amongst other things...
..is a 62 year old monk, who sings in a metal band (link includes some footage). Now for the part just for the non-believers in the power of metal; Brother Cesare does it solely "to convert people to life, to understand life, to grab hold of life, to savour it and enjoy it. Full stop". How awesome is that?
Bandwidth throttling, or packet shaping, is becoming a more common feature that many ISPs give you, the consumer, for free. This is killing the planet. Bear with me and you'll see sense.
During UK working hours, and peak times in the evening many will see traffic being shaped (and these periods are being increased). Effectively this means that the only period where any legal and unhindered downloading can occur is between the hours of midnight and 9am. At the company I work for, we all work from home - which means pulling down ISOs and other media from companies like Microsoft, etc. during the day - which we can't do any more without the line being throttled. During the day this kills us as our VoIP phone system can get stuttery, connections to servers becomes unreliable or you get poor responsiveness.
This now increasingly means that I'm keeping PCs on during the night to get the stuff I need. For our small company multiply this by 3. Now take into account illegal downloads and the population of the UK. Now multiply this across the world.
I'd be willing to bet that the environmental impact of upgrading the infrastructure to the home would be less than that caused by the number of computers eating electricity.
So, ISPs - Stop killing the little baby penguins.
Those of you who also have the fun of looking after ISA 2006, maybe interested in knowing that ISA 2006 SP1 is out and hit the MS download site yesterday. There are mostly fixes, but two new features did stand out to me - the "Traffic Simulator" and the "Configuration Change Tracking". In our customer's environment these could be exceptionally handy, as multiple people do have access to ISA's console, and documenting alterations are sometimes somewhat lax.
If you're going to install it on your box(es), as with all ISA updates you'll need to becareful installing it. The service pack does stop the ISA services and requires a reboot - which means dropping network connections. I've not had the pleasure of to personally testing it on a virtual machine yet, but I'd be willing to bet that it doesn't restart the ISA server before that reboot.
Thomas Shinder, who we affectionately refer to as Roger Moore at work, wrote "a few" words on all of the new features (from his point of view), along with an extended tutorial on the new web publishing rule test feature. If you're looking after ISA at all, it's definately worth at least skimming through the first bits to get an idea of what's coming.
I'm liking XCache. "It does exactly what it says on the tin", and all from the people who brought the world LigHTTPD. And that makes me wonder. Should I be taking a long hard look at Apache HTTPD?
