Anybody else craving a Sea Breeze?

Also, apparently Steve Jobs was pretty vocal about the uselessness of DRM for a couple of years before Apple dropped it. Unfortunately, since Apple doesn't own the music, it wasn't their decision.

As an anglophone living in Quebec, I can say that while historically, some of the language laws did help improve a situation ripe with prejudice against French, in the last 25 or so years, the tides have turned and the laws are now oppressive, prejudice against English, and more importantly, counterproductive. It is clear that the intent of this law is to promote French language video games in Quebec. It is also obvious that this will fail.

Punishing noncompliance will have an adverse effect on French video games. Let's see some incentive. Tax breaks or grants to companies that release in French at the same time as English. Money talks, bigotry walks.

It is well known that the power generated at a site greatly exceeds the amount of power that can be delivered over a distance. While there is enough wind to generate the US's power consumption needs, how much extra would we need to generate to ensure that the required amount actually reaches the US? Everybody seems to jump at opportunities to generate seemingly limitless amounts of energy, however more attention and research should go into making systems more efficient and operate with lower power. Also, with the distance factor in mind, it is clear that if I were to plant solar cells on my roof, I would reap a much higher percentage of the energy generated than if I were to use power generated from wind in the Oceans.

Remember... "it' doesn't like to be called God.

That's really quite brilliant. That would be metered kind of like cell phone plans.

Throttling generally causes pretty large customer backlashes and a lot of resentment, as it is generally an unfair method of controlling bandwidth. In my own experience, customers have an easier time dealing with Bandwidth Caps, as they can grok that bandwidth costs ISP's money, but they don't feel discriminated against. Extra fees for over-usage charges can help finance a larger bandwidth pipeline in the future.

Also, looking at the usage stats, can you actually determine that P2P is a major cause of congestion? The last time I saw a breakdown of types of traffic, HTTP still took up the largest portion of bandwidth even in peak hours, on account of sites like youtube and google video.

Continue with the self teaching. It's an important tool. More important than the languages you learn is the ability to learn new languages. Sure, that .Net certification will get you far in your Miscro$oft friendly workplace, until one day somebody says, "shit, this legacy system we need you to maintain was written in PERL". At which point, your self-teaching skills will be your WIN.

I know a number of people who stopped reading the comic strip Dilbert because although it would make them laugh, from time to time a strip would address something remarkably specific to their workplace... and they would just die a little inside.

The arrogance of educated workers isn't anything particularly new however it is something that seems to drift from field to field along with educational trends. A couple of years ago I read an article on how something like over 60% of CEO's would not hire anyone with an MBA on account of how disastrous former employees had been. At the time, and as a generality (no I'm not talking about you, Mr. MBA who happens to read slashdot) MBA graduates tended to assume that because of their diploma, they knew how to run a department or company better than people without the equivalence in education, but many years of experience. Now this trend is starting to apply to programmers. They expect that with their degrees and certifications, they will be better workers, and thus given better opportunities than people many years their senior. Now I'm not saying we are all supposed to LIKE Bill Gates, or anything, but his high school diploma has certainly gotten him far. No amount of education will ever replace work experience. Learning new or even old out-dated languages is part of any intense IT job, and only with experience will you be good at troubleshooting and reverse engineering the kind of poorly documented stuff that you will be expected to do. Personally, I have the same level of education as Bill Gates and have dropped out of college twice, but that hasn't prevented glamourous opportunities from coming my way. On account of my skill, experience, and knowledge of my companies products, I've been flown to Edmonton (okay... it's really not THAT glamourous), while some of my colleagues have been to Vancouver several times. Now I'm not saying higher education won't get me farther in life, but not having higher education has certainly not prevented hard work and experience from contributing to an interesting career. Any college graduate should know that your education will get you nowhere without hard work and level headedness, and that an inflated ego will only hold you back. I don't think it's necessarily fair to entirely blame the baby-boomers for this scourge of arrogant graduates, but as a trend, I certainly suspect they didn't help. The boomers did grow up in a time where education guaranteed a more exciting career and life. Then 'everybody' went to school and we wound up with Generation X. You'd somehow hope that this younger generation (of which I am pretty much a part) would have caught on. Let's just blame videogames and short-attention span TV instead.

LOOK AT THE MONKEY!!!

Hi iSeal. I work for an ISP that sells consumer broadband. Being a small ISP, we resell dsl service on the incumbent telephone company's network, however the backbone connection is through another provider. Even during peak hours, the capacity of our backbone connection is not threatened. If it were, it would be our prerogative to increase our capacity in proportion to the usage requirements of our customer base. While some smaller companies may split 50mbps connections between a thousand users (though you'd probably only manage comfortably with 500 users), bandwidth becomes more cost effective to purchase in larger volumes, so if your customer base is large enough, you needn't worry as much about clogging the tubes. Now I'm not in any way opposed to traffic shaping. Whether we admit it or not, there have been traffic shaping rules in existence in networks for years. Be it an office increasing QoS on their VoIP lines, or an ISP ensuring that HTTP gets a little bit better treatment than SSL. The issue that has been faced lately by many smaller ISP's is the lack of transparency of the major carriers (i.e. videotron/bell etc) and their imposition of shaping rules on customers or resellers without any prior notice, and even in Bell's case, outright denying that there was any traffic shaping. At this point in time, Bell has yet to offer any evidence that their tubes are clogged. Given Bell's track record of not scaling their network as fast as their customer basis, it wouldn't surprise me if they had congestion at some points, however if this were the case, and it was not feasible to scale up their network accordingly, at the very least providing options with regards to traffic shaping would be at least somewhat of a sane thing to do. There is nothing inherently wrong with ISPs charging different rates for services with different levels of priority on their network. Why not charge $5 or $10 more per month for a non-throttled connection. In my experience, most power-users would be willing to pay for that extra kick, provided they are not being bullied by the incumbents...

Apparently, Videotron doesn't see that P2P is a way of eliminating network congestion. It is far more efficient and lest congesting than a direct client/server model. Pretend for a moment that I'm Trent Reznor. I 'could' release my album on line, stick it on a hosting server, and ask my millions of adoring fans to download it from me directly. But that would clock the tubes, specifically, those near my hosting server. OR I could let them download a tiny torrent file, and they can download my latest album from each other. Which sounds like it would cause more network congestion? With advancements of P2P, congestion problems are further solved as there have been a couple Torrent client plugins I've heard of that try to find peers geographically close to you, thus filling fewer tubes with your pron.

Eww... while reading the comments, I saw that you said you'd installed RT and I just about threw up in my mouth. Please do yourself a favour, and if you use RT, please make sure you have the latest version, and/or can tart up the interface to make it more pleasing to look at. Now let me please excuse that autonomic reaction and say it's based solely on personal experience using an ugly and disorganized implementation of RT. Secondly, while it might actually be very practical and useful as a ticketing system, a ticketing system isn't necessarily the direction timothy would want to go in. A operation ticketing system can be very useful (essential) for managing tasks, duties, escalations, follow ups, etc, but as far as documentation or communication is concerned, they don't tend to be structured in a way that gives the immediate response of a chat room. I agree with several previous posters in that perhaps a better approach would be to improve training procedures and documentation so that agents have access to the information they need rather than relying on a chat typed interface. I personally recommend mediawiki, as pretty much everybody on the planet knows how to use it, you'd want to have a more monitored or secure editing process.