Why do ISPs still provide email?

FWIW; I've seen inside a few large ISP mail deployments, but I speak for myself in my comments here and not my employer (etc etc etc).

Why do ISPs provide email? Because a huge percentage of customers use it, and want it.

I personally don't (I have my own domain, and use Google apps), and know very few people who do, but lots and lots of customers still use it. I can't get into numbers for obvious reasons, but it's seen as being incredibly important, up to and including in the CxO layer, and a lot of money gets spent on supplying it and improving it.

Oddly enough netbooks exist, or at the other extreme you've got 64 CPUs and 256GB of RAM but only crappy 2000era Matrox graphics. Neither of those, and a pile of other cases in between (eg. desktop with Intel graphics), are going to be able to do much or anything to accelerate the graphics in a window manager so there should be a fallback that doesn't need a GPU. If the fallback is handing over to something else like fluxbox, fine, that's better than the current situation.

Eh? I bought literally the cheapest netbook I could, and its GPU is more than capable of making GNOME3 perfectly smooth.

If you want a fallback for non-GPU, there's no reason it has to be part of the GNOME stack - LXDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, etc - all perfectly reasonable fallbacks that you can select during login.

Or not host it because it's disrespectful to the guy *in* the video, and his family?

This wasn't a "oops, I didn't know I was stealing...sorry!" case...this was a "you can't prove s**t, BRING IT" case...and so they brought it. Case closed.

I don't think anybody here is arguing about guilt here, I think the thing to remember is paying over $200k in fines for torrenting one album is just fucking stupid and shouldn't be allowed in the first place. If the judgement was for $9250 overall rather than per song, this wouldn't be news.

The embedded IP address is the IP address of the server you're connected to. IP addresses are not personal information. The account name is not personal. If I follow this logic your email address is personal information, and so is your license plate?

Yes, I consider those things my personal details, along with my street address, phone number, bank account number, etc. etc.

What I'd really like to hear is for a gay marriage advocate to explain to me why polygamy should be illegal yet gay marriage should be legal.

Why does it matter if polygamy is legal? That's a different discussion that everyone will have different opinions on, and can be dealt with without entwining it with same-sex marriage. Let each be debated on its own merits.

Without specifically addressing your example, I'd like to say that I (as a sysadmin, who has been running v6 servers for ~3 years) MUCH prefer v6 addresses.

Let's take 2001:44b8:8020:ff00::84. I remember that one off the top of my head, as it happens. And, actually, I remember a LOT of the v6 addresses for servers I look after, off the top of my head. Why? Because they make sense.

2001:44b8::/32 belongs to the organisation I currently work for. "80" is always in there for our Adelaide datacentres. (b0 for Sydney, c0 for Melbourne, etc). Different prefixes are allocated for customer use. "20" is because it's the second DC (Our primary DC is 8060, aka ADL6). :ff00: designates a VLAN interface - :ffxx: VLANs are all ones for Systems Infrastructure. ::84? Primary DNS resolver. ::85 is a secondary. Other system types have other common IP groupings.

The IPv4 address is 203.16.214.237. Utterly meaningless in comparison.

In other instances, I can recognise at a glance that something is part of a particular VLAN behind a particular ASA. IPs can finally actually have meaning beyond just squeezing them in. Not to mention the pain when you fill a /28, because new requirements popped up 6-12 months after the address-space was carved up...

The best part? It's not set in stone, there's plenty of address space for us to use a different scheme just by toggling a bit or two near the top of the address space.

PS. Of course this is all my opinion, not my employer's, yada yada :-)

Secondly, with the focus on protecting the value of the internet rights alone they are missing two other opportunities - namely the chance to get non-Telstra subscribers to have access, and secondly the chance to get more people overall to watch the sport. More eyes is more advertising, more merchandise and more members - and possibly more gambling revenue too.

I really doubt that anyone using Optus' service has no alternative means of watching the show later.

I suspect the AFL's involvement is more to ensure that Telstra pay again next year, rather than losing out on the $$ from the streaming contract.

oblig. disclaimer: I work at a carrier in .au, but not one involved in this case. This is my personal opinion. Some settling of contents may have occurred during transit.

Works offline too (my netbook has a full checkout, incl. history).

Only real downsides:
  * Doesn't work natively on my iPhone
  * I have to remember to push/pull when I make changes (but even here, I just have to manually merge changes - nothing is "lost")

Git + GPG + a GPG-VIM plugin.

I use "vim" to edit my password file as if it is plain-text; git pull/commit/push to make changes to it.

If I need to roll back, I check out an older copy of the file.

1: Have kids, then it'll be natural for both of you to be up regularly, and nobody will mind the occasional night-time waking that you get paid for.

2: Your S.O. will learn to sleep through it, and you'll learn to react faster to silence the alarm.

3: Fix your systems and monitoring to wake you up only when it's more important. (eg., use a different alert threshold for non-daylight hours, use email-only alerts where you can, etc).

I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup...

Have you tried (say) Calibre's conversions? I've thrown random HTML files at it to create MOBI-format eBooks for my Kindle, and it's done a brilliant job, with no twiddling needed at all in most cases.

I'm guessing the main haters are sysadmins, who see threats to their importance and way of working.

Spoken like a true developer ;-)

Developers need to get used to the idea of Operations, as much as the Ops folk need to get in bed with the dev side of things.

Devs and Ops have traditionally led very different lives, and it's that schism that's really made DevOps-style movements so hard (and important).

As a random example - Ops people are typically on call, and get woken up (automatically by a monitoring system) because disk space on server 'x' filled up. Yet much of the time, it's the application's fault - and the sysadmin then spends far too much time trying to get developers to think about disk space growth, data retention, etc - rather than the developer being across those operational concerns from day one, which in a DevOps-ified world they should be.

It's about trying to get both groups to work towards a common goal - and too many people on _both_ sides of the fence don't understand why the other side wants what they do.

(I'm an ex-developer sysadmin, FWIW).

My phone uses a dual core processor and 256MB of RAM and still can't reliably open my contacts list.

We have gone backwards since those days.

Ah, you need to turn the GUI on your phone off and start using it in 80x24 text-mode. I did that with mine, lightning fast now!

Has any commercial site since 2001 or so actually ever returned a 404 response to a non-existent page, rather than an arbitrary ad-happy landing page or redirect to the homepage?

You can serve a 404 response that includes content, which would be The Right Thing To Do to ensure happy users and happy crawler-bots.