The Telcos here are only just starting to roll out consumer xDSL setups, but ISP's have been using DSL modems in Australia since at least 1998, mostly to connect to peering points.
To get this service from Telstra, you need to order a Standard Permitted Attachment Private Line (PAPL), which will cost around $90 to $200 per month. DC continuity (required for DSL) is expressly denied on this service, so it will pay to be friendly with the tech who installs it.
We tried it out with Alcatel HDSL modems, and the 2mb/s speeds are great!
It is not obvious to me whether or not the monopoly is harmfull in this case. Cisco, I understand, actually makes good products. But is that any consolation when they can lock out competition, charge arbitrary prices, and in the future stop making good products because, like MS, they don't _need_ to make good products, just new ones. As of yet most of this hasn't come to pass, but it is a possibility as it is with any monopoly.
Cisco has several protocols that have Monopoly-Abuse potential. All of their switches talk to each other with ISL, proprietary to Cisco, and difficult to integrate with other brands of switch. (Although they do support an open standard as well)
WCCP v2 is copyrighted by Cisco, and only available for their caching hardware and routers, so you can't use any of the cool transparent proxy features of it with squid.
Cisco Discovery protocol is only used for.. you guessed it.. Cisco equipment.
Sometimes bugs in Cisco software cause pain for other brands because "everyone else has no problems" connecting their Cisco gear to Cisco gear that works on a Cisco tweaked version of the standard. There are plenty of other areas in Cisco that make it incompatable with other vendors, but some of these features are useful things (like BGP community strings) that other brands simply need to catch up on.
Over here in Australia, we have to pay to send data to the US, and then we have to pay to receive it.
America pays nothing to send data to Australia, and then pays nothing to receive data from Australia.
This is hardly equitable, and will continue as long as the Internet is centred on America. What incentive do they have to pay for any international transit?
Iridium can support Data Transmission - Poorly
on
R.I.P. Iridium
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· Score: 1
AFAIK, Iridium cannot support data transmission --which is the primary reason McCaw opted not to bail them out, since he can't use their birds for Teledesic.
The Iridium Satellite communications systems are essentially beefed up GSM towers. Apparently, many of the parts and even model numbers are the same as those you see irradiating your neighbourhood. Some of the Iridium phones claimed to support 2400 baud communications, and we all know that 8kbps is required for a reasonable digital voice transmission. Also keep in mind that an unreliable and slow connection like this would be almost unusable with TCP (which was never designed with satellite communications in mind). It would really only be useful in remote areas, or for people who move around a lot, the same reason Iridium was created in the first place. Obviously this is not a profitable business model.
Australia's largest retailer, Harvey Norman, made good on their threat last year to stop selling Compaq products if Compaq started web sales. The result? Harvey-Norman no longer sells Compaq computers, costing Compaq something like 18 million in revenue for the year. Throughout the retail industry in Australia, large retailers are leaning on their distributors to make sure that ecommerce sites cannot offer better prices.
In order to deliver streaming video to the masses, you need a lot more bandwidth, or a smarter way of getting it to people.
Caching Proxy servers have been around for years and do a great job of reducing the backbone bandwidth requirements, but they have been unable to cache or share streaming video due to the proprietary formats being used, many of which do not lend themselves to use by multiple clients.
Proxy servers used this way in a Hierarchy would dramatically reduce the bandwidth required to distribute video, especially broadcasts. It would be great if an open source solution took this into consideration.
Not an actual Y2K bug, but 2 of the Mobile Phone networks down here have been unusable since 11:30pm due to massive congestion by well wishers! An alternative Y2K rollover bug?
During yesterday (the 31st) there were also a lot of bank outages, but nothing that really inconvenienced anyone I know.
Have a look at the X Client Server relationship. The Client Software (Actually the X Server) runs in a high res graphics mode, and cannot do anything on the server that the server doesn't allow it to do.
Also look at PGP. Open Sourced code, running on untrusted PC's with Untrusted email clients, yet trusted to be secure.
I'm not saying these apply directly to quake, but it suggests to me that the problem is not unsolvable.
My question is : how expensive would it be to use Flash Ram instead of a hard drive? Look at Cisco routers, they don't have HD...
Cisco Routers use Flash to store the Operating System, but they use NVRAM to store the configuration and logged information.
Flash devices have a finite number of writes (usually 400-1000) before they start to fail, but a practically infinite number of reads.
It's not overly expensive to do (Since you don't need to have a full distribution loaded, just the essentials) but you need to run the system from ram and find another way of storing frequently changed data if you want it to last. See the Embedded-Linux-HOWTO for more information.
You can go one step further with the apache ForceType directive, there's no reason why you can't end such a URL with.html, so it looks just like a normal page.
We did this with a newspaper site that wanted to keep all the old articles online, and have them indexed, yet still run fresh ads and links on them. We also used an intermediate 'virtual' directory, which allowed different URL's for different entry points, to the same content. Many Thanks to the authors of PHP.
Another hint is to set an Expires: header in the future so that the search engine thinks that the content is static.
Slashdot Mirror
The Telcos here are only just starting to roll out consumer xDSL setups, but ISP's have been using DSL modems in Australia since at least 1998, mostly to connect to peering points.
To get this service from Telstra, you need to order a Standard Permitted Attachment Private Line (PAPL), which will cost around $90 to $200 per month. DC continuity (required for DSL) is expressly denied on this service, so it will pay to be friendly with the tech who installs it.
We tried it out with Alcatel HDSL modems, and the 2mb/s speeds are great!
It is not obvious to me whether or not the monopoly is harmfull in this case. Cisco, I understand, actually makes good products. But is that any consolation when they can lock out competition, charge arbitrary prices, and in the future stop making good products because, like MS, they don't _need_ to make good products, just new ones. As of yet most of this hasn't come to pass, but it is a possibility as it is with any monopoly.
.. you guessed it .. Cisco equipment.
Cisco has several protocols that have Monopoly-Abuse potential. All of their switches talk to each other with ISL, proprietary to Cisco, and difficult to integrate with other brands of switch. (Although they do support an open standard as well)
WCCP v2 is copyrighted by Cisco, and only available for their caching hardware and routers, so you can't use any of the cool transparent proxy features of it with squid.
Cisco Discovery protocol is only used for
Sometimes bugs in Cisco software cause pain for other brands because "everyone else has no problems" connecting their Cisco gear to Cisco gear that works on a Cisco tweaked version of the standard. There are plenty of other areas in Cisco that make it incompatable with other vendors, but some of these features are useful things (like BGP community strings) that other brands simply need to catch up on.
Over here in Australia, we have to pay to send data to the US, and then we have to pay to receive it.
America pays nothing to send data to Australia, and then pays nothing to receive data from Australia.
This is hardly equitable, and will continue as long as the Internet is centred on America. What incentive do they have to pay for any international transit?
AFAIK, Iridium cannot support data transmission --which is the primary reason McCaw opted not to bail them out, since he can't use their birds for Teledesic.
The Iridium Satellite communications systems are essentially beefed up GSM towers. Apparently, many of the parts and even model numbers are the same as those you see irradiating your neighbourhood. Some of the Iridium phones claimed to support 2400 baud communications, and we all know that 8kbps is required for a reasonable digital voice transmission.
Also keep in mind that an unreliable and slow connection like this would be almost unusable with TCP (which was never designed with satellite communications in mind).
It would really only be useful in remote areas, or for people who move around a lot, the same reason Iridium was created in the first place. Obviously this is not a profitable business model.
Australia's largest retailer, Harvey Norman, made good on their threat last year to stop selling Compaq products if Compaq started web sales. The result? Harvey-Norman no longer sells Compaq computers, costing Compaq something like 18 million in revenue for the year. Throughout the retail industry in Australia, large retailers are leaning on their distributors to make sure that ecommerce sites cannot offer better prices.
Yes, Australians put the bubbles in there in the first place, so it stands to reason that they should understand them best.
If you don't believe it, check out the movie Young Einstein
In order to deliver streaming video to the masses, you need a lot more bandwidth, or a smarter way of getting it to people.
Caching Proxy servers have been around for years and do a great job of reducing the backbone bandwidth requirements, but they have been unable to cache or share streaming video due to the proprietary formats being used, many of which do not lend themselves to use by multiple clients.
Proxy servers used this way in a Hierarchy would dramatically reduce the bandwidth required to distribute video, especially broadcasts. It would be great if an open source solution took this into consideration.
Not an actual Y2K bug, but 2 of the Mobile Phone networks down here have been unusable since 11:30pm due to massive congestion by well wishers! An alternative Y2K rollover bug?
During yesterday (the 31st) there were also a lot of bank outages, but nothing that really inconvenienced anyone I know.
Have a look at the X Client Server relationship. The Client Software (Actually the X Server) runs in a high res graphics mode, and cannot do anything on the server that the server doesn't allow it to do.
Also look at PGP. Open Sourced code, running on untrusted PC's with Untrusted email clients, yet trusted to be secure.
I'm not saying these apply directly to quake, but it suggests to me that the problem is not unsolvable.
My question is : how expensive would it be to use Flash Ram instead of a hard drive? Look at Cisco routers, they don't have HD ...
Cisco Routers use Flash to store the Operating System, but they use NVRAM to store the configuration and logged information.
Flash devices have a finite number of writes (usually 400-1000) before they start to fail, but a practically infinite number of reads.
It's not overly expensive to do (Since you don't need to have a full distribution loaded, just the essentials) but you need to run the system from ram and find another way of storing frequently changed data if you want it to last. See the Embedded-Linux-HOWTO for more information.
You can go one step further with the apache ForceType directive, there's no reason why you can't end such a URL with .html, so it looks just like a normal page.
We did this with a newspaper site that wanted to keep all the old articles online, and have them indexed, yet still run fresh ads and links on them. We also used an intermediate 'virtual' directory, which allowed different URL's for different entry points, to the same content. Many Thanks to the authors of PHP.
Another hint is to set an Expires: header in the future so that the search engine thinks that the content is static.