I live in Southern California. A few years ago I went to stay with some family in Milwaukee. I was there for about a week and one of the things that I noticed was how much more relaxed everyone was. The pace of life was really different. People seemed to take their time getting places and nobody really seemed to be in a big hurry to get anywhere. When waiting in line at places, there wasn't an urgency to get to the front. People took the time to talk to each other. It seemed like for the most part nobody had anything else better to do, and they were all living in the moment.
I had an interesting experience when I got back to LA. After I got off of the plane, I was walking through the airport at Wisconson speed and seemed like people were hurrying by me. None the less, my mind was still in vacation mode and I was enjoying the tranquil feeling that was still with me. I got my car out of the parking lot and proceeded to drive home. As soon as I had to merge onto the freeway, I felt the rush of the rest of the world catch up with me. All of a sudden my brain kicked into high gear. It was like a survival mechanism. There was no way I could deal with the 405 freeway while in the Wisconson mindset.
Conversely, I know people who have grown up in Southern California who then leave and hate where they end up. Almost universally, those who leave and miss California all say almost the same thing. "Everything here is too slow. There isn't enough to do." Personally, I can't wait to get out of here. I think the pace of life here sucks.
I don't think that DSL companies are going to jump right on the bandwidth capping bandwagon because the technologies are different. I was on a 3MB DSL line for the last four years. I recently moved and stepped up to a 7MB cable connection. The difference in the connection speed is night and day. A 3MB DSL line simply can't move the kind of data that a 10MB cable connection can. DSL users are inherently capped due to limitations in the amount of data that you can push over a twisted pair. The cable infrastructre on the other hand can sustain much higher throughputs.
For as long as there has been cable internet, there have been problems with bandwidth. In the mid-1990s, a friend of mine got cable he could tell when his neighbors were using their line because his transfer rates would suffer. If my girl friend didn't want to watch cable, I would still be on DSL because the speed is consistent, and most importantly, the latency is predictable. I play a lot of FPS games and a low latency is key. I don't move a lot of large files around. My experience has always been that cable is great for sustained file transfers. DSL is better for latency and connection quality.
Interestingly enough, the Taoists have been using the metaphor of the body as a microcosm of heaven and earth for thousands of years. The belief is that the same effects that manifest in nature also manifest in the body. As human beings, we aren't separate from nature. Our bodies do not behave differently than the world we live in. Any interaction that can be observed in nature has a similar, corresponding interaction within the body. Science is finally catching up to the point where we can now see those interactions, and in situations like this, they provide insights into what people have been intuiting for thousands of years.
Posts like yours are the reason that I enjoy participating in discussions on here. I'm surprised that you're still moderated at 0, but this thread is probably stale at this point and the people with mod-points have probably moved onto threads closer to the top of the page. You made a lot of good observations, and I'm not quite sure why you made the decision to post anonymously. My dad was a Harvard MBA (same class as Clinton) and my mom has a masters. They both did pretty well and I didn't even graduate from college. I have a pragmatic view of the world that I live in. There are people and organizations with power and leverage and the means to make things happen. They make those things happen in order to make their lives better, and to further consolidate their power. Computers weren't invented so that we can post on Slashdot. They were invented so that bankers could keep track of money, and so that scientists could perform computations for the people who paid them to conduct experiments. The people at the top of social hierarchy saw a need and spent money to develop the tools to fill those needs. The internet wasn't developed so that we can download movies and have access to real time video conferencing. It was developed by the military so that they could better coordinate their research.
All throughout history we have seen the same pattern occur over an over again. What was once limited to the domain of a select few eventually becomes available to larger and larger portions of society. The internet isn't any different than the telephone or the computer or any other technology that people today take for granted. Society as a whole has deemed telephone service so important that jobless people on welfare can get free phone service. The internet isn't there yet, but who is to say that some day it won't be?
I can't say that I understand where you are coming from because I don't know you, but I have some sense of it from what you've written. You come across as the kind of person who knows what it takes to be successful because you have found your own success. You look at the government and you get upset because you see waste, and greed and corruption and inefficiency and many of the other aspects of a huge organization and it irks you. You are apparently the kind of person who always strives to make things better, not just for yourself, but for others. That inclination has manifested itself in your profession and it manifests here in your belief that everyone is entitled to better internet service than they currently have. Those qualities that you manifest are commendable qualities.
As I said previously, I am pragmatic. I don't think that the government particularly owes me jack shit. In fact, I want as little to do with the government as possible. I don't think that corporations owe me anything, and I spend as little as I can and do without a lot of things. I don't make much money in a year and certainly make far less than you do. I look around at what the government and the corporations have to offer me, and in all honesty, I decide to pass on a lot of it.
Your post struck a couple of nerves, but that is okay. You obviously have a lot of pent up anger, and some issues with the way the world works. I'm a convenient, +5 moderated Slashdot poster who happened to tap into the groupthink and lift it up high enough for you to take a couple of wacks at it. I don't take your attacks personally, even though it would be easy to do so. As much as I respect the collective here, I'm not so attached to my ego that I need to be overly concerned with voicing my opinions, or having them picked apart.
To get to the meat of your post, I read a lot of "right" and "wrong" claims. Monopolies aren't "right." The playing field "should" be level. What's your point? I don't think the playing field has been level since the first chimp picked up a stick, and it isn't going to start now. The playing field should be level for who? I can get basic internet access for ~$20 a month. The
How exactly you think private companies have the right to charge us through the nose for technology developed either in part or fully by our own tax dollars is beyond me. When you say that "we paid for the R&D", that's more of a reason for it be cheaper for us, not less!
I guess this is just a semantic argument over "cheap". To me, $150 a month for a 10+mb internet feed an unlimited downloads is cheap. Ten years ago, I was paying more than that in long distance charges to swap warez at 28800 baud.
And do you know why? It's because stupid cunts such as yourself are willing to bend over and take it, all the while justifying their fucking by comparing the monthly cost to a few hours work.
I should leave this alone, but I re-read it and I just can't. How else am I supposed to compare things? We live in a society where we exchange a medium of currency that by and large, everyone earns by working. Our economy functions because a person can work doing one thing and not have to directly barter for what they need from someone else. Therefore comparing three hours of work to a month of internet access is perfectly valid.
You just serve to further illustrate what an entitled whiner acts like. Your parents spent money twenty years ago and you still want to reap the rewards of it? What have you done to contribute to bringing down the price of internet access other than whine about it? What entitles you to low cost access to the internet other than the virtue of having been born to parents who already paid some taxes to develop the infrastructure that you can now trade a couple of hours worth of work for every month to access?
Aside from the fact that $200 billion dollars of public money was spent nearly 20 years ago to upgrade infrastructure (and we got virtually fuckal in terms of improvement), telecomm companies in other countries seem to do well for less. The end user ends up paying much less and they get better service.
Thanks for the hate and spite. Setting that aside, 20 years ago was 1989. People were using, what 300 baud modems? 1200 baud modems if they were lucky? Try streaming video at 1200 baud. Now we have 10+mb to our house and we can stream video, while downloading torrents, while playing online games and having a voice conversation with five other people via Skype... all at the same time. How old are you? Were you even on the internet ten years ago? I was. It's ridiculous how different it is today compared to ten years ago... much less twenty.
As for the other countries paying less, they followed our lead, and leveraged technologies that... wait for it... we paid for the R&D on. Where was TCP/IP invented? Japan? Korea? Where is Cisco based? Thailand? How about Bell Labs? Oh yeah, America there again. Other countries got to leverage the economies of scale and reaped the benefit of being late adopters. You can't even compare Japan and South Korea to America. They are geographically different. They don't have a telecommunications infrastructure that stretches across 3000+ miles and reaches over 300 million people.
So you mean to tell me that things change? Holy I-Ching Batman! The providers are becoming more transparent and letting you know what you will get depending on what you pay. Up until a year or two ago, an "unlimited" connection really was unlimited. For most subscribers, it still is unlimited. Only the people out there on the cutting edge are bumping up against the caps. There is finally enough content available that people are able to tax their connections nearly full time. Being asked to pay $150 a month for truly unlimited internet access isn't that bad of a deal.
I'm only thirty, but I'm already having an old man moment here. I don't think a lot the people posting on Slashdot realize how far technology has come. I remember connecting to the internet at 14400. I remember connecting to BBSes at 2400 baud and being able to type faster than the connection could echo back the characters. Busy signals were a constant problem. Swapping 1.44MB worth of data took over an hour (at 2400 baud). If you dialed outside of your LATA, you had to pay toll charges. Compared to back then (get off my lawn!), we're in a totally different world. The amount of content that is available nearly instantenously is mind boggling. Until I discovered ways around things, I was spending hundreds of dollars a month in phone charges to get the same kind of software that I can get from the Pirate Bay... and that was in the mid-1990s.
The term "entitlement generation" has reached my ears from time to time, and discussions like this one serve to highlight the truth of the matter. Where the hell do you people think all of this capability comes from? Do you think that the cable company just plugs in a router, and all of a sudden "the Internet" just works? I wonder how many network engineers Time Warner employees. I wonder how much those guys make a year. How about field techs? Customer service operators? Sales reps? How much do they have to pay in property taxes and electricity to keep their CO's running?
Here's a dose of reality for everyone. If you don't like the prices, don't pay them. If you can do without, do without. If you can't, suck it up and deal with it. You don't need a 10mb+ pipe to get on the Internet. Spend $25 a month and get a DSL line and you won't have to worry about bandwidth caps. I was on a 3mb DSL line up until this year, and it worked just fine. It cost me $45 a month. I make far more than that in a couple of hours at work. Lets say you make $20 an hour, and given that this is Slashdot, I'd be surprised if anyone made any less than that. For one day's worth of work, you get unlimited, high speed internet access for a month. Now check your reality. Is one day worth of your labor worth an unfair trade for the labor of all of the people who have to labor for you to have an always on, available, high speed internet connection? Or is your labor so much more valuable to society that the one day of your labor is worth so much more than the labor of all the other people who give you 30+/-1 days a month worth of internet access?
Speakeasy. They have a "Business Ethernet" service that will give you up to 10mbps. It might not be available in your area though. We are using them to replace our current MPLS WAN here at work and saving thousands of dollars a month in the process.
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
Place to be searched: teh intarwebs
Things to be seized: teh inph0z
Affirmation: "I hereby affirm that the bad guy is using teh intarwebs to trade teh inph0z and by obtaining teh inph0z by tapping teh intarwebs, we will be able to prevent bad things from happening."
Judge: "I'm interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter."
It only had four bedrooms? Man, what a shack! Did it even have running water?! If they can afford to add three bedrooms, they can afford a couple of dollars in lightbulbs.
Your parents can afford the mortgage on seven bedrooms and four bathrooms. You think they are going to notice the cost of replacing four lightbulbs in a month?!
Now you know that ConEd isn't really doing this as an anti-terror measure, they are doing it as a "grid is overloaded" measure. However, they put that spin on it to get government funding, and it worked. I'm betting this is a similar money grab.
You are right on the money. I work at an institution (non-profit 503c3) that relies on grants for a lot of our funding. From what I've been able to tell, the process of writing a grant is all about just wording the request in the right way to relate what you want to do, with what the grant provides money to do. Based on my limited knowledge of the subject, grants are created out of the legislative process when Congress mandates that money gets spent a certain way. They make grants available to try to focus the spending of the funds. Companies then apply for the grants and then theoretically spend the money in ways that are in line with the grant.
I'm completely convinced that the editors have gone off their rockers. I submitted an Ask Slashdot question a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to know about how to integrate Linux and Windows in an enterprise network. I figured that not only could I learn something, but so could a whole slew of other people. That question got rejected. I guess nobody cares about interoperability between (arguably) the two largest operating systems in the enterprise space. So my question got rejected, but this tool (nothing personal OP) wants to know how to replace a 486 and a Pentium with something a bit more modern? And that question makes it to the front page as a worthwhile story? Jesus fucking Christ people!
I wasn't meaning to imply that the FBI would confiscate millions of computers from Verizon customers. Having re-read my post, I can see how you might have interpreted that way. When it come sot "cyber security ranting", it isn't all that far fetched that sometime in the future, during an attack on a "critical piece of infrastructure", the FBI, DHS or some other organization might decide to unplug an entire net block in order to mitigate an attack.
If I recall correctly, laws let them hold this shit for up to a month before they're obligated to move their asses and even start giving it back. That doesn't even mean they will. It's beyond ridiculous, people sue all the time for this abuse.
In theory, they have up to a month. Unless what they seize is "part of an ongoing criminal investigation", in that case, it belongs to the FBI until they are done with the case. The crappy thing for the businesses is that their insurance doesn't cover "FBI raids". So in order to get back up and running, they are going to have to take out a loan or find some other way to come up with the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase new servers. Then when they actually do get their (now obsolete) servers back, they aren't going to be able to resell either the new ones, or the old ones for anywhere near what they had to spend to replace them.
On the train on the way home there was a guy walking through the car selling the latest X-men on DVD. I think this is the proverbial "horse already left the barn" situation. However, what happened serves as a good example of what the future holds once the Federal government gets enhanced "cyber security" powers. Imagine what happens when say, for example, a Chinese botnet operator decides to launch an attack against (insert agency here) using zombies exclusively on Verizon's network. Oops... millions of Verizon customers are suddenly SOL. If you've ever had to deal with law enforcement when it comes to recovering what they took from you, you know what a nightmare this could turn into.
The job of the government is not to help the people. If people need help, they need to help themselves. If the government gets in the way of the people helping themselves, the government needs to be replaced by people who won't get in the way. If people were to act justly, with benevolence and courtesy and respect for each other, we wouldn't need the government at all.
If there were ever a driver for IPv6 implementation, this is it. Big Brother is looming large on this one. Of course it's for our security. In the end, we will have IPv6 addresses on the power meters so that the government can punish people who use too much power (in the guise of saving the environment of course). The traffic cameras will have addresses (in the guise of finding lost children of course). Every citizen will be given their own address at birth. Good bye SSN, hello 01:32:fd:...., That number will jump from device to device with them. ("You want phone service? Sure, just give me your IPv6 identifer.") I can't wait until they integrate the phone system with a DNS like system. That will make it super easy to protect us from problems, because they can instantly find us at any time. Just think of all the wonderful possibilities that can come from cyber security! I can see it now...
tracert joeqpublic
Tracing route to joeqpublic [01:32:fd:...] over a maximum of 9999 hops:
Just think of how many jobs can be created! People are going to need to setup all those nodes, and keep them running. Device manufacturers are going to have to their devices certified as BigBrotherCompliant. There are going to need to be working groups, and policy councils, and advocacy teams, and, and and.... I bet there are bureaucrats somewhere right now getting big fat hard-ons thinking about how long it will take to implement this kind of crap (for the good of the citizens of course).
Following that logic, the following would also be true. The internet can't serve up web pages, because all of the content doesn't fit in a single packet. VoIP can't be used to communication, because an entire conversation can't fit in a single packet. The list goes on and on. What kind of idiot comes up with these arguments?
The drives themselves may be hot swappable, but do they come with carriers or similar accessories that allow them to be easily swapped out in an production environment?
I've never seen an Xserve, but it seems to me that if it is truly a file server, the drives themselves are probably hot swappable and that explains that increase in cost over a standard drive. The summary mentions something about "drive carrier". I read that and I picture the drives on my Proliant servers (both SCSI and SAS). They have special carriers and can be hot swapped while the server is still up (when running on the RAID module).
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Southern California. A few years ago I went to stay with some family in Milwaukee. I was there for about a week and one of the things that I noticed was how much more relaxed everyone was. The pace of life was really different. People seemed to take their time getting places and nobody really seemed to be in a big hurry to get anywhere. When waiting in line at places, there wasn't an urgency to get to the front. People took the time to talk to each other. It seemed like for the most part nobody had anything else better to do, and they were all living in the moment.
I had an interesting experience when I got back to LA. After I got off of the plane, I was walking through the airport at Wisconson speed and seemed like people were hurrying by me. None the less, my mind was still in vacation mode and I was enjoying the tranquil feeling that was still with me. I got my car out of the parking lot and proceeded to drive home. As soon as I had to merge onto the freeway, I felt the rush of the rest of the world catch up with me. All of a sudden my brain kicked into high gear. It was like a survival mechanism. There was no way I could deal with the 405 freeway while in the Wisconson mindset.
Conversely, I know people who have grown up in Southern California who then leave and hate where they end up. Almost universally, those who leave and miss California all say almost the same thing. "Everything here is too slow. There isn't enough to do." Personally, I can't wait to get out of here. I think the pace of life here sucks.
I want to be able to pay extra to QoS tag my taxi cab so that it gets priority over the other traffic.
I don't think that DSL companies are going to jump right on the bandwidth capping bandwagon because the technologies are different. I was on a 3MB DSL line for the last four years. I recently moved and stepped up to a 7MB cable connection. The difference in the connection speed is night and day. A 3MB DSL line simply can't move the kind of data that a 10MB cable connection can. DSL users are inherently capped due to limitations in the amount of data that you can push over a twisted pair. The cable infrastructre on the other hand can sustain much higher throughputs.
For as long as there has been cable internet, there have been problems with bandwidth. In the mid-1990s, a friend of mine got cable he could tell when his neighbors were using their line because his transfer rates would suffer. If my girl friend didn't want to watch cable, I would still be on DSL because the speed is consistent, and most importantly, the latency is predictable. I play a lot of FPS games and a low latency is key. I don't move a lot of large files around. My experience has always been that cable is great for sustained file transfers. DSL is better for latency and connection quality.
Interestingly enough, the Taoists have been using the metaphor of the body as a microcosm of heaven and earth for thousands of years. The belief is that the same effects that manifest in nature also manifest in the body. As human beings, we aren't separate from nature. Our bodies do not behave differently than the world we live in. Any interaction that can be observed in nature has a similar, corresponding interaction within the body. Science is finally catching up to the point where we can now see those interactions, and in situations like this, they provide insights into what people have been intuiting for thousands of years.
Posts like yours are the reason that I enjoy participating in discussions on here. I'm surprised that you're still moderated at 0, but this thread is probably stale at this point and the people with mod-points have probably moved onto threads closer to the top of the page. You made a lot of good observations, and I'm not quite sure why you made the decision to post anonymously. My dad was a Harvard MBA (same class as Clinton) and my mom has a masters. They both did pretty well and I didn't even graduate from college. I have a pragmatic view of the world that I live in. There are people and organizations with power and leverage and the means to make things happen. They make those things happen in order to make their lives better, and to further consolidate their power. Computers weren't invented so that we can post on Slashdot. They were invented so that bankers could keep track of money, and so that scientists could perform computations for the people who paid them to conduct experiments. The people at the top of social hierarchy saw a need and spent money to develop the tools to fill those needs. The internet wasn't developed so that we can download movies and have access to real time video conferencing. It was developed by the military so that they could better coordinate their research.
All throughout history we have seen the same pattern occur over an over again. What was once limited to the domain of a select few eventually becomes available to larger and larger portions of society. The internet isn't any different than the telephone or the computer or any other technology that people today take for granted. Society as a whole has deemed telephone service so important that jobless people on welfare can get free phone service. The internet isn't there yet, but who is to say that some day it won't be?
I can't say that I understand where you are coming from because I don't know you, but I have some sense of it from what you've written. You come across as the kind of person who knows what it takes to be successful because you have found your own success. You look at the government and you get upset because you see waste, and greed and corruption and inefficiency and many of the other aspects of a huge organization and it irks you. You are apparently the kind of person who always strives to make things better, not just for yourself, but for others. That inclination has manifested itself in your profession and it manifests here in your belief that everyone is entitled to better internet service than they currently have. Those qualities that you manifest are commendable qualities.
As I said previously, I am pragmatic. I don't think that the government particularly owes me jack shit. In fact, I want as little to do with the government as possible. I don't think that corporations owe me anything, and I spend as little as I can and do without a lot of things. I don't make much money in a year and certainly make far less than you do. I look around at what the government and the corporations have to offer me, and in all honesty, I decide to pass on a lot of it.
Your post struck a couple of nerves, but that is okay. You obviously have a lot of pent up anger, and some issues with the way the world works. I'm a convenient, +5 moderated Slashdot poster who happened to tap into the groupthink and lift it up high enough for you to take a couple of wacks at it. I don't take your attacks personally, even though it would be easy to do so. As much as I respect the collective here, I'm not so attached to my ego that I need to be overly concerned with voicing my opinions, or having them picked apart.
To get to the meat of your post, I read a lot of "right" and "wrong" claims. Monopolies aren't "right." The playing field "should" be level. What's your point? I don't think the playing field has been level since the first chimp picked up a stick, and it isn't going to start now. The playing field should be level for who? I can get basic internet access for ~$20 a month. The
I guess this is just a semantic argument over "cheap". To me, $150 a month for a 10+mb internet feed an unlimited downloads is cheap. Ten years ago, I was paying more than that in long distance charges to swap warez at 28800 baud.
I should leave this alone, but I re-read it and I just can't. How else am I supposed to compare things? We live in a society where we exchange a medium of currency that by and large, everyone earns by working. Our economy functions because a person can work doing one thing and not have to directly barter for what they need from someone else. Therefore comparing three hours of work to a month of internet access is perfectly valid.
You just serve to further illustrate what an entitled whiner acts like. Your parents spent money twenty years ago and you still want to reap the rewards of it? What have you done to contribute to bringing down the price of internet access other than whine about it? What entitles you to low cost access to the internet other than the virtue of having been born to parents who already paid some taxes to develop the infrastructure that you can now trade a couple of hours worth of work for every month to access?
Thanks for the hate and spite. Setting that aside, 20 years ago was 1989. People were using, what 300 baud modems? 1200 baud modems if they were lucky? Try streaming video at 1200 baud. Now we have 10+mb to our house and we can stream video, while downloading torrents, while playing online games and having a voice conversation with five other people via Skype... all at the same time. How old are you? Were you even on the internet ten years ago? I was. It's ridiculous how different it is today compared to ten years ago... much less twenty.
As for the other countries paying less, they followed our lead, and leveraged technologies that... wait for it... we paid for the R&D on. Where was TCP/IP invented? Japan? Korea? Where is Cisco based? Thailand? How about Bell Labs? Oh yeah, America there again. Other countries got to leverage the economies of scale and reaped the benefit of being late adopters. You can't even compare Japan and South Korea to America. They are geographically different. They don't have a telecommunications infrastructure that stretches across 3000+ miles and reaches over 300 million people.
So you mean to tell me that things change? Holy I-Ching Batman! The providers are becoming more transparent and letting you know what you will get depending on what you pay. Up until a year or two ago, an "unlimited" connection really was unlimited. For most subscribers, it still is unlimited. Only the people out there on the cutting edge are bumping up against the caps. There is finally enough content available that people are able to tax their connections nearly full time. Being asked to pay $150 a month for truly unlimited internet access isn't that bad of a deal.
I'm only thirty, but I'm already having an old man moment here. I don't think a lot the people posting on Slashdot realize how far technology has come. I remember connecting to the internet at 14400. I remember connecting to BBSes at 2400 baud and being able to type faster than the connection could echo back the characters. Busy signals were a constant problem. Swapping 1.44MB worth of data took over an hour (at 2400 baud). If you dialed outside of your LATA, you had to pay toll charges. Compared to back then (get off my lawn!), we're in a totally different world. The amount of content that is available nearly instantenously is mind boggling. Until I discovered ways around things, I was spending hundreds of dollars a month in phone charges to get the same kind of software that I can get from the Pirate Bay... and that was in the mid-1990s.
The term "entitlement generation" has reached my ears from time to time, and discussions like this one serve to highlight the truth of the matter. Where the hell do you people think all of this capability comes from? Do you think that the cable company just plugs in a router, and all of a sudden "the Internet" just works? I wonder how many network engineers Time Warner employees. I wonder how much those guys make a year. How about field techs? Customer service operators? Sales reps? How much do they have to pay in property taxes and electricity to keep their CO's running?
Here's a dose of reality for everyone. If you don't like the prices, don't pay them. If you can do without, do without. If you can't, suck it up and deal with it. You don't need a 10mb+ pipe to get on the Internet. Spend $25 a month and get a DSL line and you won't have to worry about bandwidth caps. I was on a 3mb DSL line up until this year, and it worked just fine. It cost me $45 a month. I make far more than that in a couple of hours at work. Lets say you make $20 an hour, and given that this is Slashdot, I'd be surprised if anyone made any less than that. For one day's worth of work, you get unlimited, high speed internet access for a month. Now check your reality. Is one day worth of your labor worth an unfair trade for the labor of all of the people who have to labor for you to have an always on, available, high speed internet connection? Or is your labor so much more valuable to society that the one day of your labor is worth so much more than the labor of all the other people who give you 30+/-1 days a month worth of internet access?
Speakeasy. They have a "Business Ethernet" service that will give you up to 10mbps. It might not be available in your area though. We are using them to replace our current MPLS WAN here at work and saving thousands of dollars a month in the process.
Place to be searched: teh intarwebs
Things to be seized: teh inph0z
Affirmation: "I hereby affirm that the bad guy is using teh intarwebs to trade teh inph0z and by obtaining teh inph0z by tapping teh intarwebs, we will be able to prevent bad things from happening."
Judge: "I'm interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter."
Touche. I had forgotten that this is America, where it's acceptable to be leveraged to the gills.
It only had four bedrooms? Man, what a shack! Did it even have running water?! If they can afford to add three bedrooms, they can afford a couple of dollars in lightbulbs.
Your parents can afford the mortgage on seven bedrooms and four bathrooms. You think they are going to notice the cost of replacing four lightbulbs in a month?!
You are right on the money. I work at an institution (non-profit 503c3) that relies on grants for a lot of our funding. From what I've been able to tell, the process of writing a grant is all about just wording the request in the right way to relate what you want to do, with what the grant provides money to do. Based on my limited knowledge of the subject, grants are created out of the legislative process when Congress mandates that money gets spent a certain way. They make grants available to try to focus the spending of the funds. Companies then apply for the grants and then theoretically spend the money in ways that are in line with the grant.
I'm completely convinced that the editors have gone off their rockers. I submitted an Ask Slashdot question a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to know about how to integrate Linux and Windows in an enterprise network. I figured that not only could I learn something, but so could a whole slew of other people. That question got rejected. I guess nobody cares about interoperability between (arguably) the two largest operating systems in the enterprise space. So my question got rejected, but this tool (nothing personal OP) wants to know how to replace a 486 and a Pentium with something a bit more modern? And that question makes it to the front page as a worthwhile story? Jesus fucking Christ people!
I wasn't meaning to imply that the FBI would confiscate millions of computers from Verizon customers. Having re-read my post, I can see how you might have interpreted that way. When it come sot "cyber security ranting", it isn't all that far fetched that sometime in the future, during an attack on a "critical piece of infrastructure", the FBI, DHS or some other organization might decide to unplug an entire net block in order to mitigate an attack.
In theory, they have up to a month. Unless what they seize is "part of an ongoing criminal investigation", in that case, it belongs to the FBI until they are done with the case. The crappy thing for the businesses is that their insurance doesn't cover "FBI raids". So in order to get back up and running, they are going to have to take out a loan or find some other way to come up with the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase new servers. Then when they actually do get their (now obsolete) servers back, they aren't going to be able to resell either the new ones, or the old ones for anywhere near what they had to spend to replace them.
On the train on the way home there was a guy walking through the car selling the latest X-men on DVD. I think this is the proverbial "horse already left the barn" situation. However, what happened serves as a good example of what the future holds once the Federal government gets enhanced "cyber security" powers. Imagine what happens when say, for example, a Chinese botnet operator decides to launch an attack against (insert agency here) using zombies exclusively on Verizon's network. Oops... millions of Verizon customers are suddenly SOL. If you've ever had to deal with law enforcement when it comes to recovering what they took from you, you know what a nightmare this could turn into.
Rural America gets broadband access and the US government gets the infrastructure to roll out all of their privacy invading tools.
The job of the government is not to help the people. If people need help, they need to help themselves. If the government gets in the way of the people helping themselves, the government needs to be replaced by people who won't get in the way. If people were to act justly, with benevolence and courtesy and respect for each other, we wouldn't need the government at all.
If there were ever a driver for IPv6 implementation, this is it. Big Brother is looming large on this one. Of course it's for our security. In the end, we will have IPv6 addresses on the power meters so that the government can punish people who use too much power (in the guise of saving the environment of course). The traffic cameras will have addresses (in the guise of finding lost children of course). Every citizen will be given their own address at birth. Good bye SSN, hello 01:32:fd:...., That number will jump from device to device with them. ("You want phone service? Sure, just give me your IPv6 identifer.") I can't wait until they integrate the phone system with a DNS like system. That will make it super easy to protect us from problems, because they can instantly find us at any time. Just think of all the wonderful possibilities that can come from cyber security! I can see it now...
tracert joeqpublic
Tracing route to joeqpublic [01:32:fd:...]
over a maximum of 9999 hops:
1 BigBrotherDataCenter.Pentagon.Washington.DC.USA
2 EpicPrivacyInvasionDataWarehouse.USA
3 California.USA
4 Southern.California.USA
5 LosAngeles.Southern.California.USA
6 90012.LosAngeles.Southern.California.USA
7 Starbucks.90012.LosAngeles.Southern.California.USA
8 350SGrand.Starbucks.90012.LosAngeles.Southern.California.USA
9 Register01.350SGrand.Starbucks.90012.LosAngeles.Southern.California.USA
10 iPhone.joeqpublic
Trace complete.
Just think of how many jobs can be created! People are going to need to setup all those nodes, and keep them running. Device manufacturers are going to have to their devices certified as BigBrotherCompliant. There are going to need to be working groups, and policy councils, and advocacy teams, and, and and.... I bet there are bureaucrats somewhere right now getting big fat hard-ons thinking about how long it will take to implement this kind of crap (for the good of the citizens of course).
Following that logic, the following would also be true. The internet can't serve up web pages, because all of the content doesn't fit in a single packet. VoIP can't be used to communication, because an entire conversation can't fit in a single packet. The list goes on and on. What kind of idiot comes up with these arguments?
The drives themselves may be hot swappable, but do they come with carriers or similar accessories that allow them to be easily swapped out in an production environment?
I've never seen an Xserve, but it seems to me that if it is truly a file server, the drives themselves are probably hot swappable and that explains that increase in cost over a standard drive. The summary mentions something about "drive carrier". I read that and I picture the drives on my Proliant servers (both SCSI and SAS). They have special carriers and can be hot swapped while the server is still up (when running on the RAID module).