Slashdot Mirror

chamilto0516 writes "Phil Windley, a nationally recognized expert in using information technology, drove up to the Univ. of Utah recently hear this years Organick Lecture by Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet. In his notes, Vint talks about, 'Where is the Science in CS?' He also goes on to talk about real potential trouble spots with the Internet, but there is a bit on Interplanetary Internet (IPN). Apparently, the flow control mechanism of TCP doesn't work well when the latency goes to 40 minutes."

Codeine writes "The Testimony of Mr. George Gilder to the Telecommunications Policy: A Look Ahead hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation strongly supports the idea [of] mandated 'open access' to the logical layers of the network, and it is embodied in a new legislative proposal by MCI, A Horizontal Leap Forward: Formulating a New Public Policy Framework Based on the Network Layers Model. The success of the layered model in the LAN environment, migrated to the WAN."

An anonymous reader writes "Net pioneer, Vint Cerf, talked this week about the space internet (the Interplanetary Internet), and an interesting 1994 April Fool's email he penned as a Request for Comment [1607]. The thread involves a reverse time capsule from the year 2023, but covers Cerf's side interests in Shakespeare. Since 2004 marks the 30th anniversary of publication of the first paper on the Internet, his views on the future of the net and Interplanetary Internet seem to have morphed somewhat into delay and disruption tolerant networking because of high demand for videoconferencing, Voice-Over IP, and multimedia."

alt_cognito asks: "Our company runs natural gas generators here in Novi MI and when the power went out we didn't miss a beat. Nine hours later, our telco blinked and our T1 service went down despite the lines being run to different locations and ISPs (UUNet, LDMI). Service did not return until power had returned to the upstream offices. I was under the impression that these locations would be run by similar power generation. How did your telco/ISP perform?"

Well, with all the hoopla concerning the EU approval of the Worldcom and MCI it appears that Britain's Cable and Wireless may buy the MCI network. While talks are still going on, the bid may be upwards of 2 billion US. Bloody bargain, if they ask me. Which they aren't, but...

Merger of the biggies, MCI and Worldcom has been approved by the EU. Sort of. In exchange for the approval, MCI will be forced to sell off all of their "internet" parts of the company. I wonder who determines what that is and what that isn't.

The European Union is blocking the 38$US billion merger/buyout of MCI and WorldCom it was reported. Not only is the EU perturbed about the potentially "too strong" grip over the Net backbone that the merger might make, but the US regulators are looking more closely into the merger, and GTE is raising a ruckus about the merger. GTE was one of the jilted suitors of MCI.

AT&T and MCI, amongst a host of other companies have agreed to work together to construct an underseas cable connecting the US and Southern Europe. The cable will cost about 236$ million, and will be operational by September of 1999. Once in place, this will effectively increase the bandwidth between these places by twenty-fold.