Slashback: Bandwidth, Animation, Gruvin' 259
More news you can use on the @home front. Anubis333 writes: "After a while talking with customer support, I have learned that Comcast@Home (Soon to be ATT Broadband) has instituted a network-wide cap on user upload to 15KB! (Thats not much more than dialup) Also, they have now capped Usenet news access. What am I paying 50 dollars a month for again? More info on usenet here.
Upon even longer hold times, I found out that when Comcast switches over to ATT the cap will be set to 128KB and the usenet caps will be lifted, also they will support more groups. The full change over will be complete by the end of Feb. Any users in the Savannah Ga. Area, they will start here Jan. 15 and end in early feb. Call support for exact local dates if interested."
Yessir, about oh, yea big by a few more inches ... Dave contributed a link showing a side-by-side comparison of the current Apple laptop line, including the new bigger iBook. Shame about the resolution, though ...
By their fruits ye shall know them. zsazsa writes: "According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon has sued James Hibbits and Michael Webbs, the two founders of Linuxgruven for deceptive business practices. He alleges that interviewers were actually salespeople paid to enroll job applicants in training programs costing up to $3,150."
Would the FSF call Sun "GNU-minded"? maitas writes: "It seems that Sun has removed Solaris for Intel from its free download list. It's really sad to see a company that promotes its 'GNU minded' culture to go back on the few good things it had made. They even removed the Solaris source code from their site! Sad, sad, sad."
That them thar' book larnin' Stardance points to an interview at Salon with Steve Grand, in which the "designer of the artificial life program 'Creatures', talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be 'alive.'" You may remember Grand's book Creation: Life & How to Make It, reviewed on these pages. Speaking of reviews, several readers have contributed links to the New York Times' review of Lawrence Lessig's new book.
15KB... (Score:5, Informative)
I have several friends that have had a 128Kb/sec cap for a long time.
Re:15KB... (Score:4, Informative)
Binaries Re:Usenet is still accessible I think... (Score:2, Informative)
I think the caps are probably aimed mainly at posting, and particularly to curb binary posting.
Earthlink's news server, for instance, while allowing uncapped downloads, has an undocumented daily post limit of around 60 (in my experience). Now I have never needed to post 60 real discussion messages. But with standard chunk size (10000 lines), the cap makes posting any large binaries virtually impossible.
Of course, Google does not carry alt.binaries at all. So in effect these people, like many others, are going to be forced to fork over another 10 bucks a month to a third party news provider to continue their alt.binaries addiction.
Solaris/Intel has been EOL'd already (Score:5, Informative)
And as for the source code...haven't they tried taking it down a couple times already? Probably if they get enough flame mail they will put it back up and try to claim it was a "mistake".
Re:"shame about the resolution though..." (Score:4, Informative)
And, dude-- it's not like the old iBook is no longer for sale, or anything stupid like that. What are you complaining about? Too many choices?
Re:15KB... (Score:1, Informative)
Anyone know WHY they providers cap differently in different regions? I live in a rural area where cable saturation should not be a problem.
Re:"shame about the resolution though..." (Score:3, Informative)
The iBook has video mirroring, which is when the external monitor shows the same thing as the LCD. What it's missing is multihead.
Re:Damn (Score:2, Informative)
Try my local mirror mirror.aarnet [aarnet.edu.au] which still had them posted as of this post. Be warned, it's a big monolithic download...but I've got it running on Intel and it works well...
Not happy, Sun.
Solaris Foundation Source (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/source/
Journalistic integrity? 8-]
And in what world would one want to run Solaris on x86 ?
I like Solaris but this has not seriously crossed my mind.
It might be a simple view, but the options seem quite straight forward, get a Sparc or run Linux, this will cause the least grief.
(not to diss BSD people, you have your own karma and I'm sure care not a whit about the simple or the least grief)
mark
Re:solaris x86 is still up.. (Score:2, Informative)
You can still order the media kit for either platform. My guess is they took down the Intel version because of too many people with PCs grabbing them, eating away at the bandwidth. Hell, if the customer wants Solaris 8 Sparc, most likely they bought their hardware from Sun. I personally have not paid a penny to them yet (not intentionally, I have nothing against the company).
They're cutting their losses. I may not like it, but I understand why they're doing it.
128 kbit/s videoconfrencing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Caps (Score:2, Informative)
Please adjust to the realities of bandwidth cost. Here's [usenetserver.com] one of the more reasonable pricelists for pure Usenet usage. They charge $44.95 for one month of Usenet. Bring your own connection.
You may not like getting a gig a day of Usenet at no extra charge to your broadband, but I like it...I also subscribe to EZNews, but I only have to pay them for 6 gigs a month, cause I get most of my filez from my ISP's server.
When an ISP gives you webspace, they don't hand you your own server. What an ISP "owes" its users is defined by the market (what the competition offers, what is affordable/profitable, etcetera), not your concept of what is appropriate.
Sun's FAQ on x86 Solaris Cancelation (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/faq.
Re:Solaris/Intel has been EOL'd already (Score:2, Informative)
I'm on Comcast (Score:1, Informative)
I have learned that Comcast@Home (Soon to be ATT Broadband) has instituted a network-wide cap on user upload to 15KB! (Thats not much more than dialup)
I'm on Comcast in New Mexico, and my upload speed is the same as it was before - 20-25k/sec. If they've actually put this cap in place at this point, it hasn't yet affected my area.
Re:15KB... why (Score:5, Informative)
DOCSIS specifications - for US channel plan anyway - call for a 6mhz wide channel on the downstream. The downstream is anywhere from 91mhz to 750mhz (there are even some 850mhz cable plants). The 6mhz channel corresponds to a standard tv channel. With DOCSIS 1.0, the downstream can be either 64QAM or 256QAM. This is just the modulation of the digital signal as it is sent from the main facility to the subscriber. 256QAM gets you about 38mb/s of data transfer. 64QAM a little bit less.
Now, here is the crappy part. The upstream channel space from the subscriber back to the cable facilities is limited to 5-40 mhz. This is the width of the return path that the amplifiers in the system will receive and re-transmit. 0-10 is pretty much useless on most cable plants. That is the frequency space that short wave radios and the like use (a funny side note is that we once picked up a short wave religious station out of Boston using the signal ingress and amplification at our main facility). The rest is usefull for your upstream bandwidth on a DOCSIS system. The 1.0/1.1 spec states that you can use a frequency with a width of 200hz up to 3.2mhz. Obviously, the more space that you use, the more bandwidth that you have. There are also 2 types of modulation schemes that you can use. QAM16 and QPSK. QPSK is more reliable. QAM16 can carry more data. Most cable plants will use QPSK - your cable plant has to be air tight to use QAM16.
Anyway, if you use QPSK on a 3.2mhz wide channel for the upstream, you get about 5mb/s of available bandwidth. If you put 150 customers on this upstream port, and they all uploading files, emails, etc: then you could very well max out your upstream bandwidth.
That's why you have an upstream cap.
Re:Theft of Bandwidth (Score:1, Informative)
Um, I can't believe you have to ask that. Christ.
This is highly illegal, this is that "hacking" stuff you've probably read about. If you get caught, you will be disconnected and legal action will be taken against you. Which in this case will probably _not_ include a jail sentence, but you never know.. Of course, you'll probably never get caught anyway..