Microsoft isn't alone here. Several vendors are getting squirrely when it comes to Bluetooth support. 3Com had an actual products page for Bluetooth up until about a week ago. Now, the link just circles back to their home page. Intel took their Bluetooth info down somewhere before that.
I've been collecting links for Bluetooth under Linux for the last few weeks. Oddly, some of the information is going away as fast as new information is coming online. The good news, however, is that with Microsoft's latest move we will see Bluetooth for Linux support well before Bluetooth for Windows support at the kernel level. If Microsoft doesn't include support, it will be up to each individual vendor to come up with their own OS API implementation.
For people wanting to get more information on Bluetooth, there is a topsites list of links to information resources. Please, help to keep the Linux links high on the list.:)
Expect to see 2.4.4 sooner rather than later. 2.4.3 won't compile on an Alpha processor. The poor thing doesn't make it past 'init/main.c' with an error about conflicting types for 'pte_alloc' and 'pmd_alloc'.
My continuing battle to get a DEC AlphaStation working with a USB Quickcam and Zip drive will have to wait for another day.
In addition to the Axis page, I've tried to gather together as many links regarding Bluetooth running on Linux here. So far, there isn't a lot of material out there, but it's growing fast.
Re:Bluetooth - necessary in 802.11 world?
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 1
I apologize for not having a link for backup, but part of my online wanderings last week ran across mention that issues around Bluetooth in France and Japan had been settled. This is just conjecture, but it might have something to do with the power of the signal as much as the frequency it is operating on.
A quick online search ran across a number of articles with headlines such as "France legalizes Bluetooth". Here is one link talking about it. Hopefully, that settles the issue. I'm not sure what the current status of 802.11 in France is.
Just for the hell of it, here is another shameless plug for my Bluetooth on Linux information page.
Our favorite free operating system will be on the front line of new wireless technology.
Re:Bluetooth - necessary in 802.11 world?
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 1
Publications doing reviews of the IBM and Toshiba Bluetooth adapters have run them in close proximity to 802.11 equipment. Much to the reviewer's surprise the two sets of equipment ignored each other with no noticeable interference.
Neither product is always transmitting, so if both happen to transmit at the exact same time then each will look like RF noise to the other. In theory, if both systems were VERY busy this could be a problem. For the most part, this does not appear so.
I've bee trying to research these products as they pertain to Linux for the last week. Most the the fruits of this search are available in a web page of links and comments.
Re:Interoperability problems? Really??
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 1
Oddly, Intel took their main Bluetooth page down. The nearest thing I could find was their Personal Area Connectivity page, which mentions Bluetooth. I found this last week while researching links to build a page about Bluetooth with Linux implementations.
Personally, I think the Newton never recovered from Steve Jobs. Apple was ready to spin Newton off into it's own company when Jobs came back, pulled Newton back in, and then killed it. He had a bug up his backside for a long time against that product.
Re:They're for different things
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 1
Rix, do you (or anybody else) have a link for any information presented by this IBM guy? I'm putting together a web page of information on Bluetooth being used with Linux, and would be curious as to what IBM has to say. So far, the only information I have from them is a Bluetooth PC Card (PCMCIA) adapter that costs way too much.
I hope that someday we will see a truly viable open source alternative to MS Exchange. Exchange has some good concepts, but a horrible implementation. A portable, modular system could create a wonderful foundation for an information transfer, storage, and sharing architecture. Unfortunatlely, I don't see any serious efforts to create one at this time.
Broadband typically refers to running multiple frequencies over one wire (such as multiple channels on cable). Baseband is what twisted pair wire systems are usually classed as. Although, DSL is an odd beast being that the signal is being split into a low and high frequency range for voice and data.
I run the software on several servers. It runs at the lowest priority level possible, so any other work gets done first. The SETI software just scoops up all the leftover cycles. These servers have to be left running anyway, so there is no waste of power.
Let me tell you a story about Company A and Company B.
Both companies rely on ad revenue to pay their bills and keep their content available. In the beginning, both companies get the same amount of traffic for an equivalent product. Company A only uses banner ads with a click through rate that isn't even worth counting. Company B tries out a new form of presenting ads which get into a measurable percentage rate. For math, let's say they get ten times the click through rate as company A.
Half the viewers out there are Slashdot leftists who can't accept that the Internet is not a communist endeavor. These people boycot Company B and only use Company A.
As time goes, B has lost half it's traffic. This means that A is now getting 50% more traffic than it used to. B may only have half the traffic, but it has ten times the click through rate on it's remaining traffic which gives it a total of five times the click throughs than it had before using the new form of advertising. This means that B is now generating about 3-1/3 times the click through traffic as A (5 / 1.5).
As more time goes on, advertisers realize they get more bang for their buck with Company B than they received with Company A. A can no longer charge the same rates as B and sees their revenue drop. Eventually, A can't pay it's bills and goes out of business.
This isn't likely since advertisement is what pays for the company to put out content. If everyone used ad blocking techniques then many of the sites would have to go to a pay service or go out of business.
If the company uses the site to actually sell something, then you aren't liekly to run across advertisements to begin with. It's only sites that provide free services, such as web search, news, weather, and discussion forums, that rely on advertisement revenue to pay the bills. If you don't view their ads, they aren't paying their bills, so they won't miss you.
It is rather ironic that the Shuttle is delivering an antenna related to the one out of commission. Unfortunately, the electronics to drive the new Ku-Band antenna are onboard the lab module (Destiny) which isn't due to be delivered until January.
Later missions will have more and more redundant capability as station resources are delivered and activated. A good example of this will be when the stations airlock arrives and it won't be necessary to lower pressure in the entire shuttle, and seal off the station, every time a spacewalk is done.
I actually built a fully functioning Alpha system about 2-1/2 years ago for about $800. This machine was completely built using parts purchased from OnSale.com (now Egghead.com) and had a shopping list like what follows:
AlphaStation 233Mhz thin desktop machine - $300
17" monitor - $200
Extra 32MB RAM (64MB total) - $75
4GB SCSI HDD - $175
8x SCSI CD-ROM - $50
The individual prices may not be right, but I do remember the bottom line being about $800. My goal wasn't any major application, but to just have a "non-Wintel" machine at home. For that, it has worked wonderfully. Besides, it makes a cool conversation piece.
I'm sure this won't be popular due to the current mood of RedHat bashing, but it is worth pointing out that RedHat 7 comes with mod_ssl. RedHat also compiles the EAPI patch needed by mod_ssl directly into the apache package and all dependent services (such as PHP) are compiled with EAPI so that there are no package complaints.
This gives you a SSL enabled web server right out of the box (or off the wire) with RedHat.
Regarding the EAPI patch, a little background should be presented here. As mentioned earlier, Apache must be patched with EAPI (Extended API) in order to handle the SSL functions provided by mod_ssl. Other packages compiled with the Apache lib like PHP as a DSO module will complain loudly if you load them against a patched Apache when the module was compiled against unpatched libs. Because of this, you have to make sure that all your Apache related services are recompiled. RedHat's decision to include EAPI in their default Apache package simlifies this.
For a modular installation, mod_ssl is probably better being that you can turn an insecure server secure by adding a package rather than replacing an existing one. This gives you better consistency with configuration files and version control. In fact, the same configuration file can support the secure and insecure installs just by using some directives in the file.
One thing I'm curious about is if Apache 2.0 will have EAPI built in by default. This will help to avoid recompile problems like this in the future.
As for using mod_ssl, I've loaded it on several machines. Runs wonderfully. One of my machines has two secure virtual servers and four non-secure virtual servers. The only headache is that you can not do name based virtual hosting with SSL. This is a problem with SSL, not Apache, due to the point where SSL authentication and encryption takes place.
They are certainly still in production. I just received them as part of the 2000 US Mint Proof and Uncirculated coin sets that can be purchased from the US Mint.
Personally, I think they should be taken out of production. It's just as easy to carry two quarters as one half dollar. The fifty cent piece has about as much redundancy as a two dollar bill.
Well, Corel's stock is getting a nice price bounce. It closed at 3-11/16 but is now trading at about 7-1/8 in after hours. Can't wait to see what happens when the market opens in the morning.
Makes me really happy I held on to my Corel shares even when Linux started falling out of favor with the market. Of course, I miss when Corel was up over 30.
NIST encouraged competing cryptographers and the NSA (the world's largest employer of cryptographers and mathematicians) to critique the algorithms, building up a body of review that led to today's choice of the new standard.
I love this statement. Do you really think the NSA would tell the outside world if they discovered a weakness? It would be in ther best interest to sit on the knowledge so they can use it. Let everyone else out there be complacent that the data is secure while the NSA (and possibly some other trusted agencies) use it for monitoring.
I'm bloody well NOT spilling ANY info on *MY* friends to the institutional descendents of J. Edgar Hoover... or hell... nor to any other "law enforcement" type either.
If you despise this country, and it's security aparatus, so much, why are you still here? You are free to leave at any time. Unlike some countries, we don't force you to stay if you don't want to.
If you apply for a security clearance you are giving your permission for the background check. If you don't want people looking into your life, then you had better not sign on the bottom line.
It amazes me how people like to rag on our secuirty institutions such as the FBI, NSA, CIA, and NRO. Odds are, most of the people bitching have never had any direct dealings with these organizations. If these organizations didn't exist, we likely wouldn't have the freedom we do. Just as likely, Fidel Castro would be the provisional governor of the south-eastern quadrant of of North America.
Would you have rather of let the Seattle Space Needle be blown up last New Year? Would you have preferred to have seen all the bridges and tunnels in Manhattan blown up a few years ago? Wake up, these organizations are make up of Americans for the purpose of protecting Americans.
Granted, these organizations have not always been perfect in their motives and actions. However, this shortcoming has usually been a refletion of current administration policy. Who put that administration in place? We did! These organizations are a reflection of us and out own insecurities. These organizations are ultimately responsible to the same people who keep a handgun by the bed, a security system on the house, and an alarm on their car.
First, what it really is. Multicast on a local level uses a special range of IP addresses (class D addresses) that are mapped into NIC addresses using a sort of hash. Modern NIC cards have filters so they can listen in to only traffic sent to them or to a multicast address placed in the filter. This keeps the card from having to process every single packet on the network.
It is possible to route multicast traffic by tracking mulitcast group subcribership and TTL. With this, traffic will only go onto a branch of a network if someone is there to listen to it. That is the whole concept for multicast, elminating redundant or unneeded traffic streams.
The MBONE, or Multicast Backbone, is a way of tieing together networks running multicast traffic over a non-multicast capable intermediate provider (usually your ISP). MBONE works by creating tunnels through the unicast network to carry multicast traffic. It's very inefficient, but it was a way to bootstrap people up. MBONE should have been a temporary stopgap measure. It would have gone away once the service providers upgraded their equipment to support multicast routing. Unfortunately, that has never happened.
Next, a little background. I first saw multicast and MBONE demonstrated at Networld+Interop in 1994. The demo was casting a stereo quality radio signal. I fell in love with the technology then and kept in eye on it for the next six year. It still amazes me it hasn't gone further. The biggest reason I can see for the lack of progress in a complete non-interest by Internet service providers. The is odd since it could save them on bandwidth costs in the long run.
As mentioned before, the most common uses for multicast are audio and video which can support a little bit of loss. Groups like broadcast.com would all but go out of business if multicast came into universal use. If you are sending a 28Kbps audio stream, you only need 28Kbps of outgoing bandwidth. The signal will just divide at routing points until it reaches the end subscribers. If nobody is subscribing to a particular broadcast down one branch, no traffic will go down that branch. Perhaps this scares the service providers since just about anyone could setup their own audio or video broadcasting service with a ISDN (or DSL) line for bandwidth.
With a little work, non-loss tolerant products can be moved via multicast as well. Forward error correction is one way. You could also have the routing points cache a piece of the stream to ask for a rebroadcast as well. In a worst case scenario, you connect clear back to the sender using unicast to request just the blocks of data you missed. From here, it would be possible to send back down via unicast or via the multicast channel so anyone else who missed that block could pick it up. It's all a matter of how creative the programmers want to get with their file transfer service.
Software updates are one file item to use for multicast. It would also be possible to come up with a multicast FTP that could allow several receivers to tap into a stream once the sender is already going. If someone comes in half way through, the sender would just start transmitting from the beginning again once the end of the file is reached. This combines both on demand transfer with streaming broadcast. Best of both worlds.
Usenet news is another good place where multicast could cut down on bandwidth use. Give major branches of the usenet tree their own multicast address. This way, if someone doesn't want the "alt.binaries.pictures.erotica" subtree, they just don't pick up that transmission.
Time sync was a planned use for multicast. ntpd has provisions for receiving packets via multicast. There is even a special address set aside (and defined in the "mcast.net" domain). A few master servers could keep the whole Internet on common time
Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when the entire Washington Post is pushed into my set top box via multicast at night. It could then bounce over to my PDA via BlueTooth and be ready for me to take a long to the train in the morning. Since the content is all advertising supported, the paper from a digital source could be free.
There is so much possibility here, it just needs to be tapped.
Re:The technology should be sexy, not the wearers.
on
Wearable Computers
·
· Score: 2
Crawl out of the geek box for a minute and look at it from other's perspective. Sex sells. Fashion sells. Do you think people buy the latest StarTac or Samsung flip phone because they work better? No, they buy them because they are cool and sexy. Kind of a reverse size envy scenario.
As it is, most of the wearable technology is still too bulky to be acceptable in the mainstream. Until it's so small as to not be noticeable, only the geekest of the chic will be wearing it.
Imagine 20 years from now when rather than having the computer on you, it will be in you. If direct machine-mind interfaces aren't working by then, you can look forward to a thin mask on the inside of the eye for a display, and a small implant inside the ear cannal for sound.
That guy on the corner mumbling to himself isn't really crazy, he's just talking to his accountant.
"This design philosophy is at the heart of micros~1, and it's the reason ms isn't allowed in many server rooms."
Huh?
My experience has been that Microsoft is steadily marching into more and more datacenters. Over the last four years I've seen a half a dozen major sites convert from cc:Mail, Groupwise, and other products to a MS Exchange architecture. That doesn't even begin to cover the sites dropping Banyan and Novell for NT Server.
Many of the conversion decisions do not appear to be made by the techies. The Microsoft sales engineers (yes, they engineer sales) are able to work some hocus pocus on management that makes it look like MS products will solve all their problems. My best guess on this has been the claim may work something like, "Well, you use Microsoft apps on your desktop. Naturally, everything will run much better if you are talking to Microsoft apps on the back end as well."
Getting back to Exchange, it surprises me that noone has prduced a viable, open source equivalent to Exchange. There are some good concepts there. It's just the implementation that leaves a lot to be desired.
By default could mean as a kernel module with required support compiled into utilities such as nettools. I can't speak for other applications, but nettools with IPv6 support will still work if the IPv6 kernel module is not loaded. It will just not display the IPv6 information. Surely other applications could be setup the same way. The main idea here is to not have to labotomize my machine to get IPv6 support working.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft isn't alone here. Several vendors are getting squirrely when it comes to Bluetooth support. 3Com had an actual products page for Bluetooth up until about a week ago. Now, the link just circles back to their home page. Intel took their Bluetooth info down somewhere before that.
I've been collecting links for Bluetooth under Linux for the last few weeks. Oddly, some of the information is going away as fast as new information is coming online. The good news, however, is that with Microsoft's latest move we will see Bluetooth for Linux support well before Bluetooth for Windows support at the kernel level. If Microsoft doesn't include support, it will be up to each individual vendor to come up with their own OS API implementation.
For people wanting to get more information on Bluetooth, there is a topsites list of links to information resources. Please, help to keep the Linux links high on the list. :)
Expect to see 2.4.4 sooner rather than later. 2.4.3 won't compile on an Alpha processor. The poor thing doesn't make it past 'init/main.c' with an error about conflicting types for 'pte_alloc' and 'pmd_alloc'.
My continuing battle to get a DEC AlphaStation working with a USB Quickcam and Zip drive will have to wait for another day.
In addition to the Axis page, I've tried to gather together as many links regarding Bluetooth running on Linux here. So far, there isn't a lot of material out there, but it's growing fast.
I apologize for not having a link for backup, but part of my online wanderings last week ran across mention that issues around Bluetooth in France and Japan had been settled. This is just conjecture, but it might have something to do with the power of the signal as much as the frequency it is operating on.
A quick online search ran across a number of articles with headlines such as "France legalizes Bluetooth". Here is one link talking about it. Hopefully, that settles the issue. I'm not sure what the current status of 802.11 in France is.
Just for the hell of it, here is another shameless plug for my Bluetooth on Linux information page. Our favorite free operating system will be on the front line of new wireless technology.
Publications doing reviews of the IBM and Toshiba Bluetooth adapters have run them in close proximity to 802.11 equipment. Much to the reviewer's surprise the two sets of equipment ignored each other with no noticeable interference.
Neither product is always transmitting, so if both happen to transmit at the exact same time then each will look like RF noise to the other. In theory, if both systems were VERY busy this could be a problem. For the most part, this does not appear so.
I've bee trying to research these products as they pertain to Linux for the last week. Most the the fruits of this search are available in a web page of links and comments.
Oddly, Intel took their main Bluetooth page down. The nearest thing I could find was their Personal Area Connectivity page, which mentions Bluetooth. I found this last week while researching links to build a page about Bluetooth with Linux implementations.
Personally, I think the Newton never recovered from Steve Jobs. Apple was ready to spin Newton off into it's own company when Jobs came back, pulled Newton back in, and then killed it. He had a bug up his backside for a long time against that product.
Rix, do you (or anybody else) have a link for any information presented by this IBM guy? I'm putting together a web page of information on Bluetooth being used with Linux, and would be curious as to what IBM has to say. So far, the only information I have from them is a Bluetooth PC Card (PCMCIA) adapter that costs way too much.
I hope that someday we will see a truly viable open source alternative to MS Exchange. Exchange has some good concepts, but a horrible implementation. A portable, modular system could create a wonderful foundation for an information transfer, storage, and sharing architecture. Unfortunatlely, I don't see any serious efforts to create one at this time.
Broadband typically refers to running multiple frequencies over one wire (such as multiple channels on cable). Baseband is what twisted pair wire systems are usually classed as. Although, DSL is an odd beast being that the signal is being split into a low and high frequency range for voice and data.
I run the software on several servers. It runs at the lowest priority level possible, so any other work gets done first. The SETI software just scoops up all the leftover cycles. These servers have to be left running anyway, so there is no waste of power.
Let me tell you a story about Company A and Company B.
Both companies rely on ad revenue to pay their bills and keep their content available. In the beginning, both companies get the same amount of traffic for an equivalent product. Company A only uses banner ads with a click through rate that isn't even worth counting. Company B tries out a new form of presenting ads which get into a measurable percentage rate. For math, let's say they get ten times the click through rate as company A.
Half the viewers out there are Slashdot leftists who can't accept that the Internet is not a communist endeavor. These people boycot Company B and only use Company A.
As time goes, B has lost half it's traffic. This means that A is now getting 50% more traffic than it used to. B may only have half the traffic, but it has ten times the click through rate on it's remaining traffic which gives it a total of five times the click throughs than it had before using the new form of advertising. This means that B is now generating about 3-1/3 times the click through traffic as A (5 / 1.5).
As more time goes on, advertisers realize they get more bang for their buck with Company B than they received with Company A. A can no longer charge the same rates as B and sees their revenue drop. Eventually, A can't pay it's bills and goes out of business.
Welcome to market evolution.
This isn't likely since advertisement is what pays for the company to put out content. If everyone used ad blocking techniques then many of the sites would have to go to a pay service or go out of business.
If the company uses the site to actually sell something, then you aren't liekly to run across advertisements to begin with. It's only sites that provide free services, such as web search, news, weather, and discussion forums, that rely on advertisement revenue to pay the bills. If you don't view their ads, they aren't paying their bills, so they won't miss you.
Welcome to the free market economy.
It is rather ironic that the Shuttle is delivering an antenna related to the one out of commission. Unfortunately, the electronics to drive the new Ku-Band antenna are onboard the lab module (Destiny) which isn't due to be delivered until January.
Later missions will have more and more redundant capability as station resources are delivered and activated. A good example of this will be when the stations airlock arrives and it won't be necessary to lower pressure in the entire shuttle, and seal off the station, every time a spacewalk is done.
I actually built a fully functioning Alpha system about 2-1/2 years ago for about $800. This machine was completely built using parts purchased from OnSale.com (now Egghead.com) and had a shopping list like what follows:
The individual prices may not be right, but I do remember the bottom line being about $800. My goal wasn't any major application, but to just have a "non-Wintel" machine at home. For that, it has worked wonderfully. Besides, it makes a cool conversation piece.
I'm sure this won't be popular due to the current mood of RedHat bashing, but it is worth pointing out that RedHat 7 comes with mod_ssl. RedHat also compiles the EAPI patch needed by mod_ssl directly into the apache package and all dependent services (such as PHP) are compiled with EAPI so that there are no package complaints. This gives you a SSL enabled web server right out of the box (or off the wire) with RedHat.
Regarding the EAPI patch, a little background should be presented here. As mentioned earlier, Apache must be patched with EAPI (Extended API) in order to handle the SSL functions provided by mod_ssl. Other packages compiled with the Apache lib like PHP as a DSO module will complain loudly if you load them against a patched Apache when the module was compiled against unpatched libs. Because of this, you have to make sure that all your Apache related services are recompiled. RedHat's decision to include EAPI in their default Apache package simlifies this.
For a modular installation, mod_ssl is probably better being that you can turn an insecure server secure by adding a package rather than replacing an existing one. This gives you better consistency with configuration files and version control. In fact, the same configuration file can support the secure and insecure installs just by using some directives in the file.
One thing I'm curious about is if Apache 2.0 will have EAPI built in by default. This will help to avoid recompile problems like this in the future.
As for using mod_ssl, I've loaded it on several machines. Runs wonderfully. One of my machines has two secure virtual servers and four non-secure virtual servers. The only headache is that you can not do name based virtual hosting with SSL. This is a problem with SSL, not Apache, due to the point where SSL authentication and encryption takes place.
They are certainly still in production. I just received them as part of the 2000 US Mint Proof and Uncirculated coin sets that can be purchased from the US Mint.
Personally, I think they should be taken out of production. It's just as easy to carry two quarters as one half dollar. The fifty cent piece has about as much redundancy as a two dollar bill.
Well, Corel's stock is getting a nice price bounce. It closed at 3-11/16 but is now trading at about 7-1/8 in after hours. Can't wait to see what happens when the market opens in the morning.
Makes me really happy I held on to my Corel shares even when Linux started falling out of favor with the market. Of course, I miss when Corel was up over 30.
NIST encouraged competing cryptographers and the NSA (the world's largest employer of cryptographers and mathematicians) to critique the algorithms, building up a body of review that led to today's choice of the new standard.
I love this statement. Do you really think the NSA would tell the outside world if they discovered a weakness? It would be in ther best interest to sit on the knowledge so they can use it. Let everyone else out there be complacent that the data is secure while the NSA (and possibly some other trusted agencies) use it for monitoring.
I'm bloody well NOT spilling ANY info on *MY* friends to the institutional descendents of J. Edgar Hoover... or hell... nor to any other "law enforcement" type either.
If you despise this country, and it's security aparatus, so much, why are you still here? You are free to leave at any time. Unlike some countries, we don't force you to stay if you don't want to.
If you apply for a security clearance you are giving your permission for the background check. If you don't want people looking into your life, then you had better not sign on the bottom line.
It amazes me how people like to rag on our secuirty institutions such as the FBI, NSA, CIA, and NRO. Odds are, most of the people bitching have never had any direct dealings with these organizations. If these organizations didn't exist, we likely wouldn't have the freedom we do. Just as likely, Fidel Castro would be the provisional governor of the south-eastern quadrant of of North America.
Would you have rather of let the Seattle Space Needle be blown up last New Year? Would you have preferred to have seen all the bridges and tunnels in Manhattan blown up a few years ago? Wake up, these organizations are make up of Americans for the purpose of protecting Americans.
Granted, these organizations have not always been perfect in their motives and actions. However, this shortcoming has usually been a refletion of current administration policy. Who put that administration in place? We did! These organizations are a reflection of us and out own insecurities. These organizations are ultimately responsible to the same people who keep a handgun by the bed, a security system on the house, and an alarm on their car.
First, what it really is. Multicast on a local level uses a special range of IP addresses (class D addresses) that are mapped into NIC addresses using a sort of hash. Modern NIC cards have filters so they can listen in to only traffic sent to them or to a multicast address placed in the filter. This keeps the card from having to process every single packet on the network.
It is possible to route multicast traffic by tracking mulitcast group subcribership and TTL. With this, traffic will only go onto a branch of a network if someone is there to listen to it. That is the whole concept for multicast, elminating redundant or unneeded traffic streams.
The MBONE, or Multicast Backbone, is a way of tieing together networks running multicast traffic over a non-multicast capable intermediate provider (usually your ISP). MBONE works by creating tunnels through the unicast network to carry multicast traffic. It's very inefficient, but it was a way to bootstrap people up. MBONE should have been a temporary stopgap measure. It would have gone away once the service providers upgraded their equipment to support multicast routing. Unfortunately, that has never happened.
Next, a little background. I first saw multicast and MBONE demonstrated at Networld+Interop in 1994. The demo was casting a stereo quality radio signal. I fell in love with the technology then and kept in eye on it for the next six year. It still amazes me it hasn't gone further. The biggest reason I can see for the lack of progress in a complete non-interest by Internet service providers. The is odd since it could save them on bandwidth costs in the long run.
As mentioned before, the most common uses for multicast are audio and video which can support a little bit of loss. Groups like broadcast.com would all but go out of business if multicast came into universal use. If you are sending a 28Kbps audio stream, you only need 28Kbps of outgoing bandwidth. The signal will just divide at routing points until it reaches the end subscribers. If nobody is subscribing to a particular broadcast down one branch, no traffic will go down that branch. Perhaps this scares the service providers since just about anyone could setup their own audio or video broadcasting service with a ISDN (or DSL) line for bandwidth.
With a little work, non-loss tolerant products can be moved via multicast as well. Forward error correction is one way. You could also have the routing points cache a piece of the stream to ask for a rebroadcast as well. In a worst case scenario, you connect clear back to the sender using unicast to request just the blocks of data you missed. From here, it would be possible to send back down via unicast or via the multicast channel so anyone else who missed that block could pick it up. It's all a matter of how creative the programmers want to get with their file transfer service.
Software updates are one file item to use for multicast. It would also be possible to come up with a multicast FTP that could allow several receivers to tap into a stream once the sender is already going. If someone comes in half way through, the sender would just start transmitting from the beginning again once the end of the file is reached. This combines both on demand transfer with streaming broadcast. Best of both worlds.
Usenet news is another good place where multicast could cut down on bandwidth use. Give major branches of the usenet tree their own multicast address. This way, if someone doesn't want the "alt.binaries.pictures.erotica" subtree, they just don't pick up that transmission.
Time sync was a planned use for multicast. ntpd has provisions for receiving packets via multicast. There is even a special address set aside (and defined in the "mcast.net" domain). A few master servers could keep the whole Internet on common time
Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when the entire Washington Post is pushed into my set top box via multicast at night. It could then bounce over to my PDA via BlueTooth and be ready for me to take a long to the train in the morning. Since the content is all advertising supported, the paper from a digital source could be free.
There is so much possibility here, it just needs to be tapped.
Crawl out of the geek box for a minute and look at it from other's perspective. Sex sells. Fashion sells. Do you think people buy the latest StarTac or Samsung flip phone because they work better? No, they buy them because they are cool and sexy. Kind of a reverse size envy scenario.
As it is, most of the wearable technology is still too bulky to be acceptable in the mainstream. Until it's so small as to not be noticeable, only the geekest of the chic will be wearing it.
Imagine 20 years from now when rather than having the computer on you, it will be in you. If direct machine-mind interfaces aren't working by then, you can look forward to a thin mask on the inside of the eye for a display, and a small implant inside the ear cannal for sound.
That guy on the corner mumbling to himself isn't really crazy, he's just talking to his accountant.
"This design philosophy is at the heart of micros~1, and it's the reason ms isn't allowed in many server rooms."
Huh?
My experience has been that Microsoft is steadily marching into more and more datacenters. Over the last four years I've seen a half a dozen major sites convert from cc:Mail, Groupwise, and other products to a MS Exchange architecture. That doesn't even begin to cover the sites dropping Banyan and Novell for NT Server.
Many of the conversion decisions do not appear to be made by the techies. The Microsoft sales engineers (yes, they engineer sales) are able to work some hocus pocus on management that makes it look like MS products will solve all their problems. My best guess on this has been the claim may work something like, "Well, you use Microsoft apps on your desktop. Naturally, everything will run much better if you are talking to Microsoft apps on the back end as well."
Getting back to Exchange, it surprises me that noone has prduced a viable, open source equivalent to Exchange. There are some good concepts there. It's just the implementation that leaves a lot to be desired.
By default could mean as a kernel module with required support compiled into utilities such as nettools. I can't speak for other applications, but nettools with IPv6 support will still work if the IPv6 kernel module is not loaded. It will just not display the IPv6 information. Surely other applications could be setup the same way. The main idea here is to not have to labotomize my machine to get IPv6 support working.