style of music 4 or 5 years ago which I like - which is now disappearing).
I'm still buying CDs. Mostly because I like the fluff that comes with them (copying yields a stupid-looking thing). And I don't know many people who'd have CDs I'd want. And most of the tracks are just too hard to find on the net - and if I find them, they're mostly badly encoded crap.
I buy Japanese import CDs over the net from USA - and I live in Finland. With S&H and taxes, I probably pay about USD 40-45 per CD.. It's mostly cheaper than buying straight from Japan, and the titles aren't found in Finland anyway. And yes, I could probably get china/hongkong/taiwan bootlegs for half the price, but I prefer the originals, as they have nicer packaging, and then I know I support the original artists unlike with the bootlegs.
When I get the CDs, I put them to the CD-ROM drive, rip and encode, and listen to. Mostly because I spend most of my time around computers (a job - a hobby, what's the difference? I don't know which one I'm really paid for, as I mostly can't distinguish between them).
Of course it's nice every now and then to pop the disc into the standalone player in my living room, and listen to the tracks in better (less noisy, better audio equipment) environment.
Yes, I do buy other CDs, too. Sometimes I copy a disc from a friend, and then start looking for it. Every now and then I find the original, other times I don't find it and give up. Every now and then I do buy a CD without ever having heard any tracks on it. Mostly that happens when I have most of the recordings from some artist, and decide that I might as well complete the collection.
I did know about TrustedBSD, and that there is OSS work towards Secure operating systems.
However, no open source OS has, to my knowledge (which is severely lacking), been certified to date. I know TrustedBSD targets certification, but I don't know how close they're to that, and how is it going to be funded. Certification isn't free, and to keep the cert there will be continuous drain as re-certifying updated distribution costs money, too.
While SELinux is a work in progress and it'll still take time to get the required changes to the main kernel tree, it's good to know that there's an organization trying to fund the certification process.
If You want two Athlons, why not price with the real thing? Athlon MPs are at least one and a half times the price of XPs of same speed.
Prices with my local dealer: ASUS A7M266-D SOCKET A - 350 (USD 308) AMD ATHLON XP 1800+ MP CPU SOCKET A - 332 (USD 292) AMD ATHLON XP 1800+ CPU SOCKET A - 213 (USD 187)
So a dual Athlon XP 1800+ MP using Asus A7M266-D would be 1014 (USD 893), while the double XP solution (no warranty, potentially unstable, may burn, and so on) would be just 774 (USD 682). A difference of 240 - not insignificant, but I want my warranty, and specifically I want computers that work.
Oh yes, the prices I quoted are higher than Yours. However, I didn't try to find the cheapest dealer around, just the one I usually deal with.
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I have default DENY, and specific ACCEPT rules. As everything I do ACCEPT contains a protocol, this means that unknown protocols are denied. For as long as You run only IPv4, no multicast, and so on (like most people do - although IPv6 is gaining), You only need icmp, igmp, tcp, and udp. Read
If You default to ACCEPT, or have very broad ACCEPT rules based on just eg. the IP addresses, You can, with ipchains, deny as follows: Not tested, but should work.
Gigabit ethernet has two copper variations. One of them runs fine on Cat5, but requires more expensive equipment. The other requires more expensive cable, but works fine on cheaper equipment.
At least that's what I was told when I talked with a network integrator when gbit had just become available, and everyone and their mother was labeling Cat5 cable as Cat5+ or alike, to show that "It's compatible with the future standard that will be Cat6". And actually lots of the good quality Cat5 cable is good enough to pass for cheap Cat6, while the cheap Cat5 (that most buy when they see the price difference for ten spools) is barely better than Cat3...
I did get extra for working over 40h/wk, although mostly it meant getting days off later - only when it did get out of hand did I request money instead. However, that must have been profitable to my employer, as over 80% of my hours could be billed from the customers. And no, travel between home and office isn't included in working hours, which isn't a problem for me, as I live just some 40 minutes from the office.
Now I'm working with 'compensation for overtime included in salary' contract, though, and don't have problems with the issue. The compensation is decent, and I'm not expected to work myself to death.
I knew that US was weird, but is that even legal?
OK, Europe is kind of conservative, socialist, slow-moving beast, and while in some cases Finland may be 'advanced' for a European country, in some other cases it might not be so.
However, while I don't like all the restrictions and legal concepts related to work in Finland, I do understand reasonings behind them - whether I agree or not. And I do agree that unpaid overtime should not be legal. Oh yes, it's done quite a lot, but it's no more legal for that. Mandatory overtime is not legal, either.. Except for one special case ('hätätyö' - roughly translates to "people will die and the company will go bankrupt if You don't do this now!") where the employer may recall people from vacations where possible and so on, but in that case it's automatic +100% plus whatever required additional payments apply (natinal holidays and sundays are in most fields +100%, as is night unless otherwise agreed when the field is such where night-jobs are the norm).
Exceptions for overtime pay exist, but are limited to management and specialists who may, in their contracts, have provision where overtime is compensated in the basic salary and no extras that would apply for standard employees will be paid.
Then again, if overtime is "suggested" to an employee and he doesn't want to, while the employer legally can't force overtime or fire the person for not working overtime, there are enough ways to get rid of "un-cooperative" people that it can be done. Such practice fast leads to not getting good pesonnel, though.
Oh yes, 15h/wk would in about 8 weeks get to the 'yearly overtime limit' and in some 8 more weeks (with standard issue permit by govt) to the maximum yearly overtime limit allowed by the law without special permits - and even with permits, I think maximum yearly overtime is 320h. Which is, afterall, some 19% constant overtime - or quite a lot.
For clarification: I've worked unpaid overtime every now and then. Mostly it's just working a little bit longer than standard workday and not marking up the extra 0.5-1h or so.. What I don't do is: extra days (eg. 6-day weeks) or long days (>10h) without extra compensation, however I'm mostly happy to compensate by getting days off for the hours as counted - for as long as the situation doesn't get out of hand ("no, not this week either, and not the next, and.. say, howabout in september...?") at which point I'll take the cash, thank You very much, and no, I won't be here on saturday this week, and not the next either, until I get a guarantee for at least a long weekend sooner than in september.
I think that'd be pretty inefficient. Rather, get a card that talks to PRI. Don't know of any such cards, but they're very likely to exist. And if they don't exist, find a small engineering shop nearby and ask what would it take to put one together.
Think about it.. A box with six PCI slots and mobo-NIC using six WinModems could handle six phone lines - old analog lines at that. While a single PRI-card could handle 30 lines, and considering that each ISDN line is just 64000bps (8000 samples at 8bits per second - if I remember correctly), it doesn't really all that much computing power, so a single PC should easily handle it.
Of course a small shop doesn't need 30 phone lines, and could do with the WinModem-based setup, and those that need can get the VoIP from the telco, not needing their own VoIP-POTS conversion.
Actually there's a very good other reason for patents: defense. Eg. if Microsoft were to charge RedHat for patent infringement (sp?), RH might be able to counter with their own patent portfolio, charging MS of infringing RH patents. That, of course, would lead to cross-licensing which is likely cheaper than going to court for patents that should never have been granted.
Depends on how You count personnel costs.
If talking about a commercial project, software costs are mostly pretty low. One person-year costs about 50-200k, so a half-year project with five full-time persons in the project would have personnel-costs in the ~200-300k range, while the computers (say, one server @20k and five workstations about 3k each) running MS Windows+Office+VS+Visio, with Windows server (software total costs about 25k), amortized over two years would count for about 6k (hardware) plus 4k (software).
That'd make hardware costs about 2-3% and software about 1.5% of the total costs.
However, on a free project where the personnel costs are assumed to be zero (no moneytary value assigned to time used on project) things are pretty different.. If the same project would be run without personnel costs, hardware would be 60%, software 40%.
Of course there may well be other costs involved.. Telecommuting costs for five people six months could be about 5k (business class), travel might be about 6k, and so on. In the end, if people are paid a going rate for their work, it's the man-hours that make up 90% of the price of any software project unless there are special, expensive other needs (eg. embedded software development could easily mean 50k in licenses for a single project, and test-hardware might come to be anything).
Most DVDs on market are single side, dual layer discs of about 8.5B. Some are 4.7GB single layer discs.
Typically they have 5-7GB of material, of which some 200-500MB is studio logos and such, then there are extras and stuff, usually leaving a bit more than half for the actual main content (the movie).
Now, HDTV quality would require 2-2.5 times the current maximum transfer rate of the DVD drive, and the main content would be about 3-4 times the current. Of course if all the extras, studio logos and such would also be in HDTV quality (720i to 1080p), the total size of a currently typical disc in the hi-def format would be 15-28GB. Seems like Blueray is just enough..
In ten years I'll probably have 10Gbps switched ethernet or alike at home, so transferring 120TB would take about a few days.. Already transferring all the data from one computer to another (should there be diskspace to do that) would take about a day for me.
Of course having 10Gbps internet connection would be another thing. I believe I'll be stuck to this 10Mbps for a while, but 100Mbps might be possible in the future, and the house is cabled for 1000Base-TX, so it's not completely out of question.
Except that the DVD bitrate is far below video editing needs.
Assuming that I'd work with 720x480x~30(fps), or typical NTSC DVD resolution and framerate, which on DVD takes about 4-10Mbps would take more like 230Mbps uncompressed, 80Mbps losslessly compressed. Or about 35GB/h (losslessly compressed).
Then consider the possibility of working with 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan) HDTV material.. In end-user format that'd be about 15-24Mbps MPEG (8GB/h), in editing it'd be about 1900Mbps (down to 600Mbps compressed), or 270GB/h.
Then go for higher frame rate (60fps), multiple layers from which the image is formed (8 layers for this example), and material use rate of eg. 20% (using one shot out of every five), and You end up with 21TB/h of source material, perhaps 4TB/h of working material, and that 270GB/h end result, or total of about 25TB/h.
Of course people working with theatricals and film grade material need more space, but probably not on their home computers.. At least I don't know people working with theatrical material at home.
Of course the above example isn't completely valid, but that's how things could be if amateur-price digital motion cameras are available when the diskspace is. Guess how many tapes does it take to make one 20minute amateur movie? Now assume that it was all digital data, and be very much afraid. 120TB drives are so very small.
OK, how much diskspace do I currently use? Some 400GB or so. I have about 600GB, so I consider the disks "full" (>60% utilization). At the moment I'd guess about 3TB would be enough until I had some free time and about 250-300TB more space. I could currently imagine use for about 500-700TB, but not more. Ask again in ten years and I'll give You a figure at least ten times that, but definitely not 1000 times higher.. Then again, ten years back I had some 4GB and could've probably used about 10-20 at most, and couldn't have imagined use for terabytes.
Shouldn't. Of course it depends on the size of the company, and the availability of the music.
If it's a workgroup/department server where all the people know eachother, it probably isn't a public performance. However, in a large company sharing music to thousands of people You've never even heard of might as well be a public performance.
Of course there are public performances for a small, selected audience, so it's not always safe unless You check with the CO lawyers first.
Self policing worked while the clueless people were the minority. Now they're a huge majority, and unless the minority is allowed to decide for the majority, it won't work.
Note that the same applies to most other things.. However, in democracy the majority gives the power to decide for them to a minority - parliament, congress, senate, president, and so on. And it'd be hard to prove that the clueless masses have given the academia the power to decide how internet should work.
This leads to one logical conclusion: the power to decide and enforce has been given to lawmakers, police force, and the courts. Thus, it's up to them to decide and enforce the code of conduct in the internet as seen by the clueless majority. And if the reasonable people don't agree, they're free to set up a new network which doesn't allow clueless people in.
For further reference, check out Abilene, Internet2, Geant, and so on. The academia is moving forward, leaving the old internet for the masses and setting up a new R&D/edunet.
I run several computers at home. Everything behind a firewall.
With Linux systems, I set up things and pretty much know what I'm doing. They should be fairly secure.
With my Win2k, I'm not so sure. I don't really know what file permissions I should modify, and so on. Last time I tried to make a Windows workstation secure, I ended up making my NT impossible to use - only the administrator could really do something. And when I changed from "can't do" to "audit log this", I got a huge log, and didn't know what to do about it.
Now, I'm again trying to tighten the screws of this Win2k box. But already, with fairly simple fixes (like removing the "everyone, full control" permissions from the hard drive roots and granting them back to specific directories on data-drives) I got myself into trouble.
Anyone know a good book, article, website, or something about making windows fairly secure (no ultratight stuff, this is behind a firewall afterall) that would be reasonable reading for experienced Unix (and inexperienced VMS) admin who just wants to make his personal, home windows have reasonable file permissions (no, normal users don't install software to "%SYSROOT%/Program Files" or whatever it's called - to install software, I first log on as Administrator)?
OK, I've got 10Mbps from telco and cable (peak 10Mbps) from cableco. Completely automated routines download about 7GB per day, plus email, websurfing, telecommuting, occasional RedHat ISO, and so on. That is, 7GB/day + not very much.
However, the important point is that the 7GB/day is from the local networks. I'd guess it's about 90/10 from telco/cableco networks. And You know what that means? That the cable traffic may be significant in that it's shared bandwidth (except that as it's pretty much evenly distributed, it's not much in the end), but the telco traffic is nothing, as it's 10Mbps dedicated to their backbone. And in there, it's local traffic, and thus there's so much bandwidth that it won't be a problem, and also it doesn't cost them a cent in addition to local equipment and bandwidth, as opposed to any traffic from/to outside their network where they probably pay by the bit to peers and global backbones.
The point is, if the providing ISPs manage to provide such content that the consumers want from within their own network, the issue of bandwidth becomes irrelevant. Then we can finally start talking about broadband content and price of the content.
Oh yes, both the telco and cableco have different kinds of audio and video content services.. Alhough I do prefer my regular TV set for AV content, and the cableco provides enough content via standard cable TV means that I haven't checked what additional AV content do they provide for broadband data customers.
Helsinki Television (HTV) has two plans: Welho Pro and Welho 525.
The Pro is their former only plan, with unlimited rate (technical limit is I think 34Mbps downstream limited to 10Mbps by the 10BaseT ethernet on modem), while the 525 is rate limited to (guessed it) 525kbps. Now that they have the new 525 plan, Pro plan has "limited availability".
Cost is about the same (I think that the 525 was some even number of euros, as it was introduced only this year, where the Pro plan was even number of Finnish marks) - roughly 40/month, or 54.66 with static IP which I have.
At least the Welho Pro is pretty fast - in Finland. But any traffic elsewhere is slow. And I mean slow as in dial-up. That's why I didn't dump my ADSL when I got the cable.. Had planned to keep them both for a while to see which worked better. Turned out both are of unacceptable quality, but keeping two consumer grade connections was still cheaper than one business grade, and they didn't have outages at the same time.. Unacceptable quality means that I did get refunds and free months in the beginning, but at least now they work more than six days a week, so no more refunds.
How much is that? I mean, I'm using about four times the estimate provided by my electricity provider.. When I signed for the electricity, I also asked for the estimate-based billing to be about twice what they thought it would be, and when they read the meter, it was way over my estimate..
Online banking has been here for long before the web. First it was text only using modem to bank's dial-up banking system. Nowadays it's web.
Of course there weren't so many people using the online banking at the time, but it wasn't because it was hard to use (it wasn't, it was very easy - so easy that some people continued to use it even when web version was available), but because not many had computers at the time.
There was a time when 'net usage was charged by non-flat fees in Finland, too. At that time anything except dial-up was for companies only (too expensive for people), and dial-up was charged by minute connected.
Now, where broadband is available (cities), it's flat fee. Cheap ADSL/cable goes for about 40/month (~USD 35), and upwards to about 150/month (~USD 130) for fast pipes with consumer grade service agreements.
Even when dial-up was double-metered (metered phone call, metered ISP charge), I negotiated a flat-rate monthly fee with a 'soft' usage limit (which never actually was enforced), as I knew that I use the 'net enough that I can get it cheaper if I promise to pay for x hours a month minimum.
Wireless (GPRS) 'net is still metered - by the megabyte. Of course there's this small startup telco that provides GPRS data for flat rate, but they'll make a huge loss and I expect that at some point the regional telco coalition that's behind them will crack, as some of the richer telcos currently in the coalition will decline to fund lossmaker any longer, and the rest will have to realize that without the rich partners funding their nice venture they can't handle it. Then, they'll just have to charge what the other wireless operators do, and unless they'll amass enough customers by that time, they're not going to make it.
OK, I don't know all that much about television standards, broadcasting, and such as it's in USA. I only know about Finland (and something about Europe and the rest of the world).
;) - and yes, paper technology actually does qualify as hi-tech).
/.er, so that should go without say), I don't know what the hell is going on there and if all TV already is pay per open eye or what, but digital does not mean instant evil. It's a technology that allows for better quality in same airspace; more channels in same airspace; or same number of channels in less airspace; AND allows for more than just audio and video - eg. interactive content, multicast and broadcast data, and so on.
Finland has rolled out DVB-T broadcasts, and will stop analog broadcasts in 2006 (although the deadline may be shifted if there's a good reason). In the process, the govTV (well, public, government funded and legislated station) created the infrastructure to broadcast DVB-T to everyone. That infra was incorporated as Digita, and some of the new company was sold to TDF (subsidiary of France Telecom).
Three new bands were allocated by the government for DVB-T broadcasts, with the notion that in 2006 when analog broadcasts end, the analog bands will go back to the government for reallocation without compensation. The three bands (multiplexes A, B and C) were given to Yleisradio (public TV) and two commercial broadcasters, with some requirements - mainly coverage (will have to broadcast throughout all of Finland, no picking just the 10% land area that covers 70% of people). Also, new air channel permits were given to channels that are mainly owned by the corps that got the multiplexes. All existing analog channels got their own digital permit, and some new channels were started (of which two already lost the permit due to not broadcasting material - that was one requirement: You get a channel, You send out signal -> no signal = no more permit).
The channels are SDTV, not HDTV. But, when done well, the picture quality can be better than analog. There's no more "snow" on TV - if reception is bad, there are MPEG artefacts, then jerkiness, then no more picture. Which is of course not supposed to happen.
More multiplexes will be given to new broadcasters later, and while currently the DVB-T signal must be used mainly for TV channels, different content will later be allowed. I'd guess we go HDTV slowly when old analog bands revert to the government and thus more airspace will be available for TV operations..
Of course currently there are very few options for receiving digital TV content.. Set top boxes that do nothing but receive the signal, demux and decode, and send via analog out to TV (dummy boxes) go for about 300. Then there's some way-too-expensive Sony TV set. Currently perhaps about 1% of Finns have DigiTV set top box. However, by next Xmas we'll have better boxes, and dummy boxes will be cheaper, so I'd expect that the real conversion to digital will happen in about two years - until that, it's more like a novelty.
However, note that nowhere is pay per view mentioned. On the air we currently have mostly free channels. There are some pay channels, but I don't think they have pay per view material yet.
While digital TV makes different kinds of payment schemens easy to implement, it doesn't really mean that all TV will be for fee. Also, as TV sets have average life of at least 10 years, it'll probably be at least 2020 before all (>98%) TVs in use have internal digi-receiver. So, until that, set top boxes are mostly the way to go, and that means analog output, which again can be captured by VCRs (and computers).
Also, as DVB-T with MHP is now a standard, and a standard in use (here, and chosen by other countries), it will last for years to come. When Finnish government chose DVB-T, it was considered a risky move, as Finland was the first (or at least one of the first) to choose a digital TV standard, and as a small country, if eg. Germany, France and UK chose some other standard (and the same one), we'd never get real receivers for reasonable prices. However, after that the gamble paid off in that as the others chose the same standard, we were a little ahead of the curve, and got the chance to be technology exporters in the field - an important thing for a small country that tries to live from highly educated people exporting knowledge and hi-tech (where paper, too, qualifies as hi-tech
Now, as I'm no expert in US politics (hey, I'm a
Fortunately the DigiTV payment methods take a little more care to use than just sitting on the remote - unless You practice "precision sitting" ;)
Of course that's just until someone makes a remote with a one-click-pay button, but for as long as Amazon doesn't make remotes, we probably don't have to worry about that.
There's a very simple reason for that: one receiver means one channel. With DVB digital television, one receiver could theoretically mean multiple channels from one multiplex, as it depends on the capabilities of demux (and decoder(s) and so on), not the actual receiver front end.
Now, You're not going to get multiple receivers on a single TV/Video card for some time, as each receiver takes real estate on the board. You can see how much just by looking at the card: the receiver is the part enclosed within the metal cover. It's perhaps about 40*80mm (1.75"*3.5").
What I really would like is pure receiver + demux cards for DVB-(T/C/S) reception. Cards which I could just tell the tuning parameters and request specific PIDs as separate streams. That way a small piece of software could just receive a single channel and store it on disk for each card, without any recompression (end result would be whatever was in the air/cable/sat - mostly SDTV 3-7Mbps CBR MPEG2 streams, perhaps some additional meta-data). If I wanted to watch something while storing, just have a second process read the (constantly growing) file on disk.
I'm still buying CDs. Mostly because I like the fluff that comes with them (copying yields a stupid-looking thing). And I don't know many people who'd have CDs I'd want. And most of the tracks are just too hard to find on the net - and if I find them, they're mostly badly encoded crap.
I buy Japanese import CDs over the net from USA - and I live in Finland. With S&H and taxes, I probably pay about USD 40-45 per CD.. It's mostly cheaper than buying straight from Japan, and the titles aren't found in Finland anyway. And yes, I could probably get china/hongkong/taiwan bootlegs for half the price, but I prefer the originals, as they have nicer packaging, and then I know I support the original artists unlike with the bootlegs.
When I get the CDs, I put them to the CD-ROM drive, rip and encode, and listen to. Mostly because I spend most of my time around computers (a job - a hobby, what's the difference? I don't know which one I'm really paid for, as I mostly can't distinguish between them).
Of course it's nice every now and then to pop the disc into the standalone player in my living room, and listen to the tracks in better (less noisy, better audio equipment) environment.
Yes, I do buy other CDs, too. Sometimes I copy a disc from a friend, and then start looking for it. Every now and then I find the original, other times I don't find it and give up.
Every now and then I do buy a CD without ever having heard any tracks on it. Mostly that happens when I have most of the recordings from some artist, and decide that I might as well complete the collection.
Like "No plaintext email" in the customer's communication requirements?
I routinely send email with company confidential data in them. And I do encrypt those emails.
I did know about TrustedBSD, and that there is OSS work towards Secure operating systems.
However, no open source OS has, to my knowledge (which is severely lacking), been certified to date. I know TrustedBSD targets certification, but I don't know how close they're to that, and how is it going to be funded. Certification isn't free, and to keep the cert there will be continuous drain as re-certifying updated distribution costs money, too.
While SELinux is a work in progress and it'll still take time to get the required changes to the main kernel tree, it's good to know that there's an organization trying to fund the certification process.
If You want two Athlons, why not price with the real thing? Athlon MPs are at least one and a half times the price of XPs of same speed.
Prices with my local dealer:
ASUS A7M266-D SOCKET A - 350 (USD 308)
AMD ATHLON XP 1800+ MP CPU SOCKET A - 332 (USD 292)
AMD ATHLON XP 1800+ CPU SOCKET A - 213 (USD 187)
So a dual Athlon XP 1800+ MP using Asus A7M266-D would be 1014 (USD 893), while the double XP solution (no warranty, potentially unstable, may burn, and so on) would be just 774 (USD 682). A difference of 240 - not insignificant, but I want my warranty, and specifically I want computers that work.
Oh yes, the prices I quoted are higher than Yours. However, I didn't try to find the cheapest dealer around, just the one I usually deal with.