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Argh! Typo again! I've got to cut down on the jellybeans. Try: this link.

The number of routers you'd need to network up every household at this speed would be phenominal, as each chassis has only a very limited number of connections. On the other hand, if you built a national backbone from these, say at 128 Tbits (not unreasonable - 32-64 fibres would not be expensive, and enough routers to load-balance and direct the data would not be inordinate), then built metropoliton networks for each town and city, at the 2-3 Tbit level (again, well within the capacity of these devices and well within what could be sensibly installed, run and maintained), and finally ran 1 Gigabit lines to each house, you could have a genuine broadband network.

(As a totally pointless exercise, I sketched out, for myself, a crude network map, based on this design, and costed it. The numbers look like a Windows serial number, but that's probably still pocket-money for Bill Gates.)

you forgot:

and one for playing games

Read: http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/

But yes, IMHO, Win9x and NT both have their places in our multi-os world =). That place is, of course, in the dumpster (tounge-in-cheek).

Serriously, Win9x is the platform for which a distressing number of games are targeted. I don't know that this is because it's particularly well tailored for this purpose, or if it's the result of driver availablity and that ubiquitous DirectX standard.

-rt
======
Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
and CRUISE for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!!

...would love to see some of the best coders and operating systems people put together a new OS from scratch using the latest techniques.

It's been done: Plan 9

Still, on a slightly lighter note, here is some stuff on the other problem that Africa faces beyond software and hardware costs which is connectivity. If you don't have a pipe then your computing options are extremely limited. If you look at The Project for Information Access and Connectivity (especially the Internet Status at Feasibility Study Universities table) you will see that most large universities are still trying to get by on a 64k (or worse) internet connection. Not totally optimal.

However, there does seem to be quite a strong move to address this problem, namely the Africa One submarine fibre optic cable project. This is a 30,000 km fibre-optic ring that will encircle the continent "by the year 2000" (I don't know of the current status although it is seems that Lucent is now involved) with 32 main pipes from the ring into coastal landing points.

Once this system is in place and local governments (hopefully) see the benefits of extending the pipes in-land then we should see a massive increase in the African Internet population and yes I am pretty sure that Linux will be one of the technologies that makes this possible.

www.lucent.com

No compatible devices? AirPort is fully 802.11 compliant.

FireWire works with basically every digital camcorder out there.

Whoops ... I apologize for making an assertion regarding range based on anecdotal information. The Lucent sales rep says 30 miles -- but I am scouring Lucent's site for anything that even comes close to that.

Basically to extend the range of either BreezeCom or Lucent Orinoco technology you need a reflective external antenna that has been aligned to point directly towards the central omnidirectional antenna.

One provider claiming to be nearing a working 30 mile range is MidCoast.net. From other sources, including ISP Planet the more typical cell size is based on line-of-site, approximately five miles with optimal base antenna placement.

Again I offer my apology for posting anecdotal information.

And it routes then, I strongly suspect, with one of these.

You're saying it's basically just an automated patch-panel for individual wavelengths within a multi-wavelength network, right ?

Wavestar is a technology being developed by Lucent technologies that uses Wave division Multiplexing to transmit data over a fiber at 400Gbits/second. Check this out for more information. Granted, it's FOR SONET/SDH, which means that to do IP you have to do IP over ATM and then put the ATM signal over SONET, but it still blows 80Gbits out of the water.

A sure sign that there is more good on the 'net than evil!

Lucent to merge with INS for $3.7 billion

There are several technical solutions available to stop yahoo (or any other site), in their tracks. these guys run an anonymizing proxy, as do these people. Of course, you also have several CGI proxies out there too, but I don't have the URL's offhand. lucent also ran a proxy, but it has since been discontinued. Freedom now has the functionality - currently free, but will eventually be fee based.

In short, the moral of the story is - if you want anonymity... you need to make a meager attempt at getting it. But not much more - there's plenty of us out there willing to thumb people like yahoo and their court odors (or should that be orders?)

.

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I checked on running a T1 to my house and the companies I've talked to tell me they won't do it because such broadband is not a "Residential" service. Well fuck them. Lets get together and use some of these babies to build our own network. Since they only have a range of a few kilometers (but apparently up to 10gbps speeds) we can use high speed DSL or some other glue at the edges of the areas where we can't find similarly inclined geeks to set up links. This would be the credit union to the ISP's banks, almost entirely owned by the users setting them up.

The Lucent 400G is shipping and it transmits 3.2 terabit/sec!

There was a press release earlier this year about EPAC (the current version of PAC) being made G2-compatible, i.e. you could play a PAC file on a RealPlayer just as you can an MP3, and apparently also stream it. I don't know if it's a reality now, since I'd be hard-pressed to find, download, or stream a PAC file. I think there's also some Liquid Audio sort of PAC clients out there, but I can't remember any of the relevant URLs.

--

Here's some info from '98

Landor Associates, the consultancy responsible for the
Lucent coffee stain, rides again. Great. Oh, and what's with
the pale-blue color scheme? I thought I opened
Sun's web page by mistake :)

Sun gets my Logo Of Logos vote, followed by IBM.

--ac

raul's Debian logo
Lucent logo
Inferno logo