There are legitimate reasons for asymetry on DSL and cable

On DSL upstream and downstream have to be given seperate frequency slices out of the limited bandwidth available on a typical phone pair (which lets not forget was only designed to carry voiceband). So you have to tradeoff upstream speed and downstream speed and for most users it makes more sense to tradeoff towards downstream. Having said that I do think it's scandalous that symetric services are insanely expensive compared to asymetric ones of comparable total bandwidth.

On cable the technical reasons are even greater, cable networks are designed for broadcasting TV with a high power transmitter broadcasting through the high-loss (due to the splitting/padding) network to a lot of receivers. Upstream traffic is going against the flow which means it has a lower acceptable transmit power and a lot more interference present at the receiver.

On the other hand with fiber the only reason for the asymetry is artifical crippling (making it harder to use P2P, run servers etc)

Depends on what you see as "the whole point of using a VPN".

Afaict there are three main reasons to use a VPN

1: you don't trust the provider of your internet connection
2: you need to access IP-locked resources on the internet
3: you need to access resources on a private network that is not directly reachable from the internet.

"Split tunnel" kills reason 1 and probablly also reason 2 (unless there is some complex routing configuration in place). It certainly does not kill reason 3 which is often the main reason for using a VPN.

On the other hand forcing everything down the VPN kills the ability to use resources on your local network (a PITA if you use a network printer) and means traffic to the internet is wastefully forced to take a roundabout route to it's destination.

From what I can gather both comcast and verizon bullied netflix into paid peering by refusing to expand peering with any carrier netflix used or tried to use as an upstream.

When netfllix paid up to comcast they got massive improvments in connectivity to comcast customers, when they paid up to verizon they didn't.

http://hardforum.com/showthrea...

I don't know about the amiga specifically but some computers have a memory backup battery mounted on the main PCB. If they leak and the leakage is not noticed and dealt with quickly it can cause severe damage to PCB traces which can be a nightmare to repair.

Until you have to deal with an old machine that has one of the buggy SATA1 controllers that falls over if you plug in a SATA2 drive.

Some drives had a jumper to force SATA1 mode but that has dissappeared on more modern drives.

AFAICT oil isn't such a big issue because it's routinely shipped around the world, so unless there is noone for russia to sell it's oil to oil sanctions between russia and europe won't change things much. Europe will pay slightly more, russia will get slightly less. Other countries and trasnportation companies will profit.

Gas is the big issue because it has traditionally been moved by pipeline. Moving it by ship requires special terminals to purify and liquify it and special ships to carry the cryogenic liquid. The US currently has a glut of gas but moving that gas to europe will mean the building of more LNG terminals and ships which takes time.

IIRC 10 years is the max on com/net/org

How it could happen is pretty simple, someone is working on a new service, they are in a hurry and just buy the domain with a company credit card or a small one time PO or whatever putting their individual work email address as the contact info. They register it for a few years, maybe even the maximum of 10. Maybe they set a reminder for themselves to renew it, maybe they don't bother as they think it unlikely the domain will stay in use that long.

The project grows in importance but noone notices that the domain behind it is associated with one employee, then that employee becomes an ex-employee and their email is shut down

The problem is what the customers purchased is generally a connection to the internet with no particular gaurantees about performance. If you want connections with service level agreements coverting performance to defined locations (e.g. major peering connections) you can get them but expect to pay a hell of a lot more than you would pay for a regular "broadband" connection.

Since they never agreed to provide any particular ammount of bandwidth in the first place there is little to stop them taking away some of the bandwidth they currently give to "best effort IP" to reallocate it to premium services. Whether they do that statically by creating fixed bandwidth channels or dynamically through prioritisation doesn't really make a fundamental difference.

When the "best effort IP" service is the entire service it's in the provider's interest to make it not suck so they retain customers. OTOH when they offer both "best effort IP" and premium services it's in their interests to make the "best effort IP" service suck so they can sell more premium services (which may or may not be IP based).

It exists, it's called JNG but support for it is poor :(

I'm sure i've seen bigger.

A 1080p frame in uncompressed RGB is about 6MB. Afaict PNG gets of the order of a 3x ratio on photographic data so we are probablly talking a couple of megs of png if someone lifts a frame from a 1080p video.

Unfortunately the intenet architecture doesn't handle short connections well. The TCP/IP stack doesn't know what the available bandwidth is so it has to be conservative initially. On high bandwidth but also high latency connections (e.g. user in europe, server in the USA or vice-versa) it often doesn't reach the full speed available before the transfer is over.

This is pretty meaningless without knowing what was on the desktop at the time.

In the early days of google+ there were reports of people losing their entire google account (not just google+) for signing up to google+ under something other than their real name. I can see why people would be reluctant to take that risk (however slight) with their main google account (throwaway accounts are another matter).

Yeah, you want/need a newer version of the core stuff and you get a new and supposedly improved GUI shoved down your throat.

It's hardly unique to windows, look at all the gnome2 users who got gnome3 shoved down their throat when they updated to to the new release of their linux distros.

Looks like the NUC has the same issue most high end arm boards do, only one ethernet port :( looks like it may be possible to add a minipcie card but only by butchering the case.

How small is small?

Once you go up to mini-itx there are loads of options but I sense that is rather bigger than you want to be.

The utilite standard and pro models (but not the value model) have dual ethernet but they are kinda pricy. Theres various hackable routers but they tend to be rather lacking in CPU power and storage (they make a Pi look postively high end by comparision)

The other option is to use an external USB ethernet adaptor.

I just did some googling and it seems here in the UK a full time gabage collector would make about £12K per year (though it's paid hourly and in practice it may be difficult to find full time work).

I'm just about to start a postdoc position on just under £30K per year.