I was very impressed with the high end Sony laptops of 2004 - until two people I know who had them started having to send them in for repairs. And send them in for two weeks at a time! You'd think service would be better for a $5k laptop.
There are several community wireless networks that do very well and the one in seattle is larger than this if you count all the hotspot's and their square footage of coverage.
You're saying that Seattle Wireless has over 700 square miles of coverage? I find that pretty hard to believe.
Aside from your personal issues with Geoff Huston, don't you think he's right?
I'd say he's spot on, which is why even though the networks I manage are present at an exchange, we buy transit from a larger upstream provider. That way, if our peering arrangements go away, we're not fucked.
Cogent and Level3 are playing a game of chicken. See Bill Norton's "Art of Peering". I'm surprised his work hasn't come up in this discussion yet. The larger organization (or the one with better sales/PR, deeper pockets, or larger gonads) will win.
"Meanwhile, DSL is NOT available where I live in relatively Suburban NJ (not rural) approximately 20 miles outside New York City. My house was built in 1995 and my parents' house was built sometime before 1895, and I would have expected that I could get it first."
There was a brief time in the 1990s when neighborhoods and apartment buildings were served via fibre to the curb - with head-end equipment completely incompatible with DSL. The equipment works just fine with voice, the last mile or inch is nice clean copper that will work fine with DSL, but the critical backhaul bit isn't right. It will likely take a pile of mini-DSLAMs to get your neighborhood up and running, and the telco might not see value in doing it. On the upside, you may be the first in your area to get ADSL2.
On the topic, the ZyXel phone doesn't do too well with G.711. Documentation recommends g.729a, and for a good reason. I have been using one for the better part of a year now, and performance (over my symmetric 10mbps link to home) was abominable using the 64kbps codec - I think the phone just couldn't handle it. It is passable using g.729a, but it's still nothing special.
No kidding. The one SIP account limit is a real bummer for me, esp as another hard-wired ZyXel VoIP phone supports two. And its clock runs fast. And typing in WEP keys on the numeric keypad is no fun at all. If it weren't a free eval unit, I'd be pissed. (have been using it almost a year now)
The hype has definitely outpaced reality. I attended a talk by Gordon Antonello (chair of the WiMAX Forum technical group) yesterday and failed to learn anything new or interesting.
Some of the government types in attendance asked the (typically non-techie) question "how fast does it go" - and of course the answer was "it depends". Since WiMAX allows for channel sizes of 3.5, 7, and 10MHz, in both TDD and FDD configurations (TDD resulting in one shared channel for half-duplex communications, FDD giving a dedicated channel for send and one for receive)
In the end, the answer is, using the 7MHz channel *2 in FDD configuration with licensed spectrum, Line of sight, external powered terminal, will get you 34mbs full-duplex wire speed.
In order for a carrier to make money with this, they will want to load 340 users of E1 type bandwidth (2mbps FD), oversubscribed at 20:1.
As for NLOS applications, nothing is going to happen in the 3.5GHz band that WiMAX is initially targeting. It doesn't have the penetration of the lower frequency bands and won't go through house walls or trees, let alone give you service inside a steel and concrete office building.
PoE (802.3af) is incredibly useful in for business deployments of video cameras and wifi access points, not to mention mini-switches and outdoor wireless bridge equipment. You can even power a laser link with PoE. It makes life easier for those averse to paying out huge amounts of cash to have an electrician come in and put in new outlets. I've been playing with PoE splitters recently to power non PoE gear at 5 & 12V DC - the splitters are $35 ea and are switchable between voltages.
I didn't know anyone took this newspaper seriously. Hopefully no one out there thinks of it as having balanced reporting on politics. Even the staunchest of Young Republicans knows it was founded by Rev. Moon in order to be a conservative foil to the Washington Post.
There's been research that shows that people who use typing a lot in their lives do not develop RSI in any greater percentage than in those who do not.
That's funny. I'd like to see that research. Or any reference you could provide.
I've been typing away at a PC for a few hours a day for the last fifteen years. It wasn't until I started binge coding (8-10 hours a day) in 2002 that I began to develop RSI. By the end of 2002 I was wearing ice packs on my arms halfway through the day, and mixing painkillers in my coffee. One month I emptied every first aid kit in the building of cold packs quicker than they could replace them.
I've since left that situation, and am back to 2-3 hours a day. RSI gone, of course. But I really think that a better keyboard arrangement would have helped.
The poster claims: Soon, a large portion of New York's yellow cars will also be "green."
I would counter with an article I read in June in the Times:
In summary, the only push for green taxis so far has been a trio of operators who purchased discount medallions from the city and then couldn't use them b/c there were no hybrids approved as taxis.
Hybrid Taxis Encounter Catch-22 Of Regulation
By SEWELL CHAN (NYT) 989 words Late Edition - Final , Section B , Page 1 , Column 5
"Last October, New York City officials held a special auction of 27 heavily discounted taxi medallions that could be used only with cabs powered by natural gas or by a combination of gasoline and electricity.... Eighteen of the licenses were sold, at an average price of $222,743, one-third less... "
The infrastructure invested in the current NYC yellow taxi fleet, which happens to be almost exclusively Ford Crown Victoria, is not small. Savings on Petrol will not offset the costs of changing vehicles and support infrastructure. While the poster says "soon", I don't see "a large portion" of cabs going green before 2010.
Then, pay three bucks to send the letter by certified mail with return receipt.
And don't even bother leaving your chair! Not meaning to sound like a commercial, but US Postal Service NetPost allows one to send certified mail online.:-) They take text or a word document in a secure web page, then send it to a printer somewhere in meatspace and drop it in the mail for you.
I used this service a number of times in chasing my health insurance provider (fucked up payments), mortgage company (forgot to pay property taxes), and even the City of Boston (do they do anything right?).
I always thought that most countries should those days invest a non-negligeable part of their cultur budget to set up huge on-line databases.Encyclopedia of New Zealand for a good example. They are two years in to a ten year project sponsored by the Ministry of Culture to populate an online resource with as much information as they can.
even Mark Twain claims to have seen one more than six feet long and weighing 250 pounds in the Mississippi River. (How he managed to weigh it is not recorded ^_-).
If you're really skeptical, visit the natural history museum at the University of Kansas to see skeletons and pictures of catfish taken (by hand by divers) in the Kansas River just a hundred years ago.
Hope NexTel have better luck with their IPWireless deployment than Woosh Wireless have had in New Zealand.
While UMTS TD-CDMA has great potential, it just hasn't worked right in NZ, with average end-user latency of 250ms - just over the air. Add another 200ms to get to a website in the US (or another 250ms to get to another Woosh user) and it's like using satellite.
Upstream bandwidth has been reported at a paltry 38-64kbps, while download has not fared much better, averaging 256kbps. I have used several Woosh branded IPWireless modems myself and my results have been similar.
I understand their was a deployment in South Africa that resulted in a class-action lawsuit of customers against their ISP due to performance issues. This was discussed on the ISP-Wireless list about nine months ago.
I wish IPWireless the best of luck, but so far the performance of their kit has not impressed me.
No other ISPs, as far as I know, have their own cable linking Wellington and Auckland.
You've neglected to consider BCL, who have 4x 155mbps DMR up and down the two islands. That's easily enough capacity to handle all of NZ's Intraweb south of Auckland at this point in time. Since they're a State Owned Enterprise, they can't exactly tell Telecom to fuck off if Telecom comes to them asking for redundant capacity.
Even if Telecom was peered with other ISPs they would still have overloaded so much traffic onto TelstraClear's network that it would probally slow to a crawl.
You've also failed to consider the capacity of Telstra's network. Fibre is fibre, and when you have a pair of bundles of fibre running up and down the country, it's not terribly difficult to come up with more gigabits per second than an Advanced Network would know what to do with, let alone the pittance of commercial web traffic this country sees.
And what if something goes wrong in North Korea? Or if Nigeria destabilizes?
Still no draft, eh?
The US is in a situation like a particular South Pacific telecoms provider who had an incident this week, resulting in the cutting off of that nation's capital and shutting down their stock market.
Their multi-path redundant fibre network suddenly lost its redundancy due to a rat chewing through some fibre on a bridge. As they were fixing that fault, a post-hole digger on the other side of the country knocked out the remaining path. Oops.
Having a huge, highly trained army of willing volunteers on standby is a great thing. Does the US have such a beast today?
One of the problems of current databases when is that a typical relational database doesn't have enough dimensions. Designing a table to store data is trivial - but what happens when you need to know the intersection of X and Y at time Z?
This is a fairly common question in data warehousing: What is the data today, what did it look like yesterday, last week, and last year?
I have seen it worked around in silly ways (snapshot and rename a table every day/week/month) and more clever ways (use separate transaction tables to record changes), but never in a particularly elegant way.
Wiser colleagues whispered to me the dirty answer "object relational" and scurried away to their dens of Rob Zombie and J2EE. I never got my head around object relational databases before leaving that world, and so am left to ponder papers from IDC with statements like this one:
"putting object extensions on RDBMSs is tantamount to adding stereo radios and global navigation systems to horse-drawn carriages"
Ouch, is that a swipe at Oracle? Seems that as far back as 1997 pundits have said that the future is in ODBMS, and not RDBMS or ORDBMS. Hmm...
"If you get a copy of KPT which you have not paid for but you go ahead and use it on your home machine to make hobby files... fine. However... if you use our plugins to make up commercial art which you are charging a client for then PAY us for our tools."
Thank God that era of horrible "design" is over, and most websites are no longer littered by gigantic gooey jpgs from Photoshop and KPT! Sure, it was fun at the time, but so are a lot of things we should be ashamed of. Youthful indescretion? I didn't inhale? I did not have se^h^h
10 years would be a bit of an exaggeration, as the 200mhz Pentium didn't even release until June of 1996. Perhaps you mean an eight year old laptop?
I have a fantastic 200MHz laptop from IBM (Thinkpad 770) I purchased new in 1997 that still gets 2+ hours of use every day. It runs Win2k @ Office 2k just fine.
It is however on its 3rd LiIon battery , and the current one just holds charge for 1 hour of use.
Perhaps someone should tell them that a company called Free offers access up to 20 Megabits for 30/month in France.
Ah yes, but can this ADSL do 20mbps upstream? The SpeakEasy product can be configured for up to 4mbps upstream.
Asymmetric connections are fine for the home, but get a dozen designers on an ADSL circuit and note how they whinge when thier 25MB documents take ten minutes to upload to the print shop next door.
WiMAX in its first incarnation (with fixed base stations for business use) will be a competitor with T1/E1 services, not with ADSL. (Of course it can't compete with a well run metro fibre network)
In a few years (yes, years - maybe three or four of them in the largest cities) we can expect WiMAX to take over for the GPRS or CDMA cards in our laptops.
The Boy Scouts, or any private group for that matter, may exclude whomever they so choose, for any reason. This particular group does not believe that homosexuality or atheism are acceptable lifestyles.
And thus allowing (or encouraging) your cub scout or boy scout to wear his uniform to school on meeting days (very common practice when I was young) would be sending a pretty direct message to any gay or atheist classmate of his.
Kind of like sending your kid to school with a swastika armband, or perhaps a while robe with a pointy hood?
Sure we all have the right to assemble, but Boy Scouts (of America) in many instances goes beyond assembly and broaches affiliation in their relationships with churches, towns, veterans groups, and public schools.
Slashdot Mirror
You could try this one. 20% more expensive than your Sony, but certainly better built.
c tID=2528
http://panasonic.com.au/products/details.cfm?obje
I was very impressed with the high end Sony laptops of 2004 - until two people I know who had them started having to send them in for repairs. And send them in for two weeks at a time! You'd think service would be better for a $5k laptop.
There are several community wireless networks that do very well and the one in seattle is larger than this if you count all the hotspot's and their square footage of coverage.
You're saying that Seattle Wireless has over 700 square miles of coverage? I find that pretty hard to believe.
Aside from your personal issues with Geoff Huston, don't you think he's right?
I'd say he's spot on, which is why even though the networks I manage are present at an exchange, we buy transit from a larger upstream provider. That way, if our peering arrangements go away, we're not fucked.
Cogent and Level3 are playing a game of chicken. See Bill Norton's "Art of Peering". I'm surprised his work hasn't come up in this discussion yet. The larger organization (or the one with better sales/PR, deeper pockets, or larger gonads) will win.
"Meanwhile, DSL is NOT available where I live in relatively Suburban NJ (not rural) approximately 20 miles outside New York City. My house was built in 1995 and my parents' house was built sometime before 1895, and I would have expected that I could get it first."
There was a brief time in the 1990s when neighborhoods and apartment buildings were served via fibre to the curb - with head-end equipment completely incompatible with DSL. The equipment works just fine with voice, the last mile or inch is nice clean copper that will work fine with DSL, but the critical backhaul bit isn't right. It will likely take a pile of mini-DSLAMs to get your neighborhood up and running, and the telco might not see value in doing it. On the upside, you may be the first in your area to get ADSL2.
On the topic, the ZyXel phone doesn't do too well with G.711. Documentation recommends g.729a, and for a good reason. I have been using one for the better part of a year now, and performance (over my symmetric 10mbps link to home) was abominable using the 64kbps codec - I think the phone just couldn't handle it. It is passable using g.729a, but it's still nothing special.
No kidding. The one SIP account limit is a real bummer for me, esp as another hard-wired ZyXel VoIP phone supports two. And its clock runs fast. And typing in WEP keys on the numeric keypad is no fun at all. If it weren't a free eval unit, I'd be pissed. (have been using it almost a year now)
The hype has definitely outpaced reality. I attended a talk by Gordon Antonello (chair of the WiMAX Forum technical group) yesterday and failed to learn anything new or interesting.
Some of the government types in attendance asked the (typically non-techie) question "how fast does it go" - and of course the answer was "it depends". Since WiMAX allows for channel sizes of 3.5, 7, and 10MHz, in both TDD and FDD configurations (TDD resulting in one shared channel for half-duplex communications, FDD giving a dedicated channel for send and one for receive)
In the end, the answer is, using the 7MHz channel *2 in FDD configuration with licensed spectrum, Line of sight, external powered terminal, will get you 34mbs full-duplex wire speed.
In order for a carrier to make money with this, they will want to load 340 users of E1 type bandwidth (2mbps FD), oversubscribed at 20:1.
As for NLOS applications, nothing is going to happen in the 3.5GHz band that WiMAX is initially targeting. It doesn't have the penetration of the lower frequency bands and won't go through house walls or trees, let alone give you service inside a steel and concrete office building.
PoE (802.3af) is incredibly useful in for business deployments of video cameras and wifi access points, not to mention mini-switches and outdoor wireless bridge equipment. You can even power a laser link with PoE. It makes life easier for those averse to paying out huge amounts of cash to have an electrician come in and put in new outlets. I've been playing with PoE splitters recently to power non PoE gear at 5 & 12V DC - the splitters are $35 ea and are switchable between voltages.
From a Washington Times Article
I didn't know anyone took this newspaper seriously. Hopefully no one out there thinks of it as having balanced reporting on politics. Even the staunchest of Young Republicans knows it was founded by Rev. Moon in order to be a conservative foil to the Washington Post.
There's been research that shows that people who use typing a lot in their lives do not develop RSI in any greater percentage than in those who do not.
That's funny. I'd like to see that research. Or any reference you could provide.
I've been typing away at a PC for a few hours a day for the last fifteen years. It wasn't until I started binge coding (8-10 hours a day) in 2002 that I began to develop RSI. By the end of 2002 I was wearing ice packs on my arms halfway through the day, and mixing painkillers in my coffee. One month I emptied every first aid kit in the building of cold packs quicker than they could replace them.
I've since left that situation, and am back to 2-3 hours a day. RSI gone, of course. But I really think that a better keyboard arrangement would have helped.
JB
The poster claims: Soon, a large portion of New York's yellow cars will also be "green."
... Eighteen of the licenses were sold, at an average price of $222,743, one-third less... "
I would counter with an article I read in June in the Times:
In summary, the only push for green taxis so far has been a trio of operators who purchased discount medallions from the city and then couldn't use them b/c there were no hybrids approved as taxis.
Hybrid Taxis Encounter Catch-22 Of Regulation
By SEWELL CHAN (NYT) 989 words
Late Edition - Final , Section B , Page 1 , Column 5
"Last October, New York City officials held a special auction of 27 heavily discounted taxi medallions that could be used only with cabs powered by natural gas or by a combination of gasoline and electricity.
The infrastructure invested in the current NYC yellow taxi fleet, which happens to be almost exclusively Ford Crown Victoria, is not small. Savings on Petrol will not offset the costs of changing vehicles and support infrastructure. While the poster says "soon", I don't see "a large portion" of cabs going green before 2010.
Then, pay three bucks to send the letter by certified mail with return receipt.
:-) They take text or a word document in a secure web page, then send it to a printer somewhere in meatspace and drop it in the mail for you.
And don't even bother leaving your chair! Not meaning to sound like a commercial, but US Postal Service NetPost allows one to send certified mail online.
http://www.usps.com/mailingonline/faq.htm
I used this service a number of times in chasing my health insurance provider (fucked up payments), mortgage company (forgot to pay property taxes), and even the City of Boston (do they do anything right?).
work with microwave communications over MPLS networks daily
;-)
Wouldn't it be easier to work with MPLS over microwave networks?
Someone needs to learn the OSI model.
Indeed.
link: http://www.teara.govt.nz/
I always thought that most countries should those days invest a non-negligeable part of their cultur budget to set up huge on-line databases.Encyclopedia of New Zealand for a good example. They are two years in to a ten year project sponsored by the Ministry of Culture to populate an online resource with as much information as they can.
even Mark Twain claims to have seen one more than six feet long and weighing 250 pounds in the Mississippi River. (How he managed to weigh it is not recorded ^_-).
If you're really skeptical, visit the natural history museum at the University of Kansas to see skeletons and pictures of catfish taken (by hand by divers) in the Kansas River just a hundred years ago.
Hope NexTel have better luck with their IPWireless deployment than Woosh Wireless have had in New Zealand.
While UMTS TD-CDMA has great potential, it just hasn't worked right in NZ, with average end-user latency of 250ms - just over the air. Add another 200ms to get to a website in the US (or another 250ms to get to another Woosh user) and it's like using satellite.
Upstream bandwidth has been reported at a paltry 38-64kbps, while download has not fared much better, averaging 256kbps. I have used several Woosh branded IPWireless modems myself and my results have been similar.
I understand their was a deployment in South Africa that resulted in a class-action lawsuit of customers against their ISP due to performance issues. This was discussed on the ISP-Wireless list about nine months ago.
I wish IPWireless the best of luck, but so far the performance of their kit has not impressed me.
No other ISPs, as far as I know, have their own cable linking Wellington and Auckland.
You've neglected to consider BCL, who have 4x 155mbps DMR up and down the two islands. That's easily enough capacity to handle all of NZ's Intraweb south of Auckland at this point in time. Since they're a State Owned Enterprise, they can't exactly tell Telecom to fuck off if Telecom comes to them asking for redundant capacity.
Even if Telecom was peered with other ISPs they would still have overloaded so much traffic onto TelstraClear's network that it would probally slow to a crawl.
You've also failed to consider the capacity of Telstra's network. Fibre is fibre, and when you have a pair of bundles of fibre running up and down the country, it's not terribly difficult to come up with more gigabits per second than an Advanced Network would know what to do with, let alone the pittance of commercial web traffic this country sees.
There is not going to be a draft
And what if something goes wrong in North Korea? Or if Nigeria destabilizes?
Still no draft, eh?
The US is in a situation like a particular South Pacific telecoms provider who had an incident this week, resulting in the cutting off of that nation's capital and shutting down their stock market.
Their multi-path redundant fibre network suddenly lost its redundancy due to a rat chewing through some fibre on a bridge. As they were fixing that fault, a post-hole digger on the other side of the country knocked out the remaining path. Oops.
Having a huge, highly trained army of willing volunteers on standby is a great thing. Does the US have such a beast today?
One of the problems of current databases when is that a typical relational database doesn't have enough dimensions. Designing a table to store data is trivial - but what happens when you need to know the intersection of X and Y at time Z?
This is a fairly common question in data warehousing: What is the data today, what did it look like yesterday, last week, and last year?
I have seen it worked around in silly ways (snapshot and rename a table every day/week/month) and more clever ways (use separate transaction tables to record changes), but never in a particularly elegant way.
Wiser colleagues whispered to me the dirty answer "object relational" and scurried away to their dens of Rob Zombie and J2EE. I never got my head around object relational databases before leaving that world, and so am left to ponder papers from IDC with statements like this one:
"putting object extensions on RDBMSs is tantamount to adding stereo radios and global navigation systems to horse-drawn carriages"
Ouch, is that a swipe at Oracle? Seems that as far back as 1997 pundits have said that the future is in ODBMS, and not RDBMS or ORDBMS. Hmm...
"If you get a copy of KPT which you have not paid for but you go ahead and use it on your home machine to make hobby files... fine. However... if you use our plugins to make up commercial art which you are charging a client for then PAY us for our tools."
Thank God that era of horrible "design" is over, and most websites are no longer littered by gigantic gooey jpgs from Photoshop and KPT! Sure, it was fun at the time, but so are a lot of things we should be ashamed of. Youthful indescretion? I didn't inhale? I did not have se^h^h
10 years would be a bit of an exaggeration, as the 200mhz Pentium didn't even release until June of 1996. Perhaps you mean an eight year old laptop?
I have a fantastic 200MHz laptop from IBM (Thinkpad 770) I purchased new in 1997 that still gets 2+ hours of use every day. It runs Win2k @ Office 2k just fine.
It is however on its 3rd LiIon battery , and the current one just holds charge for 1 hour of use.
120mm - I have one in an aluminum Lian Li case. Nice and quiet with good airflow, if you don't mind having a gigantic PC case.
Perhaps someone should tell them that a company called Free offers access up to 20 Megabits for 30/month in France.
Ah yes, but can this ADSL do 20mbps upstream? The SpeakEasy product can be configured for up to 4mbps upstream.
Asymmetric connections are fine for the home, but get a dozen designers on an ADSL circuit and note how they whinge when thier 25MB documents take ten minutes to upload to the print shop next door.
WiMAX in its first incarnation (with fixed base stations for business use) will be a competitor with T1/E1 services, not with ADSL. (Of course it can't compete with a well run metro fibre network)
In a few years (yes, years - maybe three or four of them in the largest cities) we can expect WiMAX to take over for the GPRS or CDMA cards in our laptops.
The Boy Scouts, or any private group for that matter, may exclude whomever they so choose, for any reason. This particular group does not believe that homosexuality or atheism are acceptable lifestyles.
And thus allowing (or encouraging) your cub scout or boy scout to wear his uniform to school on meeting days (very common practice when I was young) would be sending a pretty direct message to any gay or atheist classmate of his.
Kind of like sending your kid to school with a swastika armband, or perhaps a while robe with a pointy hood?
Sure we all have the right to assemble, but Boy Scouts (of America) in many instances goes beyond assembly and broaches affiliation in their relationships with churches, towns, veterans groups, and public schools.