The top of the line is MarkMonitor. If you have to ask how much they cost, you can't afford them. They're the registrar for "gm.com", "ford.com", "bankofamerica.com", etc. If something goes wrong with one of their domains, alarm bells ring at their monitoring center and DNS experts, investigators, and lawyers swing into action.
Network Solutions can be difficult to deal with, but they register enough corporate domains that they have a support organization that's not a joke.
GoDaddy is generally considered to be near the bottom of the heap. You might register your personal blog with GoDaddy. Maybe.
Down at the bottom is eNom, the leader in junk domain registration. That's where you register your 100,000 typosquatting domains.
Back when regulated public utilities couldn't sell content, we didn't have this problem. The remaining independent ISPs still don't.
It's not a technical limitation. Sonic.net, which serves Northern California and the Los Angeles area, continues to offer unlimited data access up to the bandwidth purchased. Their deal is that you buy, say, 3mb/s to 6mb/s, and they guarantee the lower figure. (I get about 4mb/s on that deal.) There are no additional bandwidth charges, and their CEO says they're aren't going to be any. Since AT&T announced caps, he says Sonic has been "overwhelmed with demand".
They buy a local DSL connection from AT&T and backhaul it to their switch in Santa Rosa, CA. Sonic is also putting in fiber to the home in some areas.
This season, there are two spinoffs of "Storage Wars" - "Pawn Stars" and "American Pickers". That's how bad it's become.
The only time I see broadcast TV is at the gym. (They have basic cable, which seems to consist mostly of broadcast TV, shopping, and really old reruns.)
This is just whining by some guy who wrote a log analyzer that will no longer be necessary.
QNX has had a simple structured log daemon for years. Reading their log never tails off into junk; you always get a clean, current last record. Their solution even works on diskless systems. In many real-time applications, logs are transmitted to some remote location, rather than being kept on each local machine.
I am not sure if composting should be made mandatory, any more than recycling is, but perhaps cities should charge real costs for trash. Cities budgets are very tight right now, and trash pickup may be one way to deal with this. For instance, there could be two sizes for trash receptacles. Those who want the higher size could be charged an additional fee.
You mean you don't pay full price for trash collection? I pay about $220 a year in San Mateo County, CA. There are three containers - trash, recyclables, and yard waste. The price is based on the size of the trash container. That's for 32 gallons. 64 gallons costs more than twice as much. The containers are picked up from the curb by a truck with a large mechanical arm with a huge gripper, operated by one driver. The company that does this ("Recology", formerly Sunset Scavenger), runs the recyclables through a glass/plastic/aluminum separator.
Someone did that decades ago at Harvard, when they first got an electronic phone switch which logged internal calls. They were able to construct an organization chart of the university from the phone traffic. How fast someone called back after a message was left was a key indicator.
There's no particular reason that 380 VDC distribution should help efficiency. You still need about two more levels of switching power supply before power reaches the ICs.
Google's proposal that motherboards should need only 12VDC made more sense. Drives already run on 12VDC, and there's already a level of power conversion near the CPU to get the desired CPU voltage. The USB devices do need +5, but a 12VDC to 5VDC switching converter can handle that. And single-voltage power supplies are more efficient and simpler than multi-voltage ones.
You mention Mavs as one of the world's great surfing spots. It is, and it requires, or should I say *demands* great surfers to match it. Several people have died there.
I'm well aware of this. I keep a horse within sight of Mavericks, and a friend of mine works for Marine Rescue. Last week, a movie was being filmed there about Jay Moriarity, one of the great surfers who died there.
I suspect that the people behind this ship-based offshoring scheme just looked at a map and picked the closest ocean point to Silicon Valley. Their ferries will have to go through the break to get to Pillar Point Harbor. "Hazardous Areas Exit Outside Harbor Entrance. Extremely Dangerous Reefs". That harbor is a small boat facility. On-shore facilities for larger craft would have to be built, which would require permission from San Mateo County, which owns the harbor, the town of El Granada (pop. 5,600) and the California Coastal Commission. None of which are likely to be enthusiastic about the idea.
They can't pick a spot further north near SF, because the Farallon Islands move the US border much further offshore. Major shipping lanes converge on the Golden Gate, with a steady stream of oil tankers, container ships, and the occasional cruise ship. Permanently anchoring a ship in a traffic lane, even in international waters, is not going to fly. That comes under international admiralty law. So, offshore of SF is out.
Facebook is the next company in trouble. Their Alexa reach peaked six months ago, before Google+ launched. That means Facebook is no longer a growth company, and they have to be valued strictly on profits, less their future potential for decline. They didn't IPO on the way up. Now it's too late for an inflated valuation.
Facebook's real financial figures aren't known. They haven't had to make the reports to the SEC that a public company has to make. Groupon (and AOL before them) inflated their profits by capitalizing and depreciating things they should have expensed. (AOL tried to account for those free AOL disks as capital expenses. That got them in trouble when it was noticed.)
On top of that, social networks have a limited life. AOL was once the leading social network. Remember Geocities? Orkut? Friendster? Yahoo 360? Myspace? Once the downward slide of a social network starts, it doesn't seem to stop.
Social networks also have a fundamental problem with advertising - it's an annoyance. Relevant ads that appear with search results are both useful for users and profitable for advertisers. Ads on social networks, where you go to connect with your friends, just get in the way. Social networks try to compensate for this by adding more and more ads. That killed Myspace, and Facebook seems to be on track to go the same way.
But Facebook has to IPO. They have to pay off the early-stage investors. This isn't going to be pretty.
Big warehouse-like data centers aren't that expensive to construct as buildings. They're big hollow concrete boxes with extra power and HVAC. All the equipment comes from elsewhere, as do the installers. The construction job is usually handled by an outside contractor with access to their own work force of people who know how to put up big-box buildings fast.
The local employees get to mow the lawn.
When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do? - 1970s bus poster
A ban on phones with non-removable batteries may be necessary. You can carry the phone on board, but the battery has to go in a plastic bag in luggage.
Three ad-heavy blogs deep, the best I'm able to find is a brief note in Electronics (AU) . It's not even clear if the device pictured is an emitter or a detector.
Terahertz RF is essentially line of sight, and has roughly the propagation characteristics of light. This is not going to be useful for WiFi or cellular telephony. Imaging, though, may work. Here's a good paper on the subject. In the terahertz range, both RF and optical techniques are used; there are both antennas and lenses. The high end of the terahertz range overlaps the low end of infra-red.
Today, evolution is an engineering technology. Watching vruses and bacteria evolve from generation to generation is routine medical research. Genetic engineering and some kinds of drug discovery are forced evolutionary systems. Most of the mechanics of the process are understood. It isn't mysterious any more.
At this point, denying that evolution is real is on a par with claiming the earth is flat. Yet religious denial of evolution has increased.
More religions are anti-education than 50 years ago. Some branches of Islam are explicitly anti-education. Now that's infected Judaism, too. Which is strange, after centuries of a strong drive in the Jewish community to achieve a good education.
Just get rainbow trout. It's produced in commercial fish farms in high volume at low cost, so nobody tries to pass something else off as trout. It also tastes good and tends not to accumulate mercury, because it's low on the food chain.
There's something to be said for this. Back when Tandem was the gold standard of uptime (they ran 10 years between crashes, and had a plan to get to 50), they reported that about half of failures were maintenance-induced. That's also military experience.
The future of data centers may be "no user serviceable parts inside". The unit of replacement may be the shipping container. When 10% or so of units have failed, the entire container is replaced. Inktomi ran that way at one time.
You need the ability to cut power off of units remotely, very good inlet air filters to prevent dust buildup, and power supplies which meet all UL requirements for not catching fire when they fail. Once you have that, why should a homogeneous cluster ever need to be entered during its life?
"autocd.com" sold parts catalogs for old vehicles.
"AUTO CD.COM is your best, one-stop source for all electronic parts catalogues, auto repair manuals, service manuals, automotive repair, spare parts, auto diagnostics and auto repairs software available.
Auto parts catalog information is not copyrightable. That's been litigated, and the distributors of the third party parts catalog won. See ATC Distribution Group Inc. v.
Whatever It Takes Transmissions & Parts Inc.,
402 F.3d 700 (6th Cir. 2005). That follows from Feist vs. Rural Telephone, the telephone directory case. There is no creativity in a parts catalog.
As others have pointed out, this isn't a very good idea for high speed rail. It's not original, either. It was proposed in Taiwan a few years ago, and that design is more workable.
It's been used a few times for very low speed systems in amusement parks. The original, of course, was the moving sidewalk at the 190 Paris Exposition. That had two speeds of moving walkway side by side, to allow getting on and off. The mechanism was not a conveyor belt. It was an endless train of railroad flatcars with turntables between them. Also see the Never Stop Railway, in 1925, which is a cute mechanical solution to slowing down at stations.
Some railroads have used systems where cars were dropped off the rear of a train while the train was in motion. This never worked all that well, and there was no reverse operation to assemble the train on the fly. It's been suggested for transit systems where all cars have power, and it could be made to work.
Yahoo does have some value to Microsoft. Its news, weather, and finance services are widely used. Users of those services overlap with Microsoft's customer base, and are good advertising targets for the things Microsoft sells.
Susan Kare is very well known in the visual design world. She is the world's leading icon designer. Not only did she do the icons for the Mac, she did some of the icons for Windows. And Autodesk products. And PayPal. And Facebook.
(If the Linux crowd had someone that good, Linux on the desktop would probably be a success by now.)
It's amazing, when you think about it, that devices like cell phones can have as many as three separate radios, all duplex, all operating at the same time, in one little box. Running a receiver next to a live transmitter used to be considered impossible.
For a worst case, the Marine Radio Historical Society operates KSM, once a major RCA ship-to-shore station. The transmitters and receivers are in separate buildings several miles apart, to keep the transmitters from swamping the receivers. Receivers are much better now.
The article would be better if the manufacturer and model number of the meter was mentioned. How often do those meters transmit? Did someone misconfigure them so they're reporting too frequently?
The whole "smart meter" thing is backwards. It gives the utility too much info, but doesn't send anything useful to the end user. Sending out downstream signals like "You are at 80% of quota, need to conserve power is currently HIGH" would be useful to appliances. But no. You can't even buy something that plugs into the power line and repeats what the meter is measuring.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is a reputable registrar these days?
The top of the line is MarkMonitor. If you have to ask how much they cost, you can't afford them. They're the registrar for "gm.com", "ford.com", "bankofamerica.com", etc. If something goes wrong with one of their domains, alarm bells ring at their monitoring center and DNS experts, investigators, and lawyers swing into action.
Network Solutions can be difficult to deal with, but they register enough corporate domains that they have a support organization that's not a joke.
GoDaddy is generally considered to be near the bottom of the heap. You might register your personal blog with GoDaddy. Maybe.
Down at the bottom is eNom, the leader in junk domain registration. That's where you register your 100,000 typosquatting domains.
Back when regulated public utilities couldn't sell content, we didn't have this problem. The remaining independent ISPs still don't.
It's not a technical limitation. Sonic.net, which serves Northern California and the Los Angeles area, continues to offer unlimited data access up to the bandwidth purchased. Their deal is that you buy, say, 3mb/s to 6mb/s, and they guarantee the lower figure. (I get about 4mb/s on that deal.) There are no additional bandwidth charges, and their CEO says they're aren't going to be any. Since AT&T announced caps, he says Sonic has been "overwhelmed with demand".
They buy a local DSL connection from AT&T and backhaul it to their switch in Santa Rosa, CA. Sonic is also putting in fiber to the home in some areas.
This season, there are two spinoffs of "Storage Wars" - "Pawn Stars" and "American Pickers". That's how bad it's become.
The only time I see broadcast TV is at the gym. (They have basic cable, which seems to consist mostly of broadcast TV, shopping, and really old reruns.)
This is just whining by some guy who wrote a log analyzer that will no longer be necessary.
QNX has had a simple structured log daemon for years. Reading their log never tails off into junk; you always get a clean, current last record. Their solution even works on diskless systems. In many real-time applications, logs are transmitted to some remote location, rather than being kept on each local machine.
I am not sure if composting should be made mandatory, any more than recycling is, but perhaps cities should charge real costs for trash. Cities budgets are very tight right now, and trash pickup may be one way to deal with this. For instance, there could be two sizes for trash receptacles. Those who want the higher size could be charged an additional fee.
You mean you don't pay full price for trash collection? I pay about $220 a year in San Mateo County, CA. There are three containers - trash, recyclables, and yard waste. The price is based on the size of the trash container. That's for 32 gallons. 64 gallons costs more than twice as much. The containers are picked up from the curb by a truck with a large mechanical arm with a huge gripper, operated by one driver. The company that does this ("Recology", formerly Sunset Scavenger), runs the recyclables through a glass/plastic/aluminum separator.
This may be the answer to the Somalia pirate problem - space-based tracking.
Now adding a moderately powerful laser, say 10KW or so...
Someone did that decades ago at Harvard, when they first got an electronic phone switch which logged internal calls. They were able to construct an organization chart of the university from the phone traffic. How fast someone called back after a message was left was a key indicator.
There's no particular reason that 380 VDC distribution should help efficiency. You still need about two more levels of switching power supply before power reaches the ICs.
Google's proposal that motherboards should need only 12VDC made more sense. Drives already run on 12VDC, and there's already a level of power conversion near the CPU to get the desired CPU voltage. The USB devices do need +5, but a 12VDC to 5VDC switching converter can handle that. And single-voltage power supplies are more efficient and simpler than multi-voltage ones.
You mention Mavs as one of the world's great surfing spots. It is, and it requires, or should I say *demands* great surfers to match it. Several people have died there.
I'm well aware of this. I keep a horse within sight of Mavericks, and a friend of mine works for Marine Rescue. Last week, a movie was being filmed there about Jay Moriarity, one of the great surfers who died there.
I suspect that the people behind this ship-based offshoring scheme just looked at a map and picked the closest ocean point to Silicon Valley. Their ferries will have to go through the break to get to Pillar Point Harbor. "Hazardous Areas Exit Outside Harbor Entrance. Extremely Dangerous Reefs". That harbor is a small boat facility. On-shore facilities for larger craft would have to be built, which would require permission from San Mateo County, which owns the harbor, the town of El Granada (pop. 5,600) and the California Coastal Commission. None of which are likely to be enthusiastic about the idea.
They can't pick a spot further north near SF, because the Farallon Islands move the US border much further offshore. Major shipping lanes converge on the Golden Gate, with a steady stream of oil tankers, container ships, and the occasional cruise ship. Permanently anchoring a ship in a traffic lane, even in international waters, is not going to fly. That comes under international admiralty law. So, offshore of SF is out.
Somebody didn't think this through.
Facebook is the next company in trouble. Their Alexa reach peaked six months ago, before Google+ launched. That means Facebook is no longer a growth company, and they have to be valued strictly on profits, less their future potential for decline. They didn't IPO on the way up. Now it's too late for an inflated valuation.
Facebook's real financial figures aren't known. They haven't had to make the reports to the SEC that a public company has to make. Groupon (and AOL before them) inflated their profits by capitalizing and depreciating things they should have expensed. (AOL tried to account for those free AOL disks as capital expenses. That got them in trouble when it was noticed.)
On top of that, social networks have a limited life. AOL was once the leading social network. Remember Geocities? Orkut? Friendster? Yahoo 360? Myspace? Once the downward slide of a social network starts, it doesn't seem to stop.
Social networks also have a fundamental problem with advertising - it's an annoyance. Relevant ads that appear with search results are both useful for users and profitable for advertisers. Ads on social networks, where you go to connect with your friends, just get in the way. Social networks try to compensate for this by adding more and more ads. That killed Myspace, and Facebook seems to be on track to go the same way.
But Facebook has to IPO. They have to pay off the early-stage investors. This isn't going to be pretty.
Big warehouse-like data centers aren't that expensive to construct as buildings. They're big hollow concrete boxes with extra power and HVAC. All the equipment comes from elsewhere, as do the installers. The construction job is usually handled by an outside contractor with access to their own work force of people who know how to put up big-box buildings fast.
The local employees get to mow the lawn.
When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do? - 1970s bus poster
There must be some Federal Bureau Against Quacks, or something.
There is.
See Lengthy Jail Sentence for Vendor of Laetrile -- A Quack Medication to Treat Cancer Patients. They finally nailed Jason Vale, the guy behind Laetrile, the apricot-pit "cancer cure". He did over 5 years in a Federal pen as prisoner #09073-067.
The proposed location is 12 miles off Maverick's Beach in Half Moon Bay, one of the world's great surfing spots.
A ban on phones with non-removable batteries may be necessary. You can carry the phone on board, but the battery has to go in a plastic bag in luggage.
Three ad-heavy blogs deep, the best I'm able to find is a brief note in Electronics (AU) . It's not even clear if the device pictured is an emitter or a detector.
Terahertz RF is essentially line of sight, and has roughly the propagation characteristics of light. This is not going to be useful for WiFi or cellular telephony. Imaging, though, may work. Here's a good paper on the subject. In the terahertz range, both RF and optical techniques are used; there are both antennas and lenses. The high end of the terahertz range overlaps the low end of infra-red.
Religion is getting nuttier.
Today, evolution is an engineering technology. Watching vruses and bacteria evolve from generation to generation is routine medical research. Genetic engineering and some kinds of drug discovery are forced evolutionary systems. Most of the mechanics of the process are understood. It isn't mysterious any more.
At this point, denying that evolution is real is on a par with claiming the earth is flat. Yet religious denial of evolution has increased.
More religions are anti-education than 50 years ago. Some branches of Islam are explicitly anti-education. Now that's infected Judaism, too. Which is strange, after centuries of a strong drive in the Jewish community to achieve a good education.
Just get rainbow trout. It's produced in commercial fish farms in high volume at low cost, so nobody tries to pass something else off as trout. It also tastes good and tends not to accumulate mercury, because it's low on the food chain.
There's something to be said for this. Back when Tandem was the gold standard of uptime (they ran 10 years between crashes, and had a plan to get to 50), they reported that about half of failures were maintenance-induced. That's also military experience.
The future of data centers may be "no user serviceable parts inside". The unit of replacement may be the shipping container. When 10% or so of units have failed, the entire container is replaced. Inktomi ran that way at one time.
You need the ability to cut power off of units remotely, very good inlet air filters to prevent dust buildup, and power supplies which meet all UL requirements for not catching fire when they fail. Once you have that, why should a homogeneous cluster ever need to be entered during its life?
"autocd.com" sold parts catalogs for old vehicles. "AUTO CD.COM is your best, one-stop source for all electronic parts catalogues, auto repair manuals, service manuals, automotive repair, spare parts, auto diagnostics and auto repairs software available.
Auto parts catalog information is not copyrightable. That's been litigated, and the distributors of the third party parts catalog won. See ATC Distribution Group Inc. v. Whatever It Takes Transmissions & Parts Inc., 402 F.3d 700 (6th Cir. 2005). That follows from Feist vs. Rural Telephone, the telephone directory case. There is no creativity in a parts catalog.
Because we all know once data has been uncompressed it can never be compressed again...
Each lossy compression/decompression cycle loses data. For examples. see YouTube.
As others have pointed out, this isn't a very good idea for high speed rail. It's not original, either. It was proposed in Taiwan a few years ago, and that design is more workable.
It's been used a few times for very low speed systems in amusement parks. The original, of course, was the moving sidewalk at the 190 Paris Exposition. That had two speeds of moving walkway side by side, to allow getting on and off. The mechanism was not a conveyor belt. It was an endless train of railroad flatcars with turntables between them. Also see the Never Stop Railway, in 1925, which is a cute mechanical solution to slowing down at stations.
Some railroads have used systems where cars were dropped off the rear of a train while the train was in motion. This never worked all that well, and there was no reverse operation to assemble the train on the fly. It's been suggested for transit systems where all cars have power, and it could be made to work.
Yahoo does have some value to Microsoft. Its news, weather, and finance services are widely used. Users of those services overlap with Microsoft's customer base, and are good advertising targets for the things Microsoft sells.
Susan Kare is very well known in the visual design world. She is the world's leading icon designer. Not only did she do the icons for the Mac, she did some of the icons for Windows. And Autodesk products. And PayPal. And Facebook.
(If the Linux crowd had someone that good, Linux on the desktop would probably be a success by now.)
It's amazing, when you think about it, that devices like cell phones can have as many as three separate radios, all duplex, all operating at the same time, in one little box. Running a receiver next to a live transmitter used to be considered impossible.
For a worst case, the Marine Radio Historical Society operates KSM, once a major RCA ship-to-shore station. The transmitters and receivers are in separate buildings several miles apart, to keep the transmitters from swamping the receivers. Receivers are much better now.
The article would be better if the manufacturer and model number of the meter was mentioned. How often do those meters transmit? Did someone misconfigure them so they're reporting too frequently?
The whole "smart meter" thing is backwards. It gives the utility too much info, but doesn't send anything useful to the end user. Sending out downstream signals like "You are at 80% of quota, need to conserve power is currently HIGH" would be useful to appliances. But no. You can't even buy something that plugs into the power line and repeats what the meter is measuring.